Capacity (16 page)

Back on the sea bed, hemmed in by the oppressive darkness of the trench, Justinian thought back to the warmth that was held in the cup of that flower. It was like another life now, the contrast between the flower and this undersea bubble. The pod before him reminded him of a green toad nestling in the stinking mud of hell.

“I thought that maybe by coming here I could learn something about what happened to Anya,” he murmured.

“I’m sorry,” the pod said. As it listened to Justinian’s story, it had folded its ridiculous arms; now it spread them in apology. “I have no idea what happened to your wife. From what I can remember, I shut down my higher mental functions voluntarily. Is that what happened to Anya?”

There was a flash of movement at the edge of the dark bubble. The pod in front of Justinian had been responsible for seeding the oceans with life. At this stage in the planned terraforming schedule, there should be nothing out there more sophisticated than plankton. And yet the stinking rocks down here were plastered with bright scarlet weed. That shouldn’t be here—not fourteen kilometers below the ocean. Maybe this pod had also released its cargo too soon. Justinian was avoiding the issue. He brought his mind back to Anya.

“I don’t know what happened to my wife. I don’t think she gave up voluntarily….”

Fifteen months ago

“Justinian?” Anya was holding one hand to her head; the baby slept in the crook of her other arm. So small, barely two days old. His tiny nose was still bent out of shape from the birthing, his mouth open as he took little breaths. Perfectly at peace, wrapped in the warm aura of his mother.

“Are you okay?” asked Justinian, his attention drawn from his son by a sudden feeling of concern. “Here…let me take the baby.”

The baby’s eyes half opened as Justinian took him in his arms and shushed him gently back to sleep. Anya seemed barely aware of what was going on.

“Justinian, could you look at me?” she pleaded. “Empathize with me, I mean.”

“Is that such a good idea?” Justinian’s training told him it wasn’t. Never use MTPH on someone with whom you were involved in a close relationship. Not unless you wanted to feel all their fears and paranoia close up. Not unless you were certain you could live with the image they really held of you, rather than the one they projected through kisses and hugs and love talk.

“I wish you would.” She sighed. “I feel so…empty.”

Their life was too small and crowded after the empty expanses of the planets in the Enemy Domain. It had been Anya’s idea to move back to Earth, an idea they both regretted almost as soon as they had taken up residence in the Arctic arcology. The emptiness of the snow-blown wastes seen through the windows of the crowded gardens and living spaces of the arcology merely reminded them what they had given up. Justinian tenderly placed the baby in the minding tank and then led his wife to the sofa.

He worked his console and popped free a little blue pill.

“It is my professional opinion that this is a valid interaction,” he said softly for the record. The console shushed its agreement.

“Do you want to feed back?” he asked Anya, his fingers ready to pop a little red pill free of the console.

His wife put her hands to her head and absently kneaded the short blond hair about her temples.

“I don’t care anymore, Justy.” She sighed again. “I feel like my brain is just a mechanism. All it does is react to external stimulation.”

Justinian placed the little blue pill on the edge of his tongue and swallowed.

“That’s just depression,” he said, tasting the first edge of sensation that came from Anya. It didn’t feel like depression. It didn’t feel like anything, really.

“I feel like my mind is just a mechanical process,” said Anya. “A Turing machine. Like the thing that runs this apartment.”

The feelings that came from Anya were rising in intensity. There was something like love, something like complacency, something like mild irritation at the way he was now sitting. But mostly there was emptiness. “Just a machine,” she repeated softly.

“So what? You say that as if there was something wrong with it.” Justinian was indignant. “Your body is a mechanical process. Your heart pumps, your muscles contract, your nerves react. So what if your mind is a Turing machine? You are greater than the sum of your parts.”

Anya smiled weakly.

“I know that. But the words you speak are just being written to a length of tape inside my skull, and my brain is just the tape head that jumps back and forth as it reacts to the meaning encoded by those words.”

Justinian gave her hand a comforting squeeze, but inside he was filling with cold horror. He could see inside her brain. He was used to reading VReps; he could glance at the pattern of concentric circles that gave a sketch of a machine’s mind and gave a shape to what he saw. He had internalized the process so well that the MTPH could use the metaphor of a VRep to give shape to what his subconscious picked up. And what he was seeing now inside Anya’s head was exactly what she had described. A long reel of tape was threaded between the hemispheres of her brain, clicking through a section at a time, chattering back and forth as she examined his face, her eyes darting.

“What’s the matter, Justy? What can you see?”

“Nothing, Anya.”

“You can see it, can’t you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

She smiled sadly, and Justinian felt a surge of hope at the sudden expression of emotion.

“I know you’re humoring me,” she said. “I know that you are, and I don’t blame you. I know that a Turing machine is just a mathematical concept. But, Justy, I can feel my brain mapping directly onto the mechanism. It’s like I can almost see the original process in there, just out of reach. The self-referential part of my mind that allows me to be me. And if I see that, I will have defined myself and all of my thoughts.”

She squeezed his hands and he felt another dying fountain of emotion well inside her. She smiled again, and then he saw the old Anya with her grey brain. Just for a moment. She was fading again. He squeezed her hands tighter.

“But, Anya, so what? What does it mean to have defined all your thoughts?”

She shook her head and looked puzzled, as if trying to remember something. The tape slotted back into her brain, thunking back and forth as she formed her next sentence.

“I think,” she began, “I think it’s because once you can see the pattern, you just have to look at the tape and after that…” Her voice faded. Her lips moved as she tried to work out what to say, and the tape rattled on in her brain. She spoke again: “But then, what’s the point? They’re already defined for me, whether I have to think them or not. Ah! Of course…”

And at that point she turned her full gaze on him, as if she finally understood, and Justinian felt Anya switch off. The thought processes were still there, but there was no longer any spark of life inside. Just a sequence of movements.

“No!” he called. “Anya, listen to me! It’s just your imagination. It doesn’t make sense.”

He kissed her on her forehead, felt the coldness inside his heart deepen. He fumbled at his console and popped out a red pill. Forced open her mouth, fingers feeling the warmth of her lips, pushed the pill onto her moist tongue. He clamped her mouth shut.

“Swallow this, Anya! Listen to me! Feel what I am feeling.” The pill was the kiss of life; the electric shock that jump-starts a heart.

There was no reaction. He wondered if the pill was working, hoped it was a dud. But he knew it wasn’t; he could feel it taking hold. He could pick up the emotions she was feeling: they were all secondhand. All those emotions, but all his own. He was just feeling his own reflection; everything else that made her Anya had gone. A warm empty bottle. It was horrific, but it wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was what he could still see there inside her head. In her brain, the tape was still clicking through. It was accelerating now, clicking past at an increasing pace, as Anya fast-forwarded through to the end of her life.

Justinian was crying and was angry at himself for doing so. He didn’t want to have had to travel to the edge of another galaxy, to descend fourteen kilometers beneath the ocean and speak to a half-mad AI in order to grieve for his dead wife. He wiped his eyes with a furry sleeve of his golden passive suit.

“I’m sorry,” the AI pod said.

“For what?” Justinian said bitterly. “What do you know about it?”

“Justinian,” it was speaking gently now, “accept my sympathy. For what happened to your wife. For the fact that I can’t give you any reasons for what happened to her. I don’t think it was like that for me.”

“I don’t think so either,” Justinian snapped. He was finding it hard to regain control of himself. This wide, cold, stinking dome, with its shiny, red weeds plastered over the red rocks, was an unlikely cathedral in which to mourn, but all of a sudden, it seemed strangely appropriate. “It’s just, I don’t understand. What is thought, anyway? What is intelligence? It has driven us across the galaxy. We thought it would take us to the end of the universe, but instead it has trapped me here at the bottom of the ocean with nothing more than the ability to grieve for my wife in a place where nothing else can think.”

“That’s not quite true.”

“Isn’t it? Do you know what I think? What if there is a thought that matches every brain, one which that brain can’t think? It sets up a destructive interference pattern that shakes the thing apart, like the single note that shatters a wine glass. I was there when Anya passed away, when the essence of Anya faded. I’m frightened that I saw that thought. That it infected me and lurks in my mind, just waiting. That I’m on the edge of thinking it….”

“That sounds like a mental application of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem,” the pod observed.

Justinian stared at it.

“Gödel…We did that at school.”

“But where would these thoughts come from?”

Justinian laughed quietly, and rubbed his sleeve across his eyes again.

“Humans have been interacting with AIs for a long time. We are thinking ideas that are beyond the ability of human minds to conceive for themselves. Ideas thought up by AIs. Maybe they are unwittingly leading us down paths where we literally begin to think the unthinkable. It makes me think about something you said earlier, about our galaxy being a region of light when all else is darkness. The intelligence of an AI warps the space about itself like a gravitational field—”

He stopped, puzzled, then shook his head and frowned.

“Now where did that thought come from? Here at the end of life, about to enter a lifeless galaxy…”

One of the pod’s mechanical arms reached down to the ocean floor. Fine silt had settled there. Justinian had slipped and skidded over it earlier as he had made his way to the pod. The pod’s arm began to draw something there.

“But M32 is not lifeless,” the pod said quietly. “There is something in there. Look at the Schrödinger boxes, look at the BVBs. I notice you have one around your arm. And your leg.”

Justinian felt the warmth from his arm. Leslie had done something to stop the flesh shrinking from the cold and the BVB with it. Even so, the tight black band still felt as if it was restricting his circulation.

“I’ve got a BVB here,” said the pod. The other of its arms reached back behind the pod and picked something up: a cylinder of glass with a BVB tightly wrapped around it.

“I spun the glass myself, sometime before I limited my intelligence. My previous self dumped the images of its manufacture in the boot section where I now reside.”

“The boot section? Just like the last AI,” said Justinian,

“Really? How interesting.” The pod’s tone suggested it wasn’t. “You know, I’ve got no idea what these BVBs are, but they are forming all over this planet, all the time. Most of them just shrink out of our frame of reference.”

“Shrink to nothing,” Justinian said.

“I don’t think so. They can’t vanish if they have a hole in the middle. Basic topology. What’s the smallest a ring can be?”

Justinian’s console chimed. He glanced down at it.

“I’ve got about thirty minutes left down here before the atmosphere starts to have adverse effects. Can we move this on? What were you doing down here?”

“Do you need to ask?” the pod said peevishly. “Surely you could have looked that up before you came down here. But that’s not it, is it? You did look it up. This is some sort of test, to measure my personality. You could just look at my VRep. Here it is….”

A visual representation of the pod’s intelligence formed on its body. Justinian glanced at it: just another regular onion cross section.

“Not your fault,” the pod continued. “The EA wrote your script for you, I suppose? Well, we all have to follow our scripts. Only some of us cannot see the scripts we are following.”

The pod fell silent, one metal hand continuing to scratch at the ocean floor. It was writing something there, Justinian thought. Writing in the silt. As it did so, it disturbed something: a Schrödinger box. Where had that come from?

“I would guess it came from your ship,” the pod said, apparently following his thoughts. “Think about them, Justinian. They’re everywhere across this planet, just like the BVBs, but with one crucial difference. The BVBs settle on the physical and stay there. The boxes are fixed in position only by intelligence. It’s like something is trying to get a hold on this planet. Tell the EA I don’t think we’re the only ones venturing beyond our galaxy.”

A little thrill of fear tumbled in Justinian’s stomach. He looked towards the flier where his son was.

“You think something is maybe trying to contact us?” he said.

“I don’t think so,” the pod said. “You’re thinking in human or AI terms. This is different.”