Capacity (34 page)

Judy ran on and on. She had developed a stitch. Her long white sleeves trailed behind her, flapping in the wind.

“The section has been released. It has already begun to fall…”

“
Judy, dive!
”

The voice this time was Frances’. Judy dived and rolled, and something ricocheted off the ramp behind her. She looked up, back up the vertiginous wall of the Shawl interior, to the doorway of her apartment. Tentacles writhed up there, and for just a moment, the blue skeleton of a robot was visible before it was snatched backwards. Frances!

“Don’t look back. Just run!” Judy 11 called.

Judy rolled back onto her feet and resumed running. Down and down, round and round. Past the long white banners with their gaily printed messages, past the empty doorways of other apartments.

“Chris has some sort of nano-virus infecting this section,” Judy 11 called. “He’s taken control of nearly all of the materials in here. Frances can’t work on them; she can’t get them to reproduce for her own benefit. Chris has total control: he’s blocking signals to the outside world. Get to the airlock, Judy. Get me through, and I can call for help.”

“I’m trying,” Judy gasped, still running, her feet sore, stitch aching. “Where…you…come…from?”

“Frances,” said Judy 11. “I was hiding in her all along, where else? Oh, shit.”

There was a screeching, tearing noise, and a sudden breeze. Something gold dropped towards Judy.

“What?” Judy called, looking around. Something glinted on the back of her hand. Something metal, a flat speaker—that was how Judy 11 was speaking to her—fired by Frances. The breeze suddenly became a wind. The wind was increasing; it began to howl…

“…d…w…” Judy 11 called, the tiny voice from the speaker lost in the gale. Up above, Judy could see the material of the section folding apart, puckering and sliding over itself. Chris was rearranging its structure, opening it to space. The atmosphere was exploding away.

“Damn,” Judy said to herself. “He’s won. He’s got me.” She couldn’t believe it, that she would die here. Then the grey material of the ramp itself was breaking up, running over her feet, forming around her body, making…

“A spacesuit!” Judy 11 said in her ear. “Yes! Just like the one Kevin used. It’s the same code! Only applied to materials in atomic space. That’s neat. Atomic or digital, the code works in both worlds.”

The gold shape was still dropping towards Judy. She gave a laugh as she recognized it, then it dropped onto her, enfolded her, reshaped itself.

“Now,” Judy 11 said, confidence returning to her voice. “Run. We can make it.”

Wrapped in the skin of her best friend, filled with renewed hope, Judy ran down the disintegrating ramp, through the thinning wind, the blackness of space opening up behind her.

“Hurry,” urged Judy 11…

…Except Judy 11 was already dead. She had died before Judy had ever left her apartment, scrambled as Frances had prepared her attack in the atomic Judy’s bedroom. The metal starfish that had come whirling through the door had sent interference patterns across the electromagnetic spectrum, the thrashing patterns of its legs distorting space and time and reshaping the relationship between entities in the room. Judy 11 stood apart from Frances in the processing space that made up the robot’s mind. She didn’t stand a chance against the attack. Frances was having enough trouble preserving her own integrity; the metal starfish seemed to operate on levels of physics she hadn’t known existed. Not a moment too soon, the starfish fell to the floor and twitched and died. It looked so pathetic lying there, a coil of material that had once been part of the wall of Judy’s lounge.

“Why did you make her run?” Chris had asked, as the glacial war of attrition that was the battle ground on around them. “I only wanted to talk with her.”

“You were reprogramming her. I can’t allow you to do that.”

“You’ve condemned her to death.”

“It was better than the alternative.”

“You’re wrong.”

Complex shapes unfolded in five dimensions. Frances fought to understand this latest attack as she strove to protect Judy.

“Why are you doing that?”

“Doing what?” Frances asked.

“Struggling to preserve a pattern of bits that you can easily recreate. You know this battle is already decided. Judy is going to die. What difference does it make if she lives another thirty seconds?”

“Thirty more seconds or forty more years, she’s always going to die, Chris. I’m going to help her hold on to every moment.”

Frances sought to gain a purchase on
something,
worked to find a way around the nano-virus that made every object in the section strangely slippery to her touch. It was hopeless.

“Okay. I know that she is going to die today,” snapped Frances, as she saw her position rapidly weakening. “But, Chris, live in a body like I have done, and you would understand why I’m trying to give her these last few seconds.”

She felt black despair. She could see how Chris was manipulating magnetic fields, channeling them towards the atomic Judy, who was fleeing down the ramp. He was so much more powerful than Frances was, how could she hope to fight him?

“Frances, I could take a human mind and represent it as a string of ones and zeros, and write them out over the pages of a book. I could take a copy of
Pride and Prejudice,
burn it, and then print out the words it once contained on a wafer of plastic, and everyone would call it the same book. What is the difference?”

“Kevin knows,” Frances said. “His Private Network relies on the fact that both the clients and prisoners believe there is a difference….”

The magnetic field that Chris manipulated was getting stronger, and it was focused near the base of the ramp. Judy was running to her death, and just like with Judy 11, there was nothing Frances could do to save her.

“Still you try,” Chris remarked. “Still you try to save her. There’s nothing there that can’t be represented as bits, Frances. Are you saying that one pattern of bits has more value than another?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Frances said, knowing Chris was teasing her. He could have destroyed her already. He wasn’t just a robot, Chris was all the material around her. Chris had always been much bigger than he had let on; he had a way of insinuating himself into the environment and then focusing attention on that beautiful grey body that stood at the heart of his being. Frances was just one very small robot lost within him.

“It’s your fault that I have to kill her,” Chris said. “If you hadn’t hidden the truth from her all this time…”

“Don’t you see?” Frances said. “Her origin makes no difference! That is the Watcher’s point!”

And then it hit.
Chris was playing with her.

“You’re playing with my mind, aren’t you, Chris? You’re doing to me what we do to humans all the time. You’re making me think what you want me to think. Why are you doing that?”

“Look at Judy.” It was like she was wading through jelly, moving so, so slowly down the ramp. Everything that humans did was slow when you thought at robot speed. Seconds had passed for Judy, no time at all in her human frame of reference. Seconds were a long, long time to Frances and Chris. The battle would be long over before Judy hit the magnetic field. How could Frances have forgotten that? Because she had been in a body so long, and Chris knew it and was using that fact against her. But why?

Because Chris was frightened of her. He still knew that Frances could do something to stop him.

And then she saw it—the path to the outside world, a small hole in Chris’ shielding field. A way to call for help. Call to the Watcher. In her haste she sent a signal straight through the hole.

“Double bluff,” Chris said, looking back down into her mind from the space she had opened up in order to call for help, and then his intelligence crashed down on hers, swamping it.

“Triple bluff,” Frances said.

Judy was running for her life. The ramp shuddered, and she stumbled, tripped, rolled to the edge and went over. She gave a scream as she began to fall. Faster and faster…She hit the ground with a force that knocked the breath out of her. She hurt. Oh, how she hurt. But she wasn’t dead. The golden spacesuit had formed itself into a padded shell as she hit the ground. She climbed painfully to her feet and looked around at the base of the section.

The base? She had reached the bottom at last. The walls of the section rose up all around her, a tall dark chimney, open to the stars. In their midst, the dark shape of the World Tree climbed up, its banners and streamers torn and lost to the vacuum.

Somebody spoke: “Judy, it’s me.”

“Frances! Where’s Judy 11?”

“Never mind. Turn round! Run back up the ramp! Now!”

Judy hesitated. “How do I know it’s really you, Frances?” she asked.

“You don’t. But Chris has a magnetic storm focused around that airlock, and it’s growing. You need to get away from it.”

Judy took a few steps towards the ramp, then paused.

And another voice spoke up. Loud and clear within the golden helmet of the spacesuit. A rich, deep, trustworthy voice. “Judy, it’s true. Run. I’m coming to help you.”

“Who are you?” she asked suspiciously.

“The Watcher. I can see you now. I’m sending help.”

“The Watcher?” Judy felt her legs go weak.

“Judy, it’s true!” Frances called. “I tricked Chris and got a look at that seed in his head. It began to grow. Faster and faster. Chris couldn’t look away; it has a way of drawing your attention to it. Chris had to cut his intelligence right down to stop it expanding further, but he is still much more powerful than me. He
still
has control of all the material of this section. All I have is my body.”

Judy had been walking back towards the base of the spiral ramp. Now she began to run. The white path rose from the green grass up, up into the cold depths, where it lost itself in the stars that now glittered above, seen through the peeled-back walls of the section. And black, and yet somehow more than black against the night sky, there was something else. Something big and branching and…

“Don’t look at it!” the Watcher and Frances called out in unison.

Judy was now running
up
the ramp. She was tired, the stitch in her side wouldn’t go away, and yet she kept on running, one foot in front of the other, pushing down harder and harder as she climbed. Hot breath, it was stifling in the golden suit…There was movement on the ramp ahead. Something small. She gazed at it, and whatever it was froze in place.

“Oh, no…” she breathed. Frances was telling the truth. There, on the white plastic of the ramp, she saw what she had only heard about up until now. Even though she could see it, she still didn’t believe it in her heart.

A Schrödinger box. Here, nearly on the Earth.

“No,” she said again.

“Keep running,” Frances shouted.

She ran on. Suddenly, it seemed a lot harder. Her legs were too heavy. The effort was immense. What was going on? She could barely raise her arms.

“Frances!” she called. “What?”

“It’s Chris,” said her friend. “He’s increased the gravity at the base of the section. It’s on maximum, Judy; he can’t turn it up any more. You have to keep running. The Watcher is too busy. It’s doing something to the plant…. I don’t know what. I daren’t look. There is a shuttle on the way…”

“It will be too late,” said another voice. “We’re reentering the atmosphere, Judy.”

“Shit.”

“The Shawl, Judy—life and death. What you have been fighting for. The section is reentering. It is beginning to burn—”

“No!” Judy redoubled her efforts.

“This is it,” said Chris. “You are going to die for your beliefs, and they’re not even really yours.”

All around her there was movement. The walls of the section were breaking apart. Folding over themselves. Judy saw more stars appearing. The white ramp bucked beneath her feet.

“Onto the branch,” called the stranger’s voice. The Watcher. Judy dived from the white ramp onto a branch of the World Tree. “Hold on!”

The call came just as gravity gave out. All around her the section was breaking apart into thrashing metal shapes as the VNMs that had once built this part of the Shawl were reawakened. Below, Judy could see the blue-white globe of the Earth in the spaces opening up between the thrashing shapes.

The thrashing shapes. They were forming into something else. Monsters.

Judy wished she had some MTPH to take. Meditate, she thought; think yourself calm. Her handhold shook as one of the shapes gripped the edge of the branch to which she was clinging.

“Frances, help me!” she called. The metal thing that had gripped the branch began to coalesce into a definite shape. A long sinuous body formed; red eyes opened to stare at her. A dragon. It grew larger as more of the material of the dying section joined on to its body. It began to walk towards her, its many legs digging into the thick black bark with cruelly curved claws. White wood was torn free to float into space as it made its way onwards. The dragon was bigger than she was, bigger than her old apartment, with a long head that swung back and forth, looking for her. It was still growing.

“Frances! Help me!” she called again. Still there was no reply. What was Frances doing? Hand over hand, Judy pulled herself back along the branch until she reached the trunk of the tree. The golden spacesuit grew spikes at its hands and feet. She dug them deep into the bark, gaining purchase. The dragon grew bigger. It was reaching for her, slowly.

She screamed again: “Frances!”

“There’s no help,” came Chris’ voice. “You see, Frances may have the greater intelligence now, but I still have control of nearly all of the section’s material. I have the matter; all Frances has are her own thoughts.” Chris laughed. “Funny, isn’t it? That two such intelligent beings are reduced to a wrestling match.”