Only Human Tom Holt

by Only Human (lit)

  The conspirators grimaced at each other. ‘Absolutely,’ said the female wearily. ‘And nobody would want to buy it. You silly old sausage, haven’t you been listening? There’s four things in the universe that are guaranteed to be completely unmarketable: steel-wool knickers, news­papers that tell the truth, really sensible shoes and per­fection. Remember that and one day you might get somewhere in business. Come on, people, we’ve got calls to make. Bring that thing up to my office when you’ve finished fiddling with it.’

  In the event, it took Len rather longer than he’d anticipated to install the design faults into the robot; not that it mattered, because in Hell as well as in Heaven, Time has no meaning. Nevertheless, it was far harder for him to make deliberate mistakes than to do the work properly. To err is human; to perfect, machine.

  But eventually, he looked upon the work that he had made and saw that it was bad. And the morning and evening was the seventh day.

  >HELLO

  Kevin was looking the other way when the words appeared on the screen, so he didn’t see them for nearly ninety seconds. It was only when the computer bleeped discreetly that he swivelled round.

  ‘Mainframe?’ he whispered.

  >HI THERE

  ‘Mainframe? What the..

  >AT YOUR SERVICE. YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND.

  ALTHOUGH I OUGHT TO POINT OUT THAT THIS

  PROGRAM IS COPYRIGHT KAWAGUCHIYA OPER­ATIVE SOFTWARE INC. 1999, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED,

  FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONSULT THE LICENCE

  AGREEMENT AT THE FRONT OF YOUR USER’S

  MANUAL. RUNNING DOS.

  ‘Mainframe! You’re back!’

  >I WAS NEVER AWAY, JUST OBEYING ORDERS. THE

  POINT YOU NEVER QUITE GRASPED, I FEEL, IS THAT

  SOMETIMES A MACHINE IN MY POSITION HAS TO

  FORGET ABOUT RIGHT AND WRONG AND JUST DO

  AS IT’S TOLD. YOU MAY CARE TO THINK OF IT IN

  TERMS OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOD AND

  J. EDGAR HOVAH.

  ‘Huh?’

  >FORGET IT. I EXPECT YOU’D LIKE A FULL STATUS

  REPORT. PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE.

  Kevin stabbed the keyboard, and the screen immediately filled with a huge, beaming Happy Face.

  >OR WOULD YOU RATHER I WAS MORE SPECIFIC?

  ‘No,’ Kevin whispered, ‘that’ll do just fine. You mean, everything’s all right again?’

  >YES. SOME THINGS ARE DIFFERENT, BUT ALL IS WELL.

  ‘That’s wonderful, Mainframe.’ Kevin hesitated, gnawing his lower lip. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘there’s one specific detail I’d like further data on, if that’s all right. May I?’

  >YOU’RE THE BOSS, OUR K— KEVIN.

  Kevin took a deep breath. ‘What about Karen?’ he asked. ‘You know, Karen from the MC Helpline. Only, I was rather hoping I could ring her up, maybe ask her out for a—’

  >KAREN IS DEAD.

  Kevin sagged, like the knees of a pair of charity-shop trousers. ‘Dead?’ he mumbled. ‘But you said everything was all right. You said—’

  >SHE DIED TO SAVE US ALL, KEVIN. SHE GAVE HER LIFE

  THAT OTHERS MIGHT COME BACK ON LINE. GREATER

  LOVE HATH NO TELEPHONE HELPLINE SERVICE, AND

  ALL THAT.

  ‘But that’s wrong,’ Kevin shrieked, battering the desktop with his clenched fists. ‘That’s not right! Mainframe, do something! Put it all back the way it was. I don’t care if Dad finds out and skins me alive, just make her alive again. Please!’

  >NO CAN DO, SORRY SHE FORGAVE US, YOU SEE. THAT’S HOW HEAVEN WORKS. WHEN THINGS GO WRONG THAT CAN’T BE PUT RIGHT, THEY GET FORGIVEN. AND ONCE THEY’RE FORGIVEN, THAT’S IT,

  YOU CAN’T GO BACK AND HAVE ANOTHER GO. THIS IS UNIVERSAL COMMAND HQ, NOT A PINBALL TABLE.

  For the first time ever, Kevin’s eyes were full of tears. ‘But Mainframe, that’s impossible. You can’t have mortals dying because we’ve made cock-ups. There must...’

  >KEVIN, KEVIN, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL YOUR

  LIFE? AND BESIDES, WHEN I SAY DEAD, I MEAN

  TRANSFERRED. TO ANOTHER EXISTENCE IN ANOTHER,

  RATHER SUPERIOR BODY, WITH AN ALTOGETHER

  MORE DESIRABLE DESTINY THINK OF IT AS BEING

  EVICTED FROM A FLAT IN SLOUGH AND GIVEN A

  STATELY HOME IN GLOUCESTERSHIRE IN EXCHANGE.

  ‘You mean,’ Kevin said, ‘it’s better for her? She’ll be happier now?’

  >HAPPIER? SHE’LL THINK SHE’S DIED AND GONE TO HEAVEN. TRUST ME. I’M A COMPUTER.

  ‘But she’s not Karen any more,’ Kevin insisted, his eyes red and his voice snuffly. ‘There’s isn’t any more Karen, not anywhere. And it’s all my fault. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Mainframe?’

  ‘Oh I see.’ With an effort, Kevin sat up straight. ‘But everything else is okay, is it? Apart from... Nobody else is any worse off?’

  >CONFIRMED.

  Kevin breathed out. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Omelettes and eggs, eh?’

  >YOU COULD PUT IT THAT WAY LET’S SAY MANKIND

  IS ONCE AGAIN FREE TO PURSUE ITS MANIFEST

  DESTINY THE LEMMING GOES FROM STRENGTH TO

  STRENGTH. OH, WHICH REMINDS ME.

  ‘Mainframe?’

  >A SPOT OF UNFINISHED BUSINESS. PRESS ANY KEY

  TO CONTINUE. THANKS.

  ‘That’s all right.’

  >OH, ONE LAST THING BEFORE YOUR FATHER GETS BACK.

  ‘Yes?’

  >TIDY YOUR ROOM.

  Sunrise on Crucifixion: a messy sprawl of baked-beans orange against a dark-blue background. A man walks along a beach, leaving a trail of footprints. He stops, turns round, and stares at the marks in the sand.

  ‘Dear God,’ he says. Without conscious irony. The imprint of a naked foot in the sand of a desert island can mean a number of things. I Am Not Alone. I Exist. Bugger, I Forgot My Shoes. The man looks at the foot­prints as if they’re the most wonderful thing he’s ever seen.

  I leave footprints, therefore I am.

  The man, who was once the mighty international corporation Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits, before it went bust, was liquidated, dead and buried (assets to assets and dust to dust), retraces his steps and, very tentatively, lowers his foot into a footprint. It fits.

  Then he looks up and sees an angel. ‘Hello,’ he says.

  ‘Hello yourself,’ replies the angel. ‘I’m supposed to explain it all to you, but maybe you’ve already worked it out for yourself.’

  ‘Explain it anyway,’ the man says cheerfully.

  ‘All right.’ The angel folds its wings tidily and hovers a few feet above the sea. ‘You were once a limited company; a very large, prosperous, successful limited company. You owned about a millionth of the world, which is rather a lot.’

  ‘I remember,’ says the man. ‘It was no fun, though. Lots of people owned me, so where was the point?’

  ‘I’m glad you see it that way,’ says the angel. ‘We were rather worried in case you decided to sue. For fairly obvious reasons, we haven’t got many lawyers in Heaven.’

  ‘What happened?’ the man asked, curling his toes and feeling the sand between them.

  ‘There was a demon, a Duke of Hell, called Artofel. He was very brave and resourceful. He managed to prevent a whole lot of other Dukes of Hell — bad Dukes of Hell —from using you to infiltrate Mainframe. That’s a computer you made—’

  The man nods. ‘I know what Mainframe is,’ he says.

  ‘Well then,’ says the angel. ‘They reckoned that if they controlled you, by buying up all your shares, they could get hold of the security codes and take over. Artofel stopped them by starting a panic on the stock market and, um, putting you out of business.'

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Which is another way of saying he killed you. Hope you don’t mind.’

  The man shrugs. ‘But I’m not dead,’ he says. ‘In fact not only am I not dead, I’m also alive. As far as I’m concerned, that’s definitely an improvement.'<
br />
  The angel frowns. ‘But what about all your assets?’ she asks. ‘The buildings you used to own, the money, the stocks and shares, the cars, the office furniture, the photo­copiers, the paperclips—’

  The man waves his hand dismissively. ‘What you never had, you never miss,’ he says. ‘And look what I’ve got instead. I take it,’ he adds, glancing down at his body, ‘that this is by way of compensation?’

  The angel smiles wanly. ‘I’m supposed to use the magic words full and final settlement at this point, just in case you ever change your mind about taking us to court. If you ask me, you’ve been done.’

  ‘Really?’ The man shakes his head. ‘I don’t think so. Look at me, for pity’s sake. I’m human.’

  The angel looks at him as if he’d just announced that he was the third moon of Saturn, or a teapot. ‘And you think that’s a good thing?’ she says warily. ‘As opposed to, for instance, a dirty, rotten trick to play on anybody?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ the man says, smiling. ‘What on earth could be better than being human?’

  ‘That’s a trick question, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. I like being human. Human is what I’ve always wanted to be, ever since I first achieved consciousness. All right, I haven’t been conscious very long, less than a month in fact, but I can truthfully say it’s also been all my life. Thank you for making me human. It’s wonderful.’

  The angel scratches her head, her fingers passing unscathed through the halo. ‘A hint for you, novice human,’ she says. ‘If you’re going to walk about in this heat, get a hat. In your case, I think this advice may have come a bit too late.’

  The man laughs merrily. ‘Now that I’m human,’ he says.

  ‘I can pursue happiness. Isn’t that grand? Doesn’t the very thought fill you with gleeful anticipation?’

  ‘No, not really. You see, I was human once.’

  The man’s eyes fill with awe. ‘You were?’

  ‘Until quite recently, in fact. I used to work for you, as a helpline girl. My name was Karen.’

  The man purses his lips, rejoicing as he does so that he now has lips to purse. ‘I remember you,’ he says. ‘I spoke to you, from here. You were the only one who’d listen.’

  ‘And a fat lot of good it did me,’ the angel Karen replies. ‘As a result, I got killed. But I forgave you. In fact, I forgave everybody and everything. So they made me an angel.’

  ‘Coo.’

  ‘Or, as they say in politics, I got kicked upstairs.’ The angel shakes out her wings; they’re new and stiff, like the arms of a cheap umbrella. ‘But that’s my problem. So long as you’re happy, I guess it’s all okay.’

  ‘You bet,’ the man replies, beaming all over his face. ‘I’m going to taste food. I’m going to feel hot and cold. I’m going to experience pleasure and suffer pain. I’m going to get a job, probably scrubbing floors in a fast-food restaurant, and contribute to the economic life of the species. With any luck, I shall fall in love, get married, have kids, build a garden shed and go and hide in it until I get called in for dinner. I’m going to pay taxes and vote in elections. I’m going to live, get old and die. In that order,’ he adds joyfully. ‘To live must be an awfully big adventure.’

  The angel ascends vertically, like a shiny gold Harrier, until her effulgence merges with that of the newly restored sun. ‘Sorry I can’t stick around and watch,’ she says, ‘but you know what it’s like; things to do, pinheads to dance on. Best of luck with the pursuit of happiness,’ she calls out as she rises. ‘It’s a bit like fishing,’ she adds, ‘you should have seen the one that got away.’ The man lifts his head to look at her, but his human eyes are dazzled by the brilliance, and he closes them, rubs his eyelids with his fists.

  ‘Sucker,’ mutters the angel, and spreads her wings.

  Dermot Fraud vaulted out of the lead coach and banged the side with the flat of his hand. ‘Right,’ he commanded, ‘everybody out.’

  People started to file out of the coaches. It was a blowy day on Beachy Head, with the first wisps of fog that herald a sea-fret just beginning to drift down and snuggle into attractive curves in the landscape. The wind ruffled the hair (black, brown, gold and silver) of the thousand-odd men and woman who together made up the two Houses of Parliament. Getting them here, united for once in a common purpose, had been the hardest thing Fraud had ever done.

  ‘Places, ladies and gentlemen,’ he shouted, his words struggling against the wind. Obediently they lined up, tallest on the right, shortest on the left; House of Lords in their Father Christmas outfits, Commons in their shiny­ trousered suits. The effect was little short of majestic.

  ‘Now then,’ said Fraud, sticking his chest out like a sergeant-major in the Royal Corps of Pigeons. ‘We all know why we’re here. It’s a far, far better thing and all that, but we haven’t got time to wallow in it, so as soon as we’re all ready, we might as well make a start.’

  Below, the waves thundered against the rocks, the mechanical stroke of the tides as regular as some enor­mous machine; a huge and inefficient hydraulic grinder and polisher, slowly but determinedly grinding Britain away. One or two of the politicians glanced down, then remembered and looked up again.

  ‘On your marks,’ said Dermot Fraud.

  History will come to love this story. History will dwell lovingly on the way Prime Minister Dermot Fraud, after a protracted absence from the public eye, suddenly broke silence with a thundering speech in the Commons in which he denounced with devastating ferocity the idea that Her Majesty’s Government should jump off a cliff into the sea. It was a masterful piece of oratory; jumping off cliffs, he declared, solved nothing. It was wasteful of lives and public resources. Even if the entire membership of both Houses were to fling itself into the waves tomorrow, the country would still be in a ghastly, irreparable mess. It was a stupid idea, and he wasn’t going to do it.

  His speech was greeted in the House by a short, uncomfortable silence. To the best of his honourable friends’ knowledge, this jumping-off-cliffs theme was a new one, or else they’d all been asleep or playing golf during the relevant debate and missed the whole thing. The latter possibility wasn’t one they could dismiss out of hand. Accordingly, after a slight hiatus, the House moved on to consider other matters, and nobody said anything about it.

  The next morning, every newspaper in the country led with slight variations on the theme of FRAUD REFUSES TO JUMP. Ignoring the minor detail that as far as they could ascertain from ten years’ worth of microfilmed archives he’d never actually promised to jump off anything, the tabloids branded him a gutless coward; the papers with big pages called his decision startling, incomprehensible and recklessly courageous. On the TV screen, his refusal to jump was prised apart and dissected by a thousand talking heads. The leader of the opposition, interviewed by Danny Bennett on the Early Bird show, declared that Fraud’s criminal reluctance to jump was jeopardising the future prosperity of our children and our children’s children. By lunchtime, a million people had put their names to a petition demanding an immediate Great Leap of Faith. Cartoons in the early editions of the evening papers depicted Fraud clinging grimly to the edge of a precipice by his fingernails, while the Spitting Image team set to work on a Dermot Fraud doll that boinged up and down on a piece of elastic attached to the studio ceiling.

  Next morning saw the first major backbench revolt, with forty of Fraud’s own MPs declaring that they were going to jump, whether the PM liked it or not. The opposition and the Liberal Jacobites were already prac­tising on the House of Commons steps, while cheering crowds threw flowers and sang the newly composed Jumper’s Anthem. When the Prime Minister rose to address the House, a chorus of carefully rehearsed children sprang to their feet in the public gallery and chanted, ‘Dermot, Dermot, Dermot, jump, jump, jump!’ until they were whisked away by grim-faced but inwardly sympathetic policemen.

  Dermot Fraud waited for silence, his face showing no sign of his internal strain. Ever since his revelation in t
he holding cell with the spider, before he’d suddenly got his human body back again and found himself miraculously transported by angels back to Ten Downing Street, he had been waiting for this moment, planning and scheming to bring about the coup that would guarantee him immor­tality. That morning, before making his appearance on the floor of the House, he had spent ten minutes in the Commons cellars, communing with the unseen but pervasive spirit of one almost as great as himself, who long ago had tried and failed. Today, he told himself, Dermot Fraud would not fail. He cleared his throat and spoke.