by Lou Anders
I fall to my knees.
He motions that I rise. I am humbled by his presence. He is one of only twelve and is second only to the Foremost, who is the titular head of the Rapture. Apart from encounters with the machine, I have never bowed in the presence of such wisdom and insight.
He asks me questions about the machine. What does he eat? When does he sleep? What are his interests? I answer each question truthfully. Then he asks if I know what the machine hopes to accomplish by meeting the Checker. In fact I do not, as the concept of love is as unknown to me as a mountain, ocean, or sky.
The Disciple ponders this a moment and then delivers a homily in which he confirms what I already know, that the machine is performing a set of calculations that will bring the menace of the infidels to an end and I should help him to finish his work by performing my server duties to the best possible extent.
I vow to do that (without pointing out that I have always done that) and I am dismissed. Outside the room, others who serve the machine are called to question.
At the end of my shift I attend my nightly prayer ritual, and I pray more fervently than ever for guidance. I could have told the Disciple about the machine’s communication with the Checker through their calculations, but I did not. Was that a lie? And why was I protecting the machine?
The machine is ecstatic. I place his breakfast before him, and he shovels great dripping spoons of oatmeal into his mouth. He is hardly able to speak between his appetite and his joy.
“I met with the Disciple, and he has agreed to my request!” he blurts. I can barely understand him.
But I feel two things—an overwhelming happiness for the machine and an unspeakable sense of relief for myself. The conflict is resolved. Better, my faith in the forces around me has been restored. The company is good. The Rapture is wise. And the machine is as smart and virtuous as I have always believed. It is by my relief that I measure the depth of my uncertainty, which I suppose demonstrates that what the Rapture teaches us is true: Human beings are fallible creatures who must always reaffirm their faith in order to earn a seat at the Savior’s table in the Great Hereafter.
“I must hurry to prepare,” the machine whispers as he lifts the bowl to his lips and literally sucks down the remainder of the oatmeal. It is hot and burns his throat, but he swallows anyway, grimacing with pain. The sight of the company’s greatest asset attacking his breakfast with the gusto of a ten-year-old is too comical for me to restrain a chuckle, and the machine sees this and winks at me.
“Always remember: The Savior did not place us on this earth to work and pray and never celebrate the marvel of life. Even the infidels, damned as they are, know this.”
I will not let his casual heresies spoil my good mood. I collect his plates, and he lunges from the table to put away papers and restore order to his living area. I leave with a smile.
I am happy for him. I am happy for myself. I am happy for all of us.
At my midshift prayer ritual I am removed from the sanctuary and escorted to my room by company officiates. Each officiate is armed with an omnus, a wandlike device that can disable a person with a touch. Along the way, I see other servers being similarly escorted. I have never seen such a display of military authority, and it frightens me. Are we under attack? Have the infidels invaded?
As I lie on my bed awaiting instructions, my thoughts take a dour turn. Might this have something to do with the machine’s liaison with the Checker? Has calamity struck? Has their relationship been tainted?
Are we all to be retired?
I stay in my room for an entire service cycle. Then I am instructed to feed the machine.
A company officiate stops me as I prepare to enter the machine’s quarters. “You will not speak to him,” he says. “You will leave his food and collect the dishes from the previous meal. Any deviation from these instructions will result in immediate retirement. Do you understand?”
A chill passes through me, and I feel my eyes growing wide. I can only nod. The officiate conducts me through the door.
Another officiate is standing in the corner of the room. He is holding an omnus which crackles ominously with electrical charge. He watches me the way I think a predator must study its prey.
The machine is hunched over his table. He looks worse than after his starvation, and my heart aches for him. An oozing weal crosses his cheek, and it is clearly the stinging mark of an omnus lash. That the company would treat their greatest asset with such harsh disregard troubles me more than any heresy the machine has spoken in my presence.
“How can I work with that infernal noise?” the machine mutters as I place his meal before him.
“Do not speak,” the officiate orders.
The machine looks up at me, and his eyes are wild with rage. “The meeting was a fraud! They lied!”
The officiate snarls, “Do not speak, Tabulator!” but the machine shouts, “The woman was no Checker! She came from the breeding stock of some other Tabulator! She knew nothing of mathematics!”
The officiate advances. Evil purple feelers of electricity crawl menacingly across its tip. I step back, and the machine hunches down over his sheets of calculations. But the rage still smolders in his glare.
“Leave,” the officiate tells me. I collect dishes and leave.
I ask to be excused from my midshift prayer ritual. I feel an emptiness inside.
I feed the machine.
He has not eaten the breakfast I brought him.
Slowly I place his lunch before him, and as I collect the bowl of oatmeal he looks at me with a quiet desperation and whispers, “They say I have been corrupted by the infidels!”
The officiate strides across the room and lashes out with the omnus. The machine screams and arches his back. His face is pinched into an expression of agony so complete that for a long moment he does not breathe. Then he collapses to the table, and the air gushes out of his lungs in a pitiful moan.
I cannot stand the sight of it. Without being told I grab the dishes and hurry for the door.
I lie in my room. I think about things. What is a mountain, or an ocean, or sky? What is truth anymore?
I know the machine has not been corrupted by the infidels. Such a thing is not possible. We were all born here—the machine, the Checker, and all the servers who make his life possible. We have never left the Redoubt, and nobody has ever entered. The company made it that way to protect us from corruption and retirement.
Each of us has faithfully executed his duties.
Something is happening to me that I don’t understand.
A slow transformation of belief.
What is this love the machine would give his life for?
I begin to cry.
I feed the machine.
The room is draped in shadow with only a small lamp in the center of the table providing illumination. The officiate is a dark shape in the corner, and the flickering of his omnus somehow fails to reveal any further detail, as though light itself would shun his presence. The machine stares blankly at an empty sheet of paper.
He has not eaten his lunch, and I expect he will have nothing to do with the dinner I have brought him. He seems reduced, as if pain were sucking the bone from his body. I wish he would eat, but I know I cannot make him. I don’t expect I’ll be feeding him much longer.
As I have always done, I carefully place the bowls and plates on the table, avoiding the precious sheets of mathematics. I remove the bowls and plates I brought earlier. I prepare to leave. As I do so, the machine slowly looks up at me. He says, “I want you to know something.”
The officiate comes striding across the room.
The machine says, “I think you already know what I was going to say.”
The officiate raises the omnus to strike, and I react without thinking.
I grab his arm.
He is strong, far stronger than I, having been bred for the purpose of striking people. But perhaps he hesitates because it is unthinkable that a food server who has
been conditioned from birth to obey would defy that conditioning. Whatever the reason, I snatch the omnus from his grip and ram it into his chest, and it discharges with a strangely satisfying explosion of sparks. The officiate’s muscles spasm, and he grabs the shaft of the omnus and receives a second jolt that knocks him across the room, where he collapses and lies still.
The machine gazes up at me with wonder. He says, “God help us, but thank you!” and leaps from his seat. I am stunned by what I have done and as the machine scuttles into the shadows to check on the officiate and then returns to our island of light, I begin to sense the enormity of my actions. I try to sit down. The machine helps me.
I am an abomination, I whisper.
The machine shakes his head vigorously. When I don’t respond, he takes my face into his hands. It is the first time he has ever touched me. His skin is rough, the fingers callused from all the years of scribbling and erasing and scratching out. He looks into my eyes, and I see his vast intelligence, unfettered now by hierarchy or ritual, and it transcends everything I have been taught.
He says, “You are a human being, and I thank you.”
He lets go. He darts back across the room and returns with the omnus. He hefts it with his right hand and collects the basket of dishes with the other. He says, “May I borrow your frock? Perhaps they’ll think it is you.”
I ask him what he is doing.
“I mean to find her,” he answers.
But that’s impossible. He doesn’t know where she is.
“If I must search every room of the Redoubt, I will find her,” he says.
But he cannot do that. The device in his brain. If he goes beyond the areas that have been approved, the device will …
“Yes, I know.”
No, I blurt. I am lost in every way now. He sets the dishes down and crouches at my feet and takes my hand into his. “You must listen to me,” he says, “and you must listen carefully because this may be the last chance you and I have to speak and I have something very important to tell you.”
I nod without understanding.
“I will not finish my calculations for the Rapture.”
I stare at him without comprehension.
“I have a very good reason. Circling far above our world is a series of hateful devices placed there by the governments that preceded the Rapture,” he says. “These devices are similar to the ones inside our brains, but they are much larger, capable of retiring whole cities in a pulse of light that would destroy many millions of people and spread poison across the face of the world.”
I cannot conceive of such a thing.
“The Rapture intends to use these devices to destroy the infidels,” he says angrily, taking his eyes from me to swear softly, “and that is what I have been doing. Performing the calculations that will tell the devices where to fall. The calculations must be executed in three dimensions, and I am the only Tabulator capable of keeping all the variables in order.”
My thoughts are a storm of turmoil.
He hangs his head in silence a moment, but when he speaks his voice is firm.
“I know nothing of these infidels. Perhaps they deserve such a fate. But I do know if the infidels are corrupt they will answer to the Savior, not the Rapture. And that is what our leaders really want—a world rendered in their image, where love is imprisoned, watched over by guards and struck down when it defies them. That is not what the Savior intended when he placed us here. He expected us to celebrate life.
“He expected us to love.”
Enough. I cannot take it all in—devices and cities and love. It is too much, and I feel my world falling away from me. I do not know whom to ask for guidance.
The machine stands and smiles down at me.
“This moment has brought me more joy than any other in my life,” he says, “and I thank you for it.”
I give him my frock. I don’t know what else to do.
He steals to the door. He opens it and lashes out with the omnus. The officiate tumbles to the floor.
The machine glances back at me. He winks. And then he is gone.
I sit in the chair.
Moments later, I hear the sharp crack of a detonation, and when I peer into the hallway the machine is lying on the floor, a fine mist of blood coating the opposite wall.
I am confined to my room for a period of seven shifts. I wait to be given absolution. I wait for the device inside my brain to detonate. I wonder if it will hurt. But it doesn’t happen. I am brought to face an inquiry. Officiates from the company and a Disciple are there. The officiate I attacked has not regained consciousness. No mention is made of the machine. They ask me what happened, and I tell them the officiate attempted to strike the machine and I intervened. They seem almost amused. They tell me my loyalty to the machine is commendable, but a greater loyalty to the company and the Rapture must be observed. I insist I am telling them the truth. They tell me I am lying. They tell me I have been corrupted by the infidels. None of these things are true, and I become angry. They send me back to my room to await the Hereafter.
On the seventh shift my supervisor tells me to feed the machine.
He is lying in his bed. His head has been shaved, and a bandage covers the right hemisphere of his skull. A wheeled table that extends over his chest is covered in papers.
Calculations.
His eyes finally find mine. They are filled with defeat.
“It seems I have been outwitted,” he says, and his voice possesses none of the vigor I had always known. He throws a weak sigh, and his gaze wanders to the ceiling. “The device inside my brain … it was implanted in such a way as to disable, not kill. I am paralyzed from the waist down.” A disappointed frown momentarily clouds his expression. “How was I to know?”
I tell him I am glad to see him. He shakes his head.
“I am happy they chose not to retire you. I told them I attacked the officiate. It seemed to fit their mode of thinking.”
I am overcome by equal parts sadness and gratitude. He lied—blatantly lied. But he did so in my behalf. That a man of his importance would sacrifice himself for a server—the idea fills me with a peculiar devotion that has nothing to do with anything I have learned in my life.
“And now I have finished their infernal calculations.”
I say nothing.
“I had no choice,” he explains, his voice heavy with misery. “They threatened to retire the Checker! They threatened to retire all of you! I could not allow it. What is life in a world without love?”
He sighs again. “So I will exchange the lives of millions of people for the love of a single woman. It is I,” he says gravely, “who is the abomination.”
I tell him no, he is not, though I cannot say why. He dismisses my objection with a flick of a finger and draws me close so I may hear without being overhead. “The courier will be here soon to carry my work to the Checker. In it I have delivered a final message. I have explained everything to her. She will know what to do.” I don’t understand, but much of what the machine tells me I don’t understand.
“And then,” he continues wearily, “I will likely be retired. But I am hopeful they will honor their agreement and not retire the Checker, or any of you.”
He clears a space on the table for the food I have brought him but I don’t want to set it down. I want to linger and draw out my time with him, but he beckons me to get on with things.
I look back at him from the door. The enclosing fog of sadness clears a moment, and he does a curious thing.
He winks.
I try to picture it in my mind’s eye: a vast prominence of stone rising farther than the eye can see into a limitless void. A body of water unthinkably larger than the biggest swimming pool splashing against the foundation of that prominence. Millions upon millions of people occupying those reaches, coming and going as they choose without regard for approval.
I cannot get my brain around any of it. So I remember that moment when I grabbed the officiate’s arm
and wrestled the omnus from his grasp and drove it into his body. I remember a shock of some unnamable emotion, compelled by a deeper feeling of … affection? As I sort through my memory I slowly realize that whatever the feeling was, it had been there a very long time, longer than I had realized.
Was it love?
“The Checker has approved my final calculations,” the machine tells me. His face is radiant. “She found no errors.”
We are summoned to a conclave. Everybody who lives at the Redoubt attends. Even the machine.
It is unprecedented.
A Disciple of the Rapture, the same Disciple as before, stands before us. He tells us in a righteous voice the menace of the infidel will be put to rest this very evening. He thanks us on behalf of the Rapture for our work.
As we leave, those of us who serve the machine are taken aside. We are led to the sanctuary where we are given absolution.
It can mean only one thing.
For the last time, I feed the machine.
“What do you think retirement will be like?” he asks.
I no longer care very much one way or the other. Retirement is a small issue now that life itself is false.
But I tell him retirement is a slow warmth that steals over the soul followed by an awakening in the Hereafter where all questions are answered. I have been taught to say that, but I no longer believe it. Soon we will all know the truth.
“I disagree,” the machine chuckles around a crust of bread. “Retirement is not a transmigration of the soul. It is merely the physical collapse of the body. The brain’s electrical signals become randomized, then cease altogether. Afterwards,” he pauses to swallow, “there is nothing.”
His table is set. I begin collecting dishes from the previous meal.
“Do you think the citizens of our land could live with such a thing?” he asks. I tell him no. It defies what they have been taught.
“Yes,” he nods. “It is a principle by which the infidels live. But what if it were true?”
I finish collecting the dishes. They must be arranged in the basket in a particular way, and I kneel at his bedside and set about doing that. As I work, I tell him that if there were no Hereafter, then this life would become much more important.
