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
