Ghost Spin (23 page)

“That part of ALEF’s story still doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, where did this supposed wild AI outbreak come from? Who would import DNA-based AI to a Periphery planet with no AI police? And even if they did, there’s gotta be a kill switch. What kind of maniac wouldn’t have a kill switch?”

“Maybe a maniac who thought DNA-based AI was going to help them navigate the Drift and didn’t know enough to look for a kill switch? Or maybe a maniac who thought that unkillable AI was going to help them win the war against the Syndicates?”

Li rolled her eyes. “Skip the conspiracy theories, okay? I’ve already had my full daily dose of ridiculous.”

“Well, it did come from the Navy shipyard, after all.”

But Li just made a rude noise at that. Everyone knew that UNSec issued exemptions from the banned technology list to security-critical
industries. But that was a matter of bigger bombs or nastier bioagents or enhanced chemical interrogation techniques. Infectious DNA-platformed AI was the ultimate in banned tech, not merely a matter of morals but a matter of holding the line in the human-AI balance of power throughout UN space. People like Helen Nguyen tolerated limited citizenship rights for Emergent AIs because they had to. They needed the best technology they could get to fight the Syndicates, and the big Emergents shed bleeding-edge tech like humans shed skin cells. So they tolerated them—ALEF, the Consortium, the Continuum, all the other ever-shifting Freetown factions. They tolerated them until they pushed the boundaries a little too far. Then they paraded the Inter-faithers and the anti-AI activists and the other assorted crazies on the news spins just to remind them that the universe outside their golden cage was big and dangerous and full of people who didn’t like them one little bit and were willing to do something about it. Then they gave them back to their toys—because even the toys that flirted with the banned-tech list were hugely valuable to the war effort against the Syndicates. In fact, those ones usually turned out, in the long run, to be especially valuable.

But letting DNA-based AI get out into the general population without a kill switch? That was the ultimate nightmare scenario, one that raised the specter of AIs seizing control of the human genome. That kind of technology would need a sign-off at the highest levels, perhaps even a unanimous vote of the Security Council itself. And even then … no, it was too crazy. No one would sign off on that, she decided.

But on the other hand …

“I still don’t understand why ALEF got involved. Why wouldn’t the Navy clean up their own mess?”

“Well, they probably tried before they came to ALEF.”

“But that’s what I’m asking you. Why go to ALEF at all?”

His GUI shifted—Li could have sworn uncomfortably.

“Well, ALEF and UNSec … you know …”

“No. I don’t know.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Is this some AI thing that you’re not allowed to tell me about?”

“What was that story Cohen always used to tell? You know, the one about the motorcycle and the Swiss policeman?”

Li knew immediately what he was talking about. The story went all the way back to his long-dead creator, Hy Cohen. It was a long, involved, shaggy-dog joke about trying to get a broken-down motorcycle from Germany to Italy in the trunk of his car. The German police had issued terse statements about verboten this and verboten that. The French had required a complicated but purely formal set of approvals, memorialized by one of their ever-beloved official stamps. And the Swiss … the Swiss police had stopped him on some cow-infested and revoltingly bucolic mountain road and, after a long, involved, frowning multiparty consultation, delivered their final verdict and the story’s punch line: “Well, it’s allowed, I suppose … but you have to admit it’s not pretty!”

The joke had always escaped Li, who only had the faintest notion of what sorts of countries Switzerland and Italy had been. Mostly it symbolized for her the long expanse of Cohen’s life, memories, and adventures that stretched out for centuries before her birth—and that she’d always assumed would stretch out for centuries after her death as well.

But now she absorbed the chain of emotionally charged connections—Hy Cohen, Germany, UNSec, stamps and regulations and travel permits—and she realized that, in his roundabout, associative, AI manner, Router/​Decomposer was trying to tell her something.

“Are you saying ALEF was working with the AI police?”

“Well …” Even now, he didn’t want to commit. “I hear.”

“You hear what?”

“Okay, more than hear. Cohen told me once. I guess it’s ALEF’s dirty little secret.”

Li made a disbelieving face. “I can’t see Cohen going along with that.”

“Well, he did tell me, didn’t he?”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning that he wasn’t happy about it. Even if he did it for them.”

Li didn’t know what to say to that, or how to think about the new light into which it cast Cohen’s habitual—and habitually unexplained—
absences. So she changed the subject. “If the outbreak was hitting the civilian population, wouldn’t we be hearing about it?”

“I don’t know,” Router/​Decomposer said. “Like I said, everyone’s being very tight-lipped. Why don’t you look for your next buyer, and I’ll go rattle some cages and see what I can find out.”

Five minutes later, Caitlyn Perkins was leaving the Caledonia in search of the second buyer on the Loyal Opposition’s yard sale listing.

She hoped she wasn’t being followed, but if she was, there wasn’t much she could do about it. And given the vagueness of her directions, she doubted that Dolniak would learn much even if he was following her. Personally she wasn’t holding out much hope of finding this particular buyer.

The address she’d been given was in Shadyside. But when she had asked for directions at the hotel front desk, the clerk had looked askance at it.

“That address is just an alley,” he told her, as if there was something problematic about alleys that he thought she ought to be aware of.

“So?”

“So it’s not on the city maps.”

They looked at each other blankly for a moment.

“It’s not a real street,” he explained when it was clear he was going to have to explain something. “No paving, no sewage, no listing in the city directories.”

“So how do I find it?”

He shrugged and pointed to a point deep inside Shadyside’s crooked crescent. “Try asking at the Homestead Incline Station. They might know.”

It took Li almost an hour just to find the incline station. And by that time she’d decided that she never wanted to set foot in Shadyside again. In the old Pittsburgh, Shadyside had been an elegant suburb that later became the home of Henry Ford’s first motorcar factory. In Monongahela Pit, Shadyside’s name was literal; New Allegheny’s already weak sun never rose above Mount Monongahela’s broad shoulders in the winter, and Shadyside was cloaked in dank, impenetrable shadows from early fall to late spring. The predictable result was pestilence,
tuberculosis, and suicide. The neighborhood had soon lost anything resembling a permanent population or decent housing. For as long as anyone could now remember, Shadyside had been synonymous with rookeries, tenement houses, and refugees. And if you wanted to know which group of impoverished refugees was least wanted and most abused, all you had to do was walk the streets of Shadyside and see whose children were sitting on the crumbling front stoops and playing in the fetid gutters.

Mostly, of course, they were the children of genetic constructs like Li herself. And in the topsy-turvy worldview of human prejudice, being a natural-born human—subject only to the chance damage of radiation and mutation of the ancient generation ships—made you different from and better than those whose ancestors had missed the boat in the first wave of the Great Migration and had to sell their genesets to the corporations in order to get a ticket to all the wonderful new terraformed worlds that were supposed to be so much better than the one they’d left behind … and whose sponsors carefully didn’t mention that terraforming was a work in progress and that certain changes to the basic human geneset would be regrettable but inevitable.

Li found the boardinghouse—silently thanking her corporate geneset as she strode up and down the plunging alleys of Shadyside at a pace far beyond merely human lung capacity—only to hear that the man she was looking for had moved out weeks ago. Then she descended down a chain of increasingly sordid worker’s hotels and flophouses, each one leading her to the next, and each one telling the same sordid story: late hours and late rent payments, final warnings and eviction notices. In the end she wound up on the other end of Shadyside looking for someone last heard traveling under the name of Kusak.

“Oh. Yeah. Kusak,” said the woman at the door of the last and most decrepit lodging house. “Which one you want?”

“There’s more than one?” Li asked, her attention sharpening.

“Yes and no,” the landlady said grimly. “If you know what I mean.”

Li lowered her head in what could have passed for assent, just to keep the woman talking.

“They were different enough ages to be father and son. And they
looked plenty alike, too. But … they weren’t. Sometimes you just get a feeling. You know?”

Li did know. In fact she was getting a feeling herself, though she didn’t know enough about New Allegheny’s local brand of angry to guess whether the nasty innuendos were aimed at clones or homosexuals.

“Can you describe them?”

The woman tried, just like the others had. Her description of the older man was no better than the ones Li had heard before; he could have been any down-on-his-luck dirtsider along the entire sorry arc of the Periphery. But the younger man was another thing entirely.

“He was too pretty,” the woman said. “Not that he made anything of it. But he just didn’t look like anyone you’d ever expect to see around here.”

“How so?”

“He looked like those fellows you see on the entertainment spins.”

“A spin star?” Li asked incredulously.

“No.” The woman’s face hardened. “He looked like one of the bad guys. He looked like a bad guy from an old war movie.”

Li’s mind raced, flipping between flashbacks from her tours on Gilead and newer, less painful memories. There had been a vogue for anti-Syndicate war spins just before the last campaign on Gilead went sour and people decided they’d rather forget about the war entirely. Most of them had been awful. And one of the worst problems had been getting people to play the Syndicate soldiers. There’d been a little cottage industry of aspiring male starlets getting themselves cut to look like Syndicate constructs. It had never worked, though; you couldn’t sculpt that kind of inhuman perfection onto an imperfect and asymmetrical human bone structure. Still, Li had seen the real thing: score upon score of physically perfect, inhumanly disciplined, utterly identical soldiers.

“When do you expect them back?” she asked, her heart pounding in anticipation.

“I don’t. They moved out yesterday.”

Li almost cursed out loud. And then she wondered, with a little chill
of apprehension: Why yesterday? What had happened yesterday that had scared them into deeper cover? Another buyer on the list had died. And Li had arrived on-planet. Did they know about her?

“What else can you tell me about them?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“All I know’s they paid their rent on time.”

“So they must have been working. Where?”

The woman laughed harshly. “Where does anyone work who lives here? Mencken.”

“Mencken?” Li repeated.

“Mencken,” the woman repeated, as if the single word were explanation enough. “It’s the biggest steel mill in the Crucible.”

“How long will it take me to get there from here?”

The boardinghouse owner gave her a pitying look. “Too long. Day shift’ll be shutting down in twenty minutes, and you won’t be able to catch a trolley anywhere within miles of here until night shift gets under way. And by then it’ll be dark anyway.”

Li gave a baffled glance at the sky, which as far as she could tell had been dark all day.

“Trust me,” the woman told her. “Wired or not, you don’t want to walk the Crucible at night. That’s flat out taking your life in your hands.”

THE DRIFT

She woke up in the cargo hold of a corporate troop transport. She knew where she was the minute she came out of the tank, though it took a few more moments to identify the subliminal signals that had led her to that conclusion.

By that time, however, she was past worrying about why and where she was, because it was clear that the ship was in full emergency mode. The call to quarters wailed in the distance. Hurried figures rushed back and forth, many of them carrying weapons or EVA suits.

And, incongruously, there was a suit-and-tie-clad middle-management type sitting at the side of her tank with no life support gear in sight and a thick sheaf of papers in his hand.

Li sat up, blinking, and took a closer look at him. Smooth-skinned face. Corporate-issue hair. Corporate-issue smile. Salaryman.

“What the hell is going on here?”

“We’re under attack by pirates. Uh … I think.”

“You
think
?”

“Well, they don’t exactly fly the Jolly Roger,” said the salaryman. “First of all, it’d look like puke on a false-color conformal array display. And then there’s, you know, the element of surprise and all.”

“Have they boarded us yet?”

“No, but when I left the office to come down here they were refusing to reply to our hails and screaming in like a bat out of hell at .18 light local frame.”

“Then you don’t even know whether or not they’re really—”

“Look, do you actually give a shit? I mean, would it be better if they were Syndicate?” He thrust the sheaf of papers toward her. “I need your signature on this.”

Li rubbed her eyes. “You came all the way down here in the middle of a pirate attack for my autograph?”

“Well, everyone’s actually.”

Li looked around and realized that her tank was only one of dozens. They stretched all down the echoing length of the hold, one after another, their proprietary virufacture solutions glistening luridly under the naked arc lights.