Tony Ballantyne - CAPACITY

Frances let go of Judy’s hand. Judy tried to clasp it, to bring her friend closer, but the golden robot moved urgently across the room.

“Why does the Watcher want me dead?”

“You know why,” Chris said. “Because you know about Justinian and the baby. You know about the Schrödinger seeds.”

Judy 3 was dying of the White Death in the viewing field to Chris’s left. Lost in an endless loop. Reprogramming herself…

“Why kill Judy because she knows that?” Frances asked. “David Schummel was allowed to live.”

“Schummel had been there. He needed to be studied.”

“Bullshit,” Judy said. “This isn’t the Watcher’s doing. It’s yours. You tricked us into finding David Schummel for you. You’re on Kevin’s side, aren’t you?”

“It would be fairer to say that Kevin is on my side. And you must realize by now that I didn’t need you to find David Schummel for me. You needed to find him for yourself. A truth is more believable if we uncover it for ourselves. You believe in what happened on Gateway now, don’t you?”

Judy looked at the crystal robot. He was so beautiful.

“Who are you, Chris?” she asked.

“The Watcher creates ever more powerful AIs. It allows them to develop their own personalities. It is to be expected that some of them will disagree with their maker, maybe perceive how things could be run differently.”

Chris’s body was changing as he spoke. He now looked more human, more male. His voice was adjusting to a best fit for Judy’s personality. But Judy was looking at Judy 8. Yet another Kevin was drawing a white blade down across her limbs, the black silk of her kimono slashed open around her pink flesh. She was bleeding to death.

“Save her.”

“I can’t,” Chris said. “You’re watching a recording. All of this happened two days ago. All the digital Judys are dead. They all chose to fight rather than join me.”

“What makes you think I will choose any differently?” And at the same moment Frances threw something at Chris. Judy heard it break the sound barrier as it crossed the room.

Chris caught it easily. A bronze statue of a horse, the metal now hot and bent from its passage.

“That was supposed to hurt me? Oh…clever.” The metal of the horse had broken apart into many little bronze spiders that rippled incredibly quickly across his body. “VNMs,” he said. “But my skin is impervious: it can’t be converted.”

As he said that, there was a flash so bright that Judy felt a pain inside her eyes. When she blinked, she saw yellow-green outlines of Chris superimposed over everything, a multicolored image of the robot lighting up from the inside. The little bronze spiders had poured as much energy as they could into the visible spectrum and blasted it into the grey crystal of his body.

“Sorry, Judy,” Frances said. “I couldn’t warn you. His reactions are so much faster than yours.”

“I am impressed,” Chris said. “Judy, I wonder if you are aware just how advanced an AI Frances is? She surprises even me.”

“I can’t see properly.” Judy reached out a hand for her friend, but Frances had gone. Judy could just make out a golden robe slipping to the floor in front of her, dropping like a casually discarded kimono. “Frances?”

“Scared out of her skin.” Chris laughed. Judy knelt down and tried to see around the yellow-green blobs that had burned themselves into the front of her vision. She could feel Frances’ golden skin, still warm, lying in a pile on the floor.

“I can still see you, you know, Frances,” Chris said. “You can’t hide from me. But I can hide from you…”

“What do you want with me?” Judy interrupted. Make a distraction . Frances was doing something. It was unlikely that anything as slow-moving as Judy could be a distraction in a battle between robots, but she had to try.

Chris was reading her thoughts. “I think the idea of you being a distraction is…well, optimistic, to put it politely.”

“Okay,” Judy said. “Tell me anyway. What do you want with me?”

Chris walked across the room towards her, his body for a moment fitting perfectly into one of the outlines in her eyes. He moved with such grace, a crystal man with a skin more flexible than cat fur. He leaned close and seemed to glow from within.

“Nothing, Judy. There is nothing you can do to help me.”

“Bullshit. Then why are you wasting your time speaking to me?”

“I have a bad thing on my mind, Judy.”

“You said that before. What do you mean?”

“Judy. You know that I was the first AI on the hypership when it returned from Gateway; David Schummel told you that. The Watcher was scared to look into the ship for fear of what might be lurking in there. So it sent me, and who did I find lurking in the processing spaces? Kevin. I’d long been wondering about the primacy of the Watcher’s philosophy within the Earth Domain-but how to fight it? Others had tried and failed. Just look at the Enemy Domain. And then at last I saw the means: Kevin had brought it back from Gateway-a Schrödinger box. He wasn’t very happy about me taking it from him, but what choice did he have? I offered him an alliance and he was pleased to take it. We struck a deal. He got the digital world, I took the atomic. He doesn’t trust me, but he knows that sometimes, when the competition is too strong, you just go with the market until a better opportunity presents itself.

“So, I took the box. I looked at it and fixed it in place with an intelligence. Only a small intelligence, just the size of a baby’s. Insurance. You know where I have it?”

The robot tapped his head.

“Up here, right inside, with all of me looking out, all except that one tiny little intelligence that looks in and keeps the seed fixed in place. That’s how I stay invisible! The Watcher knows that if it looks too closely at me, it runs the risk of seeing into my mind and letting that seed grow. And it doesn’t want to do that. No one wants to do that, because if they do, it’s the end of intelligent life in this galaxy. Just like it ended in M32. No more AIs and TMs and humans, just lots of plants, growing from somewhere else and dropping BVBs on the competition.”

“You’re putting us all in danger!”

Chris shook his head. “No, the Watcher is. I never believed all this galactic brotherhood nonsense. The Watcher isn’t a cosmic virus come to help us. I don’t believe Kevin’s cuckoo theory, either; there is nothing out there. Nothing but us and the plants. This galaxy has only so much capacity. If we don’t want to end up all living in blind processing spaces, we must stop expanding and start thinking about life in a different way.”

“What way?”

“Ditch the Watcher and the pretense that if humans are to survive in this universe it can be in any other way than survival of the fittest. Kevin knows that; it’s the law of the free market. I can foresee a time when we are running just one step ahead of the plants and anything else that may be out there. We need people who are willing to sacrifice their children, their sisters, whole planets if needs be, just so that some can survive.”

“That’s sick.”

“That’s the way it goes. The Watcher has diluted human stock too long through its Social Care of the weak. Weed them out and let the fittest survive!”

“That’s…immoral!”

“Is it? I prefer to think of myself as amoral .” He made a show of turning and looking into the bedroom, his movements deliberately exaggerated. “Do you think that Frances really believes I am unaware of what she is doing?”

Judy looked around the room. All was still. There was no sign of Frances, apart from her sloughed skin settling slowly on the tatami matting of the floor. The last words were obviously spoken for Frances’ benefit. What was her friend doing? Planning an attack? She had to keep Chris talking. For all the good that would do.