Capacity

Welcome to the year 2252—and congratulations! You’re now a personality construct. We know that can be a daunting stage of personal development, especially if you don’t remember making this life-changing decision. But we’re here to help….

Helen is waking to a dark new reality—one that she’s certain she didn’t choose. In this borrowed existence, she finds an unexpected guide in Judy, a geisha-faced virgin who’s on a mission of her own. Together, the two of them begin a dangerous run through dozens of imagined worlds in an attempt to trap a psychopath haunting the shadowed areas of virtual space—a killer who brutally murdered an earlier version of Helen and who plans to kill again. Meanwhile, Justinian is investigating a peculiar rash of AI suicides on far-off planets—and finds that not only is there more to these “deaths” than he thought, but that they may be linked to his wife Anya’s mysterious coma.

In a future where AIs have taken over human life and the Environment Agency runs everything for our own good, the fact that we can live on after physical death as sentient digital beings should have been a good thing. Instead, as Helen and Justinian are about to discover, it just means there are more ways to die.

Tony Ballantyne grew up in County Durham in the North East of England. He studied Math at Manchester University before moving to London for ten years where he taught first Math and then later IT. He now lives in Oldham with his wife and two children. His hobbies include playing boogie piano, walking, and cycling.

Tony's short fiction has appeared in The Third Alternative and Interzone magazines, and in the anthology Constellations edited by Peter Crowther.