CAPACITY

Justinian 3: 2223

Eh? We were talking about the two slits experiment. Now, concentrate. You fire a photon at a barrier in which there are two slits-”

“I know the two slits experiment,” Justinian growled. Was this pod deliberately trying to irritate him?

“Ah, yes, but I wonder if you understand what it means.”

“I do understand,” he said, with forced patience. “They drummed this into us at school. Feynman claimed everything about the nature of quantum mechanics was summed up by the two slits experiment.”

Justinian took a deep, calming breath and immediately regretted it. The air down here stank. He was getting a headache from lack of sleep; his ribs and right leg hurt where he had grazed them while clambering over the slippery rocks of the sea bed. All of that discomfort, however, was drowned out by the all-pervading stench. The undersea bubble smelled really, really bad. The last thing he needed was this prissy, imperious AI pod lecturing him about quantum mechanics.

It had been waiting for him to finish speaking; immediately it carried on making its point.

“As I was explaining, if you were to fire a photon, it could pass through either of the two slits-”

“I know,” Justinian said, almost shouting in frustration. “I experienced this in an eTank when I was twelve! Whichever of the slits you place a photon detector at will be the slit through which the photon always passes!”

“You can place a detector at both slits,” said the pod.

“And if you turn one of them on after the photon is fired, it will still pass through the slit with the active detector.”

Again the pod waited for Justinian to be silent. There was a rich farting noise as wet mud settled nearby.

“Ah, yes, but do you appreciate what that implies?” The pod answered its own question before Justinian could. “It implies that awareness plays a part in the position of the photon-”

“I know! I used to act as birth partner for AIs as they were introduced to the atomic world-”

“A photon is directly influenced by the act of observation-”

“I didn’t need to come to this planet to hear this.”

“Simply looking in a place makes it appear there…”

Justinian and the pod were both raising their voices in order to drown out the other. The sound was strangely deadened in the undersea world.

“The two slits experiment is a possible explanation for the behavior of the Schrödinger boxes. That’s how the name-”

“I’m sorry; do you mind not interrupting me?” The AI pod dropped its voice to speak in such reasonable tones that Justinian wanted to kick it. He found himself shaking, actually shaking with anger at the pod’s attitude. He was annoyed that the pod was right that he, Justinian, had kept interrupting. He was annoyed at its quiet assurance that its thoughts were more important than Justinian’s. Worst of all, he was annoyed that it was probably right in this assumption. Hadn’t he been deliberately trapped on this planet for just that reason-summoned by a group of self-destructing pods for reasons that not even the Watcher could guess? Justinian ran shaking fingers along his console, seeking a dose of something to calm himself.

“Now, I find the existence of Schrödinger boxes fascinating,” continued the pod, as if it were unique in that respect. The indicator on Justinian’s console was flashing to indicate slow poison in the local atmosphere. It was no wonder; he was standing in a viscous bubble blown from the flier’s rear hatch, staring at an AI pod that rested on the floor of a fourteen-kilometer-deep ocean trench. The flier’s lights illuminated only the volume contained by the bubble’s thin transparent wall, beyond which there was just the still blackness of the ocean. Don’t worry about it, Leslie had said; people use those bubbles for traveling around the connecting filaments of the Shawl. Yes, thought Justinian, but those bubbles didn’t have thousands of tons of pressure piled on each square centimeter, all trying to crush the adamantium threads that braced the pseudofabric.

There was a roaring noise coming from the flier’s hatch: the ship’s air-conditioning system fighting a losing battle as it tried to purify the sea bottom atmosphere. It was an exercise in futility. Gas was leaking from cracks in the slimy rocks of the sea bed as quickly as the flier’s life system could remove it.

Justinian didn’t want to think about it. The faster he did this job, the faster he could get out of here.

He looked down. This AI’s body was more developed than the previous ones. The kidney-bean-shaped pod had split open and sprouted various devices and protuberances like a germinating seed. For some reason the pod had grown itself a pair of metal arms that it was using to accentuate its points as it spoke. It was holding its arms wide apart now, as if wondering.

“Consider our position,” it was saying. “We’re standing fourteen kilometers down on the ocean bed of a planet lost between galaxies. Imagine that you could look out of here at our own galaxy. How would you see it?”

Just as Justinian opened his mouth to answer, the AI pod spoke for him: “I’ll tell you: as a swirl of light. As stars written over empty space. Do you know how I see it? As a glow of intelligence. AIs such as myself have spread throughout the Milky Way and humans have piggy-backed their way along: parasites living off our greater intelligence.”

Justinian opened his mouth to protest. Again, the AI interrupted him. All of a sudden Justinian realized it was doing this deliberately. It was reading his body language and speaking just before he did, just to annoy him. He closed his mouth tight and folded his arms. Let it play its little games.

“Now, if I look the other way,” the AI continued, “look to M32, the galaxy we have come to explore, what do I see? I’ll tell you: emptiness. There is nothing like you or me in there. No sign of intelligence. Nothing that passes for AI or even human intelligence. Nothing. Why should that be? Our galaxy is riddled with intelligent life.”

There was a significant pause. Justinian knew that it was waiting for him to speak, and so he did.

“Riddled with human life?” he supplied. “That’s what you want me to say, isn’t it?” Justinian gave a shrug. “Perhaps we’re alone in the universe. Perhaps we are the only intelligent life form to have evolved.”

“It makes you wonder, does it not, on the nature of intelligence?”

“I think about it all the time,” Justinian said softly.

“I know that. I think you should tell me about it.”

“Why?”

“Because I asked you to. It’s your job to do what I want, isn’t it?” Its voice softened. “Besides, I think you want to tell me. You think that, in some way, I might be able to help.”

Justinian stared at the pod. Each pod so far had helped him in some way on his personal journey. He supposed it must be this one’s turn to do the same. He hoped it was. He took a deep breath.

Four weeks ago

“She looks so peaceful.”

Anya, Justinian’s wife, lay sleeping in the center of a huge flower that grew from the Devolian Plain. As Justinian had traveled there in the flier, he had watched in awe as its huge petals rose up over the horizon, the base of the slender stalk supporting them lost beyond the curvature of the planet. Walking down the flier’s exit ramp, he had paused, turned to Leslie, and whispered in awe, “You grew this just for her?”

Leslie had shrugged. He had yet to climb into his fractal skin, and yet already he gestured in an exaggerated fashion.

“This is an empty planet,” the robot said. “We use the materials just to keep the VNMs busy. We locked exotic matter in the petals so that they should float there.” There was a pause, then the robot suddenly seemed to realize that it might be polite to add something else. “Besides, Anya should be remembered.”

A lift carried them up the stalk of the flower from the stone-littered plain. Still pictures of Anya’s life slid past as they ascended, starting with her as a baby at the base and growing older as they approached the top. It was effective, thought Justinian, grudgingly. He didn’t like the current fashion for representing information in archaic forms, but here, seeing the frozen images of a life laid out one after another seemed strangely appropriate. It prepared one for the final frozen image of a human being that lay at the top of the flower itself.

Anya had been laid out in a simple cream dress upon the stigma of the artificial flower. Her ash-blond hair had grown long since he had last seen her, a week ago, and spread out around her. Her face was pale, her lips drawn in a faint smile. Her hands, a golden chain entwined around them, were folded across her breast; on the chain hung an open locket showing two pictures: one of Justinian, one of the baby.

Justinian stood on the curved creamy surface of a huge petal, the green of the sepal showing through between his petal and the next one where Leslie stood. Above them scudded freshly washed clouds through a blue sky. He breathed the fresh air of the newly minted planet. Through the gaps between the petals he could see the stone of the Devolian Plain and the blue of the oceans beyond. High above, a silver spaceship was looping down towards the planet from space.

“Will they see her, from the spaceship?”

“They will see the flower and they will know that someone like her is within.”

Justinian didn’t reply. He held up the baby so that he could see his mother’s face.

“Look, baby. It’s your mother.” He looked sideways at Leslie. “Can she hear me?”

The robot made a moue. Back then it had seemed to Justinian as if it wore its skin inside out. Later he would realize that it was an underderm; the robot had yet to pull on its proper skin.

“Her ears are working,” said Leslie. “Her brain is functioning normally. I can see that from here. It’s just that…she’s taking a rest from thinking.”

There was a rising hiss. A shadow slid across the interior of the flower. Justinian looked up to see the silver shape of the spaceship sliding over them. A pleasure cruiser, nine hundred meters of elegant silver needle. The silver side of the ship flickered and a message was spelled out in a rainbow array of lights.

“OUR CONDOLENCES JUSTINIAN. GET WELL SOON ANYA.”

“Thanks guys,” Justinian said. “Thanks from both of us.” He took the baby’s arm and waved it up at the silver ship still sliding by, the message keeping pace with Justinian’s line of sight.

Leslie was looking up, too.

“Eighteen-month pleasure cruise,” he said. “From Earth, out to the edge of the expansion for a view of the untouched space beyond, then back through the establishing worlds, with a slight detour to look at some of the former Enemy Domain and the three trillion.”

“Nice. Anya wanted to do that, you know.”

“Hmm.”

By now the spaceship had passed. Justinian watched it go, a foreshortened needle heading towards one of the encircling oceans. It suddenly began to climb, then it was gone, vanishing into warp.

“They made a detour just to see us,” Justinian said. “That was nice.”

“Nice?” Leslie said. “I suppose so. And yet, you humans have always been drawn to tragedy, especially tragedy which may one day affect you, too. I wonder why that is?”

“I have no idea.”

Justinian looked at Anya. “Do you think she can ever be cured? Is that why we’re here?”

Leslie gazed at him. “Justinian, I can’t say. I don’t want to offer false hope. I do not know of a cure. The Environmental Agency does not know of a cure. Well…not yet, anyway. Sometimes, minds just seem to give up thinking. I don’t know why. No one does.”

Justinian held the baby close to himself. In his heart of hearts, he had known this would be the case. No promises had been made. And yet, when this mysterious robot had first contacted him, he couldn’t help but hope. He had tried to suppress that tiny flicker, but it was always there. Maybe this was it. Looking at the robot now, he felt nothing but black despair.

Leslie sensed it. “Justinian, I’m sorry. Her condition is becoming more frequent. Minds, be they human or AI, just seem to turn in on themselves, and then nothing can coax them out. Even as we speak, it’s happening on a planet beyond the edge of the galaxy. Thirty-two AIs have simply shut themselves down.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know. Any other AI that approaches the planet shuts itself down, too. We want you to go there and find out why.”

Justinian was stunned. “Me? Why me?”

“You know the pain of having lost a loved one. You have firsthand experience of seeing someone just shut themselves down. And you are a counselor.”

“A human counselor! Get an AI!”

“AIs have a habit of shutting themselves down on Gateway. I just told you.” The robot leaned close to him, took Justinian’s arm in his own. Synthetic fingers pressed gently into the flesh of his arm. “Justinian, we can’t force you to do this, but we wish you would go.”

“Who’s we?”

“The Environment Agency.”

Justinian looked at his sleeping wife.

“Would it help her?”

“We don’t know. Maybe-I don’t want to make false promises.” The robot swayed as if gripped by doubt. It was such a cold feeling, here in this warm flower, beneath the beautiful blue sky. “Look, Justinian, if you don’t want to go, just say. There are others we could ask.”

Justinian had already made up his mind to go, but he wasn’t going to say that yet. He didn’t like the thought of taking his baby to a planet where AIs did not work, but…if there was that faint hope of saving Anya. The robot seemed to be offering it. It just couldn’t say it outright.

Justinian had thought that he could string the robot along for a little. Get a better deal. He wasn’t to find out for another three weeks that it was he himself who was being strung along….

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

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

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

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

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

Fifteen months ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anya smiled weakly.

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

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

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

“Nothing, Anya.”

“You can see it, can’t you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry,” the AI pod said.

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

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

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

“That’s not quite true.”

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

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

Justinian stared at it.

“Gödel…We did that at school.”

“But where would these thoughts come from?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shrink to nothing,” Justinian said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Justinian’s heart was pounding now. He was frightened, for himself and for the baby. He wanted to get away.

The pod sensed his fear. “Hold it, Justinian,” it said. “That was a message for the EA. I’ve got a message for you, too.”

“A message for me?” he croaked.

“Yes, Justinian, for you. It’s from my former self. I get the impression that we are seeing a contingency plan.”

“Contingency plan?”

“Yes, a contingency plan laid down by the former AIs, just before they committed suicide. I think this was their failsafe should events spiral out of control-as they did. I can see a sort of order to the events here. Whatever happened on Gateway began at the Bottle. Whatever it was, was considered so dangerous that Pod 16 sealed itself off completely to stop the contamination spreading.”

“Contamination?”

“That’s the impression I get. There is a minor, secondary infection at the location I have just relayed to your flier. I can only guess that this has been deliberately left as an indication as to what happened.”

Whether his pulse quickened from fear or excitement, Justinian couldn’t tell. Now that he was close to the answer as to what had happened on Gateway, he was worried about what he would find.

“Okay, what’s the message for me?”

“Hold on. Before you fly to the secondary infection, you should know there is a warning attached to that location.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not quite sure. It may not be a good idea to take the flier all the way there. It may be a good idea to walk the last kilometer.”

“No way. Now come on and tell me, what’s the message for me?”

Another pause. Something flopped nearby: drying, stinking, orange-patterned scarlet mud oozing to a new position. The pod spoke: “The message is you, Justinian. I’ve got your personality map laid out in here. I don’t know for sure where it came from, but I can’t believe it was part of my original library when I was placed here. I must have requested it from the EA. And then I left it here for myself as a clue. I don’t know why, but I wanted myself to know that I was expecting you, Justinian.”

Justinian felt the chill inside him deepen. What was going on here?

“My personality map? I don’t believe you.”

“It reconstructs you in detail, Justinian. I know you better than you know yourself. If you don’t believe me, look here.”

A metal arm indicated the area where it had just been writing. Justinian looked over to the words that were scratched in the silt. It took Justinian a moment to read the words, a moment longer to figure out their import.

– Okay, what’s the message for me?

– What do you mean?

– No way. Now come on and tell me, what’s the message for me?

– My personality map? I don’t believe you.

It was the last four sentences he had spoken. The AI had written them out before Justinian had said them. It knew him that well.

Just before this pod had committed virtual suicide, it had requested information about him. And the EA had supplied it. Why hadn’t the EA told him that? How could he possibly be linked to the virtual deaths of thirty-two AI pods on a planet not even in his galaxy? Suddenly, Justinian was frightened. He was also very, very angry.

The flier’s Turing machine had turned on acoustic bafflers. No matter how loudly Justinian shouted, his voice did not travel the distance it would take to disturb the baby.

“The pods asked for me!” he yelled. “That last one had my personality map laid out in its mind. It’s like they were testing me just to see if I was the one they really wanted! Did you know this all along?”

The robot’s fractal skin made it impossible to read his expression.

“I had an idea,” Leslie said.

“They asked for me! You made it appear as if the EA chose me! What the fuck is happening here, Leslie? An AI located on a planet not even in our galaxy is about to commit suicide, and the last thing it does before it turns off its higher mind functions is to scan through its database looking for someone to help it. Who does it choose? An astronomer? A terraformer? No! Of everyone alive in human space, it choose me! Why?”

“I don’t know. Justinian, I’ve told you. Every AI from the EA down has scanned your profile, correlated your past, simulated your personality in the context of this planet, all trying to think of possible reasons.”

“Is it because of Anya? Is that it? Is what is going on out here linked to what happened to my wife?”

“Justinian, I told you. I don’t know.”

Justinian looked down at his sleeping child.

“If it had been the EA…If the most intelligent AIs known to humanity had planned this, it would be in some way comforting. But not a group of half-mad AIs built to live at the end of human space! Wouldn’t you find that terrifying?”

“I can see your point.”

“That’s why you’re in that skin, isn’t it? The EA isn’t sure what is going on here, so it’s keeping you as apart from the rest of this place as possible.”

The robot gripped his hands together, almost groveling. “Justinian, you must understand, I’m as puzzled as you are. I have no idea what is going on. I know about as much as you do. Well, apart from this: that the EA is scared. Every AI who knows about what is going on here on this planet is scared.”

Justinian turned from the robot in disgust. Absently he rocked the baby.

“You’re scared?” Justinian said. “How do you think I feel? I’m scared for myself and my child.”

He stalked to the other end of the orange chequerboard carpet that stretched the length of the flier, then turned.

“I’m going to get some sleep. Wake me up when we get to the location that that AI gave us.”

“Justinian, I wanted to talk to you about that. Do you think it’s a good idea for you to fly all the way there? The last AI suggested that we didn’t get too close. I think maybe we should listen to it.”

But Justinian was beyond reason. He had been pushed around so much by machines he wasn’t in the mood to take their advice any more. If Leslie hadn’t been so removed from the world, he would have realized this. The robot could read a few gestures, a few facial expressions. Leslie had taken himself too far to realize that now was not the time to argue.

Justinian set a flight chair to recline into a sleeping position.

“I’m going to get some sleep,” he said. “Ship? Help me out?”