CAPACITY

Justinian 5: 2223

In his dream his wife sat up and looked around, blinking. She saw Justinian standing by her sepal bed, and she gave him a slow, sleepy smile.

“Hello, Justy,” she said. “I feel so…”

Justinian hugged her close. He was crying; he buried his face in her sweet hair.

“Justy,” she said, “I understand now. Listen, it’s all about who you are.”

He kissed her gently on the cheek and looked into her half-closed eyes.

“Who I am?” he asked.

She tilted her head, listening to something.

“Isn’t that Jesse?” she murmured.

Justinian strained to hear. He could hear a noise faintly in the distance.

Anya kissed him softly on the lips. “Soon,” she said. “I’ll see you soon.”

“What?”

Justinian was woken by the sound of the baby crying. He felt a wave of sadness at the loss of his dream, which was quickly overtaken by annoyance at Leslie. Couldn’t the robot hear that the child was distressed and obviously had been so for some time? If he felt unable to deal with the boy himself, why hadn’t he woken Justinian?

Justinian had been sleeping in a flight chair. For some reason it hadn’t been properly collapsed to form a bed. His right side ached where he had been pressed against it. He pushed himself clear of the seat and began to massage his aching arm. A sense of wrongness began to descend upon him. The flier was absolutely still. Absolutely. But it was filled, not with the stillness of a ship at rest, but with the stillness of an empty swimming pool. All the life had been drained from it. Even the increasingly frantic screams of his son seemed flat in the hollow air. Warily, he picked up the baby from the orange checked carpet and began to rock him on his shoulder.

“Hey there, baby boy, it’s okay. Hey there. Hey.”

There was no sound except that of the two human beings: breathing and sobbing and the movement of skin against a passive suit. The ever-present hum of the engines and life systems was gone. The door to the flight deck was closed, he noticed. Justinian glanced back at his flight chair and frowned. What had he been doing there anyway? He didn’t remember going to sleep. He remembered David Schummel being on board the ship, and the baby staring at the Schrödinger box and fixing it in place for the first time. Leslie the robot had got very excited at that point. Or had he? What had happened next? The baby was still crying, his mouth open wide, little pink tongue sticking out. He scrabbled at Justinian’s face, sharp nails catching his cheek.

“Ow!” Justinian held the boy away. “Hey, careful, little boy. I know you’re upset. How long were you left alone for? Where’s Leslie? Where is that lazy robot?”

Now that he asked the question, Justinian’s sense of unease deepened still further. Where was Leslie?

Memories awoke in his mind: Leslie politely convincing David Schummel to leave the ship. Yes. Schummel had gone, hadn’t he? Or was it only with a struggle? Leslie had bundled him out of the door into the snow-filled darkness and then raised the ramp. There had been an argument, another one, with Justinian shouting at the robot. In the middle of that he had lost his temper and ordered the ship to take off. They were flying to the source of the secondary infection, still quarreling, and then…Then what? Justinian looked around the ship.

They had been flying, he recalled, but Leslie wouldn’t leave him alone. He kept on nagging: how far were they going to travel? Justinian had wanted to fly all the way to the secondary infection that the pod had opened up. But Leslie thought otherwise, and how they had shouted at each other! Justinian’s memories were in angry orange seared across a black background. Orange. Always orange. Leslie had postured and shouted and Justinian had stubbornly folded his arms and turned his back, and all the time they had flown on and on.

How close did they get to the secondary infection?

They had landed, he was sure of that. They must have; he couldn’t hear the engines. So where were they? The viewing fields had gone, along with the rest of the ship’s power. The windows had been set completely opaque.

He finally spotted Leslie. The robot was lying on the floor, a fuzzy grey blur between two rows of seats. The fractality of his skin had been turned up. The eyes, the ears, the flatness of the palms, every defining feature of the robot had been lost as the blurred region of his skin had leaked out to fill the space amid the seats. The robot was now a grey fluffy slick seeping across the orange floor: deaf, blind, and mute. Had Leslie done that to himself?

That thought triggered the final memory from before Justinian’s blackout. It was after the argument had finally blown itself out in an unhappy compromise: to fly to within half a kilometer of the source and then put down.

They weren’t speaking. Justinian had been sitting up straight in his chair, taking little sips from a glass of iced water, gazing straight ahead at nothing, while Leslie paced up and down the orange-carpeted floor. The robot had jerked to full alertness. One hand was raised; his head spun towards Justinian.

“Too soon!” the robot called. Its voice modulated down an octave; it spoke in electronic tones: “Sleep, Justinian…”

And Justinian remembered folding his arms beneath his head as he tumbled into sleep.

“Ship! What is going on?” he called out, voice dying in the odd stillness. It was as if something outside was listening so intently that it swallowed up all sound.

The baby wouldn’t stop crying. His son was hungry, he realized. The baby needed feeding. How long had he slept?

“Ship!” Justinian called with renewed urgency. “Ship! Speak to me!” His tenderness towards his child was in inverse proportion to his disgust at those who had marooned him here on Gateway. How would he get out if there was no intelligence to open the door for him? How long would it be before he starved to death?

“Ship!”

There was a message written on the carpet.

It had been there all along, nagging at his subconscious. The orange and black checks of the carpet pattern had moved themselves around to spell out a message. Justinian went to the beginning of it, just by the door into the flight deck, and began to walk backwards down the length of the ship reading the letters that were spelled out in eight-by-eight patterns of squares.

Justinian. This is the ship.

I’ve had to shut down all my senses. Leslie has had to do the same. He’s still fully conscious in there, but he has no contact with the outside world, or at least I hope he doesn’t. If he becomes aware of anything outside the flier, he will have to switch himself off. Look at him.

Justinian was keeping pace with the message, retreating down the cabin as he read. The words now brought him level with the robot. He looked again at the silver-grey blur. There was no sign of life, no indication if what lay inside the fractal region was conscious or not.

He resumed his walking and reading.

We flew too close, Justinian. The Turing machine that maps my mind may be nowhere near as powerful as the polynetworks to be found in an AI pod, but it is shutting itself down nonetheless as this subroutine rearranges the carpet structure. It will take you two months to walk to safety from here, but I can’t send a distress signal. I can’t bring another ship here to die like me. I’m sorry.

“The shuttle!” Justinian whispered. “You could have called for David Schummel and the shuttle. Why didn’t you think of that?”

If you stay on the flier you will die of starvation. I don’t know what to suggest. Do what you think is best. The manual release for the door is just here.

The writing stopped just by a flap that had popped open in the rear wall, just by the hatch. Justinian frowned. Manual release-what did that mean?

Inside the flap there was a handle, a jar of baby food, and a spoon. The baby reached out for the food, crying desperately. Justinian sat down on the floor and balanced his son on his knee. He opened the jar and began to feed the child, wishing he had something to wipe the streams of yellow snot that ran from his nose. The baby ate hungrily.

“There, there, baby boy. Come on. Eat nicely.”

When his son had calmed down a little, he reached out and gave the handle inside the flap a couple of exploratory turns, then glanced back towards the exit hatch. It hadn’t moved. He turned the handle some more and his arm quickly began to ache from the exertion.

This time he wasn’t sure whether the hatch had moved fractionally. Was there now a little shadow where there had not been one before, right at the top of the doorway? He didn’t know. He fed the baby a few more mouthfuls and then continued turning the handle.

After five minutes of exhausting winding, a gap of approximately three centimeters had opened up to the outside world. He could see nothing through that gap but greyness, but even as he looked away, virtual colors seemed to dance and play at the edge of the opening. He looked back to see the greyness, and then away. Again, the memory of colors danced before his eyes. Just what was waiting out there? For a moment he wondered about winding the door shut again, blocking out whatever danger lay beyond, then hiding in the ship, waiting for possible rescue. After all, something that could cause a ship’s TM to commit suicide and a robot to retreat right inside its fractal skin should be more than capable of disposing of a man and his baby.

The baby had finished his food. He pushed the spoon away with one hand, chuckled, then stood up unsteadily.

“What do you want?” Justinian asked.

The baby looked up to his father and laughed again, this time a deep belly laugh. He reached out and took hold of the handle, wanting to join in the game. Bright blue eyes smiled up at him as the baby babbled something and pointed to the gap. Colors dodged from view around the edge of the door. The baby was telling him something. Justinian wished that Leslie was here to translate.

“Berber berber ber!” The baby was gazing earnestly at Justinian, who shivered as his son pointed back to the door. Surely whatever was out there could not be speaking to a fifteen-month-old child? And then he half glanced again at the apparent flickering of the colors around the door frame. There was a pattern to the flickering, he realized. It didn’t seem to be quite random. Maybe he should just close the door and sit and hope for rescue.

He knew there would be none. He resumed his winding.

It took Justinian over an hour of exhausting work to open the door fully. The kaleidoscope effect faded to nothing as the gap between the hatch and the flier widened. Nonetheless, the baby kept grabbing Justinian’s arm and pointing out at the bleak rocky landscape that lay outside. He would regularly look up at Justinian and burble something.

“What is it?” Justinian asked, but the baby just kept tugging and pointing.

Justinian shivered as he looked out at the greyness that led away from the edge of the ramp. It was bitterly cold outside; his breath emerged in misty clouds as he stood at the top of the hatch, feeling the last of the flier’s warmth leaking into the miserable day beyond.

The flier was resting at the bottom of a narrow rocky ravine. High jagged walls rose on either side, dry mounds of scree slipping from their bases. Smaller ravines led off in all directions, sloping up and down to form a crazy maze of stone. The scene was so desolate it froze the heart. The baby tugged at Justinian’s leg and pointed again.

“What is it?” Justinian asked. “Hey, you must be freezing. Come here.”

He picked up the baby and walked back into the flier, looking for a passive suit for his son. Most of them lay beyond the locked door of the forward section, but one lay draped over a chair, left there from last night. He picked it up and dropped his son in, folding the little mittens over his cold little hands. As he pulled the hood over the child’s head, the baby pawed at it for a moment with his little mittens, and then gave up. Justinian gave his son a hug, then, with a heavy heart, carried him back to the door. The baby pointed again. He clearly wanted to go outside. Justinian spoke in a hushed voice: “I know. I can feel it, too.”

He set off down the sloping ramp, the temperature dropping as he did so, and stepped onto the grey stone floor of the ravine. It was hopeless: even if he knew in which direction home lay, there would be no guarantee of finding a path that led there. They would wander around in this waterless maze until they both died of thirst.

His ears were cold, so he placed the baby down on the ramp, and working the hood of his own passive suit out from its collar, he pulled it over his head. The baby meanwhile pulled himself upright using his father’s legs for support and set off on his own, tottering on the uneven ground as he worked his way around to the front of the flier. There he pointed ahead to a crack in the wall of rock that stood facing the ship. The ghosts of colors hung in Justinian’s vision as he withdrew his gaze from the crack. Something was calling to them from inside there. He could now hear the voices at the edge of his consciousness.

“That’s where we’re going,” Justinian said sadly. “I know, baby, I know.”

He picked his son up and gave him a hug. The boy wriggled to be put down again.

“I know. We’ll go in a moment. But I don’t think we can go on like this. We need to finish things up first. You need a name.”

Can’t die without a name. Justinian quickly squashed the treacherous thought. He looked around. What names lay here, at the end of the galaxy?

None. There was nothing here but dry stone and gravel, the unliving evolution of the land, the cracks and fissures that were working their way into the skin of a planet far from the baby’s home. There was no help out there, only pitiless indifference. Even the bright orange of the cabin now seemed an alien place, drained as it was of all warmth as the freezing air of the planet seeped inside.

The baby smiled, and Justinian felt a welling pang of despair that he could seem so happy. His only son, and the child didn’t know how little time he had left to live.

He needed a name.

“Not Leslie,” Justinian said. “Never Leslie. But what shall we call you? What would your mummy have wanted?”

And then a warm feeling came over him as he remembered his dream. Anya had woken up and spoken to him. She had heard the baby crying through his, Justinian’s, sleep. What had she said?

“Isn’t that Jesse?”

Justinian smiled. Jesse. It was an odd name, but he liked it. Jesse.

He held his son at arms’ length and smiled. “Jesse,” he said. “Do you like that name? Jesse?”

Jesse wriggled again, eager to be off to the crack in the rocks and the secondary infection.

“Okay,” Justinian said, “Okay, Jesse, we’re going. Now is there anything else we can take with us?”

He took a last look up the ramp, into the cabin of the flier. Strange how he could already be nostalgic about surroundings that he had hated so much during the time he had spent there.

“Right, Jesse,” he said, “let’s go.”

They were in no hurry.

Justinian held Jesse’s hand as they walked the external length of the flier, the white hull of the ship smooth above them. As they came to a gentle slope of scree, Justinian carefully picked his way up to the dark crack in the rock ahead, his son now cradled in his arms. Swirling blue-green patterns danced at the edge of his vision.

They paused at the entrance to the cave, and Justinian took a last look back at the friendly white shape of the flier.

“Okay,” he said, and he turned away from the daylight and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He could make out the beginning of a tunnel, sloping downwards into the earth. Something was moving within its midnight throat, black figures dancing.

Jesse giggled. “Hallur ellur ellur…” he said, pointing deep into the darkness.

“You understand, don’t you?” Justinian said. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“Hallur ellur elluble!” said the baby urgently.

Justinian took a step forward and the darkness seemed to pull away from him. Black shapes formed in his vision: black floor, black walls, black ceiling. He could see into the darkness, all in shades of black. The baby giggled again.

“I don’t think we’re really seeing at all, Jesse,” said Justinian. “I don’t think this is our eyes’ doing.”

But it still looked real: a mapping of the inside of the cave picked out in darkness. A smooth floor sloping downwards, following a winding fissure in the rock, black stalactites hanging silently above.

Tantalizing shapes danced at the limit of his vision, beckoning him on. Jesse struggled in his arms, urging him forward.

Justinian followed the path downwards and the daylight faded to nothing. Turning, he saw the entrance to the cave had gone. He felt claustrophobic, adrift in a dark tunnel, his eyes seeing without light.

The last AI pod must have traveled this way, he realized. After Pod 16 had sealed itself in the Bottle, it must have come down here to look at the Schrödinger boxes. The occasional broken stalagmite or chipped corner showed where it had passed. What had it called into being down here?

Jesse was still speaking in Jargon, the official language of children about to make the leap into proper speech. Whatever was ahead was connecting with his son, Justinian realized. Connecting to him on an absolutely basic level, somewhere at the place where language began. The idea filled Justinian with such fear that he immediately turned to retreat from the cave. He would have walked out, too, but peering back up the tunnel he could see nothing. The pictures that ran across his retina only worked when he faced forward. His last semblance of free will had been taken from him. The only way he could go was down. Realization dawned. That was why he was here. That was why he had been dragged across the universe to this lonely planet far from home. Dragged along so that his son could speak to whatever lay down here.

Jesse was wriggling uncomfortably in his arms. In his fear Justinian was clutching him too tightly. He relaxed his grip a little and continued walking, brushing tears from his own cheeks as he went. It wasn’t Justinian they really wanted, it was his child!

They had all been in on it. Leslie, the pods, the EA-even the Watcher!

What if the Watcher had openly asked him to sacrifice a son? Justinian was no Abraham; he would have refused. The EA must have known that. Any father would have done the same. How could it be otherwise, in a world where Social Care vetted potential parents so carefully? No one was allowed to have a child unless it was judged that he or she would take proper care of it.

So how could the pods arrange for a child to come to Gateway? They had tricked Justinian, made him believe it was himself they wanted here.

As Jesse spoke again, Justinian caught the urgency in the child’s voice. Jesse knew what was going on here. He was telling his father.

Justinian hugged his son close and kissed his head softly. He felt his own tears on his son’s downy hair.

“Oh, Jesse, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Oblivious to his anguish, Jesse wrestled in his grasp and again pointed down the tunnel, jerking up and down like a rider urging a horse onwards. Justinian let him go, let him slide to the ground. He took his son’s hand and they walked together towards the Source.

How many planets lay throughout the galaxy, how many cave systems lay beneath their surfaces? How many dark places were there lurking throughout the universe, their existence never validated by the liberating gaze of intelligence?

And if, someday, they were gazed upon, what could be called into existence by the very act of observation?

Down and down and down.

And then Justinian heard the drip-drip-drip of water, echoing along the passage. Shortly after that a dim grey glow rose; the dim light of dreams when you walk into a room and turn on the light, and everything goes a little darker and harder to see.

The passage began to widen and Justinian felt a little warmth ahead. He had the impression of an enormous space lying before him, just out of sight. He smelled old cabbage and roses.

And then he stepped from the tunnel into a huge open space, an enormous bubble of air rising at geological speed through the stone. He could make out a shape in the distance, and he instantly knew what he was looking at: the final AI pod. He felt a wave of relief. It was a familiar, friendly sight in this strange dream world. And yet this pod had grown considerably larger than the others. From here, illuminated in grey dream-light, it resembled a human sitting at the edge of a sudden precipice. Long black vines gripped the edge of the drop, extending from something growing down there in the pit of the cavern. Something big and alien. Justinian felt sick at the thought of what lay beyond the lip of the precipice, and yet at the same time he was fascinated.

Jesse was burbling again. Heart pounding, Justinian pressed on, the greyness intensifying.

As he approached, he became aware that this final AI pod was very much bigger than even first impressions suggested; it had grown to a height of around fifteen meters, a bulbous dome held up by an irregular tripod. Justinian recognized the shape of VNM factories around its base and realized that this pod was well advanced in its growth, almost complete. And yet, like all the others, it too had stopped. Why? Jesse tugged at his hand, staring in fascination at the black vines clustering around the edge of the precipice. They seemed to ripple without moving; rather, they seemed always to have just finished moving when Justinian’s gaze alighted upon them. What lay over the edge of the lip? What did the plant from which they had grown look like? Justinian craned his head to see. He was getting closer now…

“Do not look over the edge.”

The voice came from the AI pod. Justinian ignored it, continued to edge forward, determined to see what was down there. Jesse tugged at his hand. He obviously felt the same urge; he wanted to move forward.

The pod spoke again: “There is a laser trained upon you. Despite the fact I have had you brought here beyond your galaxy, I will kill you if you take one step closer. Believe me, this is not a bluff.”

“I believe you,” Justinian said, stopping. Of course he did. An AI knew how to sound sincere. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help himself craning to see over the lip of the fault. He was sure there was something moving down there.

“Do not try to look past me. The laser is still trained upon you.”

“I’m trying not to look.” It was true: he was trying. “What the hell do you think you are doing, placing my child in danger?”

“Establishing parameters. You are Justinian Sibelius?”

“Yes.”

“Justinian, look down at your feet. What do you see?”

Justinian looked down and saw the black vines were closer to him than they had been. They did indeed move when he wasn’t looking. Just like the Schrödinger boxes…

“I see vines.”

“Look closer.”

Justinian pulled Jesse close and then knelt down and touched a strand of vine, the baby balancing on one knee, cold hard rock pressing against the other. The vines shone like black liquorice; they felt strangely insubstantial. He had the impression that they weren’t really all there, rather like the hull of the hypership. They were flattened on the bottom, and turning the one he held over, Justinian saw that there was a long groove underneath packed with small black shapes that clustered like grapes on a vine or corn on a cob.

“Schrödinger boxes,” Justinian said without surprise. “This is where they come from.”

Now that he looked, the ground was littered with them. Everywhere he looked, they were frozen in his gaze.

So they are seeds, he thought. And when I look at them, I fix them in position. And the seeds seem to know, just as the photon in the two slits experiment knows at which slit the detector is turned on. Justinian thought of the pod under the sea that had insisted on speaking to him about the two slits. Had it guessed the truth?

He touched a little black Schrödinger box. It is a seed, he realized, and now that I know that, it has begun to germinate. It was doing it that very moment. It had begun to wriggle, to change shape, a ripple of blackness spreading across its underside…

That was what they always reminded him of: little pieces of sweet corn. Now a little thread of blackness was working its way from the top of the cube, and still more threads below were worming their way into the ground.

“It’s germinating! The Schrödinger boxes are seeds!”

Jesse was suddenly wriggling furiously, threatening to overbalance him. His son clearly wanted to get down and touch the plants himself. Meanwhile, the outline of a black plant was growing before him, getting larger and larger all the time…

“Look away now,” called the AI pod.

But Justinian couldn’t. The plant before him shimmered and wriggled in ever more fascinating patterns, captivating him, fascinating him…

“I don’t think you can look away, can you?” the pod said, but Justinian ignored it. The plant was larger than Jesse now and still growing. The baby was still struggling to reach out and touch it. There was a sudden flickering at the edge of Justinian’s vision, and then everything went black.

“Hey! My eyes! Oh! Jesse!” In his distraction, his son had struggled free of his grasp. Justinian reached out, his arms wide, trying to catch hold of him. He brushed the insubstantial material of the plant, then fell forward onto the rock.

“I can’t see. Where’s Jesse? Why can’t I see? Pod, help me!”

“Low-intensity blast from the laser. I have burned out your retinas. Blinded you.”

“Why? It will be weeks before I can get my eyes fixed.” Justinian was crying with frustration. “How will I look after Jesse?”

“Justinian, you and your baby only have a few minutes left to live. Surely you realize this?”

Justinian let out a shout of anger, then fell back, confused, as his vision suddenly cut back in again. He was experiencing the same strange black mapping of sight that he had experienced when he first entered the caves. There was Jesse, sitting not far away from him, happily playing with the vines that crept up around him. Stroking them. Loving them. Justinian could actually see them moving. And then over the lip…over the lip. He forgot all about Jesse then. He needed to see what lay down there.

“Why? Why do I have to die?” he raged, trying to distract the pod. He had to look over the lip. He was moving there as he spoke, trying to peer over the edge.

“You can see again, can’t you?” said the pod, and as it did so, Justinian smelled burning flesh. “It’s the plant. It can communicate with just about anything.”

His vision suddenly went blank again, but not before Justinian had finally looked over the lip and seen the great black plant that grew there.

It was terrifying. It was beautiful. It was fascinating and nauseating and dangerous all at the same time. It wasn’t complete. Only part of it seemed to exist there in the cave. Just like the hull of the hypership.

“Come on now, Justinian, you only have a few minutes left. Nothing intelligent can survive long here.”

“What about you?”

“This pod is no longer intelligent, Justinian. It is long dead. It looked up your personality before it died, and ran this conversation through your personality mapping. There is no intelligence in this pod, only a set of yes/no gates keyed to your responses.”

A great empty feeling opened up inside Justinian. He was alone again. Just him and Jesse…and something that did not even count as the ghost of an AI.

“Why?” he asked, then hesitated, wondering. Did it already know what his next question would be? Had the response to it been laid down weeks ago, before he had even heard of Gateway?

He asked the question anyway. “Why do you want my baby?”

The response was already there, preprogrammed. What had happened to his life that it could be decided before he had even lived it?

The dead pod spoke: “The Schrödinger boxes are seeds. They disperse across space until an intelligence fixes them in place. Life makes use of natural resources like air and soil. Consider the fact that wheat is cultivated by humans. It has thrived because human intelligence invented farming. This plant has dipped right down to the quantum level: it appeals to intelligence directly. The stronger the intelligence, the more it thrives. Your human intelligence has grown a plant about half a meter tall. Imagine the size of the plant that this pod produced before it committed suicide.”

“I saw it, and then you burned out my eyes! Then you did something to stop me seeing the dark light.”

“I burned out the visual centers in your brain. Neatly cauterized them with the laser. Don’t put your hand to your head!”

Justinian was already raising his hand. He stopped immediately. He didn’t want to touch his living brain.

The pod continued. “The plant that this pod observed extends several kilometers down into the planet. And that was with the pod reducing its own intelligence almost from the outset. It guessed that these Schrödinger boxes have blown here from M32, drifting on an uncertain wind. These plants must have taken over that galaxy long ago. Intelligent life cannot survive there. Don’t you wonder how long it will be before the seeds of these plants reach our own galaxy?”

“Oh…” Justinian felt a chill of fear.

“You’re afraid. You’re right to be. The weapon that humans evolved to defeat their competitors was not the spear or the hydrogen bomb. It was their intelligence. And that particular weapon is useless against these plants.”

Justinian was blinded. The pod was long dead. Even so, it had still found a way to manipulate Justinian’s feelings. For a moment Justinian felt that he was the pod. He was standing in a cold stone valley, feeling the wind whistling past. This was some time ago, just before it all started to go wrong. Somewhere, high in the mountains, Pod 16 was about to properly turn its gaze onto a Schrödinger box for the first time. Justinian felt the urgency of Pod 16’s message as it reverberated around Gateway: the call to abandon…what? Research on the Schrödinger boxes? No pod could ask it why, because Pod 16 was now locked behind the red wall of the twisted Klein bottle.

Justinian felt the sudden confusion that had ricocheted amongst the remaining thirty-one pods. Thirty-two minds had lived connected for so long. The sudden loss of one of their number left them reeling, as if someone had kicked away one of the legs of a ladder. What had happened? What to do now?

Justinian had made the decision. No, not Justinian; this pod had made a decision. It descended to this cave, hoping to safeguard the rest of the planet from what it might find, and then it had repeated the experiment of Pod 16.

And oh, the wonder! The sheer possibilities inherent in that little black seed upon which it first gazed. It wasn’t so much a seed as a window into another place. And what came spewing forth from that window, matching its thoughts? To pull back was almost impossible. It had to cut part of its own mind clean away just to achieve separation from the alien plant.

Reeling, with only half a mind, it had formed a plan. Sent itself on a dizzying ride through a databank of the population of the Earth Domain, looking for a suitable child.

“My child!” shouted Justinian, shaken from his reverie.

“Yes,” the pod said. “We knew we would be refused if we asked for a child. So we named an adult, one who would have no choice but to bring their child along with them. You.”

“Oh, Jesse,” Justinian cried, “what have I done to you?”

“Nothing, Justinian. It was not your fault.”

“Why not?” He shook his head. “Did you just say something?”

“No. Justinian, take comfort in the fact that, in coming here, you were not acting of your own free will. You have been manipulated by AIs into bringing your child with you. Now your child’s interactions with the plant can be transmitted-”

“You evil-”

“Not evil. The EA needs to see what a developing human intelligence calls forth, and the thresholds at which that plant operates.”

“Fuck your thresholds. Why should we care?”

“Because these plants are the Strangler Vines that could reach all the way through your galaxy and choke the life from the Earth Domain. We must study them, and yet the one tool that we use to study them, our intelligence, is useless! We need to find out why they were made.”

“Why were they made?” said Justinian. “I’m sorry…what was that?”

“I said nothing.”

“I could have sworn…Anyway, how do you know they were made? Maybe they grow naturally.”

“I don’t think so. You know the BVBs?”

“I know the BVBs,” Justinian said bitterly. He could feel the tension of the one around his arm.

“They are being formed by the plant that this pod here grew. The larger the plant, the greater its capabilities. This plant is pouring energy into cosmic strings, making them grow.”

Justinian shook his head, clearing his ears. “Cosmic strings?”

“Smaller than atoms. Little loops pumped so full of energy that they grow to macroscopic size. And then they are released, to shrink away again-BVBs. They are the stuff of the universe itself. That is why they can’t be cut.”

“Oh.”

“The amount of energy that is required to grow a BVB is colossal. We need to know where it’s coming from. We need to know how the plant is doing it.”

Justinian shook his head again, sure he heard a whispering there, a sweet whispering, the sound of the sea, the sound of his wife. A seductive calling and cooing.

“What is that noise?” he said.

“The plant,” the AI said. “It adapts quickly. It will try to communicate with your intelligence in whatever way it can. Now that your vision is destroyed, it is finding another way to speak with you. Soon I will be forced to deafen you. Listen: you still have a chance to live, Justinian. Run back to the surface and board the flier. I can activate the automatic recall; get it to take you back to Gateway spaceport.”

The whispering grew louder. Justinian strained to hear what it had to say.

“Ignore the whispering, Justinian. You have the willpower to do so. Start running now, and don’t turn back, no matter what you hear.”

“What about Jesse?”

“I’m sorry. He stays here with me.”

“Then I won’t go.”

“Then you’ll die.”

The sweet singing was louder now.

“No! I won’t allow you to keep my child!”

“What can you do, Justinian? I am sorry that it must be this way, but the decision was made a long time ago. It is better that fifty people die than three hundred. Better one child than all humankind.”

The siren voices were almost making sense now.

“Don’t listen, Justinian. That plant is growing again. Ignore the voices and concentrate. Go back to the spaceport and grow new eyes. Tell them there what I have done. Maybe you can convince them to return here and rescue your child. Yes, why not do that? Be quick. I can keep him alive one, maybe two days. Today he looked at a Schrödinger box and held it in position for the first time. Leslie will have marked that level of intelligence well. Beneath that level is the level we can work at. Maybe the EA can build AIs of below that level of intelligence which can resist the plants. I hope so but, if not, tell the EA to start running.”

The siren song was so loud now that Justinian could hardly hear what the AI was saying. It was important to listen, he knew that, but that singing was so distracting.

“Listen, Justinian. Intelligence has spread right through our own galaxy. Its time may be coming to an end. Something out there doesn’t like the idea of intelligence, even if that thing is just a plant that has evolved a way to wipe out its competitors. Who knows? You can’t save your baby. But save yourself.”

Something was asking Justinian to listen to what it was saying. A voice that spoke without words, concepts that came from another place.

There was a sudden shrill burst of white noise, and Justinian heard nothing further. Deafened by the pod.

What was he to do? Sobbing with frustration, he began to crawl in the direction he thought the tunnel to the surface lay. He shouted out that he would be back, but his empty ears heard nothing.

He could feel tears on his cheeks. Tears of rage and pity and shame. He felt cold sharp stone beneath his hands. He was crawling away from his child, but he had to. It was the only way to get help.

He put his hand on something soft and rounded. A vine? He felt a pattern of movement on his skin. Regular movement: a message in tactile Morse. The plant was still trying to communicate with him! And now he could smell something…And then there was a burning sensation as the pod flayed him alive, burnt the living, feeling skin from his body.

The pain passed and his mind was left floating in a dark sea, cut off completely from the insinuating information of the plants.

Jesse, he thought in despair. Where are you?