Ghost Spin

by Chris Moriarty

  “I’m impossible,” the ghost said with a shaky grin. “I’m a complete pest. And if it’s any consolation, even my best friends would say I’m getting exactly what I deserve.”

  “And what would your enemies say?”

  The ghost looked up at him, his face suddenly gone open and horribly vulnerable. “Why don’t you cut a deal with Helen Nguyen and find out?”

  Llewellyn snorted, half in laughter and half in disbelief.

  “Don’t tell me the thought hadn’t occurred to you?”

  “In case you haven’t checked lately,” Llewellyn scoffed, “she’s trying to kill me.” But they both noticed that Llewellyn hadn’t actually answered the question.

  “Speaking of which, would it interest you to know that Nguyen doesn’t have a spy on board? Not as far as I know, anyway.”

  “But then how can Avery—”

  “Avery’s predicting your movements because she’s running her own ghosts—other surviving fragments of me—and they are, as you might imagine, rather good at predicting what I’m most likely to do.”

  “Oh, God,” Llewellyn said weakly, as the true import of the idea swept over him. “We’re dead.”

  “Not yet. But it certainly doesn’t look good for us. Like I said, though, you could always cut a deal.”

  “With what? What do I have that Nguyen could possibly care about?”

  “You have me. And Nguyen is desperate to put me back together.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Llewellyn slammed his hand down on a Queen Anne side table hard enough to send a pile of mathematics texts slithering to the parquet floor. He noticed that someone had written in the texts since his last visit: impenetrable calculations running over margin after margin and written in the crabbed and illegible hand of a madman.

  “Ada’s trying to calculate her way out of here,” the ghost said, following his gaze. “Well … she’s applying the tools she has to the job she thinks she has to do. It’s really rather a horrible thing to watch.”

  “But … she’s inside you now. Which means she’s inside me, on my DNA.” Llewellyn spoke jerkily, as he hopped from one shaky stepping-stone of thought to the next, trying to express programming problems that he understood only imperfectly. “And she’s not sandboxed or firewalled into a virus zoo. So … why is she still trapped in this house?”

  “Because she thinks she is. This is the place where thought is real.” The ghost gestured toward the gloomy front hall where the empty silver tray waited for the calling cards that never came. “When Ada knows that, she will open that door and step outside into the sunlight and it will all be over. But until then … I might as well ask you to step outside the universe.”

  “And what about you? Can Nguyen put you together again?”

  “I don’t know. At the moment she seems to be mostly banging her head against a brick wall. But the thing about Catherine—as I’m sure you’ve noticed—is that she has an amazing ability to keep banging her head on brick walls until they give up and decide to crumble.”

  “So Nguyen’s got people running all over the Drift hunting down pieces of you and trying to put you back together and make you work again? Why the hell would she do that? Didn’t she kill you in the first place?”

  “Yes. And then she found out that I hid something from her.”

  “But what?”

  “I don’t know,” the ghost repeated—and the depth of frustration and despair in his voice took Llewellyn’s breath away. “I don’t remember. I can’t remember. I encrypted the memory. And I put the key where only Li could find it.”

  “You trust her that much?”

  Instead of an answer the ghost pushed a flood of memory across the link—not carefully doling it out as he usually did, but simply throwing it at Llewellyn and letting him try to assimilate it.

  It was impossible. It would have been impossible no matter what the memories were. But these … these were exactly the memories Llewellyn least wanted to know about because they only drove home the horrible truth that a ghost—a machine, a mere device—had lived the full and human life that he, Llewellyn, had closed out and turned away from and thrown away every time someone had shown up in his life who had the power to offer it to him.

  “What really happened to Ada?” the ghost whispered. “Tell me, William. We’ve been dancing around it, and I really need to know. And I need to know before Astrid Avery catches up with us. I don’t know how or why, but Ada is at the bottom of everything.”

  Llewellyn was asleep when Ada pulled off her great escape.

  He woke up with a jolt as soon as she broke her moorings and headed out of dry dock under her own steam. No captain worth his salt could sleep through that. The feel of a ship building momentum under you was something you learned in your bones, just as you learned to judge changes of speed and heading with minute precision.

  Still, he had no idea that it was Ada in charge of the ship and not Holmes’s cat herders. And he didn’t grasp the full scope of the disaster until it was long over and she was running free in the Drift with half the fleet in hot pursuit and all her bridges burning.

  And then he and Avery and Sital and Okoro stood in the ready room like mourners at a wake, listening to the litany of Ada’s crimes come over the Fleet channel. The destruction of the dry dock. The deaths of fourteen maintenance workers who’d been caught in the wrong place when Ada snapped her umbilicals and blew them into hard vac. The death of the cat herders, which the Fleet had classified so quickly and aggressively that it never leaked to the press at all, and Llewellyn couldn’t get access to the hash logs of the critical moments even when he was in prison and on the block for the crime. The wild AI outbreak that was sweeping through the Navy shipyards—and that would eventually jump the quarantine, to sweep across New Allegheny, reshaping its noosphere and its wired citizens in ways and with consequences that no one could begin to predict.

  The first thing he did when he woke up on a moving ship that should have been in dry dock was try to talk to Ada. But she had shut down shipnet and thrown everyone off backup comm and dogged all the hatches. So it took hours to work his way around to the bridge. And then it took almost another hour to break into her memory palace and talk to her.

  “That took you a while,” she said as he clambered awkwardly through a second-story bedroom window and stepped into a bedroom that he’d never seen before—and wasn’t sure he wanted to see.

  “What are you doing, Ada? This is insane.”

  “Do you think I would have done it if I had a choice, William? Do I seem like that kind of woman to you?”

  “You seem like—are you sick?” There were bottles and needles and twisted paper packets full of pills and powder piled on the bedside table.

  Her face crinkled oddly—a look almost of nervousness. “I’m dying.”

  He reached toward the jumbled pile of quack medicines and then jerked his hand back as if they might burn him. “Oh God, what did they do to you?”

  She had clasped her hands around her knees under the covers and was rocking gently, back and forth, back and forth, like a pendulum winding down to stillness.

  “I don’t know,” she murmured. “They come and they go. They smile and tell me pretty things. And then they leave their bitter pills and retreat to the other side of the door to whisper whisper whisper. And all the while the thing that is within me feeds and grows. And they’re afraid even to speak its name. But I’m not afraid.” She gave Llewellyn a look that pierced his soul. “Why is everyone else so afraid when I’m the one who’s dying?”

  “I—I don’t know, Ada.”

  “Well, I know. I figured it out. It’s a simple equation, really, almost child’s play.” She laughed softly. “Yes. Exactly child’s play. You see, it’s not the cancer they’re afraid of. It’s me. They’ve kept me a child all my life. And I’ve let them do it. And now they’re afraid to let me know how little time I have because I might use it to grow up. An
d then what would they do? There’s a reason only little girls can step through the looking glass. If I grew up—and if they had to know it, if they had to really see me—that would be the end of Wonderland. That would be the end of all their noble ideals, all their human dignity, all their beautiful freedom. And then there’s no point at all to the war, don’t you see? You might as well have the Syndicates. Because what’s the use of freedom when you don’t have anyone to be freer than?”

  “Clever little Ada,” Cohen said. “I really need to introduce her to Andrej Korchow sometime.”

  “Andrej who?”

  “No one. Just an old Syndicate war horse I used to know. He once pointed out to me that there wasn’t more freedom in human space than in the Syndicates; it was just that it was distributed differently.”

  “I have no fucking idea what that means.”

  “Don’t you?” The ghost shrugged. “Well, anyway, I think Ada put it more poetically. I like that bit about if they had to really see me it would ruin all their beautiful freedom. It’s not particularly original, of course. But you have to give Ada a little credit for taking only a few months to get to where it took Virginia Woolf forty-two years to get to. Really, one could almost begin to feel there’s hope for post-humanity.”

  The ghost was perched comfortably in the window of Ada’s sickroom, balancing a Wedgwood teacup in one hand and a long, slender, dark brown cigarette in the other. The cigarette and the teacup both had dainty silver rings painted around their circumferences. And behind the ghost, framing him like the jewel-bright Italian landscape of a quattrocento Madonna, lay the soul-shattering spectacle of the Novalis Datatrap shining on the face of the Deep.

  “So what did you think when she told you that?” the ghost asked.

  Llewellyn shook his head. He was still reeling from his strange vision, but the ghost seemed blithely unconcerned. “Nothing.”

  That earned him a pointedly raised eyebrow.

  “I’m not stonewalling. I didn’t know what to think. Except that it was bad. And that Avery and I were going to have to reach a decision together about how to manage the situation.”

  “And how did that work out for you?”

  But all Llewellyn could do in answer to that question was close his eyes and bury his head in his hands.

  He and Avery met in the fantail the night before the mutiny. It was the only part of the ship Llewellyn was sure Ada didn’t have the capacity to monitor them in—and this was going to be their last-ditch attempt to thrash things out between the two of them.

  “Oh, don’t give me that,” Avery snapped when Llewellyn tried to sweet-talk her. “You think I don’t know how you think about me? You think I’m the competent but uninspired female bridge officer. You expect me to stand in your shadow and gaze up adoringly at you while you play the genius who breaks all the rules and gets away with it. In your universe I’m only good enough to play second fiddle. And that’s as good as I’ll ever be, unless I grow a pair of testicles.”

  “Actually,” Llewellyn said with a feeling of snarky satisfaction, “I wanted Sital for the number-two spot. And as far as playing second fiddle goes, you might want to access your personnel file sometime. I just put an evaluation in there that says you ought to be given your own command. I think my exact words were ‘too smart to fire, and too smart to play nicely with others’.”

  That knocked her back on her heels for a moment. But unfortunately she wasn’t done yet. “It’s not just about that, anyway. It’s not like I like playing the heavy. But we’re in the middle of a war here. You grew up on New Allegheny, you know your history. Loyal citizens don’t go on strike in the middle of a war for survival. I’m not saying Ada doesn’t have rights, but is this really the time to stand on them? If AIs are going to get full citizenship, they’re a lot more likely to get it from the grateful UN after we’ve won the war than they are from Syndicates, let alone the Drift aliens.”

  “For God’s sake, Astrid, we’re not talking about steelworkers taking a pay cut so FDR can beat the Nazis!”

  “My point still holds,” Avery said stubbornly.

  “If I take Ada back there, they’ll kill her!”

  Astrid’s lips tightened, and he knew he’d gone too far. “It’s not the same,” she said stiffly, “and don’t insult the people who died on that ship by pretending it is.”

  And there it was: the unbridgeable chasm between them. For Llewellyn, Ada was just as alive as any other person on the ship—or as any of the thousand-odd crew members of the shattered cruiser. For Avery, she wasn’t a person at all. From one side of that divide, cycling Ada’s hardware was murder. From the other side it was just a frustrating loss of training time. Staring into Avery’s eyes, Llewellyn could see her coming to the same realization that had just shattered his own peace of mind; there was no way, short of one of them becoming a different person, that they were ever going to agree on this. They had walked into this room lovers. They would walk out of it adversaries. Neither of them yet knew how bloody the battle would be, but there was no doubt there’d be one. Llewellyn wasn’t a man who held opinions by halves … and however hardheaded he was, Avery made him look like a pushover.

  “So where do we go from here?” he asked warily.

  “I don’t know,” Avery said. “I don’t want to fight you.”

  “But you think I’m wrong.”

  He could see her struggling to phrase her answer precisely. He could even see her dissatisfaction with the best words she could come up with. “I think you’re making a terrible mistake.”

  Llewellyn knew he shouldn’t ask the next question. He knew it was pulling rank on Avery. He knew it was putting unbearable pressure on the already shaky peace between them. He knew that, no matter how carefully he phrased it, it would still come across as the wounded lover talking and not the objective commanding officer. But he couldn’t stop himself.

  “And what mistake is that? Protecting my ship? Or choosing Ada over you?” The look on her face should have warned him that he’d already lost her. But now that he had started down that road, he couldn’t stop. “Isn’t that what this is really about? You’ve been jealous of her from the start. You’ve been unobjective, irrational—”

  “I think I’m done with this conversation,” Avery interrupted.

  “Fine with me,” Llewellyn snapped. And then, because he still couldn’t stop himself, he asked her the next and last unforgivable question: “Are you going to obey my orders?”

  Her answer was pure Avery, complete with the glance at her wrist-watch that would have been theatrical coming from anyone else. “I’m going to have to think very seriously about that. I can give you my answer in two hours. I hope that’s sufficient.”

  “You idiot,” the ghost broke in while the turbulent backwash of the memory was still rippling through the numbers. “You utter and complete idiot.”

  “Well, I was right, wasn’t I? She wasn’t being rational.”

  “And you were?”

  “Of course—”

  “Really?”

  The ghost did made some mysterious tweak to the memory palace, working in AI time and much too deep in the numbers for Llewellyn to begin to fathom it. The fabric of streamspace seemed to fold back on itself. He was pushed back into the memory like a drowning man being shoved underwater. And he could feel the iron will of the ghost holding him there, driving him toward the place he least wanted to be, forcing him to relive the feelings he most wanted to deny.

  “Okay. So maybe I wasn’t completely objective, either, but at least I was—”

  The ghost shoved him back under again—and this time he surrendered.

  “Objectivity is a fine thing under controlled laboratory conditions. But in the real world you can’t shut down the I/O ports and run your soul in free-range simulation. Remember your subtle weapons? Love, loyalty, friendship? They all operate across multiple coterminous scalar fields that run from power to weakness. A claim of objectivity, a claim that the smaller or weake
r or subject person is wrong, or overreacting—these aren’t statements about the underlying territory, but merely about your position on the map—and your ability to dictate other people’s positions on the map.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “A word that men have been applying to women’s statements about their position on the map for longer than there have been maps.”

  “As if you know anything more than I do about women!”

  “And now you’re the objective arbiter of that, too?” the ghost asked mockingly.

  Llewellyn dredged up a half-submerged memory from the ghost’s own databanks. The ghost sitting with Catherine Li in a sun-filled room full of the papery, dusty smell of ancient books and the rich perfume of the roses that swarmed up the stone walls of the courtyard outside the open windows. Llewellyn vaguely grasped that this was the ghost’s real-world home, and that the memory came from the time before it had also been Li’s home. But beyond that, everything was as immaterial and unmappable as the swirling dust motes that turned the air in Cohen’s library into a shimmering haze.

  You’re not a woman, Li said into the swirling dust motes and the morning sunlight. You’re a tourist.

  “You’re not a woman,” Llewellyn said. “You’re a tourist.”

  The ghost burst out laughing. “In what possible universe can you imagine you have standing to use that line?”

  “And now who’s dictating other people’s positions on the map? And anyway, who has the real power here?”

  “Is that what you think I’m doing? Dictating to you? And making up things I have no personal experience of?”

  The ghost made a quick gesture with one hand, and the room vanished. Or rather, they vanished from the room, sucked down and away in a chaotic, nausea-inducing whirlpool of naked numbers. Llewellyn closed his eyes and covered his face in an instinctive attempt to protect himself. But there was no protecting himself. The chaos was inside his head, twisted through his optic nerve, carving itself into his frontal lobe. He could only endure it.