I don’t know if I really even like her, I told myself. All this wanting to change the world, all this agonizing and philosophizing, all this wanting to get to the bottom of things. So serious. It’s not really the kind of thing that I…
‘Doors closing now,’ said the train.
On Pythagoras Station, two security robots were dealing with a group of drunken Arabs, picking them up two at a time by their collars and carrying them towards the exit.
‘Damned squippies,’ muttered the American. ‘Why do we let them in at all?’
The South Asian got off the train. A Chinese civil servant sat down beside the American.
My thoughts moved off at a new angle. If you don’t like her, I asked myself, how come you’re prepared to risk your life to prove to her that you’re really not a coward?
‘Sorry we’re running a couple of minutes late,’ said the train. ‘I hope this hasn’t caused any inconvenience. This is Schrödinger Station. You can change here for the Coastal and Mountain Lines.’
Get out now, I told myself. Go back!
My brain even sent signals to my limbs to move. It was almost as if a shadow of me actually did stand up and get off the train – and who knows, perhaps in another version of my life story, this is what really happened? But in this version other signals prevailed.
The well-lit train rushed back into the darkness.
You are an empty shell, I told myself, as the train opened its doors on Skinner Station. There is nothing inside: no thoughts, no real feelings. No wonder you go to Lucy, an empty shell like you.
There was a pigeon on the platform that had somehow found its way down into the tube. It went to peck at a scrap of food that lay by the feet of a man sitting on a bench, but just as it was getting close, its fear suddenly outweighed its hunger and it scuttled back again, only to turn again and gingerly edge back towards the food.
‘Take care, doors closing,’ said the train.
And with a strange surge of shame and excitement and dread, I realized that without any doubt at all I would get out at the next station, which was in the heart of the Night Quarter, and only five minutes from the house where the ASPUs waited.
I would get out, oh yes. But I wouldn’t get back on the return train to Marija.
I remember a Serbian woman on the escalator in front of me, telling a friend about a trip to the Beacon.
‘There are lights,’ she said, ‘and strange plants, and huge animals, and even a place where it is completely dark except for stars going round and round… and this strange music. That was lovely: the singing stars.’
24
The syntec receptionist knew me well by now.
‘Good evening Mr Simling, nice to see you. Lucy is in the lounge.’
I plunged into the dark red room, instantaneously blotting out Marija and the strange tube journey and the Beacon, along with everything else in the world outside.
Lucy was looking delectable in a little white lacy negligee.
‘Oh George!’ she cried (Initial Greeting IG: 5439/r), ‘It’s great to see you again! I’ve missed you so much, darling!’
‘I can’t wait to get naked with you again,’ she murmured up in her room, as she ran her thumb, with its imbedded infrared reader, over my credit bracelet.
I put my arms round her, lifting her negligee up above her sweet breasts, kissing her hungrily…
‘Oh I love you, Lucy,’ I couldn’t stop myself from saying it now, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you!’
Twenty-five minutes later it was all over. I had had sex with Lucy. I no longer wanted sex with her. There was nothing more to do than get dressed again and creep off home. (And if I had stayed with Marija we would still be talking and drinking wine and a whole evening would lie ahead, full of strange new possibilities.)
I was bitterly, desperately, disappointed with myself.
And yet when I looked at Lucy, sitting on her bed watching me, I still loved her. I still loved this empty shell, even when the lust was all spent.
‘I love you,’ I whispered, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’
Lucy looked at me.
‘What am I?’ she asked.
She spoke in a strange monotone, quite unlike her usual warm and animated voice and her face was blank, like a person in a trance.
‘You are an ASPU, Lucy,’ I said, simply, too surprised to consider my response. ‘You’re a syntec. You’re a kind of machine.’
For about another two seconds, the face remained completely blank and motionless – and then quite abruptly, her normal friendly expression returned.
‘That was really nice George. Will I see you again soon?’
25
I was with Little Rose, my child-mother, in a leafy suburban street of white clapboard houses. The sun was shining. A yellow aeroplane droned overhead, towing a sign that simply read ‘Having a good time?’
Wholesome-looking housewives were chatting over garden fences, wholesome-looking husbands were fixing cars in the street, wholesome-looking kids on cycles were tossing rolled newspapers into mailboxes. And every one of those wholesome-looking people greeted both Ruth and I.
‘Hi there, Little Rose! How ya doing, George?’
The SenSpace Corporation had introduced another new facility. It was called ‘City without EndTM’ because you could move through it indefinitely without ever reaching an edge, although the same pattern of streets, buildings and parks repeated themselves every five virtual kilometres.
Ruth had subscribed to it at once.
The thing about City without EndTM was that you could simply wander through the streets until you found a house you liked that was vacant, and make it your own. (If you found one you liked that wasn’t vacant, you could just jump forward another five kilometres, or another ten, and there its exact copy would be.)
And when you’d chosen your house, SenSpace provided you with a vast catalogue of improvements and fittings to choose from. Wallpapers, paint, carpets, furniture, partition walls, extensions… all could be instantaneously installed, instantaneously replaced. And yet, because this was SenSpace – an illusion not only three-dimensional but tactile – the instantaneous furnishings could really be sat upon and the instantaneous walls really felt hard to the touch.
‘You must come and see my little house, George,’ she kept telling me – and I had finally, reluctantly agreed.
‘Hi there, Little Rose! How ya doing George?’
The neighbours knew who I was because they were ‘extras’: projections of SenSpace like the houses and the trees. Travel five kilometres to the next identical street and you would find exactly the same people, doing exactly the same things, the same again after ten kilometres, after fifteen, after twenty… When someone moved into a house, the extras who inhabited it before were simply deleted. Only in streets fully occupied by SenSpace subscribers, were the fictional neighbours no longer present at all.
But their illusory nature didn’t stop Little Rose from greeting them:
‘Hello there, Gramps… How are you, Bessy…! Don’t miss out my mailbox will you, Delmont?’
And she looked around at me with a pleased smile, almost as if she expected me to be impressed by the number of people she knew.
Only one person in the street did not greet us, and was not greeted by Little Rose. A pale figure in a white suit, he slunk past, avoiding our eyes.
‘Who is that?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘A subscriber. He moved in the other day to the house next door but two. It’s a shame, there was a really nice friendly family in there before and…’
But now her face lit up. She gestured towards a little house covered in bright pink roses.
‘There it is! Rose Cottage! What do you think?’
So I was shown the striped wallpaper in the lounge, the yellow-and-white in the hallway, the pink in Little Rose’s cosy bedroom. Her bed with its fluffy pink and white cover really felt soft. The room really had a feminine smell of lavender and tal
c.
‘This is your room,’ said Little Rose, showing me into a sickly pastiche of the bedroom of an adolescent boy. I cringed and was about to protest when a telephone chirruped downstairs.
I looked at Little Rose. She giggled.
‘Yes, it’s a real phone. I’m in SenSpace so much I’ve got it fixed so I can take calls in here. Will you get it for me?’
The phone, the virtual phone, was ringing in the hallway. The electronic projection of my arm reached out and picked up this electronically created mirage.
But the voice on the end was a real one, coming from the outside world.
‘Is this George Simling? I’m phoning about the advert in the paper. I understand you’re interested in making a purchase?’
It was a woman’s voice with a faint German accent.
‘Advert? No. I think there must be some mistake.’
‘No,’ the voice was very, very firm. ‘There is no mistake. I assure you of that. You were interested in making a purchase. If you’ve changed your mind, of course, that’s fine.’
The door to the kitchen of Rose Cottage was open. Beyond it, through the kitchen window, I could see an electronic ginger cat picking its way across the sunlit, electronic garden.
‘Listen, I really haven’t…’
And then, with a chill of pure fear, I understood. It was the call from the AHS.
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ‘I remember now. Yes, I am still interested in making a purchase.’
‘Who was it?’ said Little Rose when I went back upstairs. She’d been trying out different kinds of curtains in her bedroom window, which overlooked an idyllic scene of children playing in immaculate back yards, with the wholesome homes of the City without EndTM stretching away into the distance.
‘Oh, just someone from work,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take this helmet off Ruth. I’ve got a headache. I need some real air.’
26
I met the AHS contact in a café in Mendel District, a relatively poor area which had a large guestworker population. As I’d been instructed, I bought a coffee and sat outside, watching the passers-by and trying to guess which one it would be. She had told me to call her Ingrid and from her voice and accent I had created a mental picture of someone tall and fair and rather forbidding.
In the event though, she was small and dark, and I hardly noticed her until she actually sat down beside me. She wore dark glasses and had her hair tied up tightly in a bun. She shook hands with me without smiling.
‘Finish your coffee,’ she said, ‘and I’ll take you somewhere where we can be alone.’
I nodded. I felt scared but only a little because I couldn’t really believe that this was actually happening.
‘The place I’m going to take you,’ she said, ‘is a cheap hotel, whose rooms are used during the day for… assignations.’
It took me a second or so to grasp what she meant.
‘But don’t get any ideas!’ she said with a small smile.
We made our way to the hotel where an arthritic Greek woman showed us up to a bleak room with a sink and a double bed. Ingrid sat down on the bed. I hesitated, then sat beside her. There was nowhere else to sit.
The room had a lingering smell of sweat. Some couple had been making love here not long before. I wondered what it would be like to lie down on a bed like this with a real human being.
‘This will be our only meeting,’ Ingrid said, ‘I’m going to tell you about the aims and methods of the Army of the Human Spirit. When you have had a couple of days to think about it, I’ll contact you by phone. If you’ve decided you don’t want to take this any further, that’s no problem. We will leave you alone. If you’ve decided you want to join, that’s fine too. We’ve checked out your background and think you could be an asset to the struggle. Good with languages, I gather?’
I nodded.
‘What will happen then,’ Ingrid said, ‘is that in due course you will receive an invitation to attend a meeting of a club of some kind. This will be your operational unit, your cell, through which – and only through which – you will communicate with the rest of the Army.’
From the adjoining room came suddenly a woman’s loud cries:
‘OH! OH! OH! YES! YES! YES!’ she shrieked.
I returned my attention to Ingrid with great difficulty.
‘…once you’ve joined,’ she was saying, ‘it’s not so easy to leave. You could betray the identity of your cell members. You could betray the Army’s plans. It’s very important you realize this.’
The woman in the next room had reached her peak and her cries were now declining in intensity towards a plateau of peaceful pleasure.
‘Oh yes, oh darling, yes…’
Ingrid looked at me sharply, noticing how much I’d been distracted.
‘I really want to be sure you’ve understood this. What I’m telling you is that if you join and then leave, the Army will make an assessment of the security risk you pose and act accordingly. Bluntly, a decision might well be taken that you should be eliminated. It’s harsh, but we’re at war against a dangerous enemy.’
‘I understand.’
Ingrid took some papers from an inside pocket.
‘Read this. It’s the manifesto of the AHS.’
The woman in the next room said something which I couldn’t catch. A male voice chuckled. The woman gave a shout of laughter: ‘Stop! Stop!’
They were having a playfight, I realized. The man was tickling her.
With a huge effort I turned my attention to the manifesto:
‘The purpose of the Army of the Human Spirit,’ it began, ‘is to achieve a world in which the human spirit can truly express itself. We do not believe this is possible in the artificial state called Illyria. We do not believe that it is legitimate or healthy for an elite to cut itself off from the ordinary human beings who feed, clothe and sustain it, and declare itself to be a nation in its own right. Nor do we believe that the human spirit can grow in an environment in which only those things which are measurable are acknowledged to be real…’
And the document went on to demand citizenship for all residents of Illyria, regardless of educational qualifications, freedom of religious and artistic expression and an end to the programme to replace human beings with robots.
It concluded by saying that when the first two demands were met, the AHS would end its campaign of violence as it would then be possible to pursue its wider aims by peaceful means.
I handed it back to Ingrid.
‘It’s very different from how you are portrayed on TV,’ I said, ‘you know, as a bunch of religious fanatics.’
She bridled noticeably at this.
‘Many of us are religious. You’ll have to work alongside people with strong religious convictions.’
I shrugged. ‘That’s no problem.’
Another gentle little gust of laughter came from the next room.
‘And you need to understand what we’re up against,’ Ingrid went on. ‘Many people have not fully grasped how this state has changed. We all know how it began: humanism, hope, imagination, artists, musicians, scholars… You need to realize that all that has died – only its shell remains. This is a police state. O3 arrest and detain without trial, they torture horribly, they kill.’
I nodded.
‘Deep under a mountain north of Kakavia,’ Ingrid said, ‘they have dug out a kind of human abattoir. Its white rooms are lit day and night. There are gutters on the floor for the blood. There are machines whose whole purpose is to cause pain. They use mind-drugs and SenSpace nightmares to increase the terror. And it’s all hidden under hundreds of metres of solid rock, so there is no possibility of escape and no chance that anyone outside could ever hear you or get help to you.’
‘I know that,’ I said, though how I knew, I couldn’t say, because no one had ever described those white rooms to me before. I suppose the human mind picks up clues and fragments all the time, and then reconstructs them into coherent whole, like a TV re
ceiver plucking images out of the air.
I paused on the steps of the hotel and looked down at the busy street. A couple came out of the door behind me arm in arm. She was plump, pretty, cheerful-looking. He was swarthy, bearded, stocky. They stood beside me and kissed, moistly and tenderly, as if I wasn’t there at all.
‘See you Thursday my darling,’ the woman said, in a gentle, slightly husky voice as they finally parted. And I recognized the voice of the woman who’d laughed and cried out in the next room.
A police robot came by, towering over the human throng. For a moment its head turned in my direction and the silver, pupilless, unblinking eyes looked straight at me, standing on my own on the hotel steps.
I wondered about Lucy. Lucy, my love, as empty and hollow as me, what was she doing now?
27
The customer – a middle-aged Italian guestworker – is angry and ashamed. When this one asks him what he wants, he can’t even bring himself to speak, but hands over a written note.
This one (a) scans the note for linguistic/graphological cues, (b) reads off the instructions.
‘I WANT TO TIE YOU UP AND HIT YOU.’
This is situation SM-76, a very common scenario.
This one generates randomized variant of standard procedure OS-{S-66}/17:
a) fetch handcuffs and cane.
b) issue warning (variant W-3027):
‘I have to remind you not to damage me. House security has to be called if you damage me.’
c) add supplementary remark (SM-5590):
‘But you can hurt me. I want you to hurt me.’
The subject applies restraints and places this one in desired position.
Hard blows commence. {Monitor pressure}
d) commence moaning and crying.
e) carry out routine check: {Has pressure exceeded permitted level?}
The Holy Machine Page 8
