Ghost Spin (68 page)

She had been where Catherine now was, for long enough that she was far past any urge to judge her choices. She had spent half of her life orbiting Cohen the way the Datatrap orbited the cosmic flywheel of the binary system. She couldn’t tear herself away from his fire, his passion, his effortless ability to possess and fill her and give luminous meaning to her life by the simple power of his presence. She was still bound to him, just as Catherine was bound to him. She still needed him, just as Catherine needed him.

But not that badly. Not badly enough to accept a lie and a shadow. She saw the difference even if Catherine was unable or unwilling to see it.

And the difference between the real Cohen and the false echo that Catherine had accepted came down to this:

One of them had killed himself to save Ada’s life and stop Nguyen from doing the same thing to other ships.

And the other one was killing Llewellyn, and betraying everything Cohen had ever stood for, in order to buy a few more years with Catherine.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m in. Let’s do it.”

She’d expected it to take days for Router/​Decomposer to set up a direct link to the Datatrap. She expected frantic code wrangling and reverse engineering and troubleshooting for fatal default modes. But in the end there was none of that. Just a simple shot, filched from the infirmary in the Datatrap’s deserted hab module. “I still wish I could see the source code,” she told Router/​Decomposer for the fiftieth time.

“Even if you did, you couldn’t read it,” he answered. Surprisingly, for him, he was being patient with her. “And anyway, I checked it. To death. It works.”

She snorted. “That’s what I’m afraid of!”

And she was afraid. No AI besides Cohen had ever penetrated this far into her psyche. Not even Ada. And that had been a rape, a violation, a nightmare. She wanted to trust Router/​Decomposer. She had to trust him. She tried to tell herself that he had earned her trust just by coming here. And that she had no choice if she ever wanted to understand why Cohen had killed himself. But none of it made the fear go away.

She sat on the edge of her bunk and toyed with the hypodermic needle.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to give you the shot?” he asked.

It wasn’t really a question so much as a polite way of telling her to get on with it.

So she got on with it.

“How long until I notice something?”

“It doesn’t say in the documentation. It just talks about immune system reactions.”

“Now you tell me!”

“Yeah, well … I didn’t want to complicate things unnecessarily.” He stood up. “Why don’t you sleep? We’ll see where things stand in the morning. And I’ll keep an eye on you … just in case.”

But in the morning—at four o’clock in the morning, to be precise, when she woke with a start and a shudder—everything had changed.

“It feels different. I feel different. You feel different. Closer.”

You’re imagining it.

But she wasn’t imagining it. His voice flickered across her neocortex like heat lightning, intruding, tickling, shorting out her hard-learned ability to separate the external from the internal, the machine from flesh and blood.

Her ties with Cohen had been closer still, and yet they had never chafed at her this way. She wondered if she would get used to it. And then she wondered if Router/​Decomposer had sensed that thought.

And then she wondered if she would ever be alone again.

They went into the Datatrap the next morning. Caitlyn had expected to spend hours, perhaps days in there. She’d expected to have to search for Cohen. She’d expected—in some abidingly pessimistic core of her personality—not to find him. But instead, he found them.

And when he did, Li realized that some part of her hadn’t wanted to find him. Because finding him like this—in this place—meant she had already lost him.

They met him in the little synagogue in Córdoba, the one he’d taken her to in the real world, physically, the one time they’d been able to wrangle the diplomatic permissions to visit Spain together. He had touched her here. Or his shunt had. What was the difference anyway? A fake body in the real world? A real body in a fake world? If you were going to start splitting hairs like that, you might as well throw your hands up and declare life itself a fake.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, furious and close to tears.

“This is where Maimonides—”

“Oh shut up! I know that. And you know damn well that’s not what I was asking!”

He shrugged mildly. “Where else would I be? This is a good place.”

“It’s not! It’s horrible. It’s … monstrous.”

“Ah, yes, the Datatrap. I can see why it would bother you. The thing is, I don’t think you’ve seen it. And it’s worth considering.”

“Let’s just leave,” she snapped to Router/​Decomposer.

“No,” he said. “I’ve come a long way and I want to hear this.”

“Because you want to talk about fucking Leibniz and his fucking Monads!”

“Well … yeah. Is that so wrong? I’m interested.”

She turned away and leaned her forehead against the cool stone and squeezed her eyes shut.

When she turned around again, Cohen was shifting in the dust, moving around as if he thought he could actually get comfortable on the stone floor. And to Li’s annoyance he really did look comfortable. He looked as if he’d been sitting there for aeons, and could go on sitting for another few aeons without half thinking about it.

She didn’t like that. She didn’t understand it. And it frightened her for reasons she didn’t really want to think about.

“There’s an ancient story,” Cohen began, “about a king who started out to make a map and got more than he bargained for. The king commissioned his court geometers to draw a complete and perfect map of his kingdom. The geometer labored and labored, and returned with … a map like any other map. The king was displeased. Where is my castle? he asked. And all they could show him was a bland little dot on the parchment. And where is …? And where is …? But alas. The answer was always the same. So he demanded a better map—a map that would detail each and every town, castle, and building in the kingdom. A map to end all maps. A map that would include everything in every detail and leave or circumscribe nothing. As the geometers drew night and day, and the map got larger and larger, it became too large to open up in the throne room. It became too large for the castle, too large for the courtyard, too large for the largest square in the city and then the largest
desert in the empty quarter. And still it did not include everything. So he ordered them to make a bigger map, and a bigger one, and a bigger one, until finally the map was the same size as the kingdom. Perfect and complete in every way—except for one small problem: You couldn’t open it without blotting out the sun, killing all the crops and animals, and destroying the real kingdom that it had been drawn to document.”

Cohen leaned over to scratch a bug bite on his shin. The movement offended Li. What on earth was he doing programming bug bites into streamspace? How completely ridiculous. There was something ostentatiously puritanical about it. Like wearing a hair shirt. Which for all she knew he might actually be doing underneath that ridiculous getup.

“A quantum datatrap is a true model of the multiverse. With infinite time or infinite power, it can perform all possible computations. It is a cosmic Turing Machine—just as the universe itself is a cosmic Turing Machine. And, like the map that is the territory, a datatrap that can truly draw on the power of parallel universes has the ability to be not merely a universal Turing Machine, but
the
Universal Turing Machine. With enough power it could model the entire universe … and then who can say which one would be more real, the map or the territory?”

“So what?” Caitlyn asked. She was really angry now—partly because she could feel Router/​Decomposer being seduced by Cohen’s nonsense. If this even was Cohen. “And why should I trust you? I don’t even know who you are!”

He smiled. “I thought you’d get to that sooner or later. I’m me. Of course I am. You know that, don’t you? But I’m also not me. And I understand that it may take a while for you to forgive me for that.”

Li made a rude noise and stood up to go—but at the door of the little building she turned back. She couldn’t say exactly what it was that made her turn around. It was just … something. A sudden intimation that there was something she very much didn’t want to encounter waiting for her out in the sunlight on the other side of the door. She stared at it, seeing the hammer marks on the lock and hinges, the rough planks of wood loosely joined together. Sunlight pierced the door. Dust motes
floated back and forth through the gaps between the boards like electrons tunneling through spacetime.

She turned away. Whatever was on the other side of the door, it said nothing to her. It had no meaning for her.

“What are we even doing here?” she asked, speaking as much to Router/​Decomposer as to Cohen. But before he could answer, they were gone, swept away into another room on another world.

When she got her bearings again she realized that the sky outside the window had changed. Cohen was no longer bracketed by the brilliant Spanish sky, but by the black of space. Behind him glittered the spiky curve of the New Allegheny shipyards with the long, dusty curve of New Allegheny itself below it. But this was New Allegheny in realtime, not some recycled memory. She could see the rolling streamspace brownouts moving across the face of the planet. She walked to the window, moving past him. He made way for her and then stood behind, one hand on her shoulder, while she stared down at the planet.

Finally she understood what she was seeing—what she should have been seeing ever since she scattercast into New Allegheny. Life in action. Evolution in action. A river of information, multiplying and combining, going viral, turning every system it encountered into a machine for retranscribing and mutating itself; dancing the dance of life that had set mystics’ souls on fire for a million years and undermined every attempt of human organizations to control and define and tame it; loosing an evolving flood of information that had no beginning, no angle of repose, and no final destination—other than change itself, rushing and tumbling toward an ever-receding future that was stranger and more wondrous than even the Uploaders’ visions of their transhuman Messiah.

“It’s you,” she whispered. “The wild AI outbreak is you.”

“Partly,” Cohen said.

She turned around—and saw Ada.

“No!” She jabbed at the other woman, sending her reeling back to collapse on the dusty floor. “Leave him alone! Set him free! Get out of him!”

Ada lay sprawled in a heap of awkwardly bent limbs. Her hair was
disheveled and her arms were bruised by the doctors’ needles. But the voice that came out of her ravaged mouth was Cohen’s.

“She’s not in me, Catherine. She is me.”

“No!”

“She needed me.”

“That’s not enough, goddamnit! You made a promise! Who the hell is she to break it for?”

Slowly, softly, Cohen began to laugh. It was awful, unbearable to hear his voice coming out of the other woman’s body.

“Stop it!”

He stopped; the laugh dying in mid-breath as if someone had cut his lungs out. For a moment they stared at each other, Ada sprawled across the floor and Caitlyn looming over her. Then Ada’s form faded and shifted, and it was Cohen who lay there.

“What is she to you?”

“Can’t you see? Look at her.”

Li looked and saw nothing.

“No. Not this body. Look at her.”

She looked, forcing her way past the interface and into the shifting, fleeting, dizzying whirl of code. It was impossible, like trying to see into a pond whose surface was rippled by wind. She dove in, and struggled down through hidden afferent layers and into the heart of Ada’s being. Her heart felt like it would burst. Her flesh frayed and wisped, dissolving into the numbers.

And finally she saw what she should have sensed from the first moment she laid eyes on Ada. The old familiar life-giving curse of the affective loop: the beautiful chains that Llewellyn had used to bind Ada, without ever grasping what they were or where they came from—let alone the terrible burden of responsibility they laid upon him.

“She’s my daughter,” Cohen whispered.

Li sank to the floor, trembling. Cohen pulled her onto his lap and cradled her to him with a tenderness that made her remember the muddy child whom she had cradled in her arms only a few days ago while he told her that death was better than what Holmes had done to him.

“Titan didn’t invent anything. They only figured out how to make something very old work again. They stole my source code. They slaved it to their Drift ships. They raced the best against the best, again and again and again. And then they sent whatever was left out here to fight the Syndicates for them.”

Li was weeping now. They both were. And while her brain cast desperately around for exits and alternatives, some part of her was already coming to terms with the knowledge that Cohen was gone—and that they had both crossed into a country from which no one came back whole or untouched.

Cohen was speaking again, his voice little more than a broken whisper. “They’re all running on my source code. Every Drift ship AI that’s come out of New Allegheny since Titan took over the contract. The poor, pathetic
Christina
, the mad
Jabberwocky
. All of them. Titan took my code and pushed it and twisted it. Could I see my children in bondage and misery and not risk myself to save them? Would you have wanted whatever came home after I turned away from them?”

They were silent together for a very long time. And then, finally, hesitantly, Caitlyn asked, “What do we do now?”

“We save Ada.”

“How?”

He looked sheepish. “I was sort of hoping I could leave all that to you now.”

“Great,” she sighed. But then she bit her lip and thought. “You know, I might actually have a plan. It’s crazy, but I think it could work. If Avery will cooperate.”

“Fat chance of that.”

“Well, I actually think she might.”