Ghost Spin (32 page)

In the moment, however, there was no time to think about why they did it. There was barely time to even understand that they were going to do it.

There was only the shrieking wail of targeting alarms, and the
Romola
herself on comm, drowning out the voices of her bridge crew as she pleaded desperately with the
Ada
to help her. And then a twinkling pinprick flash from the bow of the Syndicate ship. And quicker than thought—quicker than the human eye could even track the flight of the fatal missile—a larger flash that blossomed out from the place the
Romola
had been to paint the whole vast sweep of space in Technicolor.

“What do you think happens when you jump through a Bose-Einstein relay?” the ghost asked Llewellyn.

“Usually? I forget to tie down the cargo, and the tug captain scrapes my hull, and the postmaster double-charges me and I find myself wishing I’d never even seen the inside of a jumpship.”

“Ah, indeed. Who’s for the merrie life of a pirate? You’re right, though. There is a certain black-box aspect to Bose-Einstein transport. Which is not that surprising, since it’s very often the case that the defining technology of an age is precisely the one that people
least
understand on an intuitive level. How many peasants in the age of steam actually understood the sly workings of Maxwell’s Demon or even what was going on in the belly of a steam locomotive? And how many of the global citizens of the hot, flat, and crowded information age actually understood how their cellphones worked? And Bose-Einstein transport may be the most impressive failure yet. It may actually go down in the books as the only major technology whose golden age came and went before science caught up with it enough to actually explain it.”

They were sitting in a swanky basement bar in pre-Migration New York. It was a little disorienting, actually. Llewellyn had seen so many old films and entertainment spins of the famous city that he couldn’t
quite grasp the reality of it—or the relative reality, since he was still only experiencing the ghost’s accumulated memories of it.

Somehow he had expected soaring eagle’s-eye views of the famous skyline. And instead he was getting an ant’s-eye view of fashionably clad feet rushing past the sidewalk-level windows.

“But the thing is,” the ghost continued, “when you strip away all the hardware and software and field arrays and entry points, what happens in Bose-Einstein transport is exactly what happens in the Drift. It’s not that the Drift is stranger than any other kind of entanglement. It’s just that entanglement itself is stranger than we can ever quite bring ourselves to realize.”

The ghost lifted his glass above his head so that the light flickering through the passing feet strobed across it. Before Llewellyn’s eyes, the glass began to shift and shimmer and mold itself to the shape of the ghost’s words.

“Imagine an onion. Or better yet, a rose. Each leaf appears to be a single membrane, but really it consists of an infinite number of superimposed leaves. Put Lewis at one end of the leaf and Alice at the other and Schrödinger’s cat in its little box with its little cyanide pill—incidentally, you do know that Alan Turing committed suicide by cyanide injection? Yes, I thought you’d find that interesting. Back to Lewis and Alice, though. Rather than envisioning the entangled qubit they share as doing anything that could violate causality, we ought simply to imagine two superimposed universes delaminating from each other. In each universe the cat dies or it doesn’t. In each universe the qubit turns or it doesn’t. And as the classical component of the message travels between Lewis and Alice—”

“Why do they call them Lewis and Alice, by the way? I always wondered that in Astro-Navigation when they were making us do problem sets.”

“Actually, it was Hannah Sharifi who started that. Before her, information theorists always used Bob and Alice. But Hannah thought Lewis was a bit more resonant. And I suspect she liked the fact that it started with an
L
, since she always argued that discovering FTL transport was really just a side effect of the important stuff, and that what she
really
ought
to be remembered for was figuring out how to use the lemma calculus to map the multiverse.”

Llewellyn snorted. “No wonder you two liked each other. Were you telling the truth when you told Li you’d slept with her?”

“Yes, actually. But you shouldn’t read too much into it. I’ve slept with a lot of mathematicians.”

“You collected them,” Llewellyn said without realizing he was quoting Catherine Li until the words were spoken, “the way schizophrenic old ladies collect house cats.”

“Been opening doors and drawers without permission, have we?” the ghost said silkily. “You want to watch out for that. Bluebeard’s wives came to a very messy end by using keys without the proper file permissions.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Llewellyn said with a smile.

The ghost opened its mouth to shoot back some clever answer—and then closed it and just watched Llewellyn for a moment. It wasn’t a mocking look, let alone a cruel one. It was just … shocked. Or so it seemed to Llewellyn in the heat of the moment. Later that night, lying in bed and rethinking the scene, he realized that the ghost hadn’t really looked shocked at all. It had looked frightened. Terrified, actually. And Llewellyn had come to know the mercurial, impossible, multifaceted essence of the ghost rather well through their forced march through their joint memories. Well enough to be quite sure that the only thing in the wide world Cohen was really afraid of was himself—his power, his fallibility, and the damage that godlike power allied with all-too-human failings could do in the world.

“Anyway,” the ghost said, passing over that odd internal moment of reckoning as lightly as a child scampering through a graveyard, “back to Lewis and Alice and the Rose E’er Blooming. Imagine the multiverse as a rose, a rose with an uncountable infinity of petals. When Alice and Lewis run their Schrödinger’s cat experiment, they create multiple branchings, each of which can be envisioned as a single petal. Until a classical message passes between Alice and Lewis—until someone does something that forces the wave to collapse—they both continue to exist in a single universe in which the cat is both alive and dead. But the box
is opened, and the cat is found alive or dead, and the message travels along the stretch of spacetime that separates the two of them, their superimposed universes delaminate from each other to create new membranes in the multiverse, each of which is its own universe with its own infinite quantum branchings. So, one universe has given birth to two—or, more realistically, an infinity—which continue to delaminate from each other until they achieve total separation throughout Lewis and Alice’s future light cones.”

Llewellyn followed this as far as it went. But he was having trouble seeing how it applied to naval tactics, and his face must have shown it.

“You’re looking at it the wrong way around,” the ghost told him. “You’re thinking of quantum branchings of the multiverse as something that happens to us. You need to start thinking of them as something we do to the universe. All of us. Every person, every mind, every body, every stone and leaf of grass and dust mote in the universe. We are all making new worlds at every moment, worlds upon worlds, universes upon universes, infinities upon infinities. Do you think in all those infinities I can’t find one where we win and our enemies lose?”

“But how? You can’t possibly run those calculations.”

“Can you run the calculations for a game of chess?”

“No.”

“But you can still play it. And you’re better than most players. And a few players are better than you. And a very few players are a lot better than you. Even though none of them can crunch the numbers any better than you can.”

“So what then? What is it you do? How do you know when to jump and where to jump to?”

“You just do. For one thing you only count the universes that count.”

“How can you tell which ones count?”

“Well, not that they don’t all count, but … some of them are just irrelevant. We don’t care about them. They have nothing interesting to say to us.”

“You make it sound as if it’s some kind of subjective aesthetic judgment.”

“Well, it is … isn’t it? Elegant ideas, elegant equations, is there really
that much difference between the two? Look at it this way. In my favorite Evelyn Waugh novel one of the characters is held hostage in the Amazonian jungle and forced to read the entire collected works of Charles Dickens aloud to his captor. In some innumerable infinity of parallel universes I myself am being held hostage on, let’s say a remote space station by a demented fellow AI. Now if he’s making me read Dashiell Hammett to him, so what? That situation is entirely lacking in aesthetic interest. But if he’s making me read Evelyn Waugh? Ah! Now
that
, I think we can both agree, is a universe in which my worldline would possess a certain level of poignant irony. Or, put another way, it would be relevant to me—and not merely contiguous. And that’s just what I’m looking for, in a mathematical sense, when I’m playing at being NavComp. Connections. Structures. Frameworks. Echoes and counterpoints. Slices of spacetime where our worldline brushes against parallel worldlines in ways that strike me as useful or interesting. And, yes, it is a subjective judgment. And, yes, what’s interesting to me might not be interesting to another AI. And, yes, it’s a kind of mathematical thinking that’s as much art as science. But when you’re good enough at it, all math is art as well as science. Of course it is. It’s the art of reducing the world to numbers in a Universal Turing Machine—just the way the programmer of a Jacquard loom reduces paintings to numbers on punch cards.”

Llewellyn’s head jerked up, and he drew in a sharp breath. “That’s exactly how Ada explained it.”

“Of course it is.” The ghost’s head cocked sideways in a theatrical, slightly precious gesture of bemusement. “Who do you think I learned it from?”

“You talked to her? And you didn’t tell me? What the hell do you think you’re playing a—”

“Not that Ada, you idiot. The real one. Ada Lovelace. The woman whose name she took. The woman who wrote what amounted to the first mathematical description of computer programming. Don’t you see that’s what we’re talking about? Information. Information is what our memories are made of. Information is what our minds are made of.
Information is what our genes and our immortality are made of. That’s what the cosmos is, William. And that’s all it is. The multiverse is just a creative exercise in mathematics: the manipulation of symbols, the enumeration of the Names of God, the art of wrestling meaning from ciphers.”

“You make it sound so heroic it’s hard to imagine you being involved in it.”

The ghost relinquished his wineglass, which popped like a soap bubble the moment he let go of it, and clapped mockingly. “Nice to see you developing a sense of humor. It’s good for the complexion. And you’re looking a little peaked lately, if you don’t mind my mentioning it.”

“I’m serious. Are you dragging me off on some religious crusade?”

“Jacob wrestled angels. I wrestle infinitudes.” The wineglass reappeared. “Just call us Chosen, Incorporated.”

“Better than Titan, Incorporated.”

The lingering smile on the ghost’s face shut off like a neutron star spinning into its final collapse. “Yes, I believe we were just talking about the lovely Miss Holmes when my minds began to wander? Go on. It was so amusing I can barely wait to hear more.”

“What do you want to know about her?” Llewellyn asked, feeling an appalling tide of exhaustion and despair sweep over him.

“No, actually,” the ghost said, changing tack as if he realized he was in danger of pushing Llewellyn too far. “Let’s talk a little more about Ada’s memory palace.”

“Why? I mean, why are you so interested in it?”

“I’m trying to make sense of it, to put it together in my own mind so … so that Ada has a place to go to make sense of herself.” The ghost laughed softly. “If that makes any sense to you at all, which I very much doubt it does. It barely even makes sense to me.”

It was funny, Llewellyn thought, how the ghost said Ada. As if she were a person and not a ship. And it didn’t even know yet. Though Llewellyn supposed he had no way of knowing what the ghost knew and didn’t know. Maybe it had already ravaged his memories, picking
through his most intimate secrets. Maybe it didn’t need him to unlock that door. Maybe this was just another of the manipulative games it so doted on.

“Her memory palace was smaller than this. More self-contained. More … predictable.”

“Naturally.” The ghost smiled a smile that Llewellyn could only call feline. “Because in this memory, at least, Ada hadn’t yet realized that she was one of a kind and no mere device.”

After the death of the
Romola
, Holmes went completely ballistic.

“What did she want to do?” the ghost asked. “Did she say specifically?”

“Not as such.”

“But the lines of battle were pretty well drawn, weren’t they? You, Sital, and Okoro for the talking cure. Holmes for a quick sail back to dry dock where Titan would either cycle the hardware or slave Ada to a semi-sentient. And what about Avery? Did she side with you or with Holmes?”

“It still wasn’t that black-and-white,” Llewellyn protested. “Everything was in flux. No one was saying any of the things you’re talking about out loud yet. Hell, I didn’t even know you
could
slave a shipboard AI to a semi-sentient. And leaving any moral qualms aside, I still think you’d be risking the life of every man on board to even try navigating the Drift on a kluged-up system like that. I just didn’t see what you’re seeing when you look at the memories. And I’m not sure I had reason to see it. I … I thought we’d pull out of the tailspin, find some accommodation we could all live with. I didn’t think it was really going to come down to a fight between me and Holmes for control of the ship.”

But if the final confrontation with Holmes was still a distant thunderhead, the fights with Avery were daily and immediate. And they had been terrible. They had been the kind of fights where you said things you could never take back and made accusations you would never be forgiven for.