CAPACITY

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.”