Ghost Spin (9 page)

Sailors were a superstitious tribe. They had always seen their ships as living things, endowed with will and luck and karma. They’d felt that way even back on Earth, when their ships were no more than inert shells of wood and canvas. And they had far stranger and more convoluted emotions about the fragile shells that protected them from the killing Deep. Modern shipboard systems were so complex that even the simplest tramp freighter possessed a rudimentary kind of sentience. Every sailor had stories of haunted ships; of ships’ AIs wreaking vengeance
for lost captains; of ships driven mad by guilt and grief after life support systems failure, rocketing across the endless reaches of space with their bellies full of corpses. Sailors loved their ships, but that love could turn to fear and distrust in a moment, especially among the common sailors whose unwired brains gave them no direct access to the shipboard AI and for whom every AI was a sort of ghost. A captain might have disagreements with his ship, might have to make compromises in order to keep the waters smooth and the AI sweet-tempered. But he bent to the AI in front of his crew. A crew that began to doubt whether its captain was in control of the ship was already halfway to mutiny.

“Of course it’s talking to me,” Llewellyn told Doyle as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“I’m not sure I like that, Will. I’m not sure I want to trust my life to some stranger—”

“It’s not a stranger,” Llewellyn said, putting an easy confidence into his voice that he was far from feeling. “It’s the ship. The same ship we’ve always had. There’s no difference between a new NavComp and any other routine upgrade.”

“Given past experience, I don’t find that reassuring!”

“Relax, Doyle,” Ike Okoro said from his usual post at Systems. Okoro was the ship’s cat herder—its sentient systems engineer. He had been cut out personally by Llewellyn’s decision to download the AI directly into his skull, and he had as much reason to be angry about it as any man on board. But Ike didn’t do angry; his naturally levelheaded temperament had been honed into an almost Zen-like calm by decades of coaxing top performance out of temperamental combat AIs and weathering their prima ballerina posing and periodic emotional meltdowns. Now Llewellyn could see him soothing Doyle just as ably as he would have soothed a jittery young AI on the eve of its first live-fire exercise. “The new NavComp’s doing its job, and it’s doing a damn good job from what I can see. I know it’s no fun to be in a pinch with an AI you don’t know. But we’ll all have plenty of time to get to know each other after we get out of this.”

Doyle looked disgruntled. But Okoro was too popular with the crew
to argue with. And even Doyle liked him too much to do more than shrug his disagreement.

“So what do we do now?” Sital asked in her usual blessedly phlegmatic tone—and, not for the first time, Llewellyn admired the seamless way in which his first mate and his cat herder kept ship and crew, body and soul, together.

We make a run for it,
the ghost breathed, its voice wafting across Llewellyn’s mind like the proverbial devil on his shoulder.

“Christ!” he muttered. “How—”

Into the Drift. The ghost’s plan sidled into his brain, brilliant and impossible. But the ghost’s certainty was catching.

“You want me to take on a Navy ship of the line? Avery’ll eat us for lunch.”

She won’t. Trust me.

“Do I have a choice?”

Not unless you want your neck stretched.

Llewellyn rubbed his face. He could feel the prickle of the crew’s eyes on him. And he could feel the doubt and fear welling up into the space his hesitation was creating.

“We run for it,” he said, echoing the ghost’s words.

Doyle snorted. “Where?”

“Into the Drift.”

“Flying blind? With Avery on our tail? Do you
want
to suffocate to death in some unmapped eddy out there?”

“More than I want to hang,” Llewellyn answered.

“Easy for you to say!”

Llewellyn gave Doyle a long, hard stare. “If you have problems with me or my command decisions, feel free to put them to the vote in the next crew meeting. But last time I checked the ship’s charter, questioning captain’s orders in the face of the enemy was mutiny.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Will, I’m not questioning you!”

“Good,” Llewellyn said mildly. “Then it’s settled. We run for it.”

Doyle’s scarred face contracted in frustration, but he kept his mouth shut.

“Turn the conn over to the AI,” Llewellyn told Sital.

“I—yes.” The usually unflappable Sital sounded flustered. Llewellyn glanced at her and read in her face what she was too seasoned to say out loud: that the AI had wrested control of the ship from her without so much as a by-your-leave. Sital cast a meaningful glance toward Okoro, who was following the action from the cat herder’s seat and also knew what had just happened.

Okoro shrugged slightly, as if to say
What do we have to lose with Avery on our tail?

And indeed he was right; the ghost couldn’t kill them any deader than Avery.

Llewellyn shrugged and turned back to the monitor. He’d deal with it later … if there was a later. For now there was nothing to do but watch the two AIs battle it out. He moved to conn to look over Sital’s shoulder, but the numbers were scrolling down the screen too fast for him to make any sense of them. He flicked into streamspace and tapped the feed from shipboard AI’s external monitors.

Instantly he was awash in false color imaging, rotational velocity spreads, Zwicky graphs, and Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams. Dark matter haloes flared around distant stars until they looked like they were bleeding out in Technicolor. Dark energy currents raced into the heart of the Drift, skirling out into fractally complex riptides and eddies where the gravitational differentials could rip a ship into pieces before any merely human reflexes had time to chart a change of course.

This was a world where even augmented humans were left behind. Decisions had to be made in AI time, and disasters struck even faster. The ghost would guide the ship, defying the odds, leaping from one quantum branching to the next, skittering across the surface of the multiverse like a flat rock skipping across water. UN battleships were piloted by Emergent AIs that hovered just on the legal side of sentience, and their captains and navigators were given every legal advantage that synapse-enhancing drugs and retro-engineered myelin sheathing and state-of-the-art wire jobs could give them. And even that wasn’t enough—not now that the Syndicates had thrown off their centuries-old ban on machine-meat hybrids and begun detanking A Series clones that could jack directly into their biomorphic shipboard systems.

Llewellyn hung naked in space, his mind linked directly to the ship’s conformal sensor array, his wire job dumping synth into his bloodstream and his mind awash in the rush of godlike speed and power that old washed-up Navy men still called “AI-in-the-blood” even when they had to buy it in a needle and the closest they’d ever get to a shipboard AI was looking up at the bellies of the big ships from dirtside.

The stars shone painfully bright, cutting through the prison of his skull and obliterating the boundary between him and the universe. He felt every move the
Christina
made as acutely as if he’d been flayed alive and crucified on the ship’s hull. With the old AI, he had had some input, some maneuvering room. But this ghost was swifter, stronger, more powerful than any Llewellyn had ever commanded … even Ada. He felt the difference as an atavistic shudder of mingled fear and envy: one top predator watching another lope across the horizon, and knowing that—real or virtual—there is only one ecological niche labeled “social predation” in every ecosystem.

The ghost boosted out of orbit at a speed that had Station Control wailing proximity warnings on every channel. But somehow the NavComp threaded the needle of the high orbital traffic and put them on course for the closest entry point. The Drift was coming up fast now, a shimmering tide of dark energy flaring across the monitor in false color imaging like an aurora borealis. And there was the silver needle of the
Ada
, just where the ghost had said she would be, waiting for them.

They flashed toward the other ship at a minuscule fraction of light speed. Far too fast for a human pilot to process the encounter—but dangerously slow by AI standards. Llewellyn knew what was happening on both ships, even though he couldn’t follow the battle in real time. The two AIs would be taking each other’s measure, scanning ports, clinching up with each other’s security systems, circling each other like sharks at a feeding ground.

Llewellyn was no numbers man. He wouldn’t be able to go back and rehash the encounter like Sital would. But he’d fought enough battles—and seen enough ships die—that he had a visceral, almost instinctive feel for the death struggle playing out between the two AIs.

Or at least he’d thought he did. Right up until the moment when Avery’s ship blinked off the screen.

“What the hell?” Doyle muttered.

Sital shook her head and tapped frantically at the antiquated keyboard.

“Where’d they go?” Llewellyn asked.

“They didn’t.”

“But—”

“They’re still there. They just powered down.”

“Why?”

“Ask your NavComp.”

“
We
did that?”

What the hell just happened? he asked the ghost.

But the ghost didn’t answer, and Llewellyn didn’t ask again. Because now they were blasting past the
Ada
and howling into the entry point at a speed that made every cell in Llewellyn’s body cringe in anticipation of disaster.

Llewellyn knew, in theory at least, what the ghost was doing. He knew that if his augmented neurons could have fired fast enough to read the displays cascading down his internals, he would have seen the ship completing a precise sequence of Poincaré transforms in order to match rotation with the Drift entry point, identifying a spin-compatible neighboring universe, and executing an entropy spill carefully calculated to offset the violence that their newly mapped worldline would inflict on this universe’s Second Law. But the actual doing of the thing—the moment of the shift—was a black box. You could tell yourself until you were blue in the face that time’s arrow was an emergent property of macroscopic systems and had no real basis in the fundamental laws of the universe. But since human consciousness was itself an emergent property of a macroscopic system, you couldn’t experience that truth in any way that made it real. It might as well be the mystical incantation of a religious doctrine … which of course some people claimed it was. The iconic topological model of the multiverse—the infinite-petaled quantum rose with its shimmering halo of superpositions—had all the hypnotic simplicity of a Tibetan mandala. But as soon as you tried
to grapple with the cold equations it disintegrated into an Escherian tangle of interlinked infinities.

“Do you even know where the ship’s taking us?” Doyle asked.

The ghost flashed a spacetime coordinate into his mind, hallucinogenically clear—and far, far faster than words.

“There,” Llewellyn said, pointing to the navigational monitor.

“It’s not even on the map,” Doyle protested.

“That’s the point.”

Llewellyn tried to sound nonchalant, but inside he wasn’t nearly so sanguine. What kind of unholy creature had he invited into his blood and genes and sinews? And if it had done that to a ship of the line on its first day out of the box, then what the hell was it going to do to him?

“Who are you?” he whispered to the ghost, half frightened of what the answer might be.

A Shipwreck of Souls.

“What the hell does that mean?”

A House of Hungry Ghosts.

“Who Are You?”

For a moment—a moment that must have stretched into hours and days in AI time—he thought there would be no answer. And when the ghost finally spoke, its voice was as bitter as the smile of a woman betrayed:

You know who I am, William. And somewhere in the black bottom of your heart, you’re happy to see me again. Even if you did murder me.

I am a Prophetess, born into the World; & this conviction fills me with humility, with fear & trembling! I tell you this because unless I do so, it is scarcely giving you fair play (in your peculiar relationship to me, that is). If you know not the colour of my mind, you may speak inappropriately to me. Was not that my early, & for a time fatal error towards you? I feared and mistrusted you, & endeavored therefore to mystify you as to all my real feelings. And a pretty chaos I made of it. As to my relations with the Divinity, such as it is or may become, neither you nor anyone else can alter or modify these, nor have you any concern with it. However intensely I may love certain mortals, there is One whom I must ever love & adore a millionfold as intensely; the great All Knowing Integral!

—Ada Lovelace

Twenty hours later she was on a jumpship bound for Freetown.

She made the trip out to Freetown wearing the heavy chain and hooded sack cloth of an Adarian priestess. Or at least so her internals told her; they claimed that the symbol on her chest—which looked to her like a sideways-tilting anarchist’s
A
—was actually a Phoenician aleph and the sign of the cult of Ada Lovelace, Mathematical Prophetess and Handmaiden of the All-Knowing Integral.