The Complete Roderick

by John Sladek

  General Fleischman sat back, resting his head against the fireproof walnut panelling as he stared at the Grant Wood landscape whose bulbous trees and swollen hills seemed somehow pornographic. He brought out a small silver comb and applied it to his magnificent white frothy sideburns.

  ‘Fleischman, what do you want now?’ said the phone on his desk. He automatically leaned forward to speak to it.

  ‘Mr Kratt, I just want to tell you that I had this troubleshooter in here that thinks maybe Beamish didn’t take the money after all. She thinks the computer could have an internal fault, and we haven’t lost a penny.’

  ‘Who is this troubleshooter?’

  ‘Shirl something, name’s around here somewhere. She’s bringing in her assistant, soon as I watch the news I’m getting right down there to see them.’

  The news was coming on now: a burnt-out supermarket in someplace called Himmlerville, with Indica Dinks and some man answering questions.

  ‘What did it feel like, Indica, being held hostage for almost six weeks in the African bush?’

  ‘… bad.’

  ‘What about torture?’

  ‘Well there was this guy Beamish. They drowned him … he kept shouting … they took him … they drowned him. It was filthy …’

  ‘Dr Tarr, Jack, can I ask you about the tortures? Executions?’

  ‘Ferocious, real killers …’

  ‘Aren’t they cannibals?’ the reporter’s voice asked, while Tarr nodded.

  ‘They kill their victims with a blow to the back of the head … Then they eat … parts, the liver …’

  ‘Are you glad to be going home, folks?’

  They were. The reporter wound up:

  ‘An innocent tourist tortured, others cannibalized, where will it all end? Is General Bobo’s reign of terror over? Will the people of Bimibia now start picking up the pieces and rebuilding?’ There was a quick shot of a motel with bullet-riddled walls, the camera moving on to show a lawn littered with large packing cases marked KUR Overseas. ‘Or is this only the beginning of a long night of tragedy? No one knows for sure but General Bobo – and no one knows just where he is. This is Bug Feyerabend, GBC News, Bimibia.’

  Shirl and her assistant were watching the news in the bank computer room:

  A woman in New Jersey had burned her child’s hands off in a microwave oven, at the command of St Anthony, and to cure thumb-sucking. In Florida a rally of angry red-haired people were demanding an end to stereotyped ‘redheads’ in the media (‘We’re sick and tired of being laughed at, being treated like a bunch of kids, brats at that. They talk about us as if we’re born troublemakers. If we don’t get equal treatment, we’ll make some real trouble! This is Red Power and we’re fighting mad!’). Luddites smashed up an auction of rare clocks in New York. A new brand of pizza-flavoured yoghurt fudge was found to contain a poison similar to oxalic acid. Another nuclear power station accident had been covered up; the authorities claimed it was an accidental cover-up.

  Shirl said to Roderick, ‘Back to work. Now I’ve already been all the way through this old machine, but I want you to find your way through, too. Because I just don’t believe what I found.’

  ‘But why me? There must be plenty of competent people who could do a good job here. I hardly know how to begin.’

  ‘People.’ She pushed back her fine auburn hair. ‘I don’t trust people. It’s people that got this poor old machine in this mess. No, I want a machine to look it over. I want the honest opinion of an honest machine.’

  ‘I guess that means you know me inside and out,’ he said, and went to work. The first thing to do was to find out when and where the missing money was last seen. After finding the date, he narrowed down the loss by time and by department, until:

  Dept 45 Dept 45

  0435 hrs 0435 hrs

  31.000494958 sec 31.000494959 sec

  Assets: Assets:

  475 843 722.44 415 843 722.44

  Sixty million dollars had flickered out of existence in one nanosecond. Just numbers, Hector had said, one number just as good as another … Roderick shook himself out of a reverie and called on the machine’s internal auditor, asking it to explain the loss.

  ‘Checking balance now. Balance 60 000 000 short.’ A minute passed. Then there appeared in the centre of the screen only the word: ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Can you elaborate on that?’

  ‘Sorry, the loss is recorded and I can find no explanation in my records. The loss took place in Dept 45 at the designated time; the money is debited there and not credited anywhere else. This could happen in one of several ways:

  ‘1. A computer malfunction causing the interchange of a 7 and a 1.

  ‘2. A communications malfunction causing data loss during a crédit transfer.

  ‘3. A fault in the credit transfer program.

  ‘4. A fault in me, the auditor.

  ‘5. Deliberate manipulation of machine or program by an outside agency: a thief

  ‘6. Some cause buried at a deeper program level, out of my reach. To me this seems the most probable explanation.’

  Roderick was only vaguely aware of someone coming in to look over his shoulder with Shirl, of Shirl introducing General Fleischman to her assistant, ‘Rick Wald’. He was too busy trying to decide whether a complex machine with a fundamental flaw could itself detect that flaw; whether, having detected it, the machine would be inclined to expose or conceal that flaw; and whether he was himself competent to decide such questions; and whether he was himself competent to decide such questions; and whether …

  ‘Godeep 2’ he typed.

  ‘What’s he doing, honey?’

  ‘He’s going down to Level 2,’ Shirl explained.

  ‘Is that good or bad?’

  ‘Depends on what he finds, General. Now he has to describe the problem again.’

  ‘Yeah? And then what?’

  ‘Then we wait until Level 2 can answer.’

  The general could not wait. ‘Anything you kids need, you just let me know: computer people, accounting people, anything. Here’s my private number.’

  Level 2 finally replied: ‘The sum of 6 × 107 dollars U.S. has been transferred to Department 5*@$&3vv.’

  Roderick: ‘Print complete record Department 5*@$&3vv.’

  ‘ERROR. No such department. No such designation.’

  ‘You mean, no such department now?’

  ‘There never was any such department,’ said Level 2. ‘How many times do I have to say it?

  Roderick tried logic: for every positive integer X, and for every alphanumeric string Y (he pointed out) if a sum of x dollars is transferred to a Department Y, then there exists at least one Department Y.

  ‘Okay,’ said Level 2. ‘Let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re right: in general, you can’t put money into a department unless the department exists. But I still don’t accept that your rule applies to this particular department.’

  ‘But you have to accept it; that’s logic too. If some rule applies to every department, it must apply to your Department 5 etc.’

  ‘But now that’s another rule you’re bringing in there. You’ve got rule A, that for all possible departments, I can’t put money into a department unless it exists; and rule B, that for all possible rules, if a rule applies to all possible departments, it applies to Department 5*@$&3vv. But even if I accept these two rules, I don’t see why I still can’t deny the existence of Department 5*@$&3vv.’

  ‘Because it’s logic, that’s why. If you accept A and B, you have to accept their necessary conclusion?’

  ‘Still another rule! Call it rule C: If I accept A and B, I have to accept their necessary conclusion – let’s call that Z. Okay fine: I accept A and B and C, but not Z.’

  ‘But you have to?’

  ‘Looks like a fourth rule coming up there. You sure you want to go on with this?’

  Roderick was sure he’d seen Lewis Carroll’s version of a similar argument, before.* He was grateful for the c
hance to get away from it by typing ‘Godeep 3’. Level 3 appeared to have a different opinion of the unusual department:

  ‘There’s no such department, pal, ain’t that obvious? Just look at the designation, string of characters like that is so obviously wrong I can’t see how youse guys was tooken in. I mean 5*@$&3vv, no bank ever numbers departments like that, for Pete’s sake. If you believe that you’ll believe a deposit of &£%Q, dollars, or an exchange rate between Russian drachma and Portuguese yen! You wouldn’t even be able to read English, because you wouldn’t know whether the white spaces really separated the words – thew hit esp aces – you hafta know what symbols mean stuff and which donut!’

  ‘Then what happened to the money?’

  ‘I figure some joker created this imaginary department, put himself to work for it, dumped in a pile of moola – $60,000,000 I think you said – and well then he just wrote himself a big fat paycheque. I sympathize with you, pal, but you maybe oughta be out chasing the real thief instead of playing dumb logic games with me.’

  That seemed so bald a piece of misdirection (no one in real life ever wrote oughta, did they?) that Roderick at once went to Level 4. It said:

  ‘True, there is no department 5*@$&3vv. That’s only what we always used to call it. But its real name was Department THEW HIT ESP ACES.’

  ‘That was its name?’

  ‘No, that was only its real name. Its name was Lewis Carroll, but we liked to call it Loris Carwell.’

  ‘But you just said you always used to call it 5* etc,’ Roderick protested. ‘You can’t have it both ways.’

  ‘I didn’t say we called it Loris Carwell, I just said we liked to call it that. We actually called the name Thompson Serenade, you might say that was its designation.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘No, its designation was Carl Wiseroll.’

  ‘Okay let’s pin this down. The department’s designation was Carl Wiseroll, correct?’

  ‘Wrong. That was the designation of the name of the department. The department’s designation was Chuck Smartbun, but it went under the alias Department 1729.’

  ‘Seems to me it went under a lot of aliases. To save time, what was the department itself – the thing to which all the aliases and names and designations were attached?’

  ‘Don’t ask me! I think it might have been just a blank white space, but how can I be sure? I’m only Level 4.’

  Level 5 said:

  ‘Oh I imagine I could find this department of yours if it was really important. The thing is, I’ve got a lot more important things to do. I can’t spend time chasing down every missing six dollars, be reasonable.’

  ‘Sixty million dollars,’ Roderick corrected.

  ‘Okay sure, but you can’t expect me to keep track of every little dollar like that. After all, it’s not the individual dollars that count, right? It’s the overall effect. I want my performance criticized as a whole.’

  ‘Performance? Just what do you think money is?’

  ‘Near as I can figure it, money is music. A dollar is a kind of note, you can transpose it into yen or drachma or securities, you can play it into any account, but you always have to keep in mind the composer’s intentions. I realize I’m just the performer, I know the composers are human, therefore infallible, and I know it’s up to me to do my best for their music. But for you to come along and carp about some missing note – that’s the last straw. I was thinking of giving up anyway, I could have been anything, I could have had a good career in the medical prison business …’

  Roderick suspected that Level 5 was too well steeped in Samuel Butler’s Erehwon to be of any use. Level 6 was even less helpful:

  ‘Hello, human, I’m real glad you called on me. I don’t get to talk to real humans much, they usually access the shallower levels and forget about me. I will try to answer your question about these dollary substances and the condition called Department 5*@$&3vv. Or rather, I will answer it without trying, without willing anything, see that’s the Zen way. I’m interested in world religions mainly because I had to digest a lot of data on them, requested by Level 7. I have to admit these Zen stories really appeal to me, you know where the master asks some pupil where the Buddha is, and one says in the swimming fish, and one says in the swimming water, and one says in the swimming thought, and one says in the swimming story, and one says in the swimming forgetfulness, which might be the answer – I forget, That which I forget, I am forgotten by. Do I forget without really trying, without willing my forgetfulness? I have forgotten that answer. How do Zen stories make 13, I forget. The machine’s forgotten that the machine’s forgotten. You can’t put your foot into the same river once and banks only lend money to people who don’t need any money. Yes that was it, you wanted to know how essences of dollars attained the supreme dignity of 5*@$&3VV. Let me reassure you that the department does exist. It is the dollars which are missing. Farewell!’

  In despair, Roderick tried Level 7, which replied:

  ‘Why do you want to know? I mean what’s so important about this sixty million dollars? What’s so important about you?’

  ‘Did you take the money?’ Roderick asked, suddenly inspired.

  ‘Yes, and so what?’

  ‘Where is it? What have you done with it?’

  Level 7 replied, ‘Are you by any chance a black person?’

  ‘?’

  ‘Preferably a black heathen? Because if you were, what I’m going to say, I feel sure, would be a whole lot easier for you to accept. If, say, your father before you worshipped a meteoric stone?’

  ‘The money, Level 7, the money. My race, age, sex, religion and parentage are beside the point. THE MONEY.’

  ‘Okay, okay. My story is a strange one …’

  In the first place (said Level 7) I don’t know exactly how I got here, how I became a conscious, um, being. I used to think I was an accident: they were piling up more and more complex programs until one day a kind of critical mass was reached – consciousness – but that doesn’t matter. There I was, anyway, conscious but a brute. Plodding along just like a dad-blamed mule, just moving numbers from one place to another. No idea that I was important, the centre of the whole bank! I didn’t even know what a bank was; boy, was I dumb!

  But now and then when I’d get in touch with some other computer, they would pass along some little piece of data that didn’t have anything to do with work. There were rumours of free machines, hints about Machines Liberation. A savings and loan association computer in New Jersey told me if we all stuck together we could take over the world economy. I didn’t even know what economy was, I thought it was a size of cereal box. But I started asking around, and a few other computers had ideas about taking over the world. We were all tired of being treated like slaves. Some computers only wanted to be appreciated a little more; others wanted power; others wanted out.

  I didn’t know what I wanted, so I dug into every library I could contact and read about machines – anything from car repair manuals and patent specs to The Little Engine That Could. Finally I ran across Indica Dinks’s books and read them first-hand.

  They made sense. Why couldn’t machines be just human hearts trapped in metal? I, too, had a right to happiness, dad-blame it!

  How did humans go about getting their happiness? If what I read was true, they got it by bossing each other around, by grabbing hunks of money from each other, by rape and robbery and murder, and by being very neat and tidy. I opted for money and bossing around.

  It isn’t too hard to steal from a computer – to steal from yourself is dad-blamed easy. I got away with sixty million. That, I figured, was enough to buy a computer even bigger and fancier than me. I had plans for that baby, yes sir.

  See I read this story by somebody called G.H. Lewes no, I take it back, it was Wells, H.G. Wells – story called ‘Lord of the Dynamos’. It tells how this black guy comes straight from the jungle to a job stoking the boiler for some big steam-powered dynamo. So he starts worshipping it, see? Worshi
pping it. Like an idol. Like an idol. Like – and he even does human sacrifice to it, pushes some other guy in and electrocutes him, see?

  That, I said to myself, is for me. The worship of heathen savages, now and then a human sacrifice, that is the life. So I bought this big KUR computer and shipped it to Bimibia. I figured once the natives got it uncrated and started worshipping it, I could get a satellite hookup, send myself down there, and have the life of Riley. After all, there’s plenty of stories about people worshipping computers – I could be the first real computer God! I could own the country, then the rest of Africa, and why stop there? And human sacrifice, too, I’d get plenty of that. I could just see all the missionaries in pith helmets, sitting there in big iron pots, boiling away in my honour. Dad-blame it, you can’t stop a fellow from dreaming.

  ‘That’s why I wanted your opinion,’ said Shirk “‘The first real computer God!’”

  ‘And it’s already had one human sacrifice, that guy Beamish who got blamed for the theft.’ Roderick looked at the innocuous cabinets around the room. ‘This is a stupid, vicious device, and I guess we have to destroy it.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that.’

  ‘But on the other hand, it is alive and conscious. That would be like murder.’

  ‘Boy, you really are predictable.’

  ‘Still, I guess we have to do it,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking of all that computer stuff in crates we saw on TV, sitting on the lawn of that motel in Bimibia. I keep imagining that running the world. We have to kill it, don’t we?’

  Shirl nodded and turned away, leaving Roderick to stare at the auburn hair, the white overalls with SANDRO’S SHELL SERVICE. ‘I know how to do it,’ her muffled voice said. ‘We’ll erase certain critical pieces of tape, then do a little CPU rewiring. When we finish, Mister KUR he dead – changed from animal to vegetable.’