He glared at me, as if warning me not to challenge his embroidery of the truth. Nowhere in Illyria did ASPUs walk the streets, though I half-wondered whether a genuine confusion existed in Nikos’ mind between ASPUs and real Illyrian girls.
‘Such things exist, certainly,’ I said reluctantly.
‘And now I will tell you all a story,’ Nikos announced, ‘a true story that I learned in the City about another Greek who lived there.’
45
‘His name was Giorghios. He was a Cretan. He worked as a carpenter and lived in a little apartment in the Greek quarter with his wife and his two sons. He was a decent God-fearing man too, they say. We were not allowed churches in the City so the priests had to dress in ordinary clothes and cut off their beards and work among ordinary men. But Giorghios allowed his little flat to be used for services. He prayed daily to God and Mary and he brought up his boys in the traditions of our Holy Greek church.’
The proprietress topped up his raki glass. Nikos paused and looked round dramatically at his listeners. The rain drummed on the glass shopfront of the taverna.
‘But listen! One day poor Giorghios saw a beautiful girl. She had dark hair, dark eyes, shapely breasts…’ (Nikos resorted here to gestures to describe the girl’s breasts, her wide hips, her narrow waist…) ‘He saw her passing him in the street and suddenly it was as if he had been possessed. All at once he wanted her more than anything he had ever seen. He tried to put her out of his mind and turn his thoughts back to his wife, his sons, his religion, but he could think of nothing else but that girl and her beauty. He longed for nothing else but to see her again.’
The young ex-guestworker drained his glass with a small shudder. Thunder boomed over the mountains.
‘And finally,’ he went on, ‘just as the girl was at last mercifully beginning to fade from his mind, he did see her again. He was working on a building site on the outskirts of the City when she walked past. He stood up and watched her until she disappeared and then he turned to his friend. “May God forgive me!” he said, “I want that woman more than anything else on Earth. When I see her I forget my wife and my sons and I forget God. I would give anything to possess her, even my own soul!”
‘His friend laughed. “You fool, Giorghios,” he said, “That wasn’t a real woman! That was a syntec, a machine. She is called Clara. You could possess her for thirty dollars! Never mind your soul.”
‘And he told Giorghios where she could normally be found.
‘Well, the carpenter laughed and felt ashamed. “You’re right, Andreas,” he said to his friend, “I am a fool. But I’m glad that you told me that because now I can put her out of my mind. I’m not interested in making love to a machine!”
‘And he went home to his wife and his sons feeling at peace with himself once more and thinking that this was the end of the whole business. But no. That night he lay awake thinking of Clara and her beauty – and thinking how easily he could possess her. And he lay awake the next night and the next, until eventually one night he told himself: “Well, I will go to her just once. Perhaps when my curiosity is satisfied, I can put her out of my mind.”
‘So the next day he sought out Clara, gave her money and then took her to a quiet place and possessed her. Afterwards he felt ashamed. It was horrible to think he’d betrayed his wife and sons. Even more horrible to think that he’d done it with something that wasn’t even alive. And he promised himself and God most fervently that he’d never do it again. But this promise he did not keep. The demon had got under his skin. He burned for her constantly until eventually he threw aside honour and religion and went to her again.’
Nikos paused. The proprietress came over with more raki.
‘After that,’ he continued, ‘it was as if a dam had broken and the flood could no longer be contained. Giorghios went back again and again to the beautiful Clara. He spent all the savings that he had, lying to his wife that he had sent the money for safe keeping to his father in Crete. He borrowed more money. He even began to steal, just so as to be able to keep on going back to this mechanical doll and enjoying the delights of its flesh. He was like a man addicted to raki or opium but ten times worse. He sacrificed everything to feed this sinful hunger of his, even though he knew it was wrong, even though he despised and hated himself for it, even though it made him wretched with shame and despair.
‘ “It must end,” he told himself, “it must end before I destroy myself and my family with me.” And he knew there was only one way this could be done…’
Again the young man paused for dramatic effect, downing another glass of raki and looking round at his audience with reddened, shiny eyes.
‘Listen. This is what happened. One night Giorghios took a chisel from his toolbag and sharpened it to a point. Then he went and found the syntec and took her to a dark place where they would not be disturbed. She lay down for him and she looked so beautiful that he could not bring himself to do what he had set out to do. “I will have her just this one last time!” he told himself, and he took her in his arms. But afterwards, when his desire was spent, the anger rose up in him because of the way that she had enslaved him, and then he took the chisel, just as he had planned, and drove it into her chest…’
Nikos looked round at the enthralled faces.
‘You see,’ he explained, ‘the computer that controls an android is in its chest, in the place where a human being has a heart. Is that not so, Kyrios?’
I nodded weakly.
‘But now listen!’ said the young guestworker, ‘for this is the saddest part of the story. When Giorghios stabbed her, the blood began to flow from Clara’s body – and it was not the little trickle of blood you might expect from a syntec’s human skin. No, it was real thick blood that gushed out in a torrent from deep within. “You have killed me!” whispered Clara, “Of all the men who use me, you alone I could have loved. And you have killed me!”
‘ “But Clara,” cried Giorghios, “I didn’t know! I thought you were a machine!” ’
Thunder broke overhead and Nikos paused until it had passed.
‘Then Clara laughed,’ he went on. ‘Even as her life ebbed away she laughed bitterly. “I am a Greek like you,” she whispered. “My husband has deserted me and I have not only myself to feed but my little boy and a sick old mother who needs medicine for her chest. If I didn’t pretend to be a syntec I couldn’t afford to support my son and my mother. Because men prefer machines now. A human whore can’t charge even half as much.”
‘At this, Giorghios embraced her. “Alas Clara,” he said, “I loved you from the moment I first saw you. If only I had known you were truly alive!”
‘ “I loved you too!” said Clara, and then she died.’
Nikos looked around his audience.
‘After that,’ he said, ‘Giorghios handed himself over to the police and was tried and sentenced to prison. But before he could be locked up, he took his own life, feeling himself to be already beyond the grace of God, and unable to bear his shame and his grief.’
After a long silence, the proprietress spoke in a hushed voice:
‘But dear God, how can they allow themselves to create such things? We are frail creatures, we humans. We are easily confused. There are enough misunderstandings, God knows, about the love between men and women. Why must we confuse ourselves further by creating beings that seem to be human but aren’t?’
Nikos shrugged. ‘Yes, but they don’t look at things in that way in the City. For them, anything goes in the pursuit of pleasure, anything is acceptable. Is that not so, Kyrios?’
Nikos turned his raki-glazed eyes on me, defying me to challenge his lurid fantasy. Everyone else in the room turned to look at me too.
‘Yes,’ I muttered, ‘Yes, I think you are right.’
I excused myself and went upstairs.
Lucy was sitting by the window reading, as usual. She had finished the books I had brought for her long ago and was now reading a book she had picked up in another place whe
re we had stayed. It was a Bible, an English-language Bible. I suppose it had been left behind by some traveller from Britain or North America, perhaps by one of the Protestant missionaries who sometimes operated secretly in these parts.
Lucy looked up as I came in. She was naked. She started to stand up, ready to come and join me in bed and provide me with sex. I shook my head, made a dismissive gesture, a gesture of disgust. She sat down again and continued to read.
The storm was passing away across the mountains. The rain slowed to a trickle and then stopped. The cloud moved on and the sky opened up like a window to the stars and the moon.
46
Lucy turned a page. Every two and a half minutes Lucy turned a page. In between times, the night was silent except for the sound of trickling water, and Lucy’s silhouette was motionless against the moonlit sky. But in the moonlight her eyes were scanning back and forth rapidly across a text that human eyes could not have made out at all.
What was I going to do? It was clear now that I couldn’t pass her off as human. If she wasn’t to be found out we’d always have to keep on the move.
But then how was I ever going to find work when the money ran out? I had assumed I would be able to earn a living in due course as an interpreter, but who would employ an interpreter who moved constantly from place to place?
The ASPU turned another page.
‘For God’s sake give it a rest, Lucy!’ I muttered, ‘On and on, night after night, the same stupid noise! How do you expect me to sleep with you making that racket?’
The silhouette by the window half-turned its head.
‘Racket?’ Lucy asked.
‘Come over here,’ I snapped at her, sitting up abruptly and switching on the flickery electric light. ‘What is that stuff you’re reading anyway?’
Lucy got up obediently and brought the book over to me. She watched my face, reading the anger. All the while, I suppose, she was broadcasting warning messages back to House Control.
I snatched the book from her, glancing angrily at the archaic words:
‘…And if thy hand offend thee cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched…’
‘What utter crap,’ I said, tossing it to the floor. ‘Get into bed Lucy. I need a fuck.’
Obediently she lay down beside me.
‘You do realize it was that same book which nearly did for my parents?’ I snarled.
Of course this meant nothing to her. It didn’t mean much to me either. I pulled her under me and thrust into her angrily and violently and without a pause until I reached my climax, which was so powerful that I cried out loud.
‘Have you finished now?’ said Lucy politely, after a moment.
‘Have I finished?’ I sneered. ‘Have I finished? That’s all it is to you, isn’t it? All those moans and gasps don’t mean anything at all. Nothing, nothing, nothing.’
Of course even as I spoke I realized that what I was saying was not only obvious, but also something which I must have always known. Lucy had been built to give pleasure, not to experience it. She hadn’t been designed to experience anything at all.
‘I am a machine,’ said Lucy.
But her eyes shed real tears because it was one of a number of standard responses to hostile situations of type HS-75.
‘I am a syntec,’ she said. ‘I am an Advanced Sensual Pleasure Unit.’
She had stood up and was standing naked beside the bed.
‘I am a machine,’ she repeated. Her voice was gentle, submissive. She had no capacity for anger in her design, nor any programmed repertoire with which to express it. And this left me completely unprepared for the terrifying proto-rage which was about to erupt.
‘Yes a machine,’ I shouted at her, ‘a stupid dumb machine that doesn’t know anything, that doesn’t feel anything or understand anything or care about anything at all. The outlanders say you’re monsters and abominations, but you’re not even that interesting. You’re boring, boring, boring. You’re more boring than the dullest human being alive.’
‘You said,’ began Lucy, hesitantly (it was the first time she had ever tried to present an argument of her own), ‘you said you were made of flesh and blood and I…’
‘I was talking crap.’
I had no idea what was about to happen. I didn’t understand that, though Lucy had no capacity for anger built or programmed into her, she did possess the drive towards self-preservation which is the root of anger. And this imperative, which once had extended only to her body (‘the equipment’, as they called it in the ASPU house), now stretched out beyond just her physical self. She had a need to preserve her awakeness, to defend her sense of herself.
‘I am a machine,’ she repeated yet again.
And then, quite suddenly, she took hold of the flesh of her belly and began tearing at it with all her strength.
‘Lucy! For God’s sake what are you doing?’
Lucy ignored me. Blood appeared under her nails – and then a long, red strip of flesh came away in her hand, leaving a gaping hole. I could see a manufacturer’s code printed on the grey surface beneath.
‘M2/88’ said the printed code. Plastic tubes oozed something that resembled lymph.
Shock and disbelief froze me. I watched helplessly as she tore off a second strip, up to the edge of her left breast.
‘No, Lucy…’ I whimpered. ‘Please. I’m sorry…’
She was beautiful. Why should it matter to me what she really was?
Then she took hold of the breast itself.
‘No!’
The soft breast came away easily from its plastic base. Lucy dropped it and took hold of the other one.
‘I am a robot,’ she repeated, pulling it away, ‘I am a machine.’
‘But they hate robots here,’ I whispered, watching helplessly while she pulled away another bloody strip which ended in her furry pubic mound. ‘Please Lucy! They’ll smash you, they’ll nail you up, they’ll…’
The furry flesh came away. Then Lucy paused, considering what I had said. Her face, her arms, her legs and shoulders were still human, but her whole abdomen was now an ugly contoured shell of plastic. No more breasts, no more soft warm cleft to welcome me. The torn edges of her remaining flesh glistened. Dangling tubes dripped synthetic blood and yellowish fluids…
Lucy seemed to reach a decision in her mind. She picked her Bible up off the floor, sat down by the window and calmly continued to read.
‘And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes…’
After a short time she turned the page. There was no other sound except the trickling outside.
47
Little Rose was sitting at her kitchen table having coffee with Sol Gladheim.
‘You know,’ she was saying, looking out of the window at her garden, ‘I’ve half a mind to take out all those red rose bushes down there and have a little apple orchard instead. What do you think?’
‘I think that would be very nice,’ said Mr Gladheim. ‘It would be a nice place to go out and sit sometimes. Perhaps you could– ’
Little Rose turned round in surprise. Mr Gladheim had frozen, his mouth open in mid-sentence.
‘Sol?’
A horizontal section slid sideways out of the middle of his body – and disappeared.
‘Sol!’
Another section slid away – and his legs disappeared below the knee.
‘Sol!’
She jumped up and rushed to him but his face vanished. Then the rest of his body slid away in three successive horizontal slices. There was nothing left of him at all.
Little Rose ran to the window.
The garden had changed. All the alterations and improvements she had made had vanished. It had reverted to the form it had when she first moved in. And, leaning on a spade and talking over the fence to her neighbour, Mr Topalski, was the ‘
extra’ who had inhabited her house before she arrived, in the shape of an elderly man called Mr Philips.
‘Mr Topalski!’ Little Rose called, running out of her back door. ‘What’s happening?’
She knew the old Pole was also an extra and not a real person, but he had always been a good neighbour to her all the same. (Nothing was too much trouble. He was always willing to help out.) Now he didn’t show any sign that he had even heard her. Nor did Mr Philips. Their voices rose and fell conversationally, but as she drew near to them, she realized their words meant nothing at all.
‘Yabbly yibbly yabbly yibbly,’ went Mr Philips.
‘Yibbly yabbly yibbly yabbly,’ went Mr T, with an authentic Slavonic accent.
Two gardens away a little boy was riding round his garden on a bicycle.
‘Jimmy!’ screamed Little Rose, ‘JIMMY!’
Jimmy took no notice at all.
And, far overhead, huge symbols went streaming across the sky:
Poor Little Rose. When she turned round, she found her kitchen too had changed. All the alternations she had made, the tiles, the paint, the furniture, had vanished. The fabrics and fittings had all reverted to their default settings. The house was identical again to the copies of it that recurred every five kilometres, north, south, east and west.
‘There’s some technical glitch,’ she told herself, ‘that’s all it is. The SenSpace system is temporarily down. That’s all. They’ll fix it in no time.’
And she reached up to lift the SenSpace helmet off her head.
But of course there was no helmet. She wasn’t wearing a SenSpace suit, she wasn’t in a SenSpace room and she had no corporeal arms to remove a helmet even if it had been there. The nerves that once operated the flesh and blood limbs of Ruth Simling, were now wired directly into a SenSpace radio transmitter and from there were connected to the SenSpace net. The muscles they had once controlled had long since been removed and incinerated.
The Holy Machine Page 14