The Holy Machine (3 page)

5

When I got home, Ruth wasn’t in SenSpace as I had expected, but pacing round the living room with Charlie trundling after her, helpfully proffering tranquillizers, tea, brandy and a sandwich with his four spindly arms.

‘Oh George, where have you
been
? I wish you’d
say
when you’re going to be late. I needed you here. It’s Shirley! Someone’s coming round to see us. I’m going out of my mind with worry…’

I told Charlie to put down the other things – the tea was slopping all over the floor – give her the brandy and then fetch another one for me. I took her by the shoulders and made her sit down. She grabbed my hand and clung on so tightly that it hurt. Then she started to cry.

‘What do you mean, it’s Shirley?’ I asked her, prizing my hand free from hers.

Shirley was another robot, one of three robot janitors in our tower, who cleaned the lifts and stairs, carried out simple maintenance jobs, and took turns on desk duty in the lobby. They were ‘plastecs’. Cheaper and much more common than syntecs, plastecs had rubbery plastic skins rather than actual flesh. Our landlord had installed them about a year previously, taking advantage of government subsidies to replace the three middle-aged Macedonians who’d previously performed these tasks.

‘She’s gone off. I saw her in the street, just walking away. I even spoke to her. I said “Hello Shirley” and she just looked at me and walked straight past. You know how friendly she normally is? You know how she says “Hi there, Ruth!” Well, she didn’t. She just looked at me and made…’ Ruth began to sob again, ‘She just looked at me and made this kind of growl…’

I laughed angrily then got up and walked over to the window, gulping down my brandy. Beyond the towers, the sea was blue and hazy. There was a white ship far away in the distance.

I turned round.

‘Listen Ruth, Shirley is a machine. Maybe she’s gone wrong in some way. Machines sometimes do that. I was dealing with a translation system only yesterday that had started putting the word ‘not’ into every Serbian sentence…’

‘I wish you didn’t do that work, languages and foreign countries. You’ve got no idea how dangerous those people can be. They hate us out there, George!’

‘What I’m telling you is this: if a machine goes wrong it’s no big deal. Now let’s get some supper. Charlie, what have we got in the freezer other than pizza?’

Charlie trundled towards us: ‘Steak, lasagne, cod, plaice, Irish stew…’ he began.

‘Someone’s coming to see me about it!’ Ruth whimpered, ‘Someone from the robot company. They phoned every apartment in the building. A whole team of them are coming round to interview everyone who saw Shirley in the last ten days.’

‘… French fries, waffles, chocolate ice-cream, strawberry ice-cream, lemon sorbet…’ Charlie broke off the list to pick up an ultrasound transmission from the door.

‘Someone to see you Ruth,’ he announced, ‘Her name is Marija Mejic, from the Illyria Cybernetic Corporation.’

* * *

She turned out to be a young woman of about my own age. She was friendly, intelligent and rather pretty, which immediately threw me into confusion. I was very frightened of attractive young women in those days.

‘Very sorry to bother you,’ she said, when I’d shown her to a seat. ‘I think you’re aware that a robot janitor has gone missing, and we need to find out why so as to ensure that any problem is put right.’

In spite of her South-Slav name she spoke her Illyrian English with a slight Antipodean accent.

‘It seems a lot of fuss about one defective robot,’ I said.

She looked up at me quickly with a smile. Her manner was alarmingly direct.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘It’s just that…’ she hesitated, ‘It’s just that ICC believes in being thorough about these things,’ she said.

And she went on briskly to ask a whole list of questions. When had we last seen Shirley? How often had we seen her in the last ten days? Had we noticed any discernible changes in her behaviour? What about her verbal responses? Her voice? Her posture…?

‘Does this happen a lot?’ Ruth asked her at the end.

‘Well yes, the truth is it has been happening quite a lot recently. A lot of different robots. It’s not dangerous or anything. No one’s been harmed. So the government doesn’t really want us to, you know, alarm anyone…’

‘A lot of robots?’ demanded Ruth. ‘Any sort of robots? What about our Charlie here?’

She reached down and rubbed Charlie’s shiny ‘head’, from which the original painted face had long since been worn away.

Marija Mejic glanced down at him and laughed.

‘Oh no. It’s just the ones with SE systems. You know? Self-Evolving? They are meant to learn by trial and error, so they’re actually designed to generate small fluctuations in behaviour. But every now and again, a combination of circumstances may flip them outside of their original parameters. We always knew it could happen. That’s why they are supposed to be reprogrammed every five years – wiped clean as we call it. It’s just that it seems to be happening a bit more quickly than we…’

She stood up, went to the window and glanced out.

‘The funny thing about it is that these things were supposed to be more reliable than human beings!’ she said with her back still turned to us. ‘ The whole
point
was they wouldn’t lose their heads!’

Then she turned round with a small laugh.

‘But that’s just a personal observation of mine, and strictly between you and me!’

I got up to let her out. She extended her hand to shake as I opened the door.

‘Very nice to meet you, Mr Simling.’

As her eyes met mine, I felt as if she could read in my face where I had been earlier that day: the red room, the sickly muzak, the syntecs with their scented flesh, the sweat streaming down the face of fat Paddy Malone…

I blushed.

‘Very nice to meet you too Mr Simling,’ I blurted.

Of course this visit had done nothing to allay Ruth’s fears.

‘What did she mean
flip
? What could they do? I thought they were supposed to be
safe
George! Not like those horrible Macedonians brooding about God and the Devil and whatever else those Outlanders think about. And now she says they’re dangerous too!’

‘She didn’t say they were dangerous. She just meant they wander off sometimes, or stop doing their job…’

‘Well, she shouldn’t have said all that. I’ve got a good mind to report her to the company.’

‘For being honest with us? Would you prefer people to lie?’

‘Perhaps one of them might kill somebody. How do you know what she meant by
flip
?’

‘I just guessed’ I snapped.

I didn’t care at all about what the robots might or might not do, but I was flustered and shaken, as I always was after any social encounter.

‘Why can’t anything be safe?’ Ruth complained. ‘Why is there
always
a snake in the grass?’

‘Oh give it a rest, Ruth, can’t you? Why don’t you just go into SenSpace for a bit and forget it, eh? There are no snakes in there. Not unless you want them to be, anyway.’

Ruth looked at me, almost cunningly.

‘Only if you come too,’ she said.

I hesitated. I hated SenSpace and the total surrender that it involved. It gave me the queasy feeling of being swallowed alive. But just now this didn’t seem so unappealing.

I shrugged.

‘Okay. It’s a deal.’

6

There were stars. They weren’t like the stars of ordinary reality: they were multicoloured, they stretched back in three dimensions, and they were moving, around, above and between one another.

There was a warm smell of a summer night, a hint of lilac. Celestial music came faintly from far away and then broke out into a bold fanfare as huge coloured 3D letters burst like fireworks across the firmament.

The SenSpace Consortium of Illyria

Welcomes You To

S E N S P A C E

‘Yes, welcome to SenSpace, George!’ said an intimate, female voice in my ear, ‘It’s been a long time. Are you travelling alone, or do you have companions I need to link you up with?’

‘One companion, Ruth Simling,’ I said, reluctantly adding her SenSpace
alias
: ‘Little Rose.’

‘Ah yes,’ said SenSpace fondly, ‘dear Little Rose! I’ll link you up immediately.’

Ruth appeared beside me, as our hitherto parallel SenSpace universes were merged into one. Or rather, Little Rose appeared, a small, mousily pretty young girl in a party dress, still recognizable as my mother, but some ten years younger than myself.

I looked away. We were standing on a high platform, the swirling stars above and around us. Beneath a vast patchwork landscape was laid out, teeming with detail and activity, which seemed to stretch away for hundreds of kilometres in every direction.

You could have studied it for hours just as it was, but what made it even more absorbing was the fact that whatever patch you looked at would immediately grow, as if a powerful pair of binoculars had been put in front of your eyes.

Here were children playing on a sandy beach for example, splashing among white surf and breakers of perfect translucent green. The longer I looked at it the closer they became. I could hear their voices and the sound of the surf. I could hear the flapping sound from a small boat with red sails. I could feel the sand. I could hear one little girl whisper to her brother they were going to build the biggest sandcastle ever seen. ‘That will teach John,’ she said, ‘That will teach him!…’

I looked away. The seaside at once shrunk again to a tiny blue and yellow patch far off on the surface of the seething quilt of the SenSpace world.

My eye fell on a forest. The green was very bright, like coloured glass. There was a dragon with fiery nostrils waiting in a cave. Knights were riding towards it through the emerald trees. Their silvery armour glinted, their shields were bright. You could see every single leaf on every twig.

Here was a city. The towers were ten times higher than Illyria’s. Open trains full of laughing people whizzed between them on precarious monorail bridges. Little coloured biplanes swooped and dived among them. I could see the smiling faces of the pilots as they raced one another round the towers. I saw a red plane crash through a bridge and into the side of a building with a big explosion. But then the plane was gone, the bridge was whole again and trains of happy people were whizzing across it once more.

‘There’s something I’d like to show you George,’ said Ruth beside me in her Little Rose voice.

She reached out and took my hand (I mean my
SenSpace
hand: back in the real world, in our apartment in Faraday District, she and I were at opposite sides of the room), and I followed where she led.

We came to a little cove, where olive groves came down almost to the edge of the sea. The sea was blue and so clear that shoals of fishes seemed to be flying rather than swimming over the smooth white stones on the bottom, and a rowing boat at anchor appeared suspended in space over its own shadow.

Cicadas and crickets kept up their incessant throbbing among the olive trees and pines. The air was heavy with the aromatic resins of wild herbs baking in the sun. There were goat bells in the distance. A small bird with a scrap of wool in its beak, crossed the sea to a little rocky islet fifty metres off the coast, on which grew a single small pine.

At the top of a little rocky cliff, were the ruins of a Byzantine shrine…

‘But this is Aghios Constantinos!’ I exclaimed.

Little Rose looked up at me smiling and nodding.

‘It’s even better under the moon!’ she said, and the daylight began at once to fade…

‘But it’s a real place, Ruth!’ I said. (The daylight hesitated, unsure whether to proceed, and the sun stopped its descent towards the sea.) ‘We used to go there. We had picnics. I found a tortoise once.’

‘There are tortoises here too,’ she said, ‘Look!’

‘But you can still go to Constantinos and see
real
tortoises, Ruth!’

Little Rose frowned. ‘I’ll never go back there. Not after what happened.’

Ten years previously a Swiss Illyrian had been kidnapped and murdered by Greek terrorists on that same stretch of coast, close to the border. Our visits had stopped from that date on.

‘Look!’ said Little Rose, ‘A tortoise, see, right down by your feet!’

7

I had not expected to meet Marija Mejic again after her visit to us about Shirley. But as it happened our paths crossed not long afterwards. It was at a training event for export companies put on by the governement at the Nora Ullman Institute. Myself and two others – Tony Vespuccio and Ricky Timms – were there to represent Word for Word. Marija was one of the representatives for the Illyria Cybernetic Corporation.

Ricky was a sort of friend of mine. He was a year younger than me and a victim to raging adolescent acne at the age of twenty-one. We used to get drunk sometimes and talk about programming and sport and various cult TV programmes aimed at immature young men like ourselves. Sometimes we used to go down to the sea front and fool around in the arcades. We didn’t actually
like
each other much.

Tony was a little older than us and a lot more experienced.

At the seminar we were divided into small groups of four, each of which was supposed to look at various practical problems involved with exporting technology-based equipment to the medieval and theocratic states beyond our borders. (Illyria relied on these states, after all, to provide it with food, raw materials and, in spite of robots and syntecs, labour.)

In my group were Ricky, Tony and Marija.

Marija remembered me.

‘We never found that robot of yours you know,’ she said.

I muttered something about how the replacement seemed to work fine.

‘Is your wife alright?’ she asked, ‘She seemed really shaken up.’

‘Wife?’ exclaimed Tony incredulously. ‘
Wife?’

I blushed.

Ricky giggled.

I buried myself in the interesting learning exercises provided.

Tony, on the other hand, did not even pretend to be impressed by what the government had laid on for us and he chatted to Marija instead. I listened, fascinated by how easily he seemed to do it.

I learnt that Marija had come to Illyria at the age of eleven from New Zealand when it too, after almost all of the other industrialised nations, was finally engulfed by the Reaction. For her family, it was a return to the Mediterranean, from where they had migrated only a generation previously.

She was tired of her job with ICC and unhappy with the limited options of the little bubble in which we Illyrians lived. She had recently joined the Holist League.

‘Why?’ asked Tony, who lived essentially for pleasure.

‘Illyria was a more generous place when it was founded,’ she said. ‘But I feel that now it’s slowly becoming a mirror image of the countries it was supposed to be a refuge from. The Beacon, for example, was supposed to
symbolize
the power of free thought. And yet now all kinds of thoughts are banned – even the League has been threatened.’

Tony shrugged. Resignedly, he turned his attention to the task in hand, having come to the conclusion that Marija was dull, even if she was pretty.

But I was interested. I’d always loved the Beacon since I went there with my father as a child. On one occasion, I remember, I had to stay the night with him (I think Ruth had had to go into hospital for some reason or other) and we went up to the top of the Beacon after dark. I’d never seen so much of the world: the dark sea to the west with flecks of phosphorescence and the tiny lights of ships and fishing boats moving across it, the brilliant City immediately below with all its flashing signs, and beyond the city, deep in the Zagorian mountains and up and down the coast, the little yellow lights of the Outland settlements beyond our frontiers: Greek and Shqip and Vlach and Slav…

‘And look at the way we’re supposed to watch old Ullman crumbling that figurine every night,’ said Marija. ‘I mean what does
that
tell you about this city?’

‘Have you ever tried winding it back?’ I found myself saying, very much to my own surprise.

‘No, I haven’t,’ said Marija, turning her bright, interested eyes on me.

Feeling increasingly awkward, I told her about my experience: the human form assembling itself from dust in Ullman’s godlike hands.

‘It’s as if…’ (I faltered a bit at the end of this unusually long speech). ‘It’s as if the way you see the world depends on the direction you choose to come at it from…’

‘
Exactly!
’ exclaimed Marija. ‘Exactly!’

Tony laughed. When it was time to go, Marija wrote down for me the date of a forthcoming meeting of the League.

‘You’re well in there, George,’ Tony said to me, when Marija said goodbye. ‘Play your cards right and you and she could get together and discuss the meaning of life on a regular basis.’

* * *

Outside night was falling, and the Beacon, which is silvery by day, was lighting up from within to give glimpses of its intricate interior, like one of those transparent water creatures you can watch under a microscope and see its heart beating and the food moving along its gut. Gigantic and yet seemingly weightless, it hovered over its own reflection. People were going in and out of it, up and down it, round and through it like ants in a nest: on staircases, galleries, walkways, escalators. High up in the Beacon‘s great spherical head, people were riding the Ferris wheels that revolved outside.

I walked over to the railings. The sea softly splashed against the stones. From a flagpole above me, the eye of Illyria flapped in a light breeze.

Was Tony joking, or did he really think that someone like Marija might be interested in the likes of me?

I became aware of another sound just below me. A pair of lovers were kissing in the protective darkness of the concrete sea wall, kissing and kissing and kissing, slowly and gently feeding on one another’s mouths.