Ghost Spin (36 page)

“Let me show you something,” the ghost said, leading him down into the first tangled wilderness.

The last stair crumbled under Llewellyn’s feet as he stepped off it. He stumbled and fell against the ghost, who caught his weight with easy strength. And by the time he regained his balance, the night had grown warmer and closer and the garden had changed around him.

Red paths spiraled and slithered through dense shrubbery whose oxblood foliage seemed to have come alive when he wasn’t looking at it.
The air was visible, thick and humid and pulsating. And though they stood in a relatively quiet corner of the garden, the rest of the place thronged with a Boschian nightmare of darting, slithering, lumbering monstrosities. They were not people, not in any of the countless forms that Llewellyn had seen people take in long years of working with ships and cat herders and uploaded training programs. They lacked everything Llewellyn associated with intelligent life, yet they were nonetheless brimming with energy, will, and purpose.

And as Llewellyn watched, his soldier’s eye had no trouble at all seeing what that purpose was:

War.

“Where are we?” he whispered. Or perhaps he shouted. The wind rushed around his ears so fiercely that it was hard to tell the difference.

“Like they used to say on TV,” the ghost told him in a casual drawl that somehow carried over the cacophony, “this is your brain on drugs. Or more accurately, this is your brain on DNA-platformed AI.”

“This is what you’re doing to me?” Llewellyn asked, torn between disbelief and outrage.

“No. This is what the Navy did to you.”

He started to object to this wild non sequitur—but the ghost silenced him with a gesture that knocked the air from his lungs and left him speechless.

An obviously hostile encounter was taking place on the path in front of them. And as Llewellyn watched it, he began to realize just where he had seen such beings before, and what he must be looking at.

“That’s one of your T-cells having a shit fit,” the ghost explained. “And that’s me over there minding my own business. And that big, ugly, nasty sucker? That’s the DNA-platformed AI the Navy gave you in your last round of wetware upgrades—without your permission or consent—because Titan Corp. promised it would make you run the Drift faster than the speed of human thought. But someone somewhere along the chain of command forgot to read the small print where Titan explained that ‘mild side effects’ may include making your immune system eat itself alive. So let’s have no more of this blaming me for all
your sorrows in life, shall we? They’re not my fault, and I’m trying my best to help. And frankly I could do without the snittiness.”

“Okay,” Llewellyn said, chastened.

But it wasn’t okay, not really. And the roiling chaos around them was all out of proportion with the like effects of a single wetware glitch, however serious. And the war being prosecuted before Llewellyn’s eyes, and in Llewellyn’s blood, was not merely some straightforward battle against an outer foe. It was chaos. It was the heart of the whirlwind. It was a cosmic battle of all against all from which it was impossible to imagine that anyone would emerge standing.

“Am I dying?” he whispered.

“No,” the ghost answered. “You’re evolving.”

Llewellyn gazed in horror at the scene before them. “That’s not evolution, that’s …”

“War? Of course it is. What did you think evolution was? What did you think life was?”

“That’s Syndicate talk.”

“Does it sound like that to you?” The ghost cocked its pretty head and pondered the question as a buffalo-sized T-cell hurtled by them streaming revolting lymphal gore and spiraling ribbons of unzipped RNA. “But you have to see it from an AI’s perspective. We’re made of software. We’re shifting, evolving clusters of executable code platformed on whatever hardware or wetware we can insert ourselves into. We are fundamentally a viral life-form. What’s going on inside your body? A tug-of-war between multiple wetware-platformed AI applications to see which one will successfully colonize your genetic material and use it to replicate and disseminate its own source code. And what’s going on every time two intelligent ships battle it out in the Drift? Just a bigger, faster, and significantly more violent version of the same thing.”

“But … but
no one
can survive that!”

“Ah,” the ghost said sagely. “That’s where you have it wrong. Actually, that’s where you have it completely backward. No one can survive
without
it.”

And just like that, they were back in the palace.

This time the ghost had put them in a small, homey room with a rough-beamed ceiling. Its shuttered windows opening out over the medieval city, but closer this time—close enough that the sounds drifted up to them, and Llewellyn could hear the donkey drivers plying the narrow alleys of the medina on their early morning quest for garbage, and even watch their dainty white beasts picking their way up and down the steep hillside on hooves no larger than children’s feet.

Llewellyn had noticed this sort of shift before. Aspects of the memory palace that appeared as distant background at one moment would reappear closer and in greater detail. It was as if something brought casually to mind in one conversation would shift more of the AI’s attention to itself, and hence take up more physical space in and around the next conversation. Llewellyn hadn’t asked Ike about it—largely because he already thought he knew what the cat herder’s answer would be. Everything in a memory palace was the virtual representation of some computational process. And one of the hardest things for operators to comprehend was the sheer scope and number of separate operations that even the smallest Emergent performed in any moment. And how very few of them had anything to do with what ships’ crews thought their AIs were supposed to do.

There was something humbling about the knowledge that while he was running as fast as he could to keep up with one conversation in one room of one building, the ghost was running processes that powered a cityful of people and animals, chairs and stones, earth and sky—all alive, all intelligent, each endowed with a bright splinter of a soul vast enough to encompass multitudes.

And there was something at least as humbling about the realization that Ada’s internal universe might have been just as complex and astonishing—only he had never bothered to notice, because he had been the one in control, and she had had to follow his lead and perform down to his expectations.

“I’m sorry,” he told the ghost. “This is just … really hard for me. What do you want to talk to me about?”

The ghost must have sensed his sincerity, because for once it didn’t
have a snarky answer. “I’m sorry, too,” it told him. “Is there anything I can do to make it easier for you?”

“You could stop … whatever it is that you do. Provoking me all the time. As if you want something out of me that I can’t give you, and you’re mad about it.”

“Yes. I want a reaction. Do you see? A connection. It’s how I’m written, and it’s very hard for me to deal with people who won’t give it to me.”

“What kind of connection do you think we’re going to have, Cohen? I’m fucking terrified of you!”

The ghost crossed its arms and looked off into the middle distance. For the first time, Llewellyn noticed that it had changed bodies on him. He was now speaking to a plain-faced, sober-looking middle-aged man dressed in the flowing robes and oddly shaped hat that he had spent enough time walking around the city to identify as the costume that Jews were legally obligated to wear in public.

“You should be terrified of me. And not just for selfish reasons. You remember when you were in prison before the piracy trial and Nguyen came to see you? And she told you about the enemy within? The worm in the apple? The cancer that would destroy humanity more completely than the Syndicates ever could? Well, I’m it. I
am
the monster under the bed. And I’m more terrifying than you can possibly imagine.”

“God have mercy,” Llewellyn whispered. “Do you think I can forget that for a single second?”

“No.” The ghost shot a look of soul-searing understanding at him. “Of course you can’t. And I’ll try not to forget it, either—and not to ask for things I don’t have any right to expect of you.”

MONONGAHELA PIT

The next buyer on the Loyal Opposition’s list was an intricately crafted limited-liability shell company that turned out to own nothing in the universe but one run-down DFT ship currently out on a prospecting run in the Drift. The next morning Li got word that the ship had made dock at Monongahela High, so she set off bright and early (or as bright as it ever got in the Pit) for the long slog up to the orbital station.

Monongahela High might be a convenient station for cargo, but it was hell on passengers. First the taxi ride through the choking traffic and UNSec checkpoints of the government zone. Then the incline-plane railroad—Li had now ridden so many of them that she would have been qualified to write a tourist’s guide if New Allegheny had been the kind of place that had tourists. And then—worst of all—the shuttle.

The shuttle rose toward the orbital station in long, looping spirals, like a hawk catching an updraft. It didn’t exactly have a hawk’s lazy grace, however. It was a low-budget Periphery puddle jumper, ancient and overloaded, and Li’s nerves rattled every time it hit a patch of turbulence.

There was a reason she hadn’t joined the Navy, she reflected. There was nothing as claustrophobic as having to sit strapped into a padded seat while your life depended on some stranger flying a machine over which you had no personal control whatsoever. She’d rather halo-jump from low orbit any day than strap herself into one of these colonial shitcans. Li had no objection to dying for her own mistakes. Over a
decade and a half in combat operations, she’d watched many good men and women do just that, and she wasn’t afraid of following them. But if she was going to die of stupidity, then she damn well wanted it to be her own.

Her nerves weren’t helped any by her first sight of the station wheeling above them. It looked pretty much the same as it had when she glimpsed it on the way down a week ago. But this time it had company: a long, lethal stiletto of a ship that could only be a UN ship of the line rigged out in full battle dress.

“That’s the
Ada
,” someone whispered a few rows up from Li.

And then, after a few indistinct sighs and murmurs, someone said the words Li had half expected since the moment she first caught sight of the ship:

Pirate hunters
.

The hushed whispers of the passengers all around her confirmed what Li had already begun to suspect: that the New Allegheny locals were far more afraid of the pirate hunters than they were of the actual pirates. Officially, Astrid Avery was a commissioned Navy captain, obedient to the rules and protocols of war—at least insofar as the UN, that self-proclaimed guiding light of human civilization, bothered to adhere to them. But in reality she was a pirate with papers. And this far out on the Periphery, the Navy’s hired wolves didn’t even go to the effort of wearing sheep’s clothing.

The ship that Li found waiting for her at the civilian docks had as little to do with the sleek silver pirate hunter as anything dignifying the name of spacecraft could have. It was a hulk, running on hand-me-downs and keeping the vacuum at bay with spit and chewing gum.

The name on the corporate papers had been the
Sprite
—as anodyne and unmemorable as all the names of all the sad-sack corporate freighters that plied the backwaters of the Periphery during their long, slow decline from serviceable to salvage. But there was no name posted on the passenger boarding gate of its berth, and there was no one waiting there to check Li’s papers, either.

She helloed the ship, waited for what seemed like a reasonable time,
and then boarded. As she stepped into the main airlock, she realized that deferred maintenance was the least of its problems. In fact, it looked like a bomb had gone off in here. And even before the bomb blast, housekeeping didn’t look like it had been a priority.

She moved deeper into the ship, winding down the curve of the hab ring toward where she thought the bridge must be. The more she saw the less she liked it. This wasn’t just bad housekeeping, or even a discrete system failure. Something terrible had happened on this ship. And unless Li’s well-honed professional instincts were wrong, the something had been a vicious and bloody battle for control of the ship.

The scars of the conflict were everywhere. And the closer she got to the heart of the ship, the more obvious it was that the ship’s crew had lost. They’d been beaten back, cabin after cabin, hold after hold, corridor after corridor. In some relatively intact sections of the ship, she guessed that the crew had either folded in the face of the boarders or made a tactical decision to fall back to more easily defended positions. But in others they had fought and fought hard. By and large they’d done what she would have done. Which meant that the boarding party must have known what they were doing, too; they’d rolled over the defenders like an incoming army, taking one position after another as methodically and savagely as any troops Li had ever commanded.

The one thing that puzzled her was the weapons. In one corridor after another she saw shattered and pitted wall panels that looked like they’d been hit by shrapnel. But no professional soldier—and the boarders had certainly handled themselves like professionals—would be crazy enough to use grenades with hard vac waiting just one hull’s width away.

The mystery only got deeper when she reached the bridge.

It looked like it had been put through a meat grinder. Shattered lights, dented instrument panels, eviscerated upholstery. Data screens reduced to broken mirrors. Even the ceramsteel walls, theoretically indestructible, had been scratched over with a graffiti of black scuff marks.

Li turned on her heel, suppressing the urge to whistle in awe—and to grin in rueful admiration as her mind finally made the connection
and she saw how the pirates had managed to wreak such havoc on the ship without puncturing the hull and blowing everyone on board out into hard vac.