GHOST SPIN

Third installment of Moriarty’s independently intelligible far-future series (Spin Control, 2006, etc.) featuring a power struggle between the UNSec military-industrial empire and its cold-war adversaries, the AI-enhanced clones of the Syndicate.

UNSec’s command of its interstellar colonies is crumbling as its quantum teleportation network collapses. Key to the survival of both UNSec and Syndicate, and perhaps the human species itself, is the Drift: a strange region of space where quantum reality seems to operate on a macro level. When the almost unimaginably complex Emergent AI called Cohen reportedly suicides on planet New Allegheny, various pieces of him—ghosts—survive in scattered networks, some insane, some conscious. Cohen’s wife, ex-UNSec major Catherine Li, doesn’t believe the story. Li faces several problems: She’s wanted on certain planets as a war criminal, but thanks to UNSec boss Helen Nguyen’s restructuring of her psyche, she has no recollection of what she’s accused of doing. And the only way she can reach New Allegheny is by “scattercast,” having herself beamed toward her destination as an electronic download. Unfortunately, with this method, anybody with the right equipment can grab a copy of her. Consequently, another version of Li works for UNSec Navy captain Astrid Avery, whose mission is to hunt down ex-Navy pirate William Llewellyn. Llewellyn, tortured by a guilty secret, must operate in the Drift but needs a far more powerful navigational AI than the one already in his head. The one he gets is one of Cohen’s self-aware ghosts, and the ghost promptly begins to absorb him body and soul. Complexity is the watchword here, of thought, idea, narrative, character and plot; the resulting dense, chewy narrative avoids the obvious pitfalls, though it’s certainly not an easy read.

Highly rewarding, but you’ll need to bring along plenty of active brain cells.