Ghost Spin (4 page)

Trust, Cohen had once told her, is simply a matter of informationsharing protocols.

“What?” the lawyer asked—and Li started, realizing she must have spoken the words aloud.

“Nothing,” she said. “He traveled a lot. So did I. It wasn’t the kind of relationship where you never leave. It was …” She stumbled on the last words, aware of how inadequate they sounded. “It was the kind where you always come back.”

They stared at each other for a moment—the first time, she realized, that the lawyer had really looked her in the eye.

“How—” She had to stop and swallow before she could finish the question. “How did it happen?”

“I really wish you’d sit down, Mrs.—er, Major. You look terrible.”

“How?”

The lawyer looked like he was physically frightened of delivering the next piece of news, and Li couldn’t blame him. She couldn’t remember ever being this angry in her life without hitting someone.

“The local police are calling it suicide.”

The next morning it was on all the news spins.

Li had known it would be bad, but she hadn’t even begun to imagine just how bad. They had gotten hold of the police file from New Allegheny. She’d expected that, of course. What she hadn’t expected was the dog-and-pony show of psychologists, so-called AI experts, and self-important historians. And she was not prepared, not even remotely, for the vicious things they were willing to say about Cohen himself.

It had been over a century since a major Emergent had died. And since Cohen was the only major Emergent who took enough of an interest in human society to really be involved in it, there had never been an AI death that impacted ordinary people’s lives like this one.

Unfortunately, a few people had died along with him. It turned out that one of his minor (and barely sentient) subsidiary networks handled the power grids on four planets. And when the lights had gone out, a small regional hospital on Maris turned out not to have the legally required backup generators and two elderly patients died when the life support machines stopped pumping.

This of course was Cohen’s fault. And suddenly people who had never thought before about all the things AIs did for them were shouting
about how nonorganics shouldn’t be permitted to invest in critical industries.

They decided that Cohen was a victim of what they were pleased to call Vicious Recursion Syndrome. Li, who thought she’d heard every anti-AI slur in the book by now, had never even heard of it. But as the nasty little meme dug its teeth into the noosphere, people all over UN space were suddenly acting as if
they’d
been warning everyone about it for years. V-RECs (pronounced, naturally, to rhyme with
T. rex
) was now an official epidemic of one … and if it wasn’t stamped out immediately, then rabid AIs all over the galaxy would soon be biting the hands that coded them.

Cohen had always shrugged off the media’s rampant anti-AI prejudice. “Why do you even listen to them?” he’d asked her. “These people have been around forever. Two millennia ago they were accusing Christians of undermining the Roman Empire. Five centuries ago they were complaining about secular Jews destroying America. Now they’re bitching about me. Some people just hate change. And when you’re afraid of change, you tend to spend a lot of time checking under the bed for monsters.”

Fair enough. But this was worse than anything they’d said before. It was as if Cohen’s death had unleashed their tongues. And in a manner of speaking, she supposed it had; as long as he was alive, they feared his wealth and power enough to avoid actually committing libel. But now that he was dead, they could give full flight to their most paranoid fantasies.

Cohen had been crazy, they decided. And dangerous. One step away from going rogue. Really, it was a mercy that he’d killed himself before he could spiral out of control and harm others.

By the end of the first news cycle they had built up a watertight storyline. And they’d turned Cohen into a monster: an unnatural and heartless machine leached of every drop of perspective, humor, warmth, and compassion—everything that made him who he was.

But then they started talking about Yad Vashem, and it got worse. Much worse. They knew everything. They knew about the decaying Holocaust testimonies housed in the contaminated wilderness of the
Israel-Palestine DMZ. They knew about the last-ditch, desperate upload. They knew every twist and turn and failure of Cohen’s wanderings as he’d tried to find a permanent home for the orphan memories.

Of course they knew, Li thought bitterly. They were the same people who had refused to lift a finger to help him.

Now, however, they were filling out a whole second news cycle by turning the vicious monster into a wounded hero. The weight of the testimonies had been too heavy for even Cohen’s broad shoulders. He had killed himself out of survivor’s guilt. And the only wonder was that his friends and family hadn’t cared enough to see it coming.

Everything they said was true, of course. Every fact, every quote, every data point. The only thing that was false about their story was Cohen himself.

Li had watched Cohen make that decision. Not in a noble act of self-sacrifice, but in a desperate hurried scramble that left no time for delicate moral balancings. And then she’d watched the crushing weight of those memories settle on him.

She’d thought it was madness. She’d told him to dump the testimonies into a deep space near-zero Kelvin datatrap and put a nonsentient AI in charge of them. They’d still be there, accessible to anyone who cared to visit them, but Cohen wouldn’t be responsible for them. How could anyone be responsible for
that
? And the idea that Cohen had argued for again and again—that remembering the horror would somehow keep people from doing it again—was so flagrantly opposed to the entire course of human history that, in Li’s opinion, it was little more than a fairy tale.

So she had said the last time they’d fought about it. And Cohen, true to character, hadn’t argued with her; he’d just turned on his heel, walked out the front door, and disappeared for three weeks. Then he’d come home, without saying one word about it, and settled back into the ordinary stream of their life together as if the fight had never happened. She hadn’t dared mention it again. He had shown her that she could lose him over this. And losing Cohen would have been like losing the sun: not a survivable loss.

But now she had lost him anyway. And the talking heads talked on
as if they didn’t know or care that the world had just ended for her. And Li stood stiff-legged in front of the livewall, trembling with impotent rage and feeling like they were stealing him from her all over again.

She watched the news spins until she couldn’t take it anymore. And then she fled to the only person who would understand—to the only other surviving piece of Cohen, though she wouldn’t let herself think that way.

She found Router/​Decomposer in his office on the CalTech campus. CalTech wasn’t in California anymore, of course. But the new campus on the NorAm Arc of Earth’s orbital ring was a faithful facsimile of the original. Dry desert air blew down linoleum-tiled hallways. Reverse-engineered vat-grown hawks shrieked overhead. A hot yellow sun wheeled across the sky, cutting deep into the office block through retromodern plate-glass windows.

“It can’t be suicide,” she said, ten minutes later and half a world away. “Cohen would never kill himself.”

“As I understand it, that’s what the family usually says in these cases,” Router/​Decomposer observed in a carefully neutral voice.

“The cops must have screwed up.”

That is of course possible, the AI answered, throwing the words up onto a shared blackboard of their interface instead of speaking them aloud as he usually would have.

Li threw a sharp glance in his direction, struck by the uncharacteristic formality of his answer. Router/​Decomposer was easier to read than Cohen, not so much because he was simpler but because he was less human. His machine learning systems were designed to do the job whose name he still carried—one that had been his before he had disassociated himself from Cohen and gone off to CalTech to take the first tenure-track position ever awarded to an AI by a major mathematics faculty.

And there was also the matter of Router/​Decomposer’s longstanding distaste for using human shunts. Router/​Decomposer was as capable of operating a rented body as any other AI. But unlike most AIs, who used shunts whenever they had to conduct business
or pleasure with humans, Router/​Decomposer preferred to be disembodied. Even his brief attempt to adopt a human name had foundered on his discomfort with what he called “the squish factor.” So he was simply Router/​Decomposer—a generic name that could have applied to any router/​decomposer in any of the larger Emergents. And there was no human body sitting across the desk from Li to confuse her with the play of wetware-controlled emotions that might or might not be genuine, or into which she might read things that had no place at all in his very different identity architecture.

Router/​Decomposer’s current physical interface was a three-dimensional hologram of a strange attractor that he claimed was a realtime mathematical model of the firing patterns in his prime network. Li had her doubts; AIs were as capable of stretching a point under cover of poetic license as any other sentient life-form. Still, it was pretty to look at. And, at least in Earth’s dense noosphere, where the spinstream had become transparent tech and streamspace enveloped the planet and its orbital habitats as seamlessly as a second skin, it gave him a physical presence strong enough to satisfy the instinctive human need for a face to look at, for a physical subtext to parse alongside the words that never quite said everything.

Right now Router/​Decomposer was cycling through a series of Fermat’s spirals that hung in the air like mystical mandalas. It was an odd set of patterns for him, Li thought; too stable and predictable, a holding pattern that revealed nothing … except, she supposed, lack of forward motion. Which, knowing him, would be exactly the point he was trying to make.

You disagree with me,
she guessed, following him onto the interface.
And you don’t want to say so.

Not while you’re in this mood.

“What do you think I’m going to do,” she asked wryly, “dump a cup of coffee in your lap?”

More likely storm out of here and go on some hormone-fueled rampage without giving me a chance to help you.

“And you’re willing to help me?”

You know I am.

“Out of guilt?”

The Fermat’s spiral flared into a wild explosion of Cantor dust that flickered and flamed and finally formed itself into an unstable-looking Julia Set, which Li’s internals helpfully informed her was called the Dragon. It seemed like a lot of fireworks to get across the painfully obvious: that Router/​Decomposer was filled with the same explosive mix of anger, grief, and guilt she felt roiling in her own gut.

If you want to call it that,
he answered finally.

“I’m sorry.” Li scrubbed a hand through her crew-cut hair. “That was awful even for me. I’m just … not doing very well right now.”

Slowly, the image across the desk settled into a more sedate Lorenz attractor. “Well, you’re welcome to take it out on me if it makes you feel any better. For an hour, anyway. I have class after lunch. Have you eaten, by the way?”

“Yeah.” She waved a hand vaguely in the air. “Breakfast.”

“Today?”

She tried to remember. “On the way to the lawyer’s office I think.”

“That was yesterday. Let’s go get you a bowl of soup.”

Her stomach revolted at the idea. “I couldn’t.”

“You can and you will. Or at least you’ll sit in front of a bowl of soup while I talk to you. Otherwise I’m not
going
to talk to you.”

She’d expected Router/​Decomposer to simply disembody and meet her again when she got to the cafeteria. Instead he walked with her—not that you could really call it walking—and even kept her company while she picked up her tray and waited in line and swiped her credit chip. She hadn’t expected him to show such sensitivity. Nor had she expected the friendly greetings her companion got from students and colleagues as he moved around campus.

“You’ve made a place for yourself here,” she said when they sat down.

Something shifted in the swirl of moving colors across from her, but the change was so brief she didn’t have time to analyze it. “People have been very kind. I like this place. I like who I
am
here.”

“That would have made Cohen happy.”

Really?
Shadows marched across Router/​Decomposer’s interface
like thunderheads sweeping a dangerously exposed summit.
Did you know he tried to stop me from leaving?

“I knew. But in the end he didn’t stop you.”

He stopped you.

She felt a flare of anger, almost immediately replaced by guilt.
I don’t want to talk about that.

“Well he did. Remember when you were going to join the French Foreign Legion? And all those other times you were going to leave and go off and do something—anything? And how they never quite went anywhere? Who do you think put the kibosh on things?”

“Does it really matter now?”

“He was afraid you’d get killed, I suppose. And he’s not very good at letting the chicks out of the nest, even in the best of times.”

Li didn’t want to think about what he was telling her—mainly because she had long suspected it. So she focused on the trivial:
You’re talking about it as if I’m some sort of barely sentient semiautonomous agent. It’s not the same thing at all!

“Isn’t it?” Router/​Decomposer asked. He sounded curious, as if he genuinely wanted to know. And he probably did, Li thought sourly. He probably expected her to fire off a string of equations at him.

She realized how odd their conversation must sound to casual listeners. Disjointed. Elliptical. Over the years she and Cohen had reached a fine balance together—one that respected the emotive rhythms of human speech without entirely abandoning the benefits of direct data transfer.