CAPACITY a-2

by Tony Ballantyne

  Judy’s hand was moving from her sleeve to her mouth, a tiny blue dot on her finger.

  “Ouch!”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Peter.

  “I don’t know.” Judy frowned. “I thought I felt…Never mind.” She regained her composure and placed a little pill on her tongue.

  The second spider bush was completed. After a moment’s apparent thought, it began to scuttle after the first, back towards the beach.

  “Going to harvest more foil,” Peter said. “If the tree they’re stealing it from doesn’t get its stealth routines updated fast, all the local symbiotes will find it and strip it clean of metal.”

  Judy gazed at him, the little blue pill dissolving on her tongue.

  “You’re not like your digital counterpart,” she observed. “I’ve got my sister’s report.”

  “People change.” Peter shrugged. “My digital counterpart was created years ago. We’ve grown differently.”

  Judy’s gaze was cool. “There’s more to it than that. You said you spent time in the Enemy Domain. Tell me about that.”

  Peter gave an involuntary shiver. “I was marooned there for three months,” he said. “That was after the digital Peter Onethirteen was created. He never experienced what I did.” He knelt down and picked up some of the twigs that the spider bush had dropped to the ground.

  Judy tilted her head to listen to her console. “Oh, I see,” she said in some surprise. “Three months marooned on a clone world. How could that be allowed to happen?”

  “It does sound far-fetched, doesn’t it?” Peter’s voice was soft. “Isn’t that a modern fantasy, to be out from under the gaze of the Watcher?” He noted Judy’s reaction. “Oh yes, I believe in the Watcher.”

  Frances was intrigued. “How is it possible to be marooned? Surely the EA were monitoring you at all times. They would have noticed that you were missing.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Peter straightened up, brushing his hands together. “Look, why don’t we go to my apartment? If nothing else I can get something for Judy to put on her feet.”

  The tree flickered from sight as they walked away from its stealth region. Judy had the impression that other things were hidden away in the windblown land around them.

  “You know about the origins of the Enemy Domain, of course,” said Peter. “An AI was charged with overseeing the colonization of a planet. It got paranoid and ended up creating an expanding volume of self-replicating machines. It sought to challenge the Earth sphere of expansion.”

  “It tried to make colonists,” Frances interrupted. “It left something like three trillion half-grown clones scattered through the region.”

  “I know,” Peter said. “The EA employed people like me to go into the former Enemy Domain to help clean up the mess.”

  “A lot of people from Social Care went there,” Judy said.

  “Yes,” he said patiently. “I met some of them. Anyway, I flew into the Enemy Domain alone. I had a set of library codes to build anything up to and including type six VNMs and a set of teaching resources so I could train the clone population in the use of self-replicating technology. My ship was a limited Von Neumann Machine: the copies it made of itself would not contain warp drives. I think the EA is still nervous about what may lurk in the Enemy Domain. It’s probably right, considering what happened to me.”

  Frances seemed fascinated by Peter, and Judy noticed how her walk mimicked his. She was clearly adopting his mannerisms. The robot leaned forward and tilted her head slightly.

  “And what happened to you, Peter?”

  “I was picked up by a remnant of the Enemy Domain’s security net. A very efficient net: completely isolated and self-sufficient. I hear there are still lots of regions in the ED like that. Regions that don’t know they have been defeated by the Watcher and the Earth AIs, security systems that are still fighting battles in a war that was over long ago. My ship was disabled as it flew into one of them, but an image of my ship carried on, following my original course. That security net was good: the apparent ship mimicked the emanations from my own ship exactly. It was three months before the Earth AIs realized that I wasn’t where they thought I was.”

  “And what happened during that time?” Judy asked.

  “I was interrogated.” Peter walked in silence for a while. “The details are all available from the EA, if you want to know. They…healed me afterwards.”

  Judy slowed, listening to her console. Frances walked on beside Peter. They passed through another insubstantial barrier of lavender lights, leaving the region of common ground behind. Antique low-rise buildings made of concrete and glass were scattered in a grid pattern before them, the air above them being kept clear for some reason. Skyscrapers could be seen in the distance beyond.

  “I have a subterranean apartment in one of the closer buildings,” Peter said. “They built low here, to retain the look of the area. I think that bleak concrete-and-glass look suits this countryside, don’t you?” They stopped outside the entrance to his apartment block. “Do you see that cannon over there?” He indicated a vicious black spike that stood on the top of a nearby building, pointing up into the grey sky.

  “I see it,” Frances said.

  “The AIs have calculated that, next week, a section of the Shawl will hit the ground just about where we’re now standing. That cannon is designed to destroy the last few fragments before they can do any damage. The AIs have set the burn at about a hundred meters up; it promises to be quite a display.”

  Judy walked quickly to keep up with them, white robes flapping plum and pink.

  “You live on the Shawl, don’t you, Judy?” Peter said. “I checked up on you when my digital self said that you might be calling.”

  “I do,” she said. “Frances, could I have a word, please?”

  “I’ll wait for you inside. Come right in when you’re ready. Frances can find the way.” Peter walked into the building.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Frances, brushing a ragged splinter of rose wood from Judy’s shoulder.

  Judy stared up at her. “I don’t understand what’s going on here,” she whispered. “That man is a hero. Have you accessed the records?”

  “I have,” Frances said.

  “That security net took him apart, Frances. It spread his body out across a planet, and it let him watch it all happen. Unpeeled his skin, spread out his lungs, sliced open his intestines and dropped them in a bath of nutrient. And then it just looked at him. He lay alone on a planet, far from anywhere, with an insane security net observing him. Every part of his being was under its gaze, and it let him know everything it was doing. He went insane.”

  “But the EA healed him.”

  “And I can feel the mend in his mind, Frances. I can feel where the fracture was. It’s…not nice.”

  “I feel your pain, Judy.”

  “I wonder if you can empathize with it, though.” Judy blinked. There was no one around, nothing but grey buildings and rough green grass. She put one hand to her head for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” Frances reached out to hold her friend’s hand. There was a moment’s peace, then Judy regained her composure.

  “Someone is playing games with us, Frances. What are we doing here? Whatever this man did in the past, he has atoned for his crimes. The EA knows that. It’s all in its report.”

  “I know,” Frances said. “And it’s worse than that. The EA put his mind back together. They must have had a complete map of his past to have done that. They would have known everything about his involvement with the Private Network. Why didn’t they do anything about that then?”

  “I don’t know about then,” said Judy. “But I’m starting to think they’re doing something now. Frances, the AI that interrogated Peter left his signature on the report: serial ident, VRep, image, and nomenclature. Frances, it was that stealth robot, Chris. It was Chris who interrogated him after he was rescued from the Enemy Domain.”

&
nbsp; Frances paused, accessing the records herself.

  “I see,” she said. “Judy, this is not about the Private Network, is it? We’re being deliberately led along a trail.”

  “And it’s all to do with this man Justinian. The man the Watcher murdered-supposedly murdered.” Judy looked up at the cruel spike of the cannon on the roof of the nearby building. It reminded her of the imminent demise of her own section of the Shawl. “Maybe it’s the pill,” she said, “but I can’t help feeling that events seem to be converging. I’m suffused in Blue, Frances. The world looks like a whirlpool and we’re caught in the outermost currents. I can see a funnel and it’s leading down to somewhere we don’t want to go.” Judy shook her head; she wasn’t making a lot of sense, even to herself.

  Frances spoke. “You’re overdoing the MTPH, Judy. You need to give yourself time to come down. You’re getting feedback on your own neuroses.”

  Judy took hold of Frances’ arm for support and allowed herself a moment of weakness. She blinked. Grey buildings marched in ranks into the distance. A pastel violet wall stood behind her.

  “It’s passing, Frances,” she said. “The geometry of these buildings doesn’t help. This doesn’t make sense. Why should Chris be leading us down a path to Justinian when he knows that the Watcher must be able to see our every move? Anyway, I thought Chris was working for the Watcher.”

  “He never actually said that,” the robot said, obviously replaying the conversation in her head. “Maybe he just let us believe that.”

  The dizziness was passing. For the moment.

  “Maybe the best thing for now is to keep following the path. But with caution. There was nothing about Peter Onethirteen being marooned in Judy Three’s report. Didn’t she check up on all the other instances of Peter Onethirteen’s consciousness?”

  Judy took a deep breath and straightened up and gazed at nothing in particular.

  “That’s Judy Three,” she said. “It would be just like her to get caught up in observing the PC in front of her and not think to check on all the others. I wonder about her sometimes, Frances. She shows no emotion, even to herself. She’s locked herself up so completely that only her eyes move as she looks out into the world.” She reeled a little. “Did I say that?” She shook her head. “Look, I’m ready. Let’s go inside.”

  She was lying, and they both knew it. She felt terrible. MTPH had never been like this before.

  Under the influence of blue MTPH, the world suddenly seemed very big to Judy. Big and anthropomorphic. The doorway to Peter’s apartment block opened like a mouth to allow her in. She walked along a corridor where the doors throbbed in their frames, almost too big to be contained, held in place by the pressure of the emotions that were welling up in the enclosed apartments beyond. Judy waded through the yellow and red mist that seeped into the corridor from the living spaces, sending eddies of it spinning with her bare feet. The gravity tube that connected to other floors was a hungry throat opened up, ready to gulp them down; the descending ramp that curved through ninety degrees to merge with the exotically hooped tunnel was a memory of a summer’s day. And now she was getting her emotions and memories mixed. This wasn’t right: what was in that little blue pill? Judy was suffering total synaesthesia.

  She was following Peter and Frances down into the earth, her bare feet pulling up bubbles of cosmic force as she lifted them from the rubbery surface of the gravity tube. No. That wasn’t real; that was an imagined sensation. She could tell the real ones. See the way that Peter was looking at Frances. That was real. The robot was drawing his eyes, just like this tube was pulling Judy’s feet to its perpendicular surface. They had put exotic material on spaceships, on the Shawl, and now they put it in apartment blocks so they could fit more people into their exotic geometries.

  Two joggers ran past; she felt their glow of sweat and exertion as they raced for the surface. That was real. Now they were turning through ninety degrees again until they were hanging like flies from the ceiling of the world. That was real.

  Frances surreptitiously took Judy’s arm as they entered Peter’s living room. The robot guided her unsteady friend to a chair and helped her to sit down.

  “That’s interesting,” Frances said, pointing to the dark cinder of a fir cone that stood in the center of the room.

  Peter smiled.

  “It’s a venumb from the Enemy Domain,” he explained.

  “It looks dead to me,” Frances said.

  “It would.” Peter smiled. “That venumb spread itself right through the Enemy Domain. I’ve got no idea how it got its seeds into space, but once they did, those little cones could survive the burn of reentry.”

  Judy stared at the dark cinder. A ghost of a life flickered inside it as Peter spoke. She wanted to ask him a question, but she felt too sick. That venumb came from another planet? It fell to Earth from space?

  Frances was turning something up: not the volume of her speech, but something in its modulation. “How did you find it?” The words seemed to float across the room in shimmering vermilion letters… How did you find it…

  “Deductive reasoning,” Peter replied. “I guessed that if those venumbs could spread themselves unnoticed through the Enemy Domain, they could make it down to Earth. After that it was just a question of interrogating the public databases.”

  “That would take an elegant search routine.”

  Frances wasn’t actually speaking to Peter, Judy realized. She was calibrating herself to him, adjusting her outputs to the optimum levels to appeal to him. Judy could read the feedback loop between Peter and the robot as Frances’ intentions converged with Peter’s fascination.

  “It worked,” Peter said.

  “You’re interested in other forms of life?” Frances teased.

  From her viewpoint on the couch, Peter was standing still, but the room rotated ninety degrees around him. That made sense to Judy’s drug-altered perceptions; after all, wasn’t Peter the center of their little world at the moment? If his feelings realigned, then Judy and Frances would realign themselves around him.

  “I want to know where they come from,” Peter said. There was a motor running inside him, driving him forward. Judy could see it: silver pistons and black rods. It ran on redcurrant jelly. She shook her head. Peter was speaking. “Those spider bushes we saw, they come from the Russian Free States. What is driving the world to evolve in those new directions? Have you heard the rumors of the origin of the Watcher? The Watcher believes itself to be of extraterrestrial origin. It thinks it is the product of an intergalactic computer virus that settled in the computers of Earth in the early twenty-first century.”

  “I have heard that,” Frances said. The buttons between her legs seemed to be protruding a little further than normal. Peter had noticed that; his gaze was leading Judy’s there.

  “There are venumbs all through the Enemy Domain. And if you look to the edge of the galaxy and what lurks there…”

  The room was a whirlpool, and the cinder was at its center, and they were all whirling towards the dark center; the seam in Peter’s brain where the EA had mended his mind was threatening to break. Judy could see it-it was stretching-but she had to know…

  “What’s at the edge of the galaxy, Peter? What is out there?”

  Frances put her hand on Peter’s shoulder. “I think you should sit down, Peter,” she said. “Tell me about the cinder. Has it shown any sign of germinating?”

  “No,” Peter replied, reeling back from the edge. He was looking at Frances. Looking at the buttons between her legs. “I can’t figure out the mechanism.”

  “You surprise me. I think you know an awful lot about machines…”

  Peter looked at her. “I can make them sing,” he whispered.

  The golden robot took his hand. “Do you think you could make me sing?”

  Judy looked at Frances. She hadn’t said those words. She was doing something to her body, to her voice. Judy knew that robots played with humans, that they could influence
their emotions and reactions, but she had never really seen it happen so overtly.

  “What’s at the edge of the galaxy, Peter?” she asked again. Beneath the veneer of that white face, she was flesh and blood, and she too was responding to whatever Frances was doing to Peter. It was distracting her. “What’s out there, Peter?”

  “I don’t know…but you hear things. I was marooned on that planet for three months. I was…It gives you a different perspective. We live with the EA, and we’re robbed of our volition, but in a kind way. At least we are left with the illusion of free will. Down there on that planet, I was fixed in place by total observation. No illusions-just me and that insane security net looking down at me all the time. Nowhere to hide. I suppose it was just like what I did to those people in that pirate processing space.”

  Judy was biting back bile; black bubbles of oily goo were expanding in her stomach, rising up her throat. Black bubbles were spilling from Peter’s mouth. None of it real. All the bad things that needed to be said.

  “Is it true?” she asked. “Do you really claim to understand what you did?”

  “He’s telling the truth,” Frances said, and she sat down on the floor in front of Peter and opened her legs. This is what sex is all about, she said. This is the essence. Never mind the window dressing, the curve of a neck or the sight of a nipple, pink and erect with excitement, the smell of…

  Judy shook her head, trying to disentangle what was real from the piped stream of MTPH.

  But what is real, Judy? Your extra senses give you another window on reality-or is that a window to another reality? I can see in infrared, or track your passage through the disturbance of magnetic fields. Which is the “real” view?

  “Frances, is that you?” Judy asked.

  …because I’ve removed the physicality from sex, Peter. With me you get to just concentrate on the mental. My body is smooth and cold. You can’t arouse yourself on anything but my mind. Sex is reduced to nothing more than pressing a series of buttons-but you’d be amazed at the variety that I still experience. Do you think that you’re up to it, Peter? All you can do is enter numbers. Can you tease me? Can you arouse me that way, just by using your mind? Can we have foreplay?