Capacity Read Online Free PDF Page B

himself an outsider to the only group of humans for millions of light years. The bright blue belt of M32 rose into the dark sky behind the pod. The Milky Way was a monochrome rainbow in the other direction.
    Justinian rubbed a finger across the fuzzy surface of the BVB and wondered at the strangeness of this place. As far as he was concerned, reality was a force that diminished the further one traveled from home: the hundred colonists were treading in a place of dreams where nothing worked as it should. Neither should it be expected to.
    The pod spoke in a thoughtful tone. “I don’t remember anything about BVBs. I wonder why that is?”
    “Probably because they weren’t known when you were conceived. They were only discovered on this planet.”
    Justinian crouched down before the pod, looking for external sense cluster formations. There seemed to be nothing. That implied the pod was still operating on internals. Just like all the other pods, in fact.
    “BVBs are similar to the Schrödinger boxes,” he continued, his hands glowing fluorescent green as he felt the rubbery surface of the pod. Red mud squelched under his feet and he grabbed onto the pod to maintain his balance. “BVBs only form in spaces that are not being observed, and then they immediately begin to contract.”
    “How do you know?” the pod interrupted.
    “How do I know what?”
    “How do you know that they begin to contract immediately if the space in which they form is not being observed?”
    Justinian smiled wearily.
    “Good point,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that before.” He was struck by how much like children the AIs here on Gateway had become. Innocent, but with a sharp eye for detail.
    “Someone probably did; they just didn’t explain that part to you.”
    Justinian gazed coolly at the pod. And like children, he thought, they could be incredibly tactless. They quickly figured out that Justinian wasn’t part of the scientific survey team and then equally quickly lost all respect for him.
    His legs were getting tired from crouching, so he straightened up and began to circle the pod, treading carefully on the slippery mud. One careless step and he could end up rolling down the slope into the dark water below.
    “Anyway,” he said, “BVBs form in empty spaces. We
believe
they begin to contract immediately. Sometimes they get tangled around an object, like a pipe or a tree branch. The slightest touch on their inside surface stops them contracting;
nothing
can make them expand again. And they’re unbreakable. Nothing can cut through them.”
    “Oh…” The pod’s voice was almost wistful. “What does BVB stand for?”
    “Black Velvet Band. Named after an old song, apparently.”
    Justinian rested a hand on the warm surface of the pod. He looked at the three BVBs that had formed on its supple skin. “If you rearrange your external structure to make your skin frictionless, they’ll slip right off.”
    There was a moment’s pause before the pod spoke.
    “…I can’t.”
    “You can,” Justinian said. “All AI pods have multiform integuments. Yours is just set to dormant mode at the moment. Wake it up.”
    “I can’t,” the pod said. It sounded embarrassed. “I don’t understand how to work the mechanism. I can see the potentials arranged before me, but I don’t understand how to achieve them.”
    Justinian yawned again, looking out across the water. A pale glow had appeared over there as dawn approached. He wondered if he could make out the shape of another mud bank, slowly materializing from the blackness.
    “You’ve heard all this before, haven’t you?” the pod said shrewdly. “Who are you? Why are you here? You’re obviously not one of the regular surveyors.”
    There it was again: all the pods so far had figured this out. They might be acting like children, but they still had intelligence at least equal to his own. And, stripped down though their intelligences were, they still had access to vast