CAPACITY a-2

by Tony Ballantyne

  Something similar appeared to have happened to Jenny Cook. For the past three months she had been conducting an affair, mainly in her own mind. Someone had been meeting her for drinks, but never the same person twice. Her memory had been carefully edited using psychological programs on the memory wafers, their effect augmented by spiked drinks.

  “Where are they getting this technology from?” asked one Social Care operative in frustration.

  “The military, rival companies. Government agencies like us can’t fight that sort of thing.”

  A heartbeat, and then the world changed.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure…” another said. His face was lit up with pleasure and disbelief. All this time waiting and believing, and now his faith was justified. The proof was here on the screen. This was where the individual started to fight back.

  “Look,” he croaked, then he swallowed hard. “Just look at this. I’ve heard the rumors, but I didn’t believe them. Not until now.”

  On the screen before him the indicator displaying available processing space was increasing rapidly. Something or someone out there was lending them a hand.

  “What’s going on?” someone asked.

  No one said anything. No one back then really believed in the Watcher. No one wanted to be the first to say the name.

  On the train, meanwhile, Jenny Cook was approaching her destination. The Lite train was decelerating as it neared the station built into the basement of the Berliner Sibelius building.

  On the pavement above, James Sheldon-Eva Rye’s partner-was walking to work.

  Judy awoke with a start. She was drifting in and out of consciousness. She had dreamed that she was really there, in that room with Social Care. She had been Jenny Cook, riding on that very train. Too much MTPH spilling over into her dreams, putting flesh on the false memories she had picked up from books and lectures.

  James Sheldon? He had been Eva Rye’s husband-killed by the bomb that Jenny Cook was carrying. Eva Rye had blamed the Watcher. Hadn’t she met the Watcher? Hadn’t she answered its questions, helped it to shape the world? It had led her to believe it was all-powerful.

  So when her husband had died, she had naturally assumed the death was intentional. The Watcher killed my husband. No. Not my husband. I’m Judy, not Eva. I never married. I’m a virgin. Why is that?

  Frances, she called. Her friend didn’t come. Why not? Because she was dreaming again. She had called out in the dream world, not the atomic world.

  Judy was standing in an entertainment room. Everything looked so old-fashioned, centuries out of date. There was a viewing screen in front of her, but it was a physical device fixed to the wall, incapable of being resized or moved. The carpet beneath her bare feet seemed thicker, somehow more substantial.

  She was pregnant. Her belly swelled so much that she had placed her hand in the small of her back for support. I’m not Eva, thought Judy. I’m dreaming this. What am I trying to do…justify Justinian’s murder?

  There was a man on the screen before her. He was speaking to her.

  “I told you that, Eva: the computer built into the bomb was tracking Jenny’s progress. If the train had deviated from its course, if it had stopped unexpectedly, then the bomb would have detonated. There were over fifty people on that train.”

  Judy looked at the man on the screen.

  “Who are you?”

  “Who am I?” the man scoffed. “Stop playing games, Eva.”

  It was the Watcher. Judy knew it. What was going on here? Before she knew what she was doing, Judy began to speak. But the voice and words weren’t hers, they were Eva’s. “There were over three hundred killed in the lobby of the DIANA building. One of them was James.”

  The Watcher was exasperated.

  “I’m sorry. What could I do? I didn’t know how it would end. I thought I was making the right decision at the time. With hindsight-”

  “With hindsight I should never have had anything to do with you.”

  The words came unbidden to Eva’s lips. Judy felt a strong wave of approval at what she was saying.

  The Watcher was indignant. “You don’t mean that. Everything that I’ve done is only because of what you told me to do. I thought you’d be happy-”

  “Happy!” Eva shouted. “Happy! How dare you tell me how to be happy?” She was screaming now.

  The Watcher braced himself against the glass of the screen, his face flushed. “You think that you have got the right to be angry?” he shouted. “How dare you!”

  “How dare I?” Eva asked, choking with indignation. “How dare I?”

  The Watcher banged the inside of the screen with one hand and shook his head. He wore the appearance of a good-looking young man. But the Watcher would always choose how he presented himself.

  “How dare I? How dare I?” mimicked the young man behind the screen. “It always comes back to you, doesn’t it, Eva Rye? Or Eva Storey-or whatever you’ve decided to call yourself this week. Seven billion people on this planet experience setbacks and losses every day of their lives, and they just grit their teeth and start again. And then there’s you, sobbing your little heart out here in luxury. At least James left you well cared for. That’s better than most people in this world can expect. What makes you think you’ve got the right to a perfect life? That’s why you’re always so bloody miserable. Listen, doll. Shit happens. Get used to it.”

  Judy/Eva was momentarily taken aback. Then her anger cut in.

  “Shit happens, does it? Shit happens? That would be a lot more convincing coming from someone who didn’t claim that he was here to sort things out for us, that he was going to make the world a better place.”

  “These things take time,” the Watcher sneered.

  “How much time? You sound like a politician. You claim you’re going to make things better, and then when they don’t you just stand there saying shit happens. You’re pathetic, hiding behind your screen. You step out into the real world and see what it’s like out here, and then you tell me that shit happens.”

  The Watcher’s anger vanished, replaced by a nasty smile. He was standing in a blue-lit empty room, cuboidal except for two dents in the floor at the back. The picture on the screen gave the impression that he was leaning against a sheet of glass, as if he was trying to press through into Eva’s world.

  “Me step out there? You couldn’t handle it if I did, love.”

  Eva laughed. “Don’t make empty threats, love,” she countered. Judy silently applauded through her fear.

  The Watcher laughed coldly in return.

  “Empty threats?” he said. “Ah…”

  He reached out a hand to the glass and touched it with one finger. Judy/Eva could see his fingertip flatten; see the whorls of fingerprint clearly through the glass; see the whiteness of the skin around it where the blood had been displaced. And then the whiteness returned to pink, and the finger seemed to resume its shape. Judy/Eva gave a gasp as it appeared on her side of the screen. A finger sliding from the world of bits into the world of atoms.

  “Look what I can do,” the Watcher crooned.

  Now his hand was through the glass, and then his arm, clad in a dark grey sleeve. The Watcher stepped into the real world.

  “No, you can’t,” Eva said, and she waved her arm right through his suit jacket. She saw her hand, pink and fluttering, within the grey ghost of his body. “You’re not really here, are you? This is just an illusion, like everything else about you.”

  “It’s an illusion at the moment, Eva. Give me five more years and I’ll walk this Earth in a human body. Will you recognize me then?”

  Judy/Eva felt a cold little fist of fear tighten in her stomach. The baby kicked hard.

  “Yes, I will,” she said. In her dream Judy echoed the words.

  “We both know that you’re bluffing.”

  The baby kicked again; Eva put one hand to her stomach.

  “Stop it,” she said. “You’re upsetting my baby.”

  The Watcher fold
ed his arms. Silently, Eva did the same.

  “You know that you’re upsetting me,” she said. “And you’re doing it deliberately. I can’t stop myself getting angry; you’re just too good at it.”

  The Watcher chuckled delightedly.

  “Oh it’s true, Eva. It’s true.”

  “I don’t know what you want with me this time.” She squared up to the Watcher. “What do you want?”

  “I just want to help you, Judy.”

  Judy? Did the Watcher just say Judy? It was Eva who answered.

  “You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

  The Watcher leaned forward and tried to take Eva’s hand in his transparent grasp. She pointedly kept it still, so that his hand passed straight through hers. He gave a little shrug at her recalcitrance.

  “I do this so I can see the real Eva. She’s so wrapped up in herself that it’s only when she’s angry her true character shines through.”

  In her dream Judy froze. She had the feeling that the last words weren’t actually directed at Eva. They were spoken to her. Eva, too, seemed to sense that something was amiss.

  “Stop it,” Eva said hesitantly. “Don’t speak about me as if I wasn’t here.”

  The Watcher continued, ignoring her: “She doesn’t want to be comforted. She wants to feel sorry for herself. It’s the template of her life.”

  “What is the matter with you? Why are you being so childish?” Eva asked.

  The Watcher spun around and threw up his hands.

  “You started it! James’s death was just unfortunate. Next time I’ll know to blow the train instead. Next time I’ll put the good of the many before the few. That’s right, isn’t it, Eva?”

  “Yes!”

  — That’s right, isn’t it, Judy?

  “But that’s next time!” The Watcher continued. “James was unfortunate-that’s all there is to it. You know it, but you just haven’t faced up to it yet!”

  “Yes, I have!” screamed Eva, then stopped in surprise as she heard what she had just said. The Watcher’s temper evaporated immediately. He stepped back into his screen, pulled a cord hanging from the ceiling, and the screen turned off.

  The baby kicked again.

  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.

  Frances was in the room, coming towards the bed.

  “Judy, they’re all dying!”

  Justinian 5: 2223

  In his dream his wife sat up and looked around, blinking. She saw Justinian standing by her sepal bed, and she gave him a slow, sleepy smile.

  “Hello, Justy,” she said. “I feel so…”

  Justinian hugged her close. He was crying; he buried his face in her sweet hair.

  “Justy,” she said, “I understand now. Listen, it’s all about who you are.”

  He kissed her gently on the cheek and looked into her half-closed eyes.

  “Who I am?” he asked.

  She tilted her head, listening to something.

  “Isn’t that Jesse?” she murmured.

  Justinian strained to hear. He could hear a noise faintly in the distance.

  Anya kissed him softly on the lips. “Soon,” she said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “What?”

  Justinian was woken by the sound of the baby crying. He felt a wave of sadness at the loss of his dream, which was quickly overtaken by annoyance at Leslie. Couldn’t the robot hear that the child was distressed and obviously had been so for some time? If he felt unable to deal with the boy himself, why hadn’t he woken Justinian?

  Justinian had been sleeping in a flight chair. For some reason it hadn’t been properly collapsed to form a bed. His right side ached where he had been pressed against it. He pushed himself clear of the seat and began to massage his aching arm. A sense of wrongness began to descend upon him. The flier was absolutely still. Absolutely. But it was filled, not with the stillness of a ship at rest, but with the stillness of an empty swimming pool. All the life had been drained from it. Even the increasingly frantic screams of his son seemed flat in the hollow air. Warily, he picked up the baby from the orange checked carpet and began to rock him on his shoulder.

  “Hey there, baby boy, it’s okay. Hey there. Hey.”

  There was no sound except that of the two human beings: breathing and sobbing and the movement of skin against a passive suit. The ever-present hum of the engines and life systems was gone. The door to the flight deck was closed, he noticed. Justinian glanced back at his flight chair and frowned. What had he been doing there anyway? He didn’t remember going to sleep. He remembered David Schummel being on board the ship, and the baby staring at the Schrödinger box and fixing it in place for the first time. Leslie the robot had got very excited at that point. Or had he? What had happened next? The baby was still crying, his mouth open wide, little pink tongue sticking out. He scrabbled at Justinian’s face, sharp nails catching his cheek.

  “Ow!” Justinian held the boy away. “Hey, careful, little boy. I know you’re upset. How long were you left alone for? Where’s Leslie? Where is that lazy robot?”

  Now that he asked the question, Justinian’s sense of unease deepened still further. Where was Leslie?

  Memories awoke in his mind: Leslie politely convincing David Schummel to leave the ship. Yes. Schummel had gone, hadn’t he? Or was it only with a struggle? Leslie had bundled him out of the door into the snow-filled darkness and then raised the ramp. There had been an argument, another one, with Justinian shouting at the robot. In the middle of that he had lost his temper and ordered the ship to take off. They were flying to the source of the secondary infection, still quarreling, and then…Then what? Justinian looked around the ship.

  They had been flying, he recalled, but Leslie wouldn’t leave him alone. He kept on nagging: how far were they going to travel? Justinian had wanted to fly all the way to the secondary infection that the pod had opened up. But Leslie thought otherwise, and how they had shouted at each other! Justinian’s memories were in angry orange seared across a black background. Orange. Always orange. Leslie had postured and shouted and Justinian had stubbornly folded his arms and turned his back, and all the time they had flown on and on.

  How close did they get to the secondary infection?

  They had landed, he was sure of that. They must have; he couldn’t hear the engines. So where were they? The viewing fields had gone, along with the rest of the ship’s power. The windows had been set completely opaque.

  He finally spotted Leslie. The robot was lying on the floor, a fuzzy grey blur between two rows of seats. The fractality of his skin had been turned up. The eyes, the ears, the flatness of the palms, every defining feature of the robot had been lost as the blurred region of his skin had leaked out to fill the space amid the seats. The robot was now a grey fluffy slick seeping across the orange floor: deaf, blind, and mute. Had Leslie done that to himself?

  That thought triggered the final memory from before Justinian’s blackout. It was after the argument had finally blown itself out in an unhappy compromise: to fly to within half a kilometer of the source and then put down.

  They weren’t speaking. Justinian had been sitting up straight in his chair, taking little sips from a glass of iced water, gazing straight ahead at nothing, while Leslie paced up and down the orange-carpeted floor. The robot had jerked to full alertness. One hand was raised; his head spun towards Justinian.

  “Too soon!” the robot called. Its voice modulated down an octave; it spoke in electronic tones: “Sleep, Justinian…”

  And Justinian remembered folding his arms beneath his head as he tumbled into sleep.

  “Ship! What is going on?” he called out, voice dying in the odd stillness. It was as if something outside was listening so intently that it swallowed up all sound.

  The baby wouldn’t stop crying. His son was hungry, he realized. The baby needed feeding. How long had he slept?

  “Ship!”
Justinian called with renewed urgency. “Ship! Speak to me!” His tenderness towards his child was in inverse proportion to his disgust at those who had marooned him here on Gateway. How would he get out if there was no intelligence to open the door for him? How long would it be before he starved to death?

  “Ship!”

  There was a message written on the carpet.

  It had been there all along, nagging at his subconscious. The orange and black checks of the carpet pattern had moved themselves around to spell out a message. Justinian went to the beginning of it, just by the door into the flight deck, and began to walk backwards down the length of the ship reading the letters that were spelled out in eight-by-eight patterns of squares.

  Justinian. This is the ship.

  I’ve had to shut down all my senses. Leslie has had to do the same. He’s still fully conscious in there, but he has no contact with the outside world, or at least I hope he doesn’t. If he becomes aware of anything outside the flier, he will have to switch himself off. Look at him.

  Justinian was keeping pace with the message, retreating down the cabin as he read. The words now brought him level with the robot. He looked again at the silver-grey blur. There was no sign of life, no indication if what lay inside the fractal region was conscious or not.

  He resumed his walking and reading.

  We flew too close, Justinian. The Turing machine that maps my mind may be nowhere near as powerful as the polynetworks to be found in an AI pod, but it is shutting itself down nonetheless as this subroutine rearranges the carpet structure. It will take you two months to walk to safety from here, but I can’t send a distress signal. I can’t bring another ship here to die like me. I’m sorry.

  “The shuttle!” Justinian whispered. “You could have called for David Schummel and the shuttle. Why didn’t you think of that?”