Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  “She wasn’t savable,” Llewellyn had said when Cohen finally tracked him down in prison after the court-martial. “Not after Holmes had her way with her.”

  Cohen didn’t know if Ada was savable or not. But whatever Holmes had left behind, he had to try to save it.

  He moved restlessly away from the window, wincing when he caught a glimpse of his shunt in the mirror. The borrowed body was a boy’s. He was beautiful, of course. They were always beautiful, these poor lost souls who sold the use of their bodies for the convenience of the rich and bodiless. He was beautiful and young and he had his whole life in front of him. And Cohen was about to kill him.

  He could kill him now, quickly and cleanly. Or he could hand him over to Holmes and the AI police, who would kill him with agonizing slowness while they shredded his mind to make absolutely sure that there wasn’t a scrap of Cohen left in it. But either way the boy had been doomed from the moment Cohen decided to smuggle Ada through the quarantine.

  The boy started; an involuntary reaction, one that even the miles of ceramsteel snaking through his body couldn’t entirely suppress. Cohen searched for the external stimulus that had momentarily aroused the boy’s fight-or-fight reflex. And there it was: Holmes, at the street door, backed by a grim trio of MPs whose street clothes didn’t even fool the sleepy desk clerk.

  Cohen plucked the apple from the table. He polished it on his shirtsleeve—one final, jittery moment of cowardice—and then he took a bite.

  The boy felt nothing, of course. But within seconds Cohen could feel the wild AI working its way through him. He knew the course of the infection; he’d watched it burn through half the AI techs in the Navy shipyard, Holmes first and foremost. There would be the first scattered hives; and then the rash working its way up the boy’s wrists and neck; and then the smoldering fever and the desperate race of T-cells and lymphocytes to combat the alien code that was rewriting his genetic material. In a matter of a few hours the signs of a wild AI infection would be obvious to UNSec’s AI cops or the Navy cat herders. But Cohen was gambling on the relative inexperience of the local police. It would take them quite a while, he thought, to figure it out. And by then the detectives would have come, and the medics, and the coroner. And there would be all the people they knew, and all the people their friends and family and casual acquaintances knew. Cohen didn’t have the bandwidth to run the numbers, but in his mind’s eye he saw the image of a dandelion being blown away on the wind: the delicate, deadly blossom of a meme going viral.

  As the infection coursed through the boy’s blood and marrow, Cohen shuddered in something terribly like ecstasy. No wonder humans got addicted to the stuff. No wonder UNSec didn’t allow DNA-platformed AI outside of Freetown—and even then only with an ironclad kill loop. They’d never get the cat back in the bag if the rest of the UN’s Emergents started getting used to it.

  The code flowed into every one of the 75 trillion cells in the boy’s besieged body, unzipping, unpacking, coming out of hibernation, linking each separate strand of DNA in each separate cell into a massively parallel system capable not merely of containing every piece of code and data the two fugitive AIs were made of, but of generating a cascade of copies large enough to overwhelm New Allegheny’s frontier planet noosphere, and the shipyards’ vast databases, and the Quants of the field arrays and deep space datatraps. Soon Cohen was racing the clocking speed of the universe itself on a quantum bicycle built for two … or two billion.

  At first it felt like freedom. Wonderful, really, after being compressed and flattened into the half-dead echo of himself that was all he could fit onto the boy’s obsolete wire job. Folded databases unfurled their origami wings. Cantor modules blossomed to reveal intricately nested infinities. Entire wings of Cohen’s far-flung memory palace unshuttered themselves and sprang back to life, binary flowers opening wide to catch the inrushing flood of numbers.

  It felt like clearing Earth’s gravity well on the rattling roar of a Long March rocket. It felt like rediscovering amputated limbs. It felt like getting a pardon after the hangman had already put the rope around your neck.

  Then the payload came online. And Ada—or what was left of her—started to execute. And Ada in the blood—poor, mad, broken Ada—was so much worse than Cohen had allowed himself to imagine that he would have called the whole thing off right then and there if he’d still been able to.

  But he couldn’t. He’d been very careful, all through the long sleepless nights of working out the program, to take away every back door and fail-safe and cutout that would have let him do that. After four centuries of life, he had a fair idea how far his courage would hold—and when it would break. And he’d planned for that. It was a plan Li would have liked, and he couldn’t help grinning again as he accessed a memory of her giving him a sideways, gunslinger’s look through a cloud of cigarette smoke and saying: “The easiest way to make sure a man does the right thing is to take all the wrong choices off the table.”

  Well, he’d done that all right. He’d taken it all off the table. He’d thrown it on the floor and shattered it into a million pieces. Now it would be up to Li to figure out how the hell to put it all back together again—or whether she even wanted to.

  He drifted again—and jerked himself back, frightened by how close he had come to screwing everything up in the final stretch. He started to go online, then caught himself and walked unsteadily across the room to the wall phone.

  “Hello?” he said tentatively, before realizing that he actually had to dial a number to get someone.

  Luckily the number was written on the phone—because this was the kind of place, he supposed, where the management assumed you needed to know that number.

  To his amazement a live person actually answered on the second ring. “Emergency response services. Where are you located?”

  “Um … I’d like to report a crime.”

  “Yes sir. What is your location?”

  “The Victory Motel, 2818 West Munhall Avenue, Room 219.”

  “And what is the nature of the crime, sir?”

  “Murder.”

  That put a little life into her voice, he was satisfied to note. A fellow liked to have an enthusiastic audience for his swan song—or at least an awake one. “Someone’s been murdered?” she asked hurriedly.

  “Not yet,” he told her before he hung up the phone. “But they’re about to be.”

  And then he picked up the pistol and sat down on the bed to wait for Holmes.

  He was ghosting on New Allegheny’s noosphere now, overclocking so handily that he was wiping the floor with UNSec’s horde of semi-sentient streamspace security AIs. He watched his enemies creep toward him like pawns marching across a chessboard. He still had time, but not very much of it. He resisted the urge to prod the wild AI and see if the Ada program was executing properly. Ada was doing fine—and keeping tabs on her now would take enough processing capacity to blow the entire noosphere.

  He had done his best, and his best would have to do. It would be enough. He was almost certain of that. And if it wasn’t, then it was too late to fix it.

  And besides, the only thing he really wanted to fix before he died was the one thing he couldn’t fix without handing the keys to the kingdom over to Nguyen and her bloodhounds.

  I’m sorry, Catherine. I had to choose between coming home to you or saving Ada. And you wouldn’t have wanted me on those terms. I’d never have been able to look you in the eye again.

  But he couldn’t tell her that, not with Holmes and Nguyen and the AI police watching. She’d just have to see it for herself … if she ever came close enough to forgiving him to be willing to see it.

  Holmes was in the hall now. She was trying to be quiet, of course. Pathetic the way humans always assumed he couldn’t hear anything they couldn’t. It didn’t take one-millionth of the parallel processors the boy’s DNA now hosted for Cohen to run the various overlapping streams that covered the corridor and snatch the biometrics of every member of the a
ssault team. And of course he could pick out Holmes’s breathing, Holmes’s footfalls. He could practically smell the woman, and the thought of killing her gave him a fleeting surge of satisfaction.

  It passed quickly. He knew how to handle a gun—not knowledge, exactly, but a sort of sleepwalking muscle memory from the shunts he’d ridden on UNSec missions in the days when Helen Nguyen had been cutting him a paycheck instead of trying to kill him. But he’d made it through a very long life without ever killing anyone. He’d done violence when he had to, but not fatal violence. And even then, it had always been distant and digital. This was different, and he knew without putting himself to the test that he didn’t have the stomach for it.

  A shoulder slammed against the door, rattling its flimsy hinges and breaking loose a fine rain of plaster from the wall above. A second slam made it shudder again. He heard Holmes’s familiar voice, flat and dismissive, telling someone to stop being a fool and do it right.

  Ada hated that voice. She hated it with a passion that rose up like a beast breaking out of its cage and threatened to engulf the last tenuous threads of Cohen’s sanity. Cohen dug in and held on. He couldn’t afford to let Ada master him now. He had to make sure the job was finished. He had to put them both beyond all hope of recapture.

  Holmes shot out the lock and kicked in the door.

  For a moment she and Cohen stood facing each other: her in the doorway and Cohen on the bed with the heavy revolver thrust out to the farthest length of the boy’s trembling arm and quavering in her direction.

  “Remember, no head shots,” Holmes told the men behind her. “We need to take him alive.”

  “I don’t think so,” Cohen said.

  He put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

  Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her,

  Silence more musical than any song;

  Even her very heart has ceased to stir:

  Until the morning of Eternity

  —Christina Georgina Rossetti

  (Li)

  EARTH’S ORBITAL RING: ZONA ANGELES, THE AI ENCLAVE

  Catherine Li stood in her dressing room staring at the open suitcase containing a small portion of her collection of artificial hands and told herself that some people would consider her a lucky woman.

  This dressing room was bigger than the shantytown miner’s cabin she’d grown up in. There wasn’t a piece of clothing in here that didn’t cost more money than her father had ever made in his life. And the amusing collection of luxury prosthetics that Cohen had always insisted on calling jewelry just for the satisfaction of annoying her? That was wealth taken to the point of insanity.

  In the age of viral medicine, you could get a new hand as easily as a new liver. But Cohen had convinced her not to fix the hand. And Li had her own reasons for not fixing it. She’d lost that hand because she’d forgotten about old enemies—and made the mistake of thinking they’d forgotten her. And that lesson was worth her right hand and then some.

  The most spectacular hand—and oddly, given her usual simple tastes, her favorite—was an intricate jewel-actioned clockwork hand with orbital rubies in every joint. The rubies glittered dangerously—and the jeweler who had made the hand had engraved a winged and scaled dragon up the platinum-alloy length of the limb, strategically positioned so that the rubies were indeed its eyes.

  She reached for the dragon with the ruby eyes but then pulled back in mid-gesture. No. Not today. Today’s meeting called for something less conspicuous. Something that hadn’t been a gift from Cohen.

  “Oh for Christ’s sake!” she muttered to herself. What was wrong with her, anyway? When had she turned into the kind of person who couldn’t get dressed in the morning?

  No, that wasn’t the problem. And it wasn’t nerves about the meeting with the lawyer, either. Cohen had been gone for two months this time, longer than he’d ever gone before without contacting her. Long enough for her to miss him horribly.

  There’d been no fight. There never was; Cohen hated fights like cats hate rain, and he was just as adroit at slipping out of them. But there had been … something. A shadow, a constraint, a new silence between them that added to the accumulating silences that had built up through half a lifetime together. He’d told her he’d been guilted into doing a favor for some old friends at the Artificial Life Emancipation Front, and that it might take some time, and not to worry if he dropped out of sight for a bit.

  And then he’d vanished.

  Until the note asking her to come to the lawyer’s office this morning.

  Li scanned the glittering wall of prosthetics once again, weighing her options, and knowing even as she did it that she was agonizing over this frivolous decision in order to avoid worrying about what the lawyer would tell her. Then she shrugged fatalistically. Cohen had his secrets, but he didn’t hide the things that really mattered. Not from her. He never had, and she had to trust that he wouldn’t start now. Whatever she was going to hear at this meeting, it couldn’t be all that important, or Cohen would have come back to tell her himself.

  And if he couldn’t come back? But, no. That was so far beyond imagining that she wouldn’t even let herself think about it.

  She reached for the dragon with the ruby eyes.

  There was a genuine Rothemund in Cohen’s lawyer’s office.

  What Li knew about pre-Migration art could have been written on the head of a pin with a jackhammer, but even she could recognize a Rothemund. It was primitive, almost brutal in its simplicity—further removed from the vast deep space fractals of a modern Quant than a paleolithic Venus was from a Raphael Madonna. Its living folds of DNA origami slithered through and around one another at a snail’s pace, a constant subliminal distraction. Their complex surfaces scattered the Orbital Arc’s refracted sunlight and warped the mile-high-needle habitats of the financial district until they seemed less a true reflection than an unsettling window into a through-the-looking-glass world where the normal rules of mind and matter no longer applied.

  “He’s gone,” the lawyer said while she was still trying to figure out what, if anything, to say to him.

  Li dragged her eyes away from the Rothemund, feeling seasick. She was still standing, though the lawyer had already asked her to sit down twice. She’d known the minute she saw his face that this was going to be the kind of news she wanted to hear on her feet.

  She looked at the lawyer, seeing his face with unnatural clarity, as if multiple universes had just aligned and she were sighting down a plumb line into the deep structure of the multiverse. There was a slight tremor in the man’s fingers, a sheen of sweat on his brow. Maybe he wasn’t scared of her at all. Maybe he was just on synth. High-class lawyer-grade synth. Cohen only hired the best, after all. And synth was what it took for humans to play with the best these days.

  “He’s gone,” Cohen’s lawyer repeated. “I’m sorry.”

  “What—” She had to stop and clear her throat. “What do you mean gone?”

  “You really should sit down, Mrs. Cohen.”

  “Don’t call me that. No one calls me that. Gone where? And what about his backups?”

  “They wouldn’t load. There was some problem with—well, you’d understand the details better than I do. Most of it went over my head, frankly. But you know no stone would have been left unturned. Cohen was always adamant about paying top dollar for network support.”

  “Was? Why are you talking about him like he’s dead?”

  He carried on, still in that smooth lawyer’s voice, still ignoring her questions. “One network was pulled out before the—ah—incident.”

  “One network?” There had been hundreds, maybe thousands.

  “I’ve been informed that you can expect to receive delivery in approximately ten days. Maybe that will answer some of your questions.”

  “What about the other networks? Where’s the rest of him?”

  “The auction took place last night. Obviously you’ll inherit the proceeds—”

  �
��You held a yard sale?”

  Cohen’s lawyer looked embarrassed, as if he thought the term was too vulgar to use in his elegant office. “You know how these things work.”

  She slammed her fist down on his desk. “You held a fucking yard sale?”

  The lawyer flinched as if she’d hit him.

  And there it was, the moment that always came sooner or later even in the most casual social encounters. The moment when people remembered her other life, her peculiar qualifications, her checkered history. When they remembered that the hands that were shaking theirs or passing them the butter had killed people and could do it again. When they remembered she was a war criminal.

  The trial had been almost a decade ago, but it was still alive in public memory. If nothing else, the Syndicates kept it alive with their endlessly reiterated demands that she be expatriated to face whatever passed for justice on Gilead. Personally Li thought they were right. She probably had shot those prisoners. Not that she’d ever know for certain, since she didn’t have the security clearance to see her real files. All she had were the cleverly spun half-truths that UNSec’s psychtechs had substituted for her memories—those and the bloody horrors that haunted her nightmares.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  The lawyer cleared his throat and almost managed to make eye contact with her.

  “We didn’t do anything,” he went on, more calmly. “AIs take care of their own. The auction was over before I even got the news. And his networks aren’t him, anyway. They’re just software. The person you knew was already gone.”

  She did know that, but it didn’t make it any easier. Cohen had warned her so many times over the years. He’d told her that AIs were brittle, fragile in ways that humans weren’t. That sufficient disruption of their neural networks could result in dispersal or decoherence. That they died, and got sick, and went crazy just like organics did. That not having a predetermined life span wasn’t the same thing as being immortal.