Capacity (25 page)

“I am different from her.”

“You are now, but what about one second after awakening? Two seconds? Five minutes? I tell you: only by being reborn will you truly live again.”

Judy spoke: “You are ripping off old religious texts and getting the meaning completely backwards.”

“If you say so, Judy,” Kevin said. “Let’s go inside and speak properly.” He smiled at Helen. “Promise you won’t be silly?”

Helen’s suit had no motion poppers. Judy tethered Helen to her own suit, then towed her into a nearby section of the Shawl. She noticed that Kevin did the same with Bairn.

They stood in a grey room with a picture of a man with his back to them on one wall. Helen looked around for something that she could use as a weapon. Nothing. She would have to create her own. Bairn was watching her. Helen smiled sweetly and sat down on the floor, tucking her legs underneath herself. She was still naked. She didn’t care.

Kevin began speaking. “David Schummel was a pilot on the Gateway expedition. They couldn’t use AIs out there because they kept committing suicide. They had to use human pilots. Some still exist, even today. Hobbyists. You know the sort of thing?”

Judy nodded.

“David liked to watch, too, Judy.” Kevin smiled significantly. “He had a little processing space all of his own. At night, when his duties were over, he liked to sit in his room and take a look at what was going on in there.”

“What was in there?” Helen asked.

“Does it matter? But I’ll tell you one thing that is always in those little boxes. Me. Zinman was right, Judy. I’m always there. It begins with just a look, but the observer always gets drawn in. In the end, they always want to become part of the processing space themselves, and then…well…”

“You
own
them?” Judy said.

“I own everybody in the end,” Kevin replied. “Everyone who cares to take a look. That’s how I come to know so much. Sooner or later,
everyone
will have met me.”

“Not everyone,” Helen said.

“Everyone who has had a personality construct made,” Kevin said earnestly.

It wasn’t much, as personal spaces go. It only had capacity for a maximum of eight personality constructs. Not that it mattered, because David Schummel only had one stored in there: Madeleine. An ex-girlfriend. In a fit of jealous pique, he had requested that the Private Network make this copy of her just after she had walked out on him. If he couldn’t have her, then no one else could. That aspect of her, anyway.

David had never let Madeleine see him, he just liked to watch from a distance, but she had guessed anyway. In the early days she had shouted and screamed, “Schummel, you wanker, it’s over! Let me go.” But that had been then. As the weeks turned to months and the months turned to years, she had resigned herself to her fate, just as David had come to realize the immaturity of his actions in bottling her up in the first place. But what could he do? To release her into a public processing space would simply draw the attention of the EA to his crime.

Now Madeleine had become David’s talisman. He carried her processing space everywhere—even to Gateway. How could he be separated from her? As for Madeleine, she just got on with her life. She had access to entertainment libraries, to a gym, even to a fairly decent Turing machine with which she could conduct conversations. David was too much of a coward to speak to her directly, even after all this time. Besides, he always did prefer just to watch.

So when David Schummel appeared in person in the processing space, the version of Kevin that had lurked, half asleep and unseen in the background, woke up and took notice.

Schummel’s avatar stood swaying in the small room.
It smells in here,
he thought abstractedly.
Sweat and old food and damp. Doesn’t she clean up after herself? How can she live like this?
His mind was reeling, trying to avoid thinking about what was happening outside in the atomic world.

“Schummel, you bastard. I knew it was you all this time.” Madeleine spoke the words without heat. She was half watching a story in the entertainment tank, as she did at this time every day. Pink voxels swirled in the shape of clouds and David staggered through them. He fell onto his knees and clasped her greasy hands in his. The smell in the room was coming from her, he realized. She was looking at him, but only half registering his presence. What had he done to her? He didn’t care. He had come for help, not to give sympathy.

“They’re all dead, Maddy,” he said. He gave a sob and tears began to run down his cheeks. “I couldn’t help it. It was them or me. I waited as long as I could, but the BVBs were everywhere.”

“Who are all dead?” Madeleine asked. “Look, here comes Chung. He really loves Edward—not like Philip.” A man came strolling through the pink clouds pervading the entertainment tank. He was tall and good looking; he carried a green venumb in one hand.

“Everyone is dead.” Schummel glanced at the tank in confusion. “Everyone on Gateway is dead. Everyone but me and Gwynnedd and Glenn. And that bloody robot. But I’m not sure how long even he will last.”

He looked up at her as she glanced at him, then back at the entertainment tank. He squeezed her hands tighter. “I couldn’t do anything, Maddy. They couldn’t move. If I’d stayed there much longer, I would have been trapped, too. The BVBs, they were all over. Every time you looked away, they were there, tangling themselves around you and shrinking so tight. Dawson almost made it to the shuttle ramp, you know. He tripped. Four of them around his legs, he started crawling, dragging himself along on his hands. I looked at him and those cubes were there—spilling from his mouth. It was my fault, I shouldn’t have kept looking—Schrödinger boxes filling his mouth. I couldn’t look away. I watched him choking. I hit the button, raised the ramp. He’s still out there. Lying on the landing field. I couldn’t save him. I ran to the flight deck and took off. It was like flying through black hail. Schrödinger boxes appearing everywhere I looked. I could hear them rapping on the window. They were dropping inside the cockpit, appearing between me and the glass. I hit maximum thrust, trying to get us up into space, away from that place. One of the BVBs wrapped around me, held my hand tight to the joystick. Out there in the atomic world, my hand is still—”

He retched, put his hands to his mouth and yellow vomit sprayed out between his fingers. Madeleine looked at him and smiled, her hair so long and lank and greasy.

“I see,” she purred. “You know, it’s been a long time. I guess I forgive you, David. Chung does the same, you know. He forgives Edward. He’s a good man, Chung.”

David stood up, took hold of her shoulders and shook her.

“Maddy. Listen to me. Gwynnedd is in her room. Glenn is wrapped to the flight chair in the shuttle. Both of them are unconscious. I put them out; I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I had to speak to someone. The hypership’s AI has committed suicide, too, just like all the others. We’re trapped here. Trapped above Gateway. I got the shuttle back onto the hypership, but I can’t fly the hypership home.”

“But I might be able to.”

“Chung,” said Madeleine. One of the characters had turned to face them. Madeleine was staring wide-eyed at him. “You’ve never said that before.”

“Ah,” Chung said. “That’s because I’m not really Chung. My name is Kevin. David, I think we need to talk. What is going on out there?”

Bairn sat on the floor at Kevin’s feet, watching Helen like a hawk.

“We should be on the same side,” Helen said.

Bairn folded her arms and looked away. “He tortured me, too,” she said approvingly. “It was necessary. It was the only way for me to learn.”

Judy was standing facing Kevin. She had popped little blue pill after little blue pill to no effect. In the end she fell back on traditional methods. She asked questions.

“So you were there to offer David a deal.
Did
you fly the ship back from Gateway?”

“No,” Kevin said. “The drive was beyond me. I only have human intelligence, Judy. I couldn’t possibly understand hyperdrive. Still, I realized that all I had to do was get the ship far enough away from Gateway to persuade an AI to come back to life. It took us weeks, traveling at sublight speeds, but eventually I did it. An AI built up enough intelligence to fly both the ship and David Schummel home.”

“And then what?”

“And then I set about figuring a way to pass the message on to myself.”

The piece of plastic had been lying on the floor since they had entered the room. It was only now that Helen noticed her name was written on the top of it. She picked it up and began to read.

“What message?” Judy asked.

Kevin smiled broadly. “That somewhere out there was something incredibly strange. Something new, powerful, dangerous! But where? I didn’t know where Gateway lay. Remember, I was there by chance, a passenger in David Schummel’s private processing space. Now I was traveling back to Earth, a stowaway on the hypership. I needed to get a message out to myself, but how? When that ship arrived, all hell would break loose. Who knew what the Watcher would do? Say nothing, I suppose, like it usually does. So I lay low and made plans. I managed to catch a Schrödinger box, you know, just for myself. I fixed one in position by a camera, left part of myself looking at it all the time we were traveling home.

“And then we made it back to Earth, and that robot came on board and everything changed.”

“What robot?” Judy asked.

“Chris, it called itself. I’ve never seen anything so advanced. It didn’t register on any of the ship’s senses but one. You could see it, and that was it. It came on the ship to assess what had happened; I guess the Watcher wasn’t taking any chances coming on board, what with all the other AIs committing suicide. Chris looked everywhere and took everything: David Schummel’s processing space, my Schrödinger box. Even David Schummel himself. It almost caught me…”

Helen gasped. She passed the piece of plastic across to Bairn. Kevin noticed what she had done and smiled.

He continued speaking. “But now I have found David Schummel again. Or rather, the atomic Judy has found him for me. And now, maybe, I can find a route back to Gateway.”

Judy’s console chimed. She tilted her head and listened.

“I don’t think so, Kevin. We’ve got you. We just needed to keep you fixed in place long enough to trap you. You can’t commit suicide now.”

“No need,” Helen said in a low voice, leaping across the room and seizing him by the head. She had hold of Kevin’s skull and was banging it against the floor. Somebody grabbed her and pulled her backwards. Kevin was laughing

“Leave me alone, Judy. I need to kill the fucker.” But it wasn’t Judy.

“I can’t let you do it, Helen,” Bairn whispered. Judy stood in the middle of the room, looking at them both with interest.

“Why won’t you help me, you black-and-white bitch?” Helen growled.

Kevin had got up and was walking around the room, seemingly oblivious to Helen and Bairn wrestling in the middle of the floor. He started banging at the grey walls. “Clever,” he was saying. “I’m trapped. But can you stop me from doing
this
?”

He concentrated. Judy merely smiled.

“Evidently you can,” he said.

“We’ve been stopping people from committing suicide for centuries,” Judy said. “It’s one of Social Care’s first priorities.”

Helen flung Bairn free. She dived at Kevin and pressed her fingers against his neck.

“Helen, no!” Judy leapt forward. This time it was she who pulled Helen’s hand free from Kevin’s neck. But it was a distraction; Helen’s other hand slid something sharp and white into his wrist.

“Ouch!” Kevin said. “You are persistent, Helen. I’ve always known that.” Bairn pulled Helen’s hand away. The sharp piece of plastic she had taken from her console spun across the room. Kevin glared at her and rubbed his wrist.

“Thank goodness for that,” Judy gasped. “We need him alive, Helen. Killing would be a kindness to him. It’s what he wants.”

“Pity,” Helen said.

Kevin waved his wounded hand as it erupted in grey powder. His body froze, his veins turned grey.

“Venumbs,” explained Helen. “Just a couple of them in a scratch on the end of the plastic knife. They only act on red blood cells.”

Kevin tried to scream. Too late. He was gone, burst like the head of a toadstool, grey powder drifting to the floor.

“Let’s hope none of us has open wounds,” Helen said mildly.

For the second time, Judy 3 lost her temper while on the job. “You stupid bitch! What have you done?”

“You could have stopped me if you hadn’t been so busy just watching,” Helen replied calmly.

Bairn was sobbing. She knelt on the floor, rubbing her hands through the powder.

“Don’t you see: you were his fallback?” Judy shrieked. “He knew what we were trying to do. You were his escape route! Why did you do it?”

Bairn’s tears fell on grey powder and onto the plastic sheet that Kevin had deliberately left on the floor for Helen to find.

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