Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  — You know what they’ve found?

  — What?

  — The operation of this thing?

  — I don’t know.

  — You couldn’t guess. And we’re not sure, because this is not firsthand. But by all accounts, the American security services, and ours, because ours depend upon theirs. This is what we’ve discovered: by manipulating it they manipulate grace.

  — Grace.

  — Grace, says the old man, and with this third iteration of the word he sits back in his chair and smiles. The curlicue grooves of his face buckle and chew, and his smile grows broader. It is alarming.

  — I didn’t realise you were religious, mumbles the young man.

  — You didn’t realise very much, returns the older, placidly, when you started on this project.

  The young man looks up from the table, and there’s a small flash in his eyes.

  — I didn’t, he says, realise I’d end up in prison, for instance.

  — So why do you think we’ve sprung you?

  The young man drops his eyes again, and shrinks back into himself, but he replies, in a low voice: - I should never have gone to prison. My team were scapegoats. We worked under ministerial licence, and carte blanche, on a weapons programme. If it weren’t for the cap (which is what the half-sky filling northern hemisphere blackness is now usually called) and the baying-for-blood media, and the ignorance of the public, then . . .

  He stops.

  — And anyway what, he asks, do you mean, grace? Grace? What’s that?

  — You know, says the older man, turning his right hand over and back and over as if signalling ‘so-so’ very slowly, Grace. Beautiful sunsets. That lovely tickle inside your chest on Christmas morning. The tremendous mystery.

  — What are you talking about?

  The old man sits forward, and his deep wrinkles settle on his face. Oh, he’s serious now.

  — The medium of matter, the medium which enables the plenitude of the material. You know what the S turned out to stand for? Spirit. That’s what we’ve been dabbling with, cutting and splicing. And the Chinese, by all accounts, have made a machine that includes a one-dimensional stretch of Spirit. And who knows what they can do by manipulating it? Do you think they can kill or heal? Bless or damn? Some of the reports are pretty hard to credit, actually. But it won’t stay under wraps forever. These things never do.

  There is a little more colour in the young man’s face as he looks up.

  — You always knew, he says, that we had been specifically tasked with developing an S-Bomb. The orders were sanctioned from the highest levels of government. We were doing what we were told to, up to and including organising tests. And then, when public opinion went sour, we were the ones hung out to dry. How many of my team are there even left?

  — Atonement, says the older man. That’s why you’re out, now. That’s what we’re preparing for. Sacrifice, atonement. Transgression and forgiveness. We’re working on the best information we have. But these are going to be the materials of the new dispensation.

  — Whose transgression? says the younger man, sharply. Whose forgiveness?

  — Another thing not in the news. A certain . . . organisation . . . claims to have sunk a working S-Bomb into the Atlantic east of the USA. If they detonate it at the right moment it’ll rip at twenty-five kilometres a second right through the world. It’ll set off catastrophic earthquake, oceanic storms, it’ll froth up atmospheric turbulence such as the world has never seen, before we leave it behind in space. We’re in negotiations with them about the sums of money they want not to do this.

  The young man is looking at the table again.

  — You understand what I mean?

  Nothing.

  — You think you have suffered? says the older man. You think your sufferings have even begun? This discovery, and these weapons, belong to a reality whose laws we understand in only the crudest way. But if its currency is atonement, then who is better placed to offer himself up to that than you? There have never been such dangers of death facing the world. Do you understand the ferocity of what you’ve done?

  — We didn’t mean . . .

  — Ask yourself again: why have we brought you out of prison? Why would we? How can you help? In what way can you atone?

  The young man stares a long time at the tabletop.

  The older man leans forward, and speaks in a rapid, low tone, as if pouring the words directly into the younger man’s ear. Listen, he says. Listen to me. It’s always been this way with bombs, on the one hand the rocket that hammers cities to powder, on the other the rocket that elevates human beings to the moon. It’s always been this way. Your little S-device has polluted a third of the night sky with opacity. Three more have been detonated now, spreading their ink. How could it not be the case that, understood properly, this same device will heal?

  The young man, eyes down, keeps staring.

  ~ * ~

  As they talk, the proprietor sits on a stool behind the reinforced cash register, reading the paper. This is the lead story: Experts say S-Bomb death spreading through the universe. This is the gist of the story, in which ‘cosmological expert Sanjit Bansal’ is quoted:

  If the universe were infinitely big and filled with an infinite number of stars, then the night sky would be white, because no matter which direction we looked out line-of-sight would end, eventually, with a star. There would be interstellar dust, of course, which you might think would occlude the lines of light, but in an infinite universe these would over time have heated up and incandesced. But we don’t see a white sky when we look up at night. So perhaps the cosmos is finite.

  But what if the S-Bomb technology is, like mathematics and nuclear power, something that every civilisation discovers in due course? What if there have been millions, or billions, of alien civilisations out there that have discovered the S-Bomb, and detonated them, and left behind billions of slowly expanding spherical blots of impenetrable blackness. What if the dark between the stars that we see when we look up is that. . . these inevitably unspooling spots of death, growing eventually to devour everything? What if that’s the truth of it?

  ~ * ~

  Another customer, and the proprietor folds the paper away and gets off his stool. A white porcelain mug, and the nozzle squirts in the black coffee. It covers the white circle at the base of the mug almost instantaneously.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Dantean

  Finally Avis stepped from the pinnacle of Purgatory. His stride took him over, and he put his feet onto the pliant medium of heaven itself. To have worked down through the torments of Hell, circle after circle - the stench, the air hurting the lungs with every breath - to the gate at the centre of the Earth, through the passageway. And to have laboured up the circular plateaus of the enormous mountain of Purgatory. He had achieved so much. His heart sang. It actually seemed to vibrate with joy, a pure, high, warbly sound like a finger running round the lip of a wine-glass. He strode several yards along the soft and transparent floor of the first heavenly circle. Somebody was singing. That was surely the noise, although it sounded more machine-made than human. It set the very hairs in the ears tingling.

  Before him, he could see a crystal forest, elegant trunks yearning upwards and exploding into diamante leaves, everything dripping and glittering with light. The forest positively dazzled with light. Absolutely everything up here was lit brightly, vividly, yet also warmly. It did not sting the eyes. There seemed to be no shadow anywhere, as if the whole sky were a benign, warm-blooded neon, pouring nourishing light from all sides at once. And, looking up between the stems of the trees, Avis saw the floor of the next circle, several miles above him, yet visible in perfect detail. It was as if his eyes functioned better: he could see the soles of people’s feet walking on that invisible floor, the shuddery fall of water from a tumbling waterfall falling in that higher zone, catching light and stabbing it beautifully in all dire
ctions, the broad zone of a river sweeping away to his right. And beyond that, above and above, each colossal cosmic sphere nestling inside each, reaching upwards through the bright-lit pale blue to the perfect rose of God itself. Everything was beautiful.

  ‘I’m in heaven,’ he called out, to the warm clear air. ‘Hey, I’m literally in Heaven!’

  He started running. All the claustrophobia, all that dark tooth-achey pain of Hell seemed impossibly distant from him now. He dodged through the fragile trees - were they the source of that eerie, lovely whine? Or a woman sitting in some crystal glade singing with more-than-human vocal range? A sublime image. He didn’t care. It was beautiful, beautiful. He laughed, sprinting tirelessly, flying through the clean air to land and spring away again.

  Eventually, he paused. He wasn’t tired, exactly, but he had the sense that he had run enough. He strolled onwards, and came to the edge of the crystal forest. The trees gave way to a broad meadow of white grass, like the blondest hair, the meadow, swaying in ripples with a rustle, as from air blown between pursed lips. The pale grass stretched down to a lake of lapis lazuli brightness. He wandered through the grass. It was hip-high. When he dandled his hand in it as he walked it felt soft against his skin.

  There were other people down at the lakeside.

  ~ * ~

  He sat next to a woman. ‘Hello,’ he said.

  She looked at him. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hi.’

  ‘My name’s Avis.’

  ‘Welsh,’ she said.

  Her body was as subtly different from the bodies he had seen on the terraces of Mount Purgatory as those bodies had been from the grossly physical bodies in Hell, Dalmatian-spotted with sores, reeking and saggy. It was still human in shape, two legs, two arms, trunk and head. But the skin was albino pale, rather unpleasantly so, and entirely without mark, blotch or hair. There were no toenails, and her fingernails had reduced to barely-visible upside-down bracket-marks on the end of her fingers. Her breasts were nipple-free swellings on the front of her body. There was nothing between her legs. Thighs connected into torso as innocently as a Barbie-doll. It looked, at first, as if she were wearing a very tight-fitting white plastic skin over her whole body, but Avis could see that it wasn’t that way. Only her face retained any features, and even those were smoothed and worn down like a pebble in a stream. Thin mouth, a pip-shaped nose, wide eyes almost circular. The barest hint of creases when she smiled. A single line, delicately carved, a millimetre under each eye.

  For a while Avis simply sat, watching the serenity of the water. There were half a dozen people on the lakeside, all of them either staring out at the water or lying back and looking up. A spark of joy passed through Avis’s internal wiring.

  ‘It’s so beautiful!’ he said.

  Welsh looked at him. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You need to understand,’ said Avis, hugging himself. ‘I’ve been through Hell: all the way through, all down into the filthy, disgusting, pain-ridden pit at the bottom. And then up the mountain of Purgatory - and that was no picnic. That was hard work. I feel I have, you know, earned being up here.’

  Welsh didn’t say anything in reply to this, so Avis sat in silence for a while. ‘Welsh,’ he said, trying the name out. ‘Where you from, then?’

  He was only trying to make conversation.

  ‘From?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, you know. Before you . . .’

  He trailed off.

  ‘Died?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘New Hampshire,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Avis. He was looking at his own hands. Their colour had faded, it seemed, to a coppery red. Was there, he wondered, no place in Heaven for blackness? Were they going to mutate him into a white man? The prospect was not an especially pleasant one to him, but, then again, he found he couldn’t get very upset over it. Perhaps that’s how it was, here in heaven.

  ‘You been here long?’ he asked.

  Welsh looked at him. ‘You’re just up from Purgatory,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Time is more acute down there. That’s kind of the point of Purgatory.’

  ‘You’re saying it doesn’t matter so much up here? Time, I mean?’

  Welsh looked away from him. ‘You could say that,’ she said, inattentively. ‘Not that it’s absent, exactly.’

  ‘I still can’t believe it,’ said Avis, looking around it. ‘I really can’t. I mean, Heaven! Really’

  ‘Yes,’ said Welsh. ‘Oh, hard to believe. I guess you get used to it. Or more used, at any rate.’

  ‘Did you come up through Purgatory?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I tell you, I’m headed further up,’ said Avis, firmly. ‘Further up.’

  ‘Good luck to you,’ said Avis, stretching herself in the grass. ‘Me, I’m going down.’

  ‘Down?’

  ‘You want to check off the possibilities,’ said the woman. ‘When I first got here - I mean, Homo sapiens sapiens, inquisitive man, all that. So I thought, one, I’m actually in Heaven. I died and came to Heaven, and it just turns out that the afterlife is, oh, exactly as Dante described it, down to the last hell-circle and heaven-sphere. But that seemed too outrageously implausible to me.’

  ‘Did I hear you right?’ asked Avis.

  ‘Then I thought that maybe the afterlife was, I don’t know, dependent on the individual consciousness. I took a class on Dante in my freshman year: classics of European Literature, it was called. Now, I didn’t think that his Divine Comedy made that much of an impact on me, but maybe it did, maybe it did subconsciously. But then I met people up here who’d never read Dante, who’d never heard of Dante. And that gave me pause again. So then I figured that it’s one giant computer simulation. All this is just data, just information, nothing else. But that doesn’t get me any further, because if it’s indistinguishable from the real thing then it is the real thing.’

  ‘Why would you want to go down?’ Avis pressed. Then, he added, ‘Is there somebody down there you want to - I don’t know, rescue?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’

  ‘Then why?’

  ‘Oh, they all do. I mean, I guess they all do.’ She made a vague gesture at the sky with her right arm. ‘I haven’t, like, done a survey or anything. Haven’t really spoken to any of them for a while, but I’d be surprised if any one stays up here too long. You went through Hell?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Avis, ‘and it was really nasty. I mean, really nasty.’

  ‘Oh, I know. But full of people, yes?’

  Avis nodded.

  ‘Wonder why?’

  ‘I guess I assumed that they’d all, I don’t know, committed sin. That they were being punished.’

  ‘We’ve all committed sins,’ said Welsh languidly. ‘They’re like us, down there. They could all purge themselves of their sins, make their way up Purgatory. That’s what it’s there for, Purgatory.’

  He looked at her. ‘Then why do they stay there? In Hell, I mean?’

  ‘They don’t, mostly. It does,’ she said, sitting up sharply, ‘make you wonder, doesn’t it? What is it that happens to the body with chronic pain? I don’t mean weeks or months, but, you know, centuries of pain? Does it polish the nerves smooth? An eventual wearing away of the capacity to experience pain as pain?’

  ‘Odd thing to say,’ said Avis, looking at her. ‘I can’t say I see what you mean.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, looking around again. The waters of the lake pulsed austerely at the diamond-sand shore, waves like silk curling over. ‘Haven’t you worked out the currency of this place? Its secret? You will, I guess. A year, ten, a thousand, a million. No, strike that, that’s absurd. A year, at the very most. A year is long enough.’

  ‘Secret?’

  ‘Craving,’ said Welsh, throwing a gesture out awkwardly with her right arm again to take in the various souls dotted around the lake’s shore. ‘Craving more sensation
. Souls crave sense data. The stronger the data the more information. Information is the currency of the universe. That’s what we’re hard-wired to desire.’

  ‘So you’re going voluntarily back down to Hell?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because you’re - what, bored?’

  ‘It’s not that exactly.’

  He stared at her. The images of Hell were still fresh in his mind. He couldn’t imagine anywhere he wanted less to visit. ‘You’re saying,’ he said, ‘that pain is more info-rich?’

  ‘Believe it,’ she said.