“Begin to grow into what?” Judy asked breathlessly.

“I don’t know. But the AIs on Gateway obviously didn’t like what they saw. They committed suicide rather than allow more seeds to germinate. Maybe the growth was exponential. Maybe the more intelligent the observer, the more developed the growth. Does this sound far-fetched? Have you ever stood in a meadow on a summer’s day? Have you ever suffered from hay fever? Have you ever thought about the myriad seeds just sleeting through the air above the grass? What if plants could exploit space in that way?”

He looked at Judy. “Do you understand? Do you believe me?”

“Oh, I believe you,” Judy whispered. She was thinking of the purple venumb that had stood in Peter Onethirteen’s apartment. The one that had fallen to Earth.

“But where do the plants come from?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Were they deliberately made, or did they naturally evolve? Are they like the venumbs: a result of out of control symbiosis? I have no idea.”

Judy turned to her friend. “Frances, what do you think?”

“I’m not sure. The Watcher believes there is life elsewhere. It believes it is a descendant of ET life, and yet…Where is the evidence? We have searched long and hard and found nothing. Maybe this is why: these plants are what destroyed intelligent life elsewhere. Was that deliberate? We don’t know. The very tool that makes us powerful is intelligence, and yet that is the very thing we cannot use to study our greatest threat. Every mind that is turned to contemplate these plants commits suicide.”

Judy turned back to David. “So that is why the Watcher has kept what happened on Gateway a secret.”

David gave a bitter laugh. “No. I don’t think so. There is more to it than that. The Watcher, the EA-they trade on trust. They want us to believe in them, in their capacity to look after us. But there is more. You didn’t see the way that robot played with Justinian on the flier. I wanted to take the baby to safety, but the robot wouldn’t let me. It hinted; it played on Justinian’s fears for his son’s safety; it made him angry so that he couldn’t think straight. And all so that it could keep the baby on board the ship.”

His voice, his voice that had started as a murmur and increased in volume as his speech went on, was now raised in anger. It cracked as he began to shout.

“Haven’t you realized? Justinian wasn’t the one the AIs wanted on that planet. It was the baby! All that nonsense about Justinian’s name being in the memories of the AI pods was just misdirection! The pods pretended they wanted Justinian, and then played with him to get him to bring the baby, too! I said it took intelligence to fix a seed in place. How much intelligence? How much human intelligence? When does it develop? All that maneuvering so they could get a baby at the right age to Gateway and watch as its mind developed to just the right point.

“Back then on the flier, as soon as the baby had fixed that cube in position by looking at it, Leslie got me off that ship. I saw Justinian fly off to his death, and I listened in to what happened. They deafened him, blinded him, flayed him alive. Leslie, the EA, the Watcher, all of them sent Justinian to his death, and all so they could measure the extent of the influence of intelligence on the plant.”

He slammed a pitiful fist down and shouted with the last of his cracked voice.

“And that’s not all. What about the baby? It was left to die!”

David Schummel began to cry.

“That’s what I think of the Watcher. That’s what I think of Social Care. To it, we are all expedient. When it comes to the crunch, it will sacrifice us all, just like the Watcher sacrificed a fifteen-month-old child!”

Interlude: The Atomic Judy 4.5

…pressing down upon her…

Judy awoke to find herself sitting up in bed, the hot silk sheets tangled around her. Her breathing slowed as she realized she had been dreaming. Brilliant stars in black space filled the large window behind her, illuminating the simple furnishings of her room. She was safe. Still, she couldn’t help looking up to the high ceiling, just to confirm that there was no hand reaching down from there, no hand on the end of an impossibly long arm extending down to smother her.

The idea was ridiculous, of course. Frances was in the room next door: she would have burst into the bedroom if there had been any sign of danger to Judy. The hand was just a dream, the same one she always had when she was stressed.

She lay back in bed and meditated, slowed her heart rate and tried to drift back to sleep. It was no wonder she was tense: she was pumped up with some strange variant of MTPH which was cruelly forcing her to focus on the fact that her world was collapsing around her.

The Watcher? She had never known quite whether she believed in the Watcher. To have its existence confirmed was a jolt to her, but to have that confirmation presented in such a skewed fashion…Surely, the Watcher was supposed to protect life! Could it possibly be true that it had deliberately sent Justinian Sibelius to his death?

Well, maybe it could. She thought back to her own induction into Social Care. Discussions on the origin of moral values. Theories about the existence of the Watcher. The parable of Jenny Cook and Eva Rye.

Eva Rye was a legend. Some believed in her actual existence, many more thought she was just an example of anthropomorphism. According to the story, back when the Watcher was first born, it had sought out humans to interact with. Eva Rye was the first human with whom the Watcher had properly interacted. It had therefore molded its human views upon her.

Just as Frances had chosen to do with Judy.

Judy’s eyes snapped open.

Supposing Eva wasn’t a legend. Supposing she had spoken with the Watcher. The decisions Eva had then made had subsequently shaped the world.

A cold chill settled on Judy. It was often asked: if Eva was real, then why didn’t the Watcher speak directly to people anymore? An answer had just occurred to her.

What if it did, but most people never heard it?

And what if she was one of those people?

Judy awoke to find herself sitting up in bed, the silk sheets tangled around her. Her breathing slowed as she realized it was just a dream. She had dreamed that she had awoken and looked around her room. She had a headache: bad MTPH. What had Chris done to her? She felt as if she had been asleep for days.

She shook her head. Was she really awake this time? She needed to think about something. She had almost had it then…Something about the Watcher and its true purpose. Had it really sent Justinian to his death?

Maybe yes.

What was that story she recalled, back from her induction into Social Care? The parable of Jenny Cook and Eva Rye.

Jenny Cook had been a young woman of twenty-two. She worked as a sales assistant in a clothes shop. She had no current partner; she still lived with her parents in a pleasant apartment in the Bridleworth area of the North West conurbation. On the 11th of February 2056 she left her house much later than usual, at 8:20 A.M. Social Care had been noting her increasingly erratic behavior for the previous few weeks and, when it was realized she wasn’t going to work as usual that day, that had been enough to tip her case over the threshold and trigger an intervention. An investigative team arrived at her apartment at 8:30 and, under the concerned eyes of her parents, began a thorough search of the house.

At 8:39 someone found the memory wafers in her bedside-table drawer, hidden among a pile of letters tied together with a blue ribbon. This was suspicious. Virtually nobody used wafers in 2056; everything was transferred directly by the net. Wafers that could be plugged directly into a mobile phone were used by people wanting to hide what they were doing: namely the security services, the military, big companies, and criminals. Criminals? Jenny’s parents had exchanged worried looks, but the IT specialist had provided a more comforting explanation. Sometimes they are used by lovers.