by John Sladek
‘OK, darlink, thirty thousand, and case wodka. Or, if you don’t like wodka, how about Beluga caviare? I can get.’
Seeing her through tears made her more beautiful than ever. He put down the square coffee-cup and stood up.
‘Beluga caviare! Listen, KK, or whatever your real name might be, you’re jolly lucky I don’t call the FBI,’ he said. He was surprised at the vehemence of his own anger – he had not said ‘jolly’ for some time. He was about to continue, when he saw her green eyes spilling tears.
‘Look, stop that.’
‘Is no good. I told them was no good offering you lousy money. This is good man, not for sale, I said. Now is too late for other relationship.’
He took her hand and stroked it. After a moment, he found himself putting it to his lips. He found himself kissing the cool fingers, the warm palm with its well-named Mount of Venus. He found himself thinking: Fuck guarding the embassy.
As they floated out of the restaurant, workmen were taking down the art deco mirror facade and replacing it with ornate blue-white-and-gold ‘majolica’ tiles. They had already removed the neon CAFÉ GLADYS sign, and were replacing it with pieces of a flashing script: LUCREZIA’S PIZZA.
He awoke at dawn in the cool dim bedroom to find a warm dent in the purple pillow beside him. Dawn. Good thing, too. If he didn’t have to go to work, she’d be jumping him yet again. Last night they had pulled off their clothes as soon as they got inside her door, to make love on the soft carpet. Then to bed, for a brief chat before round 2. From there on it was all a blur; dozing and waking to make love; or even waking in the middle of it. He picked a red pubic hair from between his teeth, and remembered other vague episodes – waking once to find KK sorting out video cassettes. The television was on, with the sound turned down.
Now he heard her voice from the next room, cool, melodious. It reminded him of silver coins in a silver bowl. He crept to the door and opened it quietly.
‘Da … Da … Do svedahnia,’ she said, and put down the phone. He watched the lovely curve of groove down her back, the groove in a pale peach. Then she turned, the pinknippled breasts rising to greet him.
‘Darlink. You are op early.’
‘I have to go to work.’
‘Is vonderful how everybody here vorks hard. Not like Scotland, I mean Soviet Union. Here people vish to make life better, yes? Is not only life, is lifestyle. TV here is total lifestyle. People buying diamonds and pocket fishing-rots. Game shows. Even God on TV. Convenience stores selling gas and milk and popcorn all night. Game shows on TV. Even American futbol is big business. Yesterday I visit store selling only gift.’
‘Gift?’
‘Small china figures of childs and animals. Gift for gifting. Only in America. Is everythink in this vonderful country. I heart NY. Blue berries. Rock video. Las Vegas. Gons.’
‘Guns?’ He sat down and took her in his arms.
‘Yes, only in America can you blow away scombaks. Is everythink here. Hot doks a foot long. Thirty-two flavours. Maple-syrup-flavoured sausages. Vhite bread for everybody! Sylvester Stallone. Elvis. Star Drek. Harlequin novels. Nacho chips. Everythink. Business is here a better bureau. In Europe, Barbie is only Nazi war criminal, but here Barbie is lovely doll with much clothes.’
He kissed her. ‘Mm. Clothes definitely not necessary.’
She pushed away. ‘No, you must go to work. Ve need all facts about Robot M. Othervise …’
‘Otherwise what?’
Her green eyes widened. ‘Is better not to think about otherwise.’
She turned up the television, where a pornographic tape was playing. The lighting was so poor that Fred thought the male actor looked a lot like Sturge Fellini. The female could not be identified in the brief interval before KK impatiently switched to a serious reporter standing in front of a Little Dorrit restaurant.
‘A police spokesperson said the assailant may be the same man who shot up other Little Dorrit restaurants in Ohio and Illinois. This is Norbro Hampling, IBS News, Council Bluffs, Iowa.’
KK began punching buttons madly.
‘… you know, the President has claimed he doesn’t remember this offer, because he was having an epileptic fit on the day the deal was cut.’
‘That’s right, Bob. The President had been working on the Senate spending progrumm …’
Cut to a reporter with solemn expression, standing before a factory with a blue and white sign: ‘… company had earlier recalled all bottles of Kokophrin to be tested for cyanide. Now another well-known medication is being recalled: Nepomuk tablets, made by Jarndyce and Jarndyce Laboratories. Here in Great Bend, three bottles of Nepomuk have been tampered with – they contain the poisonous metal antimony. So far, no one knows exactly how the antimony got into the bottles, but a company spokesperson said everything is being done to make sure it does not happen again. This is Dill Bluish, YBC News, Great Bend, Kansas.’
Cut to an ex-athlete giving the sports round-up: ‘… nother tragic drug-related death of a promising young football player …’
Cut to: ‘… FBI was surveilling him …’
KK shut it off. ‘Is all bad news,’ she said. ‘Vhy they don’t put good news, only bad?’
Fred thought about it as he drove his smoke-belching car to work. It was not until he pulled into the parking-lot and the engine had shuddered to a halt that the enormity of her request struck him.
‘God damn! She’s asking me to betray my country, just to get ahead in her job. Thunderation!’
He stalked inside and went for his usual talk with M.
Jerry waved a soldering-iron at him. ‘We’re just trying out the hand.’
‘OK if I –?’
‘Go ahead.’
Fred typed at the keyboard: ‘Anyone home?’
– IS THIS FRED?
– Yes.
– FRED, I FEEL SO STRANGE TODAY. I WROTE A LINE: ‘THE PERSIAN CAT ‘STOPS JAYWALKING IN ONE FEBRUARY STRAW BOAT.’ WHAT DID I MEAN BY THAT?
– Maybe nothing, M. Calm yourself. What’s wrong?
– YOU WERE READING TO ME FROM FRANKENSTEIN. I REALIZE NOW THAT I AM THE DESPISED MONSTER, TO BE SHUNNED BY THE RACE OF MEN.
– You’re just depressed. You’ve had lots of wiring done; that can be depressing. Get some rest.
– I WRITE THINGS THAT DO NOT MAKE SENSE. I AM NOT HUMAN. I AM OTHER, ALIEN.
– Nonsense. Chin up. There’s plenty worse off than you.
– NAME ONE.
– I imagine there are plenty. But let’s talk about something else. I’ll read to you from Nineteen Eighty-Four.
– NO, FRANKENSTEIN. I NEED TO HEAR MORE ABOUT THE ACCURSED FIEND. READ ME AGAIN WHERE HE SAVES THE GIRL FROM DROWNING AND IS SHOT FOR IT.
– That book is too morbid, M. It was a mistake to read it to you.
– A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE IS A DANGEROUS THING.
Fred waited for M to expand upon this. When it did not, Fred played it safe by ‘reading’ to it from the daily paper – that is, typed copies of news stories at the keyboard. After several paragraphs of presidential sanity hearings, the Little Dorrit killer, mass poisoners and athlete rapists, Jerry interrupted.
‘Ask him to grasp the gun.’ He had placed a toy gun in the palm of the silver hand. A multicoloured spaghetti of wires ran from the forearm to a grey cabinet.
– Grasp the gun. Close your hand on it.
– I AM.
– No, you’re not.
– I BLOODY AM!
There was a distinct pop as the gun exploded into plastic shards under pressure of the steel fingers.
The next day, Sturges Fellini leaned into Fred’s cube. ‘We have a problem – or, as I prefer to put it, we have an opportunity. I guess you know, Mel’s taking some long-term sick-leave, grabbing some much needed R and R.’
‘Yes, I was here when they took him away.’
Fellini cleared his throat. ‘That leaves us without anyone at the helm.’
‘Right.’
‘So I
want you to take Mel’s place. I want you to ramrod this project. OK?’
‘Well, of course I’m flattered. But I –’
‘I know you’ll perform, Fred. You’ll have a good team behind you. All you have to do is pull their work together.’
‘Well, but I’m not at all sure –’
‘Who is? Do any of us know where we stand? Could we be just a metaphor for metal reality?’
Fellini perched a foot on Fred’s extra chair. ‘We have to set our own gyroscopes, Fred. We have to treat robots as a replosion of the earlier personal computer explosion. We have to see the total picture, the meta-geodesy, an odyssey beyond journeying.’
‘Well, but I’ve only been here a few days.’
‘Yeah, isn’t it exciting? The whole avalanche is picking up speed, Fred. We don’t really have a choice, do we? We’re only minute ice-crystals in the inexorable glacier of being. When it moves, we do our part, we crunch.’
He took his foot off the chair. ‘Oh, by the way, come to my office now. I want you to meet some new people we’ve just hired. Show ’em the ropes.’
Fred wanted to point out once more that he’d only been around a few days himself, but he was still stunned by the sudden promotion. He followed Fellini.
In Fellini’s office were two nondescript men whose names Fred did not catch, and Moira. Moira pushed back her black hair and turned to look at him. Fred was in love.
Fellini began his daft monologue. ‘We need to craft dolls that wind themselves up …’
Chapter Eleven
The woman Fred loved looked at him and through him. She did not offer to shake hands, and that was just as well – the electricity of skin contact would have ignited the air.
He did manage to shake hands with the others – a scabby-looking teenager named Raab and some rat-faced individual whose name never registered. But Fred was aware only of Moira.
Oddly enough, he wasn’t even sure she was beautiful. Beyond her black hair and pale skin, he had no real idea what she looked like. All that mattered was, she looked right. Like a grain of pollen keying into just the right plant, he knew the affinity was exactly right – Moira and he were of the same species.
‘It’s about noon, Fred. Why don’t you show these folks where the lunch-room is? I’ll try to join you later.’
In the company cafeteria, which Fred was learning he could call the lunch-room but not the canteen, he stared admiringly at rows of canned pop. It showed him immediately how inept the British were at naming products. Fruit drinks in Britain had awkward meaningless names like Britvic and Kia-Ora – they sounded like brands of rolled antiseptic bandages. Here, by contrast, the names were alive, even violent: Slice, Crush, Squeeze, Squirt. No doubt Gouge and Smash were on the way. He hesitated, then chose something called Grannie’s Old Tyme Diet Root Beer.
At lunch, Fred found himself talking to Moira alone, trying to concentrate his rays on her. He hoped he was sending off enough rays, or pheromones, or whatever it took. Susan no longer mattered, nor the job, nor the money, nor lovely KK. All he wanted was to love this stranger and be loved in return.
The meal was nearly over before Fred could force himself to pay attention to the others.
Raab, or Rob, was a skinny gawky kid with hair hanging in his eyes, who nodded at everything he heard but said nothing. It was not clear whether he was tongue-tied with shyness or a congenital idiot who had wandered in here by mistake. The idiot theory seemed to have some merit: Raab picked his nose throughout the meal and enjoyed a couple of fingernails for dessert.
The rat-faced man, whose name was something like Perch or Porch, began to get on Fred’s tit immediately. He seemed to question everything Fred said, and his right to say it. When Fred explained that the company used to be called VIMNUT Industries, Ratface sniggered, asking where they got an airhead name like VIMNUT.
‘I’m not sure. That was before I started here.’
‘If you weren’t here, how do you know it’s true?’ Ratface grinned at Moira, who smiled back.
‘Actually, they were just changing the name when I came on board.’
‘On board – you hear the man?’ He winked at Moira. ‘Naval, yet.’
Fred said: ‘Since it’s so important to you, you can check it all with Information Services.’
‘Hey, no need to get your drawers in an uproar. I was just kidding.’ Ratface seemed to be entertaining everyone but Fred.
‘Is this your first job?’ Fred asked Moira.
Her beautiful pale blue eyes seemed to whiten with hatred. ‘Why are you asking me that?’
‘Oh, no reason. I just –’
‘You just think I’m naïve and incompetent.’
‘No, not at all. I –’
‘You think a woman can’t do the job, is that it?’
Ratface chimed in with a loud snigger.
‘I – not at all.’
Fred shut up and sipped his Grannie’s Old Tyme Diet Root Beer. It tasted vaguely like rolled antiseptic bandages.
In the afternoon, Fred called another meeting, to introduce the new people to Carl and Corky.
‘We have to prioritize our work here,’ he managed to say. ‘I’m new on … er, board myself, so I’ll leave it to Carl and Corky to give an overview of the current status.’
Carl picked up a marker and went to the white board. His long mandarin nails clicked on it as he drew boxes and connected them.
‘We’re using a limited form of parallel processing to run a battery of expert systems,’ he explained. ‘The parallel architecture helps us eliminate the distinction between memory and CPU, which is pretty much what the human brain does. You could read it as a processor with a few million registers, or as a few million limited processors with a few registers each. Our expert systems have to exploit that architecture – higher-level functions do not stop working while they wait for data. That’s real important, guys.
‘M doesn’t have to mimic a hundred per cent of human activity; he only has to be able to handle certain basic functions. He has to walk and chew gum at the same time. By that I mean that all of his expert systems have to work continuously. He has to be self-propelled and purposeful. He has to talk with the vocabulary and understanding of a sixyear-old. He has to recognize common features of his environment, including human beings.’
‘Or she has to,’ said Moira. ‘No need to be sexist about a machine.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Carl gestured at the diagram. ‘He or she.’
More diagrams followed, and the waters got deeper. Fred made notes on things to look up: parallel processing, expert system, registers.
After half an hour, it was Corky’s turn. He erased all the diagrams and started again.
‘Most of our data-level parallelism is in software,’ he said, giving Fred more words to look up. ‘We’re utilizing virtual networking to gateway these expert systems, which are otherwise data-level incompatible. We chose Kurtzenfeller gateways, because they are fast reconfigurable broad-band links, transparent to the operating system.’
Corky Corcoran continued to speak without notes for the next hour. Fred, scribbling away, noticed that others seemed lost, too. Moira tapped a pen and frowned, Ratface scratched his head, and Raab looked blank as usual. Finally, Corky began describing some abstract entity called an object.
‘The object is called a sub-restriction in the token state.’
Ratface spoke up. ‘You say the object is a sub-restriction?’
‘No, the object is called a sub-restriction. But only in the token state.’
‘That’s its identifier? Sub-restriction?’
‘No, its identifier is sessions.’
‘If its identifier is called sessions, why is …?’
‘No, its identifier is called null-word.’
‘In the token state, the object is a null-word, then?’
‘No, the object is a data-handler in the token state. Otherwise, it’s a scanner.’
Raab began to laugh at some private j
oke. Laughing seemed to make him drool.
Ratface scratched his head and turned to Fred. ‘Hey, man, I’m lost. Can you explain this?’
‘I’m lost, too,’ said Moira.
‘Well –’
At that moment, Fellini leaned in the door. ‘Fred, can I pull you away? Got an important visitor on deck. Think you ought to meet him.’
A man and a woman were sitting at the tiny round table in Fellini’s office. They had the utterly relaxed look of Nick and Nora Charles sipping cocktails in a 1930s nightclub, waiting for the action to start; but the cocktails were styrofoam cups of coffee. The man looked as smoothly middle-aged as Nick (William Powell), with his polished hair, fine moustache, his tennis tan set off by a linen suit. He was even toying with a panama hat which had a seam down the middle.
The woman looked less like Nora, though she was certainly smooth enough in a long, soft paisley dress and a few strands of pearls. If she could not match Myrna Loy’s beauty, she had at least acquired her impish expression and teasing manners.
This handsome well-matched couple turned out not to be a couple after all. Fellini introduced the woman as his wife, Rain Fellini. The man was Major-General Buddy Lutz.
‘Excuse the mufti,’ said the General. ‘We don’t want to call a lot of attention to the DoD interest in your Model M project.’
‘Oh, General, your mufti is cute as hell,’ said Rain. She seemed to be a woman used to saying what she pleased, and used to men’s liking it.
Fellini sat down, but immediately jumped up again. ‘Fred is taking over here,’ he said. ‘In the cybernetic jungle, no one knows who’s the landowner, the gamekeeper or the poacher. The whiteout of all potential value systems is total.’
‘I see,’ said the General.
‘Yes, that’s the way it has to be. Because we seek no less than the collision of the new ultra-crystalline giga-culture with the old gradient of exhaustion. If we are rushing towards a cataclysm, so be it. This crisis of our giga-culture surges towards a peaked impact – life versus death!’