The Holy Machine

by Chris Beckett

  Copyright

  First published in the United States of America in 2004 by Wildside Press.

  This edition first published in Great Britain in 2010 by

  Corvus, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

  Copyright © Chris Beckett 2004.

  The moral right of Chris Beckett to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form

  or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,

  or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright

  owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events

  portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously.

  First eBook Edition: January 2010

  ISBN: 978-0-857-89049-8

  Corvus

  An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  For my parents.

  Two creative people, full of curiosity about life.

  You are both very dear to me.

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  1

  Perhaps I should start this story with my escape across the border in the company of a beautiful woman? Or I could begin with the image of myself picking up pieces of human flesh in a small room in a Greek taverna, retching and gagging as I wrapped them in a shirt and stuffed it into my suitcase. (That was a turning point. There’s no doubt about that.) Or, then again, it might be better to begin with something more spectacular, more panoramic: the Machine itself perhaps, the robot Messiah, preaching in Tirana to the faithful, tens of thousands of them clutching at its every word?

  But I think I will begin with a summer night when I was twenty-two years old. (Here I am, look, at twenty-two, fumbling for my key on the landing outside our Illyria City apartment, my briefcase tucked awkwardly under my arm… ) I didn’t know it at the time but it was on this night that my strange journey began.

  I had been working late in my office at a company called Word for Word. I was a translator and my job was to assist with the language side of the various trade transactions that took place between our strange Balkan city-state and the hostile but impoverished territories that surrounded us. (Seven different languages were by then spoken within a radius of two hundred kilometres – and at least that many religions were fervently practised, each of them claiming to be the final and literal truth about everything.) There were some rewards involved in working as long hours as I did but the real reason was that I had nothing else to do, and even the office late at night felt more like home than the bleak apartment that I shared with Ruth.

  Ruth was my mother. I always called her Ruth. She never liked the idea of being mum. I was conceived quite accidentally in a boat full of frightened refugees crossing Lake Michigan. My parents were complete strangers to one another, but just that once they clung together for comfort. I believe it was the only sexual encounter of Ruth’s adult life.

  ‘Ruth?’ I called as I opened the door.

  But as usual she didn’t answer because she was suspended in her SenSpace suit, jerking back and forth like a puppet as she wandered in the electronic dreamworld. It was something she seemed to do now almost all the time except when she was sleeping or at work She was getting very thin, I observed coldly as I glanced into the SenSpace room and saw her threshing around in that lattice of wires. SenSpace food might look and even taste good – they had recently found ways of projecting olfactory sensations – but it could never fill you up.

  I ordered my own meal and a beer from the domestic, an old X3 called Charlie, which we’d owned since my childhood. He trundled patiently off to the kitchen on his rubber tyres. (Getting him repaired was increasingly difficult, but we hung onto him anyway. He was one of the family, perhaps even its best-loved member.) While the meal was heating up, I wandered out onto the balcony with the beer. We were fifty floors up and it was a fine view. You could see the sea in one direction and glimpse the bare mountains of Zagoria in the other. But all around us were towers of steel and glass. Our Illyria was a city of towers, built by the best engineers and scientists on the planet as a homeland for themselves, and a refuge from the religious extremists of the Reaction, from which Ruth and her generation had fled.

  I was very lonely in those days. I spoke eight languages fluently, but I had no one to talk to and nothing to say. I didn’t know how to be a part of the world. And as for Ruth, she didn’t even want to be. We were both of us creatures of fear. High up there in the steel canyons of our city, I would even try to derive some sense of comfort and company from the little lights of other apartments across the void, and try to persuade myself that the flashing signs in the commercial sector were speaking personally to me.

  DRINK COCA-COLA!

  RELY ON MICROSOFT!

  WATCH OUT FOR CHANNEL NINE!

  Then Charlie called me in for my meal and I sat in front of the TV and flipped on the news. In Central Asia, new religious wars were in the air and crowds were streaming round and round that hideous statue that bleeds real blood donated by the faithful, chanting ‘death! death! death!’ In Holy America, where Ruth grew up, new laws had restricted the franchise to ‘God-fearing male heads of Christian families’ and introduced the death penalty for promulgating the sinful doctrine of Evolution
.

  I flipped channels. Our TV held all programmes broadcast in the last twenty-four hours on its hard disc, so you could flip backwards and forwards as well as sideways. I hopped to and fro: random moments from a movie, a documentary about discontinuous motion, a sitcom…

  Then I came to Channel Nine and was suddenly captivated by the image of an amazingly pretty woman, with lovely gentle eyes.

  I didn’t know it then of course, but it was Lucy.

  It was actually a programme about syntecs, robots that were coated with a layer of living flesh. They were virtually identical to people, except in the one important respect that, unlike the foreign ‘guestworkers’ who were the working class of our city, but like all other robots, they could be programmed. They did not have a personal or a cultural history. They did not have the virus of irrationality and superstition which seemed to have infected ordinary uneducated folk throughout the world.

  The government’s long-term intention was to use robots to replace the guestworkers altogether, removing from our midst a dangerous fifth column for the Reaction. Thousands of human workers – Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Albanians, Russians, Indians, Filipinos – had already been sent away. Of course most of the robots who took over their jobs were fitted with plastic skins at best, and many bore no serious resemblance to human beings. But syntecs had been specifically developed to provide those services that were thought to require a ‘human’ touch. Wealthy people acquired syntec domestic servants, for example, and some prestigious offices acquired beautiful syntec receptionists. They were a luxury item.

  Inevitably there were also syntec sex workers. (Communication satellites, computers, the printing press: human beings always find a sexual angle.) Lucy was a syntec prostitute, though they were known officially as Advanced Sensual Pleasure Units, or ASPUs for short. The TV programme explained that ASPUs were entirely beneficial to society. They harmed no one, they could not themselves experience suffering and there was no empirical evidence to support the contention that their existence might encourage crimes against women. Quite the contrary was true, apparently. They had reduced the incidence of rape and they also helped prevent the spread of venereal diseases. Only superstitious notions of right and wrong could prevent anyone from seeing they were a thoroughly good and rational thing.

  But never mind all that. The image of Lucy had touched me. It had touched a raw place inside me and I was suddenly disturbingly aroused by the idea that she not only existed but was readily and easily available. I could hold her in my arms tomorrow… And there could be no rejection, no complications, no one to disappoint…

  I flipped back to see her again, curled up in her lacy negligee on the corner of a sofa. She might not really be alive, but the semblance of life was perfect. So was the sweetness and the softness and the grace.

  Make allowances, if you can, for the fact that at that time I had never been held by another human being. As a child my main companion was Charlie, our X3, with his rubber tyres and his vocabulary of fifty sentences. I used to have him ‘sleep’ by my bed.

  I let the programme run on again in real time. It was called NOW! and was a nightly current affairs round-up which gave the official government line. At the end of it Channel Nine shut down, as it always did, with the image of President Ullman, the father of our state.

  He was a giant of a man, a bleak man, a man of granite. Back in America, in the terrible early days of the Reaction, Christian mobs publicly flogged him and his wife to unconsciousness for refusing to recant their work on in vitro fertilization. Mrs Ullman had died.

  Now every night he was shown at close-down, grimly crumbling a clay figurine of a human form into dust. Look! There is no soul, there is no spirit, there is no ghost inside the machine.

  Of course I had seen it too many times for it to make any conscious impact on me. But on this particular night I thought I’d take one more peek at the pretty robot before I went to bed and, for no particular reason, instead of just flipping back to the previous programme I got the machine to run backwards.

  I saw the dust streaming upwards from the table and assembling itself miraculously in Ullman’s hands, into a human form.

  And the dour old rationalist was transformed into something like the Christian God.

  2

  Ruth had gone to sleep in SenSpace again. Her body dangled from its wires, her helmeted head slumped forward. She would get pressure sores if she wasn’t careful.

  I called to her, then went over and shook her. I did it quite roughly. I resented having to look after her.

  ‘Oh George, it’s you,’ she said, lifting the face piece and blinking at me with her owlish eyes. ‘I must have gone to sleep. Can you get me out of here?’

  I sighed, unzipped her and helped her out of the dangling suit. I hated this job because she always got in there naked in order to achieve maximum contact with the taxils.

  She was so little and thin. She had no breasts and barely any pubic hair. When I lifted her down it was as if I was the parent and she was the child. And yet if you looked carefully at her belly you could see the traces of my Caesarian birth.

  I looked away from her and wrapped her up quickly in the robe that she’d left lying on the floor.

  ‘You should eat more and spend less time in there, Ruth. You’re not doing yourself any good at all.’

  ‘Oh I’m so tired George, could you just take me through to my room?’

  ‘Carry you? Again?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Goddamit Ruth, you must eat! You’re wasting yourself away!’

  But I carried her through anyway, tucked her in bed, sent Charlie through with her knockout pills, and stood and watched her while she curled up in a foetal position and began to sink back down towards sleep.

  ‘Please, please sleep,’ I whispered.

  I was exhausted myself, and drained, and wretched. I longed for my own bed, my own oblivion…

  ‘Please, just sleep…’

  And it really did begin to look as if for once she would do just that.

  But then, no, it was not to be. My whole body clenched as I saw her shoulders beginning to shake.

  ‘Just sleep for fuck’s sake, Ruth!’ I wanted to scream at her, but I bit my tongue.

  And as the little whimpering sobs began to come, I made myself cross the room again and sit down on her bed and hold her hand.

  ‘There, there,’ I repeated mechanically, ‘there, there, there…’

  I don’t know much about her childhood. Something frightening must have happened to her I suppose, because I believe the reason she chose a career in science was that it was neutral, factual, safe – far away from the painful and messy business of human life. (That’s how science seemed to people in the days before the Reaction.)

  She shut herself in her laboratory in Chicago with her robot assistant Joe and she worked and worked and worked, going home alone in the evenings to a neat little apartment where she tended her houseplants and her collection of Victorian china cups…

  In India, the Hindu extremists massacred the industrial elite. In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox came to power in a coup, in Central Asia the vast statue of the Holy Martyr was constructed in Tashkent and every day thousands of pilgrims gave blood to keep its wounds eternally flowing… But Ruth came into work at eight every day and extracted DNA from genetically modified chicken embryos, hardly passing the time of day with anyone but Joe.

  Then the Elect came to Chicago. They held mass prayer meetings at which thousands turned to Jesus and to their cause, they roamed the streets looking for the abortionists, the homosexuals, the unbelievers… Fired by fierce preachers, the ordinary people of America were rising up against the secular order that had taken meaning away from their lives. The police stood by. The authorities looked away. Everyone could see that a dam had broken. Even the President tried to make his peace with the Elect.

  And Ruth had a cup of coffee at 11 a.m. and took ten minutes out to read her porcelain collectors’ magazine. She
refused to hear the chanting in the street. She refused to notice the burning houses that could be clearly seen from her fourth-floor laboratory window. Until suddenly they were kicking open the door, flinging open the incubators, sweeping test tubes onto the floors…

  Joe was smashed to pieces in front of her, his stalk eyes rolling, his voice box croaking out his repertoire of helpful phrases in random order:

  ‘Could you repeat that please… Glad to be of help… Have a nice day…’

  They told Ruth she had tampered sinfully with the sacred gift of life. Her head was shaven. Dressed only in sackcloth, she was led to that infamous platform beside the lake where Mrs Ullman was later to die.

  * * *

  ‘There, there, Ruth, there, there…’

  She never talked about it, but you can reconstruct the scene from countless other stories:

  The crowd murmurs and seethes. A big, handsome preacher, with blow-dried hair and a white suit, bellows like a bull about Jesus and hellfire. The first of the sackclothed figures is led forward. He is a cosmologist called Suzuki. In a faltering voice he confesses to teaching that the world began billions of years back in a Big Bang, though he knows now that it was created in six days, just five thousand years ago.

  ‘And you have always really known that, Brother Suzuki,’ says the preacher sternly.

  Suzuki swallows. The crowd hisses. Someone throws an egg which hits the scholarly scientist on the forehead and trickles slowly down over his face. Still Suzuki hesitates. The preacher turns towards him frowning.

  Suzuki lifts his head to the microphone.

  ‘I… have always known it. May God forgive my… my sin.’

  The preacher puts his arm round Suzuki’s shoulder, ‘Brother Suzuki. Let Jesus into your heart and you will still be saved.’

  The crowd surges up, and subsides and surges up again, like a restless ocean. Suzuki is led away, and a young computer scientist named Schmidt is led to the microphone.

  ‘I never meant to suggest that our programs were a rival to the human mind. They were only intended to model certain aspects of…’

  The preacher roars at him: ‘Acknowledge your sin, brother, acknowledge your sin! Don’t compound it!’