Tony Ballantyne - CAPACITY

He could feel tears on his cheeks. Tears of rage and pity and shame. He felt cold sharp stone beneath his hands. He was crawling away from his child, but he had to. It was the only way to get help.

He put his hand on something soft and rounded. A vine? He felt a pattern of movement on his skin. Regular movement: a message in tactile Morse. The plant was still trying to communicate with him! And now he could smell something…And then there was a burning sensation as the pod flayed him alive, burnt the living, feeling skin from his body.

The pain passed and his mind was left floating in a dark sea, cut off completely from the insinuating information of the plants.

Jesse , he thought in despair. Where are you ?

Relaxation had been an art form back in 2170. Helen had been an artiste.

She sat cross-legged on the smooth green lawn, cherry blossom falling softly around her. The pink-and-white blossom fell into her brushed-out hair, tangled in threads of golden sunlight. The petals formed a pointillist pattern across her white jumpsuit. Her tanned hands rested palms upwards on her knees, a gentle smile playing across her face.

This is all a pose , she thought, eyes closed. It isn’t about getting in touch with myself after my ordeal, no matter how much I try to convince myself otherwise. Damn that Judy. She’s revealed me to myself .

She opened her eyes. Kevin was walking towards her, drawing a wake of death behind him. The branches of the trees in the cherry orchard closed like hands as he walked by, red-banded trunks blackened as they aged. The grass at his feet turned brown and lay down to die. A cold wind followed him, bringing the smell of decay.

“Oh, Helen,” Kevin said, “you look so pure and virginal.”

“That was the intention.”

Helen remained seated as Kevin stopped before her. A wash of dying brown grass swirled around her.

“Must you do that?” she asked.

Kevin shrugged. “It isn’t real, Helen.” He raised an arm to take in the surrounding green orchard of this section of the Shawl. “None of this is real. This is just a processing space. It’s just the Watcher’s dream.”

Helen was climbing to her feet. “If you won’t stop, I will go and sit somewhere else. I came to this section to think.”

She turned and began to walk back through the orchard, towards the mown path that connected the different parts of the rambling forest that filled this section.

“Maybe I could train you.” Kevin’s words floated after her. “You could be my new Bairn, now that Judy three has taken the old one.”

Helen’s pace faltered for a moment, but she took a breath and strode on. A wave of dying grass washing past her feet signaled Kevin’s approach. A gentle hand clasped her shoulder.

“Hey, hold on there a moment, Helen.”

She stopped walking. The forest was dying around her. His voice was gravely soft in her ear, sweetly seductive.

“Helen, do you realize what you are giving up? How do you know you won’t like subsuming your will to another’s? Bairn did, and Bairn is you, after all.”

“Bairn isn’t me,” Helen said simply. She pulled free of his hand and walked on. She still felt calm and centered, she noticed with quiet satisfaction. There was the sound of running feet, and Kevin reached around from behind her and pulled her tightly against himself with one strong arm. His hand cupped her breast, the other hand reaching down between her legs.

“Bairn liked it when I did this,” he whispered hoarsely in her ear. Without anger, as if performing the steps of a dance, Helen stamped down hard on his instep while simultaneously jabbing her elbow back into his ribs. Kevin gave a gasp of pain as she kicked herself backwards, overbalancing them both. She rolled free of his grasp, skidding on the dead brown earth as she stood up.

“Do that again and I’ll kill you,” she said without heat.

Kevin rubbed his ribs, smiling ruefully.

“No, you won’t. Judy will have been at you. You only get one chance in the Watcher’s system. Only one chance to exercise free will, and then Social Care reprograms you. You can’t kill me now. You have empathy. You understand crime, punishment, and redemption. You can no more kill me than you can bring that last Kevin you killed back to life.”

Helen dropped into a fighting stance, her right breast aching where Kevin had roughly grasped it.

“Try me,” she said in a low voice.

Kevin pulled a white plastic blade from his pocket and tossed it to the ground near her feet. He pulled open the front of his striped shirt and thrust out his chest.

“Go on, pick up the knife. Stick it in me. I won’t stop you.”

Helen looked from his chest to the wide opalescent blade that lay on the bare ground.

“What’s the point?” she said. “If I kill you, you’ll just come back.”

Kevin slipped the shirt down from his shoulders so that his hands were semi-bound behind his back. He tilted his head back and grinned.

“So my death doesn’t matter then, does it? Go on, pick up the knife. Stick it in me while my hands are tied like this. Stop me from destroying this section of the Shawl.”

Helen deliberately kept her eyes on him, but she couldn’t help but hear the dry crackling of death all around her. Healthy trees were blackening and withering in an expanding circle, Kevin at their epicenter. The coolness of the forest was evaporating as the leaves shriveled away, leaving nothing but the harsh desert glare of the sun shining through the polarized blue filter that formed the section’s roof.

Helen quivered with frustration. “What if I don’t want to?”

“ ‘Can’t’ is what you mean. That’s not right, is it: what Judy did to you? Why should you be punished for ridding the world of me?”

The cold wind surrounding Kevin was at odds with the heat from the sun. Helen thoughtfully brushed strands of hair from her hot face and then, in one easy movement, bent and picked up the white blade from the soil. She weighed it in her hand. There was a handle molded into one end of the plastic, with little knobbles to aid her grip. The other end was wickedly sharp. She tilted the blade into the breeze, feeling the note as it sliced the wind in two.

“It is sharp, isn’t it?” she said. “One slice and I cut you open from your crotch to your neck, just like this.”

She demonstrated the motion, lightning fast. It felt good. But such thoughts were to be resisted. She centered herself once more.

“But I won’t. Judy showed me why. There are no quick and easy solutions; I’ve got to work through this on my own.”

Kevin laughed, a deep male laugh. Damn, he was good looking. The thought cut straight through to her libido without warning. She shook her head, disgusted with herself. Kevin knew what she was thinking. He smiled that lazy smile.

“Social Care couldn’t have said it better themselves,” he said. “Helen, you are a human personality construct in a processing space. You are being programmed just as surely as the EA programs a flier’s Turing machine.”

“So you say. I say I do this of my own free will.”

Kevin loomed closer, his brown eyes boring into hers.

“Do you really think that, or is that what the Watcher is making you think? You’re just a personality construct. Do you really think those thoughts, or are they just patterns in the processing space? Do you really think , or do you just think that you think because you are programmed that way? Maybe you just react to events. After all, is a real human any more than just the reactions of a bunch of neurons? Is there free will, or is your consciousness merely a transition state?”