Ghost Spin Read Online Free PDF

Reverse-engineered vat-grown hawks shrieked overhead. A hot yellow sun wheeled across the sky, cutting deep into the office block through retromodern plate-glass windows.
    “It can’t be suicide,” she said, ten minutes later and half a world away. “Cohen would never kill himself.”
    “As I understand it, that’s what the family usually says in these cases,” Router/​Decomposer observed in a carefully neutral voice.
    “The cops must have screwed up.”
    That is of course possible, the AI answered, throwing the words up onto a shared blackboard of their interface instead of speaking them aloud as he usually would have.
    Li threw a sharp glance in his direction, struck by the uncharacteristic formality of his answer. Router/​Decomposer was easier to read than Cohen, not so much because he was simpler but because he was less human. His machine learning systems were designed to do the job whose name he still carried—one that had been his before he had disassociated himself from Cohen and gone off to CalTech to take the first tenure-track position ever awarded to an AI by a major mathematics faculty.
    And there was also the matter of Router/​Decomposer’s longstanding distaste for using human shunts. Router/​Decomposer was as capable of operating a rented body as any other AI. But unlike most AIs, who used shunts whenever they had to conduct businessor pleasure with humans, Router/​Decomposer preferred to be disembodied. Even his brief attempt to adopt a human name had foundered on his discomfort with what he called “the squish factor.” So he was simply Router/​Decomposer—a generic name that could have applied to any router/​decomposer in any of the larger Emergents. And there was no human body sitting across the desk from Li to confuse her with the play of wetware-controlled emotions that might or might not be genuine, or into which she might read things that had no place at all in his very different identity architecture.
    Router/​Decomposer’s current physical interface was a three-dimensional hologram of a strange attractor that he claimed was a realtime mathematical model of the firing patterns in his prime network. Li had her doubts; AIs were as capable of stretching a point under cover of poetic license as any other sentient life-form. Still, it was pretty to look at. And, at least in Earth’s dense noosphere, where the spinstream had become transparent tech and streamspace enveloped the planet and its orbital habitats as seamlessly as a second skin, it gave him a physical presence strong enough to satisfy the instinctive human need for a face to look at, for a physical subtext to parse alongside the words that never quite said everything.
    Right now Router/​Decomposer was cycling through a series of Fermat’s spirals that hung in the air like mystical mandalas. It was an odd set of patterns for him, Li thought; too stable and predictable, a holding pattern that revealed nothing … except, she supposed, lack of forward motion. Which, knowing him, would be exactly the point he was trying to make.
    You disagree with me, she guessed, following him onto the interface. And you don’t want to say so.
    Not while you’re in this mood.
    “What do you think I’m going to do,” she asked wryly, “dump a cup of coffee in your lap?”
    More likely storm out of here and go on some hormone-fueled rampage without giving me a chance to help you.
    “And you’re willing to help me?”
    You know I am.
    “Out of guilt?”
    The Fermat’s spiral flared into a wild explosion of Cantor dust that flickered and flamed and finally formed itself into an unstable-looking Julia Set, which Li’s internals helpfully informed her was called the Dragon. It seemed like a lot of fireworks to get across the painfully obvious: that Router/​Decomposer was filled with the same explosive mix of anger, grief, and guilt she felt roiling in her own gut.
    If you want to call it that, he answered finally.
    “I’m