Made to Order

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Is that better?”

  “At least I can see you more clearly. People used to call you a sin eater, I believe?”

  The robot would have shrugged, had its inner metal frame been configured to perform such a gesture. Although it found the link with its services to be tenuous, its databanks were certainly fully aware of the practice in several cultures of one human taking on the sins of another to ensure a better afterlife, often through the eating of food, and it had, indeed, been called such a thing many times. “I’m technically known as a transfer assistant, but you can refer to me however you wish.”

  “Transfer assistant!” The old man barked a laugh. “It’s good to know your makers had a flair for the anodyne. People used to call me Your Holiness, you know.”

  “I’m sorry—Your—”

  “No, no! I mustn’t fool myself into imagining you’re more than just another machine. Still, I am, or once was, Pope Pontian the Second. The first Pontian held this office in the third century after Our Lord, and I chose to assume his name because what little we know of him suggests he was kind and pragmatic. He was arrested and tried for his beliefs in the reign of the Roman Emperor Maximinus Thrax, but instead of enduring some horrible martyrdom, he agreed to retire to Sardinia in exchange for an assurance that other Christians would be allowed to continue to practise their faith. It’s not much of a story, I know. And there are many far more spectacular popes. Pope Julius the Second, for example, actually led the armies of the Holy See into battle, can you believe? He also commissioned this ceiling.” The old man’s hand wavered up towards where, almost directly above them, Michaelangelo’s Adam reached out to receive the spark of life from God. “But look at me... Now... Here...” The steel bed hummed and clicked. “Is there really no else left out there? Has every other soul already transferred?”

  Once again, the robot might have shrugged. “There may well still be humans living corporeally somewhere. Perhaps out in the colonies on Mars, or the geodesic farms which were being developed in the Antarctic, or even in some remote wilderness. But it’s been decades since I, personally, have encountered a living human, or detected any signs or signals indicative of their presence.”

  The pope lay still for a long while, as if the rarity of his long vigil had been unknown to him until now. The robot had discovered many times through its dealings with clients that humans were capable of believing things which went against the evidence of their own senses and intellect.

  “This thing you bring used to be termed a mortal sin. But I suppose you’re aware of that as well?”

  The robot raised and lowered its head in a creaking nod. “Pope Pius the Sixteenth issued an encyclical that—”

  “Don’t patronise me, sin eater! Although many bishops and cardinals had already transferred by then, and they issued their own counter-encyclical in reply from the far side, such are the rifts and schisms which have always characterised my Church. But my own parents, they were honest, simple-hearted Catholics of the old kind, who believed death to be the absolute will of Our Lord, and expected a resurrection of a very different kind. They put off transferring until it was almost too late, and my mother’s knees were an agony to her, and my father’s heart was so weak he could barely stand. When they did, it was at my prompting, and they transferred together, which was only right. If anyone deserved a chance of living a better life on the far side of virtuality, it was them.

  “We still used to talk and exchange regular messages, at least for the first few months, and I never doubted that they were still the people I’d always loved, nor that they were far happier and more fulfilled than they’d ever been when they were corporeally alive. They found a village very much like the one they’d both grown up in, and my father worked his own fields just as he’d always wanted, and my mother sewed and pressed olives and raised chickens, and all the seasons were beautiful and the feast days were spectacular and there was never any sadness or pain. There was even a fine old church presided over by the same priest, can you believe, who’d once married them, back in this world…? But they started to find new interests. That, and they began to travel. At first, they simply visited to all the places they’d longed to see here on Earth, although of course they were far more wonderful. Venice not as a stagnant swamp, but risen back, and then far beyond, its Renaissance glory. Rome, of course, but in the full pomp of both its pagan and Christian incarnations instead of the sorry ruin it had already become. Then several versions of the Holy City they could barely describe. And from there, we began to drift apart. Soon, all I was getting from them were brief messages, followed by a silence which continues to this day...” The old man sighed. “All of which, I know, sin eater, is an old, old story. But I still pray for them, at least when I can bring myself to pray for anything at all.”

  The robot simply waited in silence, using its many sensory inputs to monitor the old man’s physical and mental state, along with the subtle interactions of all the many implants, chemicals and nano-agents which had kept him alive, for the story of how the newly transferred dwelt for a while amid the familiar foothills of old memories before making the full leap into boundless virtuality was, indeed, common.

  “Well,” the old man snapped, “aren’t you going to get on with it?”

  Again, the robot raised and lowered its head in a rough approximation of a nod. “But first, you should be aware that the process I will help guide you through is entirely reversible, at least until the final moment when you, and only you, elect to transfer, or not.”

  “Will there be any pain?”

  “None beyond that which you are already feeling. Then, even that will go.”

  “And what’s left of this body? It will simply be dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d be grateful if you could lay it in the catacombs beneath the Basilica, where many other popes are interred. The servitor I call Irene will show you the way.”

  “It is always my duty to obey the deceased’s final requests.”

  “I should have done this years ago, you know, sin eater. I mean—what use am I now? But I told myself that I was the last of the living line of Saint Peter, and that I should strive for life, or at least wait to die in the old-fashioned way. But I’ve come to realise that my procrastination was just another form of vanity, for who am I to imagine myself above something that all the rest of humanity has embraced with such joy? Still, I’ll admit it feels a little strange to be lectured on the trans-migration of souls by a robot.”

  “I do not pretend—”

  “—of course you don’t, you’re just a bloody machine!”

  “The other thing you should be aware of,” the robot continued after it had waited for the old man’s agitation to subside, “although I’m sure you know this already, is that the transfer process involves another element of decision.” It paused; despite its long experience, it had never quite found the best way to express this. “There are bad feelings, difficult memories and regrets in any life, no matter how conscientiously lived. So, and as the data singularity opens, you have a choice as to what of these things you take with you into the far side, and what to leave behind…” It paused. The old man’s pulse and breathing remained slow and regular. “It may be nothing more than a small childhood incident, or a slight problem of temperament, or a relationship that went awry. In other words, something you wish had been otherwise than it was.”

  The old man chuckled. “You make promises even Our Lord does not make.”

  “As I say, I am merely here to facilitate the process.”

  “Where is it really? I mean the…” He sought a word. “...the singularity, the far side? Is it deep in the sea, or up on the Moon, or out in deep space?”

  “In geographical terms, it’s in all of those locations and many others, with multiple power sources and endless redundancies. Some, and as we speak, are even travelling ever-further away from Earth. But they are all entangled at a quantum level. May I proceed?”

  Taking the old
man’s silence and bodily signals as continued assent, for humans often didn’t respond directly to machines, the robot snapped open the clasps of its carpetbag and produced a long, steel and glass instrument that resembled a syringe. It was filled with swirling, glinting fluid.

  “What is that thing?”

  “Merely a dataspike. Which, with your continued consent, I will use to make a small hole in your skull to introduce the nano-fluid which will initiate the process of entanglement within your brain. It will also briefly forge a bridge between your consciousness and my own heuristic circuitry, so that I may ensure that everything goes as it should.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “It always has. You might feel a slight vibration. But, as I have said, there will be no pain, and every part of this process can still be reversed.”

  The robot closed its carpetbag and moved carefully and quietly, despite a few creaks, until it was standing directly above and behind the old man’s bare skull. It could already feel the beginning tug of entanglement with the activated nano-fluid that its own quantum processes, which were made of a similar substance, were striving to make. The tiny drill at the head of the dataspike made a shrill, brief whirring as it drove through flesh, bone, membrane and cerebral fluid, then the seeking fluid flooded out from the dataspike, multiplying and entangling with billions of synapses in the old man’s brain.

  “It feels cold.”

  “People often say that. The sensation soon passes.”

  ...soon passes. The blurred echo of its own semi-human voice, but now dulled by the old man’s hearing, confirmed that the neural connection was forged. Soon, there was more. The robot saw itself as the old man saw it; a ragged and limping, yet pathetically sinister, machine. It even felt the inherent self-disgust that he disguised with his irritable manner, and the confusions of dread and excitement that churned beneath. Yet it also saw the Sistine Chapel as only a human with the great knowledge this man possessed could ever see it, not just as an artistic masterpiece, but a resounding statement of belief.

  “You’re with me now, aren’t you, sin eater?”

  You’re with me now, aren’t you, sin eater?

  Words were no longer necessary as the surface of his consciousness, the aches and the itches, the confusions and petty annoyances, swirled wider and deeper, then darkened and dissolved. For a moment, they were nowhere at all. Then there was a sudden blaze of noise and sunlight, and the robot heard the cries of children and the cluck of chickens, and saw a small hamlet of disorderly roofs and stony, irregular fields hunched beneath sheer white mountains, and it knew that this was the old man’s childhood home.

  Voices. Smoke-blackened kitchen beams. A smell of garlic and warm dough. And being lifted, laughing, high by smiling giants into the windy sky. Then an ass or a donkey nosing its head through a sag-wired fence. Then squatting over a stinking pit in an old outhouse that buzzed with flies. So it went, sounds and scents and images flowing on through the stations of a life, from the chalkdust boredom of a tiny schoolroom to the stubbly prickle of his father’s jowls.

  Kicking a football and pushing a hoe. The shivering leap into the flashing brightness of the village pond. The hurt of a torn knee. Kicking at thistles in the upper meadows after the pointless drowse of Sunday church. Then Sophia Alphonsi with mystery in her eyes and a stem of grass between her full lips, and the amazing press of her bosom through a whole long summer until the seasons turned and her look grew frosty-hard as the winter ground. But I thought… But you said… But I believed… A torment to which somehow only the dusty faces of stained glass saints in the old church brought any relief.

  His parents were disappointed when he announced he wanted to become a priest. Surely he could do something more practical with his gifts—become an engineer, or maybe a doctor—then at least they’d have grandchildren to cherish? Followed by many lonely walks across the upper meadows, consumed, he realised eventually, with little more than self-importance, but by then it seemed too late to back down from his supposed vocation.

  The weekly bus bore him and his cardboard suitcase away to a big city, where he argued endlessly with old men in draughty rooms about all the bad things that happened to good people, and the Bible’s many contradictions, and the rising seas, and the pestilential climate, and the great tide of humanity which was already escaping this ruinous world. But somehow, he was praised and admired for this endless doubting, and marked out as someone destined to go far.

  So he mouthed the holy words and raised the blessed sacrament and dutifully climbed the ladders of the Mother Church, priest to bishop, then archbishop to cardinal. Was this a test, a joke played by a God he didn’t believe in, that he should rise so high, and be called a man of great faith, when he had none at all?

  The papal election itself was a farce, with few of the remaining living cardinals physically capable of attending fully in charge of their wits, and others who’d recently transferred still insisting on their right to vote. Was there white smoke? Was it black? Did it still matter, with the Papal Swiss Guard replaced by droids, and only pigeons, rats and bots waiting outside in Saint Peter’s Square? But at least Pope Pontian the Second was already a seasoned scholar of irony. And he still had a duty, yes, to keep this final vigil as penance for a wasted life. And there were always leaky roofs and rotting woodwork, if not matters of theological nicety, to attend to, as he wandered the Vatican’s empty halls. Even when his own body started to fail him, he dealt with it in the same practical manner, and named his personal servitor Irene, and slowly submitted to the indignity of a life dependant entirely on the workings of machines.

  Days went by like years, but the years fled uncounted, and death still felt too much like giving up. But, even if transfer was just another empty promise, he was curious. And he still, yes, had fond memories of his parents, and wondered if Sophia Alphonsi had perhaps also made it to the far side… So he finally sent out many server bees to search of a surviving example of the appropriate machine… And the sin eater had come.

  Deus, Pater misericordiárum, qui per mortem et resurrectiónem Fílii sui...

  The old man was close to transfer now. The ties which bound his consciousness to his body were growing thin, and they were back inside the Sistine Chapel, but it was uptilted like some great vertical shaft pouring with baroque clouds and beams of sunlight as a massive something swirled far above.

  So that’s it, sin eater?

  Yes.

  The data singularity churned and turned. It was a vortex. It was a galaxy. It was a hole punched through reality. It was the light at the far end of a tunnel. It was the mouth of a virtual womb.

  And all I have to do is… Let go?

  Yes—whenever and however you choose.

  The robot felt the old man’s shivering excitement as he teetered at the edge of everything, just as he had once stood at the lip of the village pond. Then, in a final surge of joyful acceptance, he was gone.

  AS ALWAYS AFTER the climactic moment, the robot found it took a number of seconds for the regular, unentangled patterns of its circuitry to resume. And, as usual, as it stood over yet another dead and emptied body, the eyes blankly staring, the flesh already starting to cool, it became aware of how great the difference was between life and death.

  With a few quick switches and signals, the pumps and monitors were stilled. Next, it reversed the polarity-pull of the dataspike, causing the fluid, now darkly clogged with unwanted synaptic residues, to withdraw. The robot had had clients who were petty sadists or outright psychopaths, some of them unrepentant, who thus made their own private hell by dragging the bad things of one world into the next. But most of its clients had judged themselves far more harshly than they deserved, and the things they left behind could be touchingly small. A word misspoken, or an unkind look, were often enough to blight an entire life. Still, the bleak weight of the old man’s lack of faith, which it could still feel tugging at the edges of its heuristic consciousness from within the turbid nano fl
uid, was surprising, and, as it placed the used dataspike back inside its carpetbag, it wondered whether sin eater wasn’t such a bad title for its work after all.

  It was just placing a small adhesive patch over the cranial puncture, and batting away the still surprisingly agitated server bees—perhaps they possessed some kind of gestalt consciousness?—when it heard a knock at the far door, and the face of the servitor the old man had called Irene peered in.

  “I’ll miss him.” It shuffled forward, reaching out to touch a marbled hand with the scarred synthflesh of its own. “I really don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  Miss him… Don’t know what I’m going to do… The robot made no comment on these unduly human expressions as it finished removing the various inputs and catheters from the body, for it was not uncommon for machines to become more than a little like their masters. This might even explain the continued motility of the server bees, which had drifted up to darken the image of Adam receiving the spark of life from God.

  Now, all that was left was for the robot to carefully lift and bear the body of Pope Pontian the Second down to the catacombs, which apparently lay beneath the Basilica, with the little servitor carrying its carpetbag and showing the way, although the server bees also followed them out of the Sistine Chapel, and the Swiss Guards fell in squeakily behind to form an odd procession until they reached another deceptively small door leading into Saint Peter’s itself.

  Although the robot’s databanks contained the precise details of the Basilica’s dimensions, it remained astonishingly vast. The side chapels alone were the size of churches, and central dome, for all the litter of fallen beams which lay beneath it, glittered with threads of gold in the day’s settling light. Then, as the robot moved towards the steps leading to the catacombs behind the main altar, the far main doors boomed open, and what seemed like every mechanical device still capable of movement in the entire city came rushing in. Clearly, the information of the old man’s death had passed rapidly from server to server, and, in the absence of any other useful task, it seemed almost logical that they should be here.