CAPACITY

“I’m coming, too,” Leslie said. “Orders.”

“No, you’re not,” Justinian said. The robot had just helped make his mind up. “Ship! Take us down. David, I need to finish feeding the baby. Come on board and we can talk.”

The flier’s exit ramp dropped onto snow. Cold sighed into the craft’s interior. Justinian shivered and wondered why for a moment, then realized that the temperature gradient mechanism at the rear door had gone the way of the food synthesizer. Justinian had lived his entire life with such devices; he took their function so much for granted he realized now that he wasn’t even aware of their existence until they ceased operating.

He peered out of the open hatchway, feeling the cold nipping at his lips and ears. Schummel was a dark shape about thirty meters away, struggling towards him, waist deep in the snow.

“Do you need help?” Justinian called out, his voice sounding strangely dead in the cold air.

“I’m okay,” Schummel gasped, pushing ahead. His craft lay about fifty meters away, half illuminated by the wash of the flier’s interior lights, which shone in a wedge across the snow. Justinian made his way down to the base of the ramp, fascinated by the cold blackness that surrounded him. Stepping sideways from the cone of light into the snow and the darkness, he blinked as his eyes grew accustomed to the night, and then gave a gasp of astonishment at what he could see. The black sky seemed to rise forever, the stars tumbling down into one corner of the night as he observed the edge of galaxy M32. The arcs of the contrails left by the two craft glowed in the moonlight; they dipped down through this brilliant expanse to the points where they had landed, and Justinian followed the lines they made back along their paths through the sky.

“Amazing sight, isn’t it?” Schummel said, gasping cold clouds of steam as he came up beside Justinian. Powdered snow fell from his passive suit.

“I suppose it is,” Justinian grudgingly admitted.

“Come on, Justinian. Don’t let your frustration with the EA spoil this moment. Who could have imagined that a species with a sense of vision evolved to help them swing through trees would someday use that same sense to appreciate this sight?”

Justinian looked up into the sky and felt just a little of the tension relax that had been building up in him over the past few weeks. But the sound of his son crying brought it straight back.

“Come inside. I was halfway through feeding the baby.”

They found Leslie trying to wrestle the spoon from the baby so that he could feed him. Niblets of sweet corn skittered across the tray.

“Let him try to feed himself,” Justinian suggested. “He’s getting old enough to try.”

Leslie glanced in their direction. “Hello, David,” he said.

“Hi, Leslie. I want Justinian and the baby to fly on my shuttle to the location of the secondary infection.”

“Sorry, I can’t allow that, David. I am responsible for this mission, so I must stay with them. Anyway, I can’t place my fate in the hands of a human intelligence. No offense, but you’re too erratic.”

“Humans are too erratic! You say that after the way you have just been behaving? I’m going with David.”

“Are you going to leave the baby behind, then?”

“Of course not. He’s coming with me.”

“So you’re going to cross the freezing snow out there carrying a fifteen-month-old child? And you claim that I’m erratic?”

“You’ve turned your intelligence back up again, haven’t you?” Justinian observed. “It’s not just your body that goes into hiding behind that fractal skin. What is it that you’ve got hanging around in your mind?”

Leslie abandoned the baby, leaving him to play with the spoon. Soon the baby was quite happily trying to pick up a piece of sweet corn. The robot looked hurt.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m doing my best in difficult circumstances.”

A black flicker in the corner of Justinian’s eye turned out to be a Schrödinger cube, sitting on the orange patterned carpet nearby. “Okay,” he said. “No problem. We’ll just fly somewhere warmer, then make the swap there. After that we fly to the secondary infection, and then go home.”

“So you feel perfectly safe putting your child’s safety in the hands of a human intelligence? Do you really think that David’s reactions will be quick enough to evade danger should everything start going wrong on board his shuttle?”

Justinian looked at Schummel. The older man held up his hands, still damp from the melting snow.

“Hey! I don’t know exactly what is out there. All I’m saying is that every other AI on this planet is giving up the ghost and climbing back down the mental planes all the way into the basement. So if you must fly all the way to the secondary infection, Justinian, I think it would be safer if you were to do it with me.”

“Okay then,” Justinian said. “I’m convinced. I won’t insist on flying all the way there.”

“Great.” Schummel beamed triumphantly at the robot. “If Justinian isn’t going all the way to the secondary infection, that’s fine by me. But, even so, why risk the baby? Why not leave the baby with me while you go there alone?”

Justinian looked down at his son. The baby had picked up a Schrödinger cube on his spoon and was bringing it towards his mouth.

“Hey!” Justinian called warningly. “Ah ah ah! Don’t eat that!”

The baby frowned as Justinian replaced the cube with a piece of chicken. Several more cubes rattled onto a plastic tray nearby.

Leslie’s fractality was turned down, making him look almost human. “And why should Justinian trust a man who he has known for barely forty minutes in total with his child?”

Schummel shrugged. “Why not? We’re all in the same craft here. We’ve got to look after each other.”

“Are you saying that Justinian is not capable of looking after his own child?” the robot asked smoothly.

“I know what you’re trying to do, Leslie,” Justinian snapped. “You’re playing with my emotions. You’ve turned your intelligence up so you can manipulate me again.”

Schummel was looking around the flier with a thoughtful expression. “Have you noticed,” he said, “how he’s turned up his intelligence, and all of a sudden there are Schrödinger cubes appearing everywhere?”

Justinian realized that he was right: the floor was a drift of cubes. Little black cubes tumbled from the flight chairs, sat in the window recesses, rolled on the baby’s tray. “I’ve never seen so many,” he whispered.

“Of course there’s more,” Leslie said. “Think about it. If I turn my intelligence up, I have a wider sense of awareness; I fix more of the cubes in place as they pass through this space.”

Schummel’s eyes widened. He suddenly looked very sick. “Of course,” he murmured. “I never thought of that before. It’s so obvious; there must be a constant flux of cubes across this planet.”

“The flux increases the closer we get to the secondary infection,” Leslie said, teasingly.

“Oh, hell,” Schummel said. “I just didn’t think of that, Justinian. I just never saw it. We were standing outside barely five minutes ago, and I said that it was the first time a human had stood there looking at the stars. But, think about it: what if this is the first time that intelligent beings have ever stood on this planet? The cubes could have been flowing past this planet for millennia until we got here. And now our intelligence is fixing them here!”

Justinian stared at David, his lips moving slowly as he sampled the idea. He turned to the robot.

“Is that right?” he asked.

“Possibly,” Leslie said in a tone that implied otherwise. “But it’s an anthropomorphic way of looking at things. What makes you human beings? I’ll tell you. Intelligence. Birds fly, cheetahs run fast, plants photosynthesize. What is your defining characteristic? You can think.”

“Yeah…” David said. Leslie waved a dismissive hand.

“It colors your perception. You believe thinking is your defining characteristic, so you build AIs to think for you. Would a dog have built a smelling machine, or a bat a hearing machine? You have colonized the galaxy through the power of thought. And so, because it has been a successful method of propagation for you, you seek evidence elsewhere of objects that can be identified by intelligence. Does this not strike you as being anthropomorphic? What if evolution had left dogs the dominant creature on Earth? Would they think it significant that the cubes stayed put when you could smell them?”

Justinian was getting riled. “The argument is facile. It would take an intelligence to identify the smell. Plus, a sense of smell alone would not give us the freedom to explore the galaxy.”