Maggie Gee - The Ice People

The morning slipped away like that. Then I spent some quality time with Dora. I was more tempted than usual to use the Replicate function. I even touched it, lightly, very lightly, nothing dangerous, the merest caress … But she’d spoken, abruptly businesslike, twice, ‘Do you want me to replicate? Do you want me to replicate?’ And I had answered, rather shamefaced, ‘No’, feeling I had somehow interfered with her.

By teatime I was extremely depressed. Deciding I should refresh my knowledge so I knew what I was meddling with, I went and scanned through my information about replication and selfassembly in nanomachines. Our publicists had done a preliminary fanfare. ‘Nanomachines’, which were aggregates, in any case, could certainly ‘build in parallel, with many billions of molecular machines working at once.’ All that was required was some kind of fuel — of course any organic material could fuel the Doves — and an ability to copy a pattern. If the copies weren’t quite perfect, so much the better; that was how life had always evolved, through the random occurrence of mutations, some of which helped the next generation to survive, breed better, faster, multiply. ‘The next giant step for machines’ would be ‘To learn through time, on their own. Not only to adapt, but evolve.’

Not such a giant step, I thought. Computers had been ‘Solving Through Evolving’ (in my own Nanocorp’s slogan) for over half a century, since computer scientists realised artificial intelligence worked better and faster if left alone to race its way through myriad permutations, just like recombining DNA …

My attention wandered. I’d been left alone. I told myself, I must adapt and evolve, I must learn to live in this new lonely world, I must experiment and find solutions, but instead I read on, and dozed and dreamed, till suppertime, and felt a lot better. Then I took a long bath. Dora toddled in behind me and squatted singing in the bathroom. She liked the steam; Doves revived in moisture, it gave their ‘skin’ a healthy sheen. I felt very glad of her company. On impulse, I sponged her back and feet. She said ‘Thank you. That’s very nice.’ And it did feel tender. It reminded me of something.

The flat was hot because I’d borrowed my neighbour’s three blowers to dry a week’s worth of dirty clothes (if I had a criticism of the Doves, it was that they had no adaptations for washing. In that way, they resembled modern women. I’d sketched out several letters to the manufacturers.) After soaking in the bath I was too hot to put my clothes on. Yes, simply too hot, whatever anyone said later, I wasn’t used to it any more, since the Cooling … I poured myself a whisky, a very large whisky, and went with Dora into the bedroom.

She hopped on to the bed, as she usually did, though she sometimes missed, and did her piteous cheeping, which made me laugh, as I picked her up, and then she laughed too, which must have been programmed, but I think I only halfbelieved it was a programme, she surely did things that no other Dove did, she was somehow special, she really liked me …

She snuggled up beside me. Or I settled her besides me. I had a long drink. I wanted a cigar, so I had a cigar, because no one else was there, and I shut out Sarah’s voice saying ‘No’ from my head because she didn’t care, had never cared about me.

I had another drink. Dora was very beautiful, her innocent, transparent lashes, the downward, modest cast of her head like the pictures of Victorian women. I tried one or two of our conversations, and I somehow knew, though the words were the same, that more was being said than the actual words, and there was a kind of understanding between us. Then I switched her over to ‘Singalong’. We sang long-forgotten rugby songs together. I had another drink, then another, then another …

Which was why, when Sarah and Luke arrived, I was lying unconscious on the bed ‘with a smouldering cigar on the bloody bedspread’ (though if I were unconscious, how could it be smouldering? Even I can’t smoke a cigar in my sleep), ‘buck naked’ (a phrase that’s always made me uneasy; I was only naked because it was hot) and ‘that bloody disgusting thing on top of you’ — hold on, if she were on top of me, she had simply fallen over (stability was never a strong point with Doves), and she wasn’t disgusting, Dora, ever, even Sarah must have seen that my Dodo was sweet –

I may have briefly wondered whether Sarah could be jealous. This affair was all ridiculous, absurd, but apparently I giggled, which made things worse, and then Dora joined in, which was not her fault, and said ‘I feel happy. Isn’t life fun?’ and although I don’t remember very clearly, someone, who must have been Sarah, screamed, and Dora crashed helplessly off the bed.

Next day it all became very serious. I was crippled with headache, and Luke was crying, and saying ‘You promised not to divorce Daddy,’ which made me realise that was what she would do. Sarah said she would never have believed I could let her down so badly in front of a child. Dora had been banished to a corner of the screenroom. It looked to me as though she were slightly crooked. I suspected Sarah of covert violence, but probably she had just pushed her off the bed. Sarah was packing, with furious energy, such few possessions as she required. Her dyed red hair flew out in snakes, her white arms whipped and thrashed the air as if she would beat our world to death because it had disappointed her. I felt powerless to stop her raging progress, partly because of my hangover, partly because of a sense of unreality, a sense that we were sliding into farce –

But Luke. His pale child’s face, lengthening, strengthening towards adolescence, his worried mouth, his stricken eyes — Luke was real. Luke was tragic. He hardly spoke, just watched us both, his head turning from one to the other, and I thought he looked frighteningly adult till he suddenly said, at some irrelevant moment, ‘Can I play with Dora? — I suppose I can’t.’

‘Juno was right,’ his mother was raging. ‘They’re — completely unnatural. They’re wrong. They’re perverted. Do you know, one ate a sleeping cat?’

‘Nonsense,’ I said blankly, ‘that’s utter nonsense.’

‘It was on the news,’ Luke said eagerly, with a child’s enthusiasm for horror.

‘I don’t believe you,’ I said to his mother. ‘It’s propaganda. It’s bloody Juno. It’s Wicca World rubbish, isn’t it?’

‘You were in bed with that thing,’ she shouted at me. ‘And then you dare to start criticising us —’

As if Wicca World were above criticism.

And yet I had a feeling of sick fear. I remembered the day we went out on the picnic beyond Duxford with our first Dove, and how suddenly the grass was bare, that little dark patch of brutalised land. That sudden uneasy sense of its power.

But a cat — a cat. Not possible.

‘It just left the collar, because it was plastic,’ said Luke, helpfully. ‘And bits of fur. And the girl was crying. It was her cat. She couldn’t switch it off. The switch had broke …’

(I thought of our cats’ long vulnerable tails, weaving in their wake as they avoided Dora. But Dora was kind. Dora was safe …)

‘That’s enough, darling,’ said Sarah. ‘We’re going.’

‘When shall I see you again?’ I demanded. ‘Don’t leave in the middle of a stupid quarrel. I just got drunk last night, that’s all —’

But she interrupted, before I could explain, ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s still disgusting. I shan’t discuss it. He’s only eleven.’

‘Twelve,’ I corrected her, I couldn’t resist, but it made things worse.

‘And you forgot his birthday.’

‘I didn’t. But you won’t bloody give me your address.’