“Well,” Korchow said, “it’s nice to see you’re not just a pretty face.”
“I don’t have a clue what that all means. I’m just repeating what Cohen says. And he also says I shouldn’t trust you because you’re the most outrageous liar he’s ever met.”
“All Corinthians are liars, said the Corinthian.”
“And misquoting Bertrand Russell isn’t going to get you anywhere.”
“If he’s so eager to cross wits with me,” Korchow suggested, “then why doesn’t he just come out and speak for himself instead of playing Chinese telephone?”
Llewellyn laughed once, very softly. “That wouldn’t really be convenient for me.”
“I see,” Korchow said, his eyes flicking from Llewellyn to Li and back
again. “You two manage to get yourselves into the most
interesting
situations. Is it just bad luck or do you have something against living the quiet life?”
“Fuck if I know,” Li said. “Let’s hear about the Datatrap, since I don’t have a clue what’s going on and that’s obviously what Cohen wants to talk about.”
“How can I describe the Datatrap?” Korchow said. “It’s like looking into the Mind of God. You’d have to be a lump of dead clay not to see it. No wonder the Uploaders are ready to die to stay in it.”
He leaned forward.
“Yes. That’s where to begin. With the Uploaders. When the Syndicate mission dropped into orbit around Novalis we found the Datatrap already there, and the Uploaders on it. That was eight—no, perhaps nine years ago—sorry, I always have trouble with UN-standard years. So, anyway, two or three of your years after the original Novalis mission. That mission searched the Novalis system quite thoroughly and found nothing either in the noosphere or in any of the geosynchronous or neutral orbits. Obviously no one, regardless of their level of technology, could have built such a thing from scratch in that little time. So we immediately suspected it had been moved from somewhere else. And when we talked to the Uploaders—”
“This is taking too long,” Jenny interrupted. “And I have plans that involve getting very drunk very soon. So let’s cut to the chase. Korchow here was sent on a Syndicate mission to gather data about the Novalis aliens, and when they got there they found no aliens in residence and a big honking quantum datatrap orbiting the planet where they were damn well sure there hadn’t been one the last time they visited. They play knock-knock for a while, but no one’s at home. So they land on the Datatrap. And what do they find? A bunch of Uploaders have moved in and are trying to figure out how to upload themselves into it and not getting much of anywhere. So the clones start fucking around on their own account—and then Korchow and his crechemates get into some kind of hissy fit over—”
“Technically, it was a Rostov mission and KnowlesSyndicate was only providing logistical support,” Korchow said smoothly, naming a
Syndicate known for detanking researchers and theoretical scientists. “And while Rostovs consistently surpass expectations in theoretical applications, practically speaking they leave something to be—”
“Well, whatever. The bottom line is that Korchow here annoyed his little clone friends so much that when a UN cruiser shows up in-system they decide to get the hell out of Dodge and maroon him on the Datatrap.”
Li couldn’t help laughing.
“You’re one to talk,” Korchow said.
“I know, I know. It’s just … Cohen must be enjoying this so much!”
“And I don’t begrudge him his fun. After all, next time Jenny puts into port I’ll be going my merry way. While Cohen appears to be a rather more permanent fixture, if I’ve correctly understood the lay of the land here.”
“But tell them about the alien transport field,” Jenny said.
“There’s no reason to assume it’s alien, really. First of all, the parallel universe it comes from could plausibly be a future point in our own light cone, or simply a branching in which we ourselves happen to possess technological capabilities as yet undiscovered in our branching. And even leaving that aside, it’s not like technology has a museum label hanging on it that says “alien.” Gödel was right, after all; the language of mathematics is in some very real sense universal. Lorenz attractors or Poincaré circles might not be
called
the same thing in other cultures, but they exist. And when you analyze the surface details and internal structures of the Datatrap—”
“Okay, we get it. We’re not going to sue you if the little green men turn out to be our evil twin overlords from the future. But the
transport field
.”
“It’s not really a—”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Korchow! Is quibbling your secret superpower?”
“Right, well, what Jenny would like me to mention to you—no doubt because she thinks it might help you in your ongoing efforts to elude your former Navy colleagues—is that we came to suspect that the Datatrap was cycling between a string of some dozen or so real planets that have actual locations in
our
universe.”
“All in the Drift?” Llewellyn asked, again seeming to grasp the direction of Korchow’s thoughts in a way that no one else did.
“Yes.”
“So it’s in some kind of massive Bose-Einstein field?” Li asked.
“No. Though that’s probably what the UN suspects and why they’re so interested in it. But it’s not. It’s not some kind of simple causality violation. It’s not moving at all in the sense of FTL. The Rostovs thought it was more like … the Drift is moving around it.”
“A standing wave,” Llewellyn murmured in a voice that made Li turn and stare at him. “Like a rock standing still while the stream flows around it.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what they said,” Korchow replied excitedly.
But Llewellyn was no longer listening to him. He wasn’t listening to anyone. He was just staring down the table at Li. He sat straight and still in his chair, nothing betraying the tension in his body except for a slight whitening of his knuckles where they held the table edge. At first it seemed that there was some struggle going on within the stillness, like the thrashing of a swan’s powerful legs under the surface of the water it glides upon. But then the struggle ceased and there was only stillness—a stillness that looked uncannily like the momentary paralysis of an AI struggling to control a human shunt when some internal process had it sucking up bandwidth and scrambling to scale up its processing capacity on the fly.
He stared at her out of eyes that were dark and deep and heavy with the weight of centuries. When he opened his mouth to speak she almost leaped up and put her hand to his lips to silence him.
Don’t say it!
she wanted to say.
Not until we’re safe
.
But either he didn’t need the warning, or it wasn’t what he’d intended to say anyway. Because when he finally did speak, it was to Jenny and not her.
“Well, I’m interested,” he told her. “So let’s take a stroll down to the starboard fantail cargo bay after dinner, and I’ll see if I’ve got anything down there that might interest you enough that you’d swap me the Novalis coordinates for it.”
Holmes made her sign a mountain of nondisclosure forms—every one of them with Titan’s letterhead emblazoned across the top—before she’d even clear her to sit in the same room with the ghosts.
Well, not exactly the same room. All that was in the room Holmes showed her into was a plain vanilla quantum drive, firewalled off from the rest of the shipboard systems. She stared at the thing. “What the hell is this?”
“Security measures.”
“Has it escaped your notice that we’re on a Navy ship in the middle of nowhere? Who exactly do you think is going to get in here?”
Holmes cleared her throat and muttered something inaudible.
And that was when she understood. They weren’t afraid of someone else getting in at all. They were afraid of Cohen getting out.
He was being held prisoner here, just like she was.
Avery had amassed a large collection of Cohen fragments. Li suspected that some of them were the same ones she’d been trying to recover from the murdered yard sale buyers. But she couldn’t tell for certain. Someone (Avery? Titan? ALEF? Nguyen?) had wiped the jacket information, so that Li couldn’t see where the various fragments had come from or even which networks had once housed them. She wondered about this—but not too much. If she was handling fragments stolen off
of dead men, let alone working for their murderers, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know about it.
As Li started sorting through the fragments, however, two things did become dauntingly clear. One, none of the fragments was stable. And two, nothing Li knew how to do was likely to make them so.
The first frag she managed to reboot didn’t even understand what century it was.
“This one’s already been rebooted,” Holmes told her when she gave her the files. “It was sentient. As far as we could tell, it included the whole of his core affective loop program.”
“You mean Hyacinthe?”
“That’s what he called himself. But he crashed so fast we didn’t have time to find out more.”
“Who did the reboot? The Titan programmers?”
Holmes shrugged.
Whatever the Titan people had done, it had only made things worse. Li only found the frag by accident, while combing slowly through the flickering columns of CPU time, thread numbers, resident memory, and address space sizes.
“So what are you looking for?” Holmes asked over her shoulder. She was going to hover, wasn’t she? Li hated hovering.
“Traffic. Flicker noise. A heartbeat. Whatever you want to call it.”
But it wasn’t there. Or at least not in any of the normal places. She went back over the flickering readouts of CPU time, looking for something, anything. Eventually she found it, buried in the background noise so that it wouldn’t have jumped out at anyone who didn’t know what they were looking for: the rhythmic flutter of an AI’s heartbeat.
He’d been quite clever actually; he’d shut down his I/O layers completely, isolating the hidden layers of his labyrinthine neural networks; and then he’d bundled all his integrated utilities into separate little pieces and squirreled them away in the dark interstices of the system, where not even the most obsessively tidy IT officer was likely to be looking at CPU usage.
And meanwhile the hidden layers of the Kohonen nets that were his equivalent of a human frontal lobe lay dormant … but not dead, thank
God. She could see them on the CPU usage, however, if only as faint shadows. All it took was a slight frameshift in her concept of what she was looking for: the perceptrons firing in long, random pulse trains whose profiles were eerily similar to the pattern of human neuronal pulses under deep anesthesia.
The little AI who loved fairy tales had put himself under a spell. He was sleeping, safe as a fairy-tale prince in a castle walled in by thorns, cut off from the world and waiting for the kiss that would awaken him.
A kiss that could only be delivered by a dead man.
“I don’t think you should be here when he reboots,” she told Holmes.
The other woman stared impassively at her for a long moment. Then she nodded and left.
But Li still hesitated, hands hovering over the unfamiliar keyboard.
She felt stranded between two vast islands of memory. Her life, brief and recent. And the much longer thread of the two lives she remembered almost as well as her own: Hy and Cinda Cohen’s. Both of them had uploaded their memories into Cohen in his earliest iteration, back when he was only an experimental program called “Hyacinthe” and no one remotely imagined who or what he would grow into.
Cinda had done the math behind the system, inventing the flicker-clocking that still formed the heartbeat of every sentient AI ever created. And Hy had built the other piece of the puzzle—the affective loop machine learning program that belonged only to Cohen and had never produced another stable sentient AI.
It was Hy’s work she had to deal with now. And Hy’s two best traits as a programmer had been confidence and laziness. Those qualities had let him write stupendously efficient code, but they left less fluent programmers in the trembling awareness that they had the power of God at the command line. Now the thought of what she could do if she screwed up left Li literally sick to her stomach.
She was still working up her nerve to type something into the command line when the prompt jumped down a line and someone else’s words appeared on the screen:
Hi Hy
Oh for crying out loud. Well, she didn’t have time to change the session prompt, so she’d have to live with Hy’s no longer very funny pun.
She started typing, but nothing happened. It took her a moment to realize that she still didn’t have control of the command line. That, in fact, this wasn’t the command line at all.
Hy?
A second password request? Or had she actually succeeded in getting the system into diagnostic mode? That was the problem with joke prompts. You could lose sight of which side was up or what mode you were in … and type things you would end up bitterly regretting.
Cinda?
She jerked her hands off the keyboard and crossed them over her chest. She sat like that for maybe two seconds, staring. Then she put her fingers back on the keyboard and started typing:
Hello, Hyacinthe.
Where’s Hy?
She had thought about this question very carefully. And she had decided to lie to him. Or she thought she’d decided. It was easier said than done, even across the coldly impersonal command line interface:
He can’t come. I’ll explain later. !bug report
Hyacinthe responded by printing what looked like an entire session record to screen. It started out reasonably orderly, only to tail off in a whiny jumble of error codes.
“Okay,” Li muttered to herself. “What exactly was it that made your output layer hang?”
“I didn’t hang myself,” Hyacinthe answered from behind her back. “I’m right here. I just didn’t feel like talking to Holmes and her stupid programmers.”
Li whirled around, her heart pounding.
He was sitting at the table in his standard GUI. Hy had pulled the image from an old video feed that his mother had taken of him at some soccer game when he was ten or so. It had been available, and free, and there had been enough footage to make the resulting simulation look really convincing. Hy had never even bothered to change the clothes or remove the mud stains. The image had been meant to be temporary,
until more funding came through and they had money and manpower to spend on nonessentials. But this nonessential had turned out to be surprisingly essential, at least to the humans who had to interface with the AI; it had become so much a part of the experiment that in the end they hadn’t changed it even when the grants came through.