The Holy Machine

by Chris Beckett

  In another room I peeked through a doorway and saw Marija naked on a bed, with Paul Da Vera moving above her.

  And then I found myself in the basement, where it was cold and damp. There was a big room there like the lounge in the ASPU House, but it smelt of urine and drains. And the syntecs in there didn’t even vaguely resemble humans. They were just wooden marionettes with genitals painted on in red, jerking around on strings…

  I ran from them, climbing a narrow, grubby little spiral staircase that led nowhere at all except to a single door at its top.

  When I opened the door, there was Ruth dangling in her SenSpace suit.

  21

  I was at my desk at Word for Word a few weeks later, just before lunchtime, when the receptionist called me to say I had a visitor. We still had a human receptionist in those days, and she sounded oddly excited.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, she says it’s a surprise.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s me she wants to see?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  This time the receptionist could not quite prevent herself from giggling.

  I went down to the reception area. There was only one person waiting there, a very elegant young woman. She looked up at me and gave a warm smile of recognition. My blood froze.

  It was Lucy!

  …or so it seemed for a moment. After a second or so I realized that, although my visitor was blonde like Lucy and had the same kind of gentle, flawless beauty, she did not have the same face.

  ‘Hello George!’ she said, standing up, ‘I wondered if you’d like to come out for lunch?’

  The receptionist looked from her to me, smiling.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled, red to the roots of my hair, ‘I don’t think I know you…’

  The young woman laughed.

  ‘Do you really not recognize me, Georgie?’

  I didn’t recognize the face or the voice, but there was something in the tone – half-teasing, half-plaintive – that seemed familiar…

  ‘I’m sorry, I…’

  The stranger laughed.

  ‘Aren’t you going to give your mother a kiss?’ she said.

  A half-stifled splutter of incredulous laughter came from the receptionist behind me.

  ‘This is a Vehicle!’ Ruth told me excitedly in the lift, talking through the mouth of the pretty blonde. ‘It’s a new SenSpace facility. Isn’t it amazing? It’s a…’

  But of course by then I’d worked it out for myself. A Vehicle was a robot or syntec which was remote controlled by the SenSpace net, and could be hired by SenSpace subscribers.

  ‘I know what a Vehicle is,’ I said coldly. ‘Please don’t ever make a fool of me like that again.’

  She pouted. ‘I thought you’d be pleased to have a pretty young woman come and take you out for lunch!’

  I didn’t reply to this.

  ‘I think it’s a great idea, George. I can be a different person, I can go out on the streets and have fun, and yet be quite safe all the time.’

  A young man eyed the Vehicle with furtive admiration as we crossed the road and Ruth giggled.

  ‘It’s quite nice to be looked at, too.’

  We went to a snack bar opposite my office. I ordered coffee and chicken sandwiches for myself. Ruth’s Vehicle ordered coffee.

  ‘It must cost a fortune to hire,’ I muttered as we sat down.

  I found myself glancing at the Vehicle’s shapely legs.

  ‘It does cost a lot, but why not once in a while? Like I said, it’s fun and it’s safe.’

  ‘Safe! It’s not as if Illyria City is such a dangerous place!’

  ‘It is now, with bombs going off and everything. It was on the news this morning by the way, they’ve found two of the bombers. Would you believe they were both Illyrian citizens, not squippies. Imagine! Illyrians! Senator Kung says he’s going to put more money into O3 and give them more powers, and he’s bringing in tough new laws too.’

  I shrugged: ‘New laws that will tell us there’s only one way we’re allowed to think. It seems pretty much like America or the Outlands all over again.’

  Oddly enough I’d already almost become accustomed to this syntec being my mother. The face was different, the body was different, the voice was different, but the spirit that animated it – the body-language, the inflections of speech – were so manifestly hers.

  ‘Anyway, Ruth, how come you’re not at work?’

  The Vehicle looked evasive. ‘Oh, I’ve got a day off.’

  ‘You were off last week too. You’re only supposed to have three weeks leave a year.’

  ‘I… Well okay, if you want the truth, George, I’ve given up my job.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I wasn’t enjoying it. I don’t need the money, so I thought, why not?’

  It was true that she didn’t need the money. Nor did I actually. My father had been a wealthy man.

  But Ruth’s work had been the only place where she ever met other people, the only place she ever went outside of our apartment.

  ‘What are you going to do with your time? Moon around in SenSpace all day until it gives you ulcers?’

  It occurred to me then that in fact even now she was actually in the apartment dangling in her SenSpace suit. The door of her SenSpace room was shut. The door of the apartment was triple-locked. She was utterly alone, three kilometres away across town making the movements and gestures that this syntec was faithfully reproducing, while goggles over her eyes were projecting onto her retinas the images from the Vehicle’s video camera eyes.

  ‘What’s wrong with being in SenSpace a lot if you like it?’ she said through the Vehicle, ‘There was a thing on TV the other night about a man who’s been paralysed in a car smash. They’ve got him all wired up to SenSpace so he could live and move about in there, if not in the outside world. Some people on the programme were sorry for him, but I thought, why? What could be nicer than living in SenSpace day and night? You could always hire a Vehicle like this if you wanted to look outside.’

  ‘Yes but you’re not that man. You’ve got the use of all your limbs. I mean, if you’re just going to hide in SenSpace you might just as well be dead!’

  The pretty Vehicle looked at me. I think speaking through a Vehicle made her bolder in what she said, in the way that some people are bolder when they are wearing dark glasses, or a mask.

  ‘I might just as well be dead,’ she said very calmly. ‘You are absolutely right. And do you know the only thing that keeps me from that?’

  Just for a moment I thought she was going to say me, but I needn’t have excited myself on that account.

  ‘I don’t want to sound like a religious person,’ she said. ‘I’m not talking about heaven or hell or anything like that. But I do sometimes wonder: how do we know what death is? What happens if it’s not the end? What happens if it turns out that life is the one thing that does go on and on and won’t end however much you want it to?’

  I had an awful momentary vision of a solitary being at the core of the universe, a solitary being, unable to die, doomed to exist alone forever.

  ‘Why don’t you take the afternoon off, George?’ she asked in a completely different tone. ‘I was thinking we could go to Aghios Constantinos. The real one I mean. I’m not scared of going places when I’m going as a Vehicle!’

  ‘No, sorry. Too busy,’ I said shortly.

  In fact I was to visit Aghios Constantinos again – and with Ruth in vehicle form as well. But a good deal was to happen before then.

  22

  Several months after the evening in the New Orleans, I met Marija in the street, just off Darwin Drive. I had finished some work at the offices of a small leather-importing company and was on my way to Lucy’s. It was on January 22nd. I can place the exact date, because it was the same day that President Kung introduced his Normative Precepts Bill, listing the ‘intellectual criteria’ which were to be used to determine a whole range of decisions from whether or not a text c
ould legally be published, to whether a person was eligible to retain Illyrian citizenship:

  (1) No entity may be asserted to exist, unless the effects of its existence can be measured.

  (2) No statement may be asserted to be ‘true’ unless (a) the basis of this assertion is a properly controlled and replicable scientific procedure OR (b) the ‘truth’ of the statement would in principle be testable by such a procedure…

  And so on.

  ‘Hello, George! How are you? It’s ages since I saw you.’

  I had stopped going to the Holist League meetings. I had stopped doing anything much except working fifteen hours a day, sleeping and visiting Lucy, who I now saw three or four times a week.

  ‘I… decided I didn’t want to carry on with the meetings.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Yes, sure. That’s fair enough…’

  ‘No!’ I blurted out. ‘It wasn’t because I was afraid. It wasn’t that I was afraid of O3 and all that.’

  She looked surprised. ‘I know. Why did you think I meant that? I don’t think of you as the sort of person who is put off by that kind of thing. I don’t think of you like that at all.’

  This abolutely astonished me.

  ‘A bit of a talking shop, you thought?’ Marija asked. ‘A bit earnest and self-important?’ She nodded. ‘I thought that was what you were thinking about us that evening in the bar. I could feel your distaste. Well I must admit, that’s what I’ve begun to think too.’

  A police robot walked past us and Marija was silent until it went by.

  ‘You can never tell which way they are looking can you?’ she said. ‘Or how much they can hear.’

  She made a little dismissive gesture of dislike. She had a delightfully animated face.

  ‘Bad news about Kung’s new scheme though, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You wonder what on earth else we can do.’

  She glanced with a frown at the back of the police robot as it moved slowly down the street. Then smiled at me.

  ‘Listen, it’s really nice to see you. I was just going to get the subway home. Why don’t you come and have a drink with me if you’ve got a bit of time?’

  * * *

  In her small apartment in the district of Newton, Marija poured me a glass of red wine.

  ‘Yes, I was thinking of giving up on the League myself,’ she said.

  ‘What about Paul?’ I asked.

  She gave a wry smile.

  ‘He’s gone back to Brazil,’ she said shortly.

  I didn’t know what to say. The ebb and flow of human relationships were a complete mystery to me.

  Marija settled into a large cushion.

  ‘To be more specific,’ she said, ‘he had a wife and three kids waiting there for him all along, but had carelessly forgotten to mention them to me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I gulped my wine.

  She smiled, ‘You were thirsty. Do you want some more?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I suppose the League is just a talking shop,’ she said with a sigh. ‘But there must be some way of fighting back against this… this stifling flatness. Do you know what I mean? It’s as if Ullman and Kung and all of them have been trying to make us live in two dimensions.’

  I nodded.

  ‘They tell us that only things that can be measured are true,’ she said, ‘But if something can be imagined or dreamed about then surely it does exist in some way? Do you know what I mean? Maybe in reality there is no truly altruistic act, for example, just like they say, but the idea of altruism still exists doesn’t it? Even things like the Garden of Eden exist in that sense, or the Fall, or the great Dance of Shiva.’

  She had grown up in Auckland, in an old-style ‘Western’ country where atheists lived side by side with believers of many different kinds, but I had always lived in Illyria and I had almost no idea of what she was talking about. And yet what she said did strike a chord with me. I longed too for a wider, more generous reality.

  ‘Okay, maybe they’re not real in the way that this table is real,’ Marija said, ‘but they are still in some way real. Perhaps even in some ways more real…’

  She smiled.

  ‘Do you ever have that dream,’ she said, ‘where you are in a house and you are looking for an extra room which is somehow missing?’

  ‘Yes! I have!’ I exclaimed. I almost shouted in fact, so surprised was I to find that something so private and interior could be shared by another person.

  ‘You have? The very same dream?’

  She studied my face carefully for a few seconds, then nodded. To my surprise I managed not to look away.

  ‘It’s nice when you meet someone else who has dreamed the same dreams,’ she said.

  So it was.

  ‘I think Ullman and Kung have made Illyria a house with most of its rooms sealed off,’ she said. ‘It’s not science that’s at fault. It’s a sort of narrow literal-mindedness… I feel like I need to smash my way out somehow, or else I will suffocate. Do you know what I mean?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Sometimes I think the AHS have the right idea,’ Marija said slowly in a much more tentative voice. I could see her watching for my reaction. The AHS after all were violent enemies of the state, and their members were hunted with great ruthlessness.

  ‘Yes, I suppose they try to smash their way out with bombs. Or smash a way out for all of us.’

  ‘Exactly – they just refuse to accept the rules, even if it means violence. And maybe in the end people in general just can’t accept those rules. Maybe that was part of the reason for the Reaction.’

  ‘Even the robots can’t accept them, it seems,’ I said.

  ‘Yes! Even the robots can’t live in two dimensions.’

  She studied my face again, curiously, as if noticing something new..

  ‘You really do feel for those robots don’t you? You understand them in some way. I think I do too. I suppose that’s why I stuck with that silly job at ICC.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Hey this is interesting! Are you hungry, George? Why don’t we go out for a meal or something?’

  Now here is a strange thing. Here I was, a very isolated young man who longed to break out into the world. And here was Marija, a very attractive young woman who I’d always liked very much, suggesting we spend the evening together. I was in a position which I’d longed for and which I’d feared I would never reach. You’d think that I’d have been more than happy to accept.

  But instead something inside me suddenly froze. I felt a wave of revulsion that appeared as if from nowhere, revulsion for Marija, revulsion for being together, revulsion for friendship and talking and flirting. I was suddenly aware of the biology of it: my body, her body, hormones, itchings… just silly biological itchings dressed up as a social game.

  ‘No. No, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to be somewhere else.’

  ‘Oh, pity,’ said Marija with a disappointed shrug.

  She started to pick up the empty wine glasses.

  ‘You know you really are a dark horse, George. It would have been good to get to know you better.’

  But I’d got up already and was putting on my jacket. It was all to do with fear of course. Fear was breaking out all over me. Soon she would be able to see it and I hated the idea of that. I really didn’t want her to think of me as a creature of fear.

  I suppose that was the reason I suddenly blurted out an extraordinary thing:

  ‘I don’t know if you know any way of contacting the AHS?’

  She gave a whistle.

  ‘Now that is dangerous, George. I mean, when O3 catch people…’

  She didn’t need to finish her sentence. A clear vision came unbidden into my mind of a bare white windowless room deep underground, lit with very bright lights, and of a prisoner in there who would never see daylight again, screaming and screaming.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Well I know people who know people,’ Marija said, ‘I could see if someo
ne could get in touch with you.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ I said.

  Marija smiled and, to my consternation, suddenly kissed me.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘have a good time at whatever important place it is that you’re going!’

  23

  Down in the subway there was a crazy black man with ragged clothes and heartbroken eyes.

  ‘We are all fallen!’ he cried. ‘We are all in darkness. Darkness, darkness, darkness! Listen to me! We can’t even see who we are! We can’t even see each other’s faces! We can’t even tell how far we have fallen! Oh no, no, no! We can’t so much as glimpse that lovely light, far, far above us! We live in dark tunnels. Listen to me, people, listen to me! We are like moles, we are like blind fishes in the darkest depths of the sea!’

  As the train moved off I glanced out of the window and saw two men in suits taking the black man by the arms and dragging him away.

  I must be mad, I told myself, as I sat down beside an elderly Albanian woman. I could have spent the evening with Marija. But instead I’m going to spend it with a machine.

  I could get out now, I told myself as we drew in at Newton South Station, I could go straight back to Marija just as quickly as I got here. I could go straight back and tell her my appointment has been cancelled.

  The Albanian woman struggled wheezily to her feet and a young South Asian man took her place. I started to move. But something inside me pulled me back.

  The train plunged back into its tunnel.

  She doesn’t really like me, I told myself in Galileo Central. She just feels sorry for me. I’m a lame duck that she’s decided to be kind to. She’s one of those kinds of people. Probably she has a whole collection of lame ducks revolving around her.

  The South Asian took a computer game out of his pocket. A fat American lowered himself into the seat opposite to me. A silver security robot stared in impassively through my window as the train set off again.

  ‘Hawking West,’ said the train as we emerged into the light of another station, ‘Alight here please for Western and Memorial lines.’