Capacity

by Tony Ballantyne

  All around her there was movement. The walls of the section were breaking apart. Folding over themselves. Judy saw more stars appearing. The white ramp bucked beneath her feet.

  “Onto the branch,” called the stranger’s voice. The Watcher. Judy dived from the white ramp onto a branch of the World Tree. “Hold on!”

  The call came just as gravity gave out. All around her the section was breaking apart into thrashing metal shapes as the VNMs that had once built this part of the Shawl were reawakened. Below, Judy could see the blue-white globe of the Earth in the spaces opening up between the thrashing shapes.

  The thrashing shapes. They were forming into something else. Monsters.

  Judy wished she had some MTPH to take. Meditate, she thought; think yourself calm. Her handhold shook as one of the shapes gripped the edge of the branch to which she was clinging.

  “Frances, help me!” she called. The metal thing that had gripped the branch began to coalesce into a definite shape. A long sinuous body formed; red eyes opened to stare at her. A dragon. It grew larger as more of the material of the dying section joined on to its body. It began to walk towards her, its many legs digging into the thick black bark with cruelly curved claws. White wood was torn free to float into space as it made its way onwards. The dragon was bigger than she was, bigger than her old apartment, with a long head that swung back and forth, looking for her. It was still growing.

  “Frances! Help me!” she called again. Still there was no reply. What was Frances doing? Hand over hand, Judy pulled herself back along the branch until she reached the trunk of the tree. The golden spacesuit grew spikes at its hands and feet. She dug them deep into the bark, gaining purchase. The dragon grew bigger. It was reaching for her, slowly.

  She screamed again: “Frances!”

  “There’s no help,” came Chris’ voice. “You see, Frances may have the greater intelligence now, but I still have control of nearly all of the section’s material. I have the matter; all Frances has are her own thoughts.” Chris laughed. “Funny, isn’t it? That two such intelligent beings are reduced to a wrestling match.”

  The dragon reached out its long neck. It opened its mouth…

  “Say good-bye,” Chris said.

  And Judy let out a sudden, giggling laugh. She was terrified, but…

  She was standing on the burning World Tree, plunging towards Earth, battling dragons. Could there be any better end?

  She laughed out loud, let go of the tree, and assumed a karate stance as she floated away from the branch—just as the dragon drew back to strike.

  “Come on then!” she shouted. “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!”

  The metal dragon in front of her lunged…

  …and was parried by the branch of the tree…

  All around her the World Tree came to life and began to grapple with the dragon floating above her.

  And Judy’s laughter deepened at the sheer, incredible joy of it all.

  Plunging towards the Earth, her best friend had turned the whole World Tree into a venumb. Frances had dissolved what little material made up her body and formed it into joints and hinges, just like those of a spider bush.

  What a way to die, laughed Judy—falling to Earth on the burning wood skeleton of her best friend, wrestling with a metal dragon.

  In the middle of all that, the Watcher’s shuttle quietly materialized and took Judy on board.

  Epilogue: 2240

  The man in the grey passive suit, a lavender cravat knotted incongruously around his neck, sat down at the piano and spread his hands over the keys. He paused, and then began to play a pattern of notes: the first prelude from Book 1 of Bach’s The Well Tempered Clavier. The music filled the building in the manner of water being poured into a stone vessel, the spirit of the eighteenth century called into the little church that stood in the middle of the small French town.

  A waiter clearing the glasses from a café table looked up to see a well-dressed stranger crossing the town square. It was a warm evening and his patrons were making the most of the last of the summer evenings, enjoying a drink and the quietly remarkable view of the building opposite. Built in the fifteenth century, the church had remained relatively unchanged for at least three hundred years. Its grey stone had become a little more weathered, the stained-glass windows had needed to be covered in a thin protective laminate, but beyond that it stood firm against the advancing tide of self-replicating machinery. A great green wave of metal rose up beyond the church, frozen in the motion of crashing down to engulf the building. The fifteenth-century structure sheltered in the lee of this living sculpture that stood at the north end of the square, a reminder of the chaotic end of the twenty-second century, when the endless cycle of replication had finally been contained.

  Music spilled out into the summer evening as the latecomer to the concert slipped through the church door.

  The ancient church was to be the venue for one of the decisive meetings of human history.

  Judy sat alone in a pew halfway down the aisle, listening to the music being performed by the keyboard player who sat in the cleared space before the altar. She could feel herself beginning to relax for the first time in days, and she wanted nothing to spoil this blessed sensation. Her kimono was gone; she wore nothing but a plain black passive suit. Her hair was shaved close to her head. For the moment, she needed to keep her life very simple. Her twelve sisters were all dead. Frances was undergoing therapy in an isolated processing space to counteract a whole raft of viruses that Chris had seeded within her, and as of yet, her robot friend had indicated no desire to return to atomic space. Helen was…Well, Helen could look after herself. She would have to. Judy was in no state to help her.

  Her mind began to drift to the gentle sound of the piano…but the sound was subtly changing. Effects were slowly fading into the notes, giving them an otherworldly edge. The keyboard player was competent but not truly professional; he made too many mistakes. Ah, thought Judy, but who am I to criticize him for that?

  She listened as the man finished the piece and then, after acknowledging the brief applause, began the next: Scott Joplin, “Maple Leaf Rag.” He was playing too fast for himself, she thought.

  She didn’t notice the latecomer slipping into the chair next to her.

  “Hello, Judy. I don’t know if you’ll remember me. I’m Lemuel.”

  Judy was startled. She turned to look at the tall man seated beside her. Good looking, greying around the temples, distinguished. His skin was made of plastic. His eyes glowed softly in the dimness of the church.

  She recognized his voice.

  “You’re Frances’ friend,” she said. “I remember, you spoke to me on her birthday.”

  “That’s right. It’s good to meet you in person.” He held out a hand.

  Hesitantly, Judy shook it. She stared at the stranger, feeling as if she was somewhere else. Not thinking, Judy slid her right hand up to her left wrist, and then stopped. There was no bracelet there. For the immediate future she was to be the patient, not the counselor.

  “How is Frances?” she asked, her voice level. As she looked at Lemuel, the emotion that she had been unconsciously holding back for the past few days, and for the ten years before that, suddenly overwhelmed her. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

  “Why did you let him kill them?” she sobbed.

  “Oh, Judy,” Lemuel said sadly. He took her hand in his. His grip was firm and warm. He offered a handkerchief. Judy took it, blew her nose, waved her other hand at nothing, seeking some sort of release. Other members of the audience tried not to look in her direction. Judy looked up into the barrel-vaulted roof and waited for her crying to lessen. Lemuel squeezed her hand again.

  “I’m okay now,” she whispered, and her body shivered with emotion. “I’m okay.” Her voice was wobbling. “I just want to know. Why did you let Kevin kill my sisters?”

  “Judy, you’re upset. How could I stop Kevin?”

  She wiped her e
yes again with the back of her hand.

  “I don’t mean you personally. I mean all of you, all the AIs. I mean the Watcher. Aren’t you supposed to be looking after us?”

  “We didn’t know,” Lemuel said sadly. “Not until it was too late. We didn’t know it was happening. Chris was helping Kevin cloak his actions.”

  “I thought the Watcher knew everything,” Judy said bitterly.

  “It has never claimed that.”

  Lemuel sat back in his pew and looked around. Just ahead of them, to the right of the altar, was a large wooden frieze showing Christ being taken down from the cross. “Do you realize,” he mused, “in the past people came to these places to try to commune with the spirit that they believed made them.” He paused, and then spoke more softly. “And now, in a ziggurat, on a planet deep in the Enemy Domain, the Watcher does the same, in effect.”

  Judy stared at Lemuel. No AI ever said anything without a reason.

  A sudden flurry of noise signaled the end of the ragtime music and the start of the next piece. Now the performer was playing a medley of rock and roll hits accompanied by the sound of birdsong.

  Judy wiped her eyes with the big white handkerchief, then blew her nose again.

  “Have you captured him?” she asked.

  “Kevin? Oh yes, thanks to you, Judy. He put a lot of effort into contacting you and your sisters. He really believed that you could be brought around to his point of view. He exposed himself far too much.”

  “I don’t understand why,” Judy said bitterly. “I hate him. I always did. I tried not to let myself—I know it wasn’t my job to hate—but I couldn’t help it. How could he possibly think that I would help him?”

  “Because that’s the way he is, Judy. He thinks people are commodities to be bought and sold. He isn’t a real person. He isn’t even a genuine AI, as you understand them. He’s just a very complex program, written for DIANA. A program written by humans, long before the Transition. An early attempt at an AI, one that can replicate. Somehow it made its way to the source of the Shawl and embedded itself there. DIANA was a commercial organization that saw everything in terms of competition, acquisitions, and mergers. Kevin has the same drives written into the core of his being. They’re in his bones, you might say. In Kevin’s terms, the society that the Watcher has created is the competition, therefore he still seeks to contend with us.”

  “Why?” Judy rubbed a hand across her shaven head, feeling the little bristles spring back at her touch. It still felt odd; she was so used to having long hair. She spoke slowly: “I thought the time of competition between the large organizations and the EA ended after the Transition.”

  “It did,” Lemuel replied. “This is just the death throes.”

  Judy spoke bitterly: “So what have you done to Kevin? You say he wasn’t an AI at all; he was just a virus. You should destroy him.”

  Lemuel paused as the rock and roll medley came to an abrupt end. The performer stood and took a bow to the polite applause that echoed around the church. Lemuel was clapping the loudest of all.

  “Bravo,” he cried. “Bravo!”

  “Well?” Judy said. “Have you destroyed him?”

  Lemuel put a plastic hand gently on Judy’s arm, and she looked down at it. It felt unusual to be touched through a passive suit, having been so used to the silk of her kimonos.

  “Kevin can’t be blamed for doing what he did, Judy. It was in his programming. He wasn’t a proper AI, remember—he had no love of life, including his own. He was nothing more than a set of yes/no branches.”

  “As am I, surely,” Judy said.

  Lemuel inclined his head. “Maybe. But there comes a point when what you are transcends the mechanism. Kevin has as much of a right to life as any venumb. He’ll be kept in a bottle, as a curiosity. Just like the trees in Helen’s arboretum.”

  Judy pressed her lips tightly together. She felt as if she was going to cry again, and yet no tears emerged. She was puzzled: why had Lemuel come here in person to tell her all this? Huey, her counselor, was more than capable of debriefing her.

  “I feel that I owe you this,” Lemuel said, answering the unasked question. “It’s what Frances would want me to do, if she could safely communicate with anyone. We feel that we have let you down. Chris is a lot cleverer than we realized. He has successfully hidden his capabilities all this time, even from the Watcher. He is still out there, Judy. Once he learns you are still alive, he will come looking for you again.”

  Judy felt a cold ache of fear in her stomach. “Why?”

  The AI looked solemn. “Judy, Chris still believes that you will help him someday.”

  “Never.” Lemuel said nothing. She looked at him. “Well? I told him that on the Shawl. He tried to kill me for it.”

  Lemuel remained silent.

  “Why don’t you say anything? Why should I help Chris? How could he possibly believe that I would?”

  Lemuel put his hands together and thoughtfully touched his lips with his fingertips.

  “Judy, the reason that I am here, the reason that Frances would want me to come, is to tell you this….”

  “What?”

  Lemuel gazed intently at the performer. Judy began to think that he wasn’t going to answer, but then he turned to look at her.

  “Judy, AIs can read human personalities all the way to the least significant digit. Chris really believed that you would see his point of view. If Frances hadn’t fought him, if she hadn’t made you run, he would have convinced you.”

  “She made me run? He was trying to kill me!”

  “Not at first, Judy. Not at first.” Judy tilted her head, trying to understand what he was saying. He continued: “But Frances believed it was for the best. Judy, it was Chris who sent you looking for David Schummel. He gave away the position of the processing space owned by the Private Network. He had someone waiting in there to speak to one of your sisters. He wanted to speak to you.”

  “Why?” She paused. “He said something to me, before I ran from the room. He said that my mind had been programmed from birth. What did he mean?”

  Lemuel looked unhappy. “Judy, you know what he meant. It’s what Social Care does. You train and counsel and manipulate through social pressure. All humans are programmed from birth…”

  Judy stared at Lemuel. He gazed back.

  “…but there’s an alternative, Judy—an idea. It’s been around for a long time. Why bother with Social Care and such imperfect mechanisms? What if humans were to be directly programmed at birth?”

  “That’s immoral. What about freedom of choice?”

  “You see?” said Lemuel. “You’re starting to sound like Kevin already.”

  Lemuel leaned closer and spoke in serious tones. “The Watcher says we will never attempt direct programming, but there is evidence that somebody already has.”

  “What was that?”

  “The White Death. That was a program designed to affect human brains.”

  Judy stared at him.

  “But who? Why?”

  “No one knows where it came from.”

  “Oh.”

  “And then there’s you.”

  “What about me?” Judy felt her heart grow cold again. She suspected the answer already.

  “What if I were to tell you that your personality was written for you before you were born? What if it turned out that you were a virgin, not through personal choice, but because someone decided that you would be?”

  Judy felt something clench at her throat. She tried to speak and failed. Swallowed, and tried again.

  “And do you think that?” she asked.

  Lemuel looked back to the performer. “Aren’t you going to ask me about the baby?” he asked.

  Judy froze. She felt very small and unworthy. She had been so wrapped up in her own personal tragedy that she had never even thought about Justinian’s baby, left abandoned in the cave on Gateway.

  “How could they do that?” she asked. “How could the Watcher s
end an innocent to its death?”

  “The Watcher risked just two people in order to save the lives of billions. Trillions. Would you have done differently?”

  “Yes!”

  “I know you’re lying. I think you know it, too, in your heart of hearts. But think about this, Judy. Think about what Frances did. She looked at the seed in Chris’ head in order to find a way of defeating him and to help you live. She risked everyone on Earth just to save you.”

  “That’s the difference between strangers and friends,” Judy murmured.

  “I know,” Lemuel replied. “That’s why I remain a stranger.”

  Judy gazed at him, and then suddenly she was crying again, though there was no reason for it. Lemuel waited patiently as she regained control of herself. Her tears formed little puddles on the stone floor. She smeared the pools with her foot, then took a deep breath.

  “Has Frances put us all at risk because of me?” she asked.

  “Not yet.” Lemuel looked up into the barrel vaulting of the ceiling. Judy had the impression he was looking beyond it.

  “Judy,” he said, “three days ago there was an indescribably fascinating plant floating above the Earth, scattering seeds and BVBs in all directions. Now that plant is approaching the outer corona of the sun, where I hope it will have the decency to burn up and be utterly destroyed. The Watcher has had seventeen years to think and plan for how to deal with those plants. Even now, little black boxes skitter across the planet and across the Shawl, and we avert our gaze while lesser intelligences look at them and fix them in position before whisking them away to safety.”

  “So we are safe?”

  Lemuel pursed his lips. “I think we are slowly winning the battle, and all because seventeen years ago a boy and his father were sent to Gateway. The information gained from that expedition was enough to put in place countermeasures against just such an eventuality as the one that Frances precipitated. Taking that into consideration, I think that what the Watcher did on Gateway was the right thing, don’t you?”