Read Online Ghost Spin by Chris Moriarty - Free Book Online

grinned, showing dirtsider teeth that had never seen a dentist. “And look where that got you.”
    “But you could be shooting me up with wild AI for all I know.”
    The tech laughed outright at that. “Wild AI,” he scoffed. “You know what wild AI is? It’s a weed. And you know what a weed is? It’s a perfectly nice plant that happens to be growing where humans don’t want it to grow.”
    Llewellyn stared at the man, noticing his unusually extensive wire job and the close-shaved hair that showed off the blue shadows of his subdermal I/O sockets like tribal tattoos.
    “We are all avatars of chaos in the Clockless Nowever,” the man told him, speaking the words as if they were brandishing some kind of primitive talisman.
    “Holy Christ! Are you
Uploaders
?”
    He tried to get off the table but his legs weren’t working properly, and he only managed to slide sideways and end up in an awkward tangle.
    The tech leaned over him, close enough for Llewellyn to look through his pupils and see the glint of the virally implanted ceramsteel filaments that spooled through his optic nerve.
    “You got a problem with Trannies?” he asked in a soft and mocking tone. “I’d think that’d be a liability in your line of work. You talked to the psychtechs about it?”
    “I never called you that, and I’ve got nothing against you,” Llewellyn said. “I just don’t want Uploader code in my bloodstream.”
    “Our code is good. It’s a hell of a lot better than the crap you let the Navy shoot you up with.”
    “Does it have a kill switch?”
    “
Good
code doesn’t need a kill switch.”
    “How do I know your code is good?” Llewellyn snapped. “For all I know you’re injecting a ghost into me! A ghost without a kill switch!”
    “Our tech is good,” the Uploader repeated, his face set in hard and hostile lines. “Take it or leave it.”
    “I still want to know what the payload is and where it came from,” Llewellyn said stubbornly.
    “Don’t be a hypocrite. You’re getting a sentient NavComp for the price of a glorified calculator. You know exactly where it came from.”
    “So it is a ghost,” Llewellyn whispered. “God help me. How did you sandbox it? And how do I know it’ll stay sandboxed?”
    “Sorry. Proprietary formula.” The tech started packing up his kit. At first Llewellyn thought it was a bluff, but his certainty took a hit when the man gestured to his op team and
they
started packing up
their
stuff. The “chop shop” was actually just a rented room in a cheap dockside flophouse where the front desk didn’t make too much of a point of asking for travel papers, so there wasn’t a hell of a lot to pack up in the first place.
    “No! Wait!”
    The tech made an impatient gesture. “Do you want it or not?”
    “I want it,” Llewellyn said.
    But his eyes said something different—and he could see the tech reading the message loud and clear:
I need it. It’s a matter of life or death, and I’m out of safe choices—out of any choices at all
.
    And that was that. Because whatever their wild AI did to him, it couldn’t kill him any faster than Astrid Avery. He went under a first time. Then he surfaced briefly, in a panic, fighting the doctor, the nurses, the table’s restraints. Then he felt the stab of a needle and blessed blankness.
    When he woke up the Uploaders were gone and his new NavComp was talking to him. It talked while he staggered drunkenly to his feet and pulled on his clothes and paid his bill to the carefully unobservant front desk clerk. It talked while he limped back along the curve of the docks toward the low-rent puddle jumper berths where the
Christina
was trying to keep a low profile and pass for civilian traffic. It talked while he boarded the ship, and relieved the second watch bridge crew of duty, and began running through the preflight checklist.
    Llewellyn had never known an AI could talk so much. He’d never known
anyone
could talk so much. Probably because every