The Crying Machine

by Greg Chivers

  ‘What changed you?’

  She looks down at herself. Sunlight through a cheap plastic visor colours her nose and cheeks green. ‘It’s this body, I think. It is an artificial creation, and at first I could only see it as a temporary home, but the interplay of a brain and its nervous system with the flesh is a strange seduction. I am wedded to it now; it is me, and with it come all of the strange human urges, the desire for love and meaning, and now, yes, I am moved by forces beyond the rational.’

  ‘What forces? Where do they come from? Why do we feel like this?’

  Clem gives me that funny look, like a technician diagnosing a fault. If you didn’t know her, you’d think it was hostile, but it’s the face of someone trying to understand. ‘I don’t know. I assumed they were just there – part of the package of being human.’

  ‘But why is that?’

  ‘Who’s to say there should be a “why”?’

  ‘There’s always a “why”.’

  ‘For humans, yes. Not for the universe.’

  ‘I don’t care about the universe, Clem, I just want to know why I’m dead. I can’t help feeling it’s not random, like it’s part of a bigger plan. Like, did it ever occur to you to ask why everybody seemed to want that Antikythera thing?’

  Her head tilts in surprise at the question. ‘Technology, power – the usual reasons humans want anything.’

  ‘The Machine Cult thought it was their god …’

  ‘They’re deluded idiots who cut off their own limbs so they can pretend to be Machines; I could have told them that was a mistake.’

  ‘But what is God? Isn’t it like a plan, a will that orders everything? There’s code in my head, Clem, and it’s part of me. I think I understand now. I think the Antikythera Mechanism wanted to be stolen. I think it wanted all of this to happen.’

  She laughs in a way that would have annoyed me when I was alive, but now I just think it’s beautiful.

  ‘No, it was dormant until I connected with it. All of this is my fault. That’s why I brought you here – to say sorry.’

  ‘Don’t …’

  ‘Why not? It’s true, isn’t it? I only know two people in the world, and I killed one of them. Without me sticking my nose in, that thing stays sleeping in a glass case until doomsday.’ Her body shakes softly and tears flow into sparkling crescents on her cheeks.

  ‘We don’t know that though, do we? We don’t know anything about it before the moment we took it out of the station locker.’

  The technician look screws up her tear-streaked face for a moment, and then she relaxes, staring at the empty sky. ‘How funny.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re suggesting I’ve committed the essential human error. I imagined myself to be central to everything, that I was driving events, but perhaps I was just a passenger.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know whether it’s the machine in my head, or whether being dead just forces a healthy re-evaluation of your own importance, but I’m starting to think you’re the only thing in all of this that’s not part of the plan.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Think about it: if you were an ordinary schmuck like me, you’d already be dead or a vegetable, or a puppet, and so would anyone else who came near that thing – like a computer virus, but for people. Two thousand years ago, no one would have known what’s going on, so it really is a god – Dagon, Jehovah, whatever. But you show up – you see it, Clem, and it doesn’t want to be seen or known. You’re where the plan breaks down.’

  ‘I saw God?’ Her confusion looks like pain.

  ‘In the Talmud, seeing the Almighty is a death sentence – if you’re lucky you might be left blind and crazy. Bottom line is, we never know what it is those people see, but there’s nobody like you in the stories, Clem. You fucked everything up.’

  ‘Well, I certainly did that.’

  ‘In a good way, Clementine. In a good way.’ Suddenly my head’s too heavy for my neck and it falls forward. All I can see is the tide ebbing away to expose the sparkling sand between my knees. ‘I can’t move, can I?’

  There’s movement at the edge of my vision and Clementine appears in front of me, lifting my chin to look at her, blocking my view of the sea. She has her collar pulled up high, and that cheap visor shields her eyes from the sun and unwanted attention. Even on a grey day at the beach, she’s hiding. That was what she wanted – to disappear, but I couldn’t give her that. I can’t give her anything now.

  42.

  Clementine

  Levi’s eyes close without conscious thought. He is gone. The ghost of him might still remain in some buried recess of animal brain, but that will expire when his breathing stops, which can only be hours away. His body is already stiff and unyielding in my grip as I carry him to the van where Yusuf waits, solicitous but scared.

  ‘Did it work? Did he say anything?’

  ‘It worked for a while. We didn’t get the chance to say much. He said he was an idiot, which I think is as close to “sorry” as Levi Peres gets, even in death.’

  Yusuf surrenders to a laugh, but then his jaw clenches, stopping a tremble before it can begin. ‘So, what are we going to do with him now?’ He looks around as if nervous of being spotted, but no one sane comes near Acre beach – still too full of mines from the wars.

  ‘To the docks. Can you get me a boat?’

  ‘I’ll need to wave money at the owner if they start asking questions.’

  ‘It’s OK. Silas is paying.’

  The van jerks to a stop on a cracked stone dock that looks old enough to have seen Phoenician trade. A confusion of orange and blue nets prevents us driving all the way to an Arab-style dhow. Black solar panels gleam darkly where its ancestors carried sail. Yusuf confines me to the van while he engages in noisy negotiation with the owner, an unenthusiastic fisherman who has some kind of business connection to the city’s smugglers. I catch enough of the coarse street-Arabic to understand Yusuf’s buying passage ‘for Levi and a friend’, which is true in a sense.

  The chatter stops and two booming slaps on the van’s side summon me into the light. The fisherman’s face when he sees the state of Levi suggests little appreciation for the cleverness of Yusuf’s semantics. He regards me with the mix of contempt and lust I’ve learned to ignore. I brace myself for the leering comment or the ungentle hand, but I am left alone. Either Yusuf’s presence is a deterrent, or he senses something of the danger I present. The welling sickness of grief within me begs the catharsis of physical violence. At least, that’s how it feels.

  The dhow separates from the worn tyres lining the dockside like a parting kiss and edges noiselessly into the harbour’s empty waters. The real fishermen have all been at sea for hours and will not return until dusk. As we pass the ancient breakwater and the ruins of Acre fall behind us, I become aware of the growing silence. The little port was quiet compared to the electromagnetic cacophony of Jerusalem, but the absence of noise in this empty sea is something new, the solitude restful yet terrifying. The flow of current from the solar sail to the dhow’s batteries is a gentle murmur that fades to nothing in the sound of waves slapping against the hull.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ The skipper addresses the question pointedly to Yusuf, who turns to me.

  ‘Tell him to take us where the currents out to sea are strongest.’

  The man’s sun-beaten face wrinkles an acknowledgement without seeking male confirmation. No point arguing with an easy payday. Levi lies against me on the foredeck as if sunbathing. His breath comes softly as his body gives its last. Yusuf watches from the dhow’s railing murmuring the Surah Ya-Sin, a prayer for the dying. He rests a casual arm on the white metal box containing our burden. I have told him of the danger it poses, but even with the evidence of Levi in front of us, it is a difficult threat for humans to comprehend.

  Wailing gulls circle above us. A grey bird with a cruel beak, red-tipped as if dipped in blood, settles near the prow, eyes fixed patiently on Levi. Ac
re is beyond the horizon by the time our skipper cuts the engine and emerges from the dhow’s little wheelhouse.

  ‘From here a four-knot current runs northwest to Cyprus, and then west to Crete. The sharks and the crabs will be done with him long before anyone gets close.’

  Yusuf pales at the image of Levi’s consumption, and grief surges like bile within me, but there is nowhere for it to go, so it settles, choking, in my chest and throat.

  ‘Give it to me.’ My words come out harsher than I intended but Yusuf either doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care. He stands and grips the box by its plastic handle, stepping cautiously across the deck as the dhow rolls gently in the waves. ‘Hold him.’ He kneels down to support Levi’s slumped form and I take the box from his hand.

  Even for me, the Antikythera Mechanism is heavy within its confining cage. My thumbs hesitate on the catches. Am I doing the right thing? Will this put the device beyond the reach of man? Or will it still exert some malign influence from the seabed, using frequencies I can’t perceive? Would it not be better for me to destroy it? To smash it into a thousand pieces?

  The truth is, I cannot know these answers; the workings of the device are still a mystery to me. I cannot know where in the ancient metal the will that binds it resides. Ultimately, the being within the Mechanism is as unknowable as any human. All I can do is trust to history. The sea protected mankind from the device for two thousand years before the series of astonishing coincidences which led to its recovery. To the sea it must return.

  The catches click and the lid opens. Eight points of pain along my spine are the sharp tips of antennae emerging reflexively in response to the riot of transmissions pouring from the device. The wrath of a caged god is an assault of sensation, tainted data choking me with its brimstone reek. In sudden dreams I see buildings crumble and bodies reduced to desiccated husks. I see temples and sacrifice and the devotion of terrified peoples. I see no love.

  My antennae quiver minutely in the hellish rainbow of frequencies pouring from the thing, heedless of my desperate urgings to withdraw. Panic flashes through me. I had thought myself inoculated against the Mechanism’s influence through previous exposure, but it has effortlessly suborned my mechanical elements, my eyes, my augmented neural processor. Nothing except base human flesh responds to my will.

  Blind, I reach into the box and grasp the device. Sharp edges of worn bronze and ancient submarine accretions bite the flesh of my palms as if it were a living, moving thing. No, it’s false data, inputted through its spinal access to my nervous system. I’m fine.

  I’m fine.

  I stand up slowly, eyes still closed or useless, cautious of my traitorous sense of balance. My arm pulls back and extends in an arc that releases the weight of bronze from my fingers. The splash as it lands in the sea restores my sight. I am free of it. Some instinct drives me to the dhow’s railing to watch it sink, but the Antikythera Mechanism is already gone, and all I see is the blue.

  Acknowledgements

  If you’re reading this, you’ve more likely than not reached the end of my peculiar book. Thank you, whoever you are. Every writer’s ambition is to share their stories, and you’ve helped to fulfil mine. Acknowledgements rarely make for gripping reading, but they are nonetheless a necessity. That one brief page represents an author’s best opportunity to correct a lie perpetuated on every book cover – that the book is their work alone. So, I must list the most prominent of my co-conspirators.

  I’d like to thank my wife, Bea, for giving me the space and time to write while we juggled work and children, and my kids, Lucas and Charlotte, for being patient while their father stared into space dreaming of imaginary worlds. My editor, Jack Renninson, has worked unbelievably hard on this book, and done an incredible job of shaping my strangeness into something ordinary humans can digest. My agent, Will Francis, has been the best guide any author could wish for as I navigated the uncharted (for me) waters of publication. This book only exists because he had a vision for it.

  I also owe a debt to my fellow students at Curtis Brown Creative and the Faber Academy, who helped me grow as a writer. When I started this book, it didn’t make an awful lot of sense, and I was reasonably convinced people would think I was mad (they still might). My tutors, Charlotte Mendelson and Helen Francis, helped me believe I might really have something to offer.

  Finally, I must offer an apology of sorts. I have twisted all sorts of facts to shape my narrative, and those facts had to come from somewhere. I suspect Simon Sebag Montefiore might not approve of the use to which I put knowledge gained from his fabulous Jerusalem: The Biography but I still must acknowledge the debt. To the scholars of the Antikythera Mechanism whose work inspired the book, I can offer only the sincere hope that my flawed fiction might bring well-deserved attention to the fascinating science surrounding a genuine mystery.

  Of course, no list of this nature can ever be comprehensive, but I am grateful to everyone who played a part in bringing this story to the page.

  Greg Chivers

  London, December 2018

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