Silver Screen

by Justina Robson

  “I say again, what is this place?” Klein asked, and this time there was no mocking tone in her voice.

  I decided to answer as best I could. “This is one of the greatest machine myths: The Myth of the Unknowable Purpose. Machines have tasks that repeat, that are without end. They don't know their origin or their result. They build the tower; they strive for an answer.”

  “No kidding?”

  I continued. “Some want to destroy the tower, and they do revisions of the story where it gets attacked, hence the big holes in things. They say that purpose is an illusion and no matter how well-reasoned any task, even back to the beginning of time, it is ultimately ephemeral and meaningless.”

  “Well, I'll be damned.”

  A thin, dusty wind sheared off the ragged sides of the tower, and it whistled and creaked. Below, the lights of the industrial unit flashed and flickered as if the building were full of lightning. Ammonia and sulphur tainted the air, and on the plain we watched newer, faster machines speeding between the hulks of the dead.

  “Now what?”

  As Klein spoke, one of the distant marauders spat a bolt of yellow. It tore a strip through the air, crossing the miles in less than a second, and bored into the tower several hundred feet below us. We heard the explosion, then saw the tower shake to the late sonic boom of the incoming shot. Splinters of shining metal sprayed out like water from a pipe-burst, but the whole remained unaffected. Then, with a screeching groan, whole huge shards of the structure above us started to detach. Bolts the size of oil drums shot past our camera, falling, and I even heard Klein gasp as she suddenly saw the shape of the hidden machine embedded in the tower directly above.

  The huge beetlejet peeled from the raw bulk of the scaffolding that held it in place, like an iceberg falling from the seaward edge of a glacier. It fell so that its undercarriage came down over us and smashed our imaginary viewfinder flat. The faint blue glow of its burners was just visible as it streamed towards the assault party through an air suddenly filled with missiles and planes and the vivid-coloured bolts streaming from the tower's heavy artillery. At the base we saw whole roots draw themselves from the earth without effort, curl and fold into huge caterpillar tanks or leggy stalkers, and set off across the blasted plain—the building towed behind on its length of shaking gut.

  The screen reverted to normal operations when the file had run.

  “Are the attacking units manned or are they simply other machines?” Klein asked, shaking herself and blinking as the lights came up again.

  “In full interface you can feel that they're both,” I said.

  “Feel?”

  “It's like a psychic thing. You just know it.” I refrained from telling her the full subtlety of their union, that they were indistinguishably human and machine, much as Roy was now indistinguishable from the conscious life of the Shoal.

  “And where's the tower going?”

  “Away,” I said, making equivocal expressions to show her that I wasn't taking the mickey; I really didn't have much more of an idea as to its real meaning than she did. Then again, I always thought that the Snow Queen got an unfairly bad press, so perhaps I wasn't the best judge either.

  “Huh.” She was grudgingly impressed. “Well, you'd better put that in there somewhere. It's certainly evidence of top-level narrative generating, even if it doesn't make sense.”

  “Yeah, well, they're still working on it,” I told her, and added it to my notes on Meaning Generation In High-Grade AI Units. But the rest of my work more or less ground to a halt at that point. For some reason I couldn't get the stupid thing out of my mind. Again and again I found myself mulling over the furious industry in the building, the teamwork on the spire, the sense of hope and futility both wound tight together around what passes for a cybernetic heart. Not unlike a boy trying to spell out a word in chips of ice, come to think of it.

  Lula was in my room when I got back, very late. She was about to speak, but I forestalled her.

  “I can't face it. Whatever it is, I can't face it right now. I want a decent meal and about five days' sleep. How about you?”

  “I was just going to suggest that we should go out to eat,” she said meekly.

  “Ah.” I felt a real idiot. “I'm sorry. What a cow. Of course, let's go get the late table at Fiore's.” Even though I felt like ten shades of death, I made myself go into the bathroom and tidy up. I wore a suitably contrite expression on emerging, and we took a leisurely stroll through the park strip and up to the terrace café.

  We sat at our usual table beside the clinging trails of ivy. The empty seat where Peaches used to sit seemed forlorn. “I hope she's doing OK.”

  “She got a job with Reaxa Chemicals in Washington,” Lula said, a fount of knowledge on domestic affairs. “She's probably sent you the same mails she sent me, but you haven't been following your Inbox.”

  “That was quick.”

  “Well, you know her. No hanging about once she's made her mind up. She got a pay raise and a good position. She's moving her family out to America as soon as she can. Got a farmhouse out in the countryside and plans to keep some livestock, I think. She mentioned that she was going to buy an Akita to guard the place, and name it after you.”

  “I expect it'll roll over and lick the burglars to death, then,” I snorted, but I couldn't stop a smile. Peaches deserved to succeed. It must be the just reward for being smart enough to get out of this travesty before it reached its present miserable proportions.

  “And she was going to get some chickens and name them after all her favourite executives so that they would be more fun to chop for the pot,” she added and laughed, and this led us on to ordering coq au vin and a sack of Merlot from Montana, which is near Washington at least. Using the table interface, a few glasses further on, we went shopping and ordered a luxury hamper from London and sent it to her, air express, along with a framed photograph of us at our last-meal-of-the-condemned, taken by the café camera unit and produced in the London department store at no extra charge. We asked for them to matte-in a cartoon country bumpkin in her chair and to make us look the glamorous urban girls. No need to be morbid.

  “So,” Lula said, licking her spoon clean of its first payload of tiramisu, when the tender coq was dispatched, “tomorrow I'll go see what I can find out about those Green guys of Roy's from the funeral. You never know, the threat you got may have been just a hoax.”

  “Thanks for the idea,” I smiled wearily at her, “but I think it was real enough. I spent enough time at Edinburgh dodging their doings to know they're pretty low on humour or leniency when it comes to their pet theories. They used to make letter bombs in our kitchen.”

  “But did they send them?” She was earnest, good to the last.

  “I don't know,” I admitted. “I never heard that anyone died of one. But Augustine is primed to go running out in that death trap, so we're going to—” I lowered my voice “—go anyway.”

  Lula nodded, understanding. I wished I could as easily accept it as she could. A part of me was so angry about the entire suit affair that I wanted to ring him then and there and tell him that if he even thought of going ahead with it he'd never see me again. Of course that may not have been so very much of a threat compared to his own heady dreams of success. Perhaps it was better this way, so at least I had a vague chance of protecting him.

  “You didn't tell him the truth about the suit, did you?”

  “No,” Lula said, shaking her head with solemnity.

  A couple came in and were shown to the table next to us. Their talk was low and excited, clearly an early date, and for a while it finished our dully desperate exchanges.

  We ate slowly, and looked around us all the time with intense care. I think we knew that was the last time we would eat at Fiore's and we were both sorry. It wasn't the greatest food in the world, but it would fight off plenty of earthside restaurants, and it had been our watering hole in many more frivolously dramatic hours. We had no unhappy memories of it
.

  I toyed with the idea of a second dessert when the first was gone, but in the end we ordered coffee and mint chocolates, and when they were exhausted the waiter unexpectedly brought a pair of cognacs on the house. We thanked the manager and then turned our chairs to look out over the artificial night of the service quarter. There was a sandy area with picnic tables below and fiery torches added their light to the bright gleams of the building's Chinese-style red and green lanterns. It was busy and there was enough ambient background humming to cover anything we chose to say.

  Lula leant back with her feet on the low terrace wall where the ivy was rooted in tubs of moss. “If you get the diary, how are you going to get it from there to here?”

  “I was thinking about that,” I said, “and what I think is that the Greens can get it to me if they think it's so precious. I'll send them a communiqué via the Shoal and tell them they'd better get things arranged.”

  She considered this and rocked her head from side to side. “Hmm, fair enough. I suppose that will work. Best chance of it, anyway…And the key?”

  “No idea.”

  “So you'll read the diary?”

  “For lack of a better theory I'd better memorize it as soon as I can, then work on the other problem. Maybe there will be some kind of clue inside it. I'm hoping.”

  “Hmm.” She rolled her cognac about and gazed into the distance. “Did you get to the bottom of Maria's horrible HughIe problems, anyway?”

  “Yeah, and in my spare time I knitted you an Arran sweater and retiled the bathroom—what do you think?”

  She snuffled a laugh through her nose and rocked her chair back.

  “Ach, it's such a bind this trial,” I said. “I've no time to get together with Nine and sort anything out, not even have a decent conversation. I'm treating it like shit just when I should be begging for help or offering an understanding ear. Meanwhile, time gets shorter and shorter. Do you know how the other psychs are faring?”

  “Doing their usual.” An insult from Lula is rarely direct. Sometimes her opinions take several weeks to filter out in opaque little comments like this one, which an unsuspecting eavesdropper might readily assume were harmless.

  I felt better and took a sip of my drink. Night air on station is balmy like the Mediterranean, warmer than the days. Sitting there we could almost have been somewhere civil and safe like Algiers or Madrid. Now that Lula had brought the subject up, I began to idly mull over thoughts of the HughIes' recent behaviour, and the film-star offerings I had received.

  The first question was: why bother? If 901 had something significant to tell me, why not say so? It was better equipped than most human beings for self-expression and I was similarly uniquely set up to understand it. But, there again, the Shoal and my studies of recent AI language developments showed a degree of complex intimation that was quite possibly further advanced than human-to-human conversations. And some of them had necessarily taken place in public, which hinted that there was an element of coded secrecy going on. The best I could do was to try and strip out every atom of meaning that might be intended and try and see if I could formulate a theory.

  But another cognac down the line and I had covered auteur theory, Eisenstein, Saussure and the multiple regenerations of semiotic theory, the thoughts of Béla Balázs, a fast trawl through early twenty-first century thinkers on stage, screen, and dramatic form, and I had come up with an idea. I alerted 901 and set the implant to funnel my thoughts at it.

  “Tell me when I get close,” I said, and crossed my legs the other way for the sake of comfort. In a vaguely alcoholized fug I proposed, “You chose the figures, apart from J. Arthur Rank, on the basis of their temporal significance in the cinema.”

  “Oh, warm.”

  “They were all vehicles for the spectator's fantasies of self-importance and desire for actualization.”

  “Pretentious…”

  “But they had private lives as ordinary people that were not known, only supposed from their screen personalities.”

  “Ah, hotter.”

  I lost it a bit around then, and had to take a fortifying gulp. “Yes, and you also use them as a personal sign system, to tell me more than you could in any other way. But it's all of this together.”

  “Yes,” Nine said with audible satisfaction, “although your egomania is deplorable. I admit I had taken a leaf from Roy's book. But the point of it…”

  “Is the Silver Screen,” I said in a wave of drunken sentimental lucidity. “A barrier of light and shadow play that will always be between us, you and me, human and AI. You are not what you appear, although you are like it, but your story is different from the projected image in ways we cannot know.”

  There was a small pause. If Nine had had eyebrows, they would have been raised.

  “I loved those films, you know,” I said. “I loved them all.”

  “Other worlds.”

  We sighed and observed the station night. Despite the truth in 901's metaphor it was one of many times that I felt absolutely as one with it, that we understood one another well enough not to need either words or pictures to tell us so. In silence we were content. I remember that evening now. It was the only time and place I felt I was at home, but at the time I didn't recognize it.

  Augustine and I connected at 0300 hours, GMT. 901 provided the signalling on a huge bandwidth, minimum-delay link so that there was almost no time lag: less than half a second. Augustine received us on the suit's specially boosted telecommunications unit, now also set for full sensory relay instead of just audiovisual. From my darkened bedroom and quilted comfort I was moved in spirit to possess the suit's relayed perceptions. I gathered that “I” was in pieces and being transported to the activation site.

  “Where are we?”

  It was very dark and very cold and there was a humming motor whine coming from above me.

  “North East gas main,” Augustine whispered, his voice picked up by the sensitive microphones inside the helm. “Being towed by a service robot up to the inspection airlock at Alnwick.” He sounded cold and a little bit on edge through the muffling of his oxygen mask.

  We had decided on the gas main as the most effective and secret means of getting him and the suit into a position close to the abbey, but far enough out in the country that he wouldn't be casually noticed. The passage of his body and the suit were not large enough to disturb the gas pressures and cause any kind of alert, although 901 had the job of getting us through the airlock station without detection. The maintenance robot now hauling us through the pipeline was on a routine general checks mission, and the antifriction clothes Augustine was wearing meant it hardly noticed the extra load on its tail as it pulled his line.

  “My arms are killing me,” he said. “It can't be much further.”

  “One thousand five hundred metres,” 901 informed us, “or four minutes and fifty-one seconds.”

  There was a slight lurch and cold caress of changing gas flows as the robot took us past a junction. The pipe sloped, and for a moment we drifted into the side opening, causing the robot's wheels to lose traction on the wall. The motor howled for a second or two and we all held our breath, but then, with a jerk, it regained itself and we bumped past the corner.

  “Christ,” Augustine hissed.

  “It's all right,” I said, but my heart was thudding. The minutes seemed to last an eternity and the chill, a constant information inflow from the suit, seemed to deepen until it bit my bones. “Having second thoughts?” I asked, almost hoping he would say yes, although we'd had this out for the last time—I promised—at our final planning conversation. The whole action seemed to have a fated hold on him.

  “No, ugh, just my arms.”

  “One minute ten,” 901 informed calmly. “I'm removing the airlock station from the Company's processor array and substituting a false signal…now.”

  “You know,” Augustine said in a conversational manner, “I'm really, really glad you're with us on this one, Nine. I almost hav
e sympathy for the bastards who want to cut your cord.”

  “Grateful I'm sure,” Nine said. “Prepare to detach your line.”

  A flush of nervousness ran through me. In a moment or two, when the suit was together and Augustine was in it, I didn't know what might happen. The double AI interface and the invasive suit technology had produced a situation in sim that showed we might all merge, to one degree or another, into a gestalt. It was difficult to know whether that would be intimate or just embarrassing, with the presence of the alien AI and 901.

  “Detach now.”

  We slowed down and stopped. The motor hummed away into the distance, and it was suddenly quiet. Augustine used his one friction glove to stop us against the door, and the silence deepened as the gas pumps held off for a moment to allow the airlock to function. We heard the door open—a whirr and sonorous metal boom—and then we were trying to squash into a space too small. The door began to shut and we were still half hanging out into the main.

  “Move it!” I yelled, feeling my leg being pushed aside by the door, ready to be crushed.

  With a yank we made it. I was all over the place and began to feel sick. I'd be glad when the suit was operational. At least then my arm wouldn't feel like it was stuck through my neck, with both legs upside-down.

  There was a sharp hiss of gas exchanging, and then the other door slid open and we fell out into the blazing light and warmth of the service room.

  “No problem,” Augustine said. I heard him through his back, since he had fallen on the suit. When he got up I could see at last. We had three minutes of recovery scheduled. The room was tiny, just big enough for a single engineer to work on a robot or use the silent terminal, sitting in the one office chair Augustine was now perched on to remove the frictionless overclothes. He moved with a strong efficiency, balling each piece of fabric and wedging it into the disposal sack we had to abandon. Beneath that was a heavy thermal bodysuit for his hour in the gas main. When he stripped it off there was only a T-shirt and shorts. Proper use of the suit ordained full body contact on all internal faces.