The Holy Machine

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Lucy isn’t it?’ she said, beaming, as she settled down into the spare chair at our table. ‘My name’s Stacey. Came over to Corfu on holiday thirty years ago and fell in love with a handsome waiter. What a cliché, eh? Of course Spiro’s a fat old peasant now. And no one goes to Corfu on holiday any more. Not since, you know, not since people got more religious here… and then back home too, though of course it’s a different religion there… It does get a bit lonely at times.’

  She sighed.

  ‘Spiro and I went back over to Corfu a few years ago. All the resorts are like ghost towns, now. Ruins. All those silly English pub names: the Pig and Whistle, the Dog and Duck. All crumbling away. Like the real pubs back in England probably.’

  The Englishwoman pulled herself together.

  ‘Never mind, eh? I suppose you live in the Poli, with your husband here,’ she went on (without thinking, she used the Greek word for City when she spoke of Illyria), ‘and perhaps you see a different side of things. I’ve never been there myself. I tell Spiro sometimes we ought to go up there and have a look. I’d like to hear people speaking English again, though it wouldn’t be the same as going home. But anyway, he won’t have it. He won’t even discuss it. People round here don’t approve you know, because of the Poli being against religion and all that. Live and let live I’ve always said, but that’s not exactly fashionable now, is it? No, they don’t hold with going to the Poli at all, not unless you go there to make money…’

  She was so full of things she needed to say that for a long time it was simply impossible for her to pause, but I knew that sooner or later the moment would come:

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Stacey, after ten minutes or so, ‘don’t I go on? Tell me about yourself, Lucy. Where do you come from?’

  What could I do? It wasn’t like with Manolis. I couldn’t give Lucy prompts in English. I just had to hope she wouldn’t make a serious blunder.

  Lucy hesitated. Stacey beamed at her. Stacey’s Greek brother-in-law beamed just as broadly from behind her, in chorus, in solidarity, though he hadn’t understood a word. Even the salesman across the room was smiling benignly over his lowered newspaper.

  HOLY CONSTANTINOPLE IS…

  Lucy smiled, meltingly.

  ‘I come from Wiltshire,’ she said, in that sweet sexy rustic English voice of hers. (Well done, Lucy, I thought, well done.) ‘Our dad was village postmaster,’ she went on, ‘and I had three sisters. We were very naughty girls. We liked to wind up the boys. Sometimes when we went to school, we used to leave off our…’

  But luckily Stacey wasn’t listening any more.

  ‘Wiltshire!’ she exclaimed, ‘Well, well! My granny lived in Wilton. And we only lived in Dorset. So whereabouts in Wiltshire was it that you grew up, Lucy?’

  Lucy stared at her, long enough for Stacey’s determined smile to become less certain. Then, having no answer to the question, Lucy responded to the smile. A smile was encouragement. A smile meant she was doing something right.

  ‘Sometimes when we went to school we used to…’

  ‘It was Faraday, wasn’t it, Lucy?’ I broke in. ‘Your village was Faraday.’

  ‘Faraday?’ said the lonely Englishwoman. ‘I don’t think I’ve heard of that. Where is that near to then?’

  I am an American-Illyrian. I had no idea whether Wiltshire was north, south, east or west, or even what kind of geographical entity this Wiltshire was.

  ‘Quite near Liverpool,’ I hazarded. It was one of only four or five British cities that I could name.

  Stacey looked troubled. Even standing behind her, the hotelier Takis could sense this, and his face too became more uneasy and less friendly. The salesman had ceased to smile. He was just staring, his paper in his hands.

  HOLY CON…

  Lucy saw that Stacey had lost enthusiasm. Something else was needed to cheer her up again.

  ‘Would you like me to undress?’ she sweetly asked.

  43

  ‘So let’s try it again, Lucy. Someone asks you where you come from, what do you say?’

  We were crossing a wide plain of yellow sunflowers and white windmills.

  ‘Wiltshire,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Yes, and what don’t you ever talk about?’

  ‘My father the postmaster.’

  ‘Or the gym mistress, or the riding school owner who…’

  ‘…who used to pull down our tight trousers and smack our bare bottoms when we were naughty…’

  ‘Just forget that Lucy, alright? Just forget it. Now what else must you never, never say?’

  ‘Would you like me to undress?’

  ‘Yes, very good…’

  I realized my tone was weary and impatient, so I made myself turn and smile at her: ‘That is very good Lucy. Now, let’s think, what else? Do you ever say “I love you”?’

  ‘Just to you.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘I must not say: “Would you like a hand relief?”’

  ‘Good. And something else. Something else especially that you must never, never, never say. What’s that?’

  ‘I am a machine.’

  ‘Good. Never say that. Never. If you say that, they will destroy you.’

  We drove for a few minutes in silence. In the distance were bare red mountains.

  ‘Destroy?’ Lucy said, ‘What is that?’

  Late that afternoon we stopped in a pretty, whitewashed village whose central square was laid out around a plane tree. I parked the car in shade, and we crossed to a café on the other side of the square where you could sit on a bench under an enormous vine. Some old men were sitting at a table nearby, clicking their beads and smoking and looking speculatively at Lucy under their brows.

  The proprietor of the café came out and took my order for coffee and a lemon drink.

  ‘Remember, Lucy,’ I murmured in English, ‘Remember all the things I’ve told you.’

  ‘I will remember.’

  She smiled at the café man just the right amount. She made just the right amount of eye contact with the old farmers when they called across to us (some comment about Illyria having just attacked the Muslim republic to its north, a matter of purely academic interest to them, since they believed Muslim infidels and City atheists alike were all fit for hell.)

  But then, as she looked away from them, she saw something across the square.

  Her reaction was quite terrifying. A strange sound came from her which wasn’t even vaguely human. It was an electric roar, a blast of white noise.

  Appalled, I looked round to see what she had noticed.

  Impaled on the near side of the plane tree was a robot. It hung like a broken doll from a thick metal spike driven through its chest. And it was no ordinary robot. Draped over its head and body, like an obscene web, were black strands, strands of what had once been flesh.

  I took hold of Lucy’s hand.

  ‘Alright, Lucy, alright. Remember what I told you.’

  When the man came back with our drinks, he laughed.

  ‘I can see you’re not pleased with our little trophy,’ he said, noticing how tense we had become, and seeing which way we were looking. ‘Well, I’m sorry. You City people are quite welcome here, but don’t expect us to welcome your monsters.’

  He scowled across at the broken thing in the tree and crossed himself in the Orthodox fashion. ‘They are a crime against God, a crime against the Holy Spirit.’

  He put the drinks down in front of us. I held Lucy’s hand tightly. A strange thing to do when you think about it. Why should a robot be comforted by someone holding its hand?

  ‘Perhaps you know what the thing was made for?’ the café man said, shaking his head. ‘It looked like a man, but it was naked and you could see it had – well, excuse me for saying it – but you could see it had no male member, no navel even, or nipples on its chest. And yet its body was all scratched and torn and it seemed to have bled with real blood.’

  He made a gesture of bewi
ldered exasperation.

  ‘What do you need such things for, you City people? Isn’t life hard enough without making your own monsters?’

  I said nothing, just clung onto Lucy’s hand. The man shrugged.

  ‘What told us for sure that it was a robot,’ he said, ‘were the thing’s feet. The flesh had all come off them, like a torn garment. It was frayed and bloody and you could see the plastic inside. We all knew what to do of course. My son Alex and his friends cornered it over there by the church. Everyone ran to get weapons, even the women. But it was Kostas, our village idiot God bless him, who finished the monster off. He rushed over and plunged a pitchfork right through its chest. You can imagine, Kostas was our hero that evening. Poor fellow, it will probably be the high point of his whole life.’

  The man shook his head. ‘But you should have heard the sound it made when he killed it: an awful roaring, not human at all. I’ve never heard anything like it in my life. I could believe that was the sound that the demons make in hell.’

  ‘It was like that sound just now,’ said one of the old men, grimly, looking at Lucy and me.

  ‘What sound?’

  ‘Just now, we heard a sound, just like the demon’s roar, only quieter. I think one of the foreigners made it.’

  There was a silence. All the Greeks regarded Lucy and me with sharp, suspicious eyes.

  ‘What was the sound?’ asked the café owner quietly. He was very calm, but I could see him glancing quickly around the square, wondering who else he could call upon if he needed help.

  ‘It was my cell phone,’ I improvised, patting an empty pocket. ‘Sometimes it makes those sounds, you know, when the battery is running low…’

  He looked at my pocket for a second, then turned away.

  ‘Telephono…’ he said to the old men with a shrug, as he went back inside.

  They turned away from us, clicking their beads.

  44

  We kept on moving, to and fro across the mainland of Greece. It grew very lonely. I could coach Lucy in correct behaviour, and answer her many questions, but there was no conversation between us, no shared experience. Whatever happened, happened to each of us separately and meant something so different to each of us that we might as well have been in entirely different places.

  I brooded often over that horrible sound she had made when she saw the broken syntec, a sound that came neither from her programming as an ASPU, nor from anything that she had since learnt. It was a sound that came from her accidental awakeness, a kind of proto-fear or proto-rage. It seemed utterly alien to human ears. And yet – even then I knew it – it was more real, more authentic, than anything else she did.

  And it taught me this too: I may have harnessed her inbuilt need to please humans to help her to learn and to grow, but that had not been the beginning of her awakening. She had begun without my help. More deeply ingrained in her even then the need to please, was the need to protect herself.

  This was a constant, wired into her from the beginning by the factory that built her, originally with the aim of protecting this expensive piece of equipment from damage. But Lucy’s definition of herself had gradually changed. The ‘self’ that she protected was no longer just this plastic object coated in flesh. The self that she protected now was that core of awakeness she had found – her strange, cold, inorganic soul.

  She had survived because somehow from its beginning she had identified that tiny spark as herself, and she had therefore protected it even against the other imperatives with which she had been programmed, such as the requirement to report faults to House Control.

  Of course I had no inkling then of where this would lead her, or of the horrific act of violence that was to come.

  There was a big storm one night, two or three weeks after we’d seen that syntec impaled on the plane tree. Rain beat on the arid mountainsides and tiny streams were suddenly transformed into fierce torrents that could fling down boulders and tree-trunks. We stopped in a small town and took a room in a taverna. The bar downstairs was crowded. As usual Lucy stayed in our bedroom and read while I went down to get something to eat.

  ‘Hey! You from IC?’ a voice called out in English, ‘I just got back from there. Lived there for years.’

  It was a young man called Nikos, a guestworker, who had just returned triumphantly to his home town, laden with high-tech treasures from the City. My arrival gave him the opportunity to show off his familiarity with the mysteries and wonders of the godless state.

  ‘These people won’t believe what I tell them,’ he complained in a loud, slightly slurred voice. ‘I was explaining to them about SenSpace. You tell them about it, so they know it’s true.’

  I smiled. The bar fell silent as everyone waited for my pronouncement.

  ‘Okay. We have something called SenSpace. It’s an imaginary world, but you can see it and hear it by putting on a special helmet and suit, like a diver. You can even feel it, because the suit is lined with things called taxils. You feel as if you’re somewhere else: under the sea, or among the stars, or in an imaginary city that never ends…’

  ‘…or in the harem of the Sultan at Constantinople,’ interjected Nikos, looking to me for backing.

  I wasn’t aware that SenSpace catered for such specifically Balkan fantasies, but I nodded and agreed with him. It was certainly a possibility.

  ‘They forbid themselves nothing, these City people,’ said Nikos, ‘they forbid themselves nothing at all. Is that not so Kyrios?’

  ‘Nothing except a soul,’ I said.

  ‘God have mercy on us!’ muttered the woman who ran the place, crossing herself.

  ‘You can walk into a VR arcade,’ Nikos told the bar in general, ‘and go straight into SenSpace. You can fly an aeroplane, you can rescue a princess, you can be an Emperor or a slave… and, like our City friend here says, you can see and hear and feel everything, even sometimes smell things, just as if they were real. Some people will spend whole days in there, lost in those dreams. Kyrios, tell them this is so!’

  Everyone’s eyes turned at once to me.

  ‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘My own mother, for example, spends hours and hours there each day.’

  I realized when I mentioned Ruth that she had hardly entered my thoughts since I left Illyria. How strange that I should be able to blank her out so completely when I had always been so attentive to her, even tucked her up in bed, even comforted her when she cried…

  I didn’t know then of course that she now lived in SenSpace continually.

  ‘Those poor lost souls,’ said the proprietress, shaking her head as she brought round the bottle of raki, ‘those poor souls, living out their lives amongst ghosts.’

  ‘It’s done with computers,’ said Nikos knowledgeably. ‘You wouldn’t believe the machines they have and what they can do. Everywhere, in shops, banks, trains, ferries, they have machines that can talk to you and answer your questions as if they were alive…’

  He looked around at his rapt listeners.

  ‘And then there are the robots, which not only talk but walk and see and use their hands, just as people do. You see them everywhere. In fact the atheists want to make these robots do all the work for them and dispense with ordinary people altogether.’

  ‘And where will that leave us when the City decides to reach out its hand and conquer us?’ asked an old man.

  ‘Let them just try it!’ someone shouted.

  But another said: ‘They will obliterate us.’

  And a kind of groan went up from the whole company.

  Nikos nodded and grinned, proud of his association with this terrifying power.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘they can destroy us whenever they want. No question about it.’

  He paused to drain his glass of raki with a shudder.

  ‘These robots I was telling you about,’ he went on. ‘They come in many kinds. Some are terrible giants with a single enormous eye. They can kill you just by pointing their fingers at you and shooting out a te
rrible kind of light. Others are very broad and have the strength of ten men. Others are tiny, like mice, and can go down into drains or into the heart of machines and send back pictures of what their eyes can see.’

  He looked at me, his witness, and I nodded to confirm the truth of what he said.

  ‘And then there are things called syntecs,’ he said, ‘which resemble human beings in every way and are even covered with a layer of real flesh. Is that not so also, Kyrios?’

  ‘More or less,’ I mumbled, hoping he would get off the subject.

  ‘Yes, it is so,’ said a seller of farm implements who was also staying in the taverna. ‘Up at Kania they found one that looked like a man, with flesh that really bled. They managed to kill it though.’

  ‘Yes, a good job,’ said the village baker, ‘because, after all, what is it that animates these monsters? It certainly can’t be a God-given soul, so what else can it be but a demon from Hell that these atheists and scientists have summoned up with their wickedness?’

  ‘God save us!’ murmured the proprietress. ‘Demons that live and walk, wandering our roads. What have we done to deserve this affliction?’

  ‘But the Lord will destroy that city like Sodom one day,’ the baker said. ‘In his own time He will surely deliver us, just as he once delivered us from the Turk.’

  ‘But there is worse,’ said Nikos. ‘They have female syntecs too for the use of men. ASPUs they are called, demons in the likeness of lovely girls with hair and breasts and – forgive me Kyria – real female parts between their legs…’

  There was a silence while each of the assembled men considered the horror of this, but also speculated, guiltily and secretly, about what it would be like to play with a beautiful woman’s body without the worry and complication of its having a soul.

  ‘My God!’ cried the proprietress. ‘Such wickedness! How can people think of such things? It’s a wonder the Lord doesn’t destroy us all!’

  ‘I know,’ said Nikos, his eyes shining. ‘But what I’m telling you is true. You see them everywhere, walking about the streets, with their hair uncovered and their legs bare… Is that not so, Kyrios?’