multi-world and even give IBN and Raytheon-Mitsubishi a run for their e-creds.
My dad got into the field the old-fashioned way, going the route of AI development, but he thought having a Corpsman in the family might increase the chances of landing something big … a new technology, a new means of controlling or programming nanobots, a new approach to an old problem, like what the X’ghr did for telomere research.
And I was pretty excited about the idea myself. It wasn’t like I was letting my Dad do my thinking for me. I’d wanted to join the Navy anyway, the Hospital Corps in particular, because I had my eye on going to a school like Johns Hopkins or Bethesda University, one with a good medical download program, with an eye to becoming a doctor. I’d never been much interested in following in my father’s footsteps … or the footsteps of my grandfather and great grandfather. A century of Carlyles in General Nanodynamics, I thought, was quite enough.
Besides, to make money, real money, we needed to break free of the pack. As an employee of General Nanodynamics, with all of his ideas becoming the intellectual property of the corporation, my dad could manage a living that was comfortable enough, sure, but there is well-off rich, and there is filthy rich with a private Earth-to-orbit shuttle, your own synchorbital private mansion, and maybe a shot at some telomeric genengineering.
If I found myself in a position to bring back some exploitable xenotech, something Dad and his contacts could turn into a few hundred billion creds and a high-living lifestyle … hey, why not? I was in.
But I needed to go Fleet Marine Force to make it Out There, to give myself even a chance of being on a first contact team or encountering a new technic species not described in the EG.
And after my encounter with Private Howell that morning, I thought that my chances of that were becoming somewhat bleak. If I got dropped from FMF, I was looking at six more years of routine duty—working on the wards of a naval hospital somewhere, or serving as staff at a research station in Outer God-knows-where.
I was wondering if I’d just managed to deep-six my entire future.
“YOU JOINED THE FUCKING 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
