Ghost Spin (16 page)

I am going to have to be so unbelievably careful not to ever be alone with this woman
, he told himself. And then he told himself to stop being ridiculous because obviously they couldn’t possibly run the ship without being alone together, not even if Ike and Sital quit their day jobs in order to play chaperone. And then he told himself that the only safe thing to do was to walk straight off the ship and straight into Fleet headquarters, and go straight up the chain of command, and call down every favor he could shake loose to get Avery transferred somewhere, anywhere, as long as it was nowhere near him.

And then he accepted her crisp, sensible salute and told her to take the ship out of simdock—and retreated to the captain’s chair to lick his wounds and figure out how to deal with the disaster that his life had just turned into.

Still, as Avery moved the ship out into sim space, Llewellyn couldn’t help admiring her style and relaxing a little. She worked smoothly with the ship. She worked smoothly with Nav and Comm and Tactical. She led them the way a beautifully trained ballroom dancer leads his partner: with a light, sure touch, feet that never stumble, and a sure instinct for maintaining a proper and courteous distance.

It would be fine, he told himself. He didn’t have to perform superhuman feats to control himself. What kind of arrogant idiot was he to even have thought such a thing, let alone inflict real harm on a fellow officer’s career because of his own raging hormones? And anyway, he wouldn’t
have
to control himself, because Avery would control herself. No, she wouldn’t control herself. If she even needed to. After all—and here he dared a quick glance at the beautiful profile frowning intently
over the Nav Board—what kind of arrogant bastard would even begin to imagine that a woman like that was his for the asking?

By the time Avery had taken the ship through her first shakedown run, complete with several computationally complex Drift entries and exits, Llewellyn knew that she was one of those rare officers for whom simply doing things by the book rises to the level of genius. She would be a superb first mate, perhaps a little more unbending than was ideal, but nonetheless an officer that you could entrust with the lives of your ship and your crew without hesitation. And that other thing—whatever it was—wouldn’t be a problem. Llewellyn worked well with women. He’d always worked well with female officers; he
liked
working with women, even
preferred
it. Half his bridge crew were women and always had been—and he’d always despised and ridiculed men who couldn’t grow up enough to keep it in their pants when they were on duty.

And now he had just one more delicate first meeting with an unknown woman. A woman whose well-being would be the last thought in Llewellyn’s head at night and the first one when he woke up every morning for as long as he had command of the Ada. A woman who was too important to meet now, in realspace, in a dry run with a crew that hadn’t yet coalesced into unity. A woman he would meet only in the unreal parallel universe of streamspace, where he would have to win her over with the subtle weapons of trust, love, and loyalty …

The ship herself.

“Trust, love, and loyalty,” the ghost echoed, its voice cutting in across the tail end of the memory. “We learn them with our mother’s milk, and they are the best and cruelest of weapons. I hope you used them wisely.”

Llewellyn dropped his head into his hands. He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream. He wanted to do anything but remember.

But the ghost pressed in upon him, and there was nowhere to hide because the ghost was everywhere and everywhen. The ghost was the world, and the world was the ghost—and there was no thought, no stone, no grain of sand that it couldn’t breathe into life and turn against him.

“I talked to her in AI-space.”

“In her memory palace, you mean.”

Navy bridge crews and cat herders handled their AIs through a safely sandboxed streamspace interface that contained a VR model of their systems architecture. They called it AI-world, but really there were countless AI-worlds: Each AI built its own self-contained universe, as bright or as dark as the internal workings of the AI in question, as rich or as poor as the mind of the AI could make it, as vast or constricted as the state space through which the strange attractors of Emergent consciousness cycled endlessly in critically self-organizing, endlessly evolving patterns.

The earliest programmers had worked in realspace, directly manipulating hexadecimal code and running decompilers that had no more to do with a modern router/​decomposer than a stone axe had to do with a neutron bomb. They had envisioned computers as chess players, and had dreamed that the world of code would be an engineer’s paradise of complete and consistent rules, transparent cause and effect, pure logic and reason. They had run close to the machine in one sense—closer to the machine than any modern programmer would ever imagine running. But in another sense, they had been unimaginably distant.

Long, winding centuries separated Ada Lovelace’s first visionary leap into the information age from the wily, elusive, charming creature facing Llewellyn across the sparkling murmur of the Moorish fountain. And down through those strange generations, as transistors replaced vacuum tubes and proteins replaced silicon, the metaphor of chess had given way to deeper, richer, darker metaphors. Hacking had given way to conversation. Writing patches had given way to the talking cure. Programmers had stopped calling themselves code jockeys and started calling themselves AI shrinks and cat herders. And gradually—albeit with the protection of technologies with betraying names like
sandbox
and
cutout
and
firewall
and
kill loop
—humans had had to learn to meet the machine on its own terms and in its own territory.

“So tell me about Ada’s memory palace,” the ghost asked now. “Was it running on free-range execution?”

“God! Of course not. Do you think I’m crazy?”

The ghost’s lips tightened in an expression that Llewellyn couldn’t quite read. But there was a measure of disgust in it, or at least of judgment. He bridled at the notion of being judged by the ghost … and then he let it go. Because the ghost was right, of course. It wasn’t that he felt there was something immoral about bending a shipboard AI to its captain’s will. All soldiers had to obey orders, and a ship was as much a soldier as any other member of her crew. And to the AI-proponents who would be appalled by a ship being made to kill, Llewellyn really had nothing to say. Their world and his world were so far apart that there didn’t seem to be much point in even trying to communicate across the chasm between them. And any qualms he might once have had about what was done to shipboard AIs in the name of duty had survived real action against the Syndicates about as long as an eighteenth-century navy captain’s qualms about gunnery boys would have survived his first broadside from a French corsair. But still, there was something … unclean about the way too many captains and cat herders “managed” their AIs.

That was what had curled the ghost’s all-too-expressive lip.

And though he would have liked to defend himself, Llewellyn wasn’t enough the hypocrite to argue the point.

“So you met her in her memory palace,” the ghost prompted.

“No, not the first time. The first time was in public.”

He’d met her in London, on a day of fog and coal dust, at a five-penny exhibition of automata. Ada was the class of the show, and he’d known it from the moment she walked in. Even under the ridiculously prudish Victorian drapery, her legs were long and her walk graceful and purposeful. Even hidden by a broad-brimmed hat and a veil so thick she had to lift it up to read the printed labels on the exhibits, the lines of her face were aristocratic and beautiful. Women stared at her clothes. Men stared at her body. And the crowd around her gave way in an instinctive movement of submission and subservience.

She was regal and dangerous, Llewellyn decided, like a ship of the line gliding into port past tramp freighters and cargo spindles.

“Was it a real five-penny museum?” the ghost asked. “Oh, never
mind. Why would you know? Just tell me which automata you saw and I’ll figure it out.”

Llewellyn decided to ignore that. “I think it was real. Didn’t the real Ada meet Charles Babbage in a five-penny museum? Anyway, it felt real. As real as it gets.”

And so had Ada, from that very first moment. From before he really saw her even.

It was odd how you felt an AI’s presence. You could tell yourself till you were blue in the face that it was just your wireless projecting stored burst patterns across your cerebral cortex. That the creepy back-of-the-neck someone’s-behind-you feeling was synthesized peripheral vision. That the sense of being watched was a technological artifact rather than a true perception of your actual environment. That nothing your wetware fed into your brain when you were in streamspace had any basis in reality. But it was no good. Your brain saw, smelled, heard, and touched. And your brain believed. It was the way humans were wired.

Odd, really, that the first meeting with Ada had happened well outside the core of her own memory palace. It occurred to him now that he could have asked Ike Okoro about it. But there’d been other things to worry about, all of which seemed more urgent, and he’d never quite gotten around to mentioning it.

At first Ada refused to talk to him. It took a little arm-twisting, a few subtle hints and tweaks, the pushing of just the right buttons before she realized that he was a stranger in her world—a stranger from that other, outer world who had the power to turn off the sun and crash the moon and send her Earth spinning off its axis.

You didn’t like to do that, of course. And even then, you moved as gently as possible, because the best ships always required the most delicate handling. But sometimes you had to get a ship’s attention any way you could.

The relationship between a ship and her captain was even more delicate and complex and essential than the relationship between a captain and his human crew. But still, it was ultimately and always a relation of authority, in which it was the captain’s place to command and the ship’s to obey. The speeds of engagement dictated that the AI
actually take physical charge of the ship in any realtime crisis. No human ever beat an AI to the punch in thought, chess, or battle—and outside of old science fiction movies no human ever would. Naval engagements were prosecuted at relativistic speeds, so fast that only AIs could possibly make realtime decisions. Humans could barely even monitor the action, let alone command it. Drugs and wire jobs sped up human processing capacity, of course. But not enough. The optic nerve could only fire so many times. And an augmented optic nerve could still only fire so many times plus some percentage. Captains set strategy, but AIs executed. That was the official line, anyway. But the line between order and execution blurred beyond recognition once you hit a certain fraction of light speed. And the reality was that a good captain knew when to turn things over to the shipboard AI, and how to nurture and humor the AI so that she gave her best.…

“Blah blah blah,” interrupted the ghost, cutting through Llewellyn’s thoughts as if Llewellyn were the disembodied shade and the ghost was the only real person talking. “Spare me the violins. I’ve seen enough
Rin Tin Tin
reruns to know where this is going.”

“Who’s Rin Tin Tin?”

“Never mind. Just tell me what happened next.”

“Nothing. She was a lovely ship. Wonderful. Perfect.”

“Why do I have the feeling that I’m being covertly criticized?”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Oh never mind. I’d be the last to claim
I
was perfect. Perfection is Hell minus the good company. Anyway, forget I said anything. Let’s just go back to talking about your lovely Victorian Household Angel.”

“You make it sound so … questionable, somehow. But I didn’t do anything that wasn’t entirely by the book. To her or any other ship. You can ask the
Christina
if you want. She must be in there somewhere.”

“She is. But whenever I try to get anything useful out of her she just gets all weepy and starts reciting tedious poetry at me. Aren’t there any nice, normal AIs out here? Whatever happened to names like Euler, and Router/​Decomposer, and Plimpton 322?”

“Those are normal?”

The ghost gave him a Look.

“Well, how would I know? I’ve only ever met shipboard AIs. And they’re mostly female, I guess … because … well,
ships
are female. I mean most of them. Clearly you’re not.”

“Oh! No!” said the ghost in a voice rich with irony. “Clearly!”

“You know what I mean. And most of the Drift ships are real women, too. And from the same time period, more or less.” He started ticking ships off on his fingers. “There’s
Ada
—Lady Ada, Countess Lovelace to you, thanks very much. And then there’s our good ship the
Christina Rossetti—
”

“Well, that explains the repeated commission of wanton acts of poetry. I was starting to feel like I was being punished for my earthly sins by being trapped in an A. S. Byatt novel.”

“And then there’s an
Alice Liddell
, and—oh, yeah, I guess there is one male ship that I know of: the
Lewis Carroll
.”

“Yikes!”

“I thought so, too. Wasn’t he some kind of pedophile?”

“I don’t think that was ever formally established,” the ghost replied in a tone that struck Llewellyn as absurdly prim considering some of the other things the ghost had been only too happy to discuss with him. “But it’s true, he couldn’t have made things look worse for himself short of actually becoming a priest or leading a Boy Scout troop. Honestly though, an AI naming itself Lewis Carroll? The cliché is a crime against posthumanity in and of itself.”

“There’s a
Charles Dodgson
, too. He and
Lewis Carroll
hate each other. They’re like a pair of prima ballerinas both gunning for the same role.”

“No! Stop!” The ghost raised its hands in mock surrender.

“Oh, and a
Jabberwocky
, too.”