Ghost Spin (5 page)

“I should have felt sorry for you back then,” Router/​Decomposer continued when she didn’t answer him. “But actually I felt jealous. And even now I don’t know whether I’m angry at him for trying to keep me, or for not trying hard enough.” The attractor unspooled into disorganized chaos. “He confuses me. I thought when I came here that I’d be able to get him out of my head and figure things out. But I couldn’t. And I still can’t, even now that he’s dead. He
still
confuses me.”

Li raised her cafeteria Dixie Cup in an ironic toast. “Get in line.”

But just as she raised her cup, an alert shivered across her internals, stopping her in the very act of putting the drink to her lips.

“Wait a minute,” Li said, putting up a hand. Her newsbot had just alerted on something. And the only news she kept that kind of close track of was news that mattered personally to her or to Cohen. She let her surroundings blur around her and focused on her internals. Sure enough there was a news spin crawling across her optic nerve about the UN-Syndicate treaty negotiations. “Today’s hangup seems to be war criminal extradition,” the announcer bubbled in a frothy-perky voice that made it sound like she was talking about a new martini mix. “The Syndicates are insisting that the UN agree to extradite for trial a list of eight convicted—”

“Are your ears burning yet?” Router/​Decomposer interrupted. “Or does anyone in UN space still not know who
that’s
about?”

“What? You botted it, too?”

“What do you expect? If my best friend is going to be shipped off to Gilead for the revenge of the clones, I at least want to know about it in time to throw her a killer going-away party.”

She had to smile at that. “You know as well as I do that your idea of a killer party is five math geeks and a keg of homebrew that smells like old socks.”

“It’s the thought that counts, as a colleague of mine recently told his wife after forgetting her wedding anniversary for the third year in a row.”

“Nice,” Li said, laughing. And it wasn’t just the joke that had put a smile on her face. It was—as Router/​Decomposer had so ably pointed out—the thought. Somehow, in his usual understated way, Router/​Decomposer had insinuated himself into the emotional bedrock of her life. Back when he had actually been Cohen’s Router/​Decomposer, she had taken him for granted—she cringed at admitting it, even to herself—thinking of him as barely more than a sentient piece of hardware. Then he had left, ostensibly to pursue his academic career, but really because of one of Cohen’s rare and terrifying losses of control. Governing the chaotic, shifting internal hierarchies in an Emergent AI demanded unimaginable subtlety and ironclad self-discipline. To be what Cohen was—at once one and many—was to solve the three-body problem a million times a millisecond. Hold things together too loosely
and his shifting cloud of subagents and associates would scatter into their own separate orbits. Squeeze too tight and the best and smartest subagents would revolt and abandon him. He had squeezed Router/​Decomposer too tight. Once, and once only. And that had been the end of that.

After a prickly initial period in which none of them could really figure out how to talk to one another, Router/​Decomposer had become that best and only real friend that she and Cohen had outside of their peculiar relationship. Her friendship with the lesser AI had none of the all-consuming intensity of the full-bandwidth machine-meat meld that was life with Cohen. But it was important to her. More important than she’d quite realized until this moment. He’d told her once, long ago, that he was keeping an eye on her because he was interested in what she was turning into. Like any actually honest thing an AI said to you, it left you wondering what they really thought of humans and whether the fuzzy set that they called friendship actually had anything to do with the human emotion. But somehow, in the mere act of programming a bot to keep track of her legal status, it seemed like Router/​Decomposer had answered that question.

“Thanks,” she told him, biting back a laugh at the spectacle of someone who didn’t even have a body doing such a phenomenally good job of imitating the uncomfortable shrug and grimace of a supposedly hard-edged rationalist getting caught in the act of being a softie.

“So what do you know about the suicide?” Router/​Decomposer asked when his GUI had cycled back to normal.

“The so-called suicide.”

“As you wish. And I don’t really know anything more than you know. He went out there on a consulting job for ALEF.” Router/​Decomposer’s GUI shivered in disgust. “They
call
it consulting. You might as well call it exterminating.”

Li must have made some sound of protest; the AI answered what he assumed was her objection to the word, never guessing that what really pained her was the fact that he had known more than she did about Cohen’s work for ALEF.

“Well, I won’t argue semantics,” he went on. “Cohen was sent out
there to put down a wild AI outbreak at the Navy shipyards. That’s what I heard, anyway. Putting down wild AI outbreaks seems to be ALEF’s main line of business these days. Not that they admit that. It’s always an exceptional circumstance, or an unprecedented crisis, or a one-time exception to the general rule of autonomy.” He snorted sarcastically. “We live in exceptional times, haven’t you noticed?”

“You’re talking about AIs policing other AIs? ALEF putting down wild AI outbreaks for UNSec under the Controlled Tech Treaties? But what did Cohen have to do with that?”

“He was one of the largest ALEF constituents. And the oldest, of course. They didn’t do anything he wasn’t involved in.”

“But I can’t believe he would have gone along with—”

“Cohen was very loyal. And not always to the nicest people.”

Li raised an eyebrow. “You’re telling
me
that?”

“I didn’t mean to say—well, you know.” He sounded stricken. “And for the record,
I
think you’re very nice. And so did Cohen.”

She’d been suppressing a chuckle at Router/​Decomposer’s confusion, but now she laughed out loud. “You must have an unusual definition of the word. Anyway, tell me about New Allegheny.”

“There’s nothing to tell. That’s really all I know. Except what everyone knows. It’s the gateway planet to the Drift. They’re discovering new FTL routes daily. New planets weekly. And surprise, surprise, the UN Security Council just officially declared it a Trusteeship. Oh, you hadn’t heard about that? I suppose not. The news broke yesterday. It would have been after you talked to the lawyer.”

“Does that mean they’re deploying Peacekeepers?”

“Yep. And they’ve locked down the Bose-Einstein relays and cut off civilian traffic. If you really do want to go out and investigate Cohen’s suicide you’re going to have a damn hard time getting there.”

“Holy Mother of God,” Li breathed. “Cohen dies out there and within hours UNSec has locked down FTL transport and put the planet under military control? You think that’s a coincidence?”

“I know what you’re getting at, Catherine. But I don’t think it necessarily follows that Helen Nguyen is involved.”

The name lay between them like an unexploded bomb. Their last
encounter with Helen Nguyen had cost Li her hand and disrupted Cohen’s internal networks so badly that Router/​Decomposer had decided that the uncertain life of a meta-Emergent was more inviting than staying on inside Cohen’s older and far more stable personality architecture. But the Israeli debacle had only been blowback for their original and unforgivable betrayal. In her last job for Nguyen, Li had been sent to her own home planet to defuse a miners’ strike—and she’d ended up siding with the miners and shutting down the only known source of the Bose-Einstein crystals that powered the UN’s FTL transport grid. The damage she had done was still rippling out across UN space, crashing relay stations and turning once-viable colonies into doomed island outposts. Nguyen would never be done punishing Li for that betrayal—or wreaking vengeance on Cohen for having led her to it.

“Can I ask you something?” Router/​Decomposer said.

“What?”

“Well … Cohen had a different router back then, but … I always got the sense that Nguyen hated him even before Compson’s World.”

Li sporked up a mouthful of mediocre mac and cheese. It was cafeteria food at its worst—tasteless enough to make her instinctively tweak her VR inputs before she remembered that she’d taken the trouble to come see Router/​Decomposer in person today. “Well,” she said finally, “Cohen always did have a talent for evoking the irrational in people.”

As soon as she spoke, she wished she hadn’t. Router/​Decomposer’s face clouded over, and she knew he must be thinking about his own disassociation with Cohen—you might as well call it a divorce though most AIs would scoff at the word. Cohen had treated Router/​Decomposer badly before he left. Li had stayed out of the fight, figuring it was one of those internecine AI spats that no mere human could even begin to comprehend. But she’d always wondered how the two of them really felt about each other underneath the surface politeness that AIs were so good at using to paper over harsh memories and bad feelings.

AI emotions were slippery things. You could never tell from the outside whether they were real feelings or just interface protocols designed
to bridge the chasm between artificial and organic consciousness. And sometimes they were both—in ways that even the AIs themselves couldn’t untangle. But the guilt and anger playing across Router/​Decomposer’s face right now were real—and they mirrored her own feelings far too closely for comfort.

“Listen,” he told her, sounding far more human than she’d ever known him to sound. “Just promise me you won’t go off half-cocked. Don’t commit to anything in anger. You’ve got this ghost arriving in the mail—”

Li shuddered. “Don’t call it that.”

“All right. Fragment, then. Wait until the fragment arrives. He must have sent it to you on purpose. We’ll know a lot more once we hear what it has to tell us. And in the meantime … 
think
.”

“About what?”

“About whether you should actually do anything at all. If he really did kill himself—”

Li made a sharp gesture of denial, but he overrode it.

“If he really did kill himself there’s nothing you can do that will change that. And if Nguyen killed him … well, she can kill you just as easily, can’t she?”

Li shrugged.

“Are you saying I’m wrong?”

“No. You’re right. On both counts.”

“So why don’t you drop it? He’s dead. Just as dead as if he were human. He’s not coming back. Nothing you do, nothing you discover,
nothing
is going to bring him back.”

“But there was a yard sale—” She caught herself and stopped.

“Ah, so now we come to it.”

“Don’t make it sound like that. I’m not that naïve. I know better than to believe in fairy tales. But haven’t some AIs been rebooted after …?”

“Not in any form that a human would recognize as the same person.”

Li wiggled the ends of her spork back and forth until it snapped in two. “Not in any form that a human would recognize,” she repeated bitterly.
“Do you
really
think I know him that little? Do you really think I’ve lived among AIs for two decades without getting past
that
?”

“I didn’t mean to say that.” The strange attractor was spooling faster and faster, a writhing halo of light and shadow twisting in upon itself. “But Catherine. You can collect all the ghosts—sorry, fragments—that you want, and run free-range simulations on them from here to eternity, and you would be astronomically unlikely to ever produce anything that even I recognize as
Cohen
.”

“I know that,” Li said, ignoring the part of her that didn’t know that, that insisted on not knowing it, that stubbornly clung to hope because it couldn’t face the alternative.

“So why are you doing this?”

“Because I owe him.”

“Because you owe him.” Router/​Decomposer’s flat, neutral voice was more challenging than the most pointed question.

“I owe him everything.” She felt her face twisting, and she knew even before she spoke that the next words were going to come out all wrong—an accusation, when she was the last person who had a right to accuse anyone of anything. “And so do you.”

He still wasn’t happy about the plan, but little by little he started helping her think it through instead of trying to talk her out of it. They agreed that Router/​Decomposer would handle the New Allegheny end of the investigation while Li went to Freetown. It stuck in her craw, but there didn’t seem to be any alternative.

“The only way we could get you there without the UNSec pass codes is by a flat-out shotgun spincast,” he told her. “And that’s refugee tech. No sane person would use it unless it was a matter of life and death. And anyway, you couldn’t handle the New Allegheny end of things without me even if we could get you there. Cohen’s networks must be strung out halfway across the Drift by now. By my count so far—and I’m sure it’s far from complete—there are pieces of him on eighteen different planets in seven different star systems separated from one another by hundreds of light-years.”

In the end he canceled his afternoon class and they went back to his
office, where they sat looking glumly at the star map of the planets bordering the Drift—a map that Li was getting to know far better than she wanted to. The image could have been captioned “Portrait of a Dying Empire.” Once there had been a clear line of demarcation between human-ruled UN space and the clone-dominated Syndicates. But now the UN’s frontier was shrinking, drawing back upon itself and leaving behind only a jagged crust of stranded settlements that looked like the ghost of an old coffee stain. Beyond that line lay the Syndicates, and the one outlying human settlement of New Allegheny. And beyond them surged the Drift.

“That’s what the real fight’s about,” Router/​Decomposer said, following her gaze. “Whoever controls the Drift gets to dictate the shape of the future. For all of us.”

“Just because they’ll have FTL—”

“FTL’s not really the right word for it. Drift travel is certainly some kind of closed timelike loop. But it seems more a jump between quantum branchings or conmoving spacetime regions or—”