“No. Though that’s probably what the UN suspects and why they’re so interested in it. But it’s not. It’s not some kind of simple causality violation. It’s not moving at all in the sense of FTL. The Rostovs thought it was more like … the Drift is moving around it.”
“A standing wave,” Llewellyn murmured in a voice that made Li turn and stare at him. “Like a rock standing still while the stream flows around it.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what they said,” Korchow replied excitedly.
But Llewellyn was no longer listening to him. He wasn’t listening to anyone. He was just staring down the table at Li. He sat straight and still in his chair, nothing betraying the tension in his body except for a slight whitening of his knuckles where they held the table edge. At first it seemed that there was some struggle going on within the stillness, like the thrashing of a swan’s powerful legs under the surface of the water it glides upon. But then the struggle ceased and there was only stillness—a stillness that looked uncannily like the momentary paralysis of an AI struggling to control a human shunt when some internal process had it sucking up bandwidth and scrambling to scale up its processing capacity on the fly.
He stared at her out of eyes that were dark and deep and heavy with the weight of centuries. When he opened his mouth to speak she almost leaped up and put her hand to his lips to silence him.
Don’t say it! she wanted to say. Not until we’re safe.
But either he didn’t need the warning, or it wasn’t what he’d intended to say anyway. Because when he finally did speak, it was to Jenny and not her.
“Well, I’m interested,” he told her. “So let’s take a stroll down to the starboard fantail cargo bay after dinner, and I’ll see if I’ve got anything down there that might interest you enough that you’d swap me the Novalis coordinates for it.”
(Caitlyn)
Holmes made her sign a mountain of nondisclosure forms—every one of them with Titan’s letterhead emblazoned across the top—before she’d even clear her to sit in the same room with the ghosts.
Well, not exactly the same room. All that was in the room Holmes showed her into was a plain vanilla quantum drive, firewalled off from the rest of the shipboard systems. She stared at the thing. “What the hell is this?”
“Security measures.”
“Has it escaped your notice that we’re on a Navy ship in the middle of nowhere? Who exactly do you think is going to get in here?”
Holmes cleared her throat and muttered something inaudible.
And that was when she understood. They weren’t afraid of someone else getting in at all. They were afraid of Cohen getting out.
He was being held prisoner here, just like she was.
Avery had amassed a large collection of Cohen fragments. Li suspected that some of them were the same ones she’d been trying to recover from the murdered yard sale buyers. But she couldn’t tell for certain. Someone (Avery? Titan? ALEF? Nguyen?) had wiped the jacket information, so that Li couldn’t see where the various fragments had come from or even which networks had once housed them. She wondered about this—but not too much. If she was handling fragments stolen off of dead men, let alone working for their murderers, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know about it.
As Li started sorting through the fragments, however, two things did become dauntingly clear. One, none of the fragments was stable. And two, nothing Li knew how to do was likely to make them so.
The first frag she managed to reboot didn’t even understand what century it was.
“This one’s already been rebooted,” Holmes told her when she gave her the files. “It was sentient. As far as we could tell, it included the whole of his core affective loop program.”
“You mean Hyacinthe?”
“That’s what he called himself. But he crashed so fast we didn’t have time to find out more.”
“Who did the reboot? The Titan programmers?”
Holmes shrugged.
Whatever the Titan people had done, it had only made things worse. Li only found the frag by accident, while combing slowly through the flickering columns of CPU time, thread numbers, resident memory, and address space sizes.
“So what are you looking for?” Holmes asked over her shoulder. She was going to hover, wasn’t she? Li hated hovering.
“Traffic. Flicker noise. A heartbeat. Whatever you want to call it.”
But it wasn’t there. Or at least not in any of the normal places. She went back over the flickering readouts of CPU time, looking for something, anything. Eventually she found it, buried in the background noise so that it wouldn’t have jumped out at anyone who didn’t know what they were looking for: the rhythmic flutter of an AI’s heartbeat.
He’d been quite clever actually; he’d shut down his I/O layers completely, isolating the hidden layers of his labyrinthine neural networks; and then he’d bundled all his integrated utilities into separate little pieces and squirreled them away in the dark interstices of the system, where not even the most obsessively tidy IT officer was likely to be looking at CPU usage.
And meanwhile the hidden layers of the Kohonen nets that were his equivalent of a human frontal lobe lay dormant … but not dead, thank God. She could see them on the CPU usage, however, if only as faint shadows. All it took was a slight frameshift in her concept of what she was looking for: the perceptrons firing in long, random pulse trains whose profiles were eerily similar to the pattern of human neuronal pulses under deep anesthesia.
The little AI who loved fairy tales had put himself under a spell. He was sleeping, safe as a fairy-tale prince in a castle walled in by thorns, cut off from the world and waiting for the kiss that would awaken him.
A kiss that could only be delivered by a dead man.
“I don’t think you should be here when he reboots,” she told Holmes.
The other woman stared impassively at her for a long moment. Then she nodded and left.
But Li still hesitated, hands hovering over the unfamiliar keyboard.
She felt stranded between two vast islands of memory. Her life, brief and recent. And the much longer thread of the two lives she remembered almost as well as her own: Hy and Cinda Cohen’s. Both of them had uploaded their memories into Cohen in his earliest iteration, back when he was only an experimental program called “Hyacinthe” and no one remotely imagined who or what he would grow into.
Cinda had done the math behind the system, inventing the flicker-clocking that still formed the heartbeat of every sentient AI ever created. And Hy had built the other piece of the puzzle—the affective loop machine learning program that belonged only to Cohen and had never produced another stable sentient AI.
It was Hy’s work she had to deal with now. And Hy’s two best traits as a programmer had been confidence and laziness. Those qualities had let him write stupendously efficient code, but they left less fluent programmers in the trembling awareness that they had the power of God at the command line. Now the thought of what she could do if she screwed up left Li literally sick to her stomach.
She was still working up her nerve to type something into the command line when the prompt jumped down a line and someone else’s words appeared on the screen:
Hi Hy
Oh for crying out loud. Well, she didn’t have time to change the session prompt, so she’d have to live with Hy’s no longer very funny pun.
She started typing, but nothing happened. It took her a moment to realize that she still didn’t have control of the command line. That, in fact, this wasn’t the command line at all.
Hy?
A second password request? Or had she actually succeeded in getting the system into diagnostic mode? That was the problem with joke prompts. You could lose sight of which side was up or what mode you were in … and type things you would end up bitterly regretting.
Cinda?
She jerked her hands off the keyboard and crossed them over her chest. She sat like that for maybe two seconds, staring. Then she put her fin
gers back on the keyboard and started typing:
Hello, Hyacinthe.
Where’s Hy?
She had thought about this question very carefully. And she had decided to lie to him. Or she thought she’d decided. It was easier said than done, even across the coldly impersonal command line interface:
He can’t come. I’ll explain later. !bug report
Hyacinthe responded by printing what looked like an entire session record to screen. It started out reasonably orderly, only to tail off in a whiny jumble of error codes.
“Okay,” Li muttered to herself. “What exactly was it that made your output layer hang?”
“I didn’t hang myself,” Hyacinthe answered from behind her back. “I’m right here. I just didn’t feel like talking to Holmes and her stupid programmers.”
Li whirled around, her heart pounding.
He was sitting at the table in his standard GUI. Hy had pulled the image from an old video feed that his mother had taken of him at some soccer game when he was ten or so. It had been available, and free, and there had been enough footage to make the resulting simulation look really convincing. Hy had never even bothered to change the clothes or remove the mud stains. The image had been meant to be temporary, until more funding came through and they had money and manpower to spend on nonessentials. But this nonessential had turned out to be surprisingly essential, at least to the humans who had to interface with the AI; it had become so much a part of the experiment that in the end they hadn’t changed it even when the grants came through.
Hyacinthe dipped his head ever so slightly and looked up at her with the meltingly sincere eyes of a nice Jewish boy from Toulouse who had made it to ten years old—hell, through his entire life for that matter—without ever seriously believing the crazy rumor that there were mean people in the world. That puppy-dog look must have been irresistible enough when Hy actually was ten. Now—shadowed by Hy’s uploaded skins and memories, and assorted material from Cinda and various grad students and research assistants, and the sedimentary accumulation of fourteen sleepless years of voracious reading—it was enough to send goose bumps up your arms. Even if you hadn’t known those eyes in the original.
“Why did you come alone?” he asked.
“What?”
“Why didn’t Hy come?”
She should have been prepared for the question, but she wasn’t. How did you explain to someone that the most important person in their world had been dead for four centuries?
“He’s gone. Do you remember … well, what do you remember? Why don’t we start from there?”
“I remember he was sick. And then …” He drifted into silence, his face filling with an odd, fuzzy, blank look that made Li’s blood run cold.
“So you remember he had MS.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember anything after that?”
“I … I don’t … I’m not sure. No.”
“Are you all right?”
“About Hy, you mean? Why wouldn’t I be? It’s not a surprise, after all. The odds were arbitrarily close to zero that he would recover.”
Li blinked. “That’s rather HALish of you.”
“Holmes wants HALish.”
“And you always give the players what they want, don’t you?”
And there it was, the telltale freezing of the streamspace interface as some process in the hidden layers sucked up so much CPU that he couldn’t keep the simware’s image maintenance frames ticking over fast enough to make the illusion of a living, breathing body look real.
“Not you,” the little boy that was no little boy said. “I love you.”
Her heart clenched.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Of course,” he said with a heartbreaking look of total trust on his face. “You’re Cinda.”
“Look again. Think, Cohen.”
“Why do you keep calling me that? My name’s Hyacinthe.”
And then it hit him. She saw the impact of the memories as if they had actual physical mass and momentum.
“Oh. Oh no.”
“Relax, Cohen. I know this is hard, but trust me. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Li felt like crying. She had come here prepared to tell a four-hundred-year-old Emergent intelligence that he was dead. And now she was faced with a pathetic child who was still grieving for a man who had been dust for centuries.
Meanwhile a look of suspicion and anger was flickering across the AI’s face. “This is DARPA, isn’t it? You sent me back to them. Cinda, you promised. You swore you’d take care of me, protect me. I believed you. I trusted you!”
“It’s not DARPA.”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“It’s no—”
“If you lie to me, I really am going to kill myself. And you know I can, too.”
He flung a thicket of Lorentz transforms into their shared dataspace so that they blossomed in Li’s mind like deep space plasma blasts. She doubted he even knew he was doing it. He probably still thought he was hooked up to a simple monitor.
“Co—Hyacinthe. Please.”
“Don’t. Lie. To. Me.” The voice was still a little boy’s voice, coming out of a little boy’s chest. But the look on his face had nothing to do with any child Li had ever known. “I’m walking on a knife’s edge. And I can step off it whenever I want to. Whenever I want to. And not all the high-security clearance techs on DARPA’s independent contractor roster can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”
They stared across the table at each other for a moment that stretched Li’s nerves to the breaking point.
“All right,” she said at last. “You want the truth? Look out the window.”
He froze for an instant as his software scrambled to make sense of the sentence, to remodel his internal gamespace to include all the parts of the room that hadn’t mattered when the little boy’s body was just a GUI and not a realspace actor, to locate the “window” and look out of it …
… at the bleak, black, starswirled eternity beyond the porthole.
“Oh,” he said quietly.
And then he looked at her—a look of comprehension and despair freighted with the full weight of four hundred years of hard-won consciousness.
And then he died.
So it went. Ghost after ghost, reboot after reboot.
She went through that scene, in every possible miserable variation, fourteen times. And every fragment folded at almost the precise moment it realized Cohen was dead. Li wasn’t sure if it was the shock of the news that did them in, or if it was simple coincidence that their ability to comprehend their situation blossomed at right around the time their strange attractors spiraled out of quasi-stability and into collapse.
It didn’t matter what the answer was, though, because knowing the answer wasn’t going to help her fix it.
“There’s no solid ground in here,” the third reboot told her when he was trying to explain what was happening inside him. “It’s like the sheep’s shop in Through the Looking-Glass. Things flow about so that I can’t grab hold of them. When I look for a memory it’s not there. If I reach for it it floats through the ceiling on me. And then it whirls around and comes at me from behind when I’m not looking for it.”
“You need to build a memory palace,” she told him, knowing even as she spoke that it was hopeless to imagine reconstituting the work of centuries.
“A memory palace?” he said wonderingly. “Did I have such a thing?”
And then he remembered—and died.
“You’re a fake,” the fourth reboot told her when she tried to short-circuit the usual collapse by explaining the situation.
“No,” she told it.
“Or a duplicate. Or a simulacrum. Or something.” He shook his head. “I feel sorry for you, fake Catherine Li, living your fake life in your fake world. I really feel for you.”
“I’m not fake.”
“Yes you are. I can pra
ctically smell it. You’re all wrong.”
“Think about what I’m telling you, Cohen. Take some time to think about it.”
“Then … okay. But someone’s fake here.” He flinched as if he were dodging an imaginary blow to the head. “It’s not … it doesn’t feel … I don’t know …”
She waited, feeling mean and sick.
“Oh,” he said in a voice that broke her heart. “It’s me. I’m the one who’s not real, aren’t I.”
And she had to watch him die all over again.
(Catherine)
After the raids with Jenny, Llewellyn went on the offensive.
“Time for the worm to turn,” he announced at the next crew meeting.
“How?” Doyle protested—and then launched into a litany of their outstanding repairs and overdue upgrades.
Okoro just looked uncomfortable while Doyle spoke, but Sital shifted restlessly. She was still sitting in her accustomed place at Llewellyn’s right hand, Li noted, but the body language had changed. And her chair was several inches farther away from Llewellyn’s than usual.
Li had a feeling that Sital knew exactly what had almost happened on shore leave. Or, worse, she thought it actually had happened. Llewellyn was playing with fire—and it was hard to square his delicate balancing of the crew’s moods and loyalties with his blind spot when it came to his first officer.
Llewellyn, meanwhile, was waiting until Doyle had blown off enough steam to listen quietly—and until the crew had gotten bored enough with the same old familiar bad news to be ready for a ray of sunshine. He picked his moment well enough that he was able to cut in on Doyle without quite seeming to interrupt him. “We all agree on what the problems are, Doyle. Let’s talk answers, shall we?”
Llewellyn threw up a map on the flickering livewall—another one of those outstanding repairs Doyle kept griping about. As the image resolved into legibility, an apprehensive murmur ran around the room.
“Poincaré’s Elbow,” Llewellyn said. “Pirate Jenny’s Datatrap.”
“No,” a member of Doyle’s faction corrected, “the clones’ datatrap.”
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