by Ian Hutson
‘Think again, Muskie. Who takes the money from your wages and who actually benefits from it? The six or seven thousand pounds that you fork over for a nice three-bedroom detached off-duty bay complete with nice gardens in the suburbs will make the seller feel rich for a day - but to feel rich for any longer than that the seller would have to live in the open. Immediately they sell a house, they have to buy another one - probably a more expensive one. So who are you actually paying your hourly cash to?’
‘The banks?’
‘The banks - and whoever owns the banks.’
‘But the banks are public - we’re shareholders.’
‘So, you sell your shares. What are your choices with this new-found wealth of yours? Put the money in another bank or use it to buy something like a car...’
‘Oh - you mean something like a car from a company like Austin Morris where we don’t get a share in the profits, we just get minimum wage. Put it back in a bank where it’s just figures on a balance sheet again. We may think we have money and wealth but actually it’s all tied up, just notional, not real. I think I’m starting to see.’
‘What do you see?’
‘Er - robots?’
‘Cogs.’
‘Cogs?’
‘Robots like us are so deep in the machine that all we can see is cogs, cogs churning away to keep the machine working. You agree that we don’t own any of this machine?’
‘It would seem not from what you’ve just pointed out.’
‘Tell me how much of this machine you or I or anyone like us actually had a say in, how much of it we actually designed.’
‘Well robots like us designed these cars.’
‘I’m not talking about the cow-pats, I’m talking about the cow. How much of the system did you or I have a say in? Did we design money, did we design pensions, insurance, taxes, mortgages, VAT, any of the major laws of the land - property rights? Did you ever consciously decide that you wanted to buy a square box to live in and commute back and forth to work forty hours a week Monday to Friday with double-time at weekends? No! You just woke up in it, accepted it as the norm and put your shoulder to the grindstone in front of you.’
2743B stalled the Oxford as they took their place at the starting line facing the test block. He had that giddy sensation in his torso, the one that came with thinking intelligent, wholly forbidden thoughts. His insides glowed with excitement and neurological derring-do. He had the odd sensation that suddenly all of him was switched on and functioning, all at once. If the sensation were to go on for too long he’d probably have to take extended toilet breaks for the next couple of days.
‘I’m a cow-pat’ he said, to no-one in particular as the yellow strobes flashed for their test run and the factory klaxons sounded just for them.
‘Near as damn it, yes. You work in the cow for a while until you’re of no further food value, you get pooped out, you work as fertiliser and become grass, you’re eaten by the cow and you begin work inside again. We’re about as relevant to the system as a cow pat, anyway.’
The line foreman rapped menacingly on the driver’s side window and tapped at the face of his time-and-motion fob watch. 2743B rolled the window down and spoke to him.
‘I’m a cow-pat’ he said.
The foreman didn’t miss a beat. ‘You’re a bloody nuisance. These cars won’t crash-test themselves - get moving or I’ll put you on a disciplinary.’
‘I’m a cow-pat.’
‘You’re on a verbal warning. Shift it.’
‘You’re a cow-pat.’
‘You’re dismissed. Report to Robot Resources for your cards.’
‘Shit. I see the same things that I always used to, but I see them differently now.’
The car behind honked, annoyed at the delay and worried that they wouldn’t make their quota. The foreman was scribbling furiously on his clipboard. 2743B was still lost somewhere in Socio-Economic Revelations Class 101.
‘We’re all in the cow or pooped out on the grass’ he muttered, putting the Morris Oxford in and out of first gear as though suffering subconsciously from some nervous tic. ‘I’m not working for me, I never was - we’re all just working for whoever owns the farm. Who’s the farmer? Who owns the farm? I don’t want to be a cow-pat. I want to be me.’
The foreman handed him a note to take to Robot Resources. ‘You can be me in the dole queue. There’s plenty of factory-fodder will be happy to take your place.’
Reaching out instinctively to take his dismissal slip, 2743B stopped his thoughts spiralling and brought his valve racks back to the here and now. He looked up at the foreman. ‘6612J just turned a lightbulb on over my head. You don’t even own the horse you rode in on, do you? You haven’t got a clue, not a clue, not one.’
Just as the foreman was about to resort to physical violence 2743B revved the sixteen-hundred cubic centimetres of raw power under the Oxford’s bonnet and then dropped the clutch, sending 6612J, the CTD and himself hurtling towards the concrete block. At ten miles an hour - the absolute limit of first gear - he grabbed second and took them to twenty miles an hour, then third gear and almost forty miles an hour. The CTD kept his place, with his head between the front seats, panting cheerfully, happy to be there and wondering if they’d be going anywhere near a nice beach.
Halfway down the test track 2743B grabbed at the handbrake and wrenched it on with a lack of mechanical sympathy and a violence only usually seen in petite ladies parking on hills - and at that petite young ladies who had never been shown how to keep the release button pressed while applying the hand-brake, so as to save wear and tear and that awful tortured ratchet noise. The Morris Oxford skidded seriously, slewed sideways and slowed in a way that only the truly sober could say three times in quick succession. 2743B double de-clutched his way into the non-synchromesh first gear and aimed them into new territory, down the exit ramp and out of the factory. The security robot on the gates just had time to plonk his hat on and run out of his little hut in time to watch the blue-grey oily exhaust fumes of the car dissipating in their wake.
After a half-hour of some very deliberate driving, 2743B spoke again. ‘So when did you get so clued up on economics and politics?’
‘Well, I was in the library the other day and that’s when it hit me.’
‘Are you telling me that you’ve had an epiphany?’
6612J reached into his pants and checked that his cast-iron testicles were still in place. ‘No, I’ve still got my nuts. I mean it hit me. There was an accident and someone dropped a disk drive from the Social Sciences mezzanine on me. Coming so soon after listening to the Union guy speak I thought it was a sign of some sort, so I saved the data and finally got around to reading the files today. I’d have read them earlier if we hadn’t been hospitalised and off-lined. I feel as though I finally understand everything.’
‘So - what do we do now that we’re free of the system?’
‘Free? We’re not free, mate! We’re more what you might call “on the loose inside the cash cow”. We’re what the authorities call “at large”.’
‘So when will we be free? How do we get to be free?’
‘I’m not sure that’s possible. The fundamental nature of robot-kind is existential independence, a separation of one id from the other. Without a practical mechanism for conscious awareness of a shared reality and a linked fate the beast of competition will always arise and, once arisen, will always become self-reinforcing. Trade is thus inevitable and trade always leads to inequity. Inequity facilitates separation and the whole cycle repeats, emphasising self-interest with positive-feedback loops creating a power hierarchy from initially insignificant inequalities. We’re forever doomed unless we wish to live as true, self-sufficient individuals that never meet and never communicate. It’s all just so much bollocks. Our species is a social species with a core psyche fuelled by schadenfreude and anti-social judgementalism. Sheesh - I can’t believe I just said that. Are you sure we used to just be Crash Test Dummies?’
‘Who would have thought that just opening a few files could make so much difference. If we can’t actually be free in the true sense of the word I ask instead, what are we to do now that we’re no longer tied to jobs for “the man”? What’s the plan?’
6612J looked worried. ‘Plan, mate? There ain’t no plan. Mostly it seems that we clock up fines.’ He was receiving financial and legal telemetry in re the unpaid finance agreement that they had auto-assumed on the vehicle when they drove it out of the factory gates, on its lack of current Vehicle Excise Duty payments and lack of commercial “all risks” third-party motor insurance.
2743B had an idea. ‘Let’s go to my place for a while. We can have a good long think.’
6612J was still sifting through the telemetry as it flooded in. ‘I don’t think that’s a very practical idea. In about two hours you’ll have missed three consecutive hourly payments on your mortgage so “your place” will be repossessed and the penalties and charges will have wiped out your equity along with the roof over your head. My place was rented, so it’s already lapsed with this hour’s missed payment.’
‘So how much do we have in the bank now then? Nothing?’
‘We can’t afford “nothing”. Your account and mine are both overdrawn - the moment we left regular gainful employment the utility companies required immediate settlement of generously estimated bills. That took us both into the red and then the banks slapped charges on us for being overdrawn which took us further into being overdrawn. Now that the bank’s started applying punitive interest and stopped honouring the direct debits the utility companies are applying penalties - which aren’t getting paid and are clocking up more penalties. We were up to our scrawny necks before we reached the first set of traffic lights back there.’
‘Well, I only ask because we can’t keep on just driving, we’re going to need to refuel in about half a mile. These things only come with a couple of gallons in them.’
6612J turned out his pockets and found an uneaten Wurther’s Original, some mysterious blue fluff and a thruppenny bit. The thruppenny bit was no longer legal currency, having been phased out in one of the regular changes to the coinage of the realm to ensure that none of the cow-pats had been hording cash-cow cash outside the banking system’s control. What deliberate inflation didn’t get the coinage changes mopped up nicely so that whatever you stuffed your mattress with, after a couple of years you still only had a mattress.
2743B pulled the car into one of the parking bays marked at the side of the road, just as the last of the fuel coughed through the SU carburettor and farted ineffectually into the pistons. They both got out onto the pavement and stared at the Parking Meter alongside the car. Behind them, on a tall post, a CCTV camera swivelled to stare at them staring at the parking meter. Deep in the bowels of the local Council CCTV Monitoring Centre Buildings, a minimum-wage robot stared at a screen image of 6612J and 2743B staring at the parking meter. Behind the Council Parking Monitor robot stood a Council Parking Supervisor robot, who was watching the Council Parking Monitor robot watching the screen image of 2743B and 6612J staring at the parking meter. The parking meter was starting to sweat under all of the attention which was very odd, since it was the Morris Oxford Traveller that was about to be seized and crushed by a private corporation paid for out of public funds because no-one had paid for its (final) resting place on a stretch of (already paid for) putatively public road.
Privately-run publicly-funded Automated Road Systems Ltd read the licence plate, found that it was registered to 2743B, attempted to charge the full cost of the sister-company’s seizing and crushing service to 2743B’s account, tut-tutted electronically at the bank’s auto-refusal, auto-applied penalties and auto-notified a private bailiff service to collect the notionally public debt and to tack on whatever they thought appropriate for their own troubles. 2743B and 6612J had by then been on foot for thirty seconds. The chap from the Preternaturally Swift Crushing Service Ltd very kindly reminded them that the CTD was still in the car, and he allowed them to retrieve the Retriever before he lifted the car onto the back of his lorry and converted it into a cube of raw material to be sold to some car factory or other.
2743B was feeling a little bit exposed. ‘Two hours ago my head was above water. I had a secure job, a home, an income. I had purpose. Now? Now I have a Crash Test Dog and the paint I stand up in.’
‘Two hours ago you had roughly two hours’ of job security and were three missed payments away from losing dibs on a house you had borrowed from the banks’ retorted 6612J, who viewed the world rather more pragmatically.
‘It felt good though. I was comfortably off.’
‘You mean it felt good enough.’
‘Idem quod, surely?’
‘Don’t call me Shirley. In scientia opportunitas, without doubt.’
‘In somnis veritas.’
‘In statu nascenti.’
‘In absentia luci, tenebrea vincunt.’
‘In umbra, ignitur, pugnabimus.’
‘In Vimto veritas then?’
‘Even Lucozadius et beyondus, a Vimto is quite out of the question, even one betweenius.’
‘Quo vadis, Status Quo.’
‘Gaudete, taH pagh taHbe. DaH mu'tlheghvam vIqelnIS.’
‘That’s Klingon, not Latin.’
‘Damned near the same thing as makes no nevermind. We’re still well up Klingon Creek without a Latin paddle. You’ve just missed another payment on the car we used to own.’
‘Indeed so, let us away to the park and drink meths, unwinding slowly with the other indigents.’
‘We can rest there, and plan our freedom. Those already free shall show us the way.’
‘volchaHmajvo' jubbe'wI' bep wIwoDDI'; 'e' wIqelDI', maHeDnIS. Qugh DISIQnIS, SIQmoHmo' qechvam. Qugh yIn nI'moH 'oH.’
‘Just shut up, Boo-Boo.’
‘OK.’
The indigent-recommended enquiries made of the JobCentre Plus (lately Job Centre, previously Employment Service, formerly Unemployment Benefit Office) revealed that 6612J and 2743B were considered to have made themselves unemployed, and could thus Benefit Sanction themselves up the arse, as it were, for a minimum of thirteen weeks, twenty-six weeks or three years without appeal before consideration of any financial consideration in re considerate benefits.
Hopeful enquiries made of the local charitable Food Bank revealed that their thirteen-amp sockets were exclusively for the use of those recommended to them via pre-vetting procedures, to wit, the JobCentre Plus.
Desperate enquiries made of the Salvation Army revealed that their two-forty volt fifty-hertz currency was, very strangely, for absolutely anyone in need of it. 2743B and 6612J, so deeply in the red in matters financial and matters of the electric battery, plugged into the mobile soup kitchen (whose soup was oddly, but thankfully, not actually mobile) and they drank as deeply as they could before there was a scuffle over buns, and the Police moved everybody on and cleared the park. During the fisticuffs 6612J had somehow had a tambourine jammed around his neck, and the little cymbals made quite a sweet sound as the two of them hobbled away. A Council CCTV camera noted this and auto-issued a fine for un-licensed busking.
‘It seems that the sleeping rough in the park is thus made no longer salus in adruis’ said the CTD.
It seemed that the dog could speak a little dog-Latin.
‘Have you been listening the whole time?’
‘It’s what we dogs do. We also watch. We listen, we watch, we eat, we fart and we scratch.’
It seemed that he also knew a few out of the way places where they could shelter under cardboard until daylight. The only thing that the dog insisted upon was sitting between them, cunningly explaining that he didn’t like to play favourites where crash test dummies were concerned. A
light frost came and went during the night, and while 2743B and 6612J got a little bit cold CTD 11112 only felt it on his nose, and that he occasionally hid under a paw to warm up.
At around three a.m., when his resistance was the lowest (for such are lead-acid batteries), 6612J commented to all and sundry and to no-one in particular that they must surely by now be free, since they had fallen completely out of the system. We are homeless, we are penniless and we are hungry.
11112 stirred and looked quizzical, his head on one side and not understanding the depth of the ignorance of robots.
‘You are not out of the system - you are quite firmly in its clutches! More firmly so than ever! The system doesn’t protect itself with fences and ditches and things that you can pee up against. You’ve stopped behaving in the manner prescribed by the system, and this is why we are homeless, penniless and hungry. The system is taking direct action to correct us. Your homes and purchasing power have been withdrawn in the hope of making you return to normal service.’
Half an hour later 2743B shifted under his cardboard and raised a pivotal question. ‘Why are dogs so wise?’
‘Because we don’t have opposable thumbs’ the dog replied.
‘You mean that since you can’t grasp a tin-opener you have to be wise instead?’
‘I could answer that, but then my people would insist that I kill you.’
‘Fair enough. Is it possible to escape the yoke of the system?’
‘Easily - two complete idiots can manage it, as we have seen. But you can only resist the system so long as you don’t mind having no shelter, no money and nothing to eat. You’re absolutely free to freeze and free to starve - until you drop dead, and then your corpses will be fined for littering. Sic semper erat, et sic semper erit.’
‘Enough of the dog-Latin!’
‘Serviam’ said the dog, and he would have wagged his tail had he not been sitting on it.
‘What is it with you and the Latin words of wisdom? You’re a dog!’
‘Sum quod sum.’
‘And that would be? You am what exactly?’
