Линда Нагата - Edges

The cottage was empty.

Literally empty. Urban was not there. Neither was the sofa, the carpet, the pillows, the paintings, the side table with the shallow dish that held her irises—everything gone, nothing left behind. No goo, no detritus. On the surviving walls, the room’s adaptive tissue was exposed, its surface scalloped where mass had been carved away.

She edged across the patio, vaguely aware of Kona cautioning her, but she had to see.

“It’s cold,” she realized as she reached the threshold. There was not even the heat of metabolic processes left behind. The room was cold. So cold that the damaged surfaces of the adaptive tissue began to steam as they initiated self-repair.

A notification reached Urban on the high bridge, one he’d set up in the first years of the voyage, to let him know whenever a ghost woke from the archive. Riffan’s ghost had just awoken. He noted it. It should have been just one more banal data point and yet something about it troubled him.

Clemantine sensed the shift in his mood. *What? she asked.

*Riffan just woke his ghost from the archive. Why would he do that when he’s already awake?

A radio signal burst from Dragon ’s antenna, startling him, startling the philosopher cells. He recognized it as a warning to close the data gate on Griffin .

Somewhere, something had gone very wrong.

A submind reached him, overwhelming him in memories: an encounter with Lezuri, a newly discovered artificial world, a moment of proud defiance—and death in the form of a leaping silver tendril.

The ghost Urban had generated within his dying mind instantiated in the library. Riffan was there ahead of him, gazing at a window that displayed a view of the ring world at Verilotus. He turned to greet Urban, his face beaming with a friendly smile. “Look! It’s such an amazing thing. We must make it our destination.”

Within the library, geometry was flexible so that proximity could shift, becoming greater or lesser, but change unfolded as a sliding scale, not as teleportation. Riffan had found a way around that rule. One moment, he was by the window. And then he was face-to-face with Urban.

In the infinitesimal fraction of a second Urban required to register this, the ghost raised its fist.

At this range, Urban perceived the apparition with a peculiar double vision. There was the smiling ghost, utterly normal in appearance, but he could see into it. He could see that it was a shell, an envelope structured in Riffan’s guise, using Riffan’s permissions to allow an unauthorized intruder into the network. Contained within the shell was a dense, three-dimensional maze of computational weaponry that shimmered in luminous silver motion.

The ghost shoved its fist into Urban’s chest, injecting a data parasite.

Urban congealed his recent memories into a submind and retreated, wiping his ghost as he left.

Standing on the cold threshold of her cottage, Clemantine traded subminds with her ghost on the high bridge. Urban was there, safe, but another version of him had triggered a radio warning to close the data gate to Griffin .

“Where is he?” Kona demanded. “What the hell is going on?”

Clemantine didn’t answer. Instead, she addressed a message to both Pasha and the Bio-mechanic: *Alert! I don’t know what’s happening, but it’s bad. Be ready to trigger the Pyrrhic Defense.

Excited conversations circulated among the philosopher cells as they developed explanations for the anomalous radio signal. Ideas were proposed, analyzed, boosted or rejected within a fraction of a second while Urban fought hard to keep his rising fear in check. Lezuri had attacked him, erased him—

*What’s wrong? Clemantine demanded.

*Lezuri—

He broke off as a new submind arrived, the memories it carried seizing his attention: Riffan’s false ghost and the attack of computational weaponry.

*What about Lezuri? Clemantine pressed him.

He told her, *The war’s gone hot. A predator is loose in the network. It came after my ghost. Destroyed it. May have subsumed my permissions. If we lose the network, we lose the ship.

He could not hide his raw fear from the philosopher cells. They sensed it across a hundred thousand nodes and reacted by sending energy flowing toward the gamma-ray gun. But there was no threat in the Near Vicinity. No target.

He aborted the response: – negate that! –

The only potential threat was Griffin , trailing behind, commanded by that colder version of Clemantine.

Lezuri knew Griffin was there.

So why had he attacked, with Griffin ready and willing to put an end to any takeover attempt? Why? Unless he thought he could take over Griffin too?

Riffan’s ghost! Each time it was updated, it would have been copied from Dragon ’s archive, sent in a package to Artemis , and from there to Griffin .

Shit.

In Griffin ’s library, Clemantine stood at the center of her council of Apparatchiks. She’d summoned them immediately after she’d closed the data gate.

“Something has happened. We don’t know what, and we’ve had no instructions on whether to hold off or proceed with termination—”

“It’s too soon to commence,” the Scholar said. “We can’t act precipitously, without data.”

“I agree.”

“But we also need to be prepared to reach a decision on our own,” the Engineer said.

“Yes.” She turned to the Astronomer. “It’s on you to alert us to any external activity. If Dragon should fire a steerage jet or begin to swivel its gun—”

The entire circle froze, the attention of each entity diverted as Griffin picked up a new radio communication.

Urban’s voice: Access your archive. Delete Riffan’s ghost. Do not allow it to instantiate. It is corrupt. Repeat: it is corrupt. Do not allow it to instantiate. Do it now!

She met the Scholar’s gaze. Nodded to him. He disappeared. After he was gone, she had time to wonder if the message was true, or some inexplicable trick that would ultimately condemn Riffan to extinction.

The Scholar returned. “It’s done.”

Despite the muted emotions of her ghost, she shuddered. If the message was a hoax or the information in it wrong, she might have just murdered a man.

“Was the ghost active?” she asked.

“It was on the verge of waking.”

She closed her eyes in relief. No ghost in Griffin ’s archive should have been able to wake on its own. “So it was corrupt.”

“Yes. I’m undertaking an inspection of the entire archive to ensure no other ghosts are affected.”

“Good. Clean out the archive on Artemis too.”

She radioed a response to Dragon : “It’s done. We have no backup of Riffan. Repeat: We have no backup. What is going on over there?”

Her own voice answered her, “Stand by.”

Just seconds had passed since Clemantine issued a general warning to the ship’s company to evacuate the gee deck. Queries came back to her, too many to answer, but people were responding. Confused chatter filled the gee deck as they emerged from their homes, most asking, Is it real? A few firm voices rose above the general indecision, Shoran’s and Alkimbra’s among them: