Tony Ballantyne - CAPACITY

“Okay…?”

Another pause.

“I’m not sure that you will like what the data represents.”

Justinian frowned. The sun was rising higher and the day was promising to be a good one. If one could ignore the foul smell of the mud, there was a certain bleak freshness to the scene before him: red mud and turquoise water spreading out in lazy curls to the horizon. He had just had his first lead after three weeks on this bizarre planet. Why did the pod have to spoil it with such a roundabout way of speaking?

Justinian replied in the most uninterested tone he could manage. “Pod, I can assure you, I don’t care what the data represents. I just want to find out what happened here and then get off this planet.”

A silence seemed to stretch on and on in the glittering morning, and then-finally-the pod spoke.

“At first I thought it was just a random array of bytes, but then I noticed that when arranged in a grid they offered an old-fashioned way of representing images: a 2-D picture format. A bitmap.”

“Fine. So the deep-radar array contains a picture. Of what?”

The pod gave a passable rendition of an embarrassed cough.

“Of you,” it said.

Morning rose over the old DIANA complex to the sound of birdsong. They were walking hand in hand through the grounds when Kevin saw the cat.

“Look, Bairn,” he said, pulling her down to a crouch beside him. She leaned close, feeling safe to be so close to his strong, gentle body. He had this power over women, she knew it. She had seen him use it, time and time again, all through the virtual worlds.

A young blackbird lay in the dust of the path, wings stretched outwards for warmth. The cat was nothing more than a suggestion of a shape amongst the shrubs that had taken root in the still growing, smoke-blackened ruins. Its yellow eyes fixed on the bird.

Bairn bit her lip and looked from the cat to Kevin.

“Oh, Kevin, can’t you stop it?” she whispered, knowing the answer even as she spoke.

Kevin tightened his big hand around hers. “You know the answer to that, Bairn. If I save this little bird, the cat will only find another creature to kill. It’s hungry. It needs to eat. Just look around you.” He waved his hand around to indicate the black stumps of buildings, the new VNM growth bursting forth from the tops of the broken walls, like teeth from gums. “DIANA is dead as a commercial organization, but something is born anew. Life springs forth from death.”

Bairn shook her head. “The cat doesn’t have to eat meat. It could be fed a vegan diet. It wouldn’t know the difference.”

Kevin gently patted her hand. “It’s feral, Bairn. Look at it. Am I to spend my time rescuing birds until this cat dies of starvation?”

As he spoke the cat pounced, one tabby paw pushing the bird’s head down onto the ground, the other slicing through feathers to the flesh underneath in one fluid movement. There was a brief fluttering, then, stillness.

Bairn looked away, and Kevin continued in his deep, matter-of-fact voice. The terms he used were anachronisms. “It’s basic economics, Bairn. Where there is limited supply, a decision has to be made on how resources are to be distributed. Sometimes that decision must be to simply let nature take its course.”

Bairn stood up, a pale morning sky showing above the blackened edges of the living building around her. She felt sick.

“Food is not in limited supply,” she said.

Kevin smiled tolerantly up at her and then slowly, deliberately, rose up so that he towered over her. He looked down into her eyes; there was an edge of amusement to the low rumble of his voice.

“I wasn’t talking about food. I was talking about lifestyle.”

He paused, glanced down at the console on his wrist.

“Ah, and speaking of lifestyles, I see that our black-and-white friend has located yet another of our lifestyle zones.”

Bairn looked at Kevin questioningly. “She seems to pop up everywhere lately,” she said carefully.

Kevin smiled. “True, true-still, the processing space she has so rudely invaded is now sealed off completely. It is being shut down even as we speak. In five minutes time may well have reduced our Judy problem by ninety percent.” He brushed a black strand of hair from Bairn’s brow. “That could turn out to be a shame, really.”

The EA ran several public processing spaces that supposedly replicated atomic space exactly. Those who still spoke out for digital rights claimed that this was a subtle form of discrimination. There was only one atomic world, and its uniqueness placed it in a favored position. Those who inhabited it could claim they were unique themselves, that their digital copies were therefore in some way inferior. It was a view that the atomic Judy secretly subscribed to. Well, it wasn’t much of a secret, not when she and the twelve digital Judys shared the same memories up to the point of their separation into the digital world.

Out in the unique world of atoms, the atomic Judy dreamed that her bedroom was falling towards Earth. The first bright flicker of plasma haze could be seen through the window and, in her dream, she realized with heart-pounding horror that somehow she had got her dates wrong and had stayed on in the apartment a night too long. The floor was vibrating as the room slowly spun, and through the window she saw the rest of the Shawl apparently rotating as it receded into the distance.

Someone was calling to her. “Judy, wake up! We’ve got trouble.”

The voice was coming from her console. Judy rolled across the low bed and picked it up from the floor. She puffed a dose of something to wake her quickly.

“What is it, Frances?”

The lights slowly came up to brightness in her room. The console showed that Frances was waiting in her lounge.

“Thirty-seven minutes ago one of the EA’s monitoring AIs noticed a ship sending a diminishing narrow-beam signal off into the middle of nowhere, a patch of space thirty-two degrees above the solar plane, and four AUs out. High-resolution scans of the region revealed a processing space floating out there.”

“A pirate space?” Judy said, rolling out of bed. “Frances, get in here! Why are you lurking in the living room?” She pulled on a long white kosode, the intelligent material lazily tightening around her body.

“I know how funny you are about your…privacy.” Frances sounded indignant.

“I’m not a body fetishist. Anyway, you’re a robot. Just get in here.”

“I’m coming. Listen, a number of your digital selves went in there. They almost caught Kevin.”

Judy dipped her fingertip into a blob of makeup and felt the tiny VNMs rushing to cover her hand. Frances slid open the paper door to Judy’s bedroom and stepped carefully inside. The robot elegantly complemented the simple Japanese décor of Judy’s apartment; Frances had had her body built to her own design and had made no attempt to look more than vaguely human. She was covered in lustrous golden metal, her head a smooth bullet shape upon which had been painted a bright white smile and two blue eyes. Other than that, her body was entirely featureless save for one thing, the only physical indicator of Frances’ mindset: between her legs was a set of numbered push buttons.

As Judy serenely dipped her toe into the makeup, the robot began opening viewing fields. Patches of color sprang to life around the room, vivid against the calm yellow wood and rice-paper panels. Frances walked over to the low bed and continued with her explanation.

“Just as we managed to fix our feed into the processing space, the Private Network detonated an explosive charge attached to the antenna. They’ve seeded the processing space with something on the order of fifteen hundred billion memory leaks. It’s deflating like an old balloon: it will be gone in about three minutes.”