CAPACITY

The air was thin and cold up here, the sky a pale dome above the blue-grey slabs and tilted ledges that formed the jagged landscape. When the thirty-two AI pods of the Gateway terraforming project had become operational, and the first trickle of the ensuing flood of Schrödinger boxes had begun to flicker across the planet, it had been the pod located in this inhospitable terrain that had first requested to study them. Its claim was a sensible one; there was little to do up here in the primary stages of planetary conversion, and during this phase its processing spaces were intended to provide little more than backup for the other, busier AIs. The other pods had concurred with its request, and so Pod 16 had begun its study of the Schrödinger boxes.

That study had lasted just under thirty-five seconds before it was abruptly terminated. The pod had made an urgent broadcast to the other thirty-one pods that was cut short before completion: a fragment of complex eleven-dimensional code, then the begi

It was supposed that the second word read “Abandon,” but the rest of the message was never sent. As the red, opaque material of the Bottle did not form a completely closed region around Pod 16 until just over four seconds later, it seemed logical to assume that the pod had cut short its own message.

In just thirty-nine seconds, the Gateway mission had been changed forever. Pod 16 had effectively removed itself from the universe. It was another fourteen minutes before anyone or anything realized that there was a man trapped in the Bottle, too.

James Gabriel was twenty-seven years old at the time of enclosure. He left behind a sister on the Jupiter section of the Shawl and three personality constructs. The most recent PC, taken when James was twenty-five, had been informed of the loss and had traveled to Gateway in a processing space aboard the hyperspace-enabled ship, but naturally had not been allowed down to the planet’s surface following the EA’s edict concerning AIs of human-and-above intelligence.

All this ran through Justinian’s mind as he made his way down the tilted slab towards the edge of the Bottle. His face and ears were pinched and cold, the thin breeze carrying the emptiness of high mountain places. Previous visitors had fixed thick ropes in place with metal bolts. It was a primitive arrangement, but effective. Justinian was impressed by the human ingenuity revealed, as he had been so many times since he had arrived on the planet. Impressed by what could be achieved without the aid of AIs and VNMs. He clung to a thick white rope as he edged forward, acutely aware of the gentle downward slope of the slab just to his right and the sudden drop that lay beyond it. Pod 16 had been deposited on a ledge near the top of a sheer seven-hundred-meter cliff: a slab of stone that slid as smoothly as an ice waterfall into the chaos of broken stones far below. The shape of the Bottle, at least the part of it that could be followed by the human eye, resembled a jellyfish draped over this ledge, long tentacles trailing down the vertical slab. From what Justinian understood, the Bottle was all exterior; all that could be seen of it existed on his, the outer, side. As for Pod 16 and James Gabriel, it wouldn’t be correct to say that they were inside the Bottle, because the inside of the Bottle was twisted around on itself and existed only out here where Justinian stood. But it was definitely true to say that the space they occupied was bounded by Justinian space. He could walk around the Bottle, fly over it in the flier, even burrow beneath it, if he felt so inclined, and he would have enclosed the volume occupied by James Gabriel, but he had no way of actually passing through the surface of the Bottle to meet that unfortunate man. Nor, he assumed, could James come out to meet him.

Justinian gazed at the surface of the shape before him. It looked transparent, but the red rocky slabs and mountain peaks and dark skies he could see in its depths were just the same slabs and peaks and sky that occupied the world on this side of the boundary. Light followed a convoluted path along the skin of the Bottle.

He raised his hand and waved into the depths, wondering if James Gabriel and Pod 16 were watching him. He had seen pictures of James Gabriel, taken just minutes before the pod had activated the super-fast replicating Von Neuma

Justinian ran his hand backwards and forwards across the curving planes of the unearthly artifact. The surface seemed to dip into and out of itself, curving in directions that the eye couldn’t quite seem to follow. He had heard some of the colonists discussing its shape. It was part of another of those rumors that had slowly grown in stature until almost accepted as fact: how the AIs that ran the Earth held many things back, that the products of their imaginations were hoarded and only made human knowledge when they deemed it appropriate.

So…what if all the AI pods on the planet knew the secret of the pathway that must be followed by a laminar VNM expansion in order to enclose a volume in the ma

Or, even more disturbing, was Pod 16 responsible at all? Had something else entirely done that to the pod and poor James Gabriel?

Feeling slightly foolish, Justinian finished waving to the Bottle. Maybe someone inside had seen him. More likely his image had been bent and projected somewhere else in the Minor Mountain range: a ghostly image to scare any unlikely climbers that happened to be passing by. The same effect that had given the impression of something falling as the flier cruised by. Many other people had undoubtedly tried the same thing in the past, to no avail.

But now Justinian was going to try something new. So far as he knew, he was the only Empath here on the planet. He had been brought here to speak to AIs. Well, now he was going to try to empathize with one. He pulled the slim packet from his pocket and worked the mechanism that dropped a tiny blue MTPH pill onto his hand. He swallowed it and relaxed.

The cold air seemed to thin around him, silent waves of emptiness spreading out across the mountains, reflecting back the lifelessness that existed up here at the roof of the world. The effect was psychological, he knew. MTPH worked by boosting the mind’s ability to process peripheral information, to bring to the fore the details that only the subconscious had picked up on. Some people said there was a very small psychic component, but Justinian had used MTPH for fourteen years and didn’t believe in any such thing.

Justinian concentrated, tried to imagine his mind taking hold of the impossible shape of the bottle. Listening for crystalline singing or subsonic rumbling, tasting the thi

Nothing. All he could feel was his own imagination. If there was any information being transmitted by James Gabriel or Pod 16, he was not picking it up. The only thing he was aware of was that the baby was experiencing mild distress; probably his subconscious was aware that his son’s diaper must be full by now.