“The Datatrap killed them,” she said to no one in particular. “It burned their wetware out of them. Every millimeter of it, right into the heart of their frontal lobes.”
“The Datatrap didn’t kill them,” the Datatrap said. “Ada killed them.”
Everyone jumped. The control room livewall flickered to life, fractal patterns sweeping across it like rain before a storm.
“Keep your hair on, people. And don’t start shooting up the livewall, either. I had a hell of a time getting this place fit for human habitation again. What I wouldn’t give for a body right now—squish factor notwithstanding.”
And then, while the pirates stared at her in alarm and confusion, Li put down her weapon, pulled off her helmet, sat down on the closest table, and nearly bust a lung laughing.
(Caitlyn)
Affectclass = Iloveyou
Caitlyn remembered the first time Hyacinthe had said those words to Cinda. Or typed it, rather. Because the only thing they’d had to work with back then was the black void at the end of the command line prompt.
It had been the first affect class he’d invented for himself. They hadn’t told him he could do it. He’d simply needed it … and found it.
Poor Cinda had practically fallen off her chair. She’d printed out the session hash log and gone running down the hall to Hy’s office waving it in the air and shouting like a crazy woman.
Love was the first affective class Hyacinthe had invented for himself out of whole cloth. God only knew what he meant by it. God knew what anyone meant by it.
Nor had he invented an affect class for love’s opposite, though he had had long semantic discussions with Hy about whether the opposite of love was really hate or something he referred to as “dis-love.” According to Li’s downloaded memories—which were uncomfortably complete from a human’s point of view—they’d never reached agreement on that question.
It wasn’t without precedent. Plenty of chimps had learned and used the word. There’d even been that parrot who had screamed “i love you i’m a good boy!” over and over again when his favorite grad student–researcher tried to drop him off at the vet. But those were animals. The only naysayer the animal behaviorists had to knock down was Skinner. Hy and Lucinda had had to knock down Skinner, and Searle, and every other behaviorist who’d ever denied that an AI could think and feel instead of just mimicking.
And they never did knock them down. There had been promising moments. A few interesting articles. The real and satisfying—but largely unpublishable—proof that their maybe-sort-of-sentient AI could tackle computational problems that other, more conventional AI-based systems weren’t even close to taking on. But nothing more.
After their lifetimes, the development of AI consciousness had veered off in another direction, leaving Cohen stranded on his own branch of the evolutionary tree—a branch that had produced only a single, exceptional, magnificent flower.
Even today, Li couldn’t read the shifting, swarming mosaic of Cohen’s hidden layers nearly as well as a neurosurgeon could read his patients’ thoughts. What made Cohen sentient was at least partially understood. But what made him love and need to be loved remained an unsolvable mystery.
Later affective-loop AIs, identical in every observable way, sputtered into fitful and fleeting autonomy and died. The basic nature of the problem was clear. Sentience, at least as it manifested itself in Cohen’s computational architecture, was a strange attractor. The phenomenon called “consciousness” occupied some minuscule area of the system’s state space: every possible configuration of his vast interlocking complex of hardware and software down to the quantum level and the flap of Lorenz’s butterfly wings. Start it up from exactly the right initial state and in exactly the right conditions, and it would travel through a trajectory that included the infinite complex of surfaces that composed consciousness … or maybe a specific individual’s consciousness … or … something. The underlying mathematical structure was clear, but all it really told them was that Cohen was unique and unrepeatable. Which made him utterly precious as an individual—and frustratingly useless for experimental purposes.
It had also made Li’s life with Cohen something far beyond complicated. Because if Cinda hadn’t had a clue what Cohen meant by love all those centuries ago, Li was even more bewildered by it.
She slept. Deep inside the Ada’s systems, whatever passed for CR29091’s conscious self slept too, rolling on the quantum currents of the Drift, passive sensors spooling out into the subatomic chaos of the universe.
In sleep is surcease, they say. Or at least repair. Throughout the dogwatch of the night, the human crew lay in their bunks, splayed or sprawled or curved into fetal position, dipping in and out of REM sleep, their bodies engaged in life’s intricate dance of mending, weaving, repairing. The little biological insults of daily life were repaired. Proprietary genesets built from the pond scum bacteria of twenty-first-century nuclear power plants beat back the assault of cosmic radiation on unshielded bodies. Short-term memory was reviewed in dreams and cemented into long-term learning.
And throughout the ship’s systems very much the same processes unfolded, on a scale unimaginable even in the vast viral wilderness of the human body. Subroutines rehearsed the myriad events of the just completed circadian cycle, internal as well as external, and mediated the flow of data from temporary cache to permanent memory. Security subroutines coursed through the system deploying virtual arsenals that were modeled on human T-cells but had long ago surpassed them in complexity and processing power. Machine learning programs that themselves hovered on the edge of sentience sifted through layered and nested artificial ecosystems, improving, tweaking, troubleshooting, optimizing. Evolving.
And all the while, through a thousand invisible and immaterial fingers, the ship reached out to its sleeping and waking crew. There was a line, still, between the ship and its human freight, but that line would have been almost unrecognizable to a human of the twenty-first century. Above all, it was permeable. As human brains slept, their soft memories synced with shipboard memory. As human bodies slept, their internals dropped into diagnostic mode and reached out to the ship’s more powerful immune system. Data flowed back and forth across the permeable boundary. Life flowed back and forth. Consciousness flowed back and forth.
And close to the machine, so close as to be invisible to its human attendants and even to CR29091 itself, the dispersed consciousness that was both more and less than a ghost surfed the laminar flows of data like a ship surfing the Drift and searched for the one quiet eddy in the vast river of life that was the sleeping woman, Li.
She sat up in bed, gasping like a diver coming out of cold water, still caught in the deep-sea currents of the dream that had awakened her.
She turned on the light in a vain effort to banish the ghosts that seemed to press in around her. She cursed herself for a fool. Why had she been wasting her time fighting with Holmes? And why had she meekly taken Holmes’s no for an answer?
Ten minutes later she was standing face-to-face with a slightly disheveled and very annoyed Astrid Avery.
“Did I wake you up?” Li asked, trying to sound penitent.
“No. I haven’t gone to sleep yet.”
Thank God for small mercies.
Li recounted the clash with Holmes. Avery appeared to have no reaction at all to the information. Li couldn’t even tell if she’d known about the problem.
“I’ll have to think about it,” Avery told her.
“Why? Because you don’t have the authority to make that decision?”
Avery’s lips tightened. “I’ll have to think about it.”
But the next morning when Li went into the lab, there was a new ghost waiting for her.
The new fragment was whole. And potentially stable. And it had its complete jacket information, provenance, and transfer records included.
With a sick slithering feeling in the pit of her stomach, Li turned to the jacket info. Slowly, reluctantly, she pieced
it together and checked it against the list of buyers Router/Decomposer had given to her—God, was it only a few weeks ago?
There was no room for doubt, no matter how hard she looked for it.
It was Korchow’s fragment.
Oh fuck.
She put her head in her hands and closed her eyes, some little-girl part of her still nourishing the illusion that that would keep the monsters out.
“What the hell is wrong with you, anyway?” she muttered, too shaken to care about Holmes’s bugs. “You tried to kill him yourself. More than once. Cohen must have been out of his mind to think he could trust the man.”
But he had thought it, though she still couldn’t begin to fathom why.
Maybe trusting Korchow had gotten him killed.
It had certainly gotten Korchow killed.
And considering that Korchow had blackmailed her and maybe even tried to kill her, it was surprising how bad Li felt about that.
The Korchow ghost broke everything open. It was the key. It was a large enough, stable enough fragment that the other fragments could coalesce around it. But even with the anchor the Korchow fragment provided, and even with the complete jacket information that soon followed, Li was still a long way from integrating the shattered surviving fragments.
Instead she was left with a frayed and partial reflection of Cohen. A mirror, yes, but one that had been shattered into a million pieces and was every bit as stubbornly unwilling to be put back together as Humpty Dumpty ever was.
Day by day, reboot by reboot, interview by interview, she felt the fragments pulling her into a kind of through-the-looking-glass emotional territory where she never knew who would show up to talk to her—only that every new fragment that surfaced would bring her face-to-face with the pain of losing Cohen all over again.
Most of the fragments that she managed to reboot were pathetic, heartbreaking. But those weren’t nearly as bad as the other ones—the ones that showed her sides of Cohen she hadn’t known existed and didn’t want to think about.
It wasn’t that she blamed Cohen for these fragments. How could she when she knew her own faults so well? Anyone who thought people were all nice—or even halfway honest—was a fool. It would have been the same if Cohen had been human. The same pettiness. The same little cruelties, accidental and intended. The same subtle mingling of the base and the noble. Altruism with selfishness. Love with hate. Honesty with manipulation. The emotional debits and credits of the last fifteen years would have been no different had she been married to a human.
But what was different was seeing them laid out in front of you in such stark clarity. What was different was having to see everything she despised about Cohen sitting across the table from her, unalloyed by the warmth, the generosity, the openhearted vulnerability that had always made his faults forgivable.
AIs were no different than humans, Cohen had once told her. It was probably structurally impossible for an emergent consciousness to consciously examine its bottom-level cognitive functions. The right hand never knew what the left hand was doing, and for good reason; full self-knowledge equaled moral and emotional paralysis. You needed a little self-deception to grease the wheels of life, or else you’d end up agonizing over it instead of actually living it. But no matter how often Li told herself that, she couldn’t bring herself to feel it. Being “only human” turned out to be the one thing she couldn’t seem to forgive him for.
And sometimes the fragments that showed up to play weren’t nice at all. Sometimes they were cruel. Sometimes they were cold and manipulative and disdainful. But Li could handle cold and manipulative. What she couldn’t handle were the ones that pretended to love her.
So she knew she was in for it the morning she logged in and found Hy Cohen sitting across the table from her.
This wasn’t the older Hy, ravaged by illness, that Hyacinthe had known. It was the young man Cinda had met and fallen in love with a quarter of a century before Hyacinthe was even born. It was all there. The wiry greyhound’s body coiled in the chair as if only an act of will were keeping him earthbound. The black hair and olive skin, the beaky nose, the stubborn set to his jaw. And the curious, searching, formidably intelligent eyes—was he not the son of seven generations of rabbis and university professors?—set in a face that had that interesting lived-in look most Frenchmen seemed to magically acquire by about the age of nineteen.
Not handsome exactly. No one would ever have called him handsome. But … intriguing. Especially if your tastes tended toward high-strung intellectuals.
“You must miss him a lot,” Hy said. God, even the voice was perfect. Beyond perfect. It wasn’t like talking to Hy. It was talking to him.
“Miss who?” she asked, even though she already knew.
“I miss him, too,” Cohen said instead of answering her question. “But we don’t have to miss him. I could be him. For both of us.”
The figure across the table from her faded and shifted. Suddenly it wasn’t Hy Cohen anymore. Now it was a boy with golden eyes and hair the color of raw honey. This was the “face” Cohen had worn most of the time during their years together. And no matter how many times Li told herself that it wasn’t Cohen, she couldn’t make her heart believe otherwise. And she couldn’t stop the flood of memory and emotion that washed over her at the sight of the familiar body.
“Don’t.”
“Why not? It’s what you want. If you didn’t want it, I wouldn’t be doing it. If you didn’t want it, I wouldn’t want to do it.”
“Don’t,” she whispered again.
It was the only word she could think of. What was she supposed to say? That the idea of resurrecting a ghost and making it pretend to be Cohen was sick? (But she’d thought of it herself, hadn’t she? And long before the ghost suggested it.) That she didn’t want a fake? (But hadn’t there been nights when she’d thought fake would be plenty good enough once the lights were out?) That it would be a betrayal of Cohen’s memory? (Cohen would have been the first to laugh at that idea.)
In the end she said the one thing she really knew was true, and which wasn’t noble at all or anything close to it:
“I can’t look at that face. I don’t want to remember him. It hurts too much.”
“I just want to make you happy,” he said, still speaking with the ghost’s voice.
“Do I look happy to you?”
“You just need to let go of the past and—”
“Do I look happy?”
He turned a brilliant liquid gaze upon her. “What a beast I’ve been to you, Catherine! Won’t you let me make it up to you?”
“You don’t need to make anything up to me,” she said awkwardly. She felt a flush rise up her face. She knew this was just another scene in the passion play. And yet …
“I don’t know why I say ‘I,’ ” the reboot went on, in a lower, softer, infinitely more dangerous voice. “After all, I’m an entirely different person, aren’t I? Not that you’d notice. What do you owe Cohen that you’re willing to go through so much on the slightest chance of finding anything? Why doesn’t it even occur to you that I …” He broke off feelingly. He looked at her. He looked away. “I love you. And it breaks my heart that I’m not enough for you.”
“Oh God,” she muttered. “I’m sorry. I really am. I—”
And then she looked into his eyes and saw it. Way back there behind the meltingly sincere hurt-puppy look there was something else, something entirely different. He was playing with her. Playing with her like a fox with a hen.
She couldn’t hold it against him. It was done without malice. It was what he was made to do. And whatever peculiar quality Cohen had possessed—whatever unanticipated, coincidental quirk had made him able to talk about love and actually mean it—she couldn’t hold its absence against the ghost.
“Good try,” she said, struggling for an even tone and making it—more or less. “But I’m not playing today.”
“How can you be so cold? And you accuse me of—”
&
nbsp; “Just drop it. You know perfectly well you don’t mean a word of it.”
“Oh I suppose not,” he said petulantly. “But do you always have to take everything so seriously? You didn’t used to be so totally lacking in joie de vivre. I can remember a few times when you were more than happy to ‘seize the budding rose of May.’ ”
“Yes,” Li said sourly. “And there’s a lot you don’t remember, either. So let’s stick to the job at hand, okay?”
The ghost vanished and was replaced by the little boy, Hyacinthe.
“I’m sorry,” Cohen said in a very small and frightened version of his Hyacinthe voice. “Don’t be angry. Please. I can’t bear it.”
“I’m not angry. I’m just not playing this game.”
He peered anxiously at her. An illusion, she knew; behind the external layers the affective-loop program would be collecting emotive inputs from her on vectors that ranged from pulse rate to body temperature to blood flow distribution—and had nothing at all to do with his “eyes” or even sight as humans knew it. But the little boy across the table from her radiated worry and uncertainty and a desperate need for reassurance.
“I just want to make you happy,” he told her.
“I know you do,” she said. She didn’t know if this was genuine or not, but either way it was easier to go along with it. “And I … I appreciate it. I’m just not ready to be happy yet.”
She knew what would happen now, both from experience and because she had checked every line of the emotive loop code. Cohen would cast around until he found an appropriate peace offering: some little symbolic thing he could do or tell her that would make her happy and reestablish a friendly footing and put a little distance between him and the memory of her displeasure.
What he came up with was a complete surprise, however. It was neither a token nor purely symbolic. And if it was true, it could change everything.
“I bet I can tell you something you don’t know,” he told her.
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