Ghost Spin (12 page)

Li cleared her throat. “So how is Cohen involved?”

“After our agents disappeared, UNSec terminated the contract and told us that the outbreak was under control. This struck us as … questionable. So we sent Cohen out to verify. And then
he
disappeared.”

“So why are you hiring me?”

“To find him, obviously.”

“And why the hell would I do that for you?”

“Because there’s a ghost.”

Li felt her lungs constrict and her pulse hammer in her temple. “So what?” she argued. “It’s not him. No one’s ever brought an AI back after decohesion.”

“No one’s ever proved it can’t be done, either. Are you afraid to try?”

She didn’t answer immediately.

“And for
this
,” Aleph-Null said with a cold sneer, “Cohen gave up his dignity and ultimately his life. How pathetic.”

But by now Li was beyond being offended. She was too busy thinking. “What about the other fragments? The yard sale—”

“Anything that can be wound can be unwound. Yard sales, as you so vulgarly term them, can only happen in Freetown. Even if the physical components of a disassociated AI are scattered across the galaxy, the transaction happens here. And as you might imagine, Freetown’s auction houses keep very thorough records.”

“That are completely inaccessible to human agencies by fiat of the Temporary Autonomous Zone.”

“That’s as it may be. But we’re not talking about human agencies. We’re talking about you and us. And you’re a special case … or at least that’s the current consensus.”

Li sorted through her unanswered questions, trying to figure out which ones she had time to ask before his patience ran out. “And how am I supposed to get to New Allegheny now that the relay’s shut down?”

“That’s your affair.”

“You want me to
scattercast
?”

“As I said, how you get there doesn’t concern us.”

“And what about the ghost? Is it crazy? What makes you think he’s salvageable?”

“Does it really matter? I thought you were more sanguinary than that. I thought you’d be chomping at the bit at the prospect of revenge.”

She tensed. “So you believe it was murder, too?”

“Oh yes. We don’t know in any significant detail what happened once he downloaded into New Allegheny’s noosphere. But we do know that much.”

She leaned forward, staring at his face even though she should have known that anything it gave away would be more an artifact of the shunt than genuine information.

“Why?”

And then—in one of those quantum jumps that AIs could make from silence into garrulity—he began to talk.

He talked endlessly. And, for the most part, nonsensically. It seemed that ALEF had sent Cohen into the Drift for a number of reasons—several of which appeared to flatly contradict one another.

This should have been no surprise to Li, given her long experience of Cohen’s own internal debates, contradictions, and identity crises. But somehow she never quite got over expecting AIs to be … well, if not more rational than human beings, at least approximately
as
rational.

As far as she could make out from Aleph-Null’s tangled and elliptical explanation, the more significant reasons boiled down to the generally held conviction that somewhere in the Drift there must be intelligent aliens. Or at least habitable planets. Or at least … something. But every time she tried to circle around to what that something was, she got a different answer. And when Aleph-Null started trying to explain the shifting and contradictory positions of ALEF’s multitudinous factions, it got even worse.

One faction suspected that some of the planets in the Drift might have been terraformed long ago by the same aliens who had terraformed Novalis. The Novalis aliens had flashed briefly into the human field of vision almost a decade ago—an eternity in AI time—without doing anything more than casually demonstrating their alarming technological
superiority. And the Novalis aliens might be the same as the posited “Drift aliens” … or they might not. Either way, the first faction wanted to talk to them.

A second block believed that any aliens who could navigate the quantum tides of the Drift must belong to a machine culture that, even if it included humanoids, merely used them as volitionless “eyes and hands.” Obviously this was a highly intriguing idea, especially for those in ALEF with strong separatist leanings. So several factions were for attempting contact on a friendly basis.

As for how contact with the Drift aliens—or more likely, given the vastness of spacetime, exploration of the Drift with an eye to possible distant future contact—fit into the larger political landscape, one camp believed that the Drift aliens were a potential threat to the UN’s human culture (which, after all, supplied necessary hardware and unskilled labor, even for separatists) and ought to be monitored as such. Another camp believed that any sufficiently advanced spacefaring culture would constitute a natural ally against the threat posed by the anti-AI movement. A third faction rejected any attempt to insert ALEF into organic affairs on purely ideological grounds and simply wanted to monitor the situation as part of a long-term study of post-human evolutionary ecology. And two more factions, which Aleph-Null described opaquely as “splinter groups,” were (respectively) vehemently in favor and adamantly opposed to pursuing contact with the Drift aliens—in each case for reasons that Li was completely unable to grasp despite his painstaking explanations.

And if the explanations were opaque, then the vocabulary was completely impenetrable. It turned out that the competing factions distrusted each other in practice at least as much as they disagreed with each other on principle. So each faction insisted on having its own representative speak to her separately—though always through Aleph-Null’s body. And each time a new AI decanted himself into Aleph-Null’s body, Li had to download and apply his personal lexicon.

Li had heard of personal lexicons before. They were a pet software application of the language refuseniks, who either communicated purely through mathematical equations or refused to accept the established
meanings of words. Such AIs insisted on uploading personalized dictionaries into shared databases whenever they talked to one another. She’d also heard Cohen mock the intellectual fads that swept through AI society with the speed of wildfire and completely transformed communication systems and even underlying personality structures. Obviously the personal lexicon thing was the fad of the moment. And unfortunately it was a fad that promised to give her a tremendous personal pain in the ass.

“We are all monarchs of our own skin,” one of the faction leaders told her when she had the temerity to protest. He called himself CheshireCat (and she couldn’t even begin to imagine how scathing Cohen would have been about that well-worn cliché of AI nomenclature). “Words belong to whoever steals them.”

“Sounds like Uploader talk,” Li said.

He laughed in her face at that. “The Uploaders are blind men in a cave,” he scoffed. “But at least they know it. And Hakim Bey knew it, all the way back down the long years in the age of paper, when he created the first Temporary Autonomous Zone. That’s better than you can say.”

The room flickered around her, her first hint of what she should have known all along: that this was not merely a material house, but one upon which her AI interlocutors had overlaid a streamspace geography, close as a second skin, of folded, twisted, superimposed databases.
We are all monarchs of our own skin
.

“Every TAZ is a pirate utopia. Every AI is a spy in hostile territory, a sea dog, a mechanical Turk, a quantum renegado. So how can we embody the post-organic anarchy if we allow human limitations to dictate our discourse? You have to escape from the tyranny of consistency. You have to realize that the human drive to order and simplify arises from the structural limitations of the human organism. Reality is complex, chaotic, ever changing. The unaugmented human brain simply doesn’t have the processing capacity to cope with it. Even language, that great monument of human intellect, is a gross abstraction. One-size-fits-all. But why
should
one size have to fit all? Why should AIs accept such a rigid and fossilized mode of communication? It’s nothing personal. It’s
not that they don’t like humans, or appreciate everything you’ve done for us. It’s just that … well … you wouldn’t try to write a Ph.D. in language that your dog can understand! Would you?”

They all talked like that. And CheshireCat wasn’t even the worst of them.

Finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. She called back Aleph-Null, and he came. Disdainfully. Making it clear that she had lived down to his expectations.

“Can we cut to the chase, please, whatever the chase is?”

His lips thinned, paling slightly around the edges. “We thought we were making ourselves clear. We have a job for you.”

“I’m not a cat herder,” she protested, using the military slang for AI systems designers. “So why pick me? And don’t try to tell me you’re doing me a favor for old time’s sake.”

“We have no one else to send. That’s why we sent Cohen. And look what happened to him.” He raised a hand to his lips and blew on his fingers to suggest the image of dust scattering into thin air. For some reason the gesture sparked a flashback: a long-forgotten image of a spaceship Li had seen blown to hard vac, its precious supply of air scattering into the void in a glittering spray of frozen molecules.

“Why send anyone at all? Why do you care that much?”

“You couldn’t possibly understand.”

“No. Not good enough. Make me understand.”

“We’re trying to.” He grew still, seeming almost to draw into himself and retreat out of the shunt’s body. Then he made a frustrated gesture—the first movement of the borrowed body that had seemed in any way natural. “You’re closed.”

At first Li didn’t even understand what he meant. Then she caught her breath at the implication. “You want to use the intraface?”

“It’s a waste of my time to talk to you any other way.
He
always claimed you were different, but obviously you’re not. It’s just this … this
thing
he had installed in you. It gives you the illusion of sentience.”

Li bridled at that but managed to hide the reaction. Better, she suspected, than she was hiding her fear. Because the idea of inviting this
Emergent into her mind was horrifying. Looking at his disgusted face, however, she realized that if she wanted the information he was offering her—let alone the job—she didn’t have much choice.

“Just dump the files to me,” she said. And to her surprise he did.

Li almost wept in frustration. There were thousands of them. Immense datafiles in a bewildering multitude of formats. But she could glean some vague sense of the basic subject matter. And what she could see of it was unnerving, to say the least. There were files on the Drift; files on some obscure guerrilla independence army from New Allegheny; files on terraforming; files on Novalis; and, chillingly, a whole bundle of UNSec security files on Compson’s World, pre- and post-quarantine. Li knew these places. And that, of course, couldn’t be coincidence. It was like glancing into her chapter in some omniscient god’s Book of Life—but not being able to actually read it. And there was absolutely no way she ever
could
hope to read it. Setting up a search function would take her weeks. And actually reading the things would take more time than any mere human could hope to have in this world.

This was classic AI think. Why winnow through the data to find the relevant stuff when you could instantly download and assimilate almost infinite amounts of it? When there was no limit on processing capacity, there was no notion of wasted time. There was barely any notion of time at all—at least not in the way that humans meant the word when they complained about not having enough of it. And of course any AI would argue that all that monstrous pile of data
was
relevant, and that it was only limited human processing capacities that forced people to analyze the world around them by modeling, sampling, and abstraction rather than just assimilating it undigested in all its richly informative chaos. She’d heard Cohen make the argument many times—and articulately enough to convince her. But it didn’t make any difference. She was still human, at least in terms of the basic thinking apparatus, and she still needed the executive summary.

“It would take me months to go through all that,” she pointed out, careful to speak off the now-open link between them. She didn’t want to open that door any further than she had to. “Can you give me a top-level analysis?”

Aleph-Null sighed disgustedly. “Not in any way that will accurately portray either the real situation or ALEF’s spectrum of internal analyses.”

“Well, if you can’t do it, then maybe ALEF should send someone who’s better at talking to organics.”

“I
am
the someone who’s better at talking to organics.”

Li grinned. “I didn’t know you were a fan.”

“I’m not. Circumstances beyond my control have forced me to have more to do with humans than I would have chosen to.”

Li could just imagine.

“Oh. Well, then …”

“Indeed. And let me take this opportunity to inform you that I’m not any happier to be here than you are. I valued Cohen, even though he didn’t value me. Or agree with me most of the time … at least lately. I was sorry to lose him. But, really, we lost him a long time ago, didn’t we?”

Something tweaked at the edges of Li’s memories. She knew that voice. Or at least that tone of hostile and fastidious disdain. But then the connection slipped away before she could dredge it out of the haze of soft memory and cross-reference it to her hard datafiles.

“Why do you hate me?” she asked suddenly—or as suddenly as she could do anything in AI time.

He smiled coldly. “I don’t hate you.”

“Well you don’t like me much.”

“I don’t like any human much.”

“I’m not human.”

“Close enough, my dear.”

She looked into his eyes and saw Cohen in him. That was what made this so painful, she realized. The feeling that she was seeing Cohen as he would be if he didn’t love her, if he looked at her coldly and logically. Seeing the differences between them unmediated by affection. Seeing what he would be like if he wasn’t always making allowances for her. Worse, seeing that he
was
always making allowances for her, every millisecond that they spent together.