Крис Бекетт: The Holy Machine

‘ Subject is using special facilities ,’ Lucy replied in her batsqueak machine voice, quite inaudible to the customer, who only heard her simulated gasps of pleasure as he played with her surface layer of flesh. ‘ For your reference re duration of earlier visits , subjects credit code is 4532 7865 6120. Own estimate of remaining time: forty-five minutes .’

House Control checked the estimate with its own records, and found it to be accurate. It relayed this back to the receptionist.

‘About forty-five minutes sir,’ said the receptionist, hardly more than a second after I had asked my question, ‘You could wait in the bar, or you could make another selection in the lounge…’

I hesitated. Absurdly I felt murderously angry with Lucy for not being there for me.

‘I’ll pick another one,’ I said.

I chose one as different from Lucy as possible: a syntec in the likeness of a large black woman called Sheba. She had huge silky-skinned breasts, broad, muscly thighs and a wonderful thick dark mat of pubic hair into which I plunged greedily.

Yes, greedily is the word, for I seemed then to fall into a kind of feeding frenzy. No sooner had I finished with Sheba than I went straight back down to the lounge and picked up another ASPU called Lady Charlotte, made to look like a sophisticated aristocrat from eighteenth century Europe, complete with beauty spot and layers of petticoats.

And when I’d finished under those petticoats, I went down for still more. It was as if the emptiness left behind by one ASPU could only be filled by another – and so on and on and on. I picked out a machine called Helen, in the likeness of a worldly schoolgirl with a small scar on her upper lip, and screwed her from behind in a place made out to look like a high school locker room.

On the way down, I met Lucy coming up with another man.

The syntecs were programmed to recognize regular customers. She looked at me and smiled. And her sweet smile went right through me like a knife.

‘Oh Lucy, I do love you,’ I whispered.

And I kept on whispering it to myself outside in the street, with that dull ache pressing out from behind my eyes: ‘I love you Lucy, I love you, I love you, I love you…’

When I’d walked a couple of blocks, I was startled by the sound of an explosion not very far away. Even the ground seemed to tremble – and somewhere behind me in the street some small glass object fell to the ground and smashed.

A silence fell on the city.

And then from the distance, in several directions, came the sound of emergency vehicles, drawing quickly nearer and then rushing whooping through the blocks on either side of me.

I didn’t know it then, of course, but the front of the Fellowship of Reason building had just been blown away by a bomb. It was the first ever action of the AHS – the Army of the Human Spirit.

I remember that night, or a night soon afterwards, I had a vivid dream.

I was in a dark building searching along corridors and up and down stairs for a room which I knew I’d found there once before. It was a quiet light room, with chairs and a window overlooking a courtyard. But I couldn’t seem to find it, and the wider I searched the more forbidding the building became. Corridors were narrower. Staircases had missing railings or gaps where steps should have been. My hands became clammy with vertigo as climbed them. And the rooms that I found were either windowless or bare or were already occupied by other people.

Tony Vespuccio was in one, the playboy of the Word for Word office, whiling away an afternoon with a pretty young woman and a bottle of champagne.

‘Your own room?’ he laughed incredulously. ‘That needs a lot more guts than you’ve got George.’

In another a group of women were bathing in a plunge pool. When they saw me they looked at one another and shrieked with merriment.

In another room I peeked through a doorway and saw Marija naked on a bed, with Paul Da Vera moving above her.

And then I found myself in the basement, where it was cold and damp. There was a big room there like the lounge in the ASPU House, but it smelt of urine and drains. And the syntecs in there didn’t even vaguely resemble humans. They were just wooden marionettes with genitals painted on in red, jerking around on strings…

I ran from them, climbing a narrow, grubby little spiral staircase that led nowhere at all except to a single door at its top.

When I opened the door, there was Ruth dangling in her SenSpace suit.

I was at my desk at Word for Word a few weeks later, just before lunchtime, when the receptionist called me to say I had a visitor. We still had a human receptionist in those days, and she sounded oddly excited.

‘Who is it?’ I asked.

‘Well, she says it’s a surprise.’

‘Are you sure it’s me she wants to see?’

‘Definitely.’

This time the receptionist could not quite prevent herself from giggling.

I went down to the reception area. There was only one person waiting there, a very elegant young woman. She looked up at me and gave a warm smile of recognition. My blood froze.

It was Lucy !

…or so it seemed for a moment. After a second or so I realized that, although my visitor was blonde like Lucy and had the same kind of gentle, flawless beauty, she did not have the same face.

‘Hello George!’ she said, standing up, ‘I wondered if you’d like to come out for lunch?’

The receptionist looked from her to me, smiling.

‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled, red to the roots of my hair, ‘I don’t think I know you…’

The young woman laughed.

‘Do you really not recognize me, Georgie?’

I didn’t recognize the face or the voice, but there was something in the tone – half-teasing, half-plaintive – that seemed familiar…

‘I’m sorry, I…’

The stranger laughed.

‘Aren’t you going to give your mother a kiss?’ she said.

A half-stifled splutter of incredulous laughter came from the receptionist behind me.

‘This is a Vehicle!’ Ruth told me excitedly in the lift, talking through the mouth of the pretty blonde. ‘It’s a new SenSpace facility. Isn’t it amazing? It’s a…’

But of course by then I’d worked it out for myself. A Vehicle was a robot or syntec which was remote controlled by the SenSpace net, and could be hired by SenSpace subscribers.

‘I know what a Vehicle is,’ I said coldly. ‘Please don’t ever make a fool of me like that again.’

She pouted. ‘I thought you’d be pleased to have a pretty young woman come and take you out for lunch!’

I didn’t reply to this.

‘I think it’s a great idea, George. I can be a different person, I can go out on the streets and have fun, and yet be quite safe all the time.’

A young man eyed the Vehicle with furtive admiration as we crossed the road and Ruth giggled.

‘It’s quite nice to be looked at, too.’

We went to a snack bar opposite my office. I ordered coffee and chicken sandwiches for myself. Ruth’s Vehicle ordered coffee.

‘It must cost a fortune to hire,’ I muttered as we sat down.

I found myself glancing at the Vehicle’s shapely legs.

‘It does cost a lot, but why not once in a while? Like I said, it’s fun and it’s safe.’

‘Safe! It’s not as if Illyria City is such a dangerous place!’

‘It is now, with bombs going off and everything. It was on the news this morning by the way, they’ve found two of the bombers. Would you believe they were both Illyrian citizens, not squippies. Imagine! Illyrians! Senator Kung says he’s going to put more money into O3 and give them more powers, and he’s bringing in tough new laws too.’