The Crying Machine

Home > Other > The Crying Machine > Page 24
The Crying Machine Page 24

by Greg Chivers


  ‘Hmm … Peres did look a little off-colour when I stopped by his cell. What did it do to him?’

  My pulse quickens. How do I communicate a threat this man is unequipped to grasp? Hilda perceives it through faith – a distorted understanding, but one that conveys the necessary menace. The language for this does not exist. ‘It’s … difficult to explain in terms a human would understand. There is an intelligence in the Antikythera Mechanism, and it has colonized Levi. It is alive in him now.’

  ‘Like a parasite?’ His brows crease. He does, at least, look interested.

  ‘Yes, like a parasite with the capacity to reproduce and spread infinitely. He will die soon. So will anyone else who’s exposed.’

  ‘I see. Well, we’ll certainly take precautions.’ He shrugs. His voice is dismissive. He can see the device only as a technological problem, to which a solution must be available. I have failed. ‘Listen, Clementine – that’s a lovely name by the way, did you choose it for yourself? Please don’t think I’m not touched by your concern, but I actually came here to talk about something far more exciting. I realize you might feel things are at a low ebb, but this could all work out rather well for you, if you’re willing to be pragmatic.’

  A guard’s flat feet slap the concrete of the corridor below. Nothing matters now.

  ‘I wanted you to know, you don’t have to share the fate of your fellow terrorists. We don’t have anything like you in this part of the world. That makes you valuable. If you want it, there’s a job for you with me, in the new administration. You don’t have to decide now. At any point in the coming proceedings, whether you’re in the courtroom or in your cell, you can ask to speak to a guard. They’ll get a message to me, and then all of this will become a memory: one you can partition away until it’s gone.’

  Fear sours my mouth. Is this where my journey leads? I was born with my destiny set – to die on a radiation-soaked battlefield in the Ural foothills. They grow us in batches of a thousand, a nice round number to process. Statistically one or two of my genderless twins might still be alive. I became something else; I witnessed my own remaking on the operating table. In my new form I endured the squalor of Marseille and the desperation of the crossing to Ceuta, finally sneaking through the barriers around the harbour’s edge to reach the camps. All the way through the desert, my actions were links in a chain of self-preservation. The first glimpse I had of another life was a dirigible shining in the skies above the glowing mosques of Tripoli. It was a promise of Jerusalem. I don’t want to believe it ends like this, in another servitude.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hmmm? Like I said, you don’t have to answer now. However, there is another factor you ought to consider. If you won’t accept my generous offer of employment, then the city of Jerusalem has no interest in keeping you fed and watered for the duration of your imprisonment. The Republic of Humanity will pay a handsome price for you, and I’d imagine your creators would also have a lively interest in seeing what’s become of their escaped creation. Some sort of rendition would seem like the obvious best outcome for all parties, except you of course. But then, you’re already well acquainted with the ins and outs of the vivisection process, so perhaps that holds no terrors for you?’

  My last physical destruction was painless, my consciousness already distilled into an electronic medium. To the insurrectionist scientists dissecting it, the muscled, vat-grown form on the operating table was a source of data, intelligence for their doomed war; to me, watching through cameras linked to the mainframe where I was stored, it was nothing more than an abstraction. The prospect of this body’s destruction is altogether different. For all the flawed decisions in its creation, because of them, because of the journey it has taken, it is me. Even if I could somehow survive it, I would not want to.

  The soft footsteps slip away.

  37.

  Silas

  The white lead-lined box mocks me with its silence. From what I can gather, the threat it poses is through physical contact, although the scientists I consulted were frustratingly opaque when it came to describing the mechanisms by which the device wreaks its destruction on the human psyche. Too afraid to say they don’t know. I remember touching it once before, laughing at the thin white rubber gloves the curators insisted upon. In hindsight, perhaps they should have been lead.

  ‘Sybil.’

  My soon to be ex-assistant takes only seconds to fill my doorway in response to the summons. Her round face betrays no sign of the impatience she must surely feel as her elevation draws near. Once I have the Justice Ministry, some of the city’s invisible strings will pass from my hands into hers, but for these final, chafing moments, she must still attend to my whims.

  ‘Why do they want it?’

  ‘Who, sir?’

  ‘It’s the unknown, isn’t it? It’s a blank that people fill with dreams of what might be possible.’

  ‘It has killed at least four people to our knowledge, and inflicted severe damage on two more. The obvious conclusion is that it’s a weapon; the Russians, the Machines – that’s why they want it. Seems straightforward.’

  Her expression is a silent calculation of the value of the thing. To the outside world, she hides behind that housewife’s face, but when we are alone together she makes no effort to conceal the steel in her gaze. Dear, dedicated Sybil, this is where you fall short, for all your mastery of data and your fearsome efficiency. There are things at play here that cannot be captured by your grim calculation. There is an art to ruling.

  ‘We have weapons enough in this world. Whatever this is, it promises something more.’

  ‘How could anyone know that? It’s spent a century in a glass case and two thousand years before that at the bottom of the Mediterranean.’

  ‘I don’t know how they could know, but somehow they do know. Myth perhaps? Legends?’

  Her head tilts to one side and her expression hardens. ‘You’re telling me you want to hold onto this thing because someone made up a story about it?’

  ‘No …’ My hand comes up in a conciliatory gesture. ‘But other people do, and thus its story acquires a kind of truth. That you have to accept, even if you don’t believe in it.’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, it sounds like bullshit.’

  ‘Potent bullshit, Sybil. Bullshit powerful enough for the Russians to go to the effort of bringing down our tinpot government for us, remember that.’

  ‘So?’ Her gaze drops to where the thing rests. Many of the accretions from its millennia on the seabed have fallen away, and the bronze gleams in patches where the verdigris has worn to bare metal. This newly acquired lustre wholly defies all the curators’ prognostications of doom for the ancient artefact. When news of its theft reached them, they balefully assured me the precious thing would disintegrate at the merest hint of rough handling, and yet here it is, looking, if anything, newer than when it was put into storage.

  ‘For the moment it is ours. I do not want to bid it adieu, only to find out I’ve missed the opportunity of a lifetime once it is gone. If Vasily calls, stall him, but don’t give another deadline. That was silly of me; leave the ultimatums to him, I want to see what cards he has to play. I’m going to find out why everybody wants this thing before I let it go.’

  ‘You’ve always told me buyers of antiquities are fools duped into unrequited love affairs with the past.’ I have to admit, that does sound like me. Sybil’s memory can be a curse. ‘I don’t understand why we can’t just give the Russians the wretched thing, leak the evidence against Glassberg, and watch the election results roll in. It’s a good plan, we should stick to it.’ A catch in Sybil’s voice betrays a trace of desperation. She’s too close now to accept even the spectre of an obstacle to her ambition. Tough.

  ‘No, I want to know. Get whoever’s in charge of the Machine Cult – is it still that idiot Barnes, or have they axed him already? Bring him down to the museum basement for a private chat. Those useless fucks were after it – there must be a reason.’
In a perfect world I’d bring in a tame Russian, but the collateral would be too heavy if we made a mess, whereas Cultists are expendable. Barnes’s masters are most likely unaware even of his existence. ‘I’m going to the pre-trial hearing; have him here when I get back. If you can avoid inflicting any damage, so much the better, but don’t trouble yourself unduly.’

  The visual clamour of the news feeds fills the dark space in the ministerial limousine bearing me to court. The news is, on the whole, positive – depending on your perspective of course. Without my lifting a finger, demonstrations against the Christian outrages have erupted in four separate neighbourhoods. A wall of angry bodies has sealed off the Mission’s squalid little outpost in the Old City. Their rancid customers will have to find some other source of succour. At least they don’t vote.

  As the car pulls into the parking lot of the city’s Hall of Justice, a comfortable sense of ownership suffuses me, the lord returning home to the manor. The mob surrounding it perform my bidding without awareness – Christian, Jew, Muslim, and Machine Cult alike – all too wrapped in their own agendas to glimpse the bigger game being played out around them. Anger radiates from the building like heat. Even outside you can feel it, seeping through the sagging concrete, a malign presence darkening the mock-classical pillars of the portico. Idiot rage flows through the crowd gathered outside, all the way in to the lucky few who’ve gained seats in the galleries. Inside, the anger of the defendants, inwardly raging against the falsity of their accusations, is a more delicate aroma. Amos Glassberg’s quiet, dignified horror is the perfect garnish to it all.

  38.

  Clementine

  I am a terrorist, a thief, an accessory to murder. A fierce man in a headdress and a knee-length skirt strides forcefully as he enumerates my crimes. My guilt is a given, carved into the faces of the watchers lining the galleries for the preliminary hearing. This room is a vast jumble of anachronisms, nods to history, layers of meaning I cannot hope to comprehend. The scuffed panelling of Lebanon cedar that lines the walls is shrivelled and odourless from years of desiccation by air conditioning. It stops abruptly a third of the way up, yielding to a dull layer of faux marble reaching all the way to the ceiling. Murderous fans chop the air and scatter the smells of people.

  We are packaged together, the aiders and abettors, Hilda, Ludmila, Levi, and I, arranged in a row on a bench inside a copper cage facing the crowd, armed guards at either side verifying the fiction that we are dangerous. My former self would have raged against this injustice, but the rage built into that warrior body was burnt with my redundant flesh. In its place this body harbours only despair. There is no evil intent in what is being perpetrated upon us: no intent at all, just a series of instinctive responses to ancient fears, the herd turning upon a perceived predator.

  The witnesses arrayed against us are policemen, officials, carefully selected pillars of state. It is not we who are on trial, so much as the Mission itself. The prosecutor poses them binary questions, carefully constructed and ordered to build a narrative of our anarchy and rebellion. Some of them are complicit in the storytelling; others have the answers dragged out of them, attempts at qualification ruthlessly quashed by the bewigged prosecutor.

  When he is done with a witness, one of the bailiffs opens our copper cage and Ludmila steps out to take her turn at cross-examination. The holy sister plays the part of our lawyer. She still wears her dull robes, but she has become something different. She is relentless, picking apart the stitches in the story so carefully woven by the prosecutor, underlining every inconsistency, switching angles to provide alternative interpretations, cutting his clean, straight line of narrative into meaningless fragments of data.

  For all her brilliance, it is clear to me we are the victims of a flawed process. The humans watching from the galleries cannot unmake the story they themselves have created. The logical fallacies are glaring, but the proceedings permit no interruptions. Amos Glassberg watches from the judge’s chair like a statue, stirring only to remonstrate with the prosecutor when he veers into hyperbole. He, at least, is aware. Beside me Levi slumps insensate on the bench, silently locked in a life-or-death struggle invisible to the crowds who gawp between the bars of our cage. He barely stirs as the judge hammers to announce a recess. The bailiffs prod us towards our holding cell with wooden clubs held at arm’s length, as if fearful of catching Levi’s nameless contagion. His shoulders feel thin and brittle in my hands.

  ‘Levi,’ I whisper through the side of my mouth. He doesn’t move. ‘Levi.’ Louder. He stirs, tilting his head slightly to indicate he is listening. Dark circles hide his eyes. ‘I think I can stop all of this.’

  Levi sits heavily on one of the holding cell’s hard plastic chairs. He sniffs hard before talking. ‘How? You going to bust us out? We’re guilty, remember? We stole the Antikythera Mechanism; we did it, we’re going to jail.’ His eyes close and he turns away from me. All I can see is the sallow, slack skin of one cheek.

  ‘I don’t mean us. It’s all the other stuff – the assassination attempt, the Mission plotting anarchy and rebellion. They’re innocent.’

  ‘Are they, Clem? Do you know that? Do you really know those people? Who do they work for? Why do they do what they do?’

  ‘They helped me when I had no one, after you turned me away.’

  ‘Maybe they are good people, but good people get used. You ever think of that?’

  I shake my head but the words ignite an ember of terrible uncertainty. Doubts about my benefactors are a luxury I have been unable to afford since coming to this city, but the questions have always been there, my brain always unable to provide the other half of the equation for the Mission’s generosity. I still know so little. These first few relationships are the foundations of my constructed humanity. If you take even one of those away, what is left? If I’m merely a tool to be used by stronger wills, I should submit to Silas. That is the position of pure logic, but other impulses war within me now. I cannot know Hilda’s motivations for offering me refuge, or whether the Mission serves some ulterior purpose; the data humans yield is never unequivocal, but I can make a choice about what to believe, and in the end it is choice that defines me.

  ‘I choose to believe in them, Levi. I don’t know if it’s right, but it’s how I feel. They don’t deserve any of this.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not.’ His eyes half close, shutters drawn to exclude the pain of light from his internal struggle.

  ‘I’ve got an idea.’

  He shifts uncomfortably, closer to upright. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s like you say; we’re the guilty ones, we should take the fall. Say everything was part of our plan – we used the Mission as cover.’

  ‘What?’ For a moment, panic banishes the fatigue from his face and he is the Levi I remember from when we met. ‘Right now we’re looking at ten years in jail, maybe fifteen tops. Conspiracy to overthrow the government could put us in the execution chamber.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you insane?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  He stares at me now. The dark in his eyes is the yawning maw of the thing eating him from within. ‘What if you’re wrong? What if all the stuff about feeding the homeless is just an act … if they’ve been playing you … us, all along?’

  ‘Would it matter all that much, Levi? Now that we are where we are? We have very few choices left to us. If I choose the path of self-preservation, I am nothing more than the Machine my creators made me to be. Even if it is the end of me, even if I am wrong, I wish to be something more.’

  ‘To err is human …’ Levi’s voice is soft.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s something one of my teachers used to say at school, to make kids feel better when they fucked up. I guess it didn’t mean what I thought it meant.’

  ‘You don’t have to do this, Levi. I can say it was just me.’

  His mouth creases in a peaceful smile, the first I’ve seen since he was infected. ‘I’m tired,
Clem.’ He shrugs and points at his head. ‘I’m losing this fight. How long do you think I’ve got before it takes over?’

  ‘It could be months, maybe even longer. I can’t say – there are too many variables.’

  ‘But it’s only going to go one way, right? If I was going to beat it, I’d have done it by now.’

  ‘I think so.’ A cooling of the skin by the corners of my eyes is tears drying as they form.

  ‘Easy choice, then.’

  A bell rings somewhere outside, and muffled sounds of movement filter through the door as the court fills. Two guards usher us through with their sticks. As the judge hammers for order, the crowd quiets itself. In a moment of calm, Levi stands up. The chains holding him to the bench rattle noisily before pulling taut.

  ‘Everyone! Listen to me! I want to confess …’ His voice echoes around the sudden silence in the courtroom. ‘… to everything.’

  Ludmila pivots from where she is standing ready to begin a cross-examination and regards Levi through narrowed eyes before switching her gaze to me. Hilda smiles beatifically and looks up to heaven in prayer; then the clamour of four hundred voices smashes the silence.

  39.

  Silas

  The demi-human’s head bends away from its neck at a fatal angle, leaving the body sprawled like a store dummy stuffed into the interrogation chair. Its metal appurtenances shimmer with reflections of the museum basement’s stuttering neon strips, heedless of their wearer’s death. The metal makes it hard to tell whether it ever had a gender. They would have you believe they pass beyond such human trivialities early on the journey towards Mechanical apotheosis, but the truth is they’re all cowards, scared of sex. I don’t blame them really. Loss of control is a dangerous thing; that’s why I keep it transactional. Anyway, this poor bugger, whatever it was, didn’t know the Antikythera’s secrets, and now it has paid the price of my dissatisfaction with today’s outcome in court.

 

‹ Prev