“But why?” Caitlyn asked.
“Because we need the best AI we can get to run the Drift. We need better than the best AI we can get. And that means sentience. Not just messing around with semi-sentients or marginally sentient intelligent systems. But the real deal: big Emergents like Cohen, like Ada. And we need lots of them, many of whom are going to be killed or broken or turned into throwaways, just like the humans that crew them. And people like Holmes and Nguyen—and me—were willing to shoulder that burden. And Llewellyn wasn’t. And you know what the end result of Llewellyn’s noble stand on principle is going to be? Handing the Drift over to the Syndicates.”
It made perfect sense, of course, at least in the through-the-looking-glass world of big stakes where people like Nguyen moved humans and AIs around like chess pieces. And it made sense in the real world, too, in ways that she couldn’t even try to deny. But … it still felt rotten. It felt rotten to her even as she probed her reaction trying to figure out what exactly was so appalling about the scheme. It wasn’t as if no one had ever weaponized AIs before. And it wasn’t as if no one had ever hard-cycled an AI for disobeying orders, posing a threat to humans, or just plain being a pain in the ass. Those things happened, and everyone knew they happened. Humans had power over AIs, and there would always be people who abused power. That was the natural way of things. As Cohen had always pointed out when people got worked up about how things were going to hell in a handbasket, there was nothing new under the sun, including evil.
But this was something new under the sun. The Drift was new. The battles being waged here were new. And Ada, and all the other ships like her … they were new, too.
This felt perilously close to creating a new species and launching it into the Drift to evolve in free-range execution … all with the express intention of cycling the hardware in order to stop evolution in its tracks whenever UNSec decided things had gone far enough.
It wasn’t genocide. It wasn’t a crime that even had a name. But there was something so wrong about it that she could feel her mind flinching away from the very idea.
Just like Avery had flinched every time she heard Ada’s name. A flinch that Li had misread as a lover’s jealousy or as merely personal guilt … but now understood as a sort of existential horror in the face of a crime whose measure no human brain could even take.
“It doesn’t matter,” Avery insisted. “It’s still us or the Syndicates. If we don’t control it, they will. Who else is there?”
She started to disagree on reflex—and then she stopped short, struck by a thought that carried all the blinding force of revelation.
“Who else is there?” she repeated, testing out the sound of the words. “There’s a whole universe of who elses, that’s what. There’s ALEF. There’s the Novalis aliens … There’s New Allegheny.”
“Nguyen knocked ALEF off the chessboard when she killed Cohen,” Avery answered. “The aliens are long gone and they’re probably not coming back in any relevant time frame. And New Allegheny is a poor, pathetic, backward dirtball. They can’t fight off the Syndicates.”
“Not yet,” she agreed. “Not in any relevant time frame, to borrow your phrase. But what if we change the relevant time frame?”
And even as she said the words, she had a sudden sweeping, breathtaking vision of the Big Plan … the pattern behind all Cohen’s feints and maneuvers.
She spoke slowly, hesitantly, probing at the idea like a child trying to discover the shape of a new tooth. But even as she said the words, she knew.
Router/Decomposer was right. Cohen was in the Datatrap. And he was waiting for her. And he had run from Avery, and holed up in the Crucible, and died in filth and squalor, and given up power and life and time beyond anything she could even conceive of in order to arrive at this:
One moment. One place. One choice that would be hers alone to make—but that the rest of humanity would live with down all the long generations.
She knew it. She knew exactly what he wanted her to do.
She just didn’t know if she’d be able to do it.
(Caitlyn)
THE ADA
There were too many people on the ship now. You could feel it. You could smell it. Caitlyn had led raids on Syndicate ships during the war, and one of the first things you noticed when you boarded was that they smelled good. The Syndicates, having made the technological jump to being a true spacefaring species, had come up with the kind of intricate biophilic air refiltration systems that were needed for true deep space navigation. But the UN was still tied to planets and star systems. They still had the advantage of a working FTL transport system—at least for now. And they were ruled by the short-term economics of the markets, not by long-term strategic planning. So any true air filtration system never got past the drawing board stage.
The Ada, for all her formidable armory, was no exception to the UN-wide puddle-jumper’s approach to life support systems. Her scrubbers were designed to keep a specified number of crew members in reasonable good health for the duration of a normal mission. And normal was defined in reference to the expected crew complement on a military vessel where unexpected arrivals and creche air-and-water allotments were not part of the planning cascade. Home was never on board a ship in UN space, no matter how luxurious the ship or how distant its destination. Home was the bright, clean orbital, safely tied to a planet, with its farm fields and its gravity well and its dirtside labor pool.
Caitlyn wondered what would happen to the orbitals and the jump-ships when the Bose-Einstein network finally did go down for good. Some ships would be retrofitted, no doubt. But most would be mothballed—and she imagined vast, gloomy shipyards of abandoned hulks, the last monuments to an empire that would shrink and vanish along with the peculiar technology that had made it possible. The image wasn’t comforting—and it felt even less comforting under the looming shadow of the Datatrap.
She found Router/Decomposer in Avery’s conference room. It had been transformed from an impersonal meeting place into an information systems war room, cluttered with hardware, source code printouts, and obscure tools that she didn’t even know the names of. The mirror that Nguyen had watched her through had been reset to its normal livewall function, and at the moment it was displaying the view from the bridge: a bird’s-eye panorama of the Datatrap.
The thing was unnerving, Caitlyn decided. It was as dark as a burned-out hab ring, but it crawled with life. If you watched long enough, you could actually see it reconfigure itself, stretches of synthetic DNA crawling along one another like vacuum-born bacteria, junctions breaking and twisting and reforming into new connections. You could see it thinking. But what thoughts did such a creature have? And what could it mean to call it sentient?
The sight of Router/Decomposer himself was unnerving in a more immediate way. He hadn’t been willing to risk platforming himself on the Ada’s contaminated systems, so he was shunting through a wired body with a stand-alone portable backup drive—a rare departure for him, and one that made Caitlyn all the more aware of how long it had been since she last saw him and what he must have gone through to get here.
“Phew! It stinks out there!” she said. “How many people are on board now?”
“Between the pirates and the Navy? Five hundred and seventy-two.”
“And how long until the life support systems go critical?”
“Unclear. All in all, though, I’d say it would be better to make dock at New Allegheny sooner rather than later.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Yeah. And to think the pirates live this way all the time.”
“Do they?”
“That’s what Catherine said.”
She stopped and turned to look at him. “You’ve actually talked to her? Without Llewellyn present?”
“Only when they first got here. Not since … well … you know.”
“Oh. Right.”
“What do you think is going through her head, Caitlyn? If you don’t know, who does?�
�
“You say that like you take it for granted, but she’s not me. Cohen knew that. He—”
“He’s not Cohen.”
“Okay, the Llewellyn ghost. But he still picked her, didn’t he?”
“And you’re … jealous? That’s crazy. He only picked her because she picked him.”
“You must have seen something I didn’t. ’Cause that’s not how it felt to me.”
“Really? How did it feel?”
The shunt canted its head in a stereotyped gesture of inquiry. No, Caitlyn had to remind herself: Router/Decomposer canted his head. Somehow he seemed far less natural—and far more alien—encased in a human body instead of his usual graphic interface.
“I mean it,” he asked when she didn’t reply immediately. “I’m curious.”
She laughed briefly. “What was it Cohen always used to say about how curiosity killed the cat?”
“I wouldn’t know. You’re the Alice expert.”
She shuddered. “I didn’t know you’d accessed that memory.”
“I’ve accessed everything since the scattercast. For both you and her. But I figured that was one you wouldn’t want to talk about.” He paused, as if considering his next words. “I thought—well, anyway, I certainly wouldn’t.”
“Why don’t you just go ahead and say whatever you were about to say.”
“Nothing, really. I just wondered if you knew he was going to do that to Holmes.”
“Of course not!”
“Would you have stopped him?”
“I … I don’t know. He was protecting me after all. Or at least that was part of what he was doing.”
“But you were still shocked. Why?”
She hesitated, trying to come up with an answer that didn’t feel facile or foolish. “Because … it wasn’t like him. Like Cohen, I mean.”
“It’s not as if you haven’t seen him kill people.”
“But not like that. This was … cruel. I don’t know. It made me realize how much of what I thought was happening with the fragments was old baggage that I was bringing into the room with me. I kept thinking of them as pieces of him. I was trying to protect them, to … I don’t know … nurture them.”
“You displaying a maternal impulse?” Router/Decomposer joked.
“Yeah, I know.” She grinned, and then sobered quickly as the joke wore off and she was left with the confusing reality behind it. “I guess what I’m saying is I was still acting like they were him. Like they couldn’t bring anything new to the table. And then the Llewellyn ghost did.”
“And you didn’t like it.”
“I hated it. I hated the idea that Cohen could do that.”
“He’s not Cohen,” Router/Decomposer said gently. “And nothing he does can change who Cohen was. All he can change is your memory of Cohen. And only if you let him.”
“And when did you get so wise in the ways of the heart, my friend?”
“It’s all just words,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. And it’s easy to spout off about other people’s problems.”
She didn’t believe him, but there didn’t seem to be any point in saying so. “Then why don’t you tell me about your problems?” she asked.
“My problems.” Router/Decomposer pointed to the dark hulk of the Datatrap floating beyond the viewport. “My problems are all in there. And so are the answers. I just can’t figure out how to get to them.”
“Because the Llewellyn ghost doesn’t want you to,” she said with a bitterness that surprised her.
“You really hate him, don’t you?” Router/Decomposer said.
“I hate the way he makes a lie of the person I remember. I don’t hate him. I don’t know how to feel about him.”
Router/Decomposer was silent for so long after this that Caitlyn was starting to think the conversation was over when he finally spoke again. “When humans die they die all in one piece. AIs are different. They leave things behind. It confuses matters. Legally. Logically.” He hesitated. “Emotionally.”
“What are we—what are you going to do now? Now that you’re here, I mean.”
Router/Decomposer looked out at the Datatrap. “He’s in there,” he told her.
“You mean there’s another fragment in there?”
“Something else. I don’t know what. Something there isn’t even a word for.”
She remembered a conversation long ago with Cohen in his sundappled library.
Cohen had spoken of ghostly swimmers in the stream. Had talked about Earth’s ancient mapmakers, and how they would write “Here be Dragons” on the map when they didn’t know what else to write, or leave blank spaces that cartographers called white beauties.
“Here be dragons,” she said, pushing the long-ago afternoon into hard memory where Router/Decomposer could access it.
He caught the content of the memory even if not its emotional resonance. “Yes. I like that. White beauties and dragons and empty quarters on the map.” He gestured toward the dark curve of the Datatrap looming above them. “That’s one of them.”
“You really think he’s in there?” she asked Router/Decomposer.
“Don’t you?”
“So how do we get in there without the Llewellyn ghost stopping us?”
“Together,” Router/Decomposer said. “And you’re going to have to trust me the way you trusted him. Actually,” he corrected himself, “that’s a lie. You’re going to have to trust me more than you trusted Cohen.”
Suddenly it clicked. All his odd gestures, his apparent discomfort with her, his unusual hemming and hawing. She stared at Router/Decomposer, trying to read the shunt’s unfamiliar face—and wondering suddenly if he’d clothed himself in a human shunt precisely because he knew she couldn’t read the veil of flesh the way she could read his graphic interface.
“You want me to infect myself with the New Allegheny virus.”
“With a slightly modified version. I don’t understand what Cohen did well enough to really get under the hood, but I can piggyback onto it. And then we’ll both be able to run the Datatrap. Together. In free range.”
“Which I would never be able to survive without you. And might not even survive with you.”
“Look,” Router/Decomposer said. “You can shout and scream all you want, but it’s not going to change anything. Cohen’s in there. Not some ghost or fragment. Him. The only way we’re getting in there to talk to him is together. And if we don’t do it, then we’re never going to know why he killed himself, or why he dragged us both out here, or what the hell he wanted us to do once we got here. So go have your little wild AI panic attack and come back when you’re ready to talk to me like a rational person. And then we can go do what you damn well know we have to do.”
She didn’t go anywhere, of course. She just sat down at the table next to him and stared up at the shifting, morphing surface of the Datatrap, where the thoughts of the machine flickered and loomed like shadows on the wall of a cave.
She thought hard—not about the tidal suck of the Datatrap, but about Cohen and his insidious effects on people who fell into his orbit. For a certain kind of human, he was fatal. He sucked them into his orbit and they became mere satellites. He had certainly sucked her in. And she had blamed him for it, when all along she had really wanted it just as badly as Catherine wanted the Llewellyn ghost now. She had coasted through life for the last fourteen years, leaving chances lying where she had found them, leaving doors unopened, abandoning any project that threatened to take her away from his warmth, his strength, his love. She had known all along that Cohen had gotten her undivided attention—but she’d never gotten his. That was part of the deal. It came with the territory. And after a while, despite his best intentions, despite everyone’s best intentions, that imbalance of power, imbalance of processing capacity, imbalance of sheer raw emotion, poisoned things and turned love into something dangerously close to addiction.
She had been where Catherine now wa
s, for long enough that she was far past any urge to judge her choices. She had spent half of her life orbiting Cohen the way the Datatrap orbited the cosmic flywheel of the binary system. She couldn’t tear herself away from his fire, his passion, his effortless ability to possess and fill her and give luminous meaning to her life by the simple power of his presence. She was still bound to him, just as Catherine was bound to him. She still needed him, just as Catherine needed him.
But not that badly. Not badly enough to accept a lie and a shadow. She saw the difference even if Catherine was unable or unwilling to see it.
And the difference between the real Cohen and the false echo that Catherine had accepted came down to this:
One of them had killed himself to save Ada’s life and stop Nguyen from doing the same thing to other ships.
And the other one was killing Llewellyn, and betraying everything Cohen had ever stood for, in order to buy a few more years with Catherine.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m in. Let’s do it.”
(Caitlyn)
She’d expected it to take days for Router/Decomposer to set up a direct link to the Datatrap. She expected frantic code wrangling and reverse engineering and troubleshooting for fatal default modes. But in the end there was none of that. Just a simple shot, filched from the infirmary in the Datatrap’s deserted hab module. “I still wish I could see the source code,” she told Router/Decomposer for the fiftieth time.
“Even if you did, you couldn’t read it,” he answered. Surprisingly, for him, he was being patient with her. “And anyway, I checked it. To death. It works.”
She snorted. “That’s what I’m afraid of!”
And she was afraid. No AI besides Cohen had ever penetrated this far into her psyche. Not even Ada. And that had been a rape, a violation, a nightmare. She wanted to trust Router/Decomposer. She had to trust him. She tried to tell herself that he had earned her trust just by coming here. And that she had no choice if she ever wanted to understand why Cohen had killed himself. But none of it made the fear go away.
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