CAPACITY a-2

by Tony Ballantyne

  David Schummel looked at the floor. “That’s when I had my most shameful moment. He wanted to leave the planet. He flew to the shuttle port and demanded to leave, but I persuaded him to stay. Okay, there was no way the Watcher would have let him go anyway-it controlled the hypership-but I still helped. I persuaded him to continue with his mission. And he did.

  “When I think back to that period, it seems like things started to go wrong immediately after I persuaded Justinian to stay down there. But the human mind is a dramatist: it prefers to retell stories rather than recount facts. Maybe there were more Schrödinger boxes around after that, maybe the BVBs did settle more often, but I doubt it. How can we really tell? Here, in our world, we would ask an AI to mine the archives, but there were no AIs on Gateway.

  “My memory tells me that I began to suspect the truth then.

  “All that time I traveled up to the hypership and back again, I took the occasional sortie in a flier. I listened in to Justinian’s progress-we all did. I don’t think he realized that robot was transmitting everything that occurred on his flier to the rest of Gateway. Insurance, I suppose. If anything went wrong, we’d all know about it, and maybe we could avoid making the same mistakes.

  “And then we heard it: the final link in the chain. One of the half-dead AIs gave Justinian the location of something-a secondary infection. Somewhere on the planet there was an effect just like the one that got sealed off in the Bottle, but this time it had been left out in the open.

  “Justinian was told not to get too close to it, but he wasn’t listening. He couldn’t hear anything by that point. He was so confused by Leslie’s manipulations, he didn’t really know what he was thinking. And I don’t think Leslie was exactly sane at that point, either. He was shutting himself down bit by bit, trying to save his mind, trying to avoid seeing what it was that the other AIs had seen.

  “So Justinian began flying towards the source of the trouble. He was going to land there in a flier that was carrying the most powerful AI remaining on the planet-Leslie. We had to stop him. We held an emergency conference on what to do. It turned out there was no choice: I was the only one that could reach him in time. As it was, I had to take the shuttle practically up into orbit so as to intercept him. I burned a path down through the atmosphere, just in time to make it onto his flier.

  “I know what I said earlier, about the mind dramatizing events, but I know what I saw on that ship, and I’m certain of this. There were definitely more Schrödinger boxes than ever before. They were sleeting through that ship. Leslie was looking at me all the time I was speaking to Justinian. That robot was trying to tell me something; it was putting ideas in my head. Don’t ask me how. Body language, telepathy? Oh, you’re a member of Social Care; you know how it’s done. But I was speaking to Justinian and the robot was looking straight at me and I looked at the cubes, and that’s when I started to think about their shape, because of course they weren’t cubes. They were trapezoidal. They looked like sweet corn. Leslie was staring at the cubes, looking at the sweet corn that the baby was having for dinner. You know, I swear that robot served up sweet corn deliberately, just to lead me to the conclusion it wanted me to reach. I knew what those cubes were.”

  “What?” Judy asked. “What?”

  David licked his lips. “I need to explain. Look, you know how plants have evolved to use their environment in order to propagate? Sycamores use the wind to spread their seeds. Flowers attract insects to spread their pollen. Apple trees grow fruit that is intended to be eaten by animals, then they use the animal’s digestive system to spread their seeds. Even venumbs have adapted. Look at the spider bush.

  “Well, what if there was a plant which found its niche at the very basic level? Say it found a way to tap into quantum effects. Somehow-don’t ask me how. Its seed could move like the photon through the twin slits experiment, its position only being fixed by observation. Then, when the seed was fixed in place, it would germinate. Just like a seed won’t grow until it has the right soil, these wouldn’t grow unless the right level of intelligence existed in their surroundings. What if somewhere out there in M32 there is a plant that has learned to use intelligence to aid in its growth? If there are no intelligent observers, the seeds just blow through. But if there are…they get fixed in place, and they begin to grow…”

  Schummel’s voice trailed off. He was gazing into space, thinking.

  “Begin to grow into what?” Judy asked breathlessly.

  “I don’t know. But the AIs on Gateway obviously didn’t like what they saw. They committed suicide rather than allow more seeds to germinate. Maybe the growth was exponential. Maybe the more intelligent the observer, the more developed the growth. Does this sound far-fetched? Have you ever stood in a meadow on a summer’s day? Have you ever suffered from hay fever? Have you ever thought about the myriad seeds just sleeting through the air above the grass? What if plants could exploit space in that way?”

  He looked at Judy. “Do you understand? Do you believe me?”

  “Oh, I believe you,” Judy whispered. She was thinking of the purple venumb that had stood in Peter Onethirteen’s apartment. The one that had fallen to Earth.

  “But where do the plants come from?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Were they deliberately made, or did they naturally evolve? Are they like the venumbs: a result of out of control symbiosis? I have no idea.”

  Judy turned to her friend. “Frances, what do you think?”

  “I’m not sure. The Watcher believes there is life elsewhere. It believes it is a descendant of ET life, and yet…Where is the evidence? We have searched long and hard and found nothing. Maybe this is why: these plants are what destroyed intelligent life elsewhere. Was that deliberate? We don’t know. The very tool that makes us powerful is intelligence, and yet that is the very thing we cannot use to study our greatest threat. Every mind that is turned to contemplate these plants commits suicide.”

  Judy turned back to David. “So that is why the Watcher has kept what happened on Gateway a secret.”

  David gave a bitter laugh. “No. I don’t think so. There is more to it than that. The Watcher, the EA-they trade on trust. They want us to believe in them, in their capacity to look after us. But there is more. You didn’t see the way that robot played with Justinian on the flier. I wanted to take the baby to safety, but the robot wouldn’t let me. It hinted; it played on Justinian’s fears for his son’s safety; it made him angry so that he couldn’t think straight. And all so that it could keep the baby on board the ship.”

  His voice, his voice that had started as a murmur and increased in volume as his speech went on, was now raised in anger. It cracked as he began to shout.

  “Haven’t you realized? Justinian wasn’t the one the AIs wanted on that planet. It was the baby! All that nonsense about Justinian’s name being in the memories of the AI pods was just misdirection! The pods pretended they wanted Justinian, and then played with him to get him to bring the baby, too! I said it took intelligence to fix a seed in place. How much intelligence? How much human intelligence? When does it develop? All that maneuvering so they could get a baby at the right age to Gateway and watch as its mind developed to just the right point.

  “Back then on the flier, as soon as the baby had fixed that cube in position by looking at it, Leslie got me off that ship. I saw Justinian fly off to his death, and I listened in to what happened. They deafened him, blinded him, flayed him alive. Leslie, the EA, the Watcher, all of them sent Justinian to his death, and all so they could measure the extent of the influence of intelligence on the plant.”

  He slammed a pitiful fist down and shouted with the last of his cracked voice.

  “And that’s not all. What about the baby? It was left to die!”

  David Schummel began to cry.

  “That’s what I think of the Watcher. That’s what I think of Social Care. To it, we are all expedient. When it comes to the crunch, it will sacrifice us all, just like the Watcher sacrifi
ced a fifteen-month-old child!”

  Interlude: The Atomic Judy 4.5

  …pressing down upon her…

  Judy awoke to find herself sitting up in bed, the hot silk sheets tangled around her. Her breathing slowed as she realized she had been dreaming. Brilliant stars in black space filled the large window behind her, illuminating the simple furnishings of her room. She was safe. Still, she couldn’t help looking up to the high ceiling, just to confirm that there was no hand reaching down from there, no hand on the end of an impossibly long arm extending down to smother her.

  The idea was ridiculous, of course. Frances was in the room next door: she would have burst into the bedroom if there had been any sign of danger to Judy. The hand was just a dream, the same one she always had when she was stressed.

  She lay back in bed and meditated, slowed her heart rate and tried to drift back to sleep. It was no wonder she was tense: she was pumped up with some strange variant of MTPH which was cruelly forcing her to focus on the fact that her world was collapsing around her.

  The Watcher? She had never known quite whether she believed in the Watcher. To have its existence confirmed was a jolt to her, but to have that confirmation presented in such a skewed fashion…Surely, the Watcher was supposed to protect life! Could it possibly be true that it had deliberately sent Justinian Sibelius to his death?

  Well, maybe it could. She thought back to her own induction into Social Care. Discussions on the origin of moral values. Theories about the existence of the Watcher. The parable of Jenny Cook and Eva Rye.

  Eva Rye was a legend. Some believed in her actual existence, many more thought she was just an example of anthropomorphism. According to the story, back when the Watcher was first born, it had sought out humans to interact with. Eva Rye was the first human with whom the Watcher had properly interacted. It had therefore molded its human views upon her.

  Just as Frances had chosen to do with Judy.

  Judy’s eyes snapped open.

  Supposing Eva wasn’t a legend. Supposing she had spoken with the Watcher. The decisions Eva had then made had subsequently shaped the world.

  A cold chill settled on Judy. It was often asked: if Eva was real, then why didn’t the Watcher speak directly to people anymore? An answer had just occurred to her.

  What if it did, but most people never heard it?

  And what if she was one of those people?

  Judy awoke to find herself sitting up in bed, the silk sheets tangled around her. Her breathing slowed as she realized it was just a dream. She had dreamed that she had awoken and looked around her room. She had a headache: bad MTPH. What had Chris done to her? She felt as if she had been asleep for days.

  She shook her head. Was she really awake this time? She needed to think about something. She had almost had it then…Something about the Watcher and its true purpose. Had it really sent Justinian to his death?

  Maybe yes.

  What was that story she recalled, back from her induction into Social Care? The parable of Jenny Cook and Eva Rye.

  Jenny Cook had been a young woman of twenty-two. She worked as a sales assistant in a clothes shop. She had no current partner; she still lived with her parents in a pleasant apartment in the Bridleworth area of the North West conurbation. On the 11th of February 2056 she left her house much later than usual, at 8:20 A.M. Social Care had been noting her increasingly erratic behavior for the previous few weeks and, when it was realized she wasn’t going to work as usual that day, that had been enough to tip her case over the threshold and trigger an intervention. An investigative team arrived at her apartment at 8:30 and, under the concerned eyes of her parents, began a thorough search of the house.

  At 8:39 someone found the memory wafers in her bedside-table drawer, hidden among a pile of letters tied together with a blue ribbon. This was suspicious. Virtually nobody used wafers in 2056; everything was transferred directly by the net. Wafers that could be plugged directly into a mobile phone were used by people wanting to hide what they were doing: namely the security services, the military, big companies, and criminals. Criminals? Jenny’s parents had exchanged worried looks, but the IT specialist had provided a more comforting explanation. Sometimes they are used by lovers.

  The letters themselves provided confirmation: Jenny had a secret lover. Her parents didn’t know whether to feel pleased or sad. Why hadn’t she told them? Social Care examined the letters while the IT specialist got to work on the wafers. The reason for Jenny’s secrecy quickly became apparent. The letters suggested that Jenny was having an affair with a married man. Hence the secrecy. Hence the memory wafers. Hence the aberrant behavior.

  IT, with the aid of the SC uplink, had cracked the simple encryption routines, and a feeling of amusement and relief flooded over the SC team. No wonder Jenny’s lover had been sending her information this way, rather than directly by using the net. The wafers held pictures of Jenny and her partner. In some of them they were making love. The others showed some rather more…adventurous poses than even Social Care, no stranger to this sort of thing, had seen before.

  By 8:51 the team was beginning to relax. The parents were being comforted. The mystery was solved.

  Or was it?

  The handwriting and linguistic analysis came back, and the first cracks began to appear in the story. The analysis suggested that there was a strong probability the letters hadn’t been written by an older man at all. In all likelihood they had been written by a woman in her early thirties.

  The good-humored smiles evaporated immediately. The parents now realized there were worse things that could happen than an adventurous sex life.

  The call went out to various field teams to intercept Jenny Cook immediately just as IT noticed something odd about the intimate pictures. In one of them Jenny appeared to be missing a toe. The pictures were reexamined and everyone’s worst fears were confirmed. The pictures were fake. Jenny Cook was not having an affair at all. She only thought she was….

  The team was worried. They had heard about this sort of thing before. But it only happened in Japan, in America-not here, not in northwest England….

  This could be bad. Very bad. The police were then alerted. The checking of the wafers assumed highest priority within the Social Care processing space. All available processing power was diverted to analyzing them in detail.

  By that time Jenny Cook had visited the luggage storage lockers at the station and had boarded a Lite train. Social Care interfaced with the appropriate authorities and the police were granted immediate access to the track control system. The train was to be diverted to a siding where SC would be ready waiting, supported by an armed police team.

  And then the memory wafer’s steganography was cracked. The message went out, highest priority. Countermand the previous orders. Do not stop that train.

  Jenny Cook sat on the Lite train with a smile on her face that not even the dull clouds, drizzling grey rain over the winter city, could dampen.

  She was going to see Liam. Liam with his lazy smile and his big powerful body and his clinging wife who didn’t understand. Understanding, sexy Liam, his romantic, gentle side wasted on a frigid wife. Liam with his children that he could never leave. Liam with his active imagination and his naughty ideas.

  “My desk is bigger than your bed, Jenny,” he had said. “The window has a view over the whole city. I want to have you on that desk, Jenny.”

  “Oh, Liam, I can’t…” She couldn’t bring herself to look at him.

  “Then why are you smiling?” he asked. “Trust me; no one will disturb us. I’ll say you’re an important client. This is what you are going to do. It will be so naughty. Are you listening? I’ll leave a bag in the lockers at the Lite station. You can bring it right into the offices under everyone’s noses. Champagne, and something for you to wear…”

  As the Lite train slowed, some of the other passengers looked up. It wasn’t usual for this train to stop here…but then the driver seemed to change its mind. It picked up th
e pace, dropping into the tunnel that ran into the heart of the business zone. Jenny was tempted to open the bag and take a peek at what was inside, but she stopped herself. Liam had warned her not to.

  “What’s in there is a surprise. I want you to walk into my room without a word. I want you to stand in front of me and undress in silence. Do you think you can do that? Yes, you can. Take off your coat, and then your shoes. Unfasten your blouse and wriggle out of your skirt. I’ll just be sitting at my desk watching as you remove your bra and then slip off your panties. Just you, standing there naked. And then you unzip the bag, reach inside, and see what is in there for you to put on. I want you to walk up and down before the window, wearing it. There’ll be just you and me, and a whole office behind me and a whole city before you, not knowing what you are about to do…”

  She didn’t notice the police waiting at the back of the platforms, waiting for their instructions. She didn’t notice the cameras in the carriage turning to scan her. It was rush hour and there were fifty-four people on the Lite train with her. There were many more passengers waiting on brightly lit platforms, strung out like pearls on the dark thread of the tunnel.

  Social Care was in turmoil. IT had identified the stealth programs on the memory wafers as being similar to those used by Gaia’s Children: a terrorist group that had, until now, operated solely in Japan. Gaia’s Children targeted those companies that they believed were harming the planet in some way. Their most successful attack to date had been on the Tokyo offices of DIANA. Fourteen of the company’s middle managers had been subtly reprogrammed through a combination of drugs and hypnosis. They had all turned up at work, on the same day, carrying bombs in their briefcases.