Tony Ballantyne - CAPACITY

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.

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.