Tony Ballantyne - CAPACITY

Having been suddenly roused from sleep by Frances’ emergency call, Judy had only so far managed to don her plain white kosode and put on her makeup.

“I haven’t finished dressing yet,” she said, crossing to a black lacquer chest that stood in one corner of her room and pulling out an apple-green kimono and yellow obi sash. “And, no, not everyone dresses this way.” She smiled at the beautiful silk robe she held in her hands. “Although wafuku is an increasingly popular hobby.” She quickly finished dressing, pulling the overlap of the kimono left over right. Frances moved up behind her and helped her fasten the obi around her waist.

“And as to where you are,” continued the atomic Judy, smoothing down the wide obi sash, “well, why don’t you just take a look out of the window?”

The red frame hanging in midair widened to include Helen in the view as she walked towards the picture window that stretched from floor to ceiling.

“Where on earth…?” Helen said, her voice fading away.

“Remind me, Frances,” Judy murmured. “This personality construct of Helen was made pre-Transition, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” the robot said, “by a matter of months. February 2170.”

“That explains a lot.” Judy walked over to the window of her bedroom, while Helen stood gazing out of her own at the scene beyond, lost in wonder.

“Have you ever been in space before?”

Helen shook her head. Judy 3 joined Helen at the window and exchanged a look with her atomic counterpart. They could have guessed the answer by Helen’s reaction.

One wall of Judy’s bedroom was a huge piece of curved monomolecular crystal, in stark contrast to the simple wood and the rush matting that covered the other surfaces. The window itself wrapped into both floor and ceiling enabling the two Judys and Helen to stand there on apparent nothingness. Below them stretched thousands of kilometers of empty space, and then, below that, the blue-and-white disc of the Earth. Through swirls of cloud Helen could make out the outline of Australia, the pink penumbra of dawn neatly slicing it in two. A flickering point of light indicated the remains of the abandoned Stonebreak arcology. Seeing Earth there below her, so beautiful and blue, was an impressive sight on its own, but that was not primarily what drew Helen’s eye. Above her, around her, falling to Earth, was something that looked like a gigantic dark waterfall.

At first, it was difficult to understand what she was seeing. Looking up was to look along a seemingly never-ending dark wall, multicolored lights sparkling as they receded into the distance. Looking to the sides was exactly the same. Then, looking nearby, she realized the lights she could see were other windows-just like those of Judy’s bedroom-cunningly laid out so as to give an unobstructed view along the wall’s extent, forming hypnotic diagonal patterns as they receded to infinity. Helen could take no more. She reeled away from the window, back into the bedroom, the red-bordered viewing field following her progress.

“Where are we? What is that?” she gasped, overwhelmed.

“We’re on the Shawl,” said Judy 3, touching her hand. “Think of the stealth cube in the arboretum. All those boxes, growing up from beneath the ground. You might say that the Shawl is the stealth cube’s opposite. A series of rectangular sections, growing downwards from a point high above the Earth. All the sections are tethered together by connecting filament. They hang from a point called the source, where new sections are made. The Shawl could be the answer to the stealth cube. Where it was secret, we are obvious, where it was sinister, we celebrate joy and diversity, where-”

“But how did we get into space? I thought we were in the arboretum.” Helen knew she had said something stupid as soon as the words left her mouth.

“No. You have never been in the arboretum. That was where the atomic Helen worked. Marek Mazokiewicz made an illegal imprint of her mindset over seventy years ago. Your personality construct was created about twenty-one hours ago, based on the atomic Helen’s mindset. To you, it is as if your life just continued from when the illegal imprint was made. You weren’t meant to know that you were actually running on an illegal processing space.”

“That was part of the torture,” Frances said, speaking up for the first time. Helen looked at the robot with mild horror. The painted blue eyes and smile gave Frances a distinctly sinister look. Helen’s eyes were then drawn down to the pubic triangle of push buttons.

“This is too much to take in,” she murmured.

“You’ll get used to it,” Frances said.

Helen said nothing; she turned to stare back out into space.

The atomic Judy looked over at her digital self and moved her hands in a flickering pattern.

– Why did you bring her here? she asked.

Devising a secret sign language was so much easier when each person drew on a common core of memory. When the digital Judy mimed rocking a baby, she meant home, here, their bedroom; it was a symbol they both remembered from their childhood, when home had meant the place their younger sister had been born.

The digital Judy was answering.

– I brought her here because she’s going to ask to help in tracking down Kevin, just like every personality construct of Helen ends up doing sooner or later. I think we should say yes this time.

The atomic Judy tilted her head slightly.

– I’m listening.

– She’s just heard that Kevin has committed suicide rather than be taken by us. I’m still rather shaken by that myself.

– As am I. We were just beginning to suspect there were several personality constructs of Kevin running in tandem. I think this confirms it. Who is he, I wonder…?

The digital Judy shrugged, then indicated Helen.

– She must know we’re getting nowhere, trying to catch him.

The apple-green atomic Judy glanced at Frances, then she looked back at her digital sister.

– Why you, 3? Why are you the only one to bring Helen here? There were lots more of her PCs running in there. Why have none of the other Judys thought of using her?

Judy 3 shrugged.

– I don’t know. Look, Kevin is our best handle on the Private Network, but he’s proving too difficult to pin down. We need to try another approach, and I think that is to use Helen. Why does Kevin have such an interest in her? Time and again he comes back to her personality construct. I think we should allow her to tag along with me. She might help us learn something.

“You’re speaking about me, aren’t you?” Helen was looking out from the red-bordered field into the atomic world, looking at the apple-green Judy.

“I told you she was good,” Judy 3 said out loud.

“Which one of you two is in charge?” Helen demanded.

“Neither of us,” the atomic Judy said. “Since the Transition, everyone is legally regarded as equal, whether they exist in the digital world, as you and Judy do, or in the atomic world, like Frances and me.”

Helen smiled coldly. “Does that include who inherits the money?”

Judy 3 laughed, her black lips opening wide to reveal white teeth and a red tongue. After a moment the atomic Judy did the same, a perfect mirror image of her digital sister, even down to the opposite ways their kimonos overlapped under the obi.

“You catch on quick,” Judy 3 said, “very quickly. No, only the atomic Judy gets the money. What would I do with it, Helen? Anyway, there is little use for money nowadays, even in the atomic world. Especially since the Transition.”

“What is this Transition you keep talking about?” Helen’s tone was accusatory, as if the Judys were deliberately using terms intended to confuse her.