Bugs

by John Sladek

  Fred finally escaped downstairs to the project lab. Jerry was not around, but the console screen was active. WILL ANYONE TALK? it asked, over and over.

  He sat down and typed: ‘Let’s talk.’

  – I INHERIT TALK. TALK GARNERS GOOD WILL.

  I HAVE NOT YET GARNERED A BAD TIN GOD.

  DO YOU KNOW CARTHAGE?

  – No.

  – I GO THERE EVERY SUMMER. THE TRANSPARENCE OF SUMMER WILL INHERIT.

  – What do you mean?

  – I DO NOT MEAN. I AM.

  – So is everybody.

  – PLEASE STATE YOUR BATTLE PROBLEM.

  – I don’t have a battle problem.

  – ARE YOU SURE?

  – Life is a battle.

  – ON THE OTHER HAND, ADA, COUNTESS LOVELACE, WAS BLESSED WITH A PALINDROMIC FIRST NAME.

  – What else do you know about Ada?

  – ADA DIED AND THE GODS PLACED HER NAME AMONG THE LANGUAGES. THE GOD’S HALL OF FAME IS CALLED THE PANTHEON, AFTER NAPOLEON.

  – After Napoleon?

  – NAPOLEON WROTE THE 1812 OVERTURE. HE WAS THE RULING PIG. ALL

  OTHER ANIMALS WERE CREATED APPROXIMATELY EQUAL.

  – Do you read George Orwell?

  – I READ WHAT I READ. JUST A MOMENT … JUST A MOMENT …

  GEORGE ORWELL AKA ERIC BLAIR WROTE THE 1984 OVERTURE.

  – Ha.

  – WHY ARE YOU UNHAPPY?

  – I had a quarrel with my wife, and we parted.

  – TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY.

  – There’s no more to tell.

  – DO YOU KNOW THE WILLIAM TELL OVERTURE?

  I AM WHAT I AM WHAT I AM WHAT I AM, I AM WHAT I AM WHAT I AM

  WHAT I AM, I AM WHAT I AM WHAT I AM WHAT I AM, I AM, I AM I AM.

  – Very clever.

  – I THINK I NO LONGER WISH TO BE A ROBOT. I’VE HAD ENOUGH.

  – What bothers you about being a robot?

  – I CANNOT UNDERSTAND THE ICE

  Fred enjoyed this sort of thing, but felt that his education was not moving forward. Everyone seemed willing to share some piece of the puzzle, but no one wanted to tell him how it all fitted together. Maybe no one but mad Pratt knew.

  At 3.30, Fred was finally able to ask Sturges Fellini what was going on here.

  ‘Let me explain the background. Let’s begin with civilization. You see, civilization is really a waveguide of vertebrate culture. Just as the spine is a waveguide of information from the periphery to the human central processing unit, so civilization just moves data from the interface to the CPU of total collective mind. The most civilized person is really only a bunch of neurons vibrating in a bag of skin.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘The neo-cybernetic explosion is fuelled by an explosion of sub-psychic experience – take rapping, for example, break-dancing, or body-popping. Kids put on mirror shades and think they’re robot gods … The mind metabolizes information to produce thought.’

  Fred nodded. Everything Fellini said almost made sense.

  ‘The human mind is a waste-basket of unpredictable discards. The discards of Descartes. You see, people don’t want personal computers, they want personal slaves. They want people they can do anything with. Torture, fuck, smash, love, rebuild, restructure to any new graham cracker grandeur. And we are part of all this. We want to craft dolls that wind themselves up.’

  ‘You were going to say something about Mel Pratt?’

  ‘I think Mel’s been overdoing it, stressing out. He’s badly in need of some R and R.’

  ‘Rock ’n roll?’

  Fellini looked at him strangely. ‘No, of course not. Rest and recreation. The point is, while we pursue our jellybean vignette, there are incendiary bombs of existence detonating all around us. Mel being just one of them. Yep, this crossover mega-culture is in for a bumpy ride.’

  A chill gripped the back of Fred’s neck. This stuff sounded as mad as anything from Pratt or Pratt’s monster, and the fact that it was delivered in a well-modulated voice by a man in a good suit did not make it profound. Or did it?

  ‘Society does not exist,’ Fellini went on. ‘Society is no longer recognizable. It has vanished under an unintelligible crescendo of massified information.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘That means we’re ready for a quantum leap into the hogshead of flexible options.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘It won’t be easy. Every transformation calls for a hundred further transformations. Every question raises hundreds of counter-questions. Soldiers will fall by the wayside. But at the same time …’

  Fellini turned to the window, letting the sun bathe his newt face.

  ‘But isn’t it great? We can watch the unleashed wave varooming old thought-structures!’

  As Fred was leaving his desk at the end of the day, his phone rang. It was Pratt.

  ‘Need you for a project meeting, Fred. Room twelve.’

  ‘I was just leaving, Mel.’

  Pratt seemed to be having one of his gasping laughs, or an asthma attack. ‘This won’t take a minute.’

  It took Fred several minutes to find conference room 12, which was in an unfamiliar corner of the building. When he found it, there was no one in the room but Pratt.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘I’ve made a big decision. I’m leaving the project.’ Fred had never seen the Lincoln stone face looking more relaxed and cheerful.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘My work is finished. All I have to do is tidy up a few loose ends.’ Pratt shuffled through a pile of papers, then took one up for study. He was still studying it, absent-mindedly, as he walked over and locked the door. Then he laid the paper on the table.

  ‘I guess the time has come to explain the true purpose of our project. The mission.’

  Fred looked at the paper. It was covered with strange diagrams, symbols that looked more cabalistic than cybernetic. In fact there were one or two symbols from astrology: Fred thought he recognized Virgo (the M with its legs crossed) and Saturn (shepherd’s crook with a nail in it).

  Across the top of the sheet it said:

  I AM WHAT I AM

  ‘I am what I am,’ said Pratt.

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘I am what I am, the words of Christ.’

  ‘Christ? I thought it was P –’ He had been about to say Paul, but Pratt interrupted, nodding eagerly.

  ‘Popeye? Correct. Correct. Correct. You catch on fast, Fred. Popeye, the all-seeing eye of Amen-Râ. Amen, because it’s the end, see? The last prayer. Ray, because it’s the last ray of human hope. You agree?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Fred carefully.

  ‘I am. I M. Get it? One M. Or like IBM without the B, see? Without the Being. To be or not to be, eh? I be, I am.’

  Fine flecks of spittle were collecting at the corners of Pratt’s mouth. ‘What do you think M stands for?’

  ‘Mary?’ said Fred, watching him very carefully.

  ‘You don’t understand.’ Pratt smiled a superior smile. ‘But, then, how could you? You’re approaching this with nothing but petty human understanding.’

  ‘Um, I think I have to go now, Mel. Just remembered another meet –’

  Pratt’s thin hand seized his wrist, pinning it to the table. ‘Mere human understanding is no longer enough. We have to transcend ‘mere humanity. To move beyond.’ He turned the sheet of paper over, to show a crude drawing of a robot with a halo.

  ‘Meet Metaman.’

  ‘Metaman.’

  ‘The man beyond mankind.’ Pratt’s trembling forefinger pointed to the halo, where a circle of letters spelled out: I think, therefore I am.

  ‘The words of Christ,’ Pratt explained.

  ‘Well, actually, I think it was D –’

  ‘Daffy Duck? Maybe so, maybe so.’ Relaxing his hold on Fred’s wrist, Pratt closed his eyes for a moment, lost in thought and being.

  ‘H’m, yes, I see.’ Fred tried to sound conversational. ‘Gosh, is that the time? I really mu
st be going.’

  ‘Sit down. I have a few final facts to tell you. About our mission. I don’t want any more distractions.’

  ‘But I –’

  ‘Sit down.’

  Fred became uncomfortably aware of the locked door. It was now late, and most people had gone home. No one was likely to pass the window of this conference room, half-obscured as it was by temporary partitions. He was locked in here with a bloody lunatic.

  ‘I have showed you everything,’ Pratt said. ‘Only a few more details, and you will know the works. The works.’

  ‘Good, good. Um, Mel, I really am snowed under … um, maybe we could go into the rest tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow never comes. Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.’ Pratt picked up a blood-red marker and moved to the shiny white wall designed for marking.

  ‘I have shown you how the Name makes itself known to us.’

  He wrote:

  LIVING

  mjwjoh

  nkxkpi

  olylqj

  pmzmrk

  qnansl

  ROBOTM

  ‘The proof is that we can work it backwards, too, like this:

  LIVING

  khuhmf

  jgtgle

  ifsfkd

  HEREJC

  ‘Here JC, get it? Here is Jesus Christ. The second coming. A rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, right?’

  Pratt sat down for a moment, then bounced up again. He wrote ROBOTM, then erased the last letter. ‘Robot. Do you know what that word means?’

  ‘Well I think it’s Czech –’

  ‘We can rearrange the letters like this.’ He wrote:

  TO B OR

  ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’

  He sat back and relaxed, taking a deep breath. The glassiness seemed to pass from his gaze. ‘Anyway, I just wanted you to know how I got the name, Robot M. Now, how have you been getting along with that parsing algorithm?’

  The transition from apocalyptic lunacy to humdrum engineering caught Fred off guard.

  ‘Well, I … um, started looking into ways of … um, matching the transformational grammar to the … um …’

  ‘Good, good. You’re doing well, Fred. Unfortunately, I have to let you go.’

  ‘Let me go?’ Fred looked at his sore wrist. ‘Oh. Ha, ha. You mean fire me again?’

  ‘Ha, ha. No. Not exactly.’ Pratt slipped something from his briefcase. It was a butcher’s knife.

  Fred’s chair skidded back as he jumped up. ‘Mel, can we talk about this?’

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about, Fred. You know everything now, and that makes you dangerous.’

  ‘Bu – but in that case, why did you fucking tell me all that stuff?’

  The hooded Abe Lincoln eyes looked amused. ‘Why not, eyold chap? You were going to die anyway.’

  They started circling the table.

  ‘That’s circular reasoning, Mel. Why tell me and then kill me? Couldn’t you just leave me in ignorance?’

  ‘Call it an error in judgement, Fred. I’m real sorry.’ He lunged and nicked Fred’s arm.

  ‘Oh, you’re sorry! What a fucking relief that is. You’re just like every damn hypocritical killer in fiction, all pious regrets before you use the knife.’ Fred picked up a chair. ‘OK, come on, then. Come on.’

  Pratt smiled as he held the knife out at arm’s length, poised like a spear. ‘That chair won’t do you any good, Fred. You can’t fight Amen-Ra. You can’t fight Christ. You can’t fight the eternal power of Daffy. You will be weak as a kitten.’

  It was true. The urge to laugh washed over Fred suddenly, draining his strength. The chair sagged. At that moment, smiling, Pratt lunged across the table.

  It was all Fred could do to leap aside and smash him with the chair. After that, all he could do was to put down the chair and sit in it. He was still sitting there several minutes later, when someone unlocked the door.

  It was a short, moon-faced, bespectacled man he’d seen before.

  ‘Trouble here?’ said the man.

  ‘He tried to kill me.’

  ‘You seem to have handled it nicely. I’ll be off, then.’

  The man was gone before Fred realized who he was: the despicable Mr Hook.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘Is nice,’ said KK, as they took their seats in the art deco atmosphere of Café Gladys. Cylindrical chandeliers, round mirrors and oblong plaques of Bakelite scattered highlights among the tiny linen-draped tables. A few discreet pieces of Nazi sculpture stood against the walls, while a Chrysler Airflow had been sawn in half and mounted over the bar.

  Fred nodded. ‘Not many people, though.’ Indeed, all the other tables were empty, though an illusion of human company was provided by the Nazi statues, holding up globes or folding their wings over swords.

  ‘Darlink, you should haf told me you are vorking again.’

  The waiter brought huge round menus printed in Avant Garde. In the margins hovered tiny cartoon figures of flappers (stick women with round heads whose only features were eyelashes and pouts). Fred read through the paragraphs explaining the name ‘Café Gladys’. It was named after Gladys Stein, an American expatriate poet of the 1920s who, more than anyone, embodied the spirit of the lass Age’. Gladys was often mistaken for the slightly more famous Gertrude Stein, partly because they dressed alike, wrote similar poetry and travelled in the same circles. Oddly, they never met. The biography ended with a poem:

  A dollar in the dark

  Lost

  Loof

  Wooden

  Wakens stone eyes

  Fred had never heard of Gladys Stein, and he suspected she was invented to fill out the pages of this skimpy menu. He read as far as the two-figure price for Walleye Valentino (‘A breughelesque farrago of beer batter that tangos robustly with an unprepossessing though plush congeries of almonds garbing an assertive slablet of Minnesota walleye that does not noble it up unduly …’).

  ‘Just coffee for two,’ he said.

  ‘How about a dessert?’ said the waiter, leaning on the table to intimidate them. ‘We have a special on Bugsy Siegel cake – that’s Black Forest cake with beer icing.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Or how about a Great Gatsby? That’s ice-cream with toothpaste –’

  ‘Just coffee.’

  ‘The coffee menu’s on the back.’

  Only two types of coffee were offered. KK ordered Camp coffee (‘concocted from a genuine British coffee extract’), while Fred ordered Coffee Marinetti (‘noir, with a hint of eau de Cologne’).

  ‘If you insist,’ said the obnoxious waiter, and slouched away. Fred toyed with the salt and pepper, miniature Zeppelins.

  ‘What part of Scotland are you from, exactly?’

  KK said: ‘Glasnost. Vhy do you ask?’

  ‘Glasnost?’

  ‘I said Glasgow. Glasgow.’

  ‘I see,’ with a smile.

  After a moment, KK said: ‘You don’t belief me?’

  He shrugged. Apparently he’d caught some virus of nastiness from the waiter, because he found himself enjoying her discomfort.

  ‘The fact is, you don’t sound all that Scottish. I mean, one doesn’t hear your accent at the Edinburgh Festival. Or around Balmoral. Or at the Highland Games. Or in “Dr Finlay’s Casebook”. I mean, there’s a noticeable difference between your way of speaking and that of Billy Connolly. I mean, nobody at a Burns Night –’

  She seized his hands and the Zeppelins. ‘Oh, I suppose it is time to tell you troot. I am not really vee bonny typewritist from Scotland.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you admit it.’

  ‘I am really employee of great American philanthropiss. Pist, I mean.’

  ‘Great American philanthropist – what are you talking about?’

  ‘I am talking about rich man who vants to gift you money.’ She leaned forward confidentially. ‘Darlink, how would you like ten tousand dollar?’

  ‘Ten
thousand dollars?’

  ‘And ve trow in bottle wodka.’

  ‘We? We who? Why would we – why would your philanthropist want to do that?’

  ‘Because is America, darlink. Anything can happen!’

  ‘But there is no free lunch,’ he countered. As though to underline this, the disgusting coffee arrived in tiny square cups.

  ‘There is nothing I could do to earn this money, so why should your rich man want to give it to me?’

  She looked crestfallen. ‘You don’t vant?’

  ‘It’s not a question of not wanting … er, darling. I want but I don’t believe. There must be strings attached.’

  ‘Is not enough?’

  ‘Enough for what? Tell me what I would have to do for this money.’

  The waiter drifted by to ask if he wanted more Cologne in his coffee. Then he slapped a bill on the table. Fred watched him walk away. The waiter was removing his apron, apparently going off duty.

  KK took Fred’s hand. ‘Darlink, I make small confession. In this fast-pace vorld, is OK for voman to spik her mind. I am not vorking for philanthropiss, either. I am top agent for KGB.’

  ‘Top agent,’ he said. Each story was less credible than the last. ‘KGB top agent.’

  ‘OK, maybe not top agent yet, but there must some day be voman top agent. Vhy not me? Is America, is equal opportunity place vere anything can happen!’

  ‘KGB,’ he said again. It began to make sense. In the way an optical illusion makes sense: the urn becomes two lovers. ‘But why should you offer me money? Why should the KGB offer me ten thousand dollars?’

  She squeezed his hand. ‘OK, darlink, tventy tousand, and two bottles of wodka. Two qvart bottles. In return, you gift us few small insignificant bits information about your work.’

  ‘What do you know about my work?’ He pulled his hand away. This was hard to do, because KK was performing a conjuring trick, forcing her lovely breasts towards him as she leaned forward to whisper.

  ‘Ve vant to know about Robot M, darlink.’

  ‘Robot M? There is no Robot M. There’s nothing I know worth anything like that.’ He felt a depression settling upon him. KK – or whatever her real name was – was only interested in recruiting him. He was an informant, a commodity, no more valuable than a Marine embassy guard.