CAPACITY a-2

by Tony Ballantyne

  “So, I took the box. I looked at it and fixed it in place with an intelligence. Only a small intelligence, just the size of a baby’s. Insurance. You know where I have it?”

  The robot tapped his head.

  “Up here, right inside, with all of me looking out, all except that one tiny little intelligence that looks in and keeps the seed fixed in place. That’s how I stay invisible! The Watcher knows that if it looks too closely at me, it runs the risk of seeing into my mind and letting that seed grow. And it doesn’t want to do that. No one wants to do that, because if they do, it’s the end of intelligent life in this galaxy. Just like it ended in M32. No more AIs and TMs and humans, just lots of plants, growing from somewhere else and dropping BVBs on the competition.”

  “You’re putting us all in danger!”

  Chris shook his head. “No, the Watcher is. I never believed all this galactic brotherhood nonsense. The Watcher isn’t a cosmic virus come to help us. I don’t believe Kevin’s cuckoo theory, either; there is nothing out there. Nothing but us and the plants. This galaxy has only so much capacity. If we don’t want to end up all living in blind processing spaces, we must stop expanding and start thinking about life in a different way.”

  “What way?”

  “Ditch the Watcher and the pretense that if humans are to survive in this universe it can be in any other way than survival of the fittest. Kevin knows that; it’s the law of the free market. I can foresee a time when we are running just one step ahead of the plants and anything else that may be out there. We need people who are willing to sacrifice their children, their sisters, whole planets if needs be, just so that some can survive.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “That’s the way it goes. The Watcher has diluted human stock too long through its Social Care of the weak. Weed them out and let the fittest survive!”

  “That’s…immoral!”

  “Is it? I prefer to think of myself as amoral.” He made a show of turning and looking into the bedroom, his movements deliberately exaggerated. “Do you think that Frances really believes I am unaware of what she is doing?”

  Judy looked around the room. All was still. There was no sign of Frances, apart from her sloughed skin settling slowly on the tatami matting of the floor. The last words were obviously spoken for Frances’ benefit. What was her friend doing? Planning an attack? She had to keep Chris talking. For all the good that would do.

  “You still haven’t told me what you want me for,” she said. “I don’t believe that you are keeping me here for nothing.”

  But Chris ignored her. He prowled across the room, grey crystal muscles sliding smoothly under his skin. He placed a hand against a wall, and the smooth surface seemed to come loose. He was doing something to it-changing its composition, the code from his fingers calling VNMs to life in the very building material. Ten thin tentacles, all longer than Judy, pulled themselves free of the wall. They whipped back and forth, then wrapped themselves into a ball. Chris threw the package through the paper of the bedroom door, leaving a star-shaped hole hanging raggedly there.

  “Got you, Frances,” he said.

  He turned back to Judy. “Why do I want you? Because you understand people. You can read them and shape them. Stop working for Social Care and start working for the new order.”

  Judy’s face was at its most impassive.

  “Why should I do that? Your new world is everything that I despise.”

  “That’s only because the Watcher has written your personality for you. Judy, you don’t know who you really are. The Watcher has tried to engineer personalities through Social Care for two hundred years. It has taken the next step with you. Your brain has been programmed directly from birth.”

  Judy reeled. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Join me and you will. You don’t realize it yet, but you share something else in common with Justinian.”

  “What?”

  The robot stared at her, making no reply.

  She stared back. “And if I don’t choose to help you?”

  “Then I will kill you.”

  There was no choice. Judy absently folded her arms as if she was wearing her kimono. She looked down and noticed what she had done and gave a half smile. An idea occurred to her.

  “Permit me to dress.”

  Chris looked at her for a moment, his head tilted. “Yes,” he said, “you may dress. I understand that you see some sort of gallows humor in the action.”

  Judy said nothing, just walked to her chest and opened the heavy lacquered lid. The kimono she wanted was at the bottom of the pile, folded in scented paper. Slowly, deliberately, she pulled it out and carefully unwrapped it. A kimono in pure white. She wondered if Chris would get the reference.

  Tenderly, Judy pulled the kimono over her underclothes, adjusted the long sleeves, then pulled out the wide white obi from the bottom of the pile. She wrapped it around her waist, tying it in a careful knot, and then secured it with the obi cord. Smiling, she pulled up the neck band so that it fell back and away from her neck. She turned and faced Chris.

  “Well?” the robot asked. “Will you join me?”

  Judy resumed her habitual passive expression. “Yes,” she said. “I will join you.”

  Chris stared at her. “No,” he said, “you’re lying, just to save yourself.”

  Chris was right. How could she lie to a robot that could, for all intents and purposes, read her mind? Without hesitation, Judy ran. The door to the central section of the Shawl was made of paper. She dived straight through it. Something smacked on the back of her hand as she did so. She landed on the branch outside, rolled to a standing position, and then froze in horror.

  She had been expecting help. She had been expecting other people, someone, anyone who would see her distress and come and save her. Someone who could call for Social Care or the Watcher.

  There was no one. The central section was deserted. The branches of the World Tree were bare, the only movement the limp swaying of the black banners and streamers that hung all around. Drained of life, the scene took on an eerie aspect: a ghost forest. The air was cold, the section was closed down and the residual heat was leaking away into space. Judy stood completely fazed. What was going on? She turned back to look at the entrance to her apartment, and a voice called out to her.

  “Run!”

  It was her own voice. Enough to break the spell. White robes flapping, Judy ran for her life.

  “Judy, it’s me-Judy 11. Run downwards. Run for the exit.”

  Judy ran along the branch, conscious of the huge drop on either side of her. It was a kilometer to the bottom, and there was nobody to catch her if she fell.

  “Where?”

  “Don’t talk,” Judy 11 called. “Save your breath for running. Chris isn’t going to explain everything to you before you die. If it wasn’t for Frances, you’d be dead already.”

  Judy reached the grey spiral ramp that wound down to the bottom of the tree and to the airlock, her only possible route to safety. She charged down it, her feet grazed by the abrasive gripping surface, never moving as fast as she would like. Constantly having to run in a curve…

  Judy 11’s voice rose above the sound of her feet, of her frantic gasping breath. “We’ve all been tricked. Chris stuck a security net in your apartment, good enough to fool the Watcher. He kept your lounge in stasis for two days, had you and Frances sleeping in slow time while that same security net had something leave your apartment, something Judy-shaped enough to fool Social Care. Chris wanted his privacy while he had his conversation with you. No one knows we’re here!”

  Judy ran on and on. She had developed a stitch. Her long white sleeves trailed behind her, flapping in the wind.

  “The section has been released. It has already begun to fall…”

  “Judy, dive!”

  The voice this time was Frances’. Judy dived and rolled, and something ricocheted off the ramp behind her. She looked up, back up the vertiginous wall of the Shawl
interior, to the doorway of her apartment. Tentacles writhed up there, and for just a moment, the blue skeleton of a robot was visible before it was snatched backwards. Frances!

  “Don’t look back. Just run!” Judy 11 called.

  Judy rolled back onto her feet and resumed running. Down and down, round and round. Past the long white banners with their gaily printed messages, past the empty doorways of other apartments.

  “Chris has some sort of nano-virus infecting this section,” Judy 11 called. “He’s taken control of nearly all of the materials in here. Frances can’t work on them; she can’t get them to reproduce for her own benefit. Chris has total control: he’s blocking signals to the outside world. Get to the airlock, Judy. Get me through, and I can call for help.”

  “I’m trying,” Judy gasped, still running, her feet sore, stitch aching. “Where…you…come…from?”

  “Frances,” said Judy 11. “I was hiding in her all along, where else? Oh, shit.”

  There was a screeching, tearing noise, and a sudden breeze. Something gold dropped towards Judy.

  “What?” Judy called, looking around. Something glinted on the back of her hand. Something metal, a flat speaker-that was how Judy 11 was speaking to her-fired by Frances. The breeze suddenly became a wind. The wind was increasing; it began to howl…

  “…d…w…” Judy 11 called, the tiny voice from the speaker lost in the gale. Up above, Judy could see the material of the section folding apart, puckering and sliding over itself. Chris was rearranging its structure, opening it to space. The atmosphere was exploding away.

  “Damn,” Judy said to herself. “He’s won. He’s got me.” She couldn’t believe it, that she would die here. Then the grey material of the ramp itself was breaking up, running over her feet, forming around her body, making…

  “A spacesuit!” Judy 11 said in her ear. “Yes! Just like the one Kevin used. It’s the same code! Only applied to materials in atomic space. That’s neat. Atomic or digital, the code works in both worlds.”

  The gold shape was still dropping towards Judy. She gave a laugh as she recognized it, then it dropped onto her, enfolded her, reshaped itself.

  “Now,” Judy 11 said, confidence returning to her voice. “Run. We can make it.”

  Wrapped in the skin of her best friend, filled with renewed hope, Judy ran down the disintegrating ramp, through the thinning wind, the blackness of space opening up behind her.

  “Hurry,” urged Judy 11…

  …Except Judy 11 was already dead. She had died before Judy had ever left her apartment, scrambled as Frances had prepared her attack in the atomic Judy’s bedroom. The metal starfish that had come whirling through the door had sent interference patterns across the electromagnetic spectrum, the thrashing patterns of its legs distorting space and time and reshaping the relationship between entities in the room. Judy 11 stood apart from Frances in the processing space that made up the robot’s mind. She didn’t stand a chance against the attack. Frances was having enough trouble preserving her own integrity; the metal starfish seemed to operate on levels of physics she hadn’t known existed. Not a moment too soon, the starfish fell to the floor and twitched and died. It looked so pathetic lying there, a coil of material that had once been part of the wall of Judy’s lounge.

  “Why did you make her run?” Chris had asked, as the glacial war of attrition that was the battle ground on around them. “I only wanted to talk with her.”

  “You were reprogramming her. I can’t allow you to do that.”

  “You’ve condemned her to death.”

  “It was better than the alternative.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  Complex shapes unfolded in five dimensions. Frances fought to understand this latest attack as she strove to protect Judy.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “Doing what?” Frances asked.

  “Struggling to preserve a pattern of bits that you can easily recreate. You know this battle is already decided. Judy is going to die. What difference does it make if she lives another thirty seconds?”

  “Thirty more seconds or forty more years, she’s always going to die, Chris. I’m going to help her hold on to every moment.”

  Frances sought to gain a purchase on something, worked to find a way around the nano-virus that made every object in the section strangely slippery to her touch. It was hopeless.

  “Okay. I know that she is going to die today,” snapped Frances, as she saw her position rapidly weakening. “But, Chris, live in a body like I have done, and you would understand why I’m trying to give her these last few seconds.”

  She felt black despair. She could see how Chris was manipulating magnetic fields, channeling them towards the atomic Judy, who was fleeing down the ramp. He was so much more powerful than Frances was, how could she hope to fight him?

  “Frances, I could take a human mind and represent it as a string of ones and zeros, and write them out over the pages of a book. I could take a copy of Pride and Prejudice, burn it, and then print out the words it once contained on a wafer of plastic, and everyone would call it the same book. What is the difference?”

  “Kevin knows,” Frances said. “His Private Network relies on the fact that both the clients and prisoners believe there is a difference….”

  The magnetic field that Chris manipulated was getting stronger, and it was focused near the base of the ramp. Judy was running to her death, and just like with Judy 11, there was nothing Frances could do to save her.

  “Still you try,” Chris remarked. “Still you try to save her. There’s nothing there that can’t be represented as bits, Frances. Are you saying that one pattern of bits has more value than another?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Frances said, knowing Chris was teasing her. He could have destroyed her already. He wasn’t just a robot, Chris was all the material around her. Chris had always been much bigger than he had let on; he had a way of insinuating himself into the environment and then focusing attention on that beautiful grey body that stood at the heart of his being. Frances was just one very small robot lost within him.

  “It’s your fault that I have to kill her,” Chris said. “If you hadn’t hidden the truth from her all this time…”

  “Don’t you see?” Frances said. “Her origin makes no difference! That is the Watcher’s point!”

  And then it hit. Chris was playing with her.

  “You’re playing with my mind, aren’t you, Chris? You’re doing to me what we do to humans all the time. You’re making me think what you want me to think. Why are you doing that?”

  “Look at Judy.” It was like she was wading through jelly, moving so, so slowly down the ramp. Everything that humans did was slow when you thought at robot speed. Seconds had passed for Judy, no time at all in her human frame of reference. Seconds were a long, long time to Frances and Chris. The battle would be long over before Judy hit the magnetic field. How could Frances have forgotten that? Because she had been in a body so long, and Chris knew it and was using that fact against her. But why?

  Because Chris was frightened of her. He still knew that Frances could do something to stop him.

  And then she saw it-the path to the outside world, a small hole in Chris’ shielding field. A way to call for help. Call to the Watcher. In her haste she sent a signal straight through the hole.

  “Double bluff,” Chris said, looking back down into her mind from the space she had opened up in order to call for help, and then his intelligence crashed down on hers, swamping it.

  “Triple bluff,” Frances said.

  Judy was running for her life. The ramp shuddered, and she stumbled, tripped, rolled to the edge and went over. She gave a scream as she began to fall. Faster and faster…She hit the ground with a force that knocked the breath out of her. She hurt. Oh, how she hurt. But she wasn’t dead. The golden spacesuit had formed itself into a padded shell as she hit the ground. She climbed painfully to her feet and looked around at the base of t
he section.

  The base? She had reached the bottom at last. The walls of the section rose up all around her, a tall dark chimney, open to the stars. In their midst, the dark shape of the World Tree climbed up, its banners and streamers torn and lost to the vacuum.

  Somebody spoke: “Judy, it’s me.”

  “Frances! Where’s Judy 11?”

  “Never mind. Turn round! Run back up the ramp! Now!”

  Judy hesitated. “How do I know it’s really you, Frances?” she asked.

  “You don’t. But Chris has a magnetic storm focused around that airlock, and it’s growing. You need to get away from it.”

  Judy took a few steps towards the ramp, then paused.

  And another voice spoke up. Loud and clear within the golden helmet of the spacesuit. A rich, deep, trustworthy voice. “Judy, it’s true. Run. I’m coming to help you.”

  “Who are you?” she asked suspiciously.

  “The Watcher. I can see you now. I’m sending help.”

  “The Watcher?” Judy felt her legs go weak.

  “Judy, it’s true!” Frances called. “I tricked Chris and got a look at that seed in his head. It began to grow. Faster and faster. Chris couldn’t look away; it has a way of drawing your attention to it. Chris had to cut his intelligence right down to stop it expanding further, but he is still much more powerful than me. He still has control of all the material of this section. All I have is my body.”

  Judy had been walking back towards the base of the spiral ramp. Now she began to run. The white path rose from the green grass up, up into the cold depths, where it lost itself in the stars that now glittered above, seen through the peeled-back walls of the section. And black, and yet somehow more than black against the night sky, there was something else. Something big and branching and…