Ghost Spin (10 page)

It was all nonsense to Li, of course, who still knew how to curse like a Catholic schoolgirl but didn’t have a religious bone in her body. Still, she had to admit it was a brilliant disguise. It explained her nonstandard wire job. It explained her construct’s features—for some traces of her corporate geneset were still recognizable even after the chop shop surgery that had smoothed the way off her native mining colony. And since the UN had adopted a policy of encouraging the transhumanist cult members to emigrate to the AI enclave in order to get them out of general circulation, no one at customs would be all that inclined to look too closely at one more Trannie.

But even traveling incognito she couldn’t help wincing a little as the shuttle lifted off from the Earth’s orbital ring for the brief trip out to the Bose-Einstein relay. A decade ago she would have made such a trip without thinking; it was nothing, a puddle hop between two inner worlds, not even requiring cold freeze. But now she felt the cold squeeze
of guilt at her heart as she stared up at the vast, glimmering petals of the Bose-Einstein array.

It was the characteristic image of the age—or at least of the age Li had been born into, and whose death throes would probably last well beyond her biological life span. A vast, carnivorous-looking central maw surrounded by nine petals composed of a gossamer-thin latticework of Bose-Einstein condensates and solar panels.

She’d always found the arrays beautiful. When she was a child that iconic spiny flower had symbolized the limitless possibilities of space and an escape from the grinding poverty of a mining colony. But now she couldn’t look at one without thinking of Compson’s World.

She’d been a loyal soldier when she went to Compson’s World. She hadn’t had any illusions about the system she’d devoted her entire adult life to defending. But she’d had a tetchy, ad hoc sort of patriotism. She’d always liked that line of Orwell’s about people sleeping safe in their beds at night because rough men stood ready to do violence on their behalf. And she’d been proud to be one of those rough men. But Compson’s World had knocked that out of her. It had left her not knowing what she believed in, and wondering whether any sane person could be proud of the life she’d lived.

Looking up at the field array now, she wondered if Helen Nguyen had been right all those years ago, when she accused Li of betraying the UN merely so she could sleep a little easier at night. On the whole, though, she thought Nguyen had given her too much credit. She hadn’t been standing on principles, even hazy ones. She’d just acted on reflex: on a gut sense of right and wrong that had nothing to do with the big picture and everything to do with the little piece of suffering humanity that happened to be shoved in her face at that particular moment.

That wasn’t any kind of way to run an empire. She wasn’t even sure it was a morally defensible way to run your life. But somewhere between the war crimes she’d supposedly committed on Gilead and the memory washing that had left her unable to remember whom she’d killed or why, Li had stopped believing in principles.

Maybe Nguyen was right after all, she told herself. Maybe she had been selfish. She flexed her right hand, as she often did when Nguyen
came to mind. And she was strangely revolted—as she had been several times since waking in the private clinic that morning—to feel flesh sliding over bones instead of the crisp clockwork of the familiar prosthetic. Her zookeepers—they called themselves her hosts—had decided that the prosthetic was too recognizable to make it through immigration. And so her lost hand was back again, albeit feeling disconcertingly limp and pins-and-needlesy.

The limpness wore off over the course of the day, but the strange, dreamlike drifting feeling lingered. Perhaps it was nothing more than the superficial isolation that came from traveling under her monk’s cowl. And yet … and yet she felt that she had become a ghost herself, in the world but not of it, unable to find any real point of connection with the living stream around her.

The ship drifted toward the spidery flower of the Bose-Einstein array. She heard the rumble of the maneuvering engines as it back-thrust, stopped spin, boosted, translated, and underwent the series of complex Poincaré transformations through spacetime as it coordinated its position and momentum with that of the field array. And as the ship drifted into the transport field like a fly straying into a giant Venus flytrap, Li thought about time and gravity and paradox.

The problem with thinking about faster-than-light travel was that there was just no piece of it the human brain could really wrap itself around. AIs could think about it, though they never seemed to be able to express those thoughts in terms that a human could understand. The enslaved semi-sentient AI in every field array throughout UN space had to understand the nature of closed timelike loops, after all, or no ship would ever arrive at its destination in one piece. But whenever AIs tried to explain the structure of spacetime as they saw it, they lapsed into sphinxlike riddles.

Among human physicists there were three schools of thought about FTL. The Strong Chronology Protection faction claimed that coherent evolution along closed timelike loops was impossible in normal gravitational fields and that any memories to the contrary were simply a mass delusion. This argument was difficult for most people to swallow, since the UN’s entire political and financial system depended on FTL.
But on the other hand, the Strong Protection faction did have a lot of very convincing math on their side, and it was always hard to argue with the proverbial cold equations.

The Weak Chronology Protection faction claimed that, although consistent evolution along closed timelike loops remained technically impossible, the impossibility could be sidestepped by moving into alternate universes. There were several versions of this theory, all based on different notions of the underlying structure of spacetime, but the most popular ones were Many Worlds, Multiverse, and Bubbleverse (which Li had always thought sounded more like a brand of chewing gum than a scientific theory). They all basically stood for the same idea, though: that time travel was actually travel between separate universes rather than travel from one place to another in a single unified spacetime.

And then there were the people—Cohen among them—who simply didn’t believe in Time at all. They made no sense most of the time, and would have been roundly ridiculed, if everyone didn’t agree that they had the most elegant math on their side. Li had never been comfortable with them, or with Cohen’s enthusiasm for their theories. There was something radically unsettling about their vision of the universe. And there was something even more unsettling about listening to an Emergent AI wax poetic about the idea that Time itself was not a fundamental law of the universe but merely an emergent phenomenon that someday, for no rhyme or reason, might just … stop.

It was the waxing-poetic part that really bothered Li when you got right down to it. The idea that Cohen would take such joy in contemplating a universe devoid of even the minimal structure and meaning supplied by time’s arrow. The idea that, hidden at the heart of all the pretty equations and elegant metaphors, was a sort of perverse pleasure at the idea that he himself had no real existence.

“Of course there’s no
there
there,” Cohen had said with a laugh the last time she’d called him on it. “What do you expect? It’s turtles all the way down, darling, and it always has been.”

But turtles or no turtles, there was one thing that everyone agreed on: You couldn’t exceed the speed of light without Bose-Einstein condensates.
The condensates tamed the spinfoam’s chaos, made it possible to sidestep classical physics and scale up the quantum spookiness of the universe to macroscopic levels. They existed in some dimension that unified the quantum and the classical. Or they existed in another inflationary region of the universe where the rules were different, or in a different universe altogether, or in multiple universes simultaneously. No one knew, and the debate might well be no more than semantic. The debates of quantum cosmologists were as never-ending as wars of religion—though conducted, for the most part, to higher standards of collegiality. The only sure thing was that there was no known way to exceed light speed without them.

Except that now someone had found a way. They had found in the Drift a possible escape from the death by slow strangulation that Li had brought upon them. That was why Cohen had gone to the Drift. And very likely why he had died there.

The passage through the array was instantaneous—imperceptible even to Li’s highly enhanced human senses. There was no shock, no
thereness
, to the moment when the ship dropped out of normal space and shunted from one probability path—or one universe, depending on your chosen brand of cosmology—to another. AIs were said to be able to detect the shift, but when Li had asked Cohen to describe the feeling, he’d merely shrugged and said it was like trying to describe the color of smoke to a blind person.

The general collapse of the Bose-Einstein network wasn’t immediately apparent en route to Freetown. There was nothing in the smooth AI-piloted ride or the plush white-and-neutral-toned interior of the first-class passenger cabin that screamed Death of an Empire. But then there wouldn’t be. The Ring and Freetown weren’t going to suffer from a shortage of condensates anytime soon. It was the more remote Colonies and Trusteeships along the Periphery who were falling off the map one by one as they lost their field arrays, subjecting millions of posthuman colonials to the agonizing choice between becoming impoverished refugees or permanent castaways on isolated, partially terraformed planets whose impoverished gene pools and biospheres would soon
doom them to the status of walking ghosts. But even here, at the rich, secure, reachable heart of human space, you could feel the panic. The frenetic pace of civilian traffic, shooting through relays one step ahead of the military closures that were announced almost daily. The sense of being on an almost-at-war footing, even though no one was officially admitting it. The now-routine presence of increasingly desperate refugees from the Periphery. Still, Freetown would have FTL, as long as there was a single live condensate to be cannibalized from some poorer planet. If Freetown ever went off grid it would spell the end of everything.

Freetown had begun life as a hard-luck generation ship colony just like any other. But with the invention of Bose-Einstein transport, it had become a hub in the UN’s FTL network. And then some local politician had had the brilliant idea of inviting in the AIs. He’d made Freetown the first officially recognized Temporary Autonomous Zone in UN space, and self-owned Emergents had been invited to take up residency in the TAZ—in exchange for contributing a reasonable percentage of their substantial earnings to the planetary tax rolls. Other AI enclaves had followed, all on the same taxes-for-freedom model. But Freetown remained the largest and most profitable. Officially it was part of the larger human colony on Freetown’s home planet, but in reality it was the closest thing in UN space to a machine-run society. An AI shadow government handled all governmental functions so smoothly that the human authorities were hard-pressed to find an excuse to exercise even the minimal rights of oversight and intervention the Freetown Charter had left to them. The AIs built and maintained their own civic infrastructure (considerately providing all the necessary amenities for human guest workers and business travelers). The AIs policed themselves according to laws they wrote themselves. And when AIs committed crimes—which they either did very rarely or so skillfully that they were rarely caught—their fellow AIs punished them accordingly. Which was a good thing, since the human options for punishing AI crime were extremely limited.

At first glance, Freetown looked no different than any other busy spaceport. But look again, and you saw the subtle differences. No
threatening UNSec placards stating that controlled tech would be subject to search and seizure or that resisting UNSec personnel in the performance of their official duties was a felony offense punishable by prison time. Instead there was only a vast, glimmering holographic banner that informed arriving passengers,
INFORMATION SEEKS ITS OWN FREEDOM
.

There was a group of Uploaders moving through processing just ahead of her, and Li watched them, at once repulsed and fascinated. This group hadn’t yet made their final translation into the Clockless Nowever. But their shaved heads and saffron robes declared their determination to leave their organic bodies behind and drown their individuality in the vast tidal sweep of some Emergent AI’s neural nets.

Uploading was a religion, of course, though its adherents insisted it wasn’t. One of the many overwrought, millennial religions that had swept through the UN as the age of humans crumbled and whatever was coming next ate its way out of the decaying chrysalis. What the AIs got out of the Uploaders was clear: data, memories, the information for which they were so eternally and ravenously hungry. What the Uploaders got out of it was less clear—at least to Li. She understood the attraction. It had been a constant undercurrent in her life with Cohen over the years. But it was a deadly one, as seductive as the undertow to a swimmer standing on the edge of an ocean dreaming of oblivion. Surrender and you were lost, with no way to know what waited beyond the tide line until you were past the point of no return. Even the event horizon of a black hole gave you some information about what lay beyond. But from the other side of the Singularity, no sign of life ever returned.

Li only watched the Uploaders with half an eye, though. The rest of her attention was riveted on the real show: a crystal-clear, full 3-D livewall fused onto the soaring vault of the Immigration Center in a one-molecule-deep layer of DNA-platformed quantum processors. And the image on it was exactly what you’d expect it to be—exactly what millions of religious and quasi-religious pilgrims and technophiles from all over UN space came here every year to see: the Freetown Datatrap.

Li gazed up at the Datatrap, overwhelmed by awe in spite of herself,
knowing that she was gawking just like any other tourist but unable to stop herself. It spun lazily in Freetown’s L5-equivalent stable parking slot, faintly glimmering even in the dark or outer space. Its quantum foliations cupped one within the next like the nested velvet leaves of an infinite rose. The leaves seemed to shift and shimmer as the subatomic structures of the Datatrap popped in and out of existence in the eternal dance of entanglement and decoherence. But that was a mirage, of course—an illusion that said less about what the eye actually saw than about what the brain knew was there to see.