Capacity

by Tony Ballantyne

  Justinian laughed easily. “Don’t even try to make me feel guilty, Leslie. You’ve done nothing so far but mislead me and put my child in danger. You’re damn right I don’t feel concerned about leaving.”

  “What about Anya?” Leslie asked.

  “That was a pretty low shot,” Justinian said icily.

  “Well? Can you be sure there is no connection between her and this place? What are you going to tell the baby when he grows up? Will you then explain to your son why he has no name?”

  Justinian thought about the last time he had seen his wife, laid out on the sepal of a giant flower, high above the Devolian Plain: her long hair brushed out all around her, the simple white shift that she wore, the locket at her breast containing pictures of him and the baby. And the utterly lifeless look in her eyes. Her body was alive, but her intelligence had gone.

  Justinian stared at the robot. “That’s beneath contempt,” he said, curling his lip. “You really thought that would work? I thought you could manipulate my actions better than that. All you’re doing is making me angrier.”

  He chased after the giggling baby, picked him up and swooped him further down the flier where he placed him down on the rear section of the hatch, aiming him up the carpet.

  “Okay, baby,” he said, “go!”

  Laughing, the child began to crawl back toward the robot, who seemed to be standing very, very still. Justinian was concentrating on the baby; he was elated at the thought of leaving the planet. He was only dimly aware of the fact that robots and AIs had had nearly two centuries of learning how to manipulate humans. The nagging thought—that if Leslie had annoyed him then Leslie would have meant to annoy him—was rudely shoved aside when something in a nearby viewing field flickered in his peripheral vision. Justinian rubbed his eyes, feeling suddenly disoriented.

  “What was that, ship?” he asked.

  “What was what?” said the flier.

  Justinian sounded puzzled. “It looked like something falling from the sky.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation before the flier spoke. “I just did a ten-second replay. I couldn’t see anything, although I should remind you I am working with severely curtailed senses. My status as a Turing machine may also mean that patterns in the data that might be discernible to a full AI will not be apparent to me.”

  Justinian was suddenly confused. He was trying to remember something, something that was just on the tip of his tongue.

  “Do you want me to go back?” the flier asked.

  “No. I’ve got a ship to catch,” Justinian said, but he sounded unsure.

  “Sorry,” Leslie said, appearing at his side. “I shouldn’t have said that about Anya.”

  Wordlessly, Justinian looked at the downcast robot.

  “I wanted to say, too, that we’re near the Bottle. That could be what caused the illusion of something falling.”

  Justinian headed to the other side of the flier.

  “Not that you’d want to go down there. You haven’t got the time.”

  Justinian felt a spasm of annoyance at the robot’s words. “I know.”

  “There is an AI in the Bottle. It could still be active, for all we know. It’s probably best avoided, though.”

  “Why?”

  “I just think you should avoid it, that’s all. I wonder if it can see out? It might recognize you.”

  A pause. The robot spoke on carelessly: “Not that it matters. We haven’t got the time to get down there anyway.”

  “Yes, we have,” said Justinian. “The flier can always go faster. Ship, take us down to the Bottle. Now.”

  Justinian never doubted the rumors that the EA could influence your actions without you knowing it; that all free will died when the AIs assumed power after the Transition. How could he doubt it, when he himself was part of that process, working as he did for Social Care? Still, he liked to retain the defining human belief that he was the master of his own destiny. So the gradually creeping realization that Leslie had manipulated him into making a detour during his spontaneous journey to catch the shuttle off planet came as a real blow to his ego. Here he was taking his child into further danger when he should be wasting no time in leaving this planet. What buttons had Leslie successfully pressed in order to persuade him to make this unnecessary landing?

  But maybe the landing wasn’t unnecessary; maybe there would be a clue…. He dismissed the thought quickly. That was just his ego trying to salvage some semblance of control. He had to face the facts: humans may choose the individual steps, but it was the AIs who chose the dance.

  He should tell the flier to resume its course to the spaceport right away…and yet, and yet…He felt to do so would lose him face in front of the robot.

  It was ridiculous. Even when he knew he was being manipulated, he couldn’t back down.

  And now the flier was touching down and the rear hatchway was dropping open and red shards of light were dancing around the interior of the cabin.

  Just for a moment, he was sure he saw his own face, projected onto the orange wall of the flier, formed in the patterns of the dancing red lights.

  An idea occurred to him. He opened his travel bag and pulled out a thin packet. Quickly, he slipped it into his pocket.

  The flier perched at an angle on a tilted slab in the Minor Mountain range. Even with its rear landing treads extended as far as they would go and the forward treads pulled in tight, the craft could still not be leveled. Justinian stumbled down the ramp towards the impossible red jewel of the Bottle. If you looked at it from the corner of your eye, the Bottle looked a little like a dome, roughly the size of the flier itself. If you looked at it straight on, your eye got lost in following the strange curves, and then the Bottle looked like nothing that could be described. Someone had once said it was like a Klein bottle given an extra twist, but that was a human perspective. In the absence of fully functioning AIs, no one had managed to expand further on that explanation.

  The air was thin and cold up here, the sky a pale dome above the blue-grey slabs and tilted ledges that formed the jagged landscape. When the thirty-two AI pods of the Gateway terraforming project had become operational, and the first trickle of the ensuing flood of Schrödinger boxes had begun to flicker across the planet, it had been the pod located in this inhospitable terrain that had first requested to study them. Its claim was a sensible one; there was little to do up here in the primary stages of planetary conversion, and during this phase its processing spaces were intended to provide little more than backup for the other, busier AIs. The other pods had concurred with its request, and so Pod 16 had begun its study of the Schrödinger boxes.

  That study had lasted just under thirty-five seconds before it was abruptly terminated. The pod had made an urgent broadcast to the other thirty-one pods that was cut short before completion: a fragment of complex eleven-dimensional code, then the beginning of a plaintext message. The code seemed to describe two Calabi-Yau spaces; the plaintext message consisted of sixteen bytes: “Urgent…Abando—.”

  It was supposed that the second word read “Abandon,” but the rest of the message was never sent. As the red, opaque material of the Bottle did not form a completely closed region around Pod 16 until just over four seconds later, it seemed logical to assume that the pod had cut short its own message.

  In just thirty-nine seconds, the Gateway mission had been changed forever. Pod 16 had effectively removed itself from the universe. It was another fourteen minutes before anyone or anything realized that there was a man trapped in the Bottle, too.

  James Gabriel was twenty-seven years old at the time of enclosure. He left behind a sister on the Jupiter section of the Shawl and three personality constructs. The most recent PC, taken when James was twenty-five, had been informed of the loss and had traveled to Gateway in a processing space aboard the hyperspace-enabled ship, but naturally had not been allowed down to the planet’s surface following the EA’s edict concerning AIs of human-and-above intelligence.

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nbsp; All this ran through Justinian’s mind as he made his way down the tilted slab towards the edge of the Bottle. His face and ears were pinched and cold, the thin breeze carrying the emptiness of high mountain places. Previous visitors had fixed thick ropes in place with metal bolts. It was a primitive arrangement, but effective. Justinian was impressed by the human ingenuity revealed, as he had been so many times since he had arrived on the planet. Impressed by what could be achieved without the aid of AIs and VNMs. He clung to a thick white rope as he edged forward, acutely aware of the gentle downward slope of the slab just to his right and the sudden drop that lay beyond it. Pod 16 had been deposited on a ledge near the top of a sheer seven-hundred-meter cliff: a slab of stone that slid as smoothly as an ice waterfall into the chaos of broken stones far below. The shape of the Bottle, at least the part of it that could be followed by the human eye, resembled a jellyfish draped over this ledge, long tentacles trailing down the vertical slab. From what Justinian understood, the Bottle was all exterior; all that could be seen of it existed on his, the outer, side. As for Pod 16 and James Gabriel, it wouldn’t be correct to say that they were inside the Bottle, because the inside of the Bottle was twisted around on itself and existed only out here where Justinian stood. But it was definitely true to say that the space they occupied was bounded by Justinian space. He could walk around the Bottle, fly over it in the flier, even burrow beneath it, if he felt so inclined, and he would have enclosed the volume occupied by James Gabriel, but he had no way of actually passing through the surface of the Bottle to meet that unfortunate man. Nor, he assumed, could James come out to meet him.

  Justinian gazed at the surface of the shape before him. It looked transparent, but the red rocky slabs and mountain peaks and dark skies he could see in its depths were just the same slabs and peaks and sky that occupied the world on this side of the boundary. Light followed a convoluted path along the skin of the Bottle.

  He raised his hand and waved into the depths, wondering if James Gabriel and Pod 16 were watching him. He had seen pictures of James Gabriel, taken just minutes before the pod had activated the super-fast replicating Von Neumann Machines that formed the skin of the Bottle. He was a thin man with long hair. To Justinian’s eye he had the air of a loner, the sort of person whom Social Care took an interest in as they entered their teens, encouraging them to attend parties and events and whatever else was thought would bring about a more positive social attitude. Justinian had counseled people like him in the past, and their personality profiles described exactly the sort of person who would volunteer to come to a remote place like Gateway.

  Justinian ran his hand backwards and forwards across the curving planes of the unearthly artifact. The surface seemed to dip into and out of itself, curving in directions that the eye couldn’t quite seem to follow. He had heard some of the colonists discussing its shape. It was part of another of those rumors that had slowly grown in stature until almost accepted as fact: how the AIs that ran the Earth held many things back, that the products of their imaginations were hoarded and only made human knowledge when they deemed it appropriate.

  So…what if all the AI pods on the planet knew the secret of the pathway that must be followed by a laminar VNM expansion in order to enclose a volume in the manner of the Bottle? Was it a failsafe piece of knowledge they all shared; did they all know how to make the super-fast replicating VNMs that had formed the red artifact that now lay before him? He hoped so. It was a more comforting thought than the idea that Pod 16 itself had deduced the shape in just the few seconds before it sent out its incomplete plaintext message of warning.

  Or, even more disturbing, was Pod 16 responsible at all? Had something else entirely done that to the pod and poor James Gabriel?

  Feeling slightly foolish, Justinian finished waving to the Bottle. Maybe someone inside had seen him. More likely his image had been bent and projected somewhere else in the Minor Mountain range: a ghostly image to scare any unlikely climbers that happened to be passing by. The same effect that had given the impression of something falling as the flier cruised by. Many other people had undoubtedly tried the same thing in the past, to no avail.

  But now Justinian was going to try something new. So far as he knew, he was the only Empath here on the planet. He had been brought here to speak to AIs. Well, now he was going to try to empathize with one. He pulled the slim packet from his pocket and worked the mechanism that dropped a tiny blue MTPH pill onto his hand. He swallowed it and relaxed.

  The cold air seemed to thin around him, silent waves of emptiness spreading out across the mountains, reflecting back the lifelessness that existed up here at the roof of the world. The effect was psychological, he knew. MTPH worked by boosting the mind’s ability to process peripheral information, to bring to the fore the details that only the subconscious had picked up on. Some people said there was a very small psychic component, but Justinian had used MTPH for fourteen years and didn’t believe in any such thing.

  Justinian concentrated, tried to imagine his mind taking hold of the impossible shape of the bottle. Listening for crystalline singing or subsonic rumbling, tasting the thinness of the air. Feeling the hairs on his body prickling to the energy of the red aura….

  Nothing. All he could feel was his own imagination. If there was any information being transmitted by James Gabriel or Pod 16, he was not picking it up. The only thing he was aware of was that the baby was experiencing mild distress; probably his subconscious was aware that his son’s diaper must be full by now.

  He gazed at the impossibly twisted shape of the Bottle and realized he was going to learn nothing here. The whole diversion had been nothing more than that—a diversion. A chance for Leslie and the EA to delay him.

  He turned and pulled his way back along the thick white rope towards the flier. He ran up the exit ramp, calling instructions ahead of himself as he did so.

  “Okay, ship. Take us up and get us back to the spaceport at maximum speed. We still have time to make the shuttle, right?”

  “Only just,” the ship said.

  The shuttle was a genuine antique and looked it. Everything about it spoke of its considerable age: the great wings that swept across the landing field, dwarfing the incoming flier; the clear spoon-shaped section of the flight deck; the scorched paint of the underside. The aerodynamics of the ship made it much more a thing of the air than the soulless shape of the flier as it simply moved from A to B. This was a vehicle that negotiated or, failing that, fought with the elements. This was the craft that would carry him off planet, up to the safety of the hypership.

  Justinian felt quite giddy at the thought as he strode from the exit ramp of the flier into the shadow cast by one of the shuttle’s great sweeping wings. He carried the baby in one arm and his bag in the other.

  The shuttle pilot was waiting for him, radiating an unease that Justinian could have picked up even without the lingering effects of MTPH.

  “Hello,” he said. “All that time on the shuttle and we were never properly introduced. I’m David Schummel.”

  Schummel was old: he looked to be in his sixties. He had chosen to let his hair grey and thin, possibly because that lent him a distinguished air. He was a tall man who retained his good looks, an effect enhanced by his maturity. He had warm creases around his eyes, nonetheless, the smile he gave as he shook Justinian’s hand seemed nervous.

  “I got the impression you were avoiding me,” Justinian said coolly, noting Schummel’s uncomfortable reaction. “I’m Justinian Sibelius,” he added.

  Schummel raised his eyebrows. “Sibelius. One of the old company names. Are you one of the company children?”

  “I am,” Justinian said, effectively ending that line of conversation.

  Schummel’s embarrassment at his tactlessness seemed slightly pathetic on a man of his age. The nearby lowered entrance ramp offered them both a view of the shuttle’s darkened interior, and yet Schummel made no move to lead Justinian inside.

  “What’s the ma
tter?”

  Schummel looked at the ground; he seemed ashamed to speak. “Justinian, I don’t know what you’ve done, but you’ve pissed off the EA big time. I need to ask you not to leave the planet.”

  Justinian stared at the man, all expression shutting down. He shifted his son in his arms and felt the baby’s little pink hands begin to play with the fur around his collar.

  “This is my son,” he said. “Can you tell me why I should risk his life by staying here?”

  A spasm of something almost like pain crossed Schummel’s face. “Look, I got the order to take off half an hour ago, and I refused. There were three fliers still not yet arrived here and, anyway, what was the hurry? The hypership isn’t due to depart for another six hours.”

  “Thank you for waiting,” Justinian said with just a hint of sarcasm. Nonetheless, he suddenly became fully aware of the group of fliers that formed a rough semicircle in front of the spoon-shaped nose of the shuttle. All of them were pulsing with colors that showed they still contained passengers. No one was boarding the shuttle yet.

  “And so the games began,” David Schummel said, following his gaze. He was looking in every direction but at the baby, Justinian realized. “I got another call about five minutes before your flier touched down, telling me to abandon takeoff. Apparently the hyperdrive on the hypership has developed an irregular fault and they need to move it out of orbit in order to reduce the effect of Gateway’s gravitational field.”

  Justinian gazed at him. “That’s all bullshit, isn’t it?” he said softly, and already he felt the defiance of the last two hours draining away. Why fight the EA? It always won.

  The captain leaned forward and touched Justinian on the arm. His lined face now looked very old; his voice was heavy with resignation.

  “Listen, Justinian, I’ve seen this happen before. I flew a lot of missions in the Enemy Domain. You’re not the first person I’ve met who has tried to get away from a situation he didn’t like, only to be held up by a series of seeming coincidences. The only difference today is that the EA doesn’t have its usual web of senses covering Gateway. It can’t pick up the smallest nuances of your expressions; on this planet it doesn’t have the finesse to cause subtle effects to gradually unravel that lead you to places you don’t want to be. It has to employ a more direct approach.”