Ghost Spin by Chris Moriarty Read Free Book Online Page A

who’d run out of hope, time, and credit. The technical name for it was scattercasting. Which pretty much told the whole story: People on Periphery planets without access to the Bose-Einstein FTL network or enough credit to emigrate on the lumbering slow ships had begun simply broadcasting their unencrypted jump files through the quantum spinfoam. The broadcasts were horribly corrupted and unstable. There was no way to control who downloaded them or what they did with them. There was only the slim hope—if you could even call it hope—that someone somewhere would decide to resurrect your pattern. And that the spacetime region of your resurrection would be preferable to the one in which you’d immolated yourself in the scattercaster.
    Scattercasting was illegal in UN space for all the obvious reasons. It was a legal nightmare, spawning potentially infinite copies of the broad-castee, all of whom had the same rights and legal status as the original. And, the milk of human kindness running as sweet as it did, scattercasting had spawned every kind of abuse imaginable, from quantum kidnapping to indentured servitude and (if the rumors about some of the more remote Periphery planets were true) outright slavery.
    “Not that I want you to go,” Router/​Decomposer said, “but that face really isn’t warranted. It’s technically no different than Bose-Einstein-assistedquantum teleportation. Technically speaking you
always
die in this universe and are resurrected in some other quantum branching of the multiverse. You just choose to think of BE jumps as faster than light travel and scattercasting as some kind of quantum death warrant.”
    “I think of it that way,” Li said acerbically, “because that’s the way it is.”
    “The way you think it is.” Characteristically, Router/​Decomposer had now completely lost sight of his larger goals and was arguing the technical point every bit as enthusiastically as if he
wanted
her to scattercast to New Allegheny. “But only because that’s what’s consistent with your mammalian identity architecture. The truth is, there’s no such thing as FTL. No matter what technology you’re talking about. Spinfoam-assisted quantum teleportation, the Drift, scattercasting, clicking your heels together twice and thinking of Kansas—you name it, it’s all the same. If it gets you outside your light cone, then you’ve gone to a different universe. The math is simply too elegant to deny.”
    “Anyway,” Li said, unwilling to waste time splitting cosmological hairs, “it’s not the copies of me in other worlds I’m worried about. It’s the ones in this one.”
    “But that’s my point. I don’t think you’ve grasped the kinds of distances we’re dealing with. The FTL age is over. Now that the New Allegheny field array is kaput, the entire Drift is outside your light cone barring some extraordinary act of God or General Nguyen. So basically the copy of you on New Allegheny might as well be in a parallel universe.”
    “Not copy.
Copies
.”
    Router/​Decomposer shrugged. “You’re assuming someone will go to the trouble of resurrecting more than one copy. But why would they bother? Not everyone even has the technical know-how. And besides, it’s expensive. I can’t imagine who’d even think it was worth it.”
    “Can’t you?”
    If Router/​Decomposer had been human she would have seen him remember Gilead. But even though she couldn’t see it, she knew it was happening. At least he didn’t flinch. And that mattered more than she wanted to admit to herself. Now that Cohen was gone the list of peoplefor whom Catherine Li the person was more real than the bloodthirsty caricature in her war crimes dossier was short to vanishing.
    She tried to think about what a scattercast pattern for Catherine Li, ex-Peacekeeper, ex–UNSec operative, ex–Butcher of Gilead, would mean in the multiverse—and the images that came to mind weren’t comforting.
    “Look,”