There is no answer, it reads.
—
There is a Virago Machine in an abandoned house down the road—they always leave their machines. The house is boarded up. I climb in through broken windows. Glass cuts my body. I begin to bleed. No escalators this time, the Machine sits in the kitchen next to the stove. I rest my fingers against the keyboard. She is gone now. She knew there could be no answer. I don’t feel anything. My fingers rest against the keyboard. I cannot answer the question. I imagine fleets of alien warships laying waste to the world. Punishment, no redemption. I see a scrap of yellow paper grasped between her fingers, unfolding in my hand. My fingers type, fumble and type. The cupboard splutters and whirrs, coming to life. Across the lost years of space, the communication, my answer, appears in faded type on yellow rolls of paper: I didn’t kill any children.
Selfish to the last, I wait. There is no rolling thunder, no sound of an alien fleet breaking through the sky. Just a long steady silence that screams in the ears.
—
My days begin again, not much stranger than before. No redemption, beyond punishment. I move from abandoned house to abandoned house searching for further remnants of the Crypto-System, thinking yet that there might be an answer, hidden away among the yellow rolls of paper, now crumbling to dust. The world has grown quieter still, more deserted. Lingering, as if it turns ever more slowly upon its axis. In the end I return to the house in the country. No travellers this time, no cheap wine. The Crypto-System remains, the escalators still work. Some hope is salvaged as I ride them upstairs, prepare to switch tracks at the ascent, but I have lost the knack. I lose my footing, stumble, slip, then slide to the bottom. When I look up I see the escalators stop. Caught in an unfinished movement, everything is utterly, utterly still. My heart is between beats. Quietus.
How Alex Became a Machine
STEPAN CHAPMAN
Stepan Chapman (1951–2014) was a US writer who won the Philip K. Dick Award (1997) for his first and only novel, The Troika (1996). He grew up in Glencoe, Illinois, and attended the University of Michigan. Throughout his life, Chapman either wrote full-time or held odd jobs; with his wife, Kia Chapman, he once performed PSA-type puppet shows for Arizona schoolchildren, a gig that ended when the puppets caught fire. Chapman also wrote an eccentric math book for kids and wrote plays performed at various fringe festivals. He died prematurely of a heart attack in 2014, at his desk, working on new fiction.
As a storyteller, Chapman mixed myth, science fiction, fantasy, and the surreal into a rich tapestry of unusual, ironic, and darkly humorous fictions that were often antiestablishment. Useful comparisons can be made to such distinctly American freethinkers as Mark Twain, R. A. Lafferty, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Chapman’s first story, bought by the legendary John Campbell, was published in the December 1969 Analog: Science Fiction and Fact, followed by four appearances in Damon Knight’s influential Orbit anthology series. His work also later appeared in the World Fantasy Award–winning Leviathan series (1994–2002). However, Chapman is also one of the few writers associated with science fiction to regularly appear in such prestigious publications as Chicago Review, Hawaii Review, Wisconsin Review, and Zyzzyva. In all, he published more than three hundred short stories during his lifetime, only a handful of them collected in Danger Music (1996) and Dossier (2001). A “complete stories” is long overdue.
Chapman’s most famous creation is the novel The Troika (published by the editors of this anthology through Ministry of Whimsy Press, 1997), which received widespread critical acclaim and was perhaps the most reviewed science fiction book of that year. The Troika came into print only after Chapman submitted selections from it to Jeff VanderMeer’s Ministry of Whimsy Leviathan anthology series. By that point, the novel had been rejected by more than 120 publishers—so many editors had passed on the novel, in fact, that at the Philip K. Dick Award ceremony Chapman sat by chance next to two of the editors who had rejected the novel. The story of The Troika’s publication provides a good example of how difficult it could be to publish sui generis long-form material in the American marketplace at that time.
The Troika is a tour de force of sustained surreal science fiction—influenced to some degree by manga—and contains some of the most audaciously imaginative passages ever published in the context of science fiction. Although the mordant humor of the novel invites comparisons to Joseph Heller and Terry Southern, it is uniquely “Chapmanesque” in its fusion of mythology, psychology, and the afterlife. In the novel, three main characters who have lost their memories trudge across an endless desert lit by three purple suns: a robotic jeep (Alex), a brontosaurus (Naomi), and an old woman (Eva). Only at night, in dreams, do they recall fragments of their past identities. To further complicate matters, sandstorms jolt them out of one body and into another.
The novel alternates between dream tales about the troika’s former lives and their present-day attempts to discover where they are and how they can get out. From this quest form, Chapman creates a poignant and powerful story of redemption, in which pathos is leavened by humor and pain is softened by comfort.
The excerpt included in this volume, “How Alex Became a Machine,” fuses chapters 7 and 10 of The Troika to tell the complete story of Alex, a character who is pushed by excesses of industrial capitalism into losing his humanity.
HOW ALEX BECAME A MACHINE
Stepan Chapman
1. ASSEMBLIES
I was a dour young fool when I lived in Chicago in 1995. I had my own legs back then and most of my arms—the ones I was born with. After an initial spurt, the pace of my auto-destruction had slowed. Gone were the happy days when I would whang off one of my hands at the factory, go home for a beer, and think nothing of it. I must have been sentimentally attached to myself.
I speak of this fool that I was, but I can hardly believe in him. Think of a cardboard cutout of a young fool, that’s some improvement. Dress him in cutout paper clothing: a pale blue shirt, coarse gray paper pants, little black shoes. Slot him into a world of sliding cardboard flats, inside the box of a toy theater called the factory. Cardboard walls, cardboard people, cardboard machines. Good. Now attach a power screwdriver to the stump of his right arm, and a humanoid prosthetic to the stump of his left.
That’s him.
Now stand him beside a conveyer belt. Riding the belt, a succession of television picture tubes move past him, mounted in steel frames with some circuit boards and color-coded wiring.
His new job is affixing Masonite backing panels to the frames as they roll by. His left hand places the screws, his power prosthetic drives the screws tight. Preset manipulation loops run his hands. His hands require none of his attention.
So his attention wanders. He studies the dust on the cement floor. Or he watches the other assemblers, who have to think, to some extent, about what they’re doing. Or he closes his eyes and listens to the factory—the ratchet of pneumatic wrenches, the hum of conveyer motors, the white noise from the air conditioners.
He makes up lies about his past. He pretends that he lost his hands in a war. Yes, he’s secretly at war with the factory. And obviously the factory’s winning. He’s not like the others. They just come here for the money. He doesn’t need money. What can he do with money? He never leaves the factory. He never sees the light of day. He never sleeps.
He sounds like a riddle. What makes war on a factory, has no hands, and never sleeps? I have no idea, but it’s crawling up your neck, ha-ha-ha.
It’s not that I refused my salary. In fact I drew three salaries, since I worked all three shifts every day, under differing surnames. At four p.m. I’d punch out Alex One and punch in Alex Two.
But a man has to sleep. Maybe I never was one after all. Maybe I was really a machine that was deceiving itself. It’s simple to hide from yourself. You just choose a place you’ll never look, work all the time, and never sleep. You never find out what you are, and it’s phenomenal how much you can get done.
You can think ab
out your goals in life. You can add up the minutes between you and your next coffee break. When break time comes, you can go to the so-called cafeteria—a row of vending machines against a Sheetrock wall—and sit on a polyurethane seat and think some more. You can drink hot cocoa and chicken soup and think. You can eat a hot dog and an ice cream sandwich and think. You can calculate the number of screws you sink in a day. The one thing you can’t do, if you’re me, is stop thinking. It’s a basic design flaw. If I stop for an instant, all my cores go blank.
Where was I?
I was standing at my assembly station, screwing down Masonite panels, when my foreman Mr. Bosch and the janitor Mr. Siever came walking down the aisle and stopped behind me. Mr. Bosch tapped my shoulder to get my attention, then crooked his finger to tell me to follow him to his office. Siever took my place on the line.
Mr. Bosch’s office was a glassed-in cubicle at one corner of the subbasement where we worked. He had a metal desk and two chairs in there, a file cabinet, and a coat tree. A gooseneck lamp cast an oval of light on a morass of oil-stained papers. Mr. Bosch, a bald man with thick glasses, gestured me into a chair and pushed a memo slip across the desk at me.
“The company is changing your work assignment. It’s some new motivational bullshit the management cooked up. Read that.”
I picked up the memo and held it in front of my face. I didn’t want to read it, but it was my strict policy never to disagree with people. Bitter experience had taught me that the minute you contradict someone, you instantly get sucked into their asinine private world. By avoiding arguments I wound up not talking to anyone. I lived utterly alone in my own asinine private world. Terribly alone and constantly crowded by idiots—that was my life. Rats gnaw off their feet with less provocation. Mr. Bosch watched me patiently. I tried to read the memo, but whichever way I held it, it seemed to be upside-down.
Mr. Bosch explained that my new job was to do everyone else’s jobs. Not all at once, but one job at a time. I would relieve workers at their stations and give them unscheduled ten-minute breaks.
“It’s a twelve percent pay hike,” said Mr. Bosch. “It’s a promotion. Do you know why you were chosen? Your perfect attendance record. Don’t you ever get sick, Alex?”
“I’m in training to become a machine. When do I start?”
“You just started. Congratulations. This new job is the best thing that could happen for you.”
“Right.”
“And do you know why I say that, Alex?”
“I have no idea.”
“Because of your psychological problem, Alex. You have a psychological problem as big as all outdoors. Have I mentioned it before?”
“You may have. Can I go now?”
“You’re a menace, Alex, to yourself and everyone around you. You need therapy, Alex. Lots and lots of therapy.”
“Thanks for your concern, Mr. Bosch.”
I left the office and started back toward the assembly line. I still had the memo in my screwdriver claw, so I looked at it again. Worse than ever. I still couldn’t read it, and now I couldn’t remember what it was. This happened to me in those days. Common household objects would mystify me. A paper cup, an alarm clock, a memo slip…I knew that these things had functions, but I’d be helpless to recall their names.
A horn blew in my ear. I was standing between two forklifts whose drivers were engaged in a right-of-way dispute. I got out of their way.
I went to the locker room, opened my locker, and changed my screwdriver for a more versatile prosthetic. I chose the mate of the humanoid hand that I was wearing on my left arm.
Siever was still at my workstation, doing my job with a rapt expression. Apparently we’d both been promoted. I walked up the line, all the way to the freight elevator that took away the finished video units. I watched over people’s shoulders and memorized their assembly moves. I thought to myself, I could run this whole factory if there were enough of me.
I walked up behind Evangeline, an elderly black woman with bad veins in her legs. I liked Evangeline because she admired the cleverness of my prosthetics, and once she’d given me a Christmas card. She was wearing a loud pink dress and hair curlers. Circuit boards were shuffling past, and Evangeline was slapping a diode from her diode tray onto every single board, tweezers in one hand, solder gun in the other. She saw me and tugged out her earplugs.
“What are you doing here?” she asked me.
“I got a new job.”
“That’s great, honey. You too smart to work here.”
“Give me the solder gun. I’m going to fill in for you.”
“Oh, how nice.”
Evangeline got down off her stool and stiffly walked away.
But something she’d said had wormed its way into a dark corner of my brain. What are you doing here? A dangerous question.
As the weeks of that summer wore on, I learned every assembly task that was done on our level of the subbasement. I took pride in my work and hoped to become a machine soon. Apart from the sleeplessness and the thinking too much, I was content. Until I had that bad dream. It was during the first coffee break of a graveyard shift. I fell asleep in my cafeteria chair, and I had a bad dream.
I dreamed that I was working on the line as usual, except that instead of building televisions, we were machining aircraft parts with rotary sanders. Plastic chips bounced off my goggles. I wondered why these huge fuselage sections should be made of styrene. Styrene is awfully flammable. So I walked off my station to see if I could find out where the parts got put together. I found a hangar full of bomber jets that were life-size model kits, hollow inside. Impressive as hell, but they’d never fly.
At one end of the hangar, a crew was rolling jets out into the sunshine. I followed one out. The jets were rolled down a sloping runway straight into the funnel of a gigantic grinder, which chopped them into chips, so that the chips—it came to me—could be melted down and molded into more aircraft parts.
I walked back into the factory to share my discovery. Mr. Bosch was there, but when I tried to speak to him, no words came out. So I went to the locker room and looked in a mirror. I saw why my mouth wouldn’t open. My head was made of white plastic, smooth and hollow.
I woke up in my chair and tried to remember the dream, but all that came back to me was: What am I doing here?
What were we doing? Working for ESU, Educational Systems Unlimited. Assembling what? What was the product? I asked around, but no one seemed to know. Something educational. A sane man would have dropped the matter there. But not me. I was a dream-starved machine-in-training and a man with a Quest.
I got on the freight elevator and followed a batch of our video units to the level just below ours. There I learned an assembly sequence from an oriental guy named Joe. Joe had a scraggly goatee and agile fingers. All day long he built flush tanks for toilets. He screwed on the floating copper balls.
“Maybe this floor and my floor are producing different things,” I suggested.
“Naw,” said Joe. “All same thing.”
“Maybe it’s a pay toilet with pay TV inside.”
“Your guess good as mine. What for you care?”
“Just curious.”
Joe scratched his chin. “Curiosity kill cat,” he told me.
I followed the flush tanks downstream, seeking out convergences of the component flow.
“Excuse me. I’m taking a survey. What do you think we do here?”
I stopped relieving people from their stations entirely. I rewrote my job description. I stayed in one area only long enough to scope out what they made there and where it went. A hippie type by the name of Reeves had some interesting theories. I picked his brain while he screwed colored lightbulbs into a display panel—one green, one red, one blue.
“What do you suppose it’s for?” I asked him.
“I should worry? I got my own problems.”
“But if you took a wild guess…”
“Maybe we’re not making anything, man. I
got a buddy works the level two down from here. He upholsters seat cushions. So you have to wonder. Seat, video, toilet, colored lights…What’s the big picture? I’m not sure I want to know, you know? I got a million theories, but most of them I try not to think about.”
So much for Reeves. I punched out and went home in the middle of my shift. I walked up Pulaski to Humboldt and took the bus east to the national guard armory. My apartment was two flights up over a Walgreens. I ate some popcorn and crashed. I slept on the floor, since I hadn’t gotten around to buying a mattress. There were quite a few roaches and rats, but they stayed out of my way. I think I scared them.
While I was sleeping, I had another dream. I’m watching a silent movie about an overly serious young man named Felix. He has clean-shaven Teutonic good looks and jet-black hair brushed back from a high pale forehead. A Colin Clive type.
He works at a factory where he tours the machinery with a stopwatch, timing compression cycles and making notes in a book. He also sits at a desk in a slanted brick alcove, pulling the lever of an adding machine.
The Big Book of Science Fiction Page 200