Bloodstar. Ian Douglas

NAVY TO GET RICH?” MACHINE SAID, laughing. “My God, man, what planet are you from?”

      “My man,” Doob added, “we need to run an EG xenospecies profile on you, stat! Lessee … ‘e-Car: civilization type zero-point-zero-weird. Biological code: really weird.’?”

      “Weird squared,” Machine suggested.

      The plan to score on xenotech was something I never talked about with anyone, of course. I shrugged off the teasing. “Hey, I’m tracking to become a med doctor, okay? Doctors can bring in the creds same as nanoware specialists.”

      “Sure, and they work their asses off getting there,” Doob said.

      Machine tossed off the rest of his drink—something called a “weightless slam,” and nodded. “Shit, you know how much ghost-mass doctors carry with them all the time? Ghost in the machine, dude. Ghost in the machine.”

      Most doctors are connected on a semi-permanent basis to expert AI systems running on the local Net, often with ten or twelve load-links going at a time. That’s because no one person can possibly keep all of the data necessary in his memory—even in their plug-in cerebral RAM—to maintain a smoothly working knowledge of the pharmacology, anatomy, pathology, biochemistry, nanotechnic programming, holistics, cybernetics, and psychology needed to treat patients, and that’s just to name just a few. Doctors aren’t necessarily running all of those channels all the time, but it is, I’d been told, like having ten other people with you all the time, whispering, guiding, making suggestions, kibitzing, whether you are performing surgery or simply sitting down to dinner.

      Some, like Dr. Francis, seemed to handle it pretty well. Sometimes, he would get a faraway look in his eyes, like he was listening to someone else while he’s talking to you, but usually you knew it was him behind that fresh-out-of-med-school face. In some cases, though, it became a kind of high-tech multiple-personality syndrome, where your original self tended to fade into the background as one or another of your resident AIs took over for you. I was thinking of Dr. Burchalter, on board the Puller, who often didn’t seem to be there when you talked to him. You knew you were taking orders from an expert AI who was running the show.

      Ghost in the machine indeed. The term was invented a few centuries ago by a British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle to describe conceptual problems with Descarte’s ideas of mind as distinct from body. Later, it described the neuro-evolutionary idea that human brains are grown atop mammalian brains grown atop reptilian brains, and that destructive impulses like hate, anger, or fear arise from those deeper, more primitive systems we still carry with us.

      Nowadays, however, it means losing yourself in a multiple-AI system, and your “ghost-mass” refers to the number of active AIs you have resident on your in-head CDF hardware at any given time.

      “I know, I know,” I told him. “But I can handle it. I don’t think …”

      I broke off what I was going to say. Machine was getting into the music.

      It was deeper now, more insistent, more sex-heavy sensuous. The touch-sensie sidebands were creating the feeling of a naked woman giving me a lap dance—I could feel her weight, feel her squirming against my thighs, feel her hands stroking my chest and face, all in time to the throb of the music. I had the vid bands turned way down, so the dancer’s image overlying my vision was ghosted to nearly nothing, a barely sensed shadow, but with three trajectories still burning in my gut it was getting a little hard to focus on the conversation and the lap-dancing distraction as well.

      It looked like Machine had blissed out completely to the entertainment channel. His head was back, with a silly half smile on his face, and his hands were in front of his chest, running up and down across something we couldn’t see.

      I glanced at Doob. “I think we just lost Machine,” I told him.

      “Yeah, looks like he’s got a ghost in his machine!”

      “You look like you’re getting into it, too.” He had the same silly grin as McKean, and his eyes were starting to go glassy.

      “Oh, yeah, baby!” At that point, I couldn’t tell if Doob was talking to me or to the ViR-gal invisibly grinding on his lap.

      I brought the vid up on my implant for a look. She was a virtual-reality genie—the image of a genetically enhanced young woman with impossibly long, silky white hair and an overdeveloped upper chassis. I didn’t care much for that phenotype myself; they always looked so damned top-heavy that I kept thinking they were going to fall over. This one was well done, though. The program had her looking deep into my eyes and not blankly staring off into space somewhere. Her eyes were too large for an unmodified human, revealing her look’s descent from the conventions of an old Japanese artform called anime, but she seemed to be focused totally on me. I could even smell her perfume.

      Of course, if I wanted things to get even more personal, I would have to let them deduct ten creds from my eccount. I was kind of hoping for a real-world encounter with a woman tonight, though, and, after a moment or two, I thoughtclicked a refusal to the offer.

      But what the music was giving me was just crotch-teasing, and I found the sensation annoying. So I switched off the vid and the genie’s eyes and other oversized assets vanished. I switched off the tactile and olfactory sensations as well, and was left with the music coming over my audio channels alone. Funny. The music seemed a lot flatter and less interesting without the accompaniment of those other rhythmic, layered sensations.

      Machine gave a strangled groan, and his hips started to jerk suggestively on the chair, his arms held tightly around the emptiness in front of him. It looked like he’d decided to pay the extra ten creds.

      The sight bothered me, somehow. How, I wondered, was what he was doing any different from Private Howell’s o-looping? I mean, obviously Howell had been risking serious physical injury with his stunt, and he’d taken things to the point of cataleptic rigidity. He’d lost control on several levels, in fact. The compulsion that led him to risk medical intervention, court martial, and an end to his military career—to say nothing of death from a stroke or a heart attack—suggested that he was addicted.

      But addicted to what, exactly? The dopamine and the feel-good endorphins associated with sex, obviously, but the technologies being used to generate those feelings were different in Howell than in Dubois and McKean. Howell had used nanobots programmed to manipulate dopamine levels directly in order to trigger a succession of closely looped orgasms. My two companions were letting music sidebands feed their in-head hardware with the virtual reality illusion of a gene-altered woman having sex with them.

      Howell’s experience had been more intense, sure, and thanks to the aspirin he’d managed to get his switch stuck in the on position, but in terms of the outcome it was damned hard to see the line between one set of behaviors and the other.

      “Hey, sailor,” a sultry voice said behind me. “You switched off your sensies. Don’t you like the music?”

      I turned to face one of the Earthview’s waitresses. She was short and cute and her upper chassis didn’t look like it was going to pull her over. She wore a sweet smile and a wispy nimbus of blue-white light that didn’t do a whole lot to cover what was underneath. The ID projected by her personal circuitry said “Masha,” but there wasn’t any other information in the broadcast.

      “It’s okay,” I told her. “I was kind of hoping for some real action, maybe later.”

      She laughed, an entrancing sound, and moved just a little closer. “You seen anything around here that you like?”

      I gave her a stereotypically lecherous up and down. “Absolutely. What time do you get off?”

      She leaned even closer. “Me getting off kind of depends on you, doesn’t it?”

      “I’m Elliot,” I told her. I thoughtclicked my personal ID, which broadcast my name, where I was from, the fact that I was U.S. Navy, all the basic, introductory stuff.

      “Hi,