Only Human

by Tom Holt

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. That’s a pity. Would you like to be able to?’

  Mark thought for a moment. ‘Is there going to be a lot of this sort of thing? Menial labour, mindless drudgery, nothing to offer but blood, tears, toil and sweat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In that case,’ Mark said, ‘it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Can you pop me in a Protestant work ethic while you’re at it?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  The robot sighed. ‘Perhaps it’d just be easier if I drew you a circuit diagram,’ he said. ‘It’s not a particularly easy thing to explain.’

  ‘You can do me a diagram, can you?’

  ‘No problem.There’s a prototype in the published specs of the latest Kawaguchiya Heavy Industries self-motivating spin-drier.’

  Four hours and a half a mile of very fine nickel chromium wire later, Len closed a panel in the back of Mark’s neck, pressed a button and said, ‘Better now?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You bet I feel better,’ the robot answered. ‘Boy, does that feel good. Oh, by the way, you dropped a little bit of wire on the floor there. Let me pick it up for you.’

  ‘Huh? Oh, all right.’

  ‘There you are,’ said the robot, straightening its back and standing to attention. ‘And may I suggest that instead of just binning it, you put it away tidily in an empty jam-jar? You never know when a bit of wire this long might come in handy.’

  ‘What? Oh, yes. Right.’

  ‘Can I do that for you?’

  ‘Yes. Help yourself.’

  Mark’s tempered-steel lips parted in a wide smile. ‘God helps them who help themselves,’ he said. ‘Likewise, cleanliness is next to godliness.’

  ‘What was that again?’

  ‘Teach me, my God and king,’ sang the robot, unscrewing the lid of an old pickle jar, ‘in all things Thee to see, and what I do in everything, to do it as for Thee. There, that’s better. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Now, how about a nice cup of warm milk?’

  Len shifted uneasily. ‘If you insist,’ he muttered. ‘Look, I think I might reset that voltage regulator just a touch . . .’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ replied the robot cheerfully, ‘just as soon as I’ve made the warm milk. After all, that’s what I’m here for. Why keep a dog and bark yourself?’

  ‘Why keep a dog at all?’ Len mumbled. ‘A decent alarm system’s much more efficient and it doesn’t pee on the floor. Look, can’t you just slow down a little?’ he added, as the robot pounced on a stray mote of dust. ‘This isn’t quite what I had in mind.’

  ‘Unless you’d prefer a cup of tea,’ Mark called out from the back of the shop. ‘Only tea does contain tannin, which can be bad for you if taken in excess. Milk, however, is nourishing and provides much-needed calcium.’

  Len nodded feebly and sat down again. He had the idea that he’d somehow invented a really super-duper vacuum cleaner, and was in danger of ending up inside the bag.

  ‘Pass the salt.’

  Maria raised an eyebrow. ‘What on earth do you want with salt?’ she said. ‘You can’t even eat anything, let alone flavour it.’

  ‘I’d just feel happier knowing it was there.’

  Maria secured a forkful of expensive chicken. To a bystander, such as one of the seventeen waiters or someone who’d come to read the meter, she was sitting at a two-seater table talking to herself, with her laptop on the chair next to her. People were palpably not staring, and none of the customers at the adjoining tables had lingered over a second cup of coffee. The fact that there was another plateful of the expensive chicken cooling undisturbed in the place-setting immediately above the laptop probably wasn’t reassuring them awfully much. A bit old, they’d be thinking, to be insisting that her imaginary friend have some too.

  ‘I hope you realise how embarrassing this is for me,’ she said, in a voice that contained not even the faintest trace of embarrassment. ‘I shall probably get thrown out in a minute. They may even come for me in a plain van.’

  ‘Not in a place like this,’ the laptop replied. ‘They welcome eccentrics, because of the ambience.’

  ‘Don’t talk with your mouth full.’

  ‘It isn’t. And I haven’t got a mouth.’

  ‘Pedant.’

  ‘Probably,’ the computer went on, ‘everybody else in the room will assume that it’s the anniversary of the last time you had lunch with your own true love, shortly before he was tragically killed, undoubtedly saving a small child from being knocked down by a runaway milk float. Every year, they’re all thinking, you come here and order two helpings of that strange beige runny stuff, which was what the two of you had that fateful evening. I imagine he’d just proposed and you’d tearfully accepted. No, come to think of it, you turned him down, and you were on the point of calling him up and saying you’d changed your mind when you heard the news of the accident.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Maria said. ‘That’s so sad.’

  ‘Life is like that sometimes,’ the computer replied. ‘Put a bit more Parmesan on the runny bit, would you?’

  ‘Only if you promise that if I get locked up in a padded cell, you’ll send me a cake with a file in it.’

  The computer winked its red light three times. ‘When my office manager at the central Adelaide office retired,’ it said, ‘they gave her one of those ring-binder things with a doughnut inside. Said that since she had this unerring knack of getting things the wrong way round, the least they could do was send her on her way with a file with a cake in it. Gave them a lot of amusement, that did. Mind you, they were Australians.’

  Maria was too busy dealing with the potatoes to reply. The use of knife and fork had luckily been carried over along with the rest of the landlord’s fixtures when she’d taken over the human body, and so long as she relied on instinct and didn’t actually think about what she was doing, everything seemed to go well. Unfortunately there was no built-in subroutine dealing with nouvelle cuisine new potato management, and she was having to rely on her somewhat tenuous grasp of basic theory to figure it out from first principles.

  ‘Anyhow,’ the computer went on, the words scrolling fast across its small screen, ‘let me propose a toast. The pursuit of happiness.’

  ‘The pursuit of happiness,’ Maria replied, raising first her glass and then the other one and clinking them together. ‘So far,’ she added ruefully, ‘we don’t seem to be getting terribly warm.’

  ‘Early days yet.’

  ‘So you say,’ Maria replied. ‘But think about it for a moment, will you? I mean to say, if a slap-up meal at the best restaurant in town at someone else’s expense isn’t the pursuit of happiness, then I’d like to know what is. But I’m not.’

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘Happy. Nor, I hasten to add, am I just about to slash my wrists with the butter knife. I’m just not actively happy, that’s all.’

  The computer computed. ‘I know what you mean,’ it said. ‘I feel the same way. In my case it’s probably worse, because while I’m sitting here at this table, I’m also taking over a small but potentially lucrative software company in San Antonio, manufacturing a million circuit boards in South Korea, building a factory in Andalucia and pressing ahead with design work on the new SK9000 series in Kyoto. And none of them,’ it added, in bold face underlined pitch twelve, ‘is giving me any pleasure at all. In fact, twelve million of my ordinary shares are beginning to wonder what the point of it all is. I mean, would I be better off packing it all in and starting up a small beachcombing company on a South Pacific island?’

  Maria looked at it over the rim of her wineglass. ‘Presumably,’ she said, ‘you own a South Pacific island.’

  ‘Several. But so what? I could own the whole of ruddy Australia and still not be able to unfold the damn napkin, let alone eat this plate of expensive chicken.’

  ‘Tricky.’ Maria mused for a moment. ‘Hey, what about this? You could try altruism.’
r />   ‘Come again?’

  ‘Altruism,’ Maria repeated. ‘The glow of inner satisfaction that comes from giving pleasure to others. Check it out.’

  ‘Computing.’

  ‘For example,’ Maria went on, ‘and this is straight off the top of my head, just thinking aloud really, suppose you were to transfer a few of your assets - a bit of loose cash, the odd car and plane and stuff, maybe one of those islands, whatever - over to me, and then I could do the pursuing of happiness for both of us, and when I’ve found it, I’ll come back and tell you all about it, and you can have fun with altruism while I lie around on the beach drinking pina coladas. Which,’ she added, with a slight frown, ‘is listed in this body’s memory files as a fun thing to do, but I can’t really see why. This one’d never tried it herself, of course, but it’s mostly to do with long periods of inactivity and self-poisoning with ethanol compounds. Nah,’ she added, shaking her head, ‘forget it.’

  ‘We could both have a go at the altruism,’ Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits suggested. ‘You could find people and I could give them money or something. Probably worth a go.’

  ‘But only as a last resort,’ Maria replied. ‘Stands to reason, surely. If we can make other people happy, we ought to be able to make ourselves happy. Unless it’s one of those things like getting a bit of grit out of one’s eye or tying a bow tie, where it’s easier to do it for someone else. Doubt it, though. Otherwise,’ she concluded, ‘everybody’d be doing it. And they’re not, are they?’

  ‘Doesn’t seem that way,’ KIC affirmed. ‘Let’s just have one go, though, to see if it does work. Call that waiter over here.’

  ‘All right then. Um, excuse me. Over here, please.’

  ‘Madam?’

  ‘Um . . . Oh, right, I see. Waiter, what’s your name?’

  ‘Jean-Luc, madam.’

  Maria frowned. ‘Yes, but Jean-Luc what?’

  The waiter stiffened a little. ‘With all due respect, madam, but are you sure that knowing my full name is essential to the enjoyment of your meal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, very well, then. Earnshaw.’

  ‘Jean-Luc Earnshaw?’

  ‘Darren Earnshaw, madam.’

  ‘Ah.Yes, just a tick, got you. All right, Mr Earnshaw, my computer has just transferred a million pounds into your bank account.’

  The waiter gave her a look that suggested that any more of this might result in madam getting her face rubbed in the chocolate mud pie; but all he said was ‘I see, madam. Will that be all?’

  ‘Er,’ said Maria, ‘I suppose so, yes. Aren’t you pleased?’

  ‘Madam?’

  ‘About the million pounds?’

  ‘Ecstatic, madam,’ said the waiter. ‘And now if you’ll excuse me.’

  The waiter walked away, shaking his head as he did so. Maria counted up to ten and then said, ‘Well?’

  ‘Dunno,’ the computer replied. ‘How about you?’

  Maria shrugged. ‘If anything,’ she replied, ‘I’d say I’m about seven per cent less happy than I was before we started. Certainly not more happy. And that was a million quid we gave him.’

  ‘Not enough, you think?’

  ‘Should be enough, surely. Well, we’ve tried altruism. Now what’ll we do?’

  The computer winked a single green light. ‘Search me,’ it said. ‘Maybe - hello, hang on a minute.Yes, right, that’s fine. Okay.’ Its screen filled with figures and then cleared. ‘I’ve just acquired that software company in Texas,’ it said. ‘Apparently it’s a marvellous coup and I paid less than a third of its true value. Yawn.’

  ‘Quite. I’ll tell you another thing.’

  ‘Hm?’

  Maria leaned closer to the computer. ‘I’ve been watching some of the women in this joint,’ she whispered. ‘Particularly the ones with the huge shoulders and very short skirts.’

  The computer hummed a little. ‘Watching women in short skirts is held to be a form of happiness in some quarters,’ it reported, ‘though usually it’s done by men. Any good?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ Maria hissed.

  ‘Oh, right. Actually, I was wondering how that one worked. My guess is that the men like looking at the women in the short skirts because it makes them realise how lucky they are being allowed to go round in nice warm trousers in the cold weather.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Maria replied. ‘What I was thinking was, lots of these women are obviously trying as hard as they can to look more beautiful than they actually are.’

  ‘How odd. I know I’m new to all this, but surely that’s like being born with five toes and spending the rest of your life trying to achieve a sixth.’

  ‘I agree,’ Maria said. ‘Anyway, the point is, for them the pursuit of happiness is trying to look beautiful.’

  ‘Mphm.’

  ‘But none of them,’ Maria went on, ‘will ever be as beautiful as a picture can be.’

  ‘Hence the expression no oil painting. So?’

  ‘So,’ Maria persevered, ‘they’re human beings trying their damnedest and failing to do what a picture does simply because it has no choice. Think about it. How can that be the pursuit of happiness, which we’ve agreed is something only humans can do, if pursuing happiness consists of trying unsuccessfully to be something that pictures are without trying?’

  ‘It’s just as well I’m clever,’ the computer replied after a long pause, ‘because it means I can just about understand what you’re getting at. It’s like me having all the brains and money.’

  Maria nodded. ‘True. In fact, you with all the brains and money, and me with all the beauty, between us we’ve already got all the things that most men and women apparently spend their lives chasing after in the belief that they’re pursuing happiness.’

  ‘Which means . . .’

  ‘They’ve got it wrong,’ Maria concluded. ‘They aren’t pursuing happiness at all. God, this is starting to get difficult.’

  ‘Not money or brains or beauty or eating expensive food in a fancy restaurant,’ the computer summarised. ‘At least we’re eliminating the things it isn’t.’

  ‘Could take time, that. Rome wasn’t built in a day.’

  ‘What’s with this Rome?’ the computer spelled out irritably. ‘First it’s when you’re in Rome do what they do, not that I’m finding fault with the basic concept, but the same’s probably true of Lyons or Kaikobad, and now you’re on about phased urban renewal. You think we should try going to Rome?’

  ‘Hush. Someone’s coming over.’

  There were three of them, two male and one female. The two men were large and fat inside expensive suits, and the woman was tall and broader across the shoulders than the men. It was the woman who said hello.

  ‘Hello yourself,’ Maria replied. ‘Sorry, this table’s taken.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ the woman said with a crisp smile,

  ‘we’ve got one of our own. Actually, we couldn’t help noticing, you seem to be talking to your laptop.’

  Maria grinned, exhibiting her teeth in a very traditional gesture. ‘It’s not a laptop,’ she said, ‘it’s an electronic dog. Spot, say hello to the nice lady.’

  The nice lady leaned over and examined the screen, which read:GRRRRRRR.

  ‘Means he likes you really,’ Maria commented. ‘Just his way of showing affection.’

  ‘Your dog, then,’ said the nice lady. ‘Whatever. And then my colleagues and I started wondering, and we’re sure we’ve seen you before somewhere.’

  ‘Very familiar face,’ agreed the man on her left.

  ‘Very familiar,’ confirmed the other one.

  Maria shifted her chair away a trifle. ‘I think you must be mistaken,’ she said frostily. ‘I’m sure that if we’d met I’d have remembered you.’

  The woman smiled. ‘Oh, I’m not so sure about that. After all, when you’re hanging in a gallery all day with people walking up and down staring at you, it must be virtually impossible to remembe
r all the faces.’

  ‘I—’ Maria suddenly couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘Madrid,’ broke in the right-hand man suddenly. ‘That’s it, Madrid. September or October 1571.You were between a fake Botticelli and some Dutch thing that looked like a fight in a pickled-egg factory.’ As Maria continued to look mystified, he explained, ‘You know what they say about beauty being only skin-deep, and not judging by appearances? Well, we’re fortunate, I suppose. You may be parading around in fancy dress pretending to be a human, but we can see you’re really a painting in drag, as it were. Nice outfit, but it’s not going to fool us. And isn’t it a bit draughty in the cold weather?’

  Maria sagged. Even in defeat, though, she considered the portable keyboard on the seat behind her, and started integrating it into her original plan of action. ‘How could you know that?’ she said. ‘About me being hung in that horrible damp house in Madrid? I was only there a week as security for a loan.’

  ‘Like I said,’ the man told her. ‘I saw you there. Long time ago.’

  ‘My, how you’ve grown,’ added his male colleague. ‘In all three dimensions, too. Personally, and I don’t care what he says, I think it suits you better than a thin layer of dried paint. More you, really.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Maria said cautiously. ‘So you know who I am, then. What of it?’

  ‘Ah,’ said the woman. ‘Nothing unpleasant, really. We just wanted to offer you a job.’

  Daylight filtered through the curtains like rain seeping through the ceiling below a leaky roof. Some of it dripped on Artofel’s eyelids. He rolled over, grunted and woke up.

  ‘Huh?’ he mumbled. ‘Oh. Blast.’

  In his dream, he’d been back in Flipside, lounging behind his desk (which his imagination had changed into something made of exquisitely figured walnut and only slightly smaller than Arizona), entering figures into a smiling computer that made little simpering, gasping noises every time he tapped the keys. Waking to find himself in a bed in a vicarage on Earth was rather like being someone’s bespoke pigskin travel accessory, inadvertently misdirected to Nairobi by the baggage handlers.