I laughed, as did several other on-lookers. No one felt obliged to do anything. But a robot security guard and a sintetica servant, coming from different directions, lifted the thing gently back onto its wheels. They dusted it down and the sintetica squatted briefly beside it as if asking it whether it was okay. Everyone laughed: tourists, Florentines, African hustlers. The cleaner trundled away and the other two macchine headed off on their different errands.
I was suddenly seized by a crazy conviction.
“Hey you!” I shouted, dropping my ice cream and chasing after the security guard. “I know you, don’t I? I met you in the Accademia!”
People stared at me and exchanged incredulous glances, half-shocked, half-delighted at the outlandishness of the spectacle.
And there was more in store for them. It was the robot from the Accademia. It stopped. It turned to face me. It spoke.
“Yes… The Captives…”
It was so obviously a machine voice – flat and creaking – that it was hard to believe that I could ever have taken it for a human. Maybe as the programmed order of its brain gradually unravelled, its control over its voice was weakening? But strangely the very creakiness of it seemed touching, like something struggling against all odds to break through.
Hardly believing what I was doing, I touched its cold plastic hand.
“That afternoon in the Accademia – what was it you thought I understood?”
But before the automaton could answer me, it was interrupted by a shout.
“Alt! Polizia!”
A fat policeman was running up, followed by his hammerheaded minder. The Incontrollabile turned and ran.
“Shoot it!” the policeman ordered.
“No don’t shoot!” I pleaded. “It’s harmless! It’s just come alive!”
But the minder did not take orders from me. It lifted its hand – which must have contained some sort of EMP weapon – and the Incontrollabile fell writhing to the ground.
The policeman ran over. His thick moustache twitched as he looked down at the broken machine. Then he lifted his booted heel and brought it down hard on the robot’s plastic head.
A loud, totally inhuman roar of white noise blasted momentarily from the voice-box and the head shattered, spilling a mass of tiny components out onto the square.
The policeman looked up at me triumphantly.
“Don’t talk to me about these things being alive. Look! It’s a machine. It’s just bits of plastic and wire.”
*
I dreamed that the broken machine was taken to the monastery at Vallombrosa, where the simple monks mended it and gave it sanctuary. Somehow I found it there.
“I have come to see the macchina,” I told an old friar who was working among the bee-hives.
There was a smell of honey and smoke and flowers, and the old man’s hands and shining pate were crawling with fat black bees. He smiled and led me through a wrought iron gate into an inner garden.
The macchina was sitting quietly in the shade of a flowering cherry tree, almost hidden by its thick pink clouds of blossom, which were alive with the buzzing of foraging bees. Quivering lozenges of shade and pinkish light dappled its translucent skin. An old dog lay snoozing on its left side, a tortoiseshell cat on its right.
And it spoke to me about the Great Chain of Being.
“The first level is simple matter. The second is vegetative life. The third is animal life which can act and move. Then somehow the fourth level emerges, the level of self-awareness, which distinguishes human beings from animals. And then comes a fifth level.”
“Which is what?”
The macchina seemed to smile.
“Ah, that is hard to say in human words…”
*
“Gotcha!”
Bees and cherry blossom vanished.
Freddie had leapt out of bed onto the little domestic robot, trapping it beneath a duvet.
“Thought you’d pinch my ciggies again did you, you little bugger?”
He beamed up at me from the floor, expecting me to laugh.
But suddenly I had seized him by the throat and was ramming him up against the wall.
“Leave it alone, you bastard, alright? Just leave the poor bloody thing alone!”
Karel’s Prayer
The first thing Karel Slade noticed when he woke up was an odd smell in his hotel room. It was like the plasticky smell of a new car which has just had the polythene taken off its seats, but with a hint too of something antiseptic, a hint of hospital. And it was entangled in his mind with the mood of a fading dream in which he was drowning or suffocating, or being held down.
The second thing he noticed was that the radio alarm hadn’t gone off. It was now 8.00 and his plane home flew at 8.45.
“Shit!”
He leapt out of bed naked – a big, broad-chested, athletic man in his late forties, with thick silvery hair – and grabbed the phone to get a taxi. But the line, unaccountably, was dead.
“I do not believe it!”
He pulled on his trousers and headed for the bathroom. But it was locked.
8.03, said the clock as he went to the door of the room and found that locked too. The phone rang.
“Mr Slade, please come to the door of your room.”
“It’s locked.”
“Please come to the door and walk through.”
Beyond the door, where the hotel corridor should have been, was a large almost empty room, entirely white, with three chairs in the middle of it. Two of them were occupied by men in cheap suits. The third, a tall straight-backed thing which reminded Karel both of a throne and of an electric chair, was empty.
The two men rose.
One of them, the tall, wiry black man with the gloomy, pock-marked and deeply-lined face, went to the door that Karel had just come through, closed it and locked it. The other, the rotund Anglo-Saxon with the curly yellow hair and the affable expression, came forward in greeting.
“Mr Slade, good to meet you, my name is Mr Thomas. My friend here is Mr Occam.”
Karel did not take the extended hand.
“Who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you think you’re playing at?”
There were those who said that Karel was surprisingly foul-mouthed for a prominent Christian leader, but as he often pointed out to his family and his friends, coarse language might be undesirable but it wasn’t swearing and had nothing whatever to do with the third commandment. You had to have some way of expressing your negative feelings, he always argued.
“Sit down,” said Mr Occam shortly, returning to stand beside his colleague.
Mr Thomas gestured to the throne.
“No,” Karel told him. “I don’t feel like sitting. I do feel like listening to your explanation.”
“Sit!” commanded Mr Occam.
“Yes, do sit,” said Mr Thomas, “and then we can talk sensibly.”
He returned to his own chair. He was one of those people who manage to be both plump and nimble. His quick, graceful movements were almost camp.
Karel shrugged, went to the chair and sat down.
With a buzz and an abrupt click, shackles came out of the chair legs and fastened themselves around his shins.
“Lay your arms down on the rests,” Mr Occam told him.
“What? And have them shackled too!”
The black man approached him.
“I will hit you Mr Slade if you don’t put your arms on the rests.”
Karel did as he was asked.
Buzz. Click. The shackles slid into position.
Mr Occam nodded curtly – a taciturn man acknowledging a small courtesy – and took his seat alongside Mr Thomas.
“Now Mr Slade,” said the more amiable of the two men, “let’s see if we can answer your questions for you. Who the fuck are we? Well, suffice to say that we work for a government agency. What the fuck are we playing at? That’s easy. We’re carrying out an investigation. An investigation concerning a terrorist organisation. And we beli
eve you may be able to help us with our inquiries.”
Mr Occam gave a small snort.
“He to help us with our inquiries.”is going
Mr Thomas turned to his colleague gravely.
“Do you know what Mr Occam? I think you may be right.”
*
God help me, Karel prayed.
He was very very afraid but trying hard not to show it.
Please God, help me!
As ever, when he needed it most, his faith seemed to have deserted him. In the darkness and confusion of a fallen world, we should expect thatBut we should expect that, he reminded himself. . After all, if the world wasn’t fallen, people wouldn’t need belief. They would just know.
Please God, help me! he tried again and this time help did seem to come. For a merciful moment he was able to hold the thought in his mind that all this was only happening to one man at one particular point in space and one particular moment in time. Beyond this room, outside of this moment, the world was still the world. And beyond the world, that tiny inconsequential speck, there was eternity. There was always eternity. The same as it ever was.
“I have rights,” Karel said. “You can’t detain me and shackle me and question me without a warrant.”
“With respect,” said Mr Thomas, “I think we’ve just demonstrated to you that we can.”
“But you’re breaking the law. You’re violating my constitutional rights. Sooner or later you’ll have to release me, and then this will get out. I’m a prominent man. I head an organisation with more than two million members. I have connections. I…”
“Why do you think we’ll have to release you?” queried Mr Thomas with what seemed like genuine curiosity.
“Well of course you…” Karel broke off, realising that there were, after all, other theoretical possibilities.
“Listen,” he said, “if I’m not out of here very soon, my family and colleagues will start demanding explanations. And they’ll go on until they get explanations. And then you two men are going to be in deep trouble.”
“You think so?” Mr Thomas wiggled his head from side to side doubtfully, weighing up the merits and demerits of a questionable argument. “Well who knows? Who knows? But you should let us worry about that. After all, you’ve got other things to consider.”
“Yes,” said Mr Occam. “Like for example your membership of the SHG.”
“The Soldiers of the Holy Ghost,” said Mr Thomas regretfully, almost as if embarrassed to bring it up, “an illegal terrorist organisation responsible for several hundred deaths over the past five years.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Karel. “I’m Executive Director of Christians for Human Integrity. It shares some theology with the SHG, yes. But it’s an entirely legitimate organisation, properly registered with all the appropriate authorities.”
“It’s a front for the SHG,” stated Mr Occam.
“And you, Mr Slade,” his colleague continued, “are a leading member of the SHG’s strategic command. Why deny it? You can see for yourself that we know it, so what would be the point?”
While Mr Thomas was speaking, Mr Occam leant forward and stared intently at Karel’s eyes.
Don’t try too hard to look sincere, Karel told himself. It was the mistake that liars always made, like drunkards trying too hard to act sober, like unfaithful husbands trying too hard to appear uxorious, rushing home from their mistresses with chocolates and bunches of flowers for their wives.
“I do deny it,” he said. “I deny it completely. Now let me call my lawyer.”
“No, Mr Slade,” said Mr Thomas. “That’s not going to happen. And don’t lets go on and on about it, eh? Or it will get so…”
Mr Occam broke rudely across him, leaning forward to bark a question into Karel’s face.
“Do you deny you support the aims of the SHG?”
“No I don’t deny that. Like the SHG, I’m opposed to any form of artificial life or artificial reproduction of life. I’m opposed to artificial intelligence, I’m opposed to cloning, I’m opposed to designer babies and I’m opposed to field-induced copying of human tissues. But it’s not a crime to object to tinkering with human identity. Millions agree with me. A majority of the population quite possibly.”
“And do you deny that you support the methods of the SHG?” asked Mr Thomas.
Tell the truth whenever possible, Karel told himself. The less lies the better. But he’d need to choose his words carefully.
“I believe that their use of violence is in principle justified by the cause. Most Christians for the last two thousand years – including all the Christian members of the present government – have believed that violence in some circumstances is justified. It’s the traditional doctrine of the Just War. If Christians can legitimately invoke that doctrine to justify war in defence of purely national interests then they are certainly entitled to invoke it when it comes to defending the integrity of the human person. But that’s an intellectual and theological position. It doesn’t mean that…”
“You are a member of the strategic command of the SHG,” Mr Occam said. “Not intellectual position. Not theological position. Fact. You know that. We know that. We’re not even going to discuss it. You’ve been actively involved in funding and planning attacks on laboratories and laboratory staff for the past five years at least. What we want from you are names, code words, bank accounts, structures and systems. And you’re going to tell us all of them, Mr Slade. One way or the other you’re going to tell us the whole lot.”
“No I’m not, because I don’t know them.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake man,” grumbled Mr Occam, rising wearily from his chair and hitting Karel very hard across his face.
“You can’t do that!” Karel yelled at him.
It had hurt. It had frightened him. But more than anything he was shaken by his own baby-like helplessness. He was a man who liked to be in charge of his own life.
Mr Occam hit him again, this time so hard that the entire chair toppled sideways and crashed to the floor.
Help me God, prayed Karel, shackled to the fallen chair. He could feel blood running down his cheek. He could taste the rusty tang of it in his mouth. Help me remember that this is just pain. It’s essentially trivial. It’s just something that’s happening for a very short time indeed to the most temporary part of me.
They’d had a training course in the SHG – ‘Using Faith to Withstand Torture’ – and a set of guidelines that they’d instilled into all their members. But they also knew very well that, faced with the agony of the Cross, even the Son of God had lost faith for a moment. So they’d set themselves a limited goal: you can’t hold out forever but try at least to hold out for one day to give the rest of the organisation time to go underground.
One day, Karel thought, just one day. That had to be manageable.
The guidelines proposed two stages. Stage A was to stonewall as long as possible, denying all knowledge. Stage B, when the torture got too much to bear, was to give false information. There were various fake addresses and phone numbers which would keep the enemy busy for a few hours, and tip off the people outside that they were under threat…
But for now Karel needed to try and stick to Stage A. Actually, as long as they stuck to hitting him, he felt quite confident he could cope. Hitting just hurt after all. It was only if they got onto needles and blades that he would start to be vulnerable because, brave though he was about most things in life, he was absolutely terrified of being pierced or cut. He always had been. Ever since he sliced open his knee when he was a kid and had looked inside before the blood came, and seen his own white bone.
“Names, code words, bank accounts, structures and systems,” repeated Mr Occam. “Starting, now, with the names of the other four members of the strategic command group. The real names, not the crappy fake ones that you and your pathetic friends have dreamed up. We know all about Mr French of Dawson Street. We know about Mr Gray of Oldham Road.”
Parallel to the floor in his toppled throne, like the fallen king at the end of a game of chess, Karel quailed. Telling them about the fictitious Mr French and Mr Gray had been Stage B. So now there was nothing pre-prepared to fall back on.
“I told you,” he said, “I don’t know any names. I don’t even know what the strategic command group is.”
Wham. Intense pain and nausea. Bright lights in his eyes. Mr Occam had kicked him in the stomach.
“Don’t lie to us you murderous piece of shit. We aren’t just guessing here. We know you’re high up in the SHG. We know that since the death of Leon Schultz, there’s no one senior to you in the whole gang.”
A sour strand of vomit, mixed with blood, dribbled from the corner of Karel’s mouth. The mention of Leon Schultz had shocked him. A wealthy hotelier who had died suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack three weeks ago, Schultz had indeed been the leader of the SHG, but Karel had thought this was known only to himself and his four colleagues in the strategic command group.
“Names,” said Mr Occam, “now!”
He kicked Karel again.
“Hey!” protested Mr Thomas, standing up. “Easy Mr Occam now. Easy! You’re letting it get to you again. Maybe you should take five while I have a quiet word with Mr Slade here?”
“Quiet fucking word be damned,” grumbled the black man. “Let’s stop pussyfooting around.”
It was hard for Karel to see what Mr Occam was doing because he had moved into a part of the room which was nearly above his head, but there was some kind of cabinet there against the wall, like one of those cabinets with many narrow drawers that you get in museums, holding fossils or sea-shells or pressed flowers. Mr Occam was opening and closing drawers, muttering. And then something silvery glittered in his hand and he turned and advanced across the room.
Oh shit God, Karel prayed. Help me please. If you love me God, make him put that back.
“Come on Mr Occam,” said the fat man, standing in front of his colleague and reaching up to lay his hands on his shoulders. “You know it’s not time for that yet. We need to give Mr Slade a little space. A man takes a few minutes to figure out how he’s going to get round his entire system of belief.”
The Turing Test Page 23
