Free Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One by Ian Douglas

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