Крис Бекетт - The Holy Machine

The door to the kitchen of Rose Cottage was open. Beyond it, through the kitchen window, I could see an electronic ginger cat picking its way across the sunlit, electronic garden.

‘Listen, I really haven’t…’

And then, with a chill of pure fear, I understood. It was the call from the AHS.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ‘I remember now. Yes, I am still interested in making a purchase.’

‘Who was it?’ said Little Rose when I went back upstairs. She’d been trying out different kinds of curtains in her bedroom window, which overlooked an idyllic scene of children playing in immaculate back yards, with the wholesome homes of the City without End TMstretching away into the distance.

‘Oh, just someone from work,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take this helmet off Ruth. I’ve got a headache. I need some real air.’

I met the AHS contact in a café in Mendel District, a relatively poor area which had a large guestworker population. As I’d been instructed, I bought a coffee and sat outside, watching the passers-by and trying to guess which one it would be. She had told me to call her Ingrid and from her voice and accent I had created a mental picture of someone tall and fair and rather forbidding.

In the event though, she was small and dark, and I hardly noticed her until she actually sat down beside me. She wore dark glasses and had her hair tied up tightly in a bun. She shook hands with me without smiling.

‘Finish your coffee,’ she said, ‘and I’ll take you somewhere where we can be alone.’

I nodded. I felt scared but only a little because I couldn’t really believe that this was actually happening.

‘The place I’m going to take you,’ she said, ‘is a cheap hotel, whose rooms are used during the day for… assignations.’

It took me a second or so to grasp what she meant.

‘But don’t get any ideas!’ she said with a small smile.

We made our way to the hotel where an arthritic Greek woman showed us up to a bleak room with a sink and a double bed. Ingrid sat down on the bed. I hesitated, then sat beside her. There was nowhere else to sit.

The room had a lingering smell of sweat. Some couple had been making love here not long before. I wondered what it would be like to lie down on a bed like this with a real human being.

‘This will be our only meeting,’ Ingrid said, ‘I’m going to tell you about the aims and methods of the Army of the Human Spirit. When you have had a couple of days to think about it, I’ll contact you by phone. If you’ve decided you don’t want to take this any further, that’s no problem. We will leave you alone. If you’ve decided you want to join, that’s fine too. We’ve checked out your background and think you could be an asset to the struggle. Good with languages, I gather?’

I nodded.

‘What will happen then,’ Ingrid said, ‘is that in due course you will receive an invitation to attend a meeting of a club of some kind. This will be your operational unit, your cell, through which – and only through which – you will communicate with the rest of the Army.’

From the adjoining room came suddenly a woman’s loud cries:

‘OH! OH! OH! YES! YES! YES!’ she shrieked.

I returned my attention to Ingrid with great difficulty.

‘…once you’ve joined,’ she was saying, ‘it’s not so easy to leave. You could betray the identity of your cell members. You could betray the Army’s plans. It’s very important you realize this.’

The woman in the next room had reached her peak and her cries were now declining in intensity towards a plateau of peaceful pleasure.

‘Oh yes, oh darling, yes…’

Ingrid looked at me sharply, noticing how much I’d been distracted.

‘I really want to be sure you’ve understood this. What I’m telling you is that if you join and then leave, the Army will make an assessment of the security risk you pose and act accordingly. Bluntly, a decision might well be taken that you should be eliminated. It’s harsh, but we’re at war against a dangerous enemy.’

‘I understand.’

Ingrid took some papers from an inside pocket.

‘Read this. It’s the manifesto of the AHS.’

The woman in the next room said something which I couldn’t catch. A male voice chuckled. The woman gave a shout of laughter: ‘Stop! Stop!’

They were having a playfight, I realized. The man was tickling her.

With a huge effort I turned my attention to the manifesto:

‘ The purpose of the Army of the Human Spirit ,’ it began, ‘ is to achieve a world in which the human spirit can truly express itself. We do not believe this is possible in the artificial state called Illyria. We do not believe that it is legitimate or healthy for an elite to cut itself off from the ordinary human beings who feed, clothe and sustain it, and declare itself to be a nation in its own right. Nor do we believe that the human spirit can grow in an environment in which only those things which are measurable are acknowledged to be real… ’

And the document went on to demand citizenship for all residents of Illyria, regardless of educational qualifications, freedom of religious and artistic expression and an end to the programme to replace human beings with robots.

It concluded by saying that when the first two demands were met, the AHS would end its campaign of violence as it would then be possible to pursue its wider aims by peaceful means.

I handed it back to Ingrid.

‘It’s very different from how you are portrayed on TV,’ I said, ‘you know, as a bunch of religious fanatics.’

She bridled noticeably at this.

‘Many of us are religious. You’ll have to work alongside people with strong religious convictions.’

I shrugged. ‘That’s no problem.’

Another gentle little gust of laughter came from the next room.

‘And you need to understand what we’re up against,’ Ingrid went on. ‘Many people have not fully grasped how this state has changed. We all know how it began: humanism, hope, imagination, artists, musicians, scholars… You need to realize that all that has died – only its shell remains. This is a police state. O3 arrest and detain without trial, they torture horribly, they kill.’

I nodded.

‘Deep under a mountain north of Kakavia,’ Ingrid said, ‘they have dug out a kind of human abattoir. Its white rooms are lit day and night. There are gutters on the floor for the blood. There are machines whose whole purpose is to cause pain. They use mind-drugs and SenSpace nightmares to increase the terror. And it’s all hidden under hundreds of metres of solid rock, so there is no possibility of escape and no chance that anyone outside could ever hear you or get help to you.’

‘I know that,’ I said, though how I knew, I couldn’t say, because no one had ever described those white rooms to me before. I suppose the human mind picks up clues and fragments all the time, and then reconstructs them into coherent whole, like a TV receiver plucking images out of the air.

I paused on the steps of the hotel and looked down at the busy street. A couple came out of the door behind me arm in arm. She was plump, pretty, cheerful-looking. He was swarthy, bearded, stocky. They stood beside me and kissed, moistly and tenderly, as if I wasn’t there at all.

‘See you Thursday my darling,’ the woman said, in a gentle, slightly husky voice as they finally parted. And I recognized the voice of the woman who’d laughed and cried out in the next room.

A police robot came by, towering over the human throng. For a moment its head turned in my direction and the silver, pupilless, unblinking eyes looked straight at me, standing on my own on the hotel steps.