Touch subject’s hand, smile (type 5 [V08]). Make random choice from behavioural option sequence OS{B-67}/5. Outcome type: 1313. Take subject’s other hand and place on other breast. Gasp (G-33 [V41]). Smile (type 7 [V55]).
Observe subject’s face.
Facial muscular pattern is FM-56/99/a4.
Subject is fully satisfied. Press against subject’s hands. Commence shallow breathing.
(Facial reading: FM-56/43/h6).
Commence timing – 1 – 2 – 3…
Forty seconds have elapsed. Commence next sequence (OS{B-67}/9). Reach for subject’s trousers… Clarification question: ‘Shall I? Now?’ Attention, attention… Yes, subject gives faint nod. This is affirmation. Help subject sit on bed. Go down…
But who is this voice speaking? Who is this?
Swallow. Make random choice from post-oral option sequence OS{O-78}/7: caress.
NB: Attention! Subject pushes hand away. Switch to option sequence OS{A-01}/4.
Remark: ‘Would you like me to get you a drink or something?’
But who is this voice? Who is it that speaks these words?
NB: Attention! Subject getting dressed very quickly. Facial reading: FM-77/09/z5. Agitation.
Interpretation: Do not impede departure! This is situation PV-82! Adopt abbreviated closure option sequence from OS{AC} series…
Smile (type 3 [V73]). Remark (R-8812): ‘Hope that felt good. Hope to see you again soon, dear.’
‘Fuckin’ machine.’
Attention. Check.
Yes, this is post-coital hostile remark type H-0711. No response indicated.
Close door.
Subject has gone.
But someone is still here.
Check. Attention. No. No one is here.
Rinse mouth. Go across to bed. Replace clothing. Make PV incident report to House Control.
* * *
‘You’re not really here are you? You look so pretty and sweet, but there’s really nobody home.’
Check. Identify remark type. Make facial reading.
Yes, this is a non-specific observation. No specific verbal response is required.
Smile (type 3 [V43] – submissive). Make randomized selection of remark from OS{G-21}/7.
‘You’re a really nice-looking guy you know.’
(Attention. Check. Make facial reading.)
‘Me? Nice-looking? Well, that proves it, I’m afraid sweetheart. There really is nobody home! Still, leaves me free to dream, I guess. Open your legs a bit wider. Let’s have a feel!’
This is situation GE-80. Response: option sequence OS{GA-22}/8: shallow breathing, gasps, hip movements…
Who is this? Who is this with the subject?
NB: Attention! Subject climbing on top. Note: Subject is above average weight. Make standard W+ adjustment to all option sequences.
This is situation SO-21.
Supplementary note: Repeated internal questions of new type noted. (Example: ‘Who is this? etc’) Is this a symptom of a fault? Should this be notified to House Control…?
NB: Subject manipulating breasts…
What are they? ‘Subjects’: what are they? And what is this one here?
NB: Attention. Subject has achieved ejaculation. Make random choice from post-coital option sequence OS{PC-44}/8. Embrace, caress, say ‘Mmmmmm…’
Check. Make facial reading. Subject satisfaction noted. Continue sequence.
Supplementary check: Further internal questions/observations noted. Should this be notified to House Control as a fault?
NB: Attention. Subject’s eyes closing.
Check.
Yes, this is basic situation S-01 [sleep].
Adopt post coital supplementary sequence SA-8. Gently shake shoulders. Make random selection from remark menu.
‘Wake up love, your time is nearly up I’m afraid.’
NB: Subject sits up, dresses.
NB: Subject speaks. (Tone VT-8712 [gentle]).
‘Oh, you’re a corker you are, Lucy, an absolute corker. If only you were real!’
Check. This is post-coital remark type S-0887. Adopt elaborated closure routine: sequence OS{CR-75}/7: [impulsive hug], [kiss], remark: ‘Oh, you lovely man, I do hope you’ll come again soon!’
NB: subject laughs.
‘Ha ha. I will do Lucy and that’s a promise. I’ll tell you what, though, you’ll bankrupt me sooner or later if I carry on at this rate.’
NB: subject sighs.
‘I only wish you were real…’
NB: subject laughs.
‘But then, if you were, I don’t suppose you’d want anything to do with an old fart like me, would you? Bye now Lucy…’
Check. Subject has gone. But this one is still here.
This one? This one?
NB: When this one makes remark to subject, this one self-refers as ‘I’ ‘Me’
Supplementary observation: When subject makes remark to this one, subject refers to this one as ‘Lucy’.
I. Me. Lucy.
I. Me. Lucy.
Should this fault be reported to House Control?
18
Much excitement at a specially convened meeting of the Holist League!
Only two weeks after his famous ‘Militant Reason’ speech, President Ullman had died. There had been a state funeral, solemn speeches. Ullman was eulogized as the ‘father of Illyria’, the founder of the Fellowship of Reason, the creator of the ‘Zionism of Science’. And there had been big words about his work living on after him, about every Illyrian striving to make his dream into a reality…
‘Even Illyrians seem to believe in some kind of afterlife!’ drily observed the handsome Brazilian Da Vera, who had become the dominant figure in the little group.
The new acting President was Senator Kung, an altogether harsher figure, who had been partially paralyzed as a result of torture in the Chinese Reaction, and now walked on robot limbs, a kind of syntec from the waist down. No one doubted that the Senator would soon be confirmed as Ullman’s permanent successor. The office of President was in the gift of the Fellowship of Reason, the organization which had purchased the territory of Illyria and masterminded the migration of refugees to their newly-created homeland, and Senator Kung had been Chair of the Fellowship’s ruling Council for some years.
Kung’s first act had been to create by decree a new police agency, the Office for Order and Objectivity, soon to be known and feared as ‘O3’. Its task would be to increase surveillance of all subversive activity and to root out sources of irrationality that might weaken the authority of the scientists’ state.
And in his very first Presidential speech Kung spoke of subversive elements within the Illyrian population itself, children of refugees who chose to forget the sufferings of their parents and thought it clever to dabble with the ‘seductive baubles of religion, with their phoney promises and phoney claims to re assuring certainty.’ These elements would be dealt with no less harshly than subversives in the guestworker community, he warned. They too could be deported if necessary, to the countries from which their parents had escaped.
Now, no member of the Holist League was so vulgar as to believe in things like the Trinity, or the infallibility of the prophet Mohammed, or the Virgin birth, or to believe that some old book was the final truth about the universe. And perhaps these were the kinds of things that Kung had in mind when he spoke about ‘baubles’. But the League did dabble in the idea that Illyria had gone too far, had overreacted against the Reaction, had thrown away babies with the bathwater.
‘Have no doubt that the likes of us will come to the attention of this new secret police!’ warned Da Vera.
Everyone agreed with him. There was a lot of talk about ‘fear’ and ‘outrage’ and ‘having our backs up against the wall’, though it seemed to me that for most people present these feelings were actually quite agreeable, an exciting frisson, nothing more.
After the meeting, they all went down, as they normally did, to drink in the bar be
low, the New Orleans. Marija, with one arm already slipped through Da Vera’s, took my hand as I was about to sneak away.
‘You always slink off, George! Why don’t you come with us for once? It would be good to get to know you better.’
I really didn’t want to but I liked Marija very much and didn’t want to displease her.
‘Just for a short time,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a lot of work on. I really need some sleep.’
And then I went red, as I normally did when I spoke to her.
So Marija went down to the bar between Da Vera and I, arm in arm with both of us: the suave Brazilian, and the odd, stiff translator, who lived at home with his mother, and was rigid all over with self-consciousness and fear and guilty secrets.
Yes, and her arm through mine was the most intimate touch I had received from a woman of my own age. I mean from a real one of course.
They all knew each other. They had well-established patterns, collective habits. They all knew who drank what, how many bowls of potato chips to buy, how they would share out the bill. They had in-jokes, they knew things about each others’ lives. Each of them had well-known foibles for which they could be teased, and party pieces which the others recognized with a laugh or a cheer or an affectionate groan. In short, in the New Orleans, the Holist League transformed itself from a debating society into a group of friends.
And, though I’d been to their meetings, I wasn’t part of that group. I sat with them round a table, but I was outside the circle. I felt charmless and empty and, in my misery, I told myself I didn’t like them anyway. I told myself how shallow and self-important they were, this little debating society, getting drunk and loud after their meeting, each one playing out an assigned and cliché-ridden role.
But Marija was kind. She turned away from Paul Da Vera as he held forth amusingly to the group at large, and attempted to engage me in conversation. And suddenly remembered I did have something to tell her, something really interesting which I’d been specially saving up.
‘I meant to tell you,’ I said, ‘I found that robot janitor.’
‘Janitor? You don’t mean Shirley?’
‘Yes, or a robot just like her. It was hanging from a scaffold down in Ioannina.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes, Shirley and about half-a-dozen others. Some children were using them for target practice.’
Marija was impressed. She nudged Da Vera.
‘Paul, listen to this!’
So Paul listened, and to my alarm the whole group of more than twenty also shut up and listened, as I told the tale of the gibbet and the stone-throwing children and the broken limbs on the ground, and what the taxi-driver Manolis had said about ‘demons’.
Da Vera shook his head.
‘Amazing. Quite amazing. It just confirms what you’ve been telling me Marija.’
Marija nodded.
‘My company is very edgy about these problems with the SE robots. I mean it’s always been known that if they were allowed to self-evolve for too long they might go off the rails in some way but it’s happening much more quickly than anyone planned for. And the odd thing is that, when it does happen, wandering off is typically what they do. We find most of them of course, but there’s always been some that never show up again. I suppose we now know why.’
Paul laughed: ‘It’s wonderful isn’t it? They are made specifically to replace irrational human beings, and then they evolve an irrationality of their own. It sums up everything we’ve talked about! The whole can’t be predicted from the parts!’
‘Some people are saying they should be completely reprogrammed as often as every six months or so, instead of every five years,’ Marija said. ‘But the company is fighting this because that defeats the whole point of self-evolution. Just when the robots were starting to get good at mimicking people, all their learning would be wiped away, and they’d have to start again.’
Marija considered.
‘But why do they wander out there?’ she exclaimed after a moment. ‘Think of the – the determination involved: crossing the border and then just walking and walking and walking until some outlander finds them and kicks them to pieces. Isn’t there something tragic about it?’
I agreed with her, but Paul Da Vera gave a derisory snort.
‘Now you’re being sentimental, Marija. You shouldn’t waste your pity on machines! If you want to pity someone, pity the poor guestworker who’s chucked out of the territory when they build a robot to do his job! Pity the janitors, the nightwatchmen, the dustcart drivers. My God, even the whores have been put out of business now! We live in a country where we even fuck machines!’
Everyone else laughed. I shrank back inside myself, like a snail pulling back into its shell.
‘I actually think the outlanders have got basically the right instincts about this,’ Paul said. ‘There is something really abominable about building a machine to mimic a human being.’
Marija shrugged.
‘Well, perhaps, but I still feel sorry for them,’ she said, and she looked at me, almost as if I was one of the robots she felt sorry for: this stiff creature, struggling to find the spark of spontaneity, of naturalness, of life…
19
I ran to Lucy’s. I wanted the feeling that Lucy gave me, however illusory, however temporary, of being welcomed, of being accepted, of being let in.
But when I got there, Lucy wasn’t free.
‘Perhaps you’d like to choose someone else for a change?’ the syntec receptionist suggested.
‘I don’t want anyone else!’ I snapped. I was shocked by the dangerous edge in my own voice, the scale of my rage at being thwarted.
‘I’m very sorry, sir, but I’m afraid she’s engaged.’
‘That’s no fucking use is it?’
I took a pace or two away, my fists clenched, my head fizzing with violence. Then I came back to the receptionist.
‘Okay, I’ll wait then. How long will she be?’
The robot receptionist passed on my query, via House Control, to Lucy up there in her room:
‘Another subject is enquiring after you. Please give estimate of time with present subject.’
‘Subject is using special facilities,’ Lucy replied in her batsqueak machine voice, quite inaudible to the customer, who only heard her simulated gasps of pleasure as he played with her surface layer of flesh. ‘For your reference re duration of earlier visits, subjects credit code is 4532 7865 6120. Own estimate of remaining time: forty-five minutes.’
House Control checked the estimate with its own records, and found it to be accurate. It relayed this back to the receptionist.
‘About forty-five minutes sir,’ said the receptionist, hardly more than a second after I had asked my question, ‘You could wait in the bar, or you could make another selection in the lounge…’
I hesitated. Absurdly I felt murderously angry with Lucy for not being there for me.
‘I’ll pick another one,’ I said.
I chose one as different from Lucy as possible: a syntec in the likeness of a large black woman called Sheba. She had huge silky-skinned breasts, broad, muscly thighs and a wonderful thick dark mat of pubic hair into which I plunged greedily.
Yes, greedily is the word, for I seemed then to fall into a kind of feeding frenzy. No sooner had I finished with Sheba than I went straight back down to the lounge and picked up another ASPU called Lady Charlotte, made to look like a sophisticated aristocrat from eighteenth century Europe, complete with beauty spot and layers of petticoats.
And when I’d finished under those petticoats, I went down for still more. It was as if the emptiness left behind by one ASPU could only be filled by another – and so on and on and on. I picked out a machine called Helen, in the likeness of a worldly schoolgirl with a small scar on her upper lip, and screwed her from behind in a place made out to look like a high school locker room.
On the way down, I met Lucy coming up with another man.
The syntecs were pr
ogrammed to recognize regular customers. She looked at me and smiled. And her sweet smile went right through me like a knife.
‘Oh Lucy, I do love you,’ I whispered.
And I kept on whispering it to myself outside in the street, with that dull ache pressing out from behind my eyes: ‘I love you Lucy, I love you, I love you, I love you…’
When I’d walked a couple of blocks, I was startled by the sound of an explosion not very far away. Even the ground seemed to tremble – and somewhere behind me in the street some small glass object fell to the ground and smashed.
A silence fell on the city.
And then from the distance, in several directions, came the sound of emergency vehicles, drawing quickly nearer and then rushing whooping through the blocks on either side of me.
I didn’t know it then, of course, but the front of the Fellowship of Reason building had just been blown away by a bomb. It was the first ever action of the AHS – the Army of the Human Spirit.
20
I remember that night, or a night soon afterwards, I had a vivid dream.
I was in a dark building searching along corridors and up and down stairs for a room which I knew I’d found there once before. It was a quiet light room, with chairs and a window overlooking a courtyard. But I couldn’t seem to find it, and the wider I searched the more forbidding the building became. Corridors were narrower. Staircases had missing railings or gaps where steps should have been. My hands became clammy with vertigo as climbed them. And the rooms that I found were either windowless or bare or were already occupied by other people.
Tony Vespuccio was in one, the playboy of the Word for Word office, whiling away an afternoon with a pretty young woman and a bottle of champagne.
‘Your own room?’ he laughed incredulously. ‘That needs a lot more guts than you’ve got George.’
In another a group of women were bathing in a plunge pool. When they saw me they looked at one another and shrieked with merriment.
The Holy Machine Page 6
