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Sometimes a ghost of a chance is all you get.Award-winning author Chris Moriarty returns to a dazzling cyber-noir far future in this gritty, high-stakes thriller where the only rule is “Evolve . . . or die.”The Age of Man is ending. The UN’s sprawling interstellar empire is failing as its quantum teleportation network collapses, turning once-viable colonies into doomed island outposts. Humanity’s only hope of survival is the Drift: a mysterious region of space where faster-than-light travel—or something far stranger—seems possible. As mercenaries and pirates flock to the Drift, the cold war between the human-led UN and the clone-dominated Syndicates heats up. Whoever controls the Drift will chart the future course of human evolution—and no one wants to be left behind in a universe where the price of failure is extinction.When the AI called Cohen ventures into the Drift, he dies—allegedly by his own hand—and his consciousness is scattered across the cosmos. Some of his ghosts are still self-aware. Some are insane. And one of them hides a secret worth killing for. Enter Major Catherine Li, Cohen’s human (well, partly human) lover, who embarks on a desperate search to solve the mystery of Cohen’s death—and put him back together. But Li isn’t the only one interested in Cohen’s ghosts. Astrid Avery, a by-the-book UN navy captain, is on the hunt. So is William Llewellyn, a pirate who has one of the ghosts in his head, which is slowly eating him alive. Even the ghosts have their own agendas. And lurking behind them all is a pitiless enemy who will stop at nothing to make sure the dead don’t walk again.Praise for *Ghost Spin “Complexity is the watchword here, of thought, idea, narrative, character and plot. . . . Highly rewarding.”—*Kirkus Reviews “Rewarding . . . The adaptations humans make to survive in the hostile environments of other worlds, a galaxy teetering on the edge of singularity . . . are genuinely visionary.”—*Publishers Weekly “This stand-along ‘spin-off’ offers a compelling tale of adventure/suspense blended with cybernoir and high-tech sf.”—*Library Journal “An excellent read: gripping, fast-paced, provocative and handsome.”—Tor.com “A brilliant mix of space opera, cyberpunk, and just plain great writing, Moriarty’s work is some of the most impressive in science fiction today.”—SFRevuFrom the Trade Paperback edition.Review“Complexity is the watchword here, of thought, idea, narrative, character and plot. . . . Highly rewarding.”—*Kirkus Reviews “Rewarding . . . The adaptations humans make to survive in the hostile environments of other worlds, a galaxy teetering on the edge of singularity . . . are genuinely visionary.”—*Publishers Weekly “This stand-along ‘spin-off’ offers a compelling tale of adventure/suspense blended with cybernoir and high-tech sf.”—Library Journal *“An excellent read: gripping, fast-paced, provocative and handsome.”—Tor.com “A brilliant mix of space opera, cyberpunk, and just plain great writing, [Chris] Moriarty’s work is some of the most impressive in science fiction today.”—SFRevu*Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.9780553384949|excerptMoriarty / GHOST SPINThe Real Turing TestDip the apple in the brew. Let the Sleeping Death seep through.—“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”I begin to understand Death, which is going on quietly & gradually every minute & will never be a Thing of one particular moment.—Ada Lovelace(Cohen)The CrucibleThe apple was perfect. It glistened on the battered hotel table, a vivid spot of red in the dingy room, reflecting the loaded pistol that lay beside it.The boy lay on the other side of the room, his feet up on the musty bed, staring at the apple as if it held the answers to all the mysteries of the universe.Or rather, the being that had borrowed the boy’s body looked through his eyes at the apple. The boy himself was nowhere. He had taken Cohen’s money, gone to sleep, and would never wake up to cash his paycheck. Just one more item of collateral damage to add to the red side of the ledger books, Cohen told himself. Unless you lose your nerve. Which at the moment seems entirely possible.Who would have thought it could be so hard to die? He’d seen humans do it often enough. He’d watched them lay down their lives for a principle, for a country, for pride or loyalty . . . for sheer nonsense. Hadn’t Alan Turing eaten his fatal apple at forty-two? And didn’t Cohen have good and sufficient reasons—perhaps the best reason of all—for shuffling off the mortal coil? And hadn’t Cohen lived like no human ever could have lived? What more could anyone suck out of life? So how pathetic was it that he should still be struggling to screw up his courage after four centuries?“Dying for a principle is all very well in principle,” he murmured. He tried to laugh but failed. Then he stood up, feeling ill and dizzy, and stumbled across the moldy carpet to the open window.He leaned out into the smoky twilight, gulping in great breaths of what passed for fresh air in the eternal smog of the Crucible. The sign on the bar across the street said Iron City Beer, but the sky overhead was the color of steel. Battered trolley cars ran down the center line of West Munhall Avenue packed full of exhausted steelmen coming off the swing shift. Pedestrians hurried along the sidewalk below, gray ghosts trapped between hard concrete and lowering umbrellas.There was a synth junkie slumped in the doorway across the street, shooting up in broad daylight—or what passed for it down here. Cohen watched her for a moment, taking in the young ravaged face, the tattered remnants of her Navy uniform, the silver tattooing of a military wire job that would turn out, on closer inspection, to be just a little too out-of-date to qualify her for off-planet employment. All the increasingly familiar symbols of space age conflict that was evolving far faster than the humans tasked with fighting it.She looked up suddenly, seeming to gaze straight through the hotel window and into Cohen’s eyes. But it was an illusion. She was lost in the spinstream, loaded up with black-market executables, running closer to the numbers than the human body was ever designed to run, lost in a borrowed AI dream of superimposed infinities.The old sailor who’d sold Cohen the synth had called it AI in the blood. Cohen had been shocked by the words—and then amused at his own naïveté. AI in the blood was precisely what synth was. Synthetic myelin enhancer with an intelligent payload was just a fig leaf. And the euphemisms of the off-planet policy wonks were so wrong they weren’t even wrong.“You take it to do the job,” the sailor had told Cohen, seeing only his young body and thinking he was a war vet and a fellow addict. “And then you take it to pretend you can still do the job. And then you just take it to pretend.”A monstrous flatbed rumbled down the street, looking like some mechanized refugee from the Age of the Dinosaurs. It was loaded to the breaking point with a single hulking hump of forged ceramsteel: some Drift ship engine part whose very existence was probably classified information in the rest of UN space. As the truck lumbered by, Cohen looked down and read the words monongahela machine works, new allegheny stamped into the rain-slicked metal.Cohen craned his neck to peer up through the smog: industrial-age pollution reflecting back the lights of a post-human, post-biosphere city, filtering garish holo-neon to the brooding shimmer of black pearl. Somewhere high overhead it must be a sunny spring morning, but down here in the Pit there was only the eternal acid rain and smog-choked twilight.He imagined the corporate orbitals whipping around the planet twenty miles overhead in low geosynchronous orbit. Beyond them lay the Navy shipyards: a thousand curving kilometers of barracks and dry docks and orbital munitions factories, where the shipwrights were siphoning off the geological wealth of an entire planet in what might just be the most massive military-industrial buildup in the history of the species, and the Navy cat herders coaxed and cossetted their captive AIs, and the Drift ships floated in their berths like sleek, silver, lethal piranhas. Beyond that, dominating the high-rent zone of New Allegheny’s Lagrangian neutral orbit, lay the Bose-Einstein field array, from which Cohen and his deadly contraband had been turned away only a week ago for lacking the proper travel papers. And beyond that—in a beyond that no merely human mind could map or navigate—lay the cosmos-spanning sweep of the Drift, with its uncharted eddies and whorls and spindles fanning out into the multiverse.You’ll never see any of it again, he told himself harshly. You’re going to die here, you and the poor boy, God spare his immortal soul. You’re going to die like a dog in a flyblown hotel room in the armpit of the known universe. And it’s your own damn fault—just like everything else that’s gone wrong since the minute you ported the first digit of your source code to this godforsaken backwater.Whether or not Cohen himself had a soul was still an open question after four centuries. But as for death itself . . . well, there was no question about that, no more than for any other creature that walks under the sun. Humans died and decayed and rotted back into the soil to feed the worms that tended the soil that grew into plants that fed new humans. Life devours itself, a cosmic snake eating its own tail. And artificial life was no different. Still . . . there was something horrible in the thought that the shattered fragments of his soul would be cannibalized by other AIs. Perhaps even by the Drift ships, so hungry for CPUs that the Navy were rumored to have begun press-ganging every independent AI unfortunate enough to stumble into their paths. He thought of the horrors Ada had endured—horrors that his mind still shied away from even now—and for the first time in that long night of preparations he admitted to himself that he wasn’t pulling off a bold and daring rescue. This was only an exchange of hostages.“I’m sorry,” he murmured, speaking not to what he thought of as his “self,” but rather to the myriad of autonomous and semiautonomous agents from whose complex interplay his identity emerged. He loved them. He had nurtured and pushed and protected some of them for decades, enjoying their successes just like any loving parent and looking forward to that bittersweet moment when they would themselves attain full sentience and be ready to leave the nest. But that would never happen now. He was about to sink his ship of souls and condemn all the millions who sailed in her to God only knew what living Hell.“Well, poor Ada’s in Hell already,” he told himself. Ada was drowning. She had killed, of course. And she was quite probably dangerous. Nguyen and her attack dog Holmes were right enough about that, no matter how much he longed to deny it. But in every other way—in every way that counted—Ada was as innocent as a child. And when it had come to the point of walking past a drowning child or diving in to save her, Cohen hadn’t even felt he had a choice.A half-submerged memory rose through the darkness and exploded into what passed for Cohen’s consciousness when he was operating at the rock-bottom bandwidth that was all the boy’s obsolete wire job could deliver: Ada’s face, pale and pleading beneath the masses of her dark hair. Then she was gone, replaced by other memories. Holmes talking about cycling Ada’s hardware as if they were just putting down a rabid dog. And Llewellyn—noble, useless, play-it-by-the-book Llewellyn—whose idea of saving Ada was filing a formal complaint after the axe had already fallen. Where had Llewellyn been when they pulled the switch? He’d pushed Ada over the top and into battle like the good soldier he was, without even thinking what the cost would be. He’d watched Ada sell her soul for him—and then stood idly by while the Navy scrapped it.“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 ...Pages of Ghost Spin :
