Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

But Llewellyn took no notice of him, and Li noticed that Doyle didn’t take up the accusation, either.

  “We’ve got someone else who’s seen it, too,” Llewellyn went on. “When Sital went through the logs of the freighter we took down last week, she found this.”

  The picture on the livewall flickered and cut out and changed, and suddenly they were looking at—

  “What the hell is that?” someone said. “And is it orbiting a moon?”

  “No,” Sital corrected. “That’s the smaller member of the binary pair.”

  Li felt a moment of disorientation as her sense of scale abruptly shifted and she realized that the “moon” the Datatrap was orbiting was in fact a sun.

  Okoro must have felt the same sense of bewilderment, because he cursed softly and then said, “I don’t know if Korchow was right about who built that, but I’m going to go out on a limb and agree with him about not really wanting to meet them.”

  Li agreed, too. It certainly looked like a datatrap, if its shape, surface detail, and what it revealed of its internal structures were any indication. But it dwarfed the majestic Freetown Datatrap by at least as much as the star it orbited dwarfed it. The eye couldn’t find any purchase or measure of scale in its looming bulk. It kept wanting to see it as planetary—a gas giant, for example. And yet Li realized it must be many times larger than that. And even in the blurred, distorted image taken by a ship transiting the outer rim of the system from one entry point to another, you could see the shiver and flow of the surface, partly here and partly elsewhere or elsewhen, that would make it all the more impossible to take the measure of.

  It wasn’t technology sufficiently advanced to seem like magic. It wasn’t even technology so advanced that you couldn’t grasp its function and purpose—not quite.

  But it was close enough to leave Li with the same feeling Okoro had voiced: Whoever these people were, she ardently hoped she never personally rose to the level of their conscious notice.

  “Here’s the thing,” Sital said. “The UN may not have built it. But they’re occupying it.”

  “With what army?” Li couldn’t help asking.

  The other woman laughed. “Yeah, that was my first thought, too. But from what Korchow said … well, whoever built it didn’t seem to be very worried about security. Or maybe they just thought they were the only people in the neighborhood. Anyway, that freighter was actually leased to a New Allegheny–based security contractor who had just come off a reprovisioning run to the Datatrap, and their logs say the only people on-station are a team of civilian AI specialists.”

  “Just sitting out here in the Drift all alone with nothing but the goodwill of the universe to protect them?” Doyle asked incredulously.

  “Well, this week anyway. They had a Navy cruiser docked to the station, but it got yanked back to the Navy shipyards because of unspecified ‘information systems’ issues.”

  “I guess Jenny was right about the wild AI outbreak, too,” Llewellyn said. Li couldn’t tell how he felt about it, but from the look on his face his feelings were conflicted.

  “Then the Datatrap’s a sitting duck,” Llewellyn said into the complicated silence. “There’s no one there to stop us from just walking in and taking it.”

  “Yeah,” Doyle said. “Until UNSec comes and takes it back.”

  “That won’t happen,” Llewellyn said calmly.

  “Oh, and why not?”

  “Because we’re not just going to sit in the Datatrap. We’re going to run it.”

  “With what exactly?”

  Llewellyn tapped his head. “With our AI.”

  The room broke into an uproar, but Doyle’s voice cut through the noise like a foghorn. “Her AI!” he yelled, pointing an accusing finger at Li. “Her … shit, I don’t even know what he is to her. Or you either for that matter. Or who you even are anymore.”

  “You know who I am, Doyle. I’m the guy who’s kept you alive for the last three years.”

  “No! You’re a guy who’s asking me to turn over our ship and crew to some bitch you’d never even met a month ago. How the fuck do you know she’s not working for Avery?”

  “Avery just tried to kill her, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Oh, right, I forgot. You’ve got it all figured out. Well, I don’t know any such thing, and I’m not taking my eye off the ball just because Avery played a nice little bit of AI theater for us.”

  “Listen to yourself, Doyle. We’re running for our lives and somebody just handed us a lottery ticket. Is it risky? Yes. But is the payoff worth it? You know it is. The ghost heard Korchow’s story. And he thinks he can do what the Syndicate team did.”

  “Oh, he does, does he? When did the ghost become a ‘he’ instead of an ‘it’? Did I miss a memo?”

  “The ghost says he can do it and I believe him,” Llewellyn repeated stubbornly. “We just have to get him there.”

  “We just have to get him there? And what the fuck else do we ‘just’ have to do for him? You know what this is, Will? It’s parasitic computing! It’s a fucking ship-to-ship takeover, and you’re about to be burning datum—and you’re so far from knowing it that you’re going to cheerfully take the rest of us down with you without even stopping to think why you’re running all over the Drift on the say-so of a NavComp that you’re supposed to be telling where to go!”

  “Listen to yourself, Doyle. You’re being irrational.”

  “I’m irrational?” Before Llewellyn could react, Doyle was up and across the room. He grabbed the taller man’s hand and jerked it into the air. A gasp ran around the room as everyone saw the red welts of infected ceramsteel filaments running from Llewellyn’s palm up into his shirtsleeve. “What do you call this? Is this rational? That monster’s eating you from inside and you want to hand him more! How much of you does he own already? Or do you even know anymore?”

  Sital stood up, moving between the two men. “At ease, Doyle. You’ve said enough now.”

  “No I haven’t,” he muttered. “Not by a long shot!”

  But he retreated to his accustomed place anyway.

  “Do you have anything to say to that?” Sital asked. It took Li a moment to realize that she was talking to her.

  “I’m not working for Avery,” she said.

  “But the ghost was your husband.”

  She hesitated. “Yes. But I’m not going to wreck this ship and kill its crew to get him back.”

  Doyle snorted.

  “You keep talking about the ghost this and the ghost that,” Llewellyn objected. “He’s not in control of me. I’m in control of both of us.”

  “Or at least you think you are.”

  Llewellyn flushed with anger. “Fine. Don’t take my word for it then. Ask Ike.”

  All eyes turned to Okoro, who shifted in his seat, clearly uncomfortable with being put on the spot publicly.

  “I don’t see Ike leaping to agree with you,” Doyle said sourly.

  “Don’t turn me into some kind of witness for the prosecution,” Okoro protested. And then he swung around to include Llewellyn in his scowl. “And not you, either! Leave me out of it. I’m not taking sides in this.”

  “You just did take sides,” Llewellyn pointed out.

  Okoro made a disgusted face that seemed to imply he was the lone adult in a room full of squabbling children.

  Li glanced at Sital, but she was chewing her fingernails and staring at the meeting minutes, scrolling down her tablet as if she’d suddenly decided she no longer trusted her handheld’s speech recognition software.

  Llewellyn shrugged carelessly. “I say we put it to a vote.”

  “Put what to a vote?” Doyle snapped. “You haven’t given the crew a choice!”

  “Then you give them one. No one’s stopping you.”

  Doyle looked like he was about to start chewing on the walls. “That’s always the way it is with you. You talk about votes, you talk about choice, but in the end you just sit there looking sideways at us while we talk, and
then go right ahead and do whatever you were planning to do in the first place.”

  “What do you want me to do, beg?”

  “I want you to abide by what we decide instead of walking away every time it doesn’t suit you.”

  “I have the right to pack my kit and ship out, Doyle. We all have that right.”

  “But we don’t all stand on it the way you do!”

  Llewellyn started to answer, then bit his tongue on whatever he’d been about to say. “Come now, Doyle. I’ve served you well all these years. I’ve been as winning a captain as a ship could ask for. Surely it’s a little late to get angry at me for not being something I never pretended to be?”

  “Meaning,” Doyle said sourly, “that you won’t bend your neck until they put you out an airlock feet first with a rope around it.”

  They stared at each other—Doyle red and furious, Llewellyn palely determined.

  “All right,” Doyle said finally. “I’ll go along if the rest will. But only provisionally. And I reserve the right of recall.”

  “I can’t go into action on those terms, Doyle.”

  “Then I want a committee vote before giving chase or boarding. You, me, slops, and quarters. With the crew rep for a tiebreaker.”

  “Too slow. I’ll not be chasing you all up and down the ship while we’re clearing for action.”

  The room boiled up in angry murmurs. Eventually one name precipitated out of the chaos: Sital.

  “What does Sital say?” someone asked, just loud enough to make his voice heard over the din.

  All eyes turned to her.

  She hemmed and hawed, but Li had been reading her body language throughout the meeting and had a pretty good idea of which way things were headed. “I’m with Doyle on this,” she finally said. “I think we need to have some kickout provision.”

  Llewellyn was completely unprepared for the betrayal. He stared, flushed, then turned his head away and smiled mockingly as if at some private joke. It was a very Llewellyn reaction—but it was precisely the wrong reaction in this highly charged setting.

  The crew saw it, and it didn’t sit well with them. Worse yet, Sital saw it.

  “It’s not personal,” she said in a clipped voice. “I’m thinking of the ship. And I say we need to keep open the option of a revote.”

  “We’ve never done that in a combat situation.”

  “We’ve never been in this kind of combat situation before.”

  “Fine. So what do you want?”

  “Doyle and I can throw the matter to a crew-wide vote if we both think things are going sour.”

  “In other words, if you both stop trusting me.”

  “You’re the one who put it that way, not me.”

  Llewellyn stared at her.

  “So be it,” Llewellyn said tersely. “But one way or another, we’re taking the Datatrap.”

  And then he walked out without another word while the room exploded into an angry buzz behind him.

  (Caitlyn)

  Li didn’t expect miracles. She knew as well as any of Avery’s cat herders how slippery and yet how brittle Emergents’ identities were. How could you anchor the free-floating consciousness of a mind without a body? How could you pluck an AI out of the quantum storm and give it that illusion of continuity—for it was only an illusion of continuity—that was the bedrock of classical consciousness?

  No one knew. No one had known back when Hy Cohen was banging out his experimental programs. And no one knew now. It was black magic: software designers’ slang for code whose operations can’t be explained or predicted. Emergent architecture was less code than incantation. There were spells that sometimes worked, and there were spells that never worked. But no one had ever found code that always worked. And once AIs had gone Emergent and started spawning other AIs, most human scientists had stopped even looking for it.

  Still, by the time Li had struggled with the Avery fragments for a week, she knew that the job was likely to be impossible. Indeed, the files were hopelessly corrupted—and she had a pretty good idea who the responsible party was.

  “What?” Holmes said when Li finally tracked her down in the bowels of the ship. “And make it quick. I have my own problems.”

  “Did you wipe the jacket info?”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “Bullshit! Someone cleaned those files up so that I wouldn’t be able to trace them back to the yard sale. And when they did it, they broke the files. There’s no way to integrate them into a larger system without that information.”

  “Just stick new labels on,” Holmes said with that purposeful denseness that was both infuriating and intimidating.

  “That’s not how it works.” Li paused, struggling to articulate the problem. “Cohen’s memories—the core ones that underpin his personality architecture—are more like human memories than AI memories. They’re not localized, and they’re not standard in format, either. Whoever wiped the jacket info took out file contents and functionality along with it.”

  “So put it back.”

  “I can’t. You might as well ask me to put an egg back together after it’s been broken.”

  Holmes smiled. “So make an omelet.”

  “Yeah, cute. Can I please have the original files?”

  “Sorry. Not an option.”

  “Why not?” Anger coursed through Li, leaving her internals struggling to keep up with the rising tide of adrenaline. “Because you don’t want me to know where the files came from?”

  Holmes gave her a sharp, hard look. Then she relaxed and smiled, showing her long eyeteeth. “Well, I should have figured you’d get there sooner or later. But if you’ve made it that far, then you ought to be smart enough to take the next step and realize that it’s just as easy to get yourself killed in the Drift as in the Crucible. And just for the record?” Another flash of her canines. “I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  So Li soldiered on, noting with an ironic distance that was half resignation and half self-loathing that she had always been a good soldier and a believer in keeping your mouth shut and following orders. She nursed her little company of ghosts along, consoling the grieving, soothing the panicked, convincing the deniers. She cycled the hardware again and again—and how she hated that cruel and cowardly programmer’s euphemism—in what amounted to an act of triage.

  Save the ones you can. Let the dead go. And let the dying join them.

  Gradually some patterns began to emerge, even if they weren’t particularly useful ones. And, even more gradually, she began to realize that she really had to reread Alice in Wonderland.

  “Ask me what I’ve been reading lately,” Hyacinthe asked her one morning in his little-boy voice.

  “Fine. I’ll play along. What have you been reading lately?”

  “Alice in Wonderland. Have you ever read it?”

  She smiled. “Not for a long, long time.”

  “I think I’m like Alice.”

  He paused, looking expectantly at her.

  “Don’t you want to know why?” he prompted after a moment.

  “Yes. Tell me.”

  “Because Wonderland is just like a virtual computer. And Alice is like a simulation running in a virtual computer. And the rules are coming from somewhere outside, and she doesn’t control the rules, but she has to learn how to use them to her own advantage. That’s what she’s doing, right?”

  “Uh … I guess so. Do you really feel that out of control?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you—you know I’m trying to help you, don’t you?”

  “I know.”

  “I might not be doing a very good job of it, but—”

  “You’re doing the best you can. I know.”

  “Are you angry at me?”

  “How could I ever be angry at you?”

  Li had no answer to that question, if it was a question. Just an aching sense of guilt and failure and helplessness.

  “Do yo
u remember how Cinda used to read to me?” Hyacinthe asked her.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Can you do that? Can you read my favorite part of Alice to me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Can I sit in your lap like I always used to do with her?”

  What was he after? “Of course you can.”

  He came around the table and climbed onto her lap, all legs and impossibly skinny and somehow smelling of grass and little boy and sunshine.

  Li recognized the book that materialized in her hands. It was an ancient first edition of the classic. The one Cohen had always read. He had always been pretty obsessed with that book, but this was something new. Now his surviving fragments seemed to be using it to pull identity and unity from chaos and cobble together their broken universe.

  Li felt a pang as she made the connection. Because wasn’t that what she had used Cohen for through all their years together? To cobble together her broken universe? To make her whole where she wasn’t? To paper over the gaps and blank spots and bottomless pits that she didn’t dare tread too close to?

  She dipped her head toward Hyacinthe’s dark curls and breathed in the smell of grass and sunshine and little boy. For the first time she understood—she who had never had a maternal feeling in her life—why women wanted children. Why people worked and suffered and died for their children without complaint or second thoughts.

  “Where should we begin?” she murmured.

  He opened the book and pointed to a line, and she started reading:

  Alice took up the fan and the gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking. “Dear, dear. How very queer everything is today. And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ ”

  Li didn’t know. She didn’t have time to find out before he died on her, his question unanswered. And the next morning, he was someone else again. Another day, another fragment. Another unanswerable question. Another identity scraped together out of shattered memories and half-forgotten bedtime stories.