The Holy Machine

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Tar him! Feather him! Tar him! Feather him!’ storms the great dark ocean.

  The computer scientist looks round desperately at the group of sack-clothed figures waiting behind him. Help me! his eyes say, What do they want me to say? But they all look away.

  He turns back to the microphone. ‘I confess! Please forgive me! I blasphemed against God. Jesus is Lord! He… died… for… me… God forgive me! God forgive me!’

  The preacher embraces him. ‘Easy, Brother Schmidt, easy! Jesus loves you. He has loved you for all eternity…’

  Schmidt clings to his tormentor, sobbing like a child.

  ‘There, there, Ruth, there, there…’

  A sociologist called Carp confesses to questioning the institution of marriage, to defending homosexuals, to teaching the satanic doctrine of cultural relativity…

  The crowd explodes with rage.

  ‘I know, I know,’ sobs Carp. ‘I have sinned against the God of my fathers. I have sinned against Jesus. I have sinned in a way against America. I have denied the Lord. But I do repent brothers and sisters. Pray for my soul. Help me to bear the righteous wrath of God…’

  There are cheers. The crowd likes this display. But the preacher is frowning.

  ‘Methinks he doth protest too much, brothers and sisters, methinks he doth protest too much. This is false repentance, my friends, thrown to us as a sop, while in his heart this unbeliever, this sinner, still nurses the viper of sin and atheism!’

  Carp stares at him in terror, ‘No sir, I really do… I mean…’

  He is led away to where the tar smokes and bubbles in its black pots.

  And it is Ruth’s turn.

  A cold wind blows across the lake.

  Poor Ruth. Poor little Ruth. All alone up there, facing that dark sea of rage…

  She had managed at last to get to sleep. I tiptoed to my own room, and Charlie brought me my own knockout pills.

  How excited Ruth and I were all those years ago when we unpacked dear Charlie, all shiny and new from his box lined with polystyrene. How thrilled we were when we found out we could personalize all his store of friendly messages with our own names.

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said in his raspy electronic voice, ‘Goodnight George’.

  3

  I took a different route home from work the next day, walking through the Commercial Centre, rather than taking the subway as I normally did to the District of Faraday where we lived. I told myself I needed the exercise.

  All along the seafront the crowds streamed, checking out the VR arcades with their garish holographic signs. Under the eye of robot police – two metres tall, with sad, silvery, immobile faces – the children of Illyria made their choices of the countless electronic worlds waiting to entertain them with surrogate adventure, surrogate violence, surrogate sex…

  Below the railings, the mild Adriatic sea sucked gently on the stones. I kept walking, steadily, quickly, careful not to ask myself where I was going.

  Ahead of me the Beacon of Illyria rose from the sea, Illyria’s cathedral of science, that huge silver tower like a gigantic chess-pawn that seemed to hover weightlessly above the water, though it was the tallest building in the world. People were going across the thin steel bridge that linked it to the land, heading for the delights within. Far up at its huge spherical head, there were four Ferris wheels, one for each point of the compass. They were much bigger than any fairground wheel, but they looked tiny up there. One was pulling in to unload, another was building up to full speed.

  I liked the Beacon. When he was alive my father sometimes used to take me there, on the monthly Saturdays when I spent the afternoon with him. It was a relief when we went because it was a genuine treat, a time when I could go home and tell Ruth quite truthfully that I’d had fun, wandering through the intricate maze in there that took you, each time by a different route, through the history of scientific knowledge. He even let me ride on one of those Ferris wheels, though it was understood between us that he would not ride with me. On other monthly visits, he left me to entertain myself and I had to lie to Ruth about what we’d done so as not to have to hear her say what a bad man my father was. He was a great scientist after all, the inventor of Discontinuous Motion no less, and really he had no time for children, least of all a child like me.

  (He died when I was ten, incidentally. It was an accident at work and his body was never found. He was working on new applications for Discontinuous Motion at the time, finding ways of punching holes through space to arrive at distant places, so perhaps his body is lying out there somewhere, on some planet orbiting some distant sun.)

  But now I turned away from the Beacon, away from the seafront, and along the grand Avenue of Science. I walked past the News Building with its gigantic screen, where President Ullman’s face, forty storeys high, was shown making his annual speech on the occasion of the Territorial Purchase, which he himself negotiated in order to found our unique scientists’ state. After that was the Fellowship of Reason Tower and the gleaming headquarters of IBM, Sony, Esso, Krupp and a score of the other giant corporations that moved here with the refugees. Every ten metres there was a flagpole from which fluttered alternately the many flags of the extinct secular nations from which our people came, and the black-and-white flag of Illyria. Its emblem was a wide-open eye, in contrast to the closed eyes of blind faith which surrounded us on every side.

  I kept walking, refusing to tell myself where I was going.

  Outside the Senate House there was some kind of disturbance. A little group of Greek guestworkers were holding a demonstration. They were sitting down in the road holding up placards in poorly spelt English:

  ‘LET US PLEESE CELEBRAT EESTER AND CHRISTMAS.’

  ‘ALOW US OUR TRADITONS QUIETLY THANKYOU.’

  ‘LIVE AND LET US LIVE.’

  Around them a hostile crowd of Illyrians were shouting abuse while a dozen robot police, silent silver giants, were picking up the protestors two at a time and loading them into vans with as little fuss and as little acrimony as if they were tidying away discarded food cartons.

  ‘Throw them all out!’ suddenly screamed a thin little middle-aged woman just by me. (She reminded me of Ruth, though she had a British accent). ‘Christians! Jews! Muslims! Throw out all the treacherous little bigots!’

  Her eyes were bulging with hate and fear.

  ‘Or gas the lot of them even better,’ wheezed the stooped, trembling man who was with her.

  Who knows what ghosts were haunting them? The Oxford Burnings? The Science Park Massacre? While the Elect established their American theocracy, the British tried for a time to keep the Reaction at bay by shutting their dispossessed classes away, surrounded by high fences. But in the end, their dam too had burst.

  I turned away from all of this, down Darwin Drive, into the Night Quarter where the restaurants were and the theatres and the cinemas, and…

  But still I would not allow myself to know my destination.

  4

  And then I was there, in the lobby, standing on the red carpet, smelling the sickly smell of scent and disinfectant, hearing the dreamy muzak.

  ‘Good evening, sir. Do you have an appointment?’

  The receptionist was a syntec in the likeness of a plump, cheerful, middle-aged woman.

  My mouth was so dry I could barely form the words.

  ‘No… I…’

  ‘Would you like to choose from the menu – or from one of our special offers? Or would you like to go through to the lounge and make your own selection personally?’

  ‘I… the… lounge.’

  ‘That’s fine sir. You’ll see it’s just through the door there. Have a nice evening!’

  I glided like a sleepwalker across the corridor.

  There were thin women and fat women, black women and white women, barely pubescent girls and handsome motherly women of forty. Some of them were almost naked, others dressed as nurses, as teachers, as housewives, as schoolgirls… There were boys too, and musc
ly men in posing pouches… And even stranger things: boys with breasts, girls with penises, elfin creatures, impossibly slender and covered in smooth fur, with pointy cat-like ears and narrow cat-like eyes…

  They were waiting round the edge of a big dark-red room, some reclining on sofas, some perched on stools, others standing. If you looked in their direction, they would smile and try to catch your eye and start to move towards you. If you looked away they would stop.

  The music meandered on and on and on. Sometimes it seemed like saxophones, sometimes like an orchestra of violins from long ago and sometimes like girlish voices that repeated the same few words over and over: ‘Love me, baby, baby love me, baby, baby, my baby love…’

  Male sleepwalkers wandered round and round the room, blank-faced, avoiding one another’s eyes, round and round. From time to time one or other of them would come to a stop and a smiling syntec would step forward. The man would be led from the room, as meek and docile as a lost little boy.

  ‘George!’

  A plump, balding middle-aged man stood in front of me.

  ‘It is George isn’t it? Nice to see you! What’s a good-looking young man like you doing in a place like this?’

  He had a faint Irish accent and I vaguely recognized him as one of Word for Word’s clients, an export manager for some firm that peddled technological trinkets to the near-medieval states beyond our frontiers.

  ‘Paddy, remember? Old Paddy Malone. The one with the stupid computer that’s supposed to talk Turkish but can’t! A nice piece of work you did for us there, young George, a very good job indeed!’

  He was grinning, he was slapping me jovially on the shoulders but sweat was pouring down his face.

  ‘What a feast, eh?’ he chuckled, gesturing around the room, ‘Look at that black one over there, isn’t she a peach?’

  A robot coated in silky black skin saw him pointing, smiled and made to get up from its seat, but the watery eyes of the export manager had moved on.

  ‘And will you look at that little thing! Don’t you just want to…’

  Passing ghost-like men modified their course slightly so as not to run into us.

  ‘I tell you what, George my old buddy, this place has been the making of my marriage! Any time that little itch comes along, you know, I just get down here and sort it out, no problems, no grief for anyone, at no more than the price of a half-decent meal out! Not that I’d actually want to bother the dear wife you know with the actual…’

  Again he tailed off. His eyes looked past me. Sweat poured off his bald head. Sweat dripped from his chin. The ghosts went gliding by.

  ‘Hey! Look over there! That is new! Just look at the tits on that thing! I think I can see where old Paddy’s going to find his berth tonight.’

  Some sort of reaction was building up inside me. I shook away his arm. He wasn’t paying any attention in any case, but was grinning stupidly as the big-breasted syntec came to greet him as if old Paddy was what it had been waiting for all its life.

  Horrified, I rushed from the room. I was in such a hurry that I crashed straight into one of those syntec elfin boys which was leading out a bewildered Albanian guestworker with three days stubble on his chin. I sent it flying across the floor.

  ‘Allah have mercy,’ whispered the dazed Albanian.

  * * *

  As I crossed the lobby, I saw Lucy coming down the stairs. I recognized her at once. She was even prettier than she had been on the TV, wearing a loose jumper and a pair of jeans, like a student, like a girl of my own age. She saw me looking at her and caught my eye and smiled…

  But the experience of the lounge had broken the illusion. This was not really a she at all. It was an it, a doll, a mannequin, no more real than Ruth’s SenSpace.

  ‘Ugh!’ I muttered as I turned away and headed for the door.

  ‘Enjoy the rest of your evening!’ called out the receptionist, ‘Hope we see you again soon!’

  ‘No chance, plastic one!’ I called back as I stepped out into the street and breathed in the evening air.

  I felt pleased with myself as I headed for the subway that would take me home. That was that dealt with, I said to myself, that was that nonsense out of my system.

  I remember I noticed a fly-posted notice at the subway entrance.

  ‘The Holist League,’ it read, ‘The whole is more than the parts…’

  It brought into my mind again the strange image of Ullman in reverse, creating man out of dust.

  Then I bought a bag of fresh doughnuts from a Greek vendor and made my way down to the train in its warm bright tunnel.

  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!’