Ghost Spin (57 page)

“Do you have anything to say to that?” Sital asked. It took Li a moment to realize that she was talking to her.

“I’m not working for Avery,” she said.

“But the ghost was your husband.”

She hesitated. “Yes. But I’m not going to wreck this ship and kill its crew to get him back.”

Doyle snorted.

“You keep talking about the ghost this and the ghost that,” Llewellyn objected. “He’s not in control of me. I’m in control of both of us.”

“Or at least you think you are.”

Llewellyn flushed with anger. “Fine. Don’t take my word for it then. Ask Ike.”

All eyes turned to Okoro, who shifted in his seat, clearly uncomfortable with being put on the spot publicly.

“I don’t see Ike leaping to agree with you,” Doyle said sourly.

“Don’t turn me into some kind of witness for the prosecution,” Okoro protested. And then he swung around to include Llewellyn in his scowl. “And not you, either! Leave me out of it. I’m not taking sides in this.”

“You just did take sides,” Llewellyn pointed out.

Okoro made a disgusted face that seemed to imply he was the lone adult in a room full of squabbling children.

Li glanced at Sital, but she was chewing her fingernails and staring at the meeting minutes, scrolling down her tablet as if she’d suddenly decided she no longer trusted her handheld’s speech recognition software.

Llewellyn shrugged carelessly. “I say we put it to a vote.”

“Put what to a vote?” Doyle snapped. “You haven’t given the crew a choice!”

“Then you give them one. No one’s stopping you.”

Doyle looked like he was about to start chewing on the walls. “That’s always the way it is with you. You talk about votes, you talk about
choice, but in the end you just sit there looking sideways at us while we talk, and then go right ahead and do whatever you were planning to do in the first place.”

“What do you want me to do, beg?”

“I want you to abide by what we decide instead of walking away every time it doesn’t suit you.”

“I have the right to pack my kit and ship out, Doyle. We all have that right.”

“But we don’t all stand on it the way you do!”

Llewellyn started to answer, then bit his tongue on whatever he’d been about to say. “Come now, Doyle. I’ve served you well all these years. I’ve been as winning a captain as a ship could ask for. Surely it’s a little late to get angry at me for not being something I never pretended to be?”

“Meaning,” Doyle said sourly, “that you won’t bend your neck until they put you out an airlock feet first with a rope around it.”

They stared at each other—Doyle red and furious, Llewellyn palely determined.

“All right,” Doyle said finally. “I’ll go along if the rest will. But only provisionally. And I reserve the right of recall.”

“I can’t go into action on those terms, Doyle.”

“Then I want a committee vote before giving chase or boarding. You, me, slops, and quarters. With the crew rep for a tiebreaker.”

“Too slow. I’ll not be chasing you all up and down the ship while we’re clearing for action.”

The room boiled up in angry murmurs. Eventually one name precipitated out of the chaos: Sital.

“What does Sital say?” someone asked, just loud enough to make his voice heard over the din.

All eyes turned to her.

She hemmed and hawed, but Li had been reading her body language throughout the meeting and had a pretty good idea of which way things were headed. “I’m with Doyle on this,” she finally said. “I think we need to have some kickout provision.”

Llewellyn was completely unprepared for the betrayal. He stared,
flushed, then turned his head away and smiled mockingly as if at some private joke. It was a very Llewellyn reaction—but it was precisely the wrong reaction in this highly charged setting.

The crew saw it, and it didn’t sit well with them. Worse yet, Sital saw it.

“It’s not personal,” she said in a clipped voice. “I’m thinking of the ship. And I say we need to keep open the option of a revote.”

“We’ve never done that in a combat situation.”

“We’ve never been in this kind of combat situation before.”

“Fine. So what do you want?”

“Doyle and I can throw the matter to a crew-wide vote if we both think things are going sour.”

“In other words, if you both stop trusting me.”

“You’re the one who put it that way, not me.”

Llewellyn stared at her.

“So be it,” Llewellyn said tersely. “But one way or another, we’re taking the Datatrap.”

And then he walked out without another word while the room exploded into an angry buzz behind him.

Li didn’t expect miracles. She knew as well as any of Avery’s cat herders how slippery and yet how brittle Emergents’ identities were. How could you anchor the free-floating consciousness of a mind without a body? How could you pluck an AI out of the quantum storm and give it that illusion of continuity—for it was only an illusion of continuity—that was the bedrock of classical consciousness?

No one knew. No one had known back when Hy Cohen was banging out his experimental programs. And no one knew now. It was black magic: software designers’ slang for code whose operations can’t be explained or predicted. Emergent architecture was less code than incantation. There were spells that sometimes worked, and there were spells that never worked. But no one had ever found code that always worked. And once AIs had gone Emergent and started spawning other AIs, most human scientists had stopped even looking for it.

Still, by the time Li had struggled with the Avery fragments for a week, she knew that the job was likely to be impossible. Indeed, the files were hopelessly corrupted—and she had a pretty good idea who the responsible party was.

“What?” Holmes said when Li finally tracked her down in the bowels of the ship. “And make it quick. I have my own problems.”

“Did you wipe the jacket info?”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“Bullshit! Someone cleaned those files up so that I wouldn’t be able
to trace them back to the yard sale. And when they did it, they broke the files. There’s no way to integrate them into a larger system without that information.”

“Just stick new labels on,” Holmes said with that purposeful denseness that was both infuriating and intimidating.

“That’s not how it works.” Li paused, struggling to articulate the problem. “Cohen’s memories—the core ones that underpin his personality architecture—are more like human memories than AI memories. They’re not localized, and they’re not standard in format, either. Whoever wiped the jacket info took out file contents and functionality along with it.”

“So put it back.”

“I can’t. You might as well ask me to put an egg back together after it’s been broken.”

Holmes smiled. “So make an omelet.”

“Yeah, cute. Can I please have the original files?”

“Sorry. Not an option.”

“Why not?” Anger coursed through Li, leaving her internals struggling to keep up with the rising tide of adrenaline. “Because you don’t want me to know where the files came from?”

Holmes gave her a sharp, hard look. Then she relaxed and smiled, showing her long eyeteeth. “Well, I should have figured you’d get there sooner or later. But if you’ve made it that far, then you ought to be smart enough to take the next step and realize that it’s just as easy to get yourself killed in the Drift as in the Crucible. And just for the record?” Another flash of her canines. “I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”

So Li soldiered on, noting with an ironic distance that was half resignation and half self-loathing that she had always been a good soldier and a believer in keeping your mouth shut and following orders. She nursed her little company of ghosts along, consoling the grieving, soothing the panicked, convincing the deniers. She cycled the hardware again and again—and how she hated that cruel and cowardly programmer’s euphemism—in what amounted to an act of triage.

Save the ones you can. Let the dead go. And let the dying join them.

Gradually some patterns began to emerge, even if they weren’t particularly useful ones. And, even more gradually, she began to realize that she really had to reread
Alice in Wonderland
.

“Ask me what I’ve been reading lately,” Hyacinthe asked her one morning in his little-boy voice.

“Fine. I’ll play along. What have you been reading lately?”

“
Alice in Wonderland
. Have you ever read it?”

She smiled. “Not for a long, long time.”

“I think I’m like Alice.”

He paused, looking expectantly at her.

“Don’t you want to know why?” he prompted after a moment.

“Yes. Tell me.”

“Because Wonderland is just like a virtual computer. And Alice is like a simulation running in a virtual computer. And the rules are coming from somewhere outside, and she doesn’t control the rules, but she has to learn how to use them to her own advantage. That’s what she’s doing, right?”

“Uh … I guess so. Do you really feel that out of control?”

“Yes.”

“Do you—you know I’m trying to help you, don’t you?”

“I know.”

“I might not be doing a very good job of it, but—”

“You’re doing the best you can. I know.”

“Are you angry at me?”

“How could I ever be angry at you?”

Li had no answer to that question, if it was a question. Just an aching sense of guilt and failure and helplessness.

“Do you remember how Cinda used to read to me?” Hyacinthe asked her.

“Of course I do.”

“Can you do that? Can you read my favorite part of
Alice
to me?”

“Of course.”

“Can I sit in your lap like I always used to do with her?”

What was he after? “Of course you can.”

He came around the table and climbed onto her lap, all legs and
impossibly skinny and somehow smelling of grass and little boy and sunshine.

Li recognized the book that materialized in her hands. It was an ancient first edition of the classic. The one Cohen had always read. He had always been pretty obsessed with that book, but this was something new. Now his surviving fragments seemed to be using it to pull identity and unity from chaos and cobble together their broken universe.

Li felt a pang as she made the connection. Because wasn’t that what she had used Cohen for through all their years together? To cobble together her broken universe? To make her whole where she wasn’t? To paper over the gaps and blank spots and bottomless pits that she didn’t dare tread too close to?

She dipped her head toward Hyacinthe’s dark curls and breathed in the smell of grass and sunshine and little boy. For the first time she understood—she who had never had a maternal feeling in her life—why women wanted children. Why people worked and suffered and died for their children without complaint or second thoughts.

“Where should we begin?” she murmured.

He opened the book and pointed to a line, and she started reading:

Li didn’t know. She didn’t have time to find out before he died on her, his question unanswered. And the next morning, he was someone else again. Another day, another fragment. Another unanswerable question. Another identity scraped together out of shattered memories and half-forgotten bedtime stories.

“Critter fritters or monkey-on-a-stick?” Okoro asked companionably, plopping his tray down next to Li’s on the mess hall table.

She sidled over to make room for him. “Not sure I can tell, actually.”

Okoro surveyed the unappetizing brown glop on both their trays with a connoisseur’s eye. “I’m gonna go with monkey-on-a-stick. Excellent! Full marks to the cook for creativity.”

Li didn’t think it looked any more appetizing than Okoro seemed to. But like him she ate it anyway. She and Okoro and everyone else involved in planning the raid had been running on caffeine and synthetic myelin enhancers all week long, and her hunger had become a gnawing worm that tunneled through her gut and twisted her stomach.

“You still think he can do it?” Li asked Okoro.

“Who? Cohen?” Okoro was the only person on the crew, Llewellyn included, who called Cohen by his name and not simply “the ghost.”

Okoro didn’t answer for a moment—and the silence that stretched between them was the same complicated silence, heavy with unsettled scores and unfinished arguments, that Li had felt when the crew had witnessed the fight between Llewellyn and Doyle about Cohen’s plan for the Datatrap raid.

“I think that’s the wrong question,” Okoro said at last. “I think the real question is where he wants to. And why.”

Li looked carefully at the AI designer, weighing his expression. “You’re not what I would have expected a cat herder to be.”

“You mean I’m not a thin-skinned, socially inept geek?”

She laughed.

“You don’t know what these ships are. It’s not just straightforward programming. It’s being a parent and a priest and a doctor all rolled into one, and halfway to being a lover, too, sometimes. It’s manipulating someone in ways that no one should be able to do to another soul. It’s the deepest of deep magic. You run that close to the machine, you’re in the wilderness. You have to be very sure of who you are, of how far you’re willing to go, or you can lose yourself so badly there’ll be no finding your way back home again.”

“Is that what happened to Llewellyn?”

Ike’s face closed, becoming suddenly less friendly.

“Or was Ada the problem? Something went wrong. I can hear it in the way people talk about her.”

“Nothing went wrong. Ada was perfect, one of God’s perfect souls. You make a soul into a tool, and you deserve every bad thing you have coming to you. Do you believe in God?”