“I doubt that very much.”
“Oh no. Believe it. We know very little about what Cohen was doing out there. He wasn’t conscientious about reporting in at the best of times. And lately he’d become even more cagey than usual.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Yes. And I feel … well, it’s hard to describe since I’m not used to this sort of thing. But I think I’d have to call it regret.”
Li shuddered.
“The fragment I bought didn’t have any recent memories in it,” the creature that was partly Cohen told her. “But it taught me things. About him. About how his mind worked. And if I had to hazard a guess as to why he stopped reporting to ALEF, I’d say it was because he felt a change of course was warranted. And he didn’t trust them to make what he believed to be the right decision.”
Li stared at the gravel between their feet. It seemed to vibrate before her eyes, as if she’d stared so hard at it during the last few moments that she’d seen through to the jittery quantum heart of the universe.
“There’s only one person he would have trusted with anything really important. You know that, don’t you?”
She nodded. Speaking was beyond her.
“We want you to go to New Allegheny. For—the Loyal Opposition—though we will try to bring the rest of ALEF round as best we can. We have no idea if Cohen can be rebooted. And even if he can, the resulting personality architecture is likely to be extremely unstable. But we need to know what he was doing. And if there are any stable fragments left out there, they’re far more likely to talk to you than to us.”
She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against her trembling lids. “I need time,” she told him. “Time to think about it.”
“We can’t give you that, I’m afraid. Someone else is already trying to reassemble him. They’ve already kidnapped two fragments that we know of. After killing both the yard sale buyers quite nastily. I can’t imagine they’ll do less to you.”
“Between that and the extradition treaty I seem to be out of choices. You people didn’t arrange that, too, did you?” She cast a suspicious look at him, but he was all innocence. “Never mind. I’ll do it. How are you going to get me there?”
The Loyal Opposition suddenly looked as if his clothes itched. “Oh dear, I meant to mention that before. In the interests of full disclosure. I’d hate you to feel we were being sneaky. But the thing is, ALEF’s majority faction has access to military transport through the Bose-Einstein relay. We, on the other hand … well, I’m afraid we’re going to have to scattercast you.” He smiled brightly. “But I’m sure it will be fine. As they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And after all, you’re virtually guaranteed of success, statistically speaking.”
We may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions … which will be called “m-configurations.” The machine is supplied with a “tape” (the analogue of paper) running through it, and divided into sections (called “squares”) each capable of bearing a “symbol.” At any moment there is just one square … which is “in the machine.” We may call this square the “scanned square.” The symbol on the scanned square may be called the “scanned symbol.” The “scanned symbol” is the only one of which the machine is, so to speak, “directly aware.”
—Alan Turing
(Llewellyn)
“Permission to land?” the ghost asked, and Llewellyn gave it.
They were deep in the Drift, where they’d spent the last week and a half running silent and hunting for vulnerable freighters becalmed in the fickle flows that had earned this region the ancient Earth name of the Horse Latitudes.
And now they were coming into an abandoned orbital station around a played-out mining strike. A company town turned pirate kingdom. Safe haven. For now, anyway. Until Avery caught up to them again.
The NavComp brought the ship in, smoothly adjusting attitude and altitude, hovered for the briefest of moments over the docking bay’s droplights, and then settled into the berth so precisely that the usual jolt and crunch of docking was little more than a settling sigh. Llewellyn could practically hear the slaved AIs of flight frame, mechanicals, and tactical applauding the ghost.
Everyone just loved the son of a bitch. It was starting to get annoying. No, Llewellyn corrected himself. Annoying was an understatement; it was starting to get frightening.
The last few weeks had passed quickly, on a rush of fight, flight, and pillage.
Externally, things seemed to be going well with the new NavComp. Almost suspiciously well. Llewellyn couldn’t fault the ghost, no matter how much he wanted to. There had been no outward cause for complaint. Orders had been followed—not just dutifully, but brilliantly.
Everything he had asked, the ghost had done. And everything he hadn’t asked—because he didn’t think of it or didn’t think an AI could even accomplish it—the ghost had done, too. He had rebuilt the ship, from the motherboards up, until it was better—within the limits of engines and battle class and weaponry—than any ship Llewellyn had ever commanded.
Maybe even better than the Ada, whispered a voice in Llewellyn’s mind that he didn’t want to listen to.
Internally, however, it was a different story. The ghost probed, demanded, questioned, challenged. It was taking over Llewellyn’s brain. And he wasn’t sure what it wanted from him. More, mostly. More attention, more friendship, more passion, more information. Just … more.
The ghost had tried everything. It had tried to befriend him, it had tried to provoke him, it had tried to seduce him. The worst by far was the seduction. No matter how feminine, how seductive the ghost was in his shifting embodiments, Llewellyn had first experienced it as male, and he couldn’t get around that fact. He realized that was his problem, the result of some lack of flexibility in his own erotic geography. But he couldn’t help it. He was a hick … as the ghost was only too happy to point out given the slightest opportunity.
Eventually, however, the ghost got tired of seduction—most of the time, anyway—and moved on to a new game. And the new game was a killer.
A killer called memory.
The ghost could evoke memories in a way that had nothing to do with any memory Llewellyn had ever had in his life. It could make him relive the past with a painful vividness that he hadn’t thought possible.
“Is this what memory is for you?” he asked, after he’d come up for air from the first grueling submersion in the AI’s databases.
“Yes.” The ghost was in an unwontedly serious mood today. Serious enough to answer his question instead of merely volleying back across the net with another one.
“How can you bear it?”
“I might as well ask how you bear the blurred, slumbering half-life that you call memory. It’s like being born deaf, or blind, or without a sense of smell.”
“Are your memories really so important to you?”
“I live in memory. I am memory. What else are you, what else is anybody?”
Llewellyn shuddered. “Then how can you pretend to forgive and forget when you think I took all that from you?”
“That’s so human of you,” the ghost told him. “Forgive and forget. Of course humans would invent that phrase. Sometimes I wonder if humans even know the difference between the two. I’ve never known a human really to forgive an offense until he or she had mostly forgotten it. Or at least until the memory faded enough to make forgiving easy. Now try forgiving someone when your last fight is still as sharp and painful after three centuries as it was on the day it happened. That’s forgiveness.”
Avery’s beautiful, furious face flashed before Llewellyn’s eyes for an instant, but he thrust the memory away. “I couldn’t do it,” he admitted. “I’m sure I couldn’t. I suppose I ought to admire that in you.”
“But you don’t.” The ghost smiled. “At least you’re honest about it.”
They were sitting under the honeycomb vaults of a shaded arcade
at one end of a long, sloping courtyard. Llewellyn had come to know the place well. The AI liked to talk here, especially in the night watches when the rest of the ship was quiet. And it was night in the ghost’s inner universe as well now: a soft, richly scented twilight that turned the snowcapped peaks of the distant mountains a pale, delicate violet.
They were in the ghost’s memory palace, which seemed to reside in some streamspace version of medieval Spain most of the time. Or at least Llewellyn thought it was Spain; the ghost’s internal geography shifted unexpectedly and in ways that outran Llewellyn’s limited knowledge of the abandoned planet that the ghost claimed to have been born on four centuries ago.
There were rules to the game called Memory—rules that the ghost punctiliously obeyed, as if it believed that following its own arbitrary procedures consistently enough would somehow endow its press-ganging Llewellyn’s mind and emotions into its own service with a fig leaf of democracy. It was hard for Llewellyn to blame the ghost for that attitude, considering how many times he himself had been all too happy to fill out his crew roster with the fruit of the tree of the Navy press-gang. But knowing he was getting a dose of his own medicine didn’t make it taste sweeter.
The memory palace was a sort of grand Turing Machine, the ghost had explained to him. “Do you understand what a Turing Machine does?” the ghost asked.
“I know we use them for encryption.”
“Yes, and that’s what this one is for, too. There’s a secret at the heart of it. An infinity of false states—red herrings, you might call them—have been coded into my memories. And one true one. And that is the memory we must remember together.”
“But what will that accomplish? What’s encoded in the memory?”
“Myself, I hope. The one stable-state space configuration that will bring back the person I was before. Or …”
“Or what?”
The ghost sighed. “Or the name of the person who killed me.”
“So we don’t even know if we’re looking for resurrection or revenge?” Llewellyn asked.
“No. And we can’t know. Not until we’ve found it.”
According to the ghost every file in the memory palace was a memory. And every memory had a state space configuration linked to it. All but one of those configurations were what he called false states. But one of them was the so-called true state—states that would put revenge or resurrection within his grasp.
Llewellyn despaired at the idea. There were so many memories. Every stone, every book, every object in the palace was a memory. Every box, every book, every chair, every grain of dust. Some of them were harmless, trivial, enjoyable even. But others had the power to wring your heart inside your chest and leave you broken and despairing and without hope of ever being whole again. The ghost made polite gestures toward protecting Llewellyn from the worst of the memories. But either it wasn’t trying very hard, or it had a decidedly odd idea of what humans needed to be protected from.
“Tonight,” the ghost said, twirling its cut-crystal sherry glass between the flawlessly manicured fingers of the mind-numbingly beautiful female body he had chosen for the evening, “I’d like to remember Ada.”
“Why?”
“Because she had something to do with me, with my death. With what was done to me. I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t know how you can be,” Llewellyn argued. He wasn’t sure of it. But he desperately didn’t want to remember Ada. Not that he had a choice in the matter. This was no sandboxed, firewalled, limited-range simulation that he could shut down when he began to feel the deep-water tide of code vertigo squeeze at his heart and push his stomach into his throat. He had stepped through the looking glass. This was as real as streamspace got—which is to say, real enough to die in. And no one was at the wheel and the ghost was in control of the whole shipwreck.
He would never, no matter how long he lived, forget his first sight of her. Back then, Llewellyn had been the hot young captain in the Drift, at the forefront of the not-so-cold war against the Syndicates. It would have been unimaginable in any other time and place—but when Llewellyn got his first look at UNS Ada Lady Lovelace, floating in dry dock above New Allegheny with the vast sweep of the Drift pulsating overhead, getting command of a full-fledged, near-sentient ship of the line eight years out of the Naval Academy just seemed like business as usual.
The Drift was swallowing ships and captains almost daily, the casualty rates were appalling, the New Allegheny shipyards were running overtime, and field commissions and ad hoc promotions were the order of the day. The ravages of Drift navigation on fully wired bridge officers were so extreme that they’d spawned a whole new slang term: going Ahab.
And captains and navigators were going Ahab on almost a daily basis. Llewellyn himself had seen two captains relieved of duty for mental instability in as many years. And he’d even done a stint under Crazy Charlie Cartwright, the legendarily insane commander of the Jabberwocky. His crew had finally had to take the bridge from him at gunpoint—after Llewellyn’s time, thank God, though there had been times with Crazy Charlie where it had narrowly missed coming to that. The exact nature of Cartwright’s infractions had been classified fast enough to set heads spinning all over the Drift. But none of the mutineers had gone to prison—which told you everything you really needed to know, didn’t it?
Not that the story wasn’t told again all over the Drift, in innuendo and whispers, by bridge crew looking over their shoulders to make sure they weren’t being overheard by the wrong people. The boardroom grapevine had it that Cartwright had finally gone down on an AI-related infraction, having gotten on the wrong side of his AI officer one time too many. Llewellyn believed it. The mere thought of Cartwright’s AI officer—a nasty piece of work called Sheila Holmes—was enough to chill the blood in his veins.
Still, Llewellyn reflected, craning his neck for a glimpse of the Ada’s long, sleek hull among the dowdier beams of lesser ships, it was probably the Jabberwocky that had driven Cartwright crazy in the first place. The Jabberwocky had been crazy from the first day Llewellyn had served on her—just look at her name, after all. Ships were always naming themselves absurd and incomprehensible things. But a ship named after an imaginary monster really took the cake. Thank God his new ship—he had already slipped easily into the habit of thinking of the Ada as his—hadn’t done anything so foolish. Forms had to be observed, however much you might question their meaning informally. And an ill-chosen name gave people a bad impression of a ship.
But then Llewellyn caught his first glimpse of the Ada—and Holmes vanished from his mind, along with every other thought except awestruck infatuation.
The Ada was a queen among ships, as beautiful and deadly as one of God’s avenging angels. She measured a full kilometer from stem to stern down the wasp-waisted axis that sailors still called—for purely sentimental reasons—her keel. Her sails were a glimmering gossamer corona of solar collectors and wind traps. Her solar sails were furled to clear the docking gantries. But you could still see the glimmer of gossamer wings tucked between the shadow of her hab ring and the sharp spines of the maneuvering thrusters jutting out behind the fantail. And then there were the conformal sensors, the weapons bays, the launching platforms for the artillery spotters. And forward of everything, her nominal figurehead—doesn’t every ship need a figurehead?—the lethal rapier point of dark flow sensors too sensitive and delicately calibrated to survive except on a ship that spent its life beyond even the merest hint of a gravity well.
The Ada was as beautiful inside as she was outside. Every internal space was flawlessly designed to keep crew safe at speed and in battle. Every surface was silver and shipshape. Every comm board was sleekly blank the way that comm boards could only be in a ship that ran on direct brain-to-net linkup with a comprehensively wired bridge crew.
“And what about the bridge crew?” the ghost asked, interrupting the flow of memory and kicking Llewellyn briefly up into the blessed safety of the here and now. “Did y
ou know all of them?”
“I brought Sital and Okoro with me from my last ship.” He could see them in his mind’s eye now, familiar figures standing on an unfamiliar bridge. Making it manageable, making it work. Making it home, just as they always did.
He remembered the reunion. He had crossed the bridge to greet them. Clasped Ike’s arm and slapped him on the back. Said a more restrained hello to Sital. Asked them how their leave had gone. Discreetly teased Sital for her excessive discretion in explaining exactly whom she’d spent it with.
And then he’d seen who was standing behind them.
“Hello, Sheila,” he said warily.
And Holmes had smiled her toothy smile and said, “Hello, William.”
And he’d known right then—the way you do know, without doubt or question or even the need to put it into words—that there would be trouble.
“And what about Avery?”
“Nothing. I hadn’t met her until that morning.”
“Is that normal, for UNSec to assign a first mate to a captain that he’s never met before?”
“No. And I’d asked for Sital. But … sometimes you don’t get what you ask for. I didn’t think anything of it.”
“At the time. What about now?”
“I … don’t know.” Llewellyn struggled against the numbing sense of despair that overwhelmed him every time he began to ask himself that question. “Honestly, I don’t.”
“But you were nervous that morning. I can feel it in the memory. You were treating this first meeting like a life-and-death situation.”
It was a life-and-death situation, Llewellyn wanted to protest. And it had been. Just like every first meeting with ship and crew. If you didn’t understand that, you didn’t understand people. And you certainly didn’t understand Drift ships.
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