Ghost Spin (59 page)

“Theirs.”

“Let’s try and drum up a human again. I know it’s a bunch of cat herders on there, but they’re in a war zone. They’ve got to have someone assigned to monitor incoming ship traffic.”

But no matter how they tried, they could raise no one.

“Okay then,” Llewellyn said on their fifth pass over the docking bay. “Ready or not, here we come.”

They went into full alert, suited up in case they hit hard vac inside, still half convinced the Datatrap had been captured by the Syndicates.

But then they started to notice all the little incongruous details that didn’t add up to a Syndicate raid. The calm green blip of the status lights that said the station itself had not suffered any violence. The bodies slumped over half-eaten breakfasts that told them death had come whispering in without warning instead of busting in-system at .265 subluminal.

Catherine was the one who put it together first. Now she turned on her heel, with a shiver of atavistic fight-or-flight reflex thrumming
down her spine, and counted one, two, three, four heads with their tongues grotesquely swollen and blood seeping from their eyes and ears and noses. Seven bodies with the tracery of their state-of-the-art wire jobs graffitied across their skin in blisters and ashes.

“The Datatrap killed them,” she said to no one in particular. “It burned their wetware out of them. Every millimeter of it, right into the heart of their frontal lobes.”

“The Datatrap didn’t kill them,” the Datatrap said. “Ada killed them.”

Everyone jumped. The control room livewall flickered to life, fractal patterns sweeping across it like rain before a storm.

“Keep your hair on, people. And don’t start shooting up the livewall, either. I had a hell of a time getting this place fit for human habitation again. What I wouldn’t give for a body right now—squish factor notwithstanding.”

And then, while the pirates stared at her in alarm and confusion, Li put down her weapon, pulled off her helmet, sat down on the closest table, and nearly bust a lung laughing.

Affectclass = Iloveyou

Caitlyn remembered the first time Hyacinthe had said those words to Cinda. Or typed it, rather. Because the only thing they’d had to work with back then was the black void at the end of the command line prompt.

It had been the first affect class he’d invented for himself. They hadn’t told him he could do it. He’d simply needed it … and found it.

Poor Cinda had practically fallen off her chair. She’d printed out the session hash log and gone running down the hall to Hy’s office waving it in the air and shouting like a crazy woman.

Love was the first affective class Hyacinthe had invented for himself out of whole cloth. God only knew what he meant by it. God knew what anyone meant by it.

Nor had he invented an affect class for love’s opposite, though he had had long semantic discussions with Hy about whether the opposite of love was really hate or something he referred to as “dis-love.” According to Li’s downloaded memories—which were uncomfortably complete from a human’s point of view—they’d never reached agreement on that question.

It wasn’t without precedent. Plenty of chimps had learned and used the word. There’d even been that parrot who had screamed “i love you i’m a good boy!” over and over again when his favorite grad student–researcher tried to drop him off at the vet. But those were animals. The only naysayer the animal behaviorists had to knock down was Skinner.
Hy and Lucinda had had to knock down Skinner, and Searle, and every other behaviorist who’d ever denied that an AI could think and feel instead of just mimicking.

And they never did knock them down. There had been promising moments. A few interesting articles. The real and satisfying—but largely unpublishable—proof that their maybe-sort-of-sentient AI could tackle computational problems that other, more conventional AI-based systems weren’t even close to taking on. But nothing more.

After their lifetimes, the development of AI consciousness had veered off in another direction, leaving Cohen stranded on his own branch of the evolutionary tree—a branch that had produced only a single, exceptional, magnificent flower.

Even today, Li couldn’t read the shifting, swarming mosaic of Cohen’s hidden layers nearly as well as a neurosurgeon could read his patients’ thoughts. What made Cohen sentient was at least partially understood. But what made him love and need to be loved remained an unsolvable mystery.

Later affective-loop AIs, identical in every observable way, sputtered into fitful and fleeting autonomy and died. The basic nature of the problem was clear. Sentience, at least as it manifested itself in Cohen’s computational architecture, was a strange attractor. The phenomenon called “consciousness” occupied some minuscule area of the system’s state space: every possible configuration of his vast interlocking complex of hardware and software down to the quantum level and the flap of Lorenz’s butterfly wings. Start it up from exactly the right initial state and in exactly the right conditions, and it would travel through a trajectory that included the infinite complex of surfaces that composed consciousness … or maybe a specific individual’s consciousness … or … something. The underlying mathematical structure was clear, but all it really told them was that Cohen was unique and unrepeatable. Which made him utterly precious as an individual—and frustratingly useless for experimental purposes.

It had also made Li’s life with Cohen something far beyond complicated. Because if Cinda hadn’t had a clue what Cohen meant by love all those centuries ago, Li was even more bewildered by it.

She slept. Deep inside the
Ada
’s systems, whatever passed for CR29091’s conscious self slept too, rolling on the quantum currents of the Drift, passive sensors spooling out into the subatomic chaos of the universe.

In sleep is surcease, they say. Or at least repair. Throughout the dogwatch of the night, the human crew lay in their bunks, splayed or sprawled or curved into fetal position, dipping in and out of REM sleep, their bodies engaged in life’s intricate dance of mending, weaving, repairing. The little biological insults of daily life were repaired. Proprietary genesets built from the pond scum bacteria of twenty-first-century nuclear power plants beat back the assault of cosmic radiation on unshielded bodies. Short-term memory was reviewed in dreams and cemented into long-term learning.

And throughout the ship’s systems very much the same processes unfolded, on a scale unimaginable even in the vast viral wilderness of the human body. Subroutines rehearsed the myriad events of the just completed circadian cycle, internal as well as external, and mediated the flow of data from temporary cache to permanent memory. Security subroutines coursed through the system deploying virtual arsenals that were modeled on human T-cells but had long ago surpassed them in complexity and processing power. Machine learning programs that themselves hovered on the edge of sentience sifted through layered and nested artificial ecosystems, improving, tweaking, troubleshooting, optimizing. Evolving.

And all the while, through a thousand invisible and immaterial fingers, the ship reached out to its sleeping and waking crew. There was a line, still, between the ship and its human freight, but that line would have been almost unrecognizable to a human of the twenty-first century. Above all, it was permeable. As human brains slept, their soft memories synced with shipboard memory. As human bodies slept, their internals dropped into diagnostic mode and reached out to the ship’s more powerful immune system. Data flowed back and forth across the permeable boundary. Life flowed back and forth. Consciousness flowed back and forth.

And close to the machine, so close as to be invisible to its human
attendants and even to CR29091 itself, the dispersed consciousness that was both more and less than a ghost surfed the laminar flows of data like a ship surfing the Drift and searched for the one quiet eddy in the vast river of life that was the sleeping woman, Li.

She sat up in bed, gasping like a diver coming out of cold water, still caught in the deep-sea currents of the dream that had awakened her.

She turned on the light in a vain effort to banish the ghosts that seemed to press in around her. She cursed herself for a fool. Why had she been wasting her time fighting with Holmes? And why had she meekly taken Holmes’s no for an answer?

Ten minutes later she was standing face-to-face with a slightly disheveled and very annoyed Astrid Avery.

“Did I wake you up?” Li asked, trying to sound penitent.

“No. I haven’t gone to sleep yet.”

Thank God for small mercies.

Li recounted the clash with Holmes. Avery appeared to have no reaction at all to the information. Li couldn’t even tell if she’d known about the problem.

“I’ll have to think about it,” Avery told her.

“Why? Because you don’t have the authority to make that decision?”

Avery’s lips tightened. “I’ll have to think about it.”

But the next morning when Li went into the lab, there was a new ghost waiting for her.

The new fragment was whole. And potentially stable. And it had its complete jacket information, provenance, and transfer records included.

With a sick slithering feeling in the pit of her stomach, Li turned to the jacket info. Slowly, reluctantly, she pieced it together and checked it against the list of buyers Router/​Decomposer had given to her—God, was it only a few weeks ago?

There was no room for doubt, no matter how hard she looked for it.

It was Korchow’s fragment.

Oh fuck.

She put her head in her hands and closed her eyes, some little-girl part of her still nourishing the illusion that that would keep the monsters out.

“What the hell is wrong with you, anyway?” she muttered, too shaken to care about Holmes’s bugs. “You tried to kill him yourself. More than once. Cohen must have been out of his mind to think he could trust the man.”

But he had thought it, though she still couldn’t begin to fathom why.

Maybe trusting Korchow had gotten him killed.

It had certainly gotten Korchow killed.

And considering that Korchow had blackmailed her and maybe even tried to kill her, it was surprising how bad Li felt about that.

The Korchow ghost broke everything open. It was the key. It was a large enough, stable enough fragment that the other fragments could coalesce around it. But even with the anchor the Korchow fragment provided, and even with the complete jacket information that soon followed, Li was still a long way from integrating the shattered surviving fragments.

Instead she was left with a frayed and partial reflection of Cohen. A mirror, yes, but one that had been shattered into a million pieces and was every bit as stubbornly unwilling to be put back together as Humpty Dumpty ever was.

Day by day, reboot by reboot, interview by interview, she felt the fragments pulling her into a kind of through-the-looking-glass emotional territory where she never knew who would show up to talk to her—only that every new fragment that surfaced would bring her face-to-face with the pain of losing Cohen all over again.

Most of the fragments that she managed to reboot were pathetic, heartbreaking. But those weren’t nearly as bad as the other ones—the ones that showed her sides of Cohen she hadn’t known existed and didn’t want to think about.

It wasn’t that she blamed Cohen for these fragments. How could she when she knew her own faults so well? Anyone who thought people
were all nice—or even halfway honest—was a fool. It would have been the same if Cohen had been human. The same pettiness. The same little cruelties, accidental and intended. The same subtle mingling of the base and the noble. Altruism with selfishness. Love with hate. Honesty with manipulation. The emotional debits and credits of the last fifteen years would have been no different had she been married to a human.

But what was different was seeing them laid out in front of you in such stark clarity. What was different was having to see everything she despised about Cohen sitting across the table from her, unalloyed by the warmth, the generosity, the openhearted vulnerability that had always made his faults forgivable.

AIs were no different than humans, Cohen had once told her. It was probably structurally impossible for an emergent consciousness to consciously examine its bottom-level cognitive functions. The right hand never knew what the left hand was doing, and for good reason; full self-knowledge equaled moral and emotional paralysis. You needed a little self-deception to grease the wheels of life, or else you’d end up agonizing over it instead of actually living it. But no matter how often Li told herself that, she couldn’t bring herself to feel it. Being “only human” turned out to be the one thing she couldn’t seem to forgive him for.

And sometimes the fragments that showed up to play weren’t nice at all. Sometimes they were cruel. Sometimes they were cold and manipulative and disdainful. But Li could handle cold and manipulative. What she couldn’t handle were the ones that pretended to love her.

So she knew she was in for it the morning she logged in and found Hy Cohen sitting across the table from her.