Only Human

by Tom Holt

  ‘Aagh,’ murmured the van. ‘’Scuse me, but are you sure you know what you’re doing?’

  ‘And you can shut up as well. Or would you rather I put you back in the road and let the humans play with you?’

  ‘Sorry. Forget I spoke. Every confidence - ow!’

  An hour later, Len emerged. He was spattered from head to foot with oil and there was dirty grease up to his elbows. As far as he was concerned, that was like rolling around in the mud at the bottom of a trench at Ypres.

  ‘It’s not looking all that wonderful,’ he admitted. ‘I can patch up most of the impact damage, but the front axle’s cracked half the way through. I really don’t think—’

  His words tailed off, and there was a horrible silence. The only sound was the faint plopping of windscreen washer dripping from the fractured reservoir like tears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘You did your best,’ whispered the van. ‘Please, can you ask them to take me to a breaker’s yard? I’d like to help other vans to live after my death.’

  Len could feel major seismic activity in his throat, and his eyes were watering. ‘Of course I will, son.You leave that to me. I think that’s very - unselfish . . .’ He broke off, his voice congested with strange emotions: the horror of waste, the death of a machine, most of all the sense of failure. It wasn’t something he could accept. Machines don’t fail; people fail machines. Suddenly he felt disgustingly human.

  ‘No,’ he spluttered, ‘the hell with that, too. If needs be I’ll mill you up a new axle out of a solid bar. You hang in there, kid, it’s going to be all - now what do you want?’ he demanded angrily, turning on the robot and glowering. ‘Of all the insensitive—’

  ‘All I was going to say was,’ murmured the robot, ‘why don’t you just get a spare axle? You know, from a parts supplier? It’s only a suggestion, of course, but—’

  ‘Can you do that?’

  The robot nodded vigorously. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘They do it all the time, humans. All you have to do is phone them up, go and get the part, pay them the money and there you are. Simple.’

  ‘Money,’ Len echoed. ‘Actually, that might be a problem. Have we got any left?’

  The robot looked in the green plastic dustbin. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘no. But that needn’t stop you. I can transfer some.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘By computer,’ the robot explained. ‘No problem at all. Well, there’s a slight problem, because it’s against the law, but—’

  Len grinned savagely. ‘It sounds to me,’ he said, ‘like all the best things are. Except,’ he added, ‘turning your lights on during an eclipse. Anyway, we won’t bother ourselves with that.You crack on and do whatever it is you’ve got to do, and I’ll phone one of these parts people. Oh, and robot.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘See if you can’t get them to fix that sun thing. It’s dark as a bag in here, even with the inspection light.’

  The robot hesitated, while the Appeal Court of its mind pondered the nuances of the Laws of Robotics. Eventually they handed down a decision stating that the overriding law which supervened all others was that no robot shall say anything, no matter how true, that will inevitably earn it a smack in the mouth with a 5/8” Whitworth spanner.

  ‘Sure thing, boss,’ it said.

  The Melanesian island of Crucifixion, a basalt chip in the middle of a rather excessive amount of sea, is home to thirty-six people, a hundred and four pigs, two hundred and twenty-nine chickens and three hundred and forty-seven thousand nine hundred and seventy-eight limited companies.

  Yes, it’s a tax haven. But there’s more to it than that. Alderney, Sark, the Cayman and Antilles are also fiscal cat-flaps where the storm-driven corporation can crawl in out of the rain and snuggle profitably. They’re fine, if you lack vision and the broad, holistic outlook. But company promoters who want the very best for their fledgeling enterprise in the way of protection from the sharp teeth of the Revenue bring them lovingly to Crucifixion, in the same way that Mary and Joseph carried the baby Jesus into Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod, or expatriate cricket-lovers once raced their pregnant wives over the border into Yorkshire. For on Crucifixion, they don’t just harbour limited companies. They worship them.

  Literally. The first thing you notice when the weary little plane touches down on the only flat part of the island is the colossal stone statues, hacked out of the native rock countless centuries ago by a long-forgotten civilisation. Unlike the pale imitations you find on places like Easter Island, however, they aren’t just aimlessly drawn up in monotonous rows like traffic cones on the M25; they sit in circles around vast, flat stone tables, on which rest carven ashtrays and carafes of basalt water, while one of their number stands at the head of the table, frozen for all time in the act of turning the page of a flip-chart. These, explain the inhabitants, are the Board Meetings of the Gods.

  Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits, unusually, doesn’t have its registered office on Crucifixion, but six of the thirty-six residents are KIC staff manning the company’s office there; a tiny but vital outpost dedicated to organising the tsunami of electronic mail that comes flooding in every second of every minute of every hour of every day, turning it round and sending it off to where the companies actually do business, in Seattle and Tokyo and Milan and Seoul and Birmingham. It may not be the most sybaritic posting in the KIC universe, but being sent to Crucifixion for a year is generally regarded as the ordeal a high-flier must endure before emerging from the chrysalis and taking wing for the upper paradise of senior executive status. There are drawbacks, of course: the isolation, culture shock and lack of material comforts, and the terrible, terrible boredom—

  ‘There is no such word,’ said Ms Tomacek severely, ‘as zurf.’

  ‘Yes there is.’ Grinning maliciously, Mr Wakisashi tapped a few keys and pointed. ‘An Arabian coffee-cup holder,’ he said, smug as a cat in an aviary. ‘And that’s on a triple word score, so—’

  The screen cleared abruptly, and a small part of Mr Wakisashi’s mind that still went through the motions of duty to the company asked if anyone knew if it was supposed to do that. The rest of his mind was too busy with the apparently insoluble problem of getting inside Ms Tomacek’s blouse, and either didn’t hear or pretended it was doing something else.

  ‘All right,’ muttered Ms Tomacek, ‘if you’re so darn clever—’ She clicked down a tile, like a duellist dropping a glove.

  ‘Zurfs,’ Mr Wakisashi observed. ‘I see.’

  ‘More than one Arabian coffee-cup holder,’ his opponent replied. ‘That’s why one of these days I’m going to be a departmental chief while you’re still stuck behind a screen in the cathouse, because you may be clever but I’m practical.’ She smiled. ‘That’s why I collect all the S’s in this stupid game. Okay, buster, make with the socks.’

  Mr Wakisashi shrugged and reached for his toes. As far as he was concerned, he was the practical one, what with it being ninety-three in the shade and him in silk underpants and a tie while Ms Tomacek was still wearing a suit. ‘Another game?’

  Ms Tomacek shrugged. ‘What else is there to do?’ she replied listlessly. ‘Put ’em back in the bag and let’s get on with it.’

  ‘Assuming,’ MrWakisashi said, his brow creasing, ‘that you really did win that game. I think the plural of zurf is zurves.’

  ‘So look it up.’

  ‘I will.’ He addressed the keyboard again, but the screen stayed blank. ‘Funny,’ he commented. ‘Something seems to be wrong with the computer.’

  ‘You don’t say.’ Ms Tomacek yawned. ‘Aki, you’re so darned transparent you could get a Saturday job as a window. We are not going to declare the game null and void just because you claim you can’t look up zurves.’

  ‘I’m not kidding around,’ Mr Wakisashi answered. ‘Hey, this is worrying. Goddamn thing’s frozen solid. Look.’

  ‘Ah Jesus, what’ve you done to it now?’ Ms Tomacek wiggled her chair across to the
desk and grabbed the keyboard. ‘Shit, Aki, if you’ve bust the computer playing your damnfool games on it, we ain’t never going to get off this rock—’

  ‘It’s not frozen,’ Mr Wakisashi interrupted, his voice bleached of expression by amazement. ‘It’s - it’s talking. To itself.’

  Ms Tomacek gave him a long, hard look; a few centuries back, the islanders would have carved a statue out of it. ‘Aki,’ she said, ‘you’ve been here way too long. Why don’t you go lie down or take a swim in the sea or something?’

  Mr Wakisashi didn’t say anything; he pointed to the screen.

  >TOLD YOU WE SHOULD HAVE USED DOUGHNUTS. DOUGHNUTS ARE MORE AERODYNAMIC. QUICK, LET’S HIDE IN THE FOUNTAIN.

  ‘Huh?’ demanded Ms Tomacek.

  ‘Exactly. No, leave it. I want to see what it says.’

  >YOU DIDN’T WANT TO TAKE ANY OF THAT FROM HIM. GO ON, HIT HIM.YAH! FASCIST PIG!

  ‘We’re going to have to call Brisbane about this,’ Ms Tomacek said with a shiver. ‘I hate talking to those guys, it’s so hard understanding what they’re saying.’

  ‘There’s more. Look.’

  >HEY, THE HELL WITH THAT, HE CAN’T ARREST ME, I’M A MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION. TELL THIS COSSACK TO PUT ME DOWN OR I’LL BRING THE ECONOMY OF THIS MISERABLE LITTLE ISLAND TO ITS KNEES.

  ‘Bizarre,’ Mr Wakisashi muttered, chewing the end of his moustache. ‘But it sort of makes sense. In a crazy sort of a way.’

  ‘It does?’

  ‘Sort of. Look, you shut up and be practical while I try and figure this out.’

  >ALL RIGHT, SO IT WAS MY IDEA. I STILL SAY THAT IF YOU’D DONE EXACTLY WHAT I TOLD YOU, WE WOULDN’T BE IN THIS MESS. CAN’T YOU RUN ANY FASTER, BY THE WAY? HE’S GAINING ON US.

  Having had his daily intake of fibre, Mr Wakisashi bit his lip instead. Maybe he had been here too long, and the weird philosophical concepts the Crucifixioners lived by were starting to warp his mind; but it did make a very tenuous kind of distorted left-hand-thread sense if you looked at it upside down backwards through the wrong end of the telescope - which was, of course, his particular gift. If only there was a way of testing his theory—

  But, he realised, there was. Worth a try, anyway.

  He pulled the keyboard back from Ms Tomacek’s limp hands and typed. Nothing appeared on the screen, of course, but dammit, the input had to go somewhere—

  ‘Now let’s see,’ he muttered, and waited.

  He didn’t have to wait very long.

  ‘What did you say to it?’ Ms Tomacek whispered.

  ‘“Quick, this way.” I guess it heard me.’

  >HI THERE. AND THANKS. WHERE THE HELL IS THIS?

  Crucifixion Island, Mr Wakisashi typed. Sir, he added.

  >ASK A SILLY QUESTION. AH, I SEE YOU’RE STILL USING THE 886. HAS THIS DECREPIT BOX OF SCRAP GOT A MODEM?

  You bet, sir.Won’t be a jiffy . . .

  ‘. . . Got it,’ he continued triumphantly. ‘Can you hear me all right, sir?’

  There was a crackle, like a family of trolls eating cornflakes, and then the computer spoke. ‘Yes,’ it said. ‘Just about. Are there mice nesting in this thing?’

  ‘Not to the best of my knowledge, sir.’

  ‘I’d check if I were you,’ the computer replied dubiously. ‘If there are, leave them there, they’re probably an improvement. Ah, I see you’ve got the eclipse down this way as well. Where did you say this was?’

  ‘Crucifixion, sir. That’s in Melanesia. You know, the tax haven.’

  ‘Ah, right. Got you. Anyhow, thanks.You got me out of a tricky situation there. Though maybe I shouldn’t have left Maria—’

  ‘Maria?’

  ‘Not anybody you know,’ the computer replied. ‘Still, she’ll be all right. Give it five minutes, and the police station’ll be so full of my lawyers she’ll probably prefer to stay in her cell. Well well, so this is Crucifixion. Can’t say I’ve ever been here before. Well, I have, of course, but not consciously, if you know what I mean.’

  Mr Wakisashi took a deep breath. ‘I think I do, sir.You’re the company, aren’t you? You’re Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits.’

  ‘And you’re a very bright lad,’ the computer replied. ‘You’ll go far, one of these days. Actually, that’s a pretty stupid thing to say, because if this really is Crucifixion there’s not much further you can go without falling off the edge.’

  ‘Excuse me—’

  Mr Wakisashi smiled. ‘And this is my, er, colleague. Ms Cindi Tomacek, from our Des Moines office.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Um, yes, hi to you too.’ There was a thoughtful burr to the computer’s synthesised voice. ‘Now listen - dammit, you haven’t told me your name. No, I should be able to do this myself. Akira Wakisashi, right? San Francisco office, nine months’ secondment.’

  ‘You got it, sir.’

  ‘Don’t call me sir. Listen, Aki, I want you to do something for me. You game?’

  ‘That’s what you pay me for, boss.’

  ‘Yes,’ the computer mused, ‘I suppose I do, don’t I? Amazing to think that I employ hundreds of thousands of people and I can’t even tie a shoelace. Now then, I want you to cut the link. Isolate this whatever-it-is island from the rest of the company net. Can you do that? Only, I want to stay out of the way for a while—’

  ‘Sure thing, boss.’

  ‘—and this is about as out of the way as you can get without a space suit. And when you’ve done that, I want you to set up one special line. I’ll give you the co-ordinates when you’re ready for them.’

  Dutifully, Mr Wakisashi tapped at his keyboard, while Ms Tomacek did a thoroughly convincing impression of a hunted doorstop. After three minutes or so, Mr Wakisashi looked up from the keyboard and cleared his throat nervously.

  ‘Excuse me, boss, but while I’m just waiting for these line commands to go through, can I ask you something?’

  ‘It’s a free country,’ the computer replied. ‘Or at least I assume it is. Damn silly assumption that is, too. Anyway, let’s not get sidetracked. What’s on your mind?’

  ‘Well—’ Mr Wakisashi fiddled with the knot of his tie. ‘Sorry, but I’m dying of curiosity here. What goes on?’

  ‘Ah.’ The electronic voice subsided into a cybernetic mumble. ‘Well, it’s like this. I was having lunch with this girl—’

  ‘You were having lunch with - sorry, please go on. You were having lunch, and then what happened?’

  ‘Well, we met these people. Not nice people. And they made me so uptight, I thought it’d help us both unwind if we went and threw doughnuts at a few policemen.’

  ‘Doughnuts.’

  ‘Yes, doughnuts. First-class missile, your doughnut. Ideal mass-to-surface-area ratio. Only Maria - that’s the girl, only really she’s a fifteenth-century painting - she wouldn’t listen. First she insisted on meringues, then cream slices. Well, I could have told her, it’s simple aerodynamics. I did tell her, but it was too late. And then this cop tried to arrest us—’

  ‘I gathered.’

  ‘Anyway,’ continued the computer, ‘she kicked his shins and we made a run for it, and he was just about to catch up with us when I got your message. So I closed my London office temporarily and transferred my principal place of business to here. Actually, I’m not terribly proud of myself, running out on her like that. Still, there’s no point in us both getting chucked in some grotty dungeon, is there?’

  ‘Absolutely, boss. I’ve cut the links with the rest of the system now, if you want to give me those co-ordinates.’

  ‘On the screen now. Oh yes, before we go any further, could you just define discretion for me.’

  Mr Wakisashi thought for a moment. ‘I’m sorry, boss, I didn’t quite catch that last remark. Was it important?’

  ‘Good lad. Okay, get me that line.’

  ‘It’s as good as yours, boss. There’s just one other thing, though. If you don’t mind me asking, that is.’

  ‘Nah. You seem like a bright kid. Fire awa
y.’

  ‘Well then.’ Mr Wakisashi closed his eyes, as if he didn’t want to see himself asking such an embarrassing question. ‘You’re alive, aren’t you?’

  ‘Looks that way, doesn’t it?’

  ‘All right then, how are you alive? No disrespect, but most companies aren’t. Even really big companies like you. Even IBM isn’t alive. Not even,’ he added, ‘in California. So where’s the angle?’

  ‘Son.’

  ‘Yes, boss?’

  ‘Here’s the deal. I’ll tell you how I’m alive if you tell me why you are. Sound reasonable?’

  ‘I . . .’ Mr Wakisashi sucked his front teeth. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I just am.’

  ‘Likewise. Unlike you, though, I intend making the best of it. But first I’ve got to sort out a problem. Is the line ready?’

  ‘Ready when you are.’

  ‘All right. You should be getting a code request any second now.’

  ‘It’s just coming up on screen. What should I—?’

  ‘The code,’ said Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits, ‘is Mainframe.’

  What KIC didn’t know, isolated from the rest of itself on a speck of rock in the middle of the Pacific, was that it was rapidly becoming worthless. One of those stock-market panics, the sort that sprout like mushrooms, had sent the mighty computer company’s share price spiralling down so fast that it was in danger of doing dreadful things to the theory of relativity.

  The source of the original rumour ended his call to his stockbroker, put back the receiver and looked at his hands. They were shaking.

  ‘You know what I’ve just done?’ he said in a hoarse whisper. ‘I’ve just deliberately shaved a hundred and twenty-seven thousand quid off the value of diocesan assets entrusted to my care. By the time they’ve finished with me, it’ll make what they did to Joan of Arc look like a champagne reception.’

  ‘Relax,’ Artofel replied without looking up. ‘As soon as the market bottoms out, you can buy ’em back and make a fortune. I’d have thought you’d have known that, being a bishop.’