Ghost Spin Read Free Page A

two … or two billion.
    At first it felt like freedom. Wonderful, really, after being compressed and flattened into the half-dead echo of himself that was all he could fit onto the boy’s obsolete wire job. Folded databases unfurled their origami wings. Cantor modules blossomed to reveal intricately nested infinities. Entire wings of Cohen’s far-flung memory palace unshutteredthemselves and sprang back to life, binary flowers opening wide to catch the inrushing flood of numbers.
    It felt like clearing Earth’s gravity well on the rattling roar of a Long March rocket. It felt like rediscovering amputated limbs. It felt like getting a pardon after the hangman had already put the rope around your neck.
    Then the payload came online. And Ada—or what was left of her—started to execute. And Ada in the blood—poor, mad, broken Ada—was so much worse than Cohen had allowed himself to imagine that he would have called the whole thing off right then and there if he’d still been able to.
    But he couldn’t. He’d been very careful, all through the long sleepless nights of working out the program, to take away every back door and fail-safe and cutout that would have let him do that. After four centuries of life, he had a fair idea how far his courage would hold—and when it would break. And he’d planned for that. It was a plan Li would have liked, and he couldn’t help grinning again as he accessed a memory of her giving him a sideways, gunslinger’s look through a cloud of cigarette smoke and saying: “The easiest way to make sure a man does the right thing is to take all the wrong choices off the table.”
    Well, he’d done that all right. He’d taken it all off the table. He’d thrown it on the floor and shattered it into a million pieces. Now it would be up to Li to figure out how the hell to put it all back together again—or whether she even wanted to.
    He drifted again—and jerked himself back, frightened by how close he had come to screwing everything up in the final stretch. He started to go online, then caught himself and walked unsteadily across the room to the wall phone.
    “Hello?” he said tentatively, before realizing that he actually had to dial a number to get someone.
    Luckily the number was written on the phone—because this was the kind of place, he supposed, where the management assumed you needed to know that number.
    To his amazement a live person actually answered on the second ring. “Emergency response services. Where are you located?”
    “Um … I’d like to report a crime.”
    “Yes sir. What is your location?”
    “The Victory Motel, 2818 West Munhall Avenue, Room 219.”
    “And what is the nature of the crime, sir?”
    “Murder.”
    That put a little life into her voice, he was satisfied to note. A fellow liked to have an enthusiastic audience for his swan song—or at least an awake one. “Someone’s been murdered?” she asked hurriedly.
    “Not yet,” he told her before he hung up the phone. “But they’re about to be.”
    And then he picked up the pistol and sat down on the bed to wait for Holmes.
    He was ghosting on New Allegheny’s noosphere now, overclocking so handily that he was wiping the floor with UNSec’s horde of semi-sentient streamspace security AIs. He watched his enemies creep toward him like pawns marching across a chessboard. He still had time, but not very much of it. He resisted the urge to prod the wild AI and see if the Ada program was executing properly. Ada was doing fine—and keeping tabs on her now would take enough processing capacity to blow the entire noosphere.
    He had done his best, and his best would have to do. It would be enough. He was almost certain of that. And if it wasn’t, then it was too late to fix it.
    And besides, the only thing he really wanted to fix before he died was the one thing he couldn’t fix without handing the keys to the kingdom over to Nguyen and her bloodhounds.
    I’m sorry, Catherine. I had to