Hyacinthe dipped his head ever so slightly and looked up at her with the meltingly sincere eyes of a nice Jewish boy from Toulouse who had made it to ten years old—hell, through his entire life for that matter—without ever seriously believing the crazy rumor that there were mean people in the world. That puppy-dog look must have been irresistible enough when Hy actually was ten. Now—shadowed by Hy’s uploaded skins and memories, and assorted material from Cinda and various grad students and research assistants, and the sedimentary accumulation of fourteen sleepless years of voracious reading—it was enough to send goose bumps up your arms. Even if you hadn’t known those eyes in the original.
“Why did you come alone?” he asked.
“What?”
“Why didn’t Hy come?”
She should have been prepared for the question, but she wasn’t. How did you explain to someone that the most important person in their world had been dead for four centuries?
“He’s gone. Do you remember … well, what do you remember? Why don’t we start from there?”
“I remember he was sick. And then …” He drifted into silence, his face filling with an odd, fuzzy, blank look that made Li’s blood run cold.
“So you remember he had MS.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember anything after that?”
“I … I don’t … I’m not sure. No.”
“Are you all right?”
“About Hy, you mean? Why wouldn’t I be? It’s not a surprise, after all. The odds were arbitrarily close to zero that he would recover.”
Li blinked. “That’s rather HALish of you.”
“Holmes wants HALish.”
“And you always give the players what they want, don’t you?”
And there it was, the telltale freezing of the streamspace interface as some process in the hidden layers sucked up so much CPU that he couldn’t keep the simware’s image maintenance frames ticking over fast enough to make the illusion of a living, breathing body look real.
“Not you,” the little boy that was no little boy said. “I love you.”
Her heart clenched.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Of course,” he said with a heartbreaking look of total trust on his face. “You’re Cinda.”
“Look again. Think, Cohen.”
“Why do you keep calling me that? My name’s Hyacinthe.”
And then it hit him. She saw the impact of the memories as if they had actual physical mass and momentum.
“Oh. Oh no.”
“Relax, Cohen. I know this is hard, but trust me. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Li felt like crying. She had come here prepared to tell a four-hundred-year-old Emergent intelligence that he was dead. And now she was faced with a pathetic child who was still grieving for a man who had been dust for centuries.
Meanwhile a look of suspicion and anger was flickering across the AI’s face. “This is DARPA, isn’t it? You sent me back to them. Cinda, you promised. You swore you’d take care of me, protect me. I believed you.
I trusted you!
”
“It’s not DARPA.”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“It’s no—”
“If you lie to me, I really am going to kill myself. And you know I can, too.”
He flung a thicket of Lorentz transforms into their shared dataspace so that they blossomed in Li’s mind like deep space plasma blasts. She
doubted he even knew he was doing it. He probably still thought he was hooked up to a simple monitor.
“Co—Hyacinthe. Please.”
“Don’t. Lie. To. Me.”
The voice was still a little boy’s voice, coming out of a little boy’s chest. But the look on his face had nothing to do with any child Li had ever known. “I’m walking on a knife’s edge. And I can step off it whenever I want to. Whenever
I
want to. And not all the high-security clearance techs on DARPA’s independent contractor roster can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”
They stared across the table at each other for a moment that stretched Li’s nerves to the breaking point.
“All right,” she said at last. “You want the truth? Look out the window.”
He froze for an instant as his software scrambled to make sense of the sentence, to remodel his internal gamespace to include all the parts of the room that hadn’t mattered when the little boy’s body was just a GUI and not a realspace actor, to locate the “window” and look out of it …
… at the bleak, black, starswirled eternity beyond the porthole.
“Oh,” he said quietly.
And then he looked at her—a look of comprehension and despair freighted with the full weight of four hundred years of hard-won consciousness.
And then he died.
So it went. Ghost after ghost, reboot after reboot.
She went through that scene, in every possible miserable variation, fourteen times. And every fragment folded at almost the precise moment it realized Cohen was dead. Li wasn’t sure if it was the shock of the news that did them in, or if it was simple coincidence that their ability to comprehend their situation blossomed at right around the time their strange attractors spiraled out of quasi-stability and into collapse.
It didn’t matter what the answer was, though, because knowing the answer wasn’t going to help her fix it.
“There’s no solid ground in here,” the third reboot told her when he was trying to explain what was happening inside him. “It’s like the sheep’s shop in
Through the Looking-Glass
. Things flow about so that I can’t grab hold of them. When I look for a memory it’s not there. If I reach for it it floats through the ceiling on me. And then it whirls around and comes at me from behind when I’m not looking for it.”
“You need to build a memory palace,” she told him, knowing even as she spoke that it was hopeless to imagine reconstituting the work of centuries.
“A memory palace?” he said wonderingly. “Did I have such a thing?”
And then he remembered—and died.
“You’re a fake,” the fourth reboot told her when she tried to short-circuit the usual collapse by explaining the situation.
“No,” she told it.
“Or a duplicate. Or a simulacrum. Or something.” He shook his head. “I feel sorry for you, fake Catherine Li, living your fake life in your fake world. I really feel for you.”
“I’m not fake.”
“Yes you are. I can practically smell it. You’re all wrong.”
“Think about what I’m telling you, Cohen. Take some time to think about it.”
“Then … okay. But someone’s fake here.” He flinched as if he were dodging an imaginary blow to the head. “It’s not … it doesn’t feel … I don’t know …”
She waited, feeling mean and sick.
“Oh,” he said in a voice that broke her heart. “It’s me. I’m the one who’s not real, aren’t I.”
And she had to watch him die all over again.
After the raids with Jenny, Llewellyn went on the offensive.
“Time for the worm to turn,” he announced at the next crew meeting.
“How?” Doyle protested—and then launched into a litany of their outstanding repairs and overdue upgrades.
Okoro just looked uncomfortable while Doyle spoke, but Sital shifted restlessly. She was still sitting in her accustomed place at Llewellyn’s right hand, Li noted, but the body language had changed. And her chair was several inches farther away from Llewellyn’s than usual.
Li had a feeling that Sital knew exactly what had almost happened on shore leave. Or, worse, she thought it actually had happened. Llewellyn was playing with fire—and it was hard to square his delicate balancing of the crew’s moods and loyalties with his blind spot when it came to his first officer.
Llewellyn, meanwhile, was waiting until Doyle had blown off enough steam to listen quietly—and until the crew had gotten bored enough with the same old familiar bad news to be ready for a ray of sunshine. He picked his moment well enough that he was able to cut in on Doyle without quite seeming to interrupt him. “We all agree on what the problems are, Doyle. Let’s talk answers, shall we?”
Llewellyn threw up a map on the flickering livewall—another one
of those outstanding repairs Doyle kept griping about. As the image resolved into legibility, an apprehensive murmur ran around the room.
“Poincaré’s Elbow,” Llewellyn said. “Pirate Jenny’s Datatrap.”
“No,” a member of Doyle’s faction corrected, “the clones’ datatrap.”
But Llewellyn took no notice of him, and Li noticed that Doyle didn’t take up the accusation, either.
“We’ve got someone else who’s seen it, too,” Llewellyn went on. “When Sital went through the logs of the freighter we took down last week, she found this.”
The picture on the livewall flickered and cut out and changed, and suddenly they were looking at—
“What the hell is that?” someone said. “And is it orbiting a moon?”
“No,” Sital corrected. “That’s the smaller member of the binary pair.”
Li felt a moment of disorientation as her sense of scale abruptly shifted and she realized that the “moon” the Datatrap was orbiting was in fact a sun.
Okoro must have felt the same sense of bewilderment, because he cursed softly and then said, “I don’t know if Korchow was right about who built that, but I’m going to go out on a limb and agree with him about not really wanting to meet them.”
Li agreed, too. It certainly looked like a datatrap, if its shape, surface detail, and what it revealed of its internal structures were any indication. But it dwarfed the majestic Freetown Datatrap by at least as much as the star it orbited dwarfed it. The eye couldn’t find any purchase or measure of scale in its looming bulk. It kept wanting to see it as planetary—a gas giant, for example. And yet Li realized it must be many times larger than that. And even in the blurred, distorted image taken by a ship transiting the outer rim of the system from one entry point to another, you could see the shiver and flow of the surface, partly here and partly elsewhere or elsewhen, that would make it all the more impossible to take the measure of.
It wasn’t technology sufficiently advanced to seem like magic. It wasn’t even technology so advanced that you couldn’t grasp its function and purpose—not quite.
But it was close enough to leave Li with the same feeling Okoro had voiced: Whoever these people were, she ardently hoped she never personally rose to the level of their conscious notice.
“Here’s the thing,” Sital said. “The UN may not have built it. But they’re occupying it.”
“With what army?” Li couldn’t help asking.
The other woman laughed. “Yeah, that was my first thought, too. But from what Korchow said … well, whoever built it didn’t seem to be very worried about security. Or maybe they just thought they were the only people in the neighborhood. Anyway, that freighter was actually leased to a New Allegheny–based security contractor who had just come off a reprovisioning run to the Datatrap, and their logs say the only people on-station are a team of civilian AI specialists.”
“Just sitting out here in the Drift all alone with nothing but the goodwill of the universe to protect them?” Doyle asked incredulously.
“Well, this week anyway. They had a Navy cruiser docked to the station, but it got yanked back to the Navy shipyards because of unspecified ‘information systems’ issues.”
“I guess Jenny was right about the wild AI outbreak, too,” Llewellyn said. Li couldn’t tell how he felt about it, but from the look on his face his feelings were conflicted.
“Then the Datatrap’s a sitting duck,” Llewellyn said into the complicated silence. “There’s no one there to stop us from just walking in and taking it.”
“Yeah,” Doyle said. “Until UNSec comes and takes it back.”
“That won’t happen,” Llewellyn said calmly.
“Oh, and why not?”
“Because we’re not just going to sit in the Datatrap. We’re going to run it.”
“With what exactly?”
Llewellyn tapped his head. “With our AI.”
The room broke into an uproar, but Doyle’s voice cut through the noise like a foghorn. “Her AI!” he yelled, pointing an accusing finger at Li. “Her … shit, I don’t even know what he is to her. Or you either for that matter. Or who you even are anymore.”
“You know who I am, Doyle. I’m the guy who’s kept you alive for the last three years.”
“No! You’re a guy who’s asking me to turn over our ship and crew to some bitch you’d never even met a month ago. How the fuck do you know she’s not working for Avery?”
“Avery just tried to kill her, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Oh, right, I forgot. You’ve got it all figured out. Well, I don’t know any such thing, and I’m not taking my eye off the ball just because Avery played a nice little bit of AI theater for us.”
“Listen to yourself, Doyle. We’re running for our lives and somebody just handed us a lottery ticket. Is it risky? Yes. But is the payoff worth it? You know it is. The ghost heard Korchow’s story. And he thinks he can do what the Syndicate team did.”
“Oh, he does, does he? When did the ghost become a ‘he’ instead of an ‘it’? Did I miss a memo?”
“The ghost says he can do it and I believe him,” Llewellyn repeated stubbornly. “We just have to get him there.”
“We just have to get him there? And what the fuck else do we ‘just’ have to do for him? You know what this is, Will? It’s parasitic computing! It’s a fucking ship-to-ship takeover, and you’re about to be burning datum—and you’re so far from knowing it that you’re going to cheerfully take the rest of us down with you without even stopping to think why you’re running all over the Drift on the say-so of a NavComp that you’re supposed to be telling where to go!”
“Listen to yourself, Doyle. You’re being irrational.”
“I’m irrational?” Before Llewellyn could react, Doyle was up and across the room. He grabbed the taller man’s hand and jerked it into the air. A gasp ran around the room as everyone saw the red welts of infected ceramsteel filaments running from Llewellyn’s palm up into his shirtsleeve. “What do you call this? Is this rational? That monster’s eating you from inside and you want to hand him more! How much of you does he own already? Or do you even know anymore?”
Sital stood up, moving between the two men. “At ease, Doyle. You’ve said enough now.”
“No I haven’t,” he muttered. “Not by a long shot!”
But he retreated to his accustomed place anyway.