Крис Бекетт - The Holy Machine

I shrugged: ‘New laws that will tell us there’s only one way we’re allowed to think. It seems pretty much like America or the Outlands all over again.’

Oddly enough I’d already almost become accustomed to this syntec being my mother. The face was different, the body was different, the voice was different, but the spirit that animated it – the body-language, the inflections of speech – were so manifestly hers.

‘Anyway, Ruth, how come you’re not at work?’

The Vehicle looked evasive. ‘Oh, I’ve got a day off.’

‘You were off last week too. You’re only supposed to have three weeks leave a year.’

‘I… Well okay, if you want the truth, George, I’ve given up my job.’

‘Why?’

‘I wasn’t enjoying it. I don’t need the money, so I thought, why not?’

It was true that she didn’t need the money. Nor did I actually. My father had been a wealthy man.

But Ruth’s work had been the only place where she ever met other people, the only place she ever went outside of our apartment.

‘What are you going to do with your time? Moon around in SenSpace all day until it gives you ulcers?’

It occurred to me then that in fact even now she was actually in the apartment dangling in her SenSpace suit. The door of her SenSpace room was shut. The door of the apartment was triple-locked. She was utterly alone, three kilometres away across town making the movements and gestures that this syntec was faithfully reproducing, while goggles over her eyes were projecting onto her retinas the images from the Vehicle’s video camera eyes.

‘What’s wrong with being in SenSpace a lot if you like it?’ she said through the Vehicle, ‘There was a thing on TV the other night about a man who’s been paralysed in a car smash. They’ve got him all wired up to SenSpace so he could live and move about in there, if not in the outside world. Some people on the programme were sorry for him, but I thought, why? What could be nicer than living in SenSpace day and night? You could always hire a Vehicle like this if you wanted to look outside.’

‘Yes but you’re not that man. You’ve got the use of all your limbs. I mean, if you’re just going to hide in SenSpace you might just as well be dead!’

The pretty Vehicle looked at me. I think speaking through a Vehicle made her bolder in what she said, in the way that some people are bolder when they are wearing dark glasses, or a mask.

‘I might just as well be dead,’ she said very calmly. ‘You are absolutely right. And do you know the only thing that keeps me from that?’

Just for a moment I thought she was going to say me , but I needn’t have excited myself on that account.

‘I don’t want to sound like a religious person,’ she said. ‘I’m not talking about heaven or hell or anything like that. But I do sometimes wonder: how do we know what death is? What happens if it’s not the end? What happens if it turns out that life is the one thing that does go on and on and won’t end however much you want it to?’

I had an awful momentary vision of a solitary being at the core of the universe, a solitary being, unable to die, doomed to exist alone forever.

‘Why don’t you take the afternoon off, George?’ she asked in a completely different tone. ‘I was thinking we could go to Aghios Constantinos. The real one I mean. I’m not scared of going places when I’m going as a Vehicle!’

‘No, sorry. Too busy,’ I said shortly.

In fact I was to visit Aghios Constantinos again – and with Ruth in vehicle form as well. But a good deal was to happen before then.

Several months after the evening in the New Orleans , I met Marija in the street, just off Darwin Drive. I had finished some work at the offices of a small leather-importing company and was on my way to Lucy’s. It was on January 22nd. I can place the exact date, because it was the same day that President Kung introduced his Normative Precepts Bill, listing the ‘intellectual criteria’ which were to be used to determine a whole range of decisions from whether or not a text could legally be published, to whether a person was eligible to retain Illyrian citizenship:

(1) No entity may be asserted to exist, unless the effects of its existence can be measured.

(2) No statement may be asserted to be ‘true’ unless (a) the basis of this assertion is a properly controlled and replicable scientific procedure OR (b) the ‘truth’ of the statement would in principle be testable by such a procedure…

And so on.

‘Hello, George! How are you? It’s ages since I saw you.’

I had stopped going to the Holist League meetings. I had stopped doing anything much except working fifteen hours a day, sleeping and visiting Lucy, who I now saw three or four times a week.

‘I… decided I didn’t want to carry on with the meetings.’

She nodded.

‘Yes, sure. That’s fair enough…’

‘No!’ I blurted out. ‘It wasn’t because I was afraid. It wasn’t that I was afraid of O3 and all that.’

She looked surprised. ‘I know. Why did you think I meant that? I don’t think of you as the sort of person who is put off by that kind of thing. I don’t think of you like that at all.’

This abolutely astonished me.

‘A bit of a talking shop, you thought?’ Marija asked. ‘A bit earnest and self-important?’ She nodded. ‘I thought that was what you were thinking about us that evening in the bar. I could feel your distaste. Well I must admit, that’s what I’ve begun to think too.’

A police robot walked past us and Marija was silent until it went by.

‘You can never tell which way they are looking can you?’ she said. ‘Or how much they can hear.’

She made a little dismissive gesture of dislike. She had a delightfully animated face.

‘Bad news about Kung’s new scheme though, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You wonder what on earth else we can do.’

She glanced with a frown at the back of the police robot as it moved slowly down the street. Then smiled at me.

‘Listen, it’s really nice to see you. I was just going to get the subway home. Why don’t you come and have a drink with me if you’ve got a bit of time?’

In her small apartment in the district of Newton, Marija poured me a glass of red wine.

‘Yes, I was thinking of giving up on the League myself,’ she said.

‘What about Paul?’ I asked.

She gave a wry smile.

‘He’s gone back to Brazil,’ she said shortly.

I didn’t know what to say. The ebb and flow of human relationships were a complete mystery to me.

Marija settled into a large cushion.

‘To be more specific,’ she said, ‘he had a wife and three kids waiting there for him all along, but had carelessly forgotten to mention them to me.’

‘Oh.’

I gulped my wine.

She smiled, ‘You were thirsty. Do you want some more?’

I nodded.

‘I suppose the League is just a talking shop,’ she said with a sigh. ‘But there must be some way of fighting back against this… this stifling flatness . Do you know what I mean? It’s as if Ullman and Kung and all of them have been trying to make us live in two dimensions.’

I nodded.

‘They tell us that only things that can be measured are true,’ she said, ‘But if something can be imagined or dreamed about then surely it does exist in some way? Do you know what I mean? Maybe in reality there is no truly altruistic act, for example, just like they say, but the idea of altruism still exists doesn’t it? Even things like the Garden of Eden exist in that sense, or the Fall, or the great Dance of Shiva.’