Ghost Spin (7 page)

The soul of the
Christina
had died. Not a clean and simple human death, but an AI death: a descent into a fugue state from which nothing could rouse her, and then a slow falling away as her constituent semi-autonomous agents went spinning off into the nonsentient regions of her internal state space.

Okoro and Sital and Llewellyn had all tried to save her. They’d near killed themselves with synth, running deep in the numbers, as close to the machine as skin on skin. They’d tried to stitch up the tattered remnants of the
Christina
’s psyche, working under constant fear that one of her fragments would turn on them—always a risk with weaponized AI. Still, you had to risk it, even for a small and modest shipboard AI like the
Christina
’s. She hadn’t run deep, the
Christina
. She’d sometimes seemed like little more than an idiosyncratic amalgam of quirks and quotes and mathematical puzzles. But still, she could feel and she could suffer. And there was something so childlike and affecting about even the littlest Emergent that you hated to see them suffer.

And after all, they owed her their lives. Out in the Drift your NavComp saved your life every hour you were under sail. That had been on Llewellyn’s mind through the whole desperate salvage attempt. And he’d seen the same thoughts in Sital’s and Okoro’s eyes. And the same knowledge that they were flogging the poor little
Christina
on when she was beyond all hope of salvage in order to make up for another ship that they hadn’t tried hard enough to save.

But finally they’d had to give up and shut her down, except for the critical systems that were either air-gapped for human control or slaved to the ship’s lumbering semi-sentients. Llewellyn had stayed awake for four days straight, dead-reckoning them into port. He was still enough of a sailor at heart to take pride in the feat. It would have earned him a medal back when he’d been a real Navy captain. Now it only earned him a new chance at being airlocked—or hanged, if those poor fools on the docking gantry were anything to go by.

He shot another glance around the bridge, gauging the state of people’s nerves. They were tough, he told himself; hard-bitten veterans.
They’d handle it. Besides, they all knew as well as he did that there was no way out. They’d lost too much momentum to break away from the station now, even if they could spread their sails without calling down the wrath of Station Control upon their heads. No choice left but to bluff it out.

When they docked, he would dress the most trusted and senior members of the crew in rankers’ fags and let them do enough drinking and whoring on-station to avoid raising unnecessary suspicion. And he’d keep everyone else on board, where they couldn’t run their mouths. And first thing in the morning he’d walk over to the chop shop and lie down on the operating table and let the good doctor put him to sleep.

He’d either wake up dead or with a new NavComp. And sitting here amid the wreckage of his life—twenty-eight years old, a wanted man, and unlikely as all hell to ever see thirty—he couldn’t really muster a lot of enthusiasm for either outcome.

He didn’t feel any more enthusiastic when his alarm went off in the morning. But no one was giving him a choice last time he’d checked, so he told himself he might as well get on with it.

He showered, shaved, and took a hard look in the mirror, trying to assess the face that stared back at him as if it belonged to a stranger. It was a quiet face, albeit a determined one. The face of a career Navy man who ran his ship by the book and kept his head down and his nose to the grindstone. The face of a man who believed in discipline and professionalism and doing the right thing. Not in flamboyant acts of heroism. Hell, not in flamboyant acts of anything. And yet somehow that man had backed into being an outlaw—a pirate, for God’s sake—one step at a time, making the only choices that would save his neck and his freedom.

Not that it was really that simple, of course. Nothing was. And he’d learned some things about himself during the breakneck slide from licensed pirate hunter to wanted pirate. They weren’t pleasant things, or things that made it easier to look in the mirror every morning. But they were true things. And one of those true things was that he was not the reasonable man he’d always thought himself to be.

He pulled his coat on, pocketed the grimy stack of bills that would pay the chop shop fee, loaded his Colt Police Special with rubber slugs, and tucked it into the back of his belt. He looked longingly toward the best London bespoke shotgun from Hollister & Hollister, with its elegant, dangerous curves and its filigreed spaniels eternally straining toward the pheasant they would never catch. His best gun stayed shipboard, though—even if he had gotten to the point where walking out of the airlock without it made him feel naked.

You are not a reasonable man
, he told himself for the second time that morning. A reasonable man wouldn’t imagine shooting his way off-station with a nineteenth-century shotgun in the waning days of the twenty-fifth century. But then a reasonable man would have given up long ago. A reasonable man would have accepted the old saying that pirates either retired young or died young. A reasonable man would have sold the
Christina
for scrap long ago, found some quiet corner of the Periphery to hole up in, kept his nose clean, and hoped for the best.

A reasonable man knows when it’s time to strike the colors and stop fighting. A reasonable man knows that some battles are unwinnable and some seas are uncrossable. A reasonable man knows that real life has no reset button, and the Deep doesn’t give up its dead, and there is no resurrection.

The funny thing was that that kind of stubbornness was something he’d always admired, going all the way back to his childhood. Back on his parents’ frontier farm in the Uplands, huddled under his blankets with a flashlight, poring over every book about sailors he could get his hands on, he’d already known that he was going to run away to enlist as soon as he grew into his gangly height enough to pass for sixteen. And he’d wondered if he had the thing that drove all great ship’s captains, whether their ships sailed Earth’s oceans or the darker, vaster sea of space: that unshakable, unconquerable forward drive that never faltered, not even when things were hopeless and there seemed no point in going forward. All those years ago, before he’d ever set foot off-planet, Llewellyn had already been asking himself if he had it, how he would perform, what kind of man he would be in the face of the ultimate, fatal, hopeless, unsalvageable disaster.

Well, now he knew. He had it. And it looked like a fatal case.

He came face-to-face with his own stubbornness again when he was lying on the chop shop table, fighting off the sedative. He hated that moment of surrender, of knowing that he was giving himself over into another’s power, of trusting that they wouldn’t screw things up when the only thing he’d learned to trust in the world so far was the inevitable fact that people, given half a chance, would
always
screw things up.

At the last moment, the tech pulled out a syringe—practically a horse needle—that wasn’t just a sedative.

He grabbed at it and missed, his coordination already shot to hell by the sedative. “What the hell is that?”

“Nothing. Brain juice. Synthetic myelin enhancer.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, and the payload, of course. And a standard immunosuppressant.”

“For what?” The tech’s face was blurring out on him. He felt like he was underwater.

“So your T-cells don’t kill the AI.”

“The—what? You’re giving me
AI
?”

“I’m giving you synth,” the tech said impatiently. “The same stuff the Navy’s been using to juice your wire job for your whole career.”

“Yeah, well, I trusted
them
to do that.”

The tech grinned, showing dirtsider teeth that had never seen a dentist. “And look where that got you.”

“But you could be shooting me up with wild AI for all I know.”

The tech laughed outright at that. “Wild AI,” he scoffed. “You know what wild AI is? It’s a weed. And you know what a weed is? It’s a perfectly nice plant that happens to be growing where humans don’t want it to grow.”

Llewellyn stared at the man, noticing his unusually extensive wire job and the close-shaved hair that showed off the blue shadows of his subdermal I/O sockets like tribal tattoos.

“We are all avatars of chaos in the Clockless Nowever,” the man told him, speaking the words as if they were brandishing some kind of primitive talisman.

“Holy Christ! Are you
Uploaders
?”

He tried to get off the table but his legs weren’t working properly, and he only managed to slide sideways and end up in an awkward tangle.

The tech leaned over him, close enough for Llewellyn to look through his pupils and see the glint of the virally implanted ceramsteel filaments that spooled through his optic nerve.

“You got a problem with Trannies?” he asked in a soft and mocking tone. “I’d think that’d be a liability in your line of work. You talked to the psychtechs about it?”

“I never called you that, and I’ve got nothing against you,” Llewellyn said. “I just don’t want Uploader code in my bloodstream.”

“Our code is good. It’s a hell of a lot better than the crap you let the Navy shoot you up with.”

“Does it have a kill switch?”

“
Good
code doesn’t need a kill switch.”

“How do I know your code is good?” Llewellyn snapped. “For all I know you’re injecting a ghost into me! A ghost without a kill switch!”

“Our tech is good,” the Uploader repeated, his face set in hard and hostile lines. “Take it or leave it.”

“I still want to know what the payload is and where it came from,” Llewellyn said stubbornly.

“Don’t be a hypocrite. You’re getting a sentient NavComp for the price of a glorified calculator. You know exactly where it came from.”

“So it is a ghost,” Llewellyn whispered. “God help me. How did you sandbox it? And how do I know it’ll stay sandboxed?”

“Sorry. Proprietary formula.” The tech started packing up his kit. At first Llewellyn thought it was a bluff, but his certainty took a hit when the man gestured to his op team and
they
started packing up
their
stuff. The “chop shop” was actually just a rented room in a cheap dockside flophouse where the front desk didn’t make too much of a point of asking for travel papers, so there wasn’t a hell of a lot to pack up in the first place.

“No! Wait!”

The tech made an impatient gesture. “Do you want it or not?”

“I want it,” Llewellyn said.

But his eyes said something different—and he could see the tech reading the message loud and clear:
I need it. It’s a matter of life or death, and I’m out of safe choices—out of any choices at all
.

And that was that. Because whatever their wild AI did to him, it couldn’t kill him any faster than Astrid Avery. He went under a first time. Then he surfaced briefly, in a panic, fighting the doctor, the nurses, the table’s restraints. Then he felt the stab of a needle and blessed blankness.

When he woke up the Uploaders were gone and his new NavComp was talking to him. It talked while he staggered drunkenly to his feet and pulled on his clothes and paid his bill to the carefully unobservant front desk clerk. It talked while he limped back along the curve of the docks toward the low-rent puddle jumper berths where the
Christina
was trying to keep a low profile and pass for civilian traffic. It talked while he boarded the ship, and relieved the second watch bridge crew of duty, and began running through the preflight checklist.

Llewellyn had never known an AI could talk so much. He’d never known
anyone
could talk so much. Probably because every time in his adult life he’d ever encountered someone who talked like this, he had promptly changed seats, changed tables, left the bar, developed an urgent need to relieve himself, or generally done whatever it took to get clear of them. But none of those options worked very well when the person you were trying to get away from shared your brain with you.

And by the time they broke seal and shipped out, Llewellyn had reluctantly admitted to himself that neither silence nor captainly dignity was going to do him any good.

“Do you always talk this much?” he finally asked.

Don’t complain. Good help is hard to find.

“And you’re good?”

The best.

Llewellyn snorted. “You’d better be. We’re heading into the Drift. Cocky navigators who can’t deliver get people killed out there. Or worse.”

Fine by me,
the ghost replied.
Life’s no fun unless you’re playing for keeps.

Llewellyn snorted again, but privately he agreed with the ghost. He had gone into the Navy in the golden age of Bose-Einstein transport. Space had been tamed by reliable, safe FTL transport. Of course there had still been in-system freighters and the lumbering, slow time ships of the impoverished Periphery. But for most sailors on the Deep, the heroic age of spacefaring was over.

The galaxy had turned into a quiet pond, its calm waters plied by ships whose onboard AIs competently handled the routine task of shunting a ship from one BE relay to the next along the established trade lanes. Ship’s captains had been glorified subway conductors. War had remained interesting—in the usual appalling way that war is always interesting—but navigation had become safe and boring. Space was still out there, of course. It hadn’t really gotten smaller, and it hadn’t really gotten any less dangerous. But you never saw it. You never grappled with it. You never had a chance to measure yourself against it. All that had changed when the Bose-Einstein relays started failing. Space had become vast and dangerous again. And with that danger had come challenge and romance—the same romance that Llewellyn thrilled to as a boy. And until it came back, he hadn’t known how much he missed it.

They were moving out at a good clip now, still under the station’s NavControl, but starting to power up for the big push that would take them beyond the station’s reach. Systems checks scrolled down every monitor on the bridge, faster than any unwired human could possibly read them. The side-view monitor showed the Navy shipyards, a sprawling crown of thorns whose every glittering silver spike was a UN ship of the line carrying letters of marque that entitled its captain to get rich killing pirates.