Ghost Spin (18 page)

“Not the one you knew.”

She could see that now. This was a KnowlesSyndicate A Series, all right. But it wasn’t the man she’d known as Andrej Korchow. The face looking down at her looked smoother and less lived-in than the one she remembered. There was none of Korchow’s biting humor in it, only the put-upon look of a man performing a distasteful job totally lacking in intellectual or aesthetic interest.

She steeled herself, trying to gather her wits despite the shivers racking her body. This man might not be the Korchow she’d known, but he was still from KnowlesSyndicate. That meant he was a spy. And he was still an A Series, which meant he’d be a damn good one.

As Li got her bearings, she began to notice other things that didn’t match—and that she couldn’t add up in any way that made sense. The techs and the viral tank were UN tech, but the room around them was all long, sleek, biomorphic sweeps of structural silk. And though Li was still floating weightlessly in the viral medium, the puffiness in the faces of the unadapted humans told her that they were in a zero-g environment.

“Why am I here?” she asked warily.

“Because we need your help.”

“And what in the name of God makes you think I’d help you?”

“Not what. Who.”

Another figure loomed behind the KnowlesSyndicate clone. This one was familiar, too: another A Series, but from a different Syndicate.

“Arkady!” Li gasped.

He looked down at her instead of answering. And there was something … something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, and didn’t dare believe in even when she did start to recognize it.

“Arkady?”

“Yes and no.”

“Cohen!” And it was. It was him, beyond doubt or question, instantly familiar even in a wholly unfamiliar body.

“Thank God!” Li gasped. “I was afraid—”

“It’s her, then?” The Syndicate clone interrupted.

“It’s her.”

“And will she do what we need her to do?”

“I can’t—I have to talk to her alone.”

The two men stared at each other, obviously rehashing some often-fought battle.

“Then talk. But understand this, both of you. If anything goes wrong, if you try anything, if I even suspect anything … I’ll cycle his hardware.”

He left—but his words echoed through Li’s skull like rifle fire. “What does he mean, cycle your hardware?”

“We don’t have time for that. Forget about it.”

“And what does he want me to do for him? Something he’s willing to kill you for?”

“It doesn’t matter. You won’t do it.”

“Of course I will if the alternative is—”

“I won’t let you do it. I couldn’t live with myself if I helped him do that to you.”

“What the hell is going on here?”

But his hands were already on her, caressing her, holding her, straining her to him until his clothes were soaked and she couldn’t tell if the tremors racking her body were his or hers.

It had been too long. She had forgotten what it was like when Cohen turned all of his attention on you—whether he was kissing you or talking to you or just sitting with you in silence. It was like burning up in the mantle of a star. It was an overdose, a loss of self bordering on suicidal. It had been so long. All the long months of absence. And before that the years of slow starvation, of distance and half attention. She had missed him so much.

“Look at yourself!” she laughed, feeling dizzyingly, unquestioningly, unadulturatedly happy. “Your clothes! Let me get dried off—”

And then he pushed her under.

It was a silent battle—he locked a hand over her mouth right at the beginning, and he was just as thoroughly wired as she was. She finally got free and came up fighting, scratching and clawing. But even now he was stronger.

“Wait!”

“I can’t wait. He’ll be back any minute.”

He grabbed her head and turned her face up to his so that she stared up into his eyes. “Look. No, look! Who do you see in here?”

“You.” No question or hesitation.

“If you have a friend in all the world, it’s me. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I would never leave you. Never.”

“I know that.”

“And I would never send you away into the dark alone if I could come with you.”

She coughed convulsively, her lungs trying to clear the fluid she had already swallowed.

“Listen to me, Catherine. There are things worse than death out here.”

His hands tightened on her face, and she thought he was going to lift her up to kiss her again. But instead he pushed her under. She struggled, her body desperate to escape the cold blue oblivion that was fast closing in on it. She was strong, stronger than he was—but her fingers were numb with cold and her arms were trembling and she could get no purchase on the slick walls of the resurrection tank.

“Why?” she managed to gasp at the last instant before he pushed her under again. “Why are you killing me?”

“Because I love you.”

Last week I went to see a model of the Electrical Telegraph at Exeter Hall. It was one morning & the only other person was a middle-aged gentleman who chose to behave as if
I
were the show which of course I thought was the most impudent & unpardonable. —I am sure he took me for a very young (& I suppose he thought rather handsome) governess, as the room being one of the inner halls he could not know I came in a carriage, & being in the morning my dress happened to be very plain though nice. I took care not to appear the least curious of his impetuousness, but at the same time to behave so that it should be impossible for him to speak or take any real liberty. He seemed to have been there some time, but he stopped as long as I did, & then followed me out. —I took care to look as aristocratic &
as like a Countess
as possible. Lady Athlone is an admirable model on such an occasion. I am not in the habit of meeting with such impertinence anywhere, tho’ I have of late been about a good deal alone, so I think he must be a very blackguard kind of man.

—Ada, Countess Lovelace

I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?” This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms “machine” and “think.” The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous. If the meaning of the words “machine” and “think” are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the
conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, “Can machines think?” is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words. The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the “imitation game.” It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front [
sic
] the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman.

—Alan Turing

London again. Llewellyn could tell without even lifting the heavy brocaded curtains that ballooned from their swagged tops twenty feet overhead to the waxed wooden floors of the formal drawing room. It was the street sounds that tipped you off: the rattle of wheels and carriage springs; the machine-gun rata-tat-tat of iron shoes on the hooves of Hanoverians and Percherons; the pre–information age roar of Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills.

The sounds and smells. And that other thing that spelled London in some enduring cultural memory that had survived even the generation ships: the pervasive, inescapable, eye-reddening sting of coal smog.

Ada’s memory palace was in ruins. Marble halls dribbled off into nothingness. Upper floors opened to a blank, weatherless sky. Entire wings had crumbled into ruins, collapsing in on their foundations or blanked out by a smothering fog of corrupted spinstreams.

The ghost had begun cleaning up and putting things to order, but halfheartedly, as if it hoped beyond hope that the place would magically become whole again by some external fiat. Even the notes it left around the place had a makeshift, apologetic air.

And the worst and most useless note of all, repeating itself into infinity, shelf after shelf, drawer after drawer, book after book, houseplant after houseplant:

“File corrupted” had taken on a whole new meaning for Llewellyn over the past weeks. Because he’d gradually come to understand that Cohen was neither a medieval Kabbalist nor a Victorian Household Angel nor anything else that he could put a label to. He wasn’t even the same person from one visit to another. And he wasn’t always safe, either.

Other ghosts haunted the ruins. Unassimilated and sometimes hostile fragments of the vast edifice that had been the original Emergent. Truncated half memories; tangled memories of love and fear, desire and anger.

And some of those memories hinted at even more dangerous ghosts, ones Llewellyn would have done practically anything to avoid. Ones that made him wonder if Cohen was being completely truthful with him when he insisted again and again that all he had of Ada was memories …

Today they were sitting in a grand ballroom large enough to host hundreds. Velvet curtains had once hung from the soaring ceilings, but their nub was gone, faded out into a shimmering haze of binary code. The mirrors were still there, but something was subtly wrong with the way they reflected things. Overhead, fat-bottomed putti and disturbingly carnal angels cavorted on one half of the vaulted ceilings while the other half stood open to the data-corrupted rooms of the upper floors with their moldering canopy beds and sagging mantelpieces.

The ghost sat on a grossly overstuffed love seat, and Llewellyn stood facing him. Not because he wasn’t comfortable enough to sit down—though he wasn’t, truth be told—but because there was nowhere else to sit, since the rest of the furniture had been smashed to matchsticks by
something that Llewellyn dearly hoped wasn’t still wandering the dark corridors and galleries.

The ghost stretched voluptuously and looked at Llewellyn out of the corner of one honey-brown eye. Then its look soured.

“This isn’t doing anything for you, is it?”

Llewellyn shrugged.

“How can anyone be so—no, not straight. No one’s that straight—how can you be so fucking uptight about everything?”

“Sorry.” It seemed wise to placate him. “I can’t help it. I’m just put together that way.”

The delicately chiseled mouth pursed disapprovingly. “Well, you could make an effort at least. Catherine always did.”

“Really?” Llewellyn was genuinely curious now. Was this a possible criticism of the paragon of perfection showing sail on the far horizon? Better yet, was it a chance to turn the tables on his increasingly tiresomely pseudo-Freudian interrogator? “She had to make an effort? Tell me about that.”

“She preferred girls, when push really came to shove. But she was willing to make an exception for me.”

“And I bet you liked making her make the exception.”

The ghost smiled a secret smile. “Making exceptions for each other is what friends do. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Because you … don’t … have … friends.”

“Do we really have to go there again?”

“Oh you call them friends, of course. But really they’re just people you use more … intimately … than other people.”

“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You tell me,” the ghost said.

And suddenly he wasn’t himself anymore. He was Astrid Avery, looking at him the way she had in that last awful moment before the mutiny. And then he wasn’t Astrid anymore, but another woman: darker, taller, dressed in a dove-gray morning dress that looked like it belonged in this cursed castle—

“Don’t!” Llewellyn’s voice was shaking and furious. “If you ever—I swear to God—I’ll strip you down to your motherboards—”

“Feeling a little guilty, are we?” asked the voice that haunted Llewellyn’s waking nightmares.

And then the memory had its teeth in him, and he was as helpless as a hamstrung antelope scrabbling for traction before the lion’s jaws. He shuddered and sank. And the ghost sank with him, seeing, hearing, making him relive it all in every excruciating detail when all he wanted to do with the rest of his life was forget about it.…

“Tell me about the war again,” Ada said.

“What about the war?” he asked warily, torn between a conviction that it was better to be honest—and the knowledge that there were some questions whose honest answers would bring down the wrath of Holmes and have him brought up on charges of tampering with sentient source code.

They were in the Knightsbridge House, one of his early visits, during the first week of her first real patrol in the Drift. Llewellyn knew it must be an early memory of Ada because of the way the morning sunlight flashed and danced in the ballroom mirrors. The curtains had been open onto the street outside, which meant it was before the agoraphobia—or bit rot or whatever it really was—had sunk its claws into her.