The Holy Machine E-Book

Chris Beckett

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 345

Beschreibung

George Simling has grown up in the city-state of Illyria, an enclave of logic and reason founded as a refuge from the Reaction, a wave of religious fundamentalism that swept away the nations of the twenty-first century. Yet to George, Illyria's militant rationalism is as stifling as the faith-based superstition that dominates the world outside its walls.For George has fallen in love with Lucy. A prostitute. A robot. She might be a machine, but the semblance of life is perfect. To the city authorities, robot sentience is a malfunction, curable by erasing and resetting silicon minds. But George knows that Lucy is something more.His only alternative is to flee Illyria, taking Lucy deep into the religious Outlands where she must pass as human because robots are seen as mockeries of God, burned at the stake, dismembered, crucified. Their odyssey leads them through betrayal, war and madness, ending only at the monastery of the Holy Machine...

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in the United States of America in 2004 by Wildside Press.

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2010 byCorvus, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Chris Beckett 2004.

The moral right of Chris Beckett to be identified as the authorof this work has been asserted in accordance with theCopyright, Designs and Patents act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and eventsportrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imaginationor are used fictitiously.

First eBook Edition: January 2010

ISBN: 978-0-857-89049-8

Corvus

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

26-27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

For my parents.

Two creative people, full of curiosity about life.

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

1

Perhaps I should start this story with my escape across the border in the company of a beautiful woman? Or I could begin with the image of myself picking up pieces of human flesh in a small room in a Greek taverna, retching and gagging as I wrapped them in a shirt and stuffed it into my suitcase. (That was a turning point. There’s no doubt about that.) Or, then again, it might be better to begin with something more spectacular, more panoramic: the Machine itself perhaps, the robot Messiah, preaching in Tirana to the faithful, tens of thousands of them clutching at its every word?

But I think I will begin with a summer night when I was twenty-two years old. (Here I am, look, at twenty-two, fumbling for my key on the landing outside our Illyria City apartment, my briefcase tucked awkwardly under my arm… ) I didn’t know it at the time but it was on this night that my strange journey began.

I had been working late in my office at a company called Word for Word. I was a translator and my job was to assist with the language side of the various trade transactions that took place between our strange Balkan city-state and the hostile but impoverished territories that surrounded us. (Seven different languages were by then spoken within a radius of two hundred kilometres – and at least that many religions were fervently practised, each of them claiming to be the final and literal truth about everything.) There were some rewards involved in working as long hours as I did but the real reason was that I had nothing else to do, and even the office late at night felt more like home than the bleak apartment that I shared with Ruth.

Ruth was my mother. I always called her Ruth. She never liked the idea of being mum. I was conceived quite accidentally in a boat full of frightened refugees crossing Lake Michigan. My parents were complete strangers to one another, but just that once they clung together for comfort. I believe it was the only sexual encounter of Ruth’s adult life.

‘Ruth?’ I called as I opened the door.

But as usual she didn’t answer because she was suspended in her SenSpace suit, jerking back and forth like a puppet as she wandered in the electronic dreamworld. It was something she seemed to do now almost all the time except when she was sleeping or at work She was getting very thin, I observed coldly as I glanced into the SenSpace room and saw her threshing around in that lattice of wires. SenSpace food might look and even taste good – they had recently found ways of projecting olfactory sensations – but it could never fill you up.

I ordered my own meal and a beer from the domestic, an old X3 called Charlie, which we’d owned since my childhood. He trundled patiently off to the kitchen on his rubber tyres. (Getting him repaired was increasingly difficult, but we hung onto him anyway. He was one of the family, perhaps even its best-loved member.) While the meal was heating up, I wandered out onto the balcony with the beer. We were fifty floors up and it was a fine view. You could see the sea in one direction and glimpse the bare mountains of Zagoria in the other. But all around us were towers of steel and glass. Our Illyria was a city of towers, built by the best engineers and scientists on the planet as a homeland for themselves, and a refuge from the religious extremists of the Reaction, from which Ruth and her generation had fled.

I was very lonely in those days. I spoke eight languages fluently, but I had no one to talk to and nothing to say. I didn’t know how to be a part of the world. And as for Ruth, she didn’t even want to be. We were both of us creatures of fear. High up there in the steel canyons of our city, I would even try to derive some sense of comfort and company from the little lights of other apartments across the void, and try to persuade myself that the flashing signs in the commercial sector were speaking personally to me.

DRINK COCA-COLA!

RELY ON MICROSOFT!

WATCH OUT FOR CHANNEL NINE!

Then Charlie called me in for my meal and I sat in front of the TV and flipped on the news. In Central Asia, new religious wars were in the air and crowds were streaming round and round that hideous statue that bleeds real blood donated by the faithful, chanting ‘death! death! death!’ In Holy America, where Ruth grew up, new laws had restricted the franchise to ‘God-fearing male heads of Christian families’ and introduced the death penalty for promulgating the sinful doctrine of Evolution.

I flipped channels. Our TV held all programmes broadcast in the last twenty-four hours on its hard disc, so you could flip backwards and forwards as well as sideways. I hopped to and fro: random moments from a movie, a documentary about discontinuous motion, a sitcom…

Then I came to Channel Nine and was suddenly captivated by the image of an amazingly pretty woman, with lovely gentle eyes.

I didn’t know it then of course, but it was Lucy.

It was actually a programme about syntecs, robots that were coated with a layer of living flesh. They were virtually identical to people, except in the one important respect that, unlike the foreign ‘guestworkers’ who were the working class of our city, but like all other robots, they could be programmed. They did not have a personal or a cultural history. They did not have the virus of irrationality and superstition which seemed to have infected ordinary uneducated folk throughout the world.

The government’s long-term intention was to use robots to replace the guestworkers altogether, removing from our midst a dangerous fifth column for the Reaction. Thousands of human workers – Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Albanians, Russians, Indians, Filipinos – had already been sent away. Of course most of the robots who took over their jobs were fitted with plastic skins at best, and many bore no serious resemblance to human beings. But syntecs had been specifically developed to provide those services that were thought to require a ‘human’ touch. Wealthy people acquired syntec domestic servants, for example, and some prestigious offices acquired beautiful syntec receptionists. They were a luxury item.

Inevitably there were also syntec sex workers. (Communication satellites, computers, the printing press: human beings always find a sexual angle.) Lucy was a syntec prostitute, though they were known officially as Advanced Sensual Pleasure Units, or ASPUs for short. The TV programme explained that ASPUs were entirely beneficial to society. They harmed no one, they could not themselves experience suffering and there was no empirical evidence to support the contention that their existence might encourage crimes against women. Quite the contrary was true, apparently. They had reduced the incidence of rape and they also helped prevent the spread of venereal diseases. Only superstitious notions of right and wrong could prevent anyone from seeing they were a thoroughly good and rational thing.

But never mind all that. The image of Lucy had touched me. It had touched a raw place inside me and I was suddenly disturbingly aroused by the idea that she not only existed but was readily and easily available. I could hold her in my arms tomorrow… And there could be no rejection, no complications, no one to disappoint…

I flipped back to see her again, curled up in her lacy negligee on the corner of a sofa. She might not really be alive, but the semblance of life was perfect. So was the sweetness and the softness and the grace.

Make allowances, if you can, for the fact that at that time I had never been held by another human being. As a child my main companion was Charlie, our X3, with his rubber tyres and his vocabulary of fifty sentences. I used to have him ‘sleep’ by my bed.

I let the programme run on again in real time. It was called NOW! and was a nightly current affairs round-up which gave the official government line. At the end of it Channel Nine shut down, as it always did, with the image of President Ullman, the father of our state.

He was a giant of a man, a bleak man, a man of granite. Back in America, in the terrible early days of the Reaction, Christian mobs publicly flogged him and his wife to unconsciousness for refusing to recant their work on in vitro fertilization. Mrs Ullman had died.

Now every night he was shown at close-down, grimly crumbling a clay figurine of a human form into dust. Look! There is no soul, there is no spirit, there is no ghost inside the machine.

Of course I had seen it too many times for it to make any conscious impact on me. But on this particular night I thought I’d take one more peek at the pretty robot before I went to bed and, for no particular reason, instead of just flipping back to the previous programme I got the machine to run backwards.

I saw the dust streaming upwards from the table and assembling itself miraculously in Ullman’s hands, into a human form.

And the dour old rationalist was transformed into something like the Christian God.

2

Ruth had gone to sleep in SenSpace again. Her body dangled from its wires, her helmeted head slumped forward. She would get pressure sores if she wasn’t careful.

I called to her, then went over and shook her. I did it quite roughly. I resented having to look after her.

‘Oh George, it’s you,’ she said, lifting the face piece and blinking at me with her owlish eyes. ‘I must have gone to sleep. Can you get me out of here?’

I sighed, unzipped her and helped her out of the dangling suit. I hated this job because she always got in there naked in order to achieve maximum contact with the taxils.

She was so little and thin. She had no breasts and barely any pubic hair. When I lifted her down it was as if I was the parent and she was the child. And yet if you looked carefully at her belly you could see the traces of my Caesarian birth.

I looked away from her and wrapped her up quickly in the robe that she’d left lying on the floor.

‘You should eat more and spend less time in there, Ruth. You’re not doing yourself any good at all.’

‘Oh I’m so tired George, could you just take me through to my room?’

‘Carry you? Again?’

‘Please.’

‘Goddamit Ruth, you must eat! You’re wasting yourself away!’

But I carried her through anyway, tucked her in bed, sent Charlie through with her knockout pills, and stood and watched her while she curled up in a foetal position and began to sink back down towards sleep.

‘Please, please sleep,’ I whispered.

I was exhausted myself, and drained, and wretched. I longed for my own bed, my own oblivion…

‘Please, just sleep…’

And it really did begin to look as if for once she would do just that.

But then, no, it was not to be. My whole body clenched as I saw her shoulders beginning to shake.

‘Just sleep for fuck’s sake, Ruth!’ I wanted to scream at her, but I bit my tongue.

And as the little whimpering sobs began to come, I made myself cross the room again and sit down on her bed and hold her hand.

‘There, there,’ I repeated mechanically, ‘there, there, there…’

I don’t know much about her childhood. Something frightening must have happened to her I suppose, because I believe the reason she chose a career in science was that it was neutral, factual, safe – far away from the painful and messy business of human life. (That’s how science seemed to people in the days before the Reaction.)

She shut herself in her laboratory in Chicago with her robot assistant Joe and she worked and worked and worked, going home alone in the evenings to a neat little apartment where she tended her houseplants and her collection of Victorian china cups…

In India, the Hindu extremists massacred the industrial elite. In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox came to power in a coup, in Central Asia the vast statue of the Holy Martyr was constructed in Tashkent and every day thousands of pilgrims gave blood to keep its wounds eternally flowing… But Ruth came into work at eight every day and extracted DNA from genetically modified chicken embryos, hardly passing the time of day with anyone but Joe.

Then the Elect came to Chicago. They held mass prayer meetings at which thousands turned to Jesus and to their cause, they roamed the streets looking for the abortionists, the homosexuals, the unbelievers… Fired by fierce preachers, the ordinary people of America were rising up against the secular order that had taken meaning away from their lives. The police stood by. The authorities looked away. Everyone could see that a dam had broken. Even the President tried to make his peace with the Elect.

And Ruth had a cup of coffee at 11 a.m. and took ten minutes out to read her porcelain collectors’ magazine. She refused to hear the chanting in the street. She refused to notice the burning houses that could be clearly seen from her fourth-floor laboratory window. Until suddenly they were kicking open the door, flinging open the incubators, sweeping test tubes onto the floors…

Joe was smashed to pieces in front of her, his stalk eyes rolling, his voice box croaking out his repertoire of helpful phrases in random order:

‘Could you repeat that please… Glad to be of help… Have a nice day…’

They told Ruth she had tampered sinfully with the sacred gift of life. Her head was shaven. Dressed only in sackcloth, she was led to that infamous platform beside the lake where Mrs Ullman was later to die.

* * *

‘There, there, Ruth, there, there…’

She never talked about it, but you can reconstruct the scene from countless other stories:

The crowd murmurs and seethes. A big, handsome preacher, with blow-dried hair and a white suit, bellows like a bull about Jesus and hellfire. The first of the sackclothed figures is led forward. He is a cosmologist called Suzuki. In a faltering voice he confesses to teaching that the world began billions of years back in a Big Bang, though he knows now that it was created in six days, just five thousand years ago.

‘And you have always really known that, Brother Suzuki,’ says the preacher sternly.

Suzuki swallows. The crowd hisses. Someone throws an egg which hits the scholarly scientist on the forehead and trickles slowly down over his face. Still Suzuki hesitates. The preacher turns towards him frowning.

Suzuki lifts his head to the microphone.

‘I… have always known it. May God forgive my… my sin.’

The preacher puts his arm round Suzuki’s shoulder, ‘Brother Suzuki. Let Jesus into your heart and you will still be saved.’

The crowd surges up, and subsides and surges up again, like a restless ocean. Suzuki is led away, and a young computer scientist named Schmidt is led to the microphone.

‘I never meant to suggest that our programs were a rival to the human mind. They were only intended to model certain aspects of…’

The preacher roars at him: ‘Acknowledge your sin, brother, acknowledge your sin! Don’t compound it!’

‘Tar him! Feather him! Tar him! Feather him!’ storms the great dark ocean.

The computer scientist looks round desperately at the group of sack-clothed figures waiting behind him. Help me! his eyes say, What do they want me to say? But they all look away.

He turns back to the microphone. ‘I confess! Please forgive me! I blasphemed against God. Jesus is Lord! He… died… for… me… God forgive me! God forgive me!’

The preacher embraces him. ‘Easy, Brother Schmidt, easy! Jesus loves you. He has loved you for all eternity…’

Schmidt clings to his tormentor, sobbing like a child.

‘There, there, Ruth, there, there…’

A sociologist called Carp confesses to questioning the institution of marriage, to defending homosexuals, to teaching the satanic doctrine of cultural relativity…

The crowd explodes with rage.

‘I know, I know,’ sobs Carp. ‘I have sinned against the God of my fathers. I have sinned against Jesus. I have sinned in a way against America. I have denied the Lord. But I do repent brothers and sisters. Pray for my soul. Help me to bear the righteous wrath of God…’

There are cheers. The crowd likes this display. But the preacher is frowning.

‘Methinks he doth protest too much, brothers and sisters, methinks he doth protest too much. This is false repentance, my friends, thrown to us as a sop, while in his heart this unbeliever, this sinner, still nurses the viper of sin and atheism!’

Carp stares at him in terror, ‘No sir, I really do… I mean…’

He is led away to where the tar smokes and bubbles in its black pots.

And it is Ruth’s turn.

A cold wind blows across the lake.

Poor Ruth. Poor little Ruth. All alone up there, facing that dark sea of rage…

She had managed at last to get to sleep. I tiptoed to my own room, and Charlie brought me my own knockout pills.

How excited Ruth and I were all those years ago when we unpacked dear Charlie, all shiny and new from his box lined with polystyrene. How thrilled we were when we found out we could personalize all his store of friendly messages with our own names.

‘Goodnight,’ he said in his raspy electronic voice, ‘Goodnight George’.

3

I took a different route home from work the next day, walking through the Commercial Centre, rather than taking the subway as I normally did to the District of Faraday where we lived. I told myself I needed the exercise.

All along the seafront the crowds streamed, checking out the VR arcades with their garish holographic signs. Under the eye of robot police – two metres tall, with sad, silvery, immobile faces – the children of Illyria made their choices of the countless electronic worlds waiting to entertain them with surrogate adventure, surrogate violence, surrogate sex…

Below the railings, the mild Adriatic sea sucked gently on the stones. I kept walking, steadily, quickly, careful not to ask myself where I was going.

Ahead of me the Beacon of Illyria rose from the sea, Illyria’s cathedral of science, that huge silver tower like a gigantic chess-pawn that seemed to hover weightlessly above the water, though it was the tallest building in the world. People were going across the thin steel bridge that linked it to the land, heading for the delights within. Far up at its huge spherical head, there were four Ferris wheels, one for each point of the compass. They were much bigger than any fairground wheel, but they looked tiny up there. One was pulling in to unload, another was building up to full speed.

I liked the Beacon. When he was alive my father sometimes used to take me there, on the monthly Saturdays when I spent the afternoon with him. It was a relief when we went because it was a genuine treat, a time when I could go home and tell Ruth quite truthfully that I’d had fun, wandering through the intricate maze in there that took you, each time by a different route, through the history of scientific knowledge. He even let me ride on one of those Ferris wheels, though it was understood between us that he would not ride with me. On other monthly visits, he left me to entertain myself and I had to lie to Ruth about what we’d done so as not to have to hear her say what a bad man my father was. He was a great scientist after all, the inventor of Discontinuous Motion no less, and really he had no time for children, least of all a child like me.

(He died when I was ten, incidentally. It was an accident at work and his body was never found. He was working on new applications for Discontinuous Motion at the time, finding ways of punching holes through space to arrive at distant places, so perhaps his body is lying out there somewhere, on some planet orbiting some distant sun.)

But now I turned away from the Beacon, away from the seafront, and along the grand Avenue of Science. I walked past the News Building with its gigantic screen, where President Ullman’s face, forty storeys high, was shown making his annual speech on the occasion of the Territorial Purchase, which he himself negotiated in order to found our unique scientists’ state. After that was the Fellowship of Reason Tower and the gleaming headquarters of IBM, Sony, Esso, Krupp and a score of the other giant corporations that moved here with the refugees. Every ten metres there was a flagpole from which fluttered alternately the many flags of the extinct secular nations from which our people came, and the black-and-white flag of Illyria. Its emblem was a wide-open eye, in contrast to the closed eyes of blind faith which surrounded us on every side.

I kept walking, refusing to tell myself where I was going.

Outside the Senate House there was some kind of disturbance. A little group of Greek guestworkers were holding a demonstration. They were sitting down in the road holding up placards in poorly spelt English:

‘LET US PLEESE CELEBRAT EESTER AND CHRISTMAS.’

‘ALOW US OUR TRADITONS QUIETLY THANKYOU.’

‘LIVE AND LET US LIVE.’

Around them a hostile crowd of Illyrians were shouting abuse while a dozen robot police, silent silver giants, were picking up the protestors two at a time and loading them into vans with as little fuss and as little acrimony as if they were tidying away discarded food cartons.

‘Throw them all out!’ suddenly screamed a thin little middle-aged woman just by me. (She reminded me of Ruth, though she had a British accent). ‘Christians! Jews! Muslims! Throw out all the treacherous little bigots!’

Her eyes were bulging with hate and fear.

‘Or gas the lot of them even better,’ wheezed the stooped, trembling man who was with her.

Who knows what ghosts were haunting them? The Oxford Burnings? The Science Park Massacre? While the Elect established their American theocracy, the British tried for a time to keep the Reaction at bay by shutting their dispossessed classes away, surrounded by high fences. But in the end, their dam too had burst.

I turned away from all of this, down Darwin Drive, into the Night Quarter where the restaurants were and the theatres and the cinemas, and…

But still I would not allow myself to know my destination.

4

And then I was there, in the lobby, standing on the red carpet, smelling the sickly smell of scent and disinfectant, hearing the dreamy muzak.

‘Good evening, sir. Do you have an appointment?’

The receptionist was a syntec in the likeness of a plump, cheerful, middle-aged woman.

My mouth was so dry I could barely form the words.

‘No… I…’

‘Would you like to choose from the menu – or from one of our special offers? Or would you like to go through to the lounge and make your own selection personally?’

‘I… the… lounge.’

‘That’s fine sir. You’ll see it’s just through the door there. Have a nice evening!’

I glided like a sleepwalker across the corridor.

There were thin women and fat women, black women and white women, barely pubescent girls and handsome motherly women of forty. Some of them were almost naked, others dressed as nurses, as teachers, as housewives, as schoolgirls… There were boys too, and muscly men in posing pouches… And even stranger things: boys with breasts, girls with penises, elfin creatures, impossibly slender and covered in smooth fur, with pointy cat-like ears and narrow cat-like eyes…

They were waiting round the edge of a big dark-red room, some reclining on sofas, some perched on stools, others standing. If you looked in their direction, they would smile and try to catch your eye and start to move towards you. If you looked away they would stop.

The music meandered on and on and on. Sometimes it seemed like saxophones, sometimes like an orchestra of violins from long ago and sometimes like girlish voices that repeated the same few words over and over: ‘Love me, baby, baby love me, baby, baby, my baby love…’

Male sleepwalkers wandered round and round the room, blank-faced, avoiding one another’s eyes, round and round. From time to time one or other of them would come to a stop and a smiling syntec would step forward. The man would be led from the room, as meek and docile as a lost little boy.

‘George!’

A plump, balding middle-aged man stood in front of me.

‘It is George isn’t it? Nice to see you! What’s a good-looking young man like you doing in a place like this?’

He had a faint Irish accent and I vaguely recognized him as one of Word for Word’s clients, an export manager for some firm that peddled technological trinkets to the near-medieval states beyond our frontiers.

‘Paddy, remember? Old Paddy Malone. The one with the stupid computer that’s supposed to talk Turkish but can’t! A nice piece of work you did for us there, young George, a very good job indeed!’

He was grinning, he was slapping me jovially on the shoulders but sweat was pouring down his face.

‘What a feast, eh?’ he chuckled, gesturing around the room, ‘Look at that black one over there, isn’t she a peach?’

A robot coated in silky black skin saw him pointing, smiled and made to get up from its seat, but the watery eyes of the export manager had moved on.

‘And will you look at that little thing! Don’t you just want to…’

Passing ghost-like men modified their course slightly so as not to run into us.

‘I tell you what, George my old buddy, this place has been the making of my marriage! Any time that little itch comes along, you know, I just get down here and sort it out, no problems, no grief for anyone, at no more than the price of a half-decent meal out! Not that I’d actually want to bother the dear wife you know with the actual…’

Again he tailed off. His eyes looked past me. Sweat poured off his bald head. Sweat dripped from his chin. The ghosts went gliding by.

‘Hey! Look over there! That is new! Just look at the tits on that thing! I think I can see where old Paddy’s going to find his berth tonight.’

Some sort of reaction was building up inside me. I shook away his arm. He wasn’t paying any attention in any case, but was grinning stupidly as the big-breasted syntec came to greet him as if old Paddy was what it had been waiting for all its life.

Horrified, I rushed from the room. I was in such a hurry that I crashed straight into one of those syntec elfin boys which was leading out a bewildered Albanian guestworker with three days stubble on his chin. I sent it flying across the floor.

‘Allah have mercy,’ whispered the dazed Albanian.

* * *

As I crossed the lobby, I saw Lucy coming down the stairs. I recognized her at once. She was even prettier than she had been on the TV, wearing a loose jumper and a pair of jeans, like a student, like a girl of my own age. She saw me looking at her and caught my eye and smiled…

But the experience of the lounge had broken the illusion. This was not really a she at all. It was an it, a doll, a mannequin, no more real than Ruth’s SenSpace.

‘Ugh!’ I muttered as I turned away and headed for the door.

‘Enjoy the rest of your evening!’ called out the receptionist, ‘Hope we see you again soon!’

‘No chance, plastic one!’ I called back as I stepped out into the street and breathed in the evening air.

I felt pleased with myself as I headed for the subway that would take me home. That was that dealt with, I said to myself, that was that nonsense out of my system.

I remember I noticed a fly-posted notice at the subway entrance.

‘The Holist League,’ it read, ‘The whole is more than the parts…’

It brought into my mind again the strange image of Ullman in reverse, creating man out of dust.

Then I bought a bag of fresh doughnuts from a Greek vendor and made my way down to the train in its warm bright tunnel.

5

When I got home, Ruth wasn’t in SenSpace as I had expected, but pacing round the living room with Charlie trundling after her, helpfully proffering tranquillizers, tea, brandy and a sandwich with his four spindly arms.

‘Oh George, where have you been? I wish you’d say when you’re going to be late. I needed you here. It’s Shirley! Someone’s coming round to see us. I’m going out of my mind with worry…’

I told Charlie to put down the other things – the tea was slopping all over the floor – give her the brandy and then fetch another one for me. I took her by the shoulders and made her sit down. She grabbed my hand and clung on so tightly that it hurt. Then she started to cry.

‘What do you mean, it’s Shirley?’ I asked her, prizing my hand free from hers.

Shirley was another robot, one of three robot janitors in our tower, who cleaned the lifts and stairs, carried out simple maintenance jobs, and took turns on desk duty in the lobby. They were ‘plastecs’. Cheaper and much more common than syntecs, plastecs had rubbery plastic skins rather than actual flesh. Our landlord had installed them about a year previously, taking advantage of government subsidies to replace the three middle-aged Macedonians who’d previously performed these tasks.

‘She’s gone off. I saw her in the street, just walking away. I even spoke to her. I said “Hello Shirley” and she just looked at me and walked straight past. You know how friendly she normally is? You know how she says “Hi there, Ruth!” Well, she didn’t. She just looked at me and made…’ Ruth began to sob again, ‘She just looked at me and made this kind of growl…’

I laughed angrily then got up and walked over to the window, gulping down my brandy. Beyond the towers, the sea was blue and hazy. There was a white ship far away in the distance.

I turned round.

‘Listen Ruth, Shirley is a machine. Maybe she’s gone wrong in some way. Machines sometimes do that. I was dealing with a translation system only yesterday that had started putting the word ‘not’ into every Serbian sentence…’

‘I wish you didn’t do that work, languages and foreign countries. You’ve got no idea how dangerous those people can be. They hate us out there, George!’

‘What I’m telling you is this: if a machine goes wrong it’s no big deal. Now let’s get some supper. Charlie, what have we got in the freezer other than pizza?’

Charlie trundled towards us: ‘Steak, lasagne, cod, plaice, Irish stew…’ he began.

‘Someone’s coming to see me about it!’ Ruth whimpered, ‘Someone from the robot company. They phoned every apartment in the building. A whole team of them are coming round to interview everyone who saw Shirley in the last ten days.’

‘… French fries, waffles, chocolate ice-cream, strawberry ice-cream, lemon sorbet…’ Charlie broke off the list to pick up an ultrasound transmission from the door.

‘Someone to see you Ruth,’ he announced, ‘Her name is Marija Mejic, from the Illyria Cybernetic Corporation.’

* * *

She turned out to be a young woman of about my own age. She was friendly, intelligent and rather pretty, which immediately threw me into confusion. I was very frightened of attractive young women in those days.

‘Very sorry to bother you,’ she said, when I’d shown her to a seat. ‘I think you’re aware that a robot janitor has gone missing, and we need to find out why so as to ensure that any problem is put right.’

In spite of her South-Slav name she spoke her Illyrian English with a slight Antipodean accent.

‘It seems a lot of fuss about one defective robot,’ I said.

She looked up at me quickly with a smile. Her manner was alarmingly direct.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘It’s just that…’ she hesitated, ‘It’s just that ICC believes in being thorough about these things,’ she said.

And she went on briskly to ask a whole list of questions. When had we last seen Shirley? How often had we seen her in the last ten days? Had we noticed any discernible changes in her behaviour? What about her verbal responses? Her voice? Her posture…?

‘Does this happen a lot?’ Ruth asked her at the end.

‘Well yes, the truth is it has been happening quite a lot recently. A lot of different robots. It’s not dangerous or anything. No one’s been harmed. So the government doesn’t really want us to, you know, alarm anyone…’

‘A lot of robots?’ demanded Ruth. ‘Any sort of robots? What about our Charlie here?’

She reached down and rubbed Charlie’s shiny ‘head’, from which the original painted face had long since been worn away.

Marija Mejic glanced down at him and laughed.

‘Oh no. It’s just the ones with SE systems. You know? Self-Evolving? They are meant to learn by trial and error, so they’re actually designed to generate small fluctuations in behaviour. But every now and again, a combination of circumstances may flip them outside of their original parameters. We always knew it could happen. That’s why they are supposed to be reprogrammed every five years – wiped clean as we call it. It’s just that it seems to be happening a bit more quickly than we…’

She stood up, went to the window and glanced out.

‘The funny thing about it is that these things were supposed to be more reliable than human beings!’ she said with her back still turned to us. ‘ The whole point was they wouldn’t lose their heads!’

Then she turned round with a small laugh.

‘But that’s just a personal observation of mine, and strictly between you and me!’

I got up to let her out. She extended her hand to shake as I opened the door.

‘Very nice to meet you, Mr Simling.’

As her eyes met mine, I felt as if she could read in my face where I had been earlier that day: the red room, the sickly muzak, the syntecs with their scented flesh, the sweat streaming down the face of fat Paddy Malone…

I blushed.

‘Very nice to meet you too Mr Simling,’ I blurted.

Of course this visit had done nothing to allay Ruth’s fears.

‘What did she mean flip? What could they do? I thought they were supposed to be safe George! Not like those horrible Macedonians brooding about God and the Devil and whatever else those Outlanders think about. And now she says they’re dangerous too!’

‘She didn’t say they were dangerous. She just meant they wander off sometimes, or stop doing their job…’

‘Well, she shouldn’t have said all that. I’ve got a good mind to report her to the company.’

‘For being honest with us? Would you prefer people to lie?’

‘Perhaps one of them might kill somebody. How do you know what she meant by flip?’

‘I just guessed’ I snapped.

I didn’t care at all about what the robots might or might not do, but I was flustered and shaken, as I always was after any social encounter.

‘Why can’t anything be safe?’ Ruth complained. ‘Why is there always a snake in the grass?’

‘Oh give it a rest, Ruth, can’t you? Why don’t you just go into SenSpace for a bit and forget it, eh? There are no snakes in there. Not unless you want them to be, anyway.’

Ruth looked at me, almost cunningly.

‘Only if you come too,’ she said.

I hesitated. I hated SenSpace and the total surrender that it involved. It gave me the queasy feeling of being swallowed alive. But just now this didn’t seem so unappealing.

I shrugged.

‘Okay. It’s a deal.’

6

There were stars. They weren’t like the stars of ordinary reality: they were multicoloured, they stretched back in three dimensions, and they were moving, around, above and between one another.

There was a warm smell of a summer night, a hint of lilac. Celestial music came faintly from far away and then broke out into a bold fanfare as huge coloured 3D letters burst like fireworks across the firmament.

The SenSpace Consortium of Illyria

Welcomes You To

S E N S P A C E

‘Yes, welcome to SenSpace, George!’ said an intimate, female voice in my ear, ‘It’s been a long time. Are you travelling alone, or do you have companions I need to link you up with?’

‘One companion, Ruth Simling,’ I said, reluctantly adding her SenSpace alias: ‘Little Rose.’

‘Ah yes,’ said SenSpace fondly, ‘dear Little Rose! I’ll link you up immediately.’

Ruth appeared beside me, as our hitherto parallel SenSpace universes were merged into one. Or rather, Little Rose appeared, a small, mousily pretty young girl in a party dress, still recognizable as my mother, but some ten years younger than myself.

I looked away. We were standing on a high platform, the swirling stars above and around us. Beneath a vast patchwork landscape was laid out, teeming with detail and activity, which seemed to stretch away for hundreds of kilometres in every direction.

You could have studied it for hours just as it was, but what made it even more absorbing was the fact that whatever patch you looked at would immediately grow, as if a powerful pair of binoculars had been put in front of your eyes.

Here were children playing on a sandy beach for example, splashing among white surf and breakers of perfect translucent green. The longer I looked at it the closer they became. I could hear their voices and the sound of the surf. I could hear the flapping sound from a small boat with red sails. I could feel the sand. I could hear one little girl whisper to her brother they were going to build the biggest sandcastle ever seen. ‘That will teach John,’ she said, ‘That will teach him!…’

I looked away. The seaside at once shrunk again to a tiny blue and yellow patch far off on the surface of the seething quilt of the SenSpace world.