(Catherine)
“Critter fritters or monkey-on-a-stick?” Okoro asked companionably, plopping his tray down next to Li’s on the mess hall table.
She sidled over to make room for him. “Not sure I can tell, actually.”
Okoro surveyed the unappetizing brown glop on both their trays with a connoisseur’s eye. “I’m gonna go with monkey-on-a-stick. Excellent! Full marks to the cook for creativity.”
Li didn’t think it looked any more appetizing than Okoro seemed to. But like him she ate it anyway. She and Okoro and everyone else involved in planning the raid had been running on caffeine and synthetic myelin enhancers all week long, and her hunger had become a gnawing worm that tunneled through her gut and twisted her stomach.
“You still think he can do it?” Li asked Okoro.
“Who? Cohen?” Okoro was the only person on the crew, Llewellyn included, who called Cohen by his name and not simply “the ghost.”
Okoro didn’t answer for a moment—and the silence that stretched between them was the same complicated silence, heavy with unsettled scores and unfinished arguments, that Li had felt when the crew had witnessed the fight between Llewellyn and Doyle about Cohen’s plan for the Datatrap raid.
“I think that’s the wrong question,” Okoro said at last. “I think the real question is where he wants to. And why.”
Li looked carefully at the AI designer, weighing his expression. “You’re not what I would have expected a cat herder to be.”
“You mean I’m not a thin-skinned, socially inept geek?”
She laughed.
“You don’t know what these ships are. It’s not just straightforward programming. It’s being a parent and a priest and a doctor all rolled into one, and halfway to being a lover, too, sometimes. It’s manipulating someone in ways that no one should be able to do to another soul. It’s the deepest of deep magic. You run that close to the machine, you’re in the wilderness. You have to be very sure of who you are, of how far you’re willing to go, or you can lose yourself so badly there’ll be no finding your way back home again.”
“Is that what happened to Llewellyn?”
Ike’s face closed, becoming suddenly less friendly.
“Or was Ada the problem? Something went wrong. I can hear it in the way people talk about her.”
“Nothing went wrong. Ada was perfect, one of God’s perfect souls. You make a soul into a tool, and you deserve every bad thing you have coming to you. Do you believe in God?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well I do. Okay, a scientist’s god, not Interfaither nonsense, not the kind of god any organized religion expects people to buy into. But whatever you call it—life, symmetry, the universe—there’s one thing I know for certain: The universe made intelligent life. And it made it for itself—for no other reason than just to be. You can’t turn a sentient being into a blind tool. You can’t give someone a soul, and not give them the power to do what they know is right with it. That’s not playing God, it’s playing anti-God. It’s the closest damn thing to the devil I’ve ever heard of. And there are some people on board the Ada right now who make me wish I believed in Hell.”
“But you still helped them bring her in.”
“Don’t judge me.” Now Okoro was quietly furious. “You weren’t there. You can’t understand!”
“So make me understand.”
He turned away in his fury, and then turned back toward her so forcefully that she shrank away from him out of sheer instinct.
“Do I have to spell it out for you?” He was whispering furiously now, practically hissing the words, torn between his fury and his fear of being overheard. “They lied. And we were the fools who believed them. Sital and me both. We thought they were going to help her!”
A hand fell on Li’s shoulder, and she twisted around to find Llewellyn behind her. “Everything okay?” he asked.
“Sure, Will,” Okoro said. “Sure, everything’s okay. What wouldn’t be okay?”
“Nothing I know about,” Llewellyn said coolly.
“And if there was something you needed to know about, I’d tell you about it.”
“Good, Ike. That’s very good to know. I’m glad you feel that way.”
Llewellyn walked away and Okoro stared after him until he had taken a place at another table and been drawn into another conversation.
“Ada’s still alive,” Li said. “Alive and crazy and trying to jump ship and get out from under the semi-sentient that Holmes and Avery have her slaved to. I talked to her.”
“Yeah. Sital said.”
“But Llewellyn didn’t want to hear about it.”
“No surprise there. As you may have noticed, there are a lot of things he doesn’t want to hear about lately.”
“When I tried to tell him, it was like … he didn’t even think it was relevant. Even though the first thought through his head should have been that the Ada could have infected our AI with it. With her.”
“You misinterpreted him. It’s not that he thinks it’s not relevant. It’s that he already knew about it.”
“How?”
“From me.”
Li glanced at Llewellyn, deep in conversation on the other side of the mess hall, and then turned back to Okoro. The look on Okoro’s face told her everything she needed to know.
“He wasn’t worried about catching Ada because we already caught her,” Okoro said. “We caught her when Llewellyn uploaded the ghost. And that’s probably how Avery’s ship caught her, too. I’ve gone through the source code line by line more times than I can tell you. Llewellyn’s ghost is infected and it’s using Llewellyn’s DNA to reproduce Ada’s source code and databases as well as its own. Probably every surviving fragment of your husband is infected. Probably that’s why Ada’s still on Avery’s ship. Not because they didn’t wipe her effectively but because they’re running Cohen ghosts on their systems, too.”
“Oh God,” Li breathed. “The spy.”
“Right.” Okoro’s voice dropped even lower and he stretched and glanced casually around to make absolutely sure that no one was listening. “We don’t have a spy at all. We have Avery running a Cohen fragment on her ship who’s looking at the same shipping traffic and Drift navigational charts we’re looking at … and coming up with the same solutions far too often for it to be coincidental. I’d assumed you’d thought of it already.”
“Have you told anyone?”
“Llewellyn and Sital and no one else.”
Li took a shaky breath and gave silent thanks to Okoro for what could only be understood as a flat-out decision to risk his own life to protect Cohen’s and Llewellyn’s. Because if the rest of the crew found out what Okoro suspected, there was no doubt that they’d airlock Llewellyn, and Cohen along with him. And if they found out Okoro had known about it and been hiding it from them … Li swallowed and tried not to think too hard about just how much she could end up owing him if things went really wrong.
“The thing is,” Okoro went on, moving graciously away from the subject before the pause dragged out long enough to make it seem like he was asking her for thanks, “that’s not really the thing I’m worried about right now. What I’m worried about is what the Ada program is going to do if Cohen does manage to crack the Datatrap.”
Li didn’t understand at first. “The Ada program? I thought this was just the New Allegheny outbreak.”
And now it was Okoro’s turn to stare. “But … what do you think the wild AI outbreak is? It’s your husband, in some kind of unholy marriage with whatever’s left of Ada. And so loaded to the gills with folded databases and hidden executables that I can’t even get a good enough look to say what they do until they have the room to unpack themselves … which is more room than this whole ship could ever give them.”
“But not more room than Llewellyn can give them.”
“No. I’d say a live human being’s DNA would give them just about the right amount of room.”
“So whatever this
is, it’s running on … who besides Llewellyn?”
“At a guess, every cat herder and intelligent systems tech on the Navy shipyard, and half the Drift ship crews out on the Deep, and half the civilian population of New Allegheny.”
Li thought about it, still acutely aware that this was far from a reliably private conversation—but just as aware that as long as they kept their voices down and didn’t betray themselves too badly, the middle of a crowded and noisy mess hall might just be the most discreet place to have a conversation that they really, truly, seriously didn’t want the ship or its captain to overhear. “That’s not a wild AI outbreak,” she said finally. “That’s parasitic computing. That’s someone stealing bandwidth to run some massively parallel computational process.”
“Bingo. When you have to crunch big numbers, you use big iron. When you have to crunch even bigger numbers, you go viral.”
“And you really can’t tell what it is?” Li asked with her heart thrumming in her chest.
“I said I couldn’t tell what it was going to do. I know exactly what it is.”
Li forgot to look casual—forgot everything except the need to stare at Okoro’s face and try to read his next words before he spoke them.
But when they finally came, they weren’t the words she was hoping and expecting to hear at all.
“It’s a Turing Machine.”
“What?”
“It’s a Universal Turing Machine. The structure is classic. It’s not even that complicated. At bottom, it’s what every computer is, what every person and organized system in the universe is. And this one is formalized to the point of total clarity, even if you’re just looking at the overall architecture of the thing. It’s memory after memory, fragment after fragment, slotted into watertight cells so that every imaginable input evokes an output—a state of the machine, if you want.”
“A Ship of Souls,” Li whispered.
“Exactly. Someone coded every possible configuration of both AIs into a Universal Turing Machine. Most of them are so dead they’re not even wrong. An arbitrarily small percentage—but still probably a huge number in absolute terms—are alive. And most of those are someone else and not the people that any of us ever knew. And another whole mess of them are crazy. And two of them are actually Ada and Cohen—sane, and whole, and the same people they were before they died.”
“But who would have done that?”
Okoro raised his eyebrows. “Your husband, obviously.”
“No. He would have known that the chance of anything coming out of it was vanishingly small. Those are the kind of odds that aren’t going to pan out for you unless you can afford to wait for, say, the lifetime of the universe.”
“Yeah, that’s the first problem with the ‘Turing Machine as AI Resurrection’ concept that occurred to me. In fact, that’s exactly what went through my head: You’d need the lifetime of the universe to run those calculations. And funny thing … suddenly Llewellyn’s talking about turning Cohen’s Ship of Souls loose in a datatrap that Korchow’s people think is pulling processing capacity from other universes.”
Li chewed her lower lip and stared at the congealing mess on her tray. She could feel her mind trying to twist it into something—the something—she wanted to hear. But she kept running up against the sheer computational obstacles. Even if Okoro was right, this wasn’t a scheme to bring back Cohen. It was a scheme to bring back a flood of possible alternate versions of Cohen. And, more confusingly, of Ada.
And what were those versions going to do when they got hold of the Datatrap?
“Maybe you should talk to Llewellyn about this,” she suggested finally.
“You think I haven’t tried? You think Sital hasn’t tried?”
“So what do you think is going through his head? What does he think is going to happen when we turn the Datatrap over to them?”
“Honestly?” Okoro herded the monkey-on-a-stick around his plate and then finally gave up and threw his fork down and pushed the tray away with a disgusted look on his face. “I have no fucking idea.”
They dropped into orbit around the Datatrap cautiously, expecting to hear the shriek of targeting alarms at every instant. It was beautiful and terrifying. The scale was beyond all imagining, even for someone who had seen the Freetown Datatrap. And Li’s first close look at the surface took her breath away.
It was moving. Not spinning as a normal orbital station under rotational gravity would, but actually moving. It reminded her of watching paper wasps swarming over the surface of their nest. Except that here it was the nest itself that was moving. It had weather patterns—or perhaps tectonics would be a better word for them, since the patterns pierced deep into the core of the structure. Fractal storms whirled away beneath them, chasing the distant curve of the horizon. Mandelbrot sets fissured the crust like earthquakes. Poincaré circles ripped across the landscape like the shock fronts of nuclear blasts. It seemed to be the creation of some godlike race of beings completely removed from the decay and weakness of mere human flesh.
“It’s like looking at the Face of God,” Router/Decomposer had said about the much smaller Freetown Datatrap. And now she understood the dark undercurrent she had sensed beneath those words.
You could see the vast, inhuman intelligence of the thing. You could see the play of its thoughts in the fractal storms that chased one another across that roiling and gloomy ocean. It was a glimpse of the Face of God indeed—a vision of a mind that spanned aeons and universes.
And you could see it reacting to them, too. The Datatrap was far from the passive and oblivious thing Li had expected to find. It knew they were here. And it was preparing for them.
As they swooped in for the final approach, Catherine felt a wave of queasiness that had nothing to do with the g’s they were pulling. The Datatrap seethed and boiled like a wasp’s nest that had just been sprayed with poison. It moved at the speed of thought—because thought was exactly what this motion was. The Datatrap was rewiring networks, reconnecting virtual neurons, reshaping hidden layers and folded databases and Cantor modules. It was breaking and reforming Holliday junctions, rewriting its hybrid DNA in order to become the problem it wished to solve—a living, breathing, thinking model of the universe, ripe with infinities numerable and innumerable, a being like no thing that had ever lived before it, without ancestors or descendants: an intelligence that was at once answer and question, model and universe, mind and matter—a being whose very essence was constant, relentless, inhumanly eternal-becoming.
Still, no hail came across the main navigation channel. The database was silent as they swung into orbit around it; silent as they dipped deeper into its moon-sized gravity well; silent as they began tracking the centrifugal swirl of the droplights.
Catherine saw Llewellyn and Sital glance nervously at each other, though neither of them was ready to speak their fears aloud.
“They shouldn’t have artillery,” Sital murmured finally, when the silence stretched on almost beyond bearing.
“What they should have,” Llewellyn answered, “is an evac ship. An evac ship and a working radio, for God’s sake, even if nothing else on the damn Datatrap is working.”
He was right, of course. Such a prime target merited a ship of the line to protect it, or at the very least a heavily armed cruiser. But no such ship was there—and they had come in cautiously enough to be sure of that. Which could only mean that something was wrong, even more wrong than Pirate Jenny had suspected.
The Datatrap itself bothered Li as well, in subtle ways that she had trouble putting into words. It looked nothing like the Freetown Datatrap. It had a sense of raw, hulking, brooding power that she had never seen before. It was hard to imagine people living inside it. It was hard to imagine going about the ordinary minutiae of organic life in the brooding shadow of that vast inhuman intelligence.
In the tense silence Sital’s surprised gasp sounded like a plasma blast. “They’re talking to us. We have landing permission.”
“Live?”
She shook her head. “Station AI. Not the Quant. There’s a separate AI in charge of the human part of the station.”
Llewellyn looked as relieved as Li felt about that news. “That’s okay then. The AI wouldn’t be calling us in if there were Syndicate troops aboard.”
At the last minute, however, the ship backpedaled and veered off to make a second orbit around the Datatrap.
“What just happened?” Llewellyn asked.
Sital looked confused. “Foul deck wave-off.”
“For what?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t see anything.”
Li saw the two of them glance at each other, the kind of instant communication of potential danger that only people who’ve worked together in the line of fire can share. “Who gave the wave-off? Our NavComp or theirs?”
“Theirs.”
“Let’s try and drum up a human again. I know it’s a bunch of cat herders on there, but they’re in a war zone. They’ve got to have someone assigned to monitor incoming ship traffic.”
But no matter how they tried, they could raise no one.
“Okay then,” Llewellyn said on their fifth pass over the docking bay. “Ready or not, here we come.”
They went into full alert, suited up in case they hit hard vac inside, still half convinced the Datatrap had been captured by the Syndicates.
But then they started to notice all the little incongruous details that didn’t add up to a Syndicate raid. The calm green blip of the status lights that said the station itself had not suffered any violence. The bodies slumped over half-eaten breakfasts that told them death had come whispering in without warning instead of busting in-system at .265 subluminal.
Catherine was the one who put it together first. Now she turned on her heel, with a shiver of atavistic fight-or-flight reflex thrumming down her spine, and counted one, two, three, four heads with their tongues grotesquely swollen and blood seeping from their eyes and ears and noses. Seven bodies with the tracery of their state-of-the-art wire jobs graffitied across their skin in blisters and ashes.
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