CAPACITY

mind.”

“Got it. I’m cutting out the extra feeds.”

Justinian opened his eyes.

“That’s better.” The nursery was now black, all except for a white glow directly ahead of Justinian. Whichever way he turned in his stilted, hobbled way, that white glow followed him.

“Do I have a velocity, Ludwig?”

“Relative to what?”

“Relative to anything in your universe.”

“No. I never thought of a consciousness possessing a velocity of its own. Up until now, I just watched from everywhere.”

“My mind is in my body, Ludwig. Can you put me at rest, relative to the door?”

The nursery became a familiar starscape: white points of light, fixed in space. This was the significant moment for a new AI.

“Oh,” Ludwig said. “I never saw things that way before. It’s an illusion, of course, but a beguiling one. How else would things appear to you?”

Justinian waited patiently. This was what made his job enjoyable: encountering other perspectives.

“Oh,” Ludwig said. “How bizarre. From your point of view, as soon as you look at something at the quantum level, it changes. How peculiar it must seem to you.”

A moment’s silence and Justinian felt a little wobble inside him. The last pod had talked about the quantum world, about the two slits experiment-

Ludwig interrupted his train of thought. “So, this is the human world. I think I am ready to look beyond the door, Justinian.”

“Good.”

Justinian felt the surge of fatherly pride that always accompanied the birthing of an infant AI. Okay, most of the real work was carried out by other AIs, but all AIs insisted there was something special about meeting a human intelligence for the first time, about looking at the universe through the eyes of a man or woman. His dream had compressed the time they spent together, and yet Justinian had that same feeling of fulfillment.

“Shall we go through the door?” he asked.

“I can see your world…” Ludwig’s voice trailed away.

“Ludwig?” Justinian said. The universe was slipping away, the stars fading to grey. “Ludwig?” called Justinian again. There was no reply.

He began to run towards where he thought the door was, but he couldn’t move properly. His legs wouldn’t work.

“Ludwig!” he called. “Where are you?”

There was a faint whisper in the distance and Justinian raced to wake up. He was screaming…

“It committed suicide,” Justinian screamed from his flight chair. “I heard it dying! Even a dream AI looking into this world commits suicide! Hey, what the…” His brain suddenly registered what his body was trying to tell him. He looked down and saw why, in his dream, he couldn’t move around properly. A BVB had materialized around his legs while he had been sleeping, tightly binding him to the flight chair. He stared down at the slightly fuzzy black band, as wide as his wrist but with no depth, digging into the padded material of his passive suit. He pushed his hands down on the chair’s arms and tried to pull himself clear, but his legs were stuck.

“Leslie!” he called. “Get this thing off me!”

Leslie was already there, standing behind him, arms solid and well defined as he fingered the chair, trying to work out a pattern that would hold the BVB in place while giving Justinian enough of a gap to pull his legs out. The baby had crawled over and was now standing up, holding on to Justinian’s leg and looking up at his father, mouth stretching, tears filling his eyes as he picked up on Justinian’s distress.

“Get him away from that thing,” Justinian shouted in near panic. He reached out and pushed gently on his son’s warm little head. The child started to cry and clutched onto his father more tightly.

“It’s perfectly safe as long-” Leslie began in infuriatingly calm tones.

“Get my child away from that fucking thing!” As the baby let out a wail, Leslie scooped him up and carried him quickly to a nearby flight chair that was changing its shape to that of a playpen. Justinian watched the receding face of his son and felt his own panic burned away by hot, searing anger.

“Look what you’ve done to me!” he screamed. “Look what you fuckers have done to me and my son!”

“It can’t be helped,” Leslie said. Justinian surged upwards at him, his hands catching nothing but the cloud fluff of Leslie’s suddenly expanded fractal skin. He scrabbled ineffectively at the robot’s body.

“Be careful! Fall forward and you could seriously wrench your knees.”

“FUCK OFF!” Justinian scrabbled for a moment longer, then slumped back in his chair. He held his head in his hands and uttered a despairing sob.

“What is going on? Even in my dreams an AI commits suicide rather than enter this waking world.”

“You don’t know that,” Leslie said. “Your subconscious could just have been reflecting your recent experience.”

“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” Justinian said darkly. “Are there such things as dream AIs?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Leslie said.

“Yes, you do; you saw what happened to my wife. Can an AI take root in a human brain? How would a dream AI be different than one living in a processing space?”

“There’s no such thing. It couldn’t happen.”

“Why not? It’s what MTPH does. Every mind transcends the physical mechanism that supports it. Hah! The human mind is just an AI that has evolved within a set of grey cells.”

“You’re extending a metaphor…”

Justinian wasn’t listening. He gazed at nothing as he spoke out loud. “Lots of new ideas taking root in the universe. Released by the EA and the new AIs. Ideas that humans could never think. Ideas coming awake in my dreams. And then when they see this world, they commit suicide, just like all the other AIs on this planet.”

“I’m going to change this chair’s shape,” Leslie said, moving back behind Justinian. “Get ready to pull your legs clear.”

There was a rolling feeling at Justinian’s back, and he began to twist, to tilt slightly to his right. The chair was splitting into myriad spiders upholstered in orange fabric; they crawled over each other and Justinian began to tumble backwards. The pressure behind his legs gave way and he pulled them back and up-then he was rolling over and over across the orange patterned carpet.

“Done it!” Leslie announced with satisfaction.

Justinian looked across to see the matte-black shape of the BVB still wrapped around four plastic struts sticking up into the air. The rest of the material that once formed the chair was busy folding itself into smaller and smaller shapes as it flowed to rejoin the main body of the flier.

“That BVB almost got me!” he said hoarsely. “Why didn’t you wake me earlier?”

“You needed the sleep,” Leslie said. “Anyway, you were perfectly safe.”

Justinian glared at the robot, his head pounding with fury, but the hysterical cries of the baby dragged him back to reality. He unclenched his fists, strode across to his son, picked him up, and gave him a hug. The child