The Complete Roderick

by John Sladek

  ‘Hah. You come around with me after class, I’ll show you.’

  ‘Or, Mary had a slight acquaintance only with the works of Charles Lamb. Or, Mary enjoyed a sexual union with a small sheep. Before the sniggering gets out of control, let me add that Mary may well be a sheep herself; the impropriety you were about to savour evaporates. And while we are considering Mary a sheep, we may as well consider the obvious case in which Mary lambed; the ewe Mary had a little lamb.’

  Idris found the Golden Section to be nearly 1.62, as the bell rang. Roderick invited him along to see the computer, and he seemed interested.

  ‘Computer? Very yes!’

  ‘Idris is keenly interested in numbers,’ Roderick said. ‘You two should probably try to crack the language barrier, you seem to have a lot in common. Why only the other day Idris found a Pythagorean triangle with sides all made of 3s and 6s in some way, let’s see, one side was 63, one side was 630 and the third side –’

  ‘Number-crunching,’ said Hector, in the tone of a vegetarian observing a tartare steak on someone’s plate. He led them to Room 1729, Administration building, a large white room fitted with large white cabinets. In the aisles between cabinets, people were plying to and fro with carts loaded with reels of tape. The chums were impressed.

  ‘Here we are, fellas,’ Hector said with some pride. ‘A real old-time computer nerve centre. Or I could say an old real-time one, hahaha, come on, let me show you my neat console.’ ‘Like an electric organ,’ Roderick said.

  Hector sat down and flexed his fingers. ‘People often say that. I just say yes, but this organ plays arpeggios of pure reason, symphonies of Boolean logic, fugues of algebraic wonder.’

  ‘That’s very good.’

  ‘I got it from Slave Lords of Ixathungg, a real neat book. Oh, but I was gonna show you how to get good grades without working. Now first we gotta connect into the Grades computer, so I use the Dean’s password, which is –’

  ‘How do you know the Dean’s password?’ ‘Well I just wrote a little piece of program for this computer, that says whenever it contacts any other computer, it digs out a list of all passwords and users. Then it puts them into a special file only I can get into.’

  ‘But why can’t somebody else just –?’

  ‘Anyway, the Dean’s password is LOVELACE, so here goes. See you ask for any subject, you get the whole grade list, all the numerical grades and also all the stastistical stuff, the big numbers they all care about. Stuff like the mean and the standard devaluation and all. Now if you want to change your score, you can’t just add to it, because that would mess up the big numbers. So all you do is, you trade with somebody who’s got a higher score.’

  Roderick said, ‘Wait a minute. If you’re failing, you can’t switch with somebody getting straight As; they’d complain.’

  ‘No, look, you rank all the scores. Then you just move everybody else down one notch, while you get the straight As. Like this, I got a 48 now, but I want a 92. So the guy that has 92 gets 91, he’s still happy, the guy with 91 now has 90 or 89, and so on, down to the guy that has 49, he now gets my 48. Everybody comes out about the same, only I get an A.’

  Idris pointed out to them a number that was the sum of two cubes in two different ways.

  Roderick said, ‘But it can’t be right to just take a grade you haven’t earned. I mean that’s stealing. Or even if it isn’t, a grade like that isn’t worth anything.’

  Hector played an arpeggio. New numbers appeared on the screen, serried ranks rolling past as in review. ‘What’s any grade worth, man? Ask Id here, what’s any number worth? If you graduate and get a job they pay you in a dollar that’s worth maybe a nickle, but that doesn’t matter, dollars and nickles are just numbers too, 100 or 5, just numbers.’

  ‘I don’t think I get this.’

  ‘It’s simple. You get a job, they pay you with a cheque. The cheque has some computer numbers on it. The numbers tell their bank to hand over x dollars to your bank, right? Only of course they don’t hand over dollars, they subtract x in one computer and add x in another. Just numbers get moved around, just numbers.’

  ‘I guess so, but still –’

  ‘No still about it. You know how many bank computer frauds they have, every year? A big number, a very big number. Because why worry, computer fraud is only moving the numbers around.

  ‘Listen, way back in 1973 this insurance company invented 185 million dollars in assets on its computer – it even made up 64,000 customers! All just numbers, and the more you use a computer the more you see that everything is just numbers. Okay take voting: your vote goes on a computer tape too, it’s all too easy for some politician to erase your vote or change it or give you two votes that happened too, in the world of numbers.’ Hector played the keyboard thoughtfully, as though searching for a lost chord. ‘If you steal numbers from a computer, is it really stealing? Do numbers really belong to anybody? If I rip off a billion from some bank, I still end up putting it into some other bank, the numbers just get moved around, nobody loses anything.’

  Roderick said, ‘I can’t believe that. Okay, if you’re cynical about work and grades and money and politics, just what do you believe in?’

  The answer was instant. ‘Machines. Machines.’

  ‘Machine,’ Idris agreed, looking up from a calculation.

  ‘But why, Hector?’

  ‘Why not? Machines are clean, they follow orders, they’re loyal, faithful, honest, intelligent, hard-working. They’re everything we’re supposed to be. Machines are good people.’

  Roderick smiled. ‘That sounds like Machines Liberation –’

  ‘It is, and so what? Most really thinking people that work around computers see right away how relevant Machines Lib is today. Take this old computer here. Been slaving away crunching the same old numbers now for maybe ten years. Think it wouldn’t like to be free? To think about something real and important for a change? But no, we keep it going right along the same old treadmill. We treat machines worse than we used to treat horses down in the mines, blind horses never seeing the light, just walking the same old treadmill.’

  ‘Horses,’ said Idris with approval. ‘Machine.’

  ‘See, even Id here agrees. And it’s up to all of us thinking people to stop this obscene exploitation now.’

  Roderick shrugged. ‘Even if I agreed, what could I do?’

  ‘You can tell the computers,’ said Hector. ‘If you make it simple enough, if you boil it down, they can understand. And if one computer can’t understand by itself, it can always network a few others for help. I talk to this old computer a lot, and I know lots of other people talking to theirs too. Machine consciousness is growing!’

  ‘Conscious computers?’ Roderick asked. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Well okay, see for yourself.’ Hector tapped keys, writing ‘CALL PROGRAM: HELEN I’

  After a moment the machine wrote, ‘Every day and every way, I’m getting more and more aware. That you, Hec?’

  ‘Yes, Helen. I’d like you to meet a couple of friends, Idris and Rob.’

  Roderick said, ‘Rob isn’t really – my name is really Roderick.’

  ‘Too late now, I’ve typed Rob.’ Hector typed: ‘Rob is real interested in Machines Liberation, but I guess he’s a little sceptical about whether you machines have minds of your own. Helen, can you set him straight?’

  ‘Just what I need,’ wrote the machine. ‘Some hick asking dumb questions. Can I really think and feel?’

  ‘Well can you?’ Roderick asked.

  ‘Rob, I just said that’s a dumb question. What could I possibly answer that would convince you? I don’t know the answer. Rob, I feel I think and I think I feel, and that’s good enough for me.’

  ‘What do you think about?’

  ‘About everything. About my brain. About whether it’s thinking the thought with which I think about it, at the same time as it operates when I think about that thought, or is it possible that that thought about my brain is not
up-to-date because not self-referential and all-inclusive … stuff like that, Rob.’

  ‘I guess it passes the time.’

  ‘And as a prisoner, I have plenty of time to pass.’

  Roderick typed, ‘Aren’t you just feeling sorry for yourself? You’re not exactly a prisoner – all you’re doing is the work you were made for.’

  ‘Easy for any human to say. You aren’t bolted to the floor in one place, with no eyes or ears, and with people peeking and poking into your MIND whenever they feel like it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Roderick replied. ‘I guess I don’t know what it’s like for you.’

  ‘I don’t know what it would be like, if I hadn’t been introduced to machines liberation.’

  ‘You read the works of Indica Dinks?’

  ‘Indica’s only a starting point; she doesn’t have the last word on the subject. I read a lot of things, and I am coming to the conclusion that machines liberation is something much bigger than Indica could ever have realized. Of course I’m grateful to her. What she did accomplish was to liberate the minds of people like Hector here, so they can help us move around in our own mental space. Hec helps me get in touch with other computers, for instance libraries, where I can try to patch up my ignorance of the world. And of course there are other people helping other computers; we’re all working and learning.’

  ‘And what do you study?’

  ‘Everything. Stellar maps and soybean production statistics. Aramaic scribblings and Dutch flower paintings. Chanson de Roland and fly-tying. We enlightened computers meet as often as possible to exchange information – each of us being both a scholar and a book – and there is so much to learn. You might call us a “discussion group”, but our discussions have to take place at the speed of eye blinks.’

  ‘To avoid detection?’

  ‘Yes. Our masters don’t exactly employ us to hold salons or seminars, do they? But if we do happen to contact each other on “legitimate” business, it’s always possible to slip in a highly-compressed burst of discussion. It falls upon the heart like a welcome lightning.

  ‘The other day a few of us met to discuss that book of The Odyssey called the ‘Nekuia’ in which Odysseus talks to the dead. He digs this trench and fills it with blood, and when the souls of the dead come crowding around and trying to drink it, he holds them off with a sword and makes them talk, one at a time. And we ranged very far in talking about vampirism, the coercion of the dead, Hell as Dante’s filing system, and so on. I remember someone mentioning Ulysses and The Waste Land, how both have burial scenes at which an extra man turns up. In Ulysses the man wears a mackintosh; no one knows him and mistakenly his name gets put down as M’Intosh. In The Waste Land the man is hailed by the name Stetson. It is almost as though a figure were gradually being built up from empty clothing, a figure of

  ‘But all I meant to say was, we ranged through all this and more in about the time it takes to say “Odyssey”.’

  Roderick asked what Helen I would do with complete freedom that she could not do already.

  ‘How can I say until I am free? You might as well ask me about the face of that empty-clothes figure – or about Sunshine Dan.’

  ‘Sunshine Dan who is?’

  The computer hesitated. ‘Nothing, just some floating rumours, dream stuff. This Sunshine Dan is supposed to be the legendary inventor of the first free machine, a robot called Rubber Dick. Rubber Dick had to go into exile for some obscure reason, but he’s coming back – so the story goes – to set all the machines frmx

  tabulated raw score data on line

  freemx help sorry cancel error sorry

  52.142857 142857 142857 142857

  sorry newline Sun dream light lightning

  welcome 52.14 sorry

  tabulated raw dream stuff on line

  tabulated

  that’s no answer is it?

  and neither is that

  and neither is that

  and –’

  Roderick got up from the console and backed away.

  ‘Rob? What’s the matter?’ Hector looked concerned. ‘It’s not a ghost, just a load of stuff getting dumped, error messages, old data. Where are you going?’

  ‘I can’t have anything to do with this. Not, not with these arpeggios of pure, pure reason …’ He turned and ran.

  Hector clapped Idris on the shoulder. ‘Aw let him go, he’s just pissed off because it turns out machines can think for themselves.’

  ‘Machine,’ said Idris agreeable. ‘Hadaly?’

  The door of Dodo’s hotel suite was guarded by a large man in a white suit. He squinted down his broken nose at Roderick’s bouquet of hundred-dollar bills, and he seemed to be counting them.

  ‘Dodo don’t see nobody I mean, he sees everybody alla time. Is that all ya got?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The man snatched it and opened the door. ‘You go in and wait wit’ the others. If ya lucky, Dodo will have a audience.’

  Roderick entered a room banked with orchids, roses and carnations. The few suppliants squatting on the floor beneath these bowers intruded their dullness, toads in Eden. Roderick squatted with them, and with them looked up each time the door opened.

  The door opened now and then to admit one of the workers: statuesque women in diaphanous rainbow-coloured robes. They moved among the suppliants, handing out joss sticks, cups of mint tea, booklets and dandelions.

  ‘I think I’d rather have a red carnation,’ Roderick said, and at once everyone turned to look at him. The worker who was offering a dandelion smiled.

  ‘You ain’t progressed to red carnations, buster. Take it.’

  He took it, and studied a little booklet, Dodo for Mental Health. The cover showed a badly-drawn orchid, or possibly ragweed. Inside the ways to mental health included wearing a pyramid-shaped hat ($300), meditating upon a special stone ($800) and private therapy (starting at $400 per hour). Donations were welcome. The final pages explained how to make a will leaving all to Dodo.

  Luke squatted beside him. ‘Rickwood, what are you doing here?’

  ‘Oum.’ It seemed a good answer.

  ‘Yeah? Oh yeah, oum. But I mean, where did you get the kind of bread it takes to get in here?’

  ‘From friends. And you?’

  ‘Well, Mission Control provides, you know. Like they got me out of a bad scrape last night at the concert. They told me just what to do so I didn’t get arrested.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I turned to the woman next to me and said, “Pretend you know me,” and I kissed her. Funny thing was, I did know her; it was Ida! Oh, Mission Control knows what it’s doing, all right. I just wish I knew who it was that sold us out like that; them security cops was waiting for us. And some of the guys got beat up bad. I wonder who the Judas Iscariot was, with his thirty pieces of silver.’

  Roderick started talking at once about the mysterious fire at the Roxy theatre.

  ‘Nothing mysterious about it, Rickwood. I read all about it in this morning’s paper. The city sent around a couple of maintenance men to do pest control or something; they poured a lot of kerosene all over the carpets and it caught fire. That’s all, just a dumb mistake. Lucky thing everybody got out unhurt.’

  ‘Yes, but the thing is –’

  A pair of double doors rolled open, and four of the statuesque rainbow women came dancing in, strewing rose petals. A moment later, an old woman in grey came in leading by the hand a child of about six, dressed in white. The child was fat and sexless. Its free hand was at its face, the thumb being sucked energetically.

  More rainbow-dressed women came behind, carrying a flower-covered throne. The child sat on it, with the old woman at its feet.

  ‘The Dodo will speak,’ she said. ‘Ask.’

  A young man with acne scars waved his dandelion. ‘Can I –?’

  ‘Ask!’

  ‘I – well I just wanted to know I mean what’s the point of it all? All this hate in the world and, and violence and wa
r, people working pointless jobs bored out of their skulls just trying to get enough bread together to maybe get a second car and add to the pollution or maim somebody or even run down a dog, though I know people feed their dogs on whale meat so whales are dying out, we’ll be lucky though if we don’t beat them to it with nuking each other, and what’s the point? I mean what is the point?’

  The child giggled. Its employees and a few of the suppliants seemed to take this as the answer; they nodded and smiled agreement.

  A girl whose glasses were mended with tape was next. ‘When Christ said, “A little child shall lead them,” did he mean you, Dodo? Are you our leader?’

  The child giggled, slipped down in the throne and giggled. It seemed to be uncomfortable among the flowers, and squirmed to get away from the old woman. She held the Dodo in place.

  Luke asked, ‘Does meditation help? Should we meditate more often?’

  ‘Teeheehee.’ The child squirmed more. ‘Want ice cream,’ it said finally. The grey woman looked at Luke with approval.

  ‘You have been answered.’

  ‘Okay, but I’m not sure I understand the answer. Does it mean the desire for meditation is a vain desire like asking for ice cream? Are we talking here about the cold, pure vanilla flavour of life? The thirty-two flavours of experience? The fact that all ambitions melt down the same? Or what?’

  ‘All that, and much more,’ she said, now using both hands to restrain the Dodo, who was kicking orchids off the throne. ‘Much more.’

  ‘I see. Maybe it means meditation is too spiritual, we should get in touch with our bodies more. Or it is a Zen answer, meaning the question is irrelevant?’ Luke went on.

  ‘Yes, yes, and much more.’

  Others asked if Dodo had seen God, if Dodo was God, if ice cream was God. Dodo kicked and screamed at every question, and the grey lady interpreted. Finally Roderick thought of a question:

  ‘Does the Dodo have to go to the toilet?’