The automaton obediently stepped back and I moved in front of it, thinking that this would be the end of the encounter. But the thing spoke again, very softly.
“I am sorry. I thought you might understand.”
“What?”
I wheeled round angrily.
But the robot was walking away from me.
*
You know how Italians drive? Round the corner from the Accademia some idiot in a Fiat took it into his head to try and overtake a delivery van, just as a young woman was stepping out into the road. He smashed her into the path of the van, whose left wheel crushed her head.
A wail of horror went up from the onlookers. One second there had been a living woman, the next only an ugly physical object, a broken doll: limbs twisted, brains splattered across the tarmac…
I waited there for a short while, dazed and sick but thinking vaguely that they might want me for a witness. Among the bystanders an appalled and vociferous debate was building up. The Fiat driver had hit and run, but strangely the recriminations seemed to centre not on him but on the robot driver of the delivery van, which remained motionless in the cab, obviously programmed in the event of an accident to sit tight and wait for human instructions.
“La macchina,” I kept hearing people say, “La macchina diabolica.”
One forgets that in all its gleaming Euro-modernity, Italy is still a Catholic country.
*
I went back to the hotel.
It was one of those cheap mass-market places. Through the little window of the lift, you could see that every floor was identical: the same claustrophobically narrow and low-ceilinged corridor, the same rows of plywood doors painted in alternating red, white and green. The delayed shock of the road accident suddenly hit me and I felt almost tearfully lonely.
“Ninth floor, Signor,” creaked the tinny voice of the lift.
I went down the windowless corridor from number 901 to number 963 and opened the door, dreading the empty anonymous room. But Freddie was already there.
“Fred! Am I glad to see you!”
Freddie laughed. “Yeah? Beer’s over there Tom. Help yourself.”
He was lying on the bed playing with his Gameboy and had already surrounded himself with a sordid detritus of empty beer-cans, ashtrays, pizza cartons and dirty socks. He had the TV on without the sound.
My little brother doesn’t speak Italian and has no interest whatsoever in art. He had spent his day in the streets around the hotel, trying out bars and ice cream parlours and throwing away Euros in the local VR arcades. I told him about seeing the girl killed outside the Accademia.
“Jesus Tom, that’s a bit heavy. First day of the holiday too!” He thumbed back the ring-pull of another can. “Still, nothing you could have done.”
I had a shower and we went out for something to eat. We were just finishing off our first bottle of wine when I remembered the robot.
“I meant to tell you. A weird thing happened to me in a museum. This robot security guard tried to talk to me about one of the sculptures.”
Freddie laughed. “Probably just some dumb random choice program,” he said with a mouth full of spaghetti. “Easy to set up. Every hundred visitors or whatever it spins random numbers and makes one of a hundred possible remarks…”
“But this was the Accademia, Fred, not Disneyland!”
Fred shoved a big chunk of hard Italian bread into his mouth and washed it down with a swig of wine. “What did it say exactly?”
My brother acts like a complete dickhead most of the time – he is a complete dickhead most of the time – but cybernetics is his special interest. He reads all the mags and catalogues. He visits the chatrooms. His accumulated knowledge is immense. And by the time I had told him the whole story, he had stopped eating and was looking uncharacteristically serious.
“It sounds very much like you met a Rogue there, Tom. You’d better call the police.”
I laughed. “Come on Fred, you’re putting me on!”
“No really. Those things can be dangerous. They’re out of control. People can get killed.”
I got up (“I’m warning you. This’d better not be a joke!”) and asked to use the phone. The police said that regretfully cibernetica were not under their jurisdiction and I should contact the carabinieri. (What other country would have two separate police forces operating in parallel!) I phoned the carabinieri and got through to a Sergeant Savonari in their Dipartimento di Cibernetica. He took the whole thing alarmingly seriously. There had been several reports already, he said, about the same macchina. He asked me to stay at the trattoria and he would come out immediately to see me.
*
Somewhat shaken I went back to our table.
“Christ Freddie, I had no idea. I obviously should have contacted them this morning. Is it really likely to kill someone?”
Fred laughed. “No, not at all likely. But a Rogue is out of control. So you just don’t know what it’ll do.”
“So what is a Rogue exactly? Like a Robot that’s picked up a virus?”
“Not really. A virus is something deliberately introduced. Robots go Rogue by accident. It’s like a monkey playing with a typewriter. A sophisticated robot is bombarded with sensory information all the time – they’ve got much better senses than ours mostly – and every now and then a combination of stimuli happens by chance which screws up the robot’s internal logic, unlocks the feedback loops…”
“And the robot comes alive?”
“No it doesn’t,” Freddie was irritated by my naivety, “no more than your electric razor comes alive if the switch gets broken and you can’t turn it off. It’s still just a machine but it’s running out of control.” He wiped tomato sauce from his plate with his last piece of bread. “Well if we’re going to have to wait here for this guy, you’d better buy us another bottle of wine…”
Savonari arrived soon afterwards, a small dark man with deep-set eyes and a great beak of a Roman nose. He shook us both by the hand, then reversed a chair and straddled it, leaning towards me intently across the remains of our meal. It was only after he had been with us for some minutes that I registered that he himself had a robot with him, standing motionless by the doorway, hammerheaded, inhuman, ready to leap into action in an instant if anyone should try and attack the sergeant, its master. (It was what the American police call a ‘dumb buddy’ – three hundred and sixty degree vision, ultrafast reactions, a lethal weapon built into each hand…)
Several people, it seemed, had witnessed and reported the robot’s attempt to converse with me in the Accademia – and seen it slipping away from the gallery soon afterwards – but no one else had been able to report the exact words spoken. Apparently my account confirmed beyond doubt that there had been a fundamental breakdown in the thing’s functioning, rather than, say, a simple hardware fault. The sergeant noted, for instance, that it had continued to try to talk to me when I had clearly ordered it out of the way.
“These security machines are unfortunately very prone to this problem,” said Savonari with a resigned gesture, addressing himself to Freddie. “Their senses and analytical apparatus are so very acute.”
Freddie, unable to understand a word, smiled vaguely and offered the sergeant a cigarette, which was declined.
“Our own machines are totally reprogrammed every week to avoid this,” the Sergeant said, nodding towards his sleek minder by the door, “but not everyone is so aware of the dangers.”
He made a little movement of exasperation and told me of a case he had dealt with recently where a robot farm hand had suddenly tossed its owner’s ten-year-old son into a threshing machine.
I shuddered. “What did you do?”
“Like all Rogues,” (the Italian word, it seems, is Incontrollabile), “the machine had to be destroyed. But that was no help to the little boy.”
Again the angry gesture.
“I am a Catholic, Signor Philips. Like the Holy Father, I believe that to make machines in the liken
ess of people is a sin against the Holy Spirit. I would like to see them all destroyed.”
He snorted: “My little son had a machine once that taught him how to spell. I put it out for the dustman when I discovered he had given it a human name.”
Then he shrugged and got up: “But I can only enforce the law as it stands, Signor Philips. Thank you for getting in touch. I am sure we will find the macchina very soon.”
He shook our hands again and left. We heard him outside the door barking angrily at his ‘buddy’: “Pronto, bruto, pronto!”
*
Later as we leaned comfortably on a wall watching the bats looping and diving over the river Arno, Freddie enthused about that police machine. Apparently the things are actually made in Florence in the Olivetti labs out at the Citta Scientifica.
“Beautiful design,” Freddie said. “Nothing wasted. A really Italian machine.”
I liked that concept and proceeded to spout a lot of drunken nonsense about how the taut police minder was in a direct line of descent from Michelangelo’s David – how the wires and tubes under the transparent skin of the robot in the Accademia echoed the nerves and muscles in da Vinci’s sketches of dissected limbs…
Freddie just laughed.
*
Our days settled into a routine. We were woken in the morning by the humming of a little box-shaped domestic robot, which let itself in through a hatch in the door (and drove Freddie crazy by trying to vacuum up coins, paperbacks, socks and anything else which he’d left on the floor). Then we wandered round the corner to a café and had breakfast together before splitting up for the day: me heading for the museums and churches, Freddie for the Virtual Reality arcades.
In the evening I’d meet him in one or other of the arcades (looking like a gentle Nordic giant among the wiry Italian kids as he piloted a landing on Mars, or led a column of armoured sno-cats through an Alpine pass). He’d take off the headset and we’d go to a trattoria for a meal. Then we’d find a bar on some busy street or square, so we could sit outside and watch the city go by.
After a while you start to see not just a single city but several quite separate ones. There is the city of the Florentines themselves… There are the high-tech pan-Europeans from the Citta Scientifica, wearing Japanese fashions and speaking Brussels English, larded with German catchphrases… There is the city of the tourists: Americans, Japanese, foul-mouthed British kids on school trips, earnest Swedes clutching guide-books (all different, but all of them alike in the way that they move through the famous sights as if they were a VR simulation)… And then there is the city of the dispossessed: the Arabs, the Ethiopians, the Black Africans from Chad and Burkina Faso and Niger – hawkers, beggars, hustlers, climatic refugees from the burnt-out continent, climbing up into the belly of Europa along the long gangway of the Italian peninsula…
About the fifth or sixth day into the holiday, Freddie picked up a book somewhere called Illicit Italy (with a cover photo of a transvestite hooker, learning on a Roman bar). While we sat drinking in our roadside café in the evening he kept chuckling and reading passages out loud.
“Listen to this, Tom! ‘The Bordello Sano, or Safe Brothel, recently legalised by the Italian government in an attempt to curb the AIDS epidemic, can now be found on the outskirts of all the major Italian cities, staffed entirely by what the Italians call sinteticas, robots with living human skin...’”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. Freddie read on cheerfully:
“‘The obvious advantages of sinteticas are (a) that they are very beautiful and (b) that they are completely safe. But some say that the biggest advantage is the fact that they have no soul…’”
He read on a bit to himself, then looked up. “Hey, we should go and have a go Tom. It’d be a laugh!”
*
I have to admit that I knew about the Bordello Sano in Florence and had already considered a discreet visit, just to have a look. But discretion is not my little brother’s style. The whole way over there in a crowded bus, he chatted cheerfully about the sinteticas in an embarrassingly loud voice.
“Apparently they build them to look like famous models and film-stars. There’s some old woman who used to star in porn-movies when she was young and then got elected an MP. She sold her genes to a sintetica manufacturer. She said she was bequeathing her body to the men of Italy!”
I grunted.
“Another thing,” Freddie said, “there’s actually been cases of women pretending to be sinteticas because sinteticas are more popular and make more money. Weird isn’t it? A real woman pretending to be a fake?”
But when we actually got there, Freddie went very quiet. It was ruthlessly hygienic and efficient, quite terrifying in its cool matter-of-factness. You walked through the door and a receptionist gave you a sort of menu, illustrated and in the language of your choice. Then you went through into the lounge where the sinteticas waited under reproduction Boticellis in fake gilt frames, with canned Vivaldi twiddling away in the background.
They were extremely beautiful – and looked totally human too, except for the licence plates on their foreheads. (According to Freddie’s book you can check whether you’ve got a real sintetica by seeing if the licence plate is bolted on or just glued.)
A tall blonde in a black leather miniskirt came over to Freddie and offered her – its – services.
In a small dry voice he muttered: “English… No capito…”
“Oh I’m sorry,” it said in faultless Euro-English, “I said would you like to come upstairs with me?”
Freddie looked round at me helplessly. (The kid is only eighteen years old. I could at least have tried to keep him out of this.) I shrugged and attempted to smile as the sintetica led him away.
Then it was my turn. The creature that approached me was curvaceous and dusky-skinned, with a face so sweet it set my teeth on edge. And she wore a dress of white lace which left her graceful shoulders bare and showed most of the rest of her through pretty little patterned peepholes.
“Hi, I’m Maria. I’d be pleased if you decided to choose me.”
I felt myself smiling apologetically, shrivelling in the cool frankness of her gaze. I had to struggle to remind myself that this was not a ‘her’ at all. Under the veneer of real human skin and flesh was a machine: a thing of metal and plastic and wires…
Upstairs in a room full of mirrors and plastic roses and pink ribbons, the beautiful robot spread itself appealingly on the bed and asked me for my order. I remembered the menu thing clutched in my hand and started to read it. You could choose various ‘activities’ and various states of dress or undress. And you could choose from a selection of ‘personalities’ with names like ‘Nympho’, ‘La contessa’ and ‘Virgin Bride’.
You could ask this thing to be whatever kind of lover you wanted. But instead (God knows why) I blurted out: “I don’t want any of those. Just be yourself.”
The friendly smile vanished at once from the syntetica’s face. It sagged. Its mouth half-opened. Its eyes became hollow. I have never seen such terrifying emptiness and desolation.
Freddie told me later that I read too much into that expression. It was no different from the blank TV screen you get when you push a spare button on the channel selector… Well, perhaps. But at the time I was so appalled that I actually cried out. And then I fled. I literally ran from the room, and would have run straight outside into the street if the bouncer at the door hadn’t stopped me: “Excusi, Signor. Il conto!”
There was a bill to pay and I had to wait to pay it because the receptionist was settling up with another customer who was paying extra for damage to the equipment. (“A hundred Euros, signor, for a cut lip, and fifty each for the black eyes… Thank you, Signor – oh, thank you very much, you are most kind – we look forward to seeing you again as usual…”)
As the other customer turned to go I saw the Roman nose and realised it was Sergeant Savonari of the Carabinieri, the very same who lined up with the Pope on the Robot Question.
*
I didn’t wait for Freddie. Male human company seemed about the last thing in the world I needed just then – and I guessed he would feel the same. So I spent a couple of hours wandering the streets by myself, in between those different cities that occupy the same space but hardly touch each other at all: the city of the Florentines, the city of the Euro-techs, the city of the tourists, the city of the displaced…
And it suddenly struck me that there was another city too which I hadn’t noticed before, though it had been there all the time:
Outside a tourist pizza place on the Piazza del Duomo, a little street cleaner trundles along on rubber tyres, peering about for litter and scooping up the discarded cardboard and polystyrene with long spindly arms…
Through the steamy window of a tiny bohemian restaurant, a waiter made of plastic and silicon quietly clears tables and serves coffee, while its bearded owner dispenses cigarettes and largesse to his customers…
Following behind a pair of carabinieri on the Ponte Vecchio, a robot minder guards the officers’ backs while they keep an eye on the beggars and pickpockets…
At the door of a Renaissance Palazzo, a sintetica housemaid in a blue uniform presses the entryphone button, a prestige domestic appliance clothed in human flesh, returning from an errand for its aristocratic masters…
The City of Machines.
I thought about the robot from the Accademia. I wondered whether it had been caught. I found myself having the irrational thought that I’d like to see it again.
*
Two days from the end of the holiday, I was sitting by the fountain on the Piazza della Signoria, eating a strawberry ice cream and wondering where to have my lunch when a taxi, driving too fast in what is basically a pedestrian precinct, snagged one of the little municipal cleaning machines with the corner of its bumper. The thing keeled over and lay there unable to right itself, its wheels spinning and its arms and eye-stalks waving ineffectively in the air.
I laughed, as did several other on-lookers. No one felt obliged to do anything. But a robot security guard and a sintetica servant, coming from different directions, lifted the thing gently back onto its wheels. They dusted it down and the sintetica squatted briefly beside it as if asking it whether it was okay. Everyone laughed: tourists, Florentines, African hustlers. The cleaner trundled away and the other two macchine headed off on their different errands.
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