CAPACITY a-2

by Tony Ballantyne

  His wife put her hands to her head and absently kneaded the short blond hair about her temples.

  “I don’t care anymore, Justy.” She sighed again. “I feel like my brain is just a mechanism. All it does is react to external stimulation.”

  Justinian placed the little blue pill on the edge of his tongue and swallowed.

  “That’s just depression,” he said, tasting the first edge of sensation that came from Anya. It didn’t feel like depression. It didn’t feel like anything, really.

  “I feel like my mind is just a mechanical process,” said Anya. “A Turing machine. Like the thing that runs this apartment.”

  The feelings that came from Anya were rising in intensity. There was something like love, something like complacency, something like mild irritation at the way he was now sitting. But mostly there was emptiness. “Just a machine,” she repeated softly.

  “So what? You say that as if there was something wrong with it.” Justinian was indignant. “Your body is a mechanical process. Your heart pumps, your muscles contract, your nerves react. So what if your mind is a Turing machine? You are greater than the sum of your parts.”

  Anya smiled weakly.

  “I know that. But the words you speak are just being written to a length of tape inside my skull, and my brain is just the tape head that jumps back and forth as it reacts to the meaning encoded by those words.”

  Justinian gave her hand a comforting squeeze, but inside he was filling with cold horror. He could see inside her brain. He was used to reading VReps; he could glance at the pattern of concentric circles that gave a sketch of a machine’s mind and gave a shape to what he saw. He had internalized the process so well that the MTPH could use the metaphor of a VRep to give shape to what his subconscious picked up. And what he was seeing now inside Anya’s head was exactly what she had described. A long reel of tape was threaded between the hemispheres of her brain, clicking through a section at a time, chattering back and forth as she examined his face, her eyes darting.

  “What’s the matter, Justy? What can you see?”

  “Nothing, Anya.”

  “You can see it, can’t you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  She smiled sadly, and Justinian felt a surge of hope at the sudden expression of emotion.

  “I know you’re humoring me,” she said. “I know that you are, and I don’t blame you. I know that a Turing machine is just a mathematical concept. But, Justy, I can feel my brain mapping directly onto the mechanism. It’s like I can almost see the original process in there, just out of reach. The self-referential part of my mind that allows me to be me. And if I see that, I will have defined myself and all of my thoughts.”

  She squeezed his hands and he felt another dying fountain of emotion well inside her. She smiled again, and then he saw the old Anya with her grey brain. Just for a moment. She was fading again. He squeezed her hands tighter.

  “But, Anya, so what? What does it mean to have defined all your thoughts?”

  She shook her head and looked puzzled, as if trying to remember something. The tape slotted back into her brain, thunking back and forth as she formed her next sentence.

  “I think,” she began, “I think it’s because once you can see the pattern, you just have to look at the tape and after that…” Her voice faded. Her lips moved as she tried to work out what to say, and the tape rattled on in her brain. She spoke again: “But then, what’s the point? They’re already defined for me, whether I have to think them or not. Ah! Of course…”

  And at that point she turned her full gaze on him, as if she finally understood, and Justinian felt Anya switch off. The thought processes were still there, but there was no longer any spark of life inside. Just a sequence of movements.

  “No!” he called. “Anya, listen to me! It’s just your imagination. It doesn’t make sense.”

  He kissed her on her forehead, felt the coldness inside his heart deepen. He fumbled at his console and popped out a red pill. Forced open her mouth, fingers feeling the warmth of her lips, pushed the pill onto her moist tongue. He clamped her mouth shut.

  “Swallow this, Anya! Listen to me! Feel what I am feeling.” The pill was the kiss of life; the electric shock that jump-starts a heart.

  There was no reaction. He wondered if the pill was working, hoped it was a dud. But he knew it wasn’t; he could feel it taking hold. He could pick up the emotions she was feeling: they were all secondhand. All those emotions, but all his own. He was just feeling his own reflection; everything else that made her Anya had gone. A warm empty bottle. It was horrific, but it wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was what he could still see there inside her head. In her brain, the tape was still clicking through. It was accelerating now, clicking past at an increasing pace, as Anya fast-forwarded through to the end of her life.

  Justinian was crying and was angry at himself for doing so. He didn’t want to have had to travel to the edge of another galaxy, to descend fourteen kilometers beneath the ocean and speak to a half-mad AI in order to grieve for his dead wife. He wiped his eyes with a furry sleeve of his golden passive suit.

  “I’m sorry,” the AI pod said.

  “For what?” Justinian said bitterly. “What do you know about it?”

  “Justinian,” it was speaking gently now, “accept my sympathy. For what happened to your wife. For the fact that I can’t give you any reasons for what happened to her. I don’t think it was like that for me.”

  “I don’t think so either,” Justinian snapped. He was finding it hard to regain control of himself. This wide, cold, stinking dome, with its shiny, red weeds plastered over the red rocks, was an unlikely cathedral in which to mourn, but all of a sudden, it seemed strangely appropriate. “It’s just, I don’t understand. What is thought, anyway? What is intelligence? It has driven us across the galaxy. We thought it would take us to the end of the universe, but instead it has trapped me here at the bottom of the ocean with nothing more than the ability to grieve for my wife in a place where nothing else can think.”

  “That’s not quite true.”

  “Isn’t it? Do you know what I think? What if there is a thought that matches every brain, one which that brain can’t think? It sets up a destructive interference pattern that shakes the thing apart, like the single note that shatters a wine glass. I was there when Anya passed away, when the essence of Anya faded. I’m frightened that I saw that thought. That it infected me and lurks in my mind, just waiting. That I’m on the edge of thinking it…”

  “That sounds like a mental application of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem,” the pod observed.

  Justinian stared at it.

  “Gödel…We did that at school.”

  “But where would these thoughts come from?”

  Justinian laughed quietly, and rubbed his sleeve across his eyes again.

  “Humans have been interacting with AIs for a long time. We are thinking ideas that are beyond the ability of human minds to conceive for themselves. Ideas thought up by AIs. Maybe they are unwittingly leading us down paths where we literally begin to think the unthinkable. It makes me think about something you said earlier, about our galaxy being a region of light when all else is darkness. The intelligence of an AI warps the space about itself like a gravitational field-”

  He stopped, puzzled, then shook his head and frowned.

  “Now where did that thought come from? Here at the end of life, about to enter a lifeless galaxy…”

  One of the pod’s mechanical arms reached down to the ocean floor. Fine silt had settled there. Justinian had slipped and skidded over it earlier as he had made his way to the pod. The pod’s arm began to draw something there.

  “But M32 is not lifeless,” the pod said quietly. “There is something in there. Look at the Schrödinger boxes, look at the BVBs. I notice you have one around your arm. And your leg.”

  Justinian felt the warmth from his arm. Leslie had done something to stop the flesh shrinking from th
e cold and the BVB with it. Even so, the tight black band still felt as if it was restricting his circulation.

  “I’ve got a BVB here,” said the pod. The other of its arms reached back behind the pod and picked something up: a cylinder of glass with a BVB tightly wrapped around it.

  “I spun the glass myself, sometime before I limited my intelligence. My previous self dumped the images of its manufacture in the boot section where I now reside.”

  “The boot section? Just like the last AI,” said Justinian,

  “Really? How interesting.” The pod’s tone suggested it wasn’t. “You know, I’ve got no idea what these BVBs are, but they are forming all over this planet, all the time. Most of them just shrink out of our frame of reference.”

  “Shrink to nothing,” Justinian said.

  “I don’t think so. They can’t vanish if they have a hole in the middle. Basic topology. What’s the smallest a ring can be?”

  Justinian’s console chimed. He glanced down at it.

  “I’ve got about thirty minutes left down here before the atmosphere starts to have adverse effects. Can we move this on? What were you doing down here?”

  “Do you need to ask?” the pod said peevishly. “Surely you could have looked that up before you came down here. But that’s not it, is it? You did look it up. This is some sort of test, to measure my personality. You could just look at my VRep. Here it is…”

  A visual representation of the pod’s intelligence formed on its body. Justinian glanced at it: just another regular onion cross section.

  “Not your fault,” the pod continued. “The EA wrote your script for you, I suppose? Well, we all have to follow our scripts. Only some of us cannot see the scripts we are following.”

  The pod fell silent, one metal hand continuing to scratch at the ocean floor. It was writing something there, Justinian thought. Writing in the silt. As it did so, it disturbed something: a Schrödinger box. Where had that come from?

  “I would guess it came from your ship,” the pod said, apparently following his thoughts. “Think about them, Justinian. They’re everywhere across this planet, just like the BVBs, but with one crucial difference. The BVBs settle on the physical and stay there. The boxes are fixed in position only by intelligence. It’s like something is trying to get a hold on this planet. Tell the EA I don’t think we’re the only ones venturing beyond our galaxy.”

  A little thrill of fear tumbled in Justinian’s stomach. He looked towards the flier where his son was.

  “You think something is maybe trying to contact us?” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” the pod said. “You’re thinking in human or AI terms. This is different.”

  Justinian’s heart was pounding now. He was frightened, for himself and for the baby. He wanted to get away.

  The pod sensed his fear. “Hold it, Justinian,” it said. “That was a message for the EA. I’ve got a message for you, too.”

  “A message for me?” he croaked.

  “Yes, Justinian, for you. It’s from my former self. I get the impression that we are seeing a contingency plan.”

  “Contingency plan?”

  “Yes, a contingency plan laid down by the former AIs, just before they committed suicide. I think this was their failsafe should events spiral out of control-as they did. I can see a sort of order to the events here. Whatever happened on Gateway began at the Bottle. Whatever it was, was considered so dangerous that Pod 16 sealed itself off completely to stop the contamination spreading.”

  “Contamination?”

  “That’s the impression I get. There is a minor, secondary infection at the location I have just relayed to your flier. I can only guess that this has been deliberately left as an indication as to what happened.”

  Whether his pulse quickened from fear or excitement, Justinian couldn’t tell. Now that he was close to the answer as to what had happened on Gateway, he was worried about what he would find.

  “Okay, what’s the message for me?”

  “Hold on. Before you fly to the secondary infection, you should know there is a warning attached to that location.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not quite sure. It may not be a good idea to take the flier all the way there. It may be a good idea to walk the last kilometer.”

  “No way. Now come on and tell me, what’s the message for me?”

  Another pause. Something flopped nearby: drying, stinking, orange-patterned scarlet mud oozing to a new position. The pod spoke: “The message is you, Justinian. I’ve got your personality map laid out in here. I don’t know for sure where it came from, but I can’t believe it was part of my original library when I was placed here. I must have requested it from the EA. And then I left it here for myself as a clue. I don’t know why, but I wanted myself to know that I was expecting you, Justinian.”

  Justinian felt the chill inside him deepen. What was going on here?

  “My personality map? I don’t believe you.”

  “It reconstructs you in detail, Justinian. I know you better than you know yourself. If you don’t believe me, look here.”

  A metal arm indicated the area where it had just been writing. Justinian looked over to the words that were scratched in the silt. It took Justinian a moment to read the words, a moment longer to figure out their import.

  – Okay, what’s the message for me?

  – What do you mean?

  – No way. Now come on and tell me, what’s the message for me?

  – My personality map? I don’t believe you.

  It was the last four sentences he had spoken. The AI had written them out before Justinian had said them. It knew him that well.

  Just before this pod had committed virtual suicide, it had requested information about him. And the EA had supplied it. Why hadn’t the EA told him that? How could he possibly be linked to the virtual deaths of thirty-two AI pods on a planet not even in his galaxy? Suddenly, Justinian was frightened. He was also very, very angry.

  The flier’s Turing machine had turned on acoustic bafflers. No matter how loudly Justinian shouted, his voice did not travel the distance it would take to disturb the baby.

  “The pods asked for me!” he yelled. “That last one had my personality map laid out in its mind. It’s like they were testing me just to see if I was the one they really wanted! Did you know this all along?”

  The robot’s fractal skin made it impossible to read his expression.

  “I had an idea,” Leslie said.

  “They asked for me! You made it appear as if the EA chose me! What the fuck is happening here, Leslie? An AI located on a planet not even in our galaxy is about to commit suicide, and the last thing it does before it turns off its higher mind functions is to scan through its database looking for someone to help it. Who does it choose? An astronomer? A terraformer? No! Of everyone alive in human space, it choose me! Why?”

  “I don’t know. Justinian, I’ve told you. Every AI from the EA down has scanned your profile, correlated your past, simulated your personality in the context of this planet, all trying to think of possible reasons.”

  “Is it because of Anya? Is that it? Is what is going on out here linked to what happened to my wife?”

  “Justinian, I told you. I don’t know.”

  Justinian looked down at his sleeping child.

  “If it had been the EA…If the most intelligent AIs known to humanity had planned this, it would be in some way comforting. But not a group of half-mad AIs built to live at the end of human space! Wouldn’t you find that terrifying?”

  “I can see your point.”

  “That’s why you’re in that skin, isn’t it? The EA isn’t sure what is going on here, so it’s keeping you as apart from the rest of this place as possible.”

  The robot gripped his hands together, almost groveling. “Justinian, you must understand, I’m as puzzled as you are. I have no idea what is going on. I know about as much as you do. Well, apart from this: that the EA is
scared. Every AI who knows about what is going on here on this planet is scared.”

  Justinian turned from the robot in disgust. Absently he rocked the baby.

  “You’re scared?” Justinian said. “How do you think I feel? I’m scared for myself and my child.”

  He stalked to the other end of the orange chequerboard carpet that stretched the length of the flier, then turned.

  “I’m going to get some sleep. Wake me up when we get to the location that that AI gave us.”

  “Justinian, I wanted to talk to you about that. Do you think it’s a good idea for you to fly all the way there? The last AI suggested that we didn’t get too close. I think maybe we should listen to it.”

  But Justinian was beyond reason. He had been pushed around so much by machines he wasn’t in the mood to take their advice any more. If Leslie hadn’t been so removed from the world, he would have realized this. The robot could read a few gestures, a few facial expressions. Leslie had taken himself too far to realize that now was not the time to argue.

  Justinian set a flight chair to recline into a sleeping position.

  “I’m going to get some sleep,” he said. “Ship? Help me out?”

  Helen 3: 2240

  Ah, yes. That dress is just about right.” Kevin rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Turn around again so that I can see the back.”

  Bairn spun slowly in front of the reverse viewing field, her skin showing just a little more tanned than it was in reality, the better to match the color of the dress.

  “It’s just about what we want,” Kevin said. “Although, I must say, you don’t seem very happy with it.”

  Bairn gazed at herself in the mirror, running her hands over the deep plum dress.

  “Oh no, it’s beautiful. It’s just…Kevin, are they going to catch us?”

  Kevin smiled lazily. “Catch us?” he said, taking hold of her hair and pulling it up into a chignon. “Only when we want them to.”

  The assistant stood off to one side, nervously laying out a selection of cream sweaters. Kevin gave her a withering stare as she fumbled and dropped them.