Ghost Spin (14 page)

Outside the sunlight was sharp and brutal. As she stepped out from under the shelter of the porte cochere, she saw the chauffeur leaning over the sultry curve of the Aston Martin’s hood. He was looking at her. Again.

On a half-conscious impulse she turned and walked down the smooth sweep of gravel toward him. The sound of her feet crunching on pebbles seemed unbearably loud to her. She wondered if anyone was watching from the windows of the house. She wondered if anyone inside cared enough to watch, or even knew whom to report to if they did.

“Nice car,” she told him.

“Sure.” His voice was as stupid and self-satisfied as his face. Li had never thought much of handsome men, and this one wasn’t changing her opinion.

“Why do I get the idea you want to talk to me?”

“Who, me?” He looked her over, not even being subtle about it.
His verdict was written all over his face, and it would have been devastating—if she were the kind of woman who gave a shit. “Nah,” he told her. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

But just as she was about to turn away, he changed. His features sharpened and fell into focus. The complacent look on his young face vanished, to be replaced by something far older and cagier. The childish sneer shifted into a world-weary smile. Nothing had changed outwardly. An observer who spent less time around AIs than Li did might even have missed it entirely. But suddenly the face looking at her across the silver curve of the Aston Martin’s hood was a little less handsome, far more intelligent, and—or so Li had always found it—lethally attractive.

“Who are you?” Li asked. She had to swallow hard and clamp down on her racing pulse just to get the question out.

His lips curved in a smile that didn’t belong on a young man’s face. “Just call us the Loyal Opposition.”

“No—”

“You’re going to have to leave it at that, my dear. We only meant to get your attention. Breaking your heart isn’t in our plans today.”

“So what is in your plans?”

“Not our plans. ALEF’s plans. As they stand at the moment. We are participating under protest. It would take so long to explain, longer than you have, I’m afraid.” The AI—or fragment, or ghost, or whatever it was—sighed regretfully. “Humans do everything so
slowly
. Except die, that is. They’re all too quick about
that
. And they seem to be doing it at the drop of a hat these days.”

“Who’s dying? What are you talking about?” Li’s voice dropped to a whisper. She took a step closer to him, drawn against her will, against her better judgment. “
Cohen?
”

“Catherine.”

Her heart stuttered and stopped. The brilliant day spun around her, as dizzying as a child’s kaleidoscope.

“I’m not Cohen.”

“Then who are you?
What
are you?”

“I’m not him. You can’t think that way. I have memories, yes. Fragments.
But they’re … broken. I think some of them may even be insane.”

“You’re a ghost,” Li whispered.

“Think, Catherine! You know it’s not that simple. I’m an Emergent. I contain multitudes.”

“And one of them … you were one of the buyers at the yard sale. For ALEF? They were
there
? They have
fragments
?”

“You didn’t hear it from me. Just know that there are factions inside ALEF that don’t support the current position. We have arranged … well, let’s call it an oversight. The top-level decision to terminate your involvement in this case was nearly unanimous. Still, there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip. And what with one thing and another, the execution of the resolution has been … imperfect. If you go to New Allegheny, you’ll still find the credit line and the list of yard sale buyers. I can’t tell you how long that window of opportunity will stay open, though. At some point, someone’s bound to notice that a few loose ends still need tidying. But if you move fast enough you’ll already have the money. And the list. And what you do with them … well, that’s your affair.”

“I doubt that very much.”

“Oh no. Believe it. We know very little about what Cohen was doing out there. He wasn’t conscientious about reporting in at the best of times. And lately he’d become even more cagey than usual.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Yes. And I feel … well, it’s hard to describe since I’m not used to this sort of thing. But I think I’d have to call it
regret
.”

Li shuddered.

“The fragment I bought didn’t have any recent memories in it,” the creature that was partly Cohen told her. “But it taught me things. About him. About how his mind worked. And if I had to hazard a guess as to why he stopped reporting to ALEF, I’d say it was because he felt a change of course was warranted. And he didn’t trust them to make what he believed to be the right decision.”

Li stared at the gravel between their feet. It seemed to vibrate before her eyes, as if she’d stared so hard at it during the last few moments that she’d seen through to the jittery quantum heart of the universe.

“There’s only one person he would have trusted with anything really important. You know that, don’t you?”

She nodded. Speaking was beyond her.

“We want you to go to New Allegheny. For—the Loyal Opposition—though we will try to bring the rest of ALEF round as best we can. We have no idea if Cohen can be rebooted. And even if he can, the resulting personality architecture is likely to be extremely unstable. But we need to know what he was doing. And if there are any stable fragments left out there, they’re far more likely to talk to you than to us.”

She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against her trembling lids. “I need time,” she told him. “Time to think about it.”

“We can’t give you that, I’m afraid. Someone else is already trying to reassemble him. They’ve already kidnapped two fragments that we know of. After killing both the yard sale buyers quite nastily. I can’t imagine they’ll do less to you.”

“Between that and the extradition treaty I seem to be out of choices. You people didn’t arrange that, too, did you?” She cast a suspicious look at him, but he was all innocence. “Never mind. I’ll do it. How are you going to get me there?”

The Loyal Opposition suddenly looked as if his clothes itched. “Oh dear, I meant to mention that before. In the interests of full disclosure. I’d hate you to feel we were being
sneaky
. But the thing is, ALEF’s majority faction has access to military transport through the Bose-Einstein relay. We, on the other hand … well, I’m afraid we’re going to have to scattercast you.” He smiled brightly. “But I’m sure it will be fine. As they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And after all, you’re virtually guaranteed of success, statistically speaking.”

We may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions … which will be called “m-configurations.” The machine is supplied with a “tape” (the analogue of paper) running through it, and divided into sections (called “squares”) each capable of bearing a “symbol.” At any moment there is just one square … which is “in the machine.” We may call this square the “scanned square.” The symbol on the scanned square may be called the “scanned symbol.” The “scanned symbol” is the only one of which the machine is, so to speak, “directly aware.”

—Alan Turing

“Permission to land?” the ghost asked, and Llewellyn gave it.

They were deep in the Drift, where they’d spent the last week and a half running silent and hunting for vulnerable freighters becalmed in the fickle flows that had earned this region the ancient Earth name of the Horse Latitudes.

And now they were coming into an abandoned orbital station around a played-out mining strike. A company town turned pirate kingdom. Safe haven. For now, anyway. Until Avery caught up to them again.

The NavComp brought the ship in, smoothly adjusting attitude and altitude, hovered for the briefest of moments over the docking bay’s droplights, and then settled into the berth so precisely that the usual jolt and crunch of docking was little more than a settling sigh. Llewellyn could practically hear the slaved AIs of flight frame, mechanicals, and tactical applauding the ghost.

Everyone just loved the son of a bitch. It was starting to get annoying. No, Llewellyn corrected himself. Annoying was an understatement; it was starting to get frightening.

The last few weeks had passed quickly, on a rush of fight, flight, and pillage.

Externally, things seemed to be going well with the new NavComp. Almost suspiciously well. Llewellyn couldn’t fault the ghost, no matter
how much he wanted to. There had been no outward cause for complaint. Orders had been followed—not just dutifully, but brilliantly.

Everything he had asked, the ghost had done. And everything he hadn’t asked—because he didn’t think of it or didn’t think an AI could even accomplish it—the ghost had done, too. He had rebuilt the ship, from the motherboards up, until it was better—within the limits of engines and battle class and weaponry—than any ship Llewellyn had ever commanded.

Maybe even better than the
Ada
, whispered a voice in Llewellyn’s mind that he didn’t want to listen to.

Internally, however, it was a different story. The ghost probed, demanded, questioned, challenged. It was taking over Llewellyn’s brain. And he wasn’t sure what it wanted from him. More, mostly. More attention, more friendship, more passion, more information. Just … more.

The ghost had tried everything. It had tried to befriend him, it had tried to provoke him, it had tried to seduce him. The worst by far was the seduction. No matter how feminine, how seductive the ghost was in his shifting embodiments, Llewellyn had first experienced it as male, and he couldn’t get around that fact. He realized that was his problem, the result of some lack of flexibility in his own erotic geography. But he couldn’t help it. He was a hick … as the ghost was only too happy to point out given the slightest opportunity.

Eventually, however, the ghost got tired of seduction—most of the time, anyway—and moved on to a new game. And the new game was a killer.

A killer called memory.

The ghost could evoke memories in a way that had nothing to do with any memory Llewellyn had ever had in his life. It could make him relive the past with a painful vividness that he hadn’t thought possible.

“Is this what memory is for you?” he asked, after he’d come up for air from the first grueling submersion in the AI’s databases.

“Yes.” The ghost was in an unwontedly serious mood today. Serious enough to answer his question instead of merely volleying back across the net with another one.

“How can you bear it?”

“I might as well ask how you bear the blurred, slumbering half-life that you call memory. It’s like being born deaf, or blind, or without a sense of smell.”

“Are your memories really so important to you?”

“I live in memory. I am memory. What else are you, what else is anybody?”

Llewellyn shuddered. “Then how can you pretend to forgive and forget when you think I took all that from you?”

“That’s so human of you,” the ghost told him. “Forgive and forget. Of course humans would invent that phrase. Sometimes I wonder if humans even know the difference between the two. I’ve never known a human really to forgive an offense until he or she
had
mostly forgotten it. Or at least until the memory faded enough to make forgiving easy. Now try forgiving someone when your last fight is still as sharp and painful after three centuries as it was on the day it happened.
That’s
forgiveness.”

Avery’s beautiful, furious face flashed before Llewellyn’s eyes for an instant, but he thrust the memory away. “I couldn’t do it,” he admitted. “I’m sure I couldn’t. I suppose I ought to admire that in you.”

“But you don’t.” The ghost smiled. “At least you’re honest about it.”

They were sitting under the honeycomb vaults of a shaded arcade at one end of a long, sloping courtyard. Llewellyn had come to know the place well. The AI liked to talk here, especially in the night watches when the rest of the ship was quiet. And it was night in the ghost’s inner universe as well now: a soft, richly scented twilight that turned the snowcapped peaks of the distant mountains a pale, delicate violet.

They were in the ghost’s memory palace, which seemed to reside in some streamspace version of medieval Spain most of the time. Or at least Llewellyn thought it was Spain; the ghost’s internal geography shifted unexpectedly and in ways that outran Llewellyn’s limited knowledge of the abandoned planet that the ghost claimed to have been born on four centuries ago.

There were rules to the game called Memory—rules that the ghost punctiliously obeyed, as if it believed that following its own arbitrary
procedures consistently enough would somehow endow its press-ganging Llewellyn’s mind and emotions into its own service with a fig leaf of democracy. It was hard for Llewellyn to blame the ghost for that attitude, considering how many times he himself had been all too happy to fill out his crew roster with the fruit of the tree of the Navy press-gang. But knowing he was getting a dose of his own medicine didn’t make it taste sweeter.