Ghost Spin Read Free

had already fallen. Where had Llewellyn been when they pulled the switch? He’d pushed Ada over the top and into battle like the good soldier he was, without even thinking what the cost would be. He’d watched Ada sell her soul for him—and then stood idly by while the Navy scrapped it.
    “She wasn’t savable,” Llewellyn had said when Cohen finally tracked him down in prison after the court-martial. “Not after Holmes had her way with her.”
    Cohen didn’t know if Ada was savable or not. But whatever Holmes had left behind, he had to try to save it.
    He moved restlessly away from the window, wincing when he caught a glimpse of his shunt in the mirror. The borrowed body was a boy’s. He was beautiful, of course. They were always beautiful, these poor lost souls who sold the use of their bodies for the convenience of the rich and bodiless. He was beautiful and young and he had his whole life in front of him. And Cohen was about to kill him.
    He could kill him now, quickly and cleanly. Or he could hand him over to Holmes and the AI police, who would kill him with agonizing slowness while they shredded his mind to make absolutely sure that there wasn’t a scrap of Cohen left in it. But either way the boy had been doomed from the moment Cohen decided to smuggle Ada through the quarantine.
    The boy started; an involuntary reaction, one that even the miles of ceramsteel snaking through his body couldn’t entirely suppress. Cohen searched for the external stimulus that had momentarily aroused the boy’s fight-or-fight reflex. And there it was: Holmes, at the street door, backed by a grim trio of MPs whose street clothes didn’t even fool the sleepy desk clerk.
    Cohen plucked the apple from the table. He polished it on his shirtsleeve—one final, jittery moment of cowardice—and then he took a bite.
    The boy felt nothing, of course. But within seconds Cohen could feel the wild AI working its way through him. He knew the course of the infection; he’d watched it burn through half the AI techs in the Navy shipyard, Holmes first and foremost. There would be the firstscattered hives; and then the rash working its way up the boy’s wrists and neck; and then the smoldering fever and the desperate race of T-cells and lymphocytes to combat the alien code that was rewriting his genetic material. In a matter of a few hours the signs of a wild AI infection would be obvious to UNSec’s AI cops or the Navy cat herders. But Cohen was gambling on the relative inexperience of the local police. It would take them quite a while, he thought, to figure it out. And by then the detectives would have come, and the medics, and the coroner. And there would be all the people they knew, and all the people their friends and family and casual acquaintances knew. Cohen didn’t have the bandwidth to run the numbers, but in his mind’s eye he saw the image of a dandelion being blown away on the wind: the delicate, deadly blossom of a meme going viral.
    As the infection coursed through the boy’s blood and marrow, Cohen shuddered in something terribly like ecstasy. No wonder humans got addicted to the stuff. No wonder UNSec didn’t allow DNA-platformed AI outside of Freetown—and even then only with an ironclad kill loop. They’d never get the cat back in the bag if the rest of the UN’s Emergents started getting used to it.
    The code flowed into every one of the 75 trillion cells in the boy’s besieged body, unzipping, unpacking, coming out of hibernation, linking each separate strand of DNA in each separate cell into a massively parallel system capable not merely of containing every piece of code and data the two fugitive AIs were made of, but of generating a cascade of copies large enough to overwhelm New Allegheny’s frontier planet noosphere, and the shipyards’ vast databases, and the Quants of the field arrays and deep space datatraps. Soon Cohen was racing the clocking speed of the universe itself on a quantum bicycle built for