Tony Ballantyne - CAPACITY

Jesse was burbling again. Heart pounding, Justinian pressed on, the greyness intensifying.

As he approached, he became aware that this final AI pod was very much bigger than even first impressions suggested; it had grown to a height of around fifteen meters, a bulbous dome held up by an irregular tripod. Justinian recognized the shape of VNM factories around its base and realized that this pod was well advanced in its growth, almost complete. And yet, like all the others, it too had stopped. Why? Jesse tugged at his hand, staring in fascination at the black vines clustering around the edge of the precipice. They seemed to ripple without moving; rather, they seemed always to have just finished moving when Justinian’s gaze alighted upon them. What lay over the edge of the lip? What did the plant from which they had grown look like? Justinian craned his head to see. He was getting closer now…

“Do not look over the edge.”

The voice came from the AI pod. Justinian ignored it, continued to edge forward, determined to see what was down there. Jesse tugged at his hand. He obviously felt the same urge; he wanted to move forward.

The pod spoke again: “There is a laser trained upon you. Despite the fact I have had you brought here beyond your galaxy, I will kill you if you take one step closer. Believe me, this is not a bluff.”

“I believe you,” Justinian said, stopping. Of course he did. An AI knew how to sound sincere. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help himself craning to see over the lip of the fault. He was sure there was something moving down there.

“Do not try to look past me. The laser is still trained upon you.”

“I’m trying not to look.” It was true: he was trying. “What the hell do you think you are doing, placing my child in danger?”

“Establishing parameters. You are Justinian Sibelius?”

“Yes.”

“Justinian, look down at your feet. What do you see?”

Justinian looked down and saw the black vines were closer to him than they had been. They did indeed move when he wasn’t looking. Just like the Schrödinger boxes…

“I see vines.”

“Look closer.”

Justinian pulled Jesse close and then knelt down and touched a strand of vine, the baby balancing on one knee, cold hard rock pressing against the other. The vines shone like black liquorice; they felt strangely insubstantial. He had the impression that they weren’t really all there, rather like the hull of the hypership. They were flattened on the bottom, and turning the one he held over, Justinian saw that there was a long groove underneath packed with small black shapes that clustered like grapes on a vine or corn on a cob.

“Schrödinger boxes,” Justinian said without surprise. “This is where they come from.”

Now that he looked, the ground was littered with them. Everywhere he looked, they were frozen in his gaze.

So they are seeds , he thought. And when I look at them, I fix them in position. And the seeds seem to know, just as the photon in the two slits experiment knows at which slit the detector is turned on . Justinian thought of the pod under the sea that had insisted on speaking to him about the two slits. Had it guessed the truth?

He touched a little black Schrödinger box. It is a seed , he realized, and now that I know that, it has begun to germinate . It was doing it that very moment. It had begun to wriggle, to change shape, a ripple of blackness spreading across its underside…

That was what they always reminded him of: little pieces of sweet corn. Now a little thread of blackness was working its way from the top of the cube, and still more threads below were worming their way into the ground.

“It’s germinating! The Schrödinger boxes are seeds!”

Jesse was suddenly wriggling furiously, threatening to overbalance him. His son clearly wanted to get down and touch the plants himself. Meanwhile, the outline of a black plant was growing before him, getting larger and larger all the time…

“Look away now,” called the AI pod.

But Justinian couldn’t. The plant before him shimmered and wriggled in ever more fascinating patterns, captivating him, fascinating him…

“I don’t think you can look away, can you?” the pod said, but Justinian ignored it. The plant was larger than Jesse now and still growing. The baby was still struggling to reach out and touch it. There was a sudden flickering at the edge of Justinian’s vision, and then everything went black.

“Hey! My eyes! Oh! Jesse!” In his distraction, his son had struggled free of his grasp. Justinian reached out, his arms wide, trying to catch hold of him. He brushed the insubstantial material of the plant, then fell forward onto the rock.

“I can’t see. Where’s Jesse? Why can’t I see? Pod, help me!”

“Low-intensity blast from the laser. I have burned out your retinas. Blinded you.”

“Why? It will be weeks before I can get my eyes fixed.” Justinian was crying with frustration. “How will I look after Jesse?”

“Justinian, you and your baby only have a few minutes left to live. Surely you realize this?”

Justinian let out a shout of anger, then fell back, confused, as his vision suddenly cut back in again. He was experiencing the same strange black mapping of sight that he had experienced when he first entered the caves. There was Jesse, sitting not far away from him, happily playing with the vines that crept up around him. Stroking them. Loving them. Justinian could actually see them moving. And then over the lip…over the lip. He forgot all about Jesse then. He needed to see what lay down there.

“Why? Why do I have to die?” he raged, trying to distract the pod. He had to look over the lip. He was moving there as he spoke, trying to peer over the edge.

“You can see again, can’t you?” said the pod, and as it did so, Justinian smelled burning flesh. “It’s the plant. It can communicate with just about anything.”

His vision suddenly went blank again, but not before Justinian had finally looked over the lip and seen the great black plant that grew there.

It was terrifying. It was beautiful. It was fascinating and nauseating and dangerous all at the same time. It wasn’t complete. Only part of it seemed to exist there in the cave. Just like the hull of the hypership.

“Come on now, Justinian, you only have a few minutes left. Nothing intelligent can survive long here.”

“What about you?”

“This pod is no longer intelligent, Justinian. It is long dead. It looked up your personality before it died, and ran this conversation through your personality mapping. There is no intelligence in this pod, only a set of yes/no gates keyed to your responses.”

A great empty feeling opened up inside Justinian. He was alone again. Just him and Jesse…and something that did not even count as the ghost of an AI.

“Why?” he asked, then hesitated, wondering. Did it already know what his next question would be? Had the response to it been laid down weeks ago, before he had even heard of Gateway?

He asked the question anyway. “Why do you want my baby?”

The response was already there, preprogrammed. What had happened to his life that it could be decided before he had even lived it?

The dead pod spoke: “The Schrödinger boxes are seeds. They disperse across space until an intelligence fixes them in place. Life makes use of natural resources like air and soil. Consider the fact that wheat is cultivated by humans. It has thrived because human intelligence invented farming. This plant has dipped right down to the quantum level: it appeals to intelligence directly. The stronger the intelligence, the more it thrives. Your human intelligence has grown a plant about half a meter tall. Imagine the size of the plant that this pod produced before it committed suicide.”