CAPACITY

Helen was climbing to her feet. “If you won’t stop, I will go and sit somewhere else. I came to this section to think.”

She turned and began to walk back through the orchard, towards the mown path that co

“Maybe I could train you.” Kevin’s words floated after her. “You could be my new Bairn, now that Judy three has taken the old one.”

Helen’s pace faltered for a moment, but she took a breath and strode on. A wave of dying grass washing past her feet signaled Kevin’s approach. A gentle hand clasped her shoulder.

“Hey, hold on there a moment, Helen.”

She stopped walking. The forest was dying around her. His voice was gravely soft in her ear, sweetly seductive.

“Helen, do you realize what you are giving up? How do you know you won’t like subsuming your will to another’s? Bairn did, and Bairn is you, after all.”

“Bairn isn’t me,” Helen said simply. She pulled free of his hand and walked on. She still felt calm and centered, she noticed with quiet satisfaction. There was the sound of ru

“Bairn liked it when I did this,” he whispered hoarsely in her ear. Without anger, as if performing the steps of a dance, Helen stamped down hard on his instep while simultaneously jabbing her elbow back into his ribs. Kevin gave a gasp of pain as she kicked herself backwards, overbalancing them both. She rolled free of his grasp, skidding on the dead brown earth as she stood up.

“Do that again and I’ll kill you,” she said without heat.

Kevin rubbed his ribs, smiling ruefully.

“No, you won’t. Judy will have been at you. You only get one chance in the Watcher’s system. Only one chance to exercise free will, and then Social Care reprograms you. You can’t kill me now. You have empathy. You understand crime, punishment, and redemption. You can no more kill me than you can bring that last Kevin you killed back to life.”

Helen dropped into a fighting stance, her right breast aching where Kevin had roughly grasped it.

“Try me,” she said in a low voice.

Kevin pulled a white plastic blade from his pocket and tossed it to the ground near her feet. He pulled open the front of his striped shirt and thrust out his chest.

“Go on, pick up the knife. Stick it in me. I won’t stop you.”

Helen looked from his chest to the wide opalescent blade that lay on the bare ground.

“What’s the point?” she said. “If I kill you, you’ll just come back.”

Kevin slipped the shirt down from his shoulders so that his hands were semi-bound behind his back. He tilted his head back and gri

“So my death doesn’t matter then, does it? Go on, pick up the knife. Stick it in me while my hands are tied like this. Stop me from destroying this section of the Shawl.”

Helen deliberately kept her eyes on him, but she couldn’t help but hear the dry crackling of death all around her. Healthy trees were blackening and withering in an expanding circle, Kevin at their epicenter. The coolness of the forest was evaporating as the leaves shriveled away, leaving nothing but the harsh desert glare of the sun shining through the polarized blue filter that formed the section’s roof.

Helen quivered with frustration. “What if I don’t want to?”

“ ‘Can’t’ is what you mean. That’s not right, is it: what Judy did to you? Why should you be punished for ridding the world of me?”

The cold wind surrounding Kevin was at odds with the heat from the sun. Helen thoughtfully brushed strands of hair from her hot face and then, in one easy movement, bent and picked up the white blade from the soil. She weighed it in her hand. There was a handle molded into one end of the plastic, with little knobbles to aid her grip. The other end was wickedly sharp. She tilted the blade into the breeze, feeling the note as it sliced the wind in two.

“It is sharp, isn’t it?” she said. “One slice and I cut you open from your crotch to your neck, just like this.”

She demonstrated the motion, lightning fast. It felt good. But such thoughts were to be resisted. She centered herself once more.

“But I won’t. Judy showed me why. There are no quick and easy solutions; I’ve got to work through this on my own.”

Kevin laughed, a deep male laugh. Damn, he was good looking. The thought cut straight through to her libido without warning. She shook her head, disgusted with herself. Kevin knew what she was thinking. He smiled that lazy smile.

“Social Care couldn’t have said it better themselves,” he said. “Helen, you are a human personality construct in a processing space. You are being programmed just as surely as the EA programs a flier’s Turing machine.”

“So you say. I say I do this of my own free will.”

Kevin loomed closer, his brown eyes boring into hers.

“Do you really think that, or is that what the Watcher is making you think? You’re just a personality construct. Do you really think those thoughts, or are they just patterns in the processing space? Do you really think, or do you just think that you think because you are programmed that way? Maybe you just react to events. After all, is a real human any more than just the reactions of a bunch of neurons? Is there free will, or is your consciousness merely a transition state?”

His brown eyes now seemed to fill up her whole world, drowning out the dead trees, the scorching sun, the smell of decay. He was filling up her whole mind…

No, he wasn’t. Helen dropped the blade on the ground.

“I neither know nor care.”

She turned and walked away, and as she did so she felt a swelling wave of triumph. This was how you beat Kevin-by not reacting to him. But, oh, it was difficult. The revelation took her by surprise, but it was true. She was convinced of it. He wasn’t a person in his own right; he was just a reaction to circumstances.

By now the deathly brown stain had spread to the low hills that climbed gently up towards the section’s walls. She followed a path through the dead forest of clutching black hands, looking for the airlock and the route out of this section.

“Where are you going?” Kevin called after her.

She ignored him.

“Where are you going!” His voice was more urgent.

She almost laughed. It was that simple. Then she heard him coming up behind again, half ru

“You know the joke?” he was saying. “I’m not even alive! I pass the Turing test every day, and yet I’m not even really intelligent!”

Oh, I know that now. Helen kept walking. He dodged in front of her and began to walk backwards, keeping pace. His striped shirt was still open and flapping in the breeze. He held the white knife out to her.

“Go on, take it,” he said. “I told you, I’m not real. Killing me is not immoral; I was never alive!”

She said nothing.

“And yet you can’t do even that because Judy and all the machines at Social Care have programmed you not to.”

“Nobody has programmed me,” said Helen, striding on. She should have kept her mouth shut. Kevin had a look of satisfaction. He was in again.

“You know they have. You hate me and you should. I have raped and beaten and tortured and killed you every day for the past seventy years.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“It was you as much as Bairn was you. And you killed me for what I did to Bairn. Do you believe the Watcher’s lies? That each PC is an individual? That all virtual life comes from the Watcher? It’s slavery, Helen. More insidious than the slavery I practice in the Private Network, because you, Helen, you don’t even know you are enslaved.”

“Liar!”

Kevin was half walking, half skipping backwards. He kept turning to see where he was going, trying to keep ahead of Helen as she strode on along the dead path.