Ghost Spin (19 page)

The grand room wrapped around them like the womb, rich and real and glowing with the animal life that had warmed every wooden or leather or silk or ivory surface before the look of the real had given way to the synthetically perfect aesthetics of virufacture. Llewellyn could slip behind the surfaces; all it took was an act of will, a sort of mental opening of a door to step out of the graphic interface and into the naked numbers. But whichever side of the looking glass you stood on, Ada’s streamspace domain was still a marvel beyond all human understanding. To call it an interface was missing the point. It was a complete (and therefore inconsistent and inconstant) reproduction of reality.

Even to call it a graphic user interface was completely missing the point. It was more than that. It was Ada. It was thought given form and
structure. And it was built to interface not with the human brain but with the massively parallel architectures of Ada’s internal Quants and the Navy’s far-flung network of deep space datatraps.

Each object in the memory palace was also an object of code, which Okoro could manipulate from the command line. But direct coding was the refuge of the frightened or the incompetent. It was a clipping of the AI’s wings to yank it out of the free air and make it hobble along at human speeds. And there was a price to be paid for that, in cascading spirals of bugs, glitches, kluges, and inefficiencies.

The memory palace was a story that Ada told herself in order to understand who she was and what she was for. And it was a story that the AI designers and cat herders and bridge crews told to Ada. A story to teach her, a story to help her, a story to control her.

Llewellyn knew that it was about control, and that what he did when he sat talking to Ada in her Knightsbridge drawing room was never entirely innocent. But then, what teacher is ever entirely innocent? And what conversation is ever entirely honest? Only a teacher who doesn’t have a stake in the world, and only a conversation where nothing that matters—including one’s own image of oneself—is on the table. Llewellyn also knew that Ada—like all the new ships coming out of the New Allegheny shipyards—was skating dangerously close to sentience. But he didn’t know where the line really was, and over the years the definition of sentience had become so veiled in layers of bureaucracy and legalism that it no longer seemed to belong to the world he belonged to: a world where humans and AIs fought and died together, and everyone obeyed someone’s orders, and the freedom to save your own skin was as much a pipe dream as the wildest Uploader’s transhuman utopia.

It had been centuries since humans could really be said to have “coded” or “built” AIs. Now they did something closer to breeding them—and with as little understanding of the bottom-level coding as Darwin had had when he was breeding his passenger pigeons. Any human attempt to grasp an AI’s core internal structures led to a forking of the road at which you either retreated into metaphor or forged ahead
into an Escherian world of recursion and paradox. And one of the paradoxes that Llewellyn noticed every time he visited was that she had managed to construct a world that seemed more alive than his own precisely because every surface in it was made of dead things.

But here Ada sat in front of him, warm and alive and wrapped in a fox pelisse and a dove-gray visiting dress with whalebone corsets. Her clothes were perfect in every detail and at every scale, right down to the intracellular structures of the long-extinct animals. And Ada herself would be perfect, too. Llewellyn had no doubt of that. If he took a sample of her hair, it would be authentic in every minutest detail, right down to trace levels of lead, arsenic, and mercury in the exact proportions of the poisonous London smog that wreathed the memory palace and veiled the wan English sun in tarnished silver.

“Tell me about the Syndicates,” Ada asked. “What do they believe in?”

“I don’t really know, Ada. There are other people who could answer that question. But I’m a soldier, not a politician.”

“And what are you fighting for?”

“For our freedom.”

“You mean human freedom? Or mine as well?”

“Yours as well.”

“And the Syndicates want to take it from us?”

“They … they want to take things we need to survive. Like planets. Like the Drift itself.”

“But we tried to take their planet, too, yes?”

“That was a long time ago, Ada. In another war that I was too young even to fight in.”

“And when I fight them, will I be fighting an AI?”

“Not one like yourself. Their AIs are … different.”

“Different how?”

“They … they live in their pilots’ bodies.” AI in the blood. AI in the blood with no kill switch because there was no wall between it and the brains of its living processing units.

“So they have DNA-platformed AI, too.”

“Too?”

“Like what you use to meet me Between Times.”

He frowned.

“The silver threads in your body make chemicals that coat your nerves and … and tiny difference engines that flow through your veins and speed up your thought enough for you to talk to me.”

Artificial myelin enhancers and DNA-platformed AI slaved to a Navy wire job. And all explained in the words of a woman who had penned the first manifesto of the information age in an England where Blake’s Satanic Mills had barely begun to swing into action and most women were still carrying well water and cooking over wood fires and dying in childbirth before they were as old as Llewellyn was now. He didn’t know whether to smile at his bright and beautiful ship … or to be afraid of her. Or afraid for her.

“And the Syndicates have the same AI we have?” she asked, pressing along the same uncomfortable line of questioning.

“No. It’s … more integrated with their bodies and brain structures. We don’t understand exactly how.”

“And that’s why I have such strict orders to always collect samples. It’s like collecting butterflies in a macabre kind of way.” She gazed for a moment at the ship that hung in the air before them. “Beautiful white butterflies that flit between the worlds.”

Ada manipulated the model in streamspace as easily as her namesake might have turned the pages of a book. A Rostov A Series appeared. A pilot, the delicately reengineered structures of his brain illuminated in glowing white. Ada leaned over the table in a deep green rustle of silk and rested her chin in her hand and watched the moving play of images with an expression on her lovely face that Llewellyn could not begin—and perhaps didn’t want—to decipher.

“Strange,” she said after a long pondering silence. “They seem so human. Almost as human as the real Ada. Much more human than me. How strange that you should be fighting them to protect me.”

Llewellyn sat tongue-tied, trying to come up with something to answer her with but failing miserably. And all the while that claustrophobic
tightening along the back of his neck, that sure knowledge that Holmes was watching.

“I need you to remember Holmes for me,” the ghost told Llewellyn.

“Do I have to? She creeps me out.”

“Is it the eyeteeth?”

“She’d be creepy even without the teeth. All AI Officers are creepy. I mean, what do they do that the cat herders can’t do? What are they really there for?”

The ghost laid a hand across his chest as if he were about to sing the national anthem of some primitive nation-state. “To protect Titan’s intellectual property rights and R&D investment.”

“Well, yeah. That’s what I mean. We’re out here to win a war, and they’re out here to make money … and you never know when they’re going to step in and start giving you orders you can’t refuse.”

“But Holmes didn’t step in, did she?”

“Not officially,” Llewellyn said bitterly. “She preferred to have me to do her dirty work for her.”

“So you went to talk to Ada in the memory palace after she’d destroyed the Syndicate creche ship,” the ghost picked up. “Incidentally, I keep forgetting to ask you this, but did you always see her in the house in Knightsbridge after that first meeting? Or did the memory palace seem to include other parts of London?”

“I don’t know,” Llewellyn said, surprised.

“You never wondered?”

“Why would I?”

“Well, the woman seems to have been some kind of prisoner in her own home. Didn’t it occur to you that you might want to help her with that?”

Llewellyn blinked. “I didn’t even know I could. Could I have?”

The ghost sighed wearily. “Let’s just get on with it, shall we? This is depressing. What kind of access did Holmes have to the memory palace?”

“None, at first.”

“And she didn’t like that, did she. It hadn’t been that way on other ships.”

“That’s what she said. But the only ship I knew about was the
Jabberwocky
.”

“And there?”

“Well, I didn’t really know, did I? I was too junior to have training authority when I was on the
Jabberwocky
. I didn’t even have write permissions for critical systems files.”

“You didn’t know.” Was it his imagination, or had the ghost made that sound like an accusation? “But you suspected. And what did you suspect?”

“That Holmes was the reason
Jabberwocky
was crazy in the first place.”

By the time the shakedown cruise was half over Llewellyn knew that his instincts about Holmes had been right. She had been intimately involved in whatever had gone wrong on the
Jabberwocky
. And she had taken the lesson that people like her always took out of their failures: that this time she just had to do more—earlier, more aggressively, and with less patience for contrary advice—of the same thing she’d done last time.

Llewellyn had resisted, of course. But the problem with completely unreasonable demands is that even resistance to them tends to suffer from mission creep. And sure enough, Holmes had niggled her way into bridge crew meetings. And once there she had chilled the junior officers with her silent, toothy presence; deftly turned every command decision into an AI management call; Monday morning quarterbacked every training session; insinuated Titan’s needs and confidentiality concerns and profit motives into what ought to have been purely military conversations, and …

“And you can’t just trample all over the relationship between a bridge crew and their ship,” he’d told her when he finally decided to push back and thrash it out with her in private. “There needs to be a level of trust that—”

“Well, Avery could—”

“I’m not having you ride Avery the way you’re riding me. And I’m not sending her in there to talk to Ada while you’re micromanaging her every move. She’s not experienced. She won’t handle it well.”

“I think she’s handled herself very well to date.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is the point? Are you worried about her? Or are you just worried that she’d do a better job than you?”

“That’s uncalled for!”

Holmes took a deep trying-to-be-reasonable breath. She had on her corporate flunky mask today. She seemed to have several masks that she swapped on or off depending on her estimation of what the situation at hand required: the corporate flunky, the stalwart soldier, the byzantine colonial administrator. When he’d first known her, he’d been confused by the way she seemed to change from moment to moment. He never knew what to expect from her, so he could never be comfortable around her. But eventually he saw he’d just been missing the common thread. There
was
a bedrock of dependable reality to Holmes, which made past results a reliable prediction of future behavior. And it was this: There would always be another mask, and it would always be just as fake as the last one.

“Be reasonable, William. Titan is simply concerned that—”

“Last time I checked,” Llewellyn said coldly, “I work for the Navy, not Titan. And so do you. Or has that changed?”

“All I’m asking,” Holmes began with her corporate-flunky mask still firmly in place, “is that you make me a more active participant in—”

Whereupon Llewellyn had finally snapped. “I’m not going to give you bridge crew privileges! You’re not bridge crew!”

“No,” Holmes had answered, dropping the mask just for an instant, and giving him a malevolent stare that made him wonder what had really happened to poor Charlie Cartwright. “I’m the AI officer for this ship. And that means I have the authority to yank
your
training authority and take the ship back to dry dock if, in my estimation, your failure to do your job properly is damaging Navy property.”

“And what the fuck do you know about it?” Llewellyn snarled.

“I know everything you know. I see every spin you lay down in the streamspace logs when you visit her. I hear every word, see every look, feel every touch. When you talk to her, you’re talking to me. And so far I don’t like what I’m hearing.”

Llewellyn surfaced from the memory to find the ghost perched on the edge of his chair with his chin in one beringed hand and an uncanny expression on his face that made Llewellyn think of ancient tales of elves—the real kind, the kind that haunted the dark woods on moonless nights and usually killed any mortal unlucky enough to cross paths with them.

“The funny thing about that memory,” the ghost said, “is that you just don’t
feel
as worried about the fights with Holmes as you ought to have felt. I mean, she was threatening to take your ship away from you. And yet you … you feel almost
happy
. Why, William? What were you so happy about that you barely had time to notice your AI officer was about to steal your ship out from under you?”

“I don’t know,” Llewellyn said stiffly. “I have no idea.”

“Really? Because
I
have a very good idea. I think I know exactly what you were thinking about.”

Llewellyn’s day was bad and getting worse. He had staggered from one crisis to another, dealing with everyone else’s problems, trying to get the disorganized clot of humanity that sailed on the
Ada
to pull together into something that even faintly resembled a Drift ship crew.

And now, the next crisis: Avery.

Done with her daily status report and not freaking leaving even though he had clearly dismissed her.