Tony Ballantyne - CAPACITY

“Do you know what they are?” it asked. “They’re amazing!”

“They’re called Schrödinger boxes,” Justinian said carefully. The pod wasn’t fooled.

“Ah! So you don’t actually know what they are either. Maybe you can tell me about these bands wrapped around my shell. Do you know what they are, or do you simply have a name for them?”

Justinian was too tired to be insulted. Besides, it was all part of the script.

“We call them Black Velvet Bands, BVBs for short,” he replied. “Look, I’ve got one in here.”

He pulled the plastic rod from the thigh pocket of his passive suit and waited a moment for the pod to scan it.

“Very interesting,” it said. “Where did you find it?”

“The plastic rod is a table leg. One of the other colonists found the BVB wrapped around it as they were sitting down to breakfast one morning.”

“One of the other colonists? How many are there now on Gateway?”

“Still just a hundred. And me, of course.”

Justinian gave an involuntary shiver as he said these words. It reminded him how far he was from home, and Justinian felt doubly alone. Here he was, standing on a remote mud slick, lost on a planet that floated between galaxies, and yet he felt himself an outsider to the only group of humans for millions of light years. The bright blue belt of M32 rose into the dark sky behind the pod. The Milky Way was a monochrome rainbow in the other direction.

Justinian rubbed a finger across the fuzzy surface of the BVB and wondered at the strangeness of this place. As far as he was concerned, reality was a force that diminished the further one traveled from home: the hundred colonists were treading in a place of dreams where nothing worked as it should. Neither should it be expected to.

The pod spoke in a thoughtful tone. “I don’t remember anything about BVBs. I wonder why that is?”

“Probably because they weren’t known when you were conceived. They were only discovered on this planet.”

Justinian crouched down before the pod, looking for external sense cluster formations. There seemed to be nothing. That implied the pod was still operating on internals. Just like all the other pods, in fact.

“BVBs are similar to the Schrödinger boxes,” he continued, his hands glowing fluorescent green as he felt the rubbery surface of the pod. Red mud squelched under his feet and he grabbed onto the pod to maintain his balance. “BVBs only form in spaces that are not being observed, and then they immediately begin to contract.”

“How do you know?” the pod interrupted.

“How do I know what?”

“How do you know that they begin to contract immediately if the space in which they form is not being observed?”

Justinian smiled wearily.

“Good point,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that before.” He was struck by how much like children the AIs here on Gateway had become. Innocent, but with a sharp eye for detail.

“Someone probably did; they just didn’t explain that part to you.”

Justinian gazed coolly at the pod. And like children, he thought, they could be incredibly tactless. They quickly figured out that Justinian wasn’t part of the scientific survey team and then equally quickly lost all respect for him.

His legs were getting tired from crouching, so he straightened up and began to circle the pod, treading carefully on the slippery mud. One careless step and he could end up rolling down the slope into the dark water below.

“Anyway,” he said, “BVBs form in empty spaces. We believe they begin to contract immediately. Sometimes they get tangled around an object, like a pipe or a tree branch. The slightest touch on their inside surface stops them contracting; nothing can make them expand again. And they’re unbreakable. Nothing can cut through them.”

“Oh…” The pod’s voice was almost wistful. “What does BVB stand for?”

“Black Velvet Band. Named after an old song, apparently.”

Justinian rested a hand on the warm surface of the pod. He looked at the three BVBs that had formed on its supple skin. “If you rearrange your external structure to make your skin frictionless, they’ll slip right off.”

There was a moment’s pause before the pod spoke.

“…I can’t.”

“You can,” Justinian said. “All AI pods have multiform integuments. Yours is just set to dormant mode at the moment. Wake it up.”

“I can’t,” the pod said. It sounded embarrassed. “I don’t understand how to work the mechanism. I can see the potentials arranged before me, but I don’t understand how to achieve them.”

Justinian yawned again, looking out across the water. A pale glow had appeared over there as dawn approached. He wondered if he could make out the shape of another mud bank, slowly materializing from the blackness.

“You’ve heard all this before, haven’t you?” the pod said shrewdly. “Who are you? Why are you here? You’re obviously not one of the regular surveyors.”

There it was again: all the pods so far had figured this out. They might be acting like children, but they still had intelligence at least equal to his own. And, stripped down though their intelligences were, they still had access to vast libraries of data. Data that covered many, many subjects. How to read body language would be just one of them.

Justinian played it straight. “My name is Justinian. I’m a counselor. I’ve been brought to Gateway to try and figure out why AIs aren’t thriving here.”

“A counselor?” said the pod. “The sort that uses the empathy drug? You’re an MTPH counselor?”

“Originally. I work mainly with personality constructs nowadays.”

“Personality constructs? Does that make a difference?”

“It shouldn’t. You have to retrain in the use of MTPH-”

“I suppose that’s one reason for sending you here to speak to me,” the pod said thoughtfully. “Still, I would have thought the reasons for my failure would be beyond human intelligence. I would have thought the investigation would be a job for an AI.”

Justinian let sarcasm lace his voice. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? The trouble is, AIs don’t seem to want to work on Gateway. So far I’ve interviewed fourteen of the thirty-two pods that were seeded here. All of them have been exactly like you: drastically reduced versions of their former selves. Virtual suicides.”

The pod seemed unbothered by his tone. “Really? So it wasn’t just me, then…”

The pod was silent for a moment. When it spoke, Justinian thought there was an edge of fear to its voice. That was silly, of course. The pod could make its voice sound however it wanted.

“So that’s why they sent a human. But why you, I wonder? There’s more, isn’t there, Justinian? There’s a reason they chose you in particular.”

Justinian stifled another yawn and looked towards the dark shape of the flier, lost behind the bright lights that illuminated the pod. He thought longingly of his bed.

“I counsel potential suicides,” he said. “Specifically, I counsel personality constructs who wish to wipe themselves from the processing space in which they reside.”

“Give me an example.”

“Why can’t you look one up for yourself? Your databases are intact, aren’t they?”

“You know they are. You’re testing me, aren’t you? Well, now I want to test you. Give me an example of the way you work with human PCs.”

Justinian rubbed his hands together uneasily. Even after fourteen other pods had asked him exactly the same question, he still felt uncomfortable about opening himself up to one. He was used to having his personality read by AIs-what twenty-third-century person wasn’t? — but this was different. This pod had got halfway through its development cycle and then, for no apparent reason, wiped out all its higher brain functions. Just like every other pod on Gateway. He was dealing with an unstable personality. And that was frightening. Everyone knew that AIs could make you do what they wanted you to, without you even knowing it. Those of a more paranoid frame of mind believed that the Watcher itself was only giving the human race the impression of free will. They believed that it was in reality driving humankind towards its own, inscrutable goal. AIs could always force you to choose the card they wanted, and the one in front of Justinian was unstable. What might it choose to make him do? Maybe Justinian would just suddenly, inexplicably take it into his head to step off this mud spit into the dark water below. What if he were to now swim off into the cold night, to sink into the blackness, to drown in the dark all alone, light years from home?