Capacity (9 page)

“I’ve been speaking to the EA,” he said.

“I’m very pleased for you,” Justinian said sarcastically.

“They’ve worked out the probability of either you or the baby coming to any harm from the BVBs. Apparently it’s negligible. You’re more likely to die on the journey home than as a result of a BVB.”

“That’s a comforting thought. Did they mention anything about the fact that my picture was stored in that AI pod?”

“…They concurred with my theory: the pod must have done a search on the database and come to the same conclusion as the EA. You were obviously the best person to work out what has gone wrong here.”

Justinian stared at the robot accusingly.

“Why did you hesitate before answering? You’re a robot, you must have deliberately chosen to hesitate. Why are you choosing to sound shifty?”

“I’m not. I’m trying to sound sincere.”

“Sincere!” Justinian laughed. “That will be something to think about when I’m flying home with the baby.”

“Justinian! Don’t be so stubborn! Aren’t you curious about what is going on here? How can you just leave without knowing? You’ll spend the rest of your life wondering!”

The baby had finished his meal. Orange goo spattered the tray, the baby, even Justinian, who took the spoon from his son with a struggle, the BVB constricting his arm as he did so. The heat bandage was making him sweat under his passive suit. Calmly, Justinian turned towards the flight deck.

“Ship! What time is the next shuttle off planet?”

“One hour thirty minutes.”

“And our ETA at the spaceport?”

“One hour fifteen minutes.”

Justinian smiled at the robot. “There you are. And all I own is my console and travel bag. No packing necessary.”

The baby took advantage of the distraction to snatch back the spoon.

“All gone,” Justinian said, holding up the empty bowl for the child to see. The baby’s mouth twisted; he was threatening to cry. Justinian glanced across to the kitchen unit that had formed on the forward wall. “Leslie, can you get me the pear halves? They’re in the bowl over there.”

“I can’t,” the robot said sulkily. “My hands are too fractally.”

“Fractally?” Justinian said. “Is that a word?” He looked intently at the robot. “How can a robot be so lazy?”

“It’s not being lazy,” Leslie replied petulantly. “It’s about the appropriate expenditure and conservation of energy. If you were a robot, you’d understand.”

Justinian laughed as he went over to fetch the bowl. Now that he knew he was leaving the planet, his mood was suddenly a lot lighter. When he got back, the baby was hitting at a Schrödinger box that had appeared on the sauce-spattered tray in front of him.

Justinian made to flick the box from the tray, then paused just for a moment. In under two hours he would have left this planet and would no longer be encountering these bizarre artifacts. It was odd how, in just three weeks, he had become so blasé about something so unusual. He picked up the box and examined it carefully. It was small: about the size of the first joint of his little finger, almost a cube but for a slight taper to its shape. Merely looking at it fixed it in position; holding it clenched tight in his hand put a fix on it and kept it in place. He slipped it in his pocket, where he couldn’t feel it through the padded material of his passive suit, then almost immediately he put his hand back into the pocket. The cube was gone.

He suddenly became aware that Leslie was watching him. “What?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” said the robot.

Justinian squeezed the handle of the spoon, making it frictionless for a moment. Orange sauce slipped from it to the tray. He squeezed the handle again and scooped a spoonful out of a pear half. Another Schrödinger box had appeared, lodged amid the pears themselves.

“They never did figure out what these things were doing,” he murmured to himself. “They haven’t figured out anything on this planet.” He raised his voice. “Hey Leslie,” he called, “have they even figured out how to get into the Bottle yet?”

“The Bottle?” said the robot, in surprised tones. “Why bring that up?”

“I was just thinking about all the things I will leave behind when I get off this planet. Can they get into it yet?”

“No. Do you think they really want to?” There was still an edge of sulkiness to its voice.

The ship suddenly spoke up: “Electrical storm coming up. Do you want to go around it?”

“No, straight through,” Justinian said. “And let’s have full visual.”

“No problem,” said the ship. It was nice to speak to a PC that didn’t automatically disagree with him, Justinian thought.

Viewing fields expanded all around, and the scattered flight chairs and carpeted interior of the flier gradually disappeared, leaving Justinian, the baby, and the robot seemingly hanging in empty air. There was nothing but the deep blue sea below them, the blue sky above, and, ahead of them, the sinister black line of storm clouds approaching at Mach 7.

“It’s AI five’s region,” explained the ship. “Lots of warm air rising from the ocean heat exchange.”

The black line of the storm clouds lengthened and grew, towering higher and higher above them, and Justinian felt a thrill of anticipation as he saw the flicker of lightning. Puffs of grey skittered past them, the sea below glimmered in an unearthly violet, and then, with a breathtaking suddenness, the storm enveloped them. They flew into the space between the anvil clouds, the darkness lit by an eerie electrical glow. Lightning arced from the seething dark below them, up to the towering masses of clouds above. Justinian flew through the dark cathedral spaces feeding pear pieces to the baby, who turned his head this way and that at the strange glowing lights, so fascinated that he almost forgot to eat.

At the front of the flier, slumped in a flight chair, Leslie sulked.

The baby was crawling across the soft carpet, arms and legs moving like a clockwork toy as he chased a striped ball. The viewing fields had been collapsed to normal proportions now that they had left the region of the storm. Justinian’s attention flicked back and forth between his son and the twisted shapes of the Minor Mountain region. Blue-grey rills and columns, crags and cliffs all formed a cracked and tilted pavement below the flier. Red crystals grew from the highest peak, another VNM project mysteriously abandoned before completion. The flier interrupted his thoughts.

“Sorry, Justinian, course corrections during the storm have added about five minutes to the journey. We’ll be pushing it to make your connection off planet.”

“Why?” said Justinian, relaxing in his flight chair. “According to my reckoning, we should still make the shuttle with ten minutes to spare.”

The ship did not answer straightaway. When it did, its voice sounded a little slow. “From what I understand, the shuttle launch has been brought forward.”

Justinian looked at Leslie, whose face immediately smudged over. Knowing the robot could still hear him, he spoke in deliberately calm tones.

“I’m sure they’ll hold for us. Radio ahead and let them know we’re coming.”

“They may not be able to wait,” the robot said, his face unsmudging. “The shuttle will obey the commands of the hypership.”

Justinian grinned at the robot. “I thought you would most likely be the brains behind this latest development. Well, it’s not a problem; the flier can go faster than this.”

The baby was pistoning back up the length of the flier now, heading towards Leslie, giggling as he chased the ball. Justinian rose easily from his seat and kicked the ball aft. The baby laughed as he turned to follow it.

“I don’t know how you can be so without conscience,” Leslie said accusingly. “You’re walking out on all of us, and you don’t give a damn.”

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.