CAPACITY

The Atomic Judy 3: 2240

Ten years ago, when she was nineteen, Judy had known everything. She wore her chastity like a shield between her black kimono and her lithe body, and she walked with a calm self-assurance that allowed the former to spice the latter. Her black hair was pulled up to reveal her long white neck sliding smoothly down to the promise of her naked body beneath her clothes.

“Into the main hall,” Frances said, speaking through Judy’s console. “I think that’s where I should like it to take place.”

Judy walked through a door like any other and into the huge space of the factory. A woman in a white jumpsuit was gazing up at a great yellow wishbone being pulled slowly from two flat pools of golden liquid set in the floor. She straightened up as she saw Judy and gave her an inquiring smile.

“It’s all right, Ms. Barbucci; she’s with me.” The woman’s expression changed to something like respect as Frances’ voice sounded from her console.

“You must be Judy,” she said, taking her by the arm. “Come this way. I have some things laid out waiting.”

She led Judy around the low lip of one of the circular pools from which they were pulling the wishbone. The syrupy liquid it contained seemed no more than a few centimeters deep, yet as they circled its calm surface, Judy saw another half-meter or so of smooth yellow material slide from the pool.

“The finished object must be all one piece,” explained Ms. Barbucci, pointing upwards to where her leg of the wishbone joined the one emerging from the other pool.

“What’s it for?” The yellow shape was beautiful in its flawless way, possessing a balance and symmetry to its sweeping form.

“Energy column for Jupiter. They drop a stack of these things about four thousand kilometers long into the upper atmosphere. They sing like tuning forks, I’m told.”

Judy eyed the wishbone appreciatively. She wondered: if she took a little blue pill, would she be able to hear the latent note that would someday ring from it?

“Why don’t you grow your body like that, Frances?” she wondered aloud.

“I thought about it,” said the voice on her console. “But I want to live on a human scale and see the world the way you see it.”

“I still don’t quite understand why. But thank you anyway, Frances. Thank you for inviting me to your birthday.”

“Who else would I invite? Now, that looks like the place.”

A white rectangle, the size of a large room, had been painted on the factory floor. The area inside was stacked with rolls of silver cloth, piles of black chips, rusty tangles of steel wire, fluffy clumps of white stuff, glistening blue sponge…

“My birthplace,” Frances sighed.

Judy stepped onto the white rectangle and looked around. She felt dwarfed by the activity of the rest of the factory. Some people called this place the Source; it was where the first sections of the Shawl had been designed. Now they reproduced by themselves in the space beneath the factory, the blue-white disc of the Earth lying thousands of kilometers below. If you looked down through the great transparent lens in the factory floor, you could see some of the newly born sections turning end over end, waiting to be joined to the uppermost row of the Shawl itself, from where they would begin their long procession downwards as other rows were added above them, until eventually they were released….

But there were other things made here, too. Some of them were quarantined: new types of robot, experimental star drives, VNM designs that had the potential to reproduce unchecked. But everything else was open to inspection. Not far away was a swarm of silver VNMs busily working away, repeatedly forming themselves into metal towers, springing almost as high as the wishbone above before shrinking to nothing, rising and falling like the bars on a graphic equalizer as they tried and failed to find an optimal shape.

“Frances?” The voice came from Judy’s console. It was deeper, yet in some imprecise way more feminine than her friend‘s.

“Sukara!” Frances called, “I’m so pleased you’re here.”

“Don’t forget us!” chorused two other voices.

“Lemuel! Cadence!”

“We couldn’t let you leave us without saying good-bye.”

“But I’m not leaving you!”

Judy tried to adopt an impassive expression, but she couldn’t manage it. Her face wobbled in a tearful smile. She was dimly aware of the sacrifice Frances was making.

“Now, stop that, Judy. We need you to look after our friend!”

“I will,” Judy said, wiping her face with the back of her hand.

“She will,” Frances agreed. “They know you will, Judy. That’s why they’re having this conversation at a human level-so you can listen in. They respect you. They think you’re all right.”

“For a human,” Sukara laughed.

High above, a cloud of scarlet gas was twisting as it drifted up the side of the incredibly high, domed roof of the factory. Judy guessed the shape that was coalescing up there must be the size of a small town. The gas, the wishbone, the heaving mass of VNMs, all these made her aware just how small she herself was. She had a sudden, greater, insight into what Frances was doing: cutting herself loose from the wider domain of the processing spaces to trap herself in one small body.

“Frances,” Judy said, suddenly humble. “You know I’m flattered, but why me?”

“I’ll tell you, but you might think I’m being rude.”

“I won’t. I’m a counselor for SC. We’re supposed to understand other points of view. You helped train me.”

“And I saw a potential in you I have seen in no other human. You know that. But that’s not why I chose you. You want to know why? It’s because I know your limitations better than any other human’s.”

Judy smiled. “I can see how that could be a compliment.”

“It wasn’t intended as a compliment,” Frances said. “It was just a statement of fact. Now, I think I’m ready. See the blue sponge?”

It looked like glistening transparent blue jelly, sitting in a shallow tank near her feet. Tiny silver bubbles fizzed inside it.

“I see it,” Judy said.

“Drop one of the reserve VNMs from your console into the sponge.”

Judy held her console over the blue jelly, the silver bubbles fizzing excitedly towards her, and watched as a tiny silver-grey machine dropped into the tank.

“Will that be enough?” she asked. “Don’t you need special machines? That VNM is the one that I usually use for repairing rips in clothes.”

Frances and the other AIs laughed from the console. “That’s such a human thing to say, Judy. All machines can make other ones eventually. There is nothing special about the materials-only the shaping intelligence.”

The little machine seemed to dissolve into the tank.

“How long will it take?” Judy whispered.

“Shhh…It’s happening already.”

The silver bubbles in the tank were rushing together, forming shapes. Silver rods formed of bubbles rose to the surface, bringing the jelly up with them. A blue spongy skeleton began climbing from the tank, even as it formed itself. Blue arms gripped the sides as a blue blob looking something like a brain pulled itself clear of the surrounding goo.

“All right,” Frances said, “I’m ready…”

Voices called from the console.

“Good-bye.”

“Good luck, dear.”

“Come home to us.”

The blue skeleton swayed as it rose from the tank. In some strange way, it seemed to be looking directly at Judy. She backed away uncertainly.

“No, Judy, stay. I need to touch you.”

The voice came from her console, but Judy had no doubt that Frances was now speaking from the blue skeleton. She swallowed hard, then held out her arm. The blue skeleton took her wrist in a cold, fizzing grip.

“I’m giving up so many viewpoints, Judy, but this. To really touch something for the first time…”

Something like a blue hand ran itself across Judy’s face. She forced herself not to flinch.

“Oh, Judy, I have so many more ways of experiencing the world than you, yet even so, I feel so restricted. But if I was everywhere, I would not be a robot. It is necessary for me to withdraw into this body to get the human perspective.”

The blue skeleton gripped Judy for support as it looked around the factory, up at the scarlet shape that had formed in the roof space, back at the last motion of the stacks of VNMs behind them which seemed to have settled on a final shape.

Rain began to fall over half the extent of the factory floor. Judy could look through the silver curtain of water to the dry floor lying beyond the golden pools. Fat drops splashed against her kimono, plastering the thin silk against her skin.

“Why is it raining?” she asked.

“You know,” Frances said in a voice of awed wonder, “I don’t know straight off. I have to look it up.”

“It’s not too late to come back, Frances,” called one of the voices from the console.

“No, Lemuel. I want to stay…”

“Aren’t you going to put a skin on?” Sukara asked. There came a crackling noise from around the base of the brain of the blue skeleton, and then Frances spoke from the robot’s body.

“Oh, yes, I know the perfect thing. Judy, help me.”

Frances led Judy across the factory floor, the black-and-white woman supporting this blue, spongy, fizzing, stick creature. They were heading towards the base of one of the wishbone legs.

Frances climbed into the yellow pool and Judy watched the blue skeleton sink beneath its surface.

“But the wishbone is so hard,” said Judy. “Frances won’t be able to move.”

“Frances was an expert engineer,” Cadence said. The surface of the yellow pool began to stir.

“She still is,” Judy murmured. None of the omnipresent AIs were so rude as to contradict her.

Frances emerged from the pool in a golden suit, yellow liquid slowly setting around her body like buttery toffee. Frances’ body was to be smooth and featureless, and Judy had a sudden flash of recognition: that was how she, Judy, liked to think of herself. And then she saw the buttons between Frances’s legs, and she heard a peal of laughter from her console.

“You’re her template, Judy,” Sukara explained. “She’s not been totally honest with you. Already the strain of being focused into one point is restricting her. She’s reacting to you. She’s the rest of you. She’s exploring humanity by completing you.”

Ten years later, Judy and Frances stood on a road that wound its way along the Brittany coastline. White spray, carried by the brisk wind from waves crashing on the rocks below, glistened on Judy’s golden skin. She moved her head this way and that, searching for a route to Peter Onethirteen.

“My feet are cold.”

“Put your tabi back on, then,” Frances said, pointing to the scraps of material tucked into the white silk of her friend’s obi.

“They’re genuine cotton!” Judy said indignantly. “They’ll get stained.”

The wind gusted again and she shivered. The pines standing on the low hills that rose out of the sand dunes were almost doubled over, their branches waving inland, bent by the ceaseless winds blowing over the iron-grey sea.

“This way.” Frances led her along a strip of rough grass weaving inland from the sand dunes between the green reeds of a saltmarsh.

“I hate this wilderness.” Judy fastidiously pulled the legs of her cotton trousers up a little. She had tucked the five separate robes of her dress up into her sash to stop them getting dirty. “The sooner they release VNMs to convert the whole Earth to plastic, the better.”

Frances laughed. “I find it quite sensual. You’re too clinical, Judy. I’m sure that your digital selves have a better time of it. They can always take refuge in the thought that their world is all bits, in the end.”

“And my world is all atoms. It’s all the same.”

The air was damp. Rough grass coated in gritty sand rubbed against their legs as they strode on through the no-man’s-land between the dunes and the low green hills. Ahead of them, a sparkling pattern of lavender lights formed a wall in the air as a warning. Judy waved her hand through the barrier experimentally. Frances stepped straight through and turned to wait for her friend.

“According to the records, the atomic Peter Onethirteen spends most of his time in here,” she said. “I can see why. I sometimes think about coming to live in a common land. It seems to me to be an echo of the thinking behind the Shawl, only without compromise-purer.”

“You should move to Penumbra.” Judy took a deep breath, then followed her friend through the lavender wall.

“See, you’re still alive,” Frances said.

Judy ignored her, examining a scrubby brown tree that twisted itself close to the ground, its ragged green leaves flickering in the wind. The overlaps of her robes flickered in sympathy. “Look at that tree. Is it natural, or a venumb?”

“Natural,” Frances said. “It’s a hawthorn. Now that looks like a venumb to me.”

Judy turned in the direction she was pointing. Keeping just inside the lavender wall, a brown spider bush shuffled backwards, tugging at a piece of silver foil. Silver metal hinges bent and clicked, forming joints in the brown thorny twigs that comprised its legs.

“Where did the foil come from?” she asked.

“Trunk of another spider tree, probably,” Frances said. “Let’s follow it. It’s heading in Peter’s direction.”

Sand spilled across the green mounds in long yellow tongues. Judy’s ankles felt cold and raw from the damp abrading wind. The spider bush seemed unconcerned, its legs clicking along like clockwork, the topmost joints weaving in loops like knitting needles as it dragged its prize back home. Next to the bright colors of Judy’s kimono, it looked dull and unimpressive.

“Where’s its processing space?”

“Probably in the main tree,” Frances suggested, her attention elsewhere as she scanned around for Peter Onethirteen. “It’s rare for a species to waste materials by incorporating a brain into each separate servant.”

The spider bush stood as high as Judy’s waist, formed of brown thorny twigs as thick as her finger, all joined together by metal hinges. The top half of the venumb was a woven mass of twigs from which four thorny pincers reached out to grasp the piece of silver foil, now sending giddy flashes of grass and sky and kimono reflecting in the dull day. As the spider bush made its way down the other side of the low hill, there was a moment of discontinuity, then Judy suddenly found herself standing beneath a huge silver tree.

“Whoa!”

“Couldn’t you see it?” Frances said. “I didn’t think the baffles on this tree were that strong.”

“Just strong enough,” a man’s voice said. “That’s how it has survived.” There was another moment of discontinuity, and a middle-aged man appeared before them wearing an apologetic expression.

“I’m Peter Onethirteen.”

Judy took a deep breath and resumed her professional exterior. Her face assumed its impassive expression.

“You were expecting us, weren’t you?” she said.

Peter Onethirteen nodded, glancing at Judy’s bare feet.

“My digital self contacted me this morning. I don’t know what you did to him, but he was terrified.”

Judy folded her hands into the sleeves of her kimono. “But you’re not, are you?” she said. “Interesting.”

“Oh, I’m still scared,” said Peter calmly, “but I have learned that it’s more effective to ride events than oppose them.” The atomic Peter’s short, stocky body was winning the battle against middle-aged spread. His thinning hair was shaved close to his head. The contrast with his digital self was marked.

Judy said nothing. The spider bush had by now dragged its piece of foil to the base of the silver tree. It dropped it there and then awkwardly began to climb the trunk.

“Ah. It’s going to make another bush to help with the harvest,” said Frances, who had been apparently ignoring the exchange between the two humans. “Clever things, these venumbs.”

“Actually, it’s not a venumb,” Peter Onethirteen said, going over to join her. “It’s more a symbiote,” he continued. “A bit like the way that lichen is a symbiosis between fungus and algae. The tree itself is a genetically modified rose bush. The VNM seems to find the thorny wood of the tree provides the best building material. Watch…”

Smooth brown twigs were falling to the ground, sharp red thorns glowing in the pale light. A rasping, clicking noise came from the branches above, where the spider bush worked unseen. The noise ceased and the spider bush then dropped to the ground in a tangled heap. There was a moment’s stillness and then it began to twitch, its silver joints flashing, and the bush gradually regained control of its legs. It raised itself up and then began collecting the twigs it had just harvested into a pile.

Peter Onethirteen was smiling as he watched the spider bush tearing off pieces of silver foil and placing them amongst the twigs. He moved forward to crouch down by the bush and beckoned Judy closer. She stood at his shoulder, her robes flapping gently in the wind.

“To be honest, I don’t quite understand how the next bit works,” he said. “I don’t think it uses nanotechs, but there is no way those twig fingers could form the metal foil into hinges and motors. It’s a beautiful principle, though. In a region of scarce resources, both VNM and plant make use of their respective strengths. The VNM gains access to building material, while the tree gets armor and stealth protection.”

“Did they evolve naturally? Or do they have a creator?” Peter looked towards her. Her body remained still, but there was a note of interest in her voice.

“I don’t know. They were found in the Russian Free States over a hundred years ago. Nobody will admit how long they’d been around before they were discovered.”

Still crouching, he waved his hand to take in the area around them. “This area was established as common ground after the Transition. It’s littered with symbiotes like these.” He paused. Frances had moved up beside him, bringing the push buttons between her legs level with his face. He appeared to notice them for the first time.

“There’s something about these bushes,” he said, looking rather disconcerted. He turned to Judy. “A suggestion that there are forms of evolution other than the path chosen for us by the EA. I spent time in the Enemy Domain, you know. It gives you a different…perspective.”

Judy’s hand was moving from her sleeve to her mouth, a tiny blue dot on her finger.

“Ouch!”

“What’s the matter?” asked Peter.

“I don’t know.” Judy frowned. “I thought I felt…Never mind.” She regained her composure and placed a little pill on her tongue.

The second spider bush was completed. After a moment’s apparent thought, it began to scuttle after the first, back towards the beach.

“Going to harvest more foil,” Peter said. “If the tree they’re stealing it from doesn’t get its stealth routines updated fast, all the local symbiotes will find it and strip it clean of metal.”

Judy gazed at him, the little blue pill dissolving on her tongue.

“You’re not like your digital counterpart,” she observed. “I’ve got my sister’s report.”

“People change.” Peter shrugged. “My digital counterpart was created years ago. We’ve grown differently.”

Judy’s gaze was cool. “There’s more to it than that. You said you spent time in the Enemy Domain. Tell me about that.”

Peter gave an involuntary shiver. “I was marooned there for three months,” he said. “That was after the digital Peter Onethirteen was created. He never experienced what I did.” He knelt down and picked up some of the twigs that the spider bush had dropped to the ground.

Judy tilted her head to listen to her console. “Oh, I see,” she said in some surprise. “Three months marooned on a clone world. How could that be allowed to happen?”

“It does sound far-fetched, doesn’t it?” Peter’s voice was soft. “Isn’t that a modern fantasy, to be out from under the gaze of the Watcher?” He noted Judy’s reaction. “Oh yes, I believe in the Watcher.”

Frances was intrigued. “How is it possible to be marooned? Surely the EA were monitoring you at all times. They would have noticed that you were missing.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Peter straightened up, brushing his hands together. “Look, why don’t we go to my apartment? If nothing else I can get something for Judy to put on her feet.”

The tree flickered from sight as they walked away from its stealth region. Judy had the impression that other things were hidden away in the windblown land around them.

“You know about the origins of the Enemy Domain, of course,” said Peter. “An AI was charged with overseeing the colonization of a planet. It got paranoid and ended up creating an expanding volume of self-replicating machines. It sought to challenge the Earth sphere of expansion.”

“It tried to make colonists,” Frances interrupted. “It left something like three trillion half-grown clones scattered through the region.”

“I know,” Peter said. “The EA employed people like me to go into the former Enemy Domain to help clean up the mess.”

“A lot of people from Social Care went there,” Judy said.

“Yes,” he said patiently. “I met some of them. Anyway, I flew into the Enemy Domain alone. I had a set of library codes to build anything up to and including type six VNMs and a set of teaching resources so I could train the clone population in the use of self-replicating technology. My ship was a limited Von Neumann Machine: the copies it made of itself would not contain warp drives. I think the EA is still nervous about what may lurk in the Enemy Domain. It’s probably right, considering what happened to me.”

Frances seemed fascinated by Peter, and Judy noticed how her walk mimicked his. She was clearly adopting his mannerisms. The robot leaned forward and tilted her head slightly.

“And what happened to you, Peter?”

“I was picked up by a remnant of the Enemy Domain’s security net. A very efficient net: completely isolated and self-sufficient. I hear there are still lots of regions in the ED like that. Regions that don’t know they have been defeated by the Watcher and the Earth AIs, security systems that are still fighting battles in a war that was over long ago. My ship was disabled as it flew into one of them, but an image of my ship carried on, following my original course. That security net was good: the apparent ship mimicked the emanations from my own ship exactly. It was three months before the Earth AIs realized that I wasn’t where they thought I was.”

“And what happened during that time?” Judy asked.

“I was interrogated.” Peter walked in silence for a while. “The details are all available from the EA, if you want to know. They…healed me afterwards.”

Judy slowed, listening to her console. Frances walked on beside Peter. They passed through another insubstantial barrier of lavender lights, leaving the region of common ground behind. Antique low-rise buildings made of concrete and glass were scattered in a grid pattern before them, the air above them being kept clear for some reason. Skyscrapers could be seen in the distance beyond.

“I have a subterranean apartment in one of the closer buildings,” Peter said. “They built low here, to retain the look of the area. I think that bleak concrete-and-glass look suits this countryside, don’t you?” They stopped outside the entrance to his apartment block. “Do you see that cannon over there?” He indicated a vicious black spike that stood on the top of a nearby building, pointing up into the grey sky.

“I see it,” Frances said.

“The AIs have calculated that, next week, a section of the Shawl will hit the ground just about where we’re now standing. That cannon is designed to destroy the last few fragments before they can do any damage. The AIs have set the burn at about a hundred meters up; it promises to be quite a display.”

Judy walked quickly to keep up with them, white robes flapping plum and pink.

“You live on the Shawl, don’t you, Judy?” Peter said. “I checked up on you when my digital self said that you might be calling.”

“I do,” she said. “Frances, could I have a word, please?”

“I’ll wait for you inside. Come right in when you’re ready. Frances can find the way.” Peter walked into the building.

“What’s the matter?” asked Frances, brushing a ragged splinter of rose wood from Judy’s shoulder.

Judy stared up at her. “I don’t understand what’s going on here,” she whispered. “That man is a hero. Have you accessed the records?”

“I have,” Frances said.

“That security net took him apart, Frances. It spread his body out across a planet, and it let him watch it all happen. Unpeeled his skin, spread out his lungs, sliced open his intestines and dropped them in a bath of nutrient. And then it just looked at him. He lay alone on a planet, far from anywhere, with an insane security net observing him. Every part of his being was under its gaze, and it let him know everything it was doing. He went insane.”

“But the EA healed him.”

“And I can feel the mend in his mind, Frances. I can feel where the fracture was. It’s…not nice.”

“I feel your pain, Judy.”

“I wonder if you can empathize with it, though.” Judy blinked. There was no one around, nothing but grey buildings and rough green grass. She put one hand to her head for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Frances reached out to hold her friend’s hand. There was a moment’s peace, then Judy regained her composure.

“Someone is playing games with us, Frances. What are we doing here? Whatever this man did in the past, he has atoned for his crimes. The EA knows that. It’s all in its report.”

“I know,” Frances said. “And it’s worse than that. The EA put his mind back together. They must have had a complete map of his past to have done that. They would have known everything about his involvement with the Private Network. Why didn’t they do anything about that then?”

“I don’t know about then,” said Judy. “But I’m starting to think they’re doing something now. Frances, the AI that interrogated Peter left his signature on the report: serial ident, VRep, image, and nomenclature. Frances, it was that stealth robot, Chris. It was Chris who interrogated him after he was rescued from the Enemy Domain.”

Frances paused, accessing the records herself.

“I see,” she said. “Judy, this is not about the Private Network, is it? We’re being deliberately led along a trail.”

“And it’s all to do with this man Justinian. The man the Watcher murdered-supposedly murdered.” Judy looked up at the cruel spike of the cannon on the roof of the nearby building. It reminded her of the imminent demise of her own section of the Shawl. “Maybe it’s the pill,” she said, “but I can’t help feeling that events seem to be converging. I’m suffused in Blue, Frances. The world looks like a whirlpool and we’re caught in the outermost currents. I can see a funnel and it’s leading down to somewhere we don’t want to go.” Judy shook her head; she wasn’t making a lot of sense, even to herself.

Frances spoke. “You’re overdoing the MTPH, Judy. You need to give yourself time to come down. You’re getting feedback on your own neuroses.”

Judy took hold of Frances’ arm for support and allowed herself a moment of weakness. She blinked. Grey buildings marched in ranks into the distance. A pastel violet wall stood behind her.

“It’s passing, Frances,” she said. “The geometry of these buildings doesn’t help. This doesn’t make sense. Why should Chris be leading us down a path to Justinian when he knows that the Watcher must be able to see our every move? Anyway, I thought Chris was working for the Watcher.”

“He never actually said that,” the robot said, obviously replaying the conversation in her head. “Maybe he just let us believe that.”

The dizziness was passing. For the moment.

“Maybe the best thing for now is to keep following the path. But with caution. There was nothing about Peter Onethirteen being marooned in Judy Three’s report. Didn’t she check up on all the other instances of Peter Onethirteen’s consciousness?”

Judy took a deep breath and straightened up and gazed at nothing in particular.

“That’s Judy Three,” she said. “It would be just like her to get caught up in observing the PC in front of her and not think to check on all the others. I wonder about her sometimes, Frances. She shows no emotion, even to herself. She’s locked herself up so completely that only her eyes move as she looks out into the world.” She reeled a little. “Did I say that?” She shook her head. “Look, I’m ready. Let’s go inside.”

She was lying, and they both knew it. She felt terrible. MTPH had never been like this before.

Under the influence of blue MTPH, the world suddenly seemed very big to Judy. Big and anthropomorphic. The doorway to Peter’s apartment block opened like a mouth to allow her in. She walked along a corridor where the doors throbbed in their frames, almost too big to be contained, held in place by the pressure of the emotions that were welling up in the enclosed apartments beyond. Judy waded through the yellow and red mist that seeped into the corridor from the living spaces, sending eddies of it spinning with her bare feet. The gravity tube that connected to other floors was a hungry throat opened up, ready to gulp them down; the descending ramp that curved through ninety degrees to merge with the exotically hooped tunnel was a memory of a summer’s day. And now she was getting her emotions and memories mixed. This wasn’t right: what was in that little blue pill? Judy was suffering total synaesthesia.

She was following Peter and Frances down into the earth, her bare feet pulling up bubbles of cosmic force as she lifted them from the rubbery surface of the gravity tube. No. That wasn’t real; that was an imagined sensation. She could tell the real ones. See the way that Peter was looking at Frances. That was real. The robot was drawing his eyes, just like this tube was pulling Judy’s feet to its perpendicular surface. They had put exotic material on spaceships, on the Shawl, and now they put it in apartment blocks so they could fit more people into their exotic geometries.

Two joggers ran past; she felt their glow of sweat and exertion as they raced for the surface. That was real. Now they were turning through ninety degrees again until they were hanging like flies from the ceiling of the world. That was real.

Frances surreptitiously took Judy’s arm as they entered Peter’s living room. The robot guided her unsteady friend to a chair and helped her to sit down.

“That’s interesting,” Frances said, pointing to the dark cinder of a fir cone that stood in the center of the room.

Peter smiled.

“It’s a venumb from the Enemy Domain,” he explained.

“It looks dead to me,” Frances said.

“It would.” Peter smiled. “That venumb spread itself right through the Enemy Domain. I’ve got no idea how it got its seeds into space, but once they did, those little cones could survive the burn of reentry.”

Judy stared at the dark cinder. A ghost of a life flickered inside it as Peter spoke. She wanted to ask him a question, but she felt too sick. That venumb came from another planet? It fell to Earth from space?

Frances was turning something up: not the volume of her speech, but something in its modulation. “How did you find it?” The words seemed to float across the room in shimmering vermilion letters… How did you find it…

“Deductive reasoning,” Peter replied. “I guessed that if those venumbs could spread themselves unnoticed through the Enemy Domain, they could make it down to Earth. After that it was just a question of interrogating the public databases.”

“That would take an elegant search routine.”

Frances wasn’t actually speaking to Peter, Judy realized. She was calibrating herself to him, adjusting her outputs to the optimum levels to appeal to him. Judy could read the feedback loop between Peter and the robot as Frances’ intentions converged with Peter’s fascination.

“It worked,” Peter said.

“You’re interested in other forms of life?” Frances teased.

From her viewpoint on the couch, Peter was standing still, but the room rotated ninety degrees around him. That made sense to Judy’s drug-altered perceptions; after all, wasn’t Peter the center of their little world at the moment? If his feelings realigned, then Judy and Frances would realign themselves around him.

“I want to know where they come from,” Peter said. There was a motor running inside him, driving him forward. Judy could see it: silver pistons and black rods. It ran on redcurrant jelly. She shook her head. Peter was speaking. “Those spider bushes we saw, they come from the Russian Free States. What is driving the world to evolve in those new directions? Have you heard the rumors of the origin of the Watcher? The Watcher believes itself to be of extraterrestrial origin. It thinks it is the product of an intergalactic computer virus that settled in the computers of Earth in the early twenty-first century.”

“I have heard that,” Frances said. The buttons between her legs seemed to be protruding a little further than normal. Peter had noticed that; his gaze was leading Judy’s there.

“There are venumbs all through the Enemy Domain. And if you look to the edge of the galaxy and what lurks there…”

The room was a whirlpool, and the cinder was at its center, and they were all whirling towards the dark center; the seam in Peter’s brain where the EA had mended his mind was threatening to break. Judy could see it-it was stretching-but she had to know…

“What’s at the edge of the galaxy, Peter? What is out there?”

Frances put her hand on Peter’s shoulder. “I think you should sit down, Peter,” she said. “Tell me about the cinder. Has it shown any sign of germinating?”

“No,” Peter replied, reeling back from the edge. He was looking at Frances. Looking at the buttons between her legs. “I can’t figure out the mechanism.”

“You surprise me. I think you know an awful lot about machines…”

Peter looked at her. “I can make them sing,” he whispered.

The golden robot took his hand. “Do you think you could make me sing?”

Judy looked at Frances. She hadn’t said those words. She was doing something to her body, to her voice. Judy knew that robots played with humans, that they could influence their emotions and reactions, but she had never really seen it happen so overtly.

“What’s at the edge of the galaxy, Peter?” she asked again. Beneath the veneer of that white face, she was flesh and blood, and she too was responding to whatever Frances was doing to Peter. It was distracting her. “What’s out there, Peter?”

“I don’t know…but you hear things. I was marooned on that planet for three months. I was…It gives you a different perspective. We live with the EA, and we’re robbed of our volition, but in a kind way. At least we are left with the illusion of free will. Down there on that planet, I was fixed in place by total observation. No illusions-just me and that insane security net looking down at me all the time. Nowhere to hide. I suppose it was just like what I did to those people in that pirate processing space.”

Judy was biting back bile; black bubbles of oily goo were expanding in her stomach, rising up her throat. Black bubbles were spilling from Peter’s mouth. None of it real. All the bad things that needed to be said.

“Is it true?” she asked. “Do you really claim to understand what you did?”

“He’s telling the truth,” Frances said, and she sat down on the floor in front of Peter and opened her legs. This is what sex is all about, she said. This is the essence. Never mind the window dressing, the curve of a neck or the sight of a nipple, pink and erect with excitement, the smell of…

Judy shook her head, trying to disentangle what was real from the piped stream of MTPH.

But what is real, Judy? Your extra senses give you another window on reality-or is that a window to another reality? I can see in infrared, or track your passage through the disturbance of magnetic fields. Which is the “real” view?

“Frances, is that you?” Judy asked.

…because I’ve removed the physicality from sex, Peter. With me you get to just concentrate on the mental. My body is smooth and cold. You can’t arouse yourself on anything but my mind. Sex is reduced to nothing more than pressing a series of buttons-but you’d be amazed at the variety that I still experience. Do you think that you’re up to it, Peter? All you can do is enter numbers. Can you tease me? Can you arouse me that way, just by using your mind? Can we have foreplay?

“No, Frances,” Judy murmured to herself, “that’s you. There’s somebody else in here, Frances. Who is it?”

No. Who are you, Judy? If only you knew. You dream of a hand, over your face…

“How do you know that?”

Frances and Peter hadn’t moved. Frances wasn’t sitting on the floor, her legs open and knees pulled up. She wasn’t drawing Peter’s hand towards herself, gently shaping his fingers to press the numbered buttons. All I’m feeling is Peter’s emotions, Judy thought. She’s drawing him out as part of the investigation. Or maybe I’m picking up on the edge of his attraction. Oh, it’s powerful. I can feel an aching…

“I can’t feel anyone else here,” Frances said. She paused. “What about that stealth robot-Chris?”

“It doesn’t feel like him,” Judy said.

“It wouldn’t,” Frances said patiently. “He’s a stealth robot.”

Judy forced herself to her feet.

“Peter, those people in the processing space. Why did you do it?”

Peter turned to look at her. He had an erection; she could see it, bulging through his trousers. He didn’t seem embarrassed by it. He licked his lips and looked at Frances.

“You want the truth? I don’t know if you’ll understand. My name is Onethirteen. You know what that means. My great-grandmother was company property, raised from an aborted fetus. As an aborted fetus she was legally dead, therefore not human, therefore she was company property. The Transition put a stop to that sort of thing, but that wasn’t all it stopped. We also lost something valuable on the way.”

“What?” Frances asked. “Surely that sort of legal indenture is wrong.”

“It was. Or I think it was. But that’s the point. You see, there used to be a debate about whether what the companies were doing was right or wrong. Now there is no debate. The EA says how it should be, and we all just go along with it. How can we be good or bad when there is no choice? I wanted to do something for myself.”

“How childish,” Judy said.

“I know. I wanted to be fat, or an alcoholic or something, but the Watcher won’t let me.”

“You’re pathetic.” The words were out before she could stop them. The room was turning around and around. Judy was feeling annoyed; her emotions were leaking out.

“You of all people should understand,” Peter said. “You chose to remain a virgin…Look, I’m not making excuses. I’m just explaining how I felt back then. I remember…”

He paused, and the whole room held its breath, the walls spasming out, the air suddenly stilled. MTPH again, thought Judy. I’m hyperaware. I’m imagining things that are not there. This is significant. Somebody wants me thinking like this. Someone has spiked my pills to make me invest this scene with significance. Who could have done it? Is it really Chris? Is it really him I can feel in here?

“What do you remember, Peter?” It was Frances who had spoken; she felt it, too.

Peter spoke quickly. “I…Who makes all these choices? Is it the Watcher? I think so. Why is our world the shape that it is? I used to know someone, he was so bitter… He was the pilot on the Rocinante, the Private Network’s ship. He had this theory about capacity.”

“Capacity?” asked Frances.

“Oh, yes,” Peter said. “Look at me: balding, weak heart. I have to exercise or I get really unwell. Look at the pilot. He was in his sixties, then. He’ll be a really old man now, if he’s still alive. Why is that? Why do we still get old? Can’t the Watcher cure us?”

“I don’t know,” Judy said.

Peter waved his hand. “There is a theory about the maximum amount of information that can be stored in a given space. It’s all to do with entropy and black holes. Apparently a one-centimeter black hole represents ten to the power of sixty-six bits of data.”

“So?” Frances said.

“So how much capacity does a personality construct require in a processing space? Don’t answer that, Frances. I once tried to work out how many PCs the universe could contain, given the upper limit on information that could be represented therein. I tried to work out how long it would take before we filled it, given our current rate of expansion.”

“And how long was that?”

“A few thousand years. I don’t know. I didn’t believe it. But then I remembered the lessons from school. How, since the Transition, the Watcher has restricted us in our wish to expand. We don’t take over planets as we please anymore. My theory is that the Watcher has also restricted our lifespan. We live an average of seventy years. That’s less than a Westerner could expect at the start of the twenty-first century! We have been told that it is necessary, that even personality constructs should suffer imaginary ailments in order that they feel human. I think it is just another way of restricting human expansion.”

Frances remained silent. Judy could read the conviction in Peter as he spoke. “You really believe that, don’t you?” she said.

“Oh, yes, but that’s not all David used to say.”

“David?”

“David Schummel, the pilot of the Rocinante. He’d been around. When he was younger, he went to the edge of another galaxy.”

Peter caught the look that Judy gave Frances.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“Nothing,” Judy said. “Go on.”

Peter eyed them for a moment.

“He said there was something out there-something odd. He thought the EA wasn’t telling us the full story, and that got me to thinking, and then I did some math, and it made me wonder. You see, our current rate of expansion isn’t going to take us to the edge of the galaxy for several millennia. Why is that? What has the EA seen out there that has frightened it so much it is keeping us locked up in here?”

Outside Peter Onethirteen’s apartment block, standing in the grey drizzle, Frances looked at Judy with concern. “Are you sure that you’re all right?”

“No, I’m not, but that doesn’t matter. Tell me, have you found David Schummel yet?”

“I have. You’re not going to believe this. He lives on the Shawl. In your section.”

“In my section?” Judy’s stomach felt as if it was full of olive oil. She wanted to be sick.

“Someone is leading us right to him.”

“I know. They’ve drugged me to see the connections they want me to see.”

They were silent for a time, then Frances spoke: “What are you going to do about Peter?”

“Peter? Nothing. You heard; his crimes are already logged by the EA. He’s been punished. I just wonder why they didn’t go after the rest of the Private Network.”

Raindrops were running merrily down Frances’ body. When she finally spoke, it was in a monotone. “Maybe the EA didn’t want anyone to notice that planet at the edge of another galaxy.”

Judy nodded. “I’m going to summon us a personal shuttle.”

“Is that wise? It will only draw attention to us.”

“I don’t care. We need to get back up to the Shawl right now.” She tilted her head and whispered to her console.

A few moments later they saw a dark V shape dropping towards them.

“Social Care is quick,” Frances said. The shuttle’s wings blocked out the rain above them for a moment before settling on the grass nearby, just by the lavender barrier. A spider bush came to look for a moment at the mass of materials lying just out of its range. Frances reached through the barrier for a moment and lovingly stroked it, then turned and ran up the shuttle’s ramp to where Judy already sat in a flight chair, shivering.

“Okay,” said the robot. “Let’s go.”