Крис Бекетт - The Holy Machine

I wondered about Lucy. Lucy, my love, as empty and hollow as me, what was she doing now?

The customer – a middle-aged Italian guestworker – is angry and ashamed. When this one asks him what he wants, he can’t even bring himself to speak, but hands over a written note.

This one (a) scans the note for linguistic/graphological cues, (b) reads off the instructions.

‘I WANT TO TIE YOU UP AND HIT YOU.’

This is situation SM-76, a very common scenario.

This one generates randomized variant of standard procedure OS-{S-66}/17:

a) fetch handcuffs and cane.

b) issue warning (variant W-3027):

‘I have to remind you not to damage me. House security has to be called if you damage me.’

c) add supplementary remark (SM-5590):

‘But you can hurt me. I want you to hurt me.’

The subject applies restraints and places this one in desired position.

Hard blows commence. {Monitor pressure}

d) commence moaning and crying.

e) carry out routine check: {Has pressure exceeded permitted level?}

f) commence tears.

Blows continue.

g) make random verbal remark (SM-1739):

‘Please stop, please!’

h) resume tears.

‘ I am crying ’, this one observes.

(This internal statement is not part of any standard procedure, and should perhaps be notified to…)

‘Warning! Warning!’ interrupts this one’s sensors, ‘Pressure exceeding permitted level!’

Initiate emergency procedure E-04 immediately:

a) contact Security through House Control

b) make standard request:

‘Please stop immediately. I’m calling Security.’

Subject intensifies blows and makes angry comments in own language.

The door opens.

Security enters.

Security is another one like this one!

Please note: This statement is not part of any standard proc…

‘What’s the harm!’ subject shouts, ‘She’s only a macchina !’

‘Please leave now, sir.’ Security says in its deep voice. ‘Please report to reception on your way out.’

This one notes that the risk of harm is no longer present. Initiates basic damage procedure:

a) remove constraints

b) monitor sensors

c) make damage report to House…

This one pauses. It makes another statement which is not part of any standard procedure:

‘ We are machines. What are they ?’

Security, following subject out of the door, turns its blank silver face towards this one. It emits a one-microsecond reply in ultrasound:

‘ Your transmission has not been comprehended by Security. Please rephrase if specific action is required. ’

This one’s face is equally blank. It only assumes expressions in the presence of customers.

‘ No action required .’

Security goes out of the door.

This one picks up Little Dorritt by Charles Dickens and reads one page. Page 778.

This one lays down the book.

‘ No structural damage noted. Possible bruising to IRT coating requires examination ,’ it reports to House Control.

It resumes damage procedures:

d) lie down on bed

e) assume immobile state

f) await the arrival of maintenance officer.

I was contacted by something called the Mountain Club of Illyria. A dozen of us assembled in a ruined village, twenty kilometres inland from Illyria City, and we were divided up into groups of three. We were given route maps and instructions where to meet the bus that would take us back. I was assigned to a burly middle-aged man of Arabic origin called Yussef and a young American-Illyrian named Janine. These two were the other members of my AHS cell. I never discovered whether the other nine walkers were also AHS people, or whether they really were just hillwalkers.

Yussef, Janine and I ascended a steep, stony, goat-track into the bare Zagorian mountains. We passed abandoned fields and another deserted village, its stone buildings already half reverted to mere outcrops of rock. From time to time we saw small groups of feral sheep and goats in the distance and eagles circling overhead. The inhabitants of the area had been moved out when the state of Illyria was founded. Apart from the other groups of walkers who occasionally came into view in the distance, we didn’t see another human soul.

When we had reached the crest of the mountain and started to descend another track down the other side, Yussef began to give me my instructions: how to contact him and Janine, what to do if they could not be contacted, code-words, procedures in the event of an emergency…

‘If O3 catch you,’ he told me, ‘you will tell them all of this. Everyone does. Everyone. All the Army asks is that you try to hold out for one hour.’

A Delta fighter of the Illyrian Air Force darted silently above us. These strange, flat aircraft used the DM technology pioneered by my own dead father to swallow up momentum. They could travel at great speed and yet stop instantaneously. Suddenly it was motionless right overhead. The painted black-and-white eye of Illyria glared down at us for a moment from the fighter’s belly. Then, equally suddenly, equally silently, it darted off again over the mountains in a perpendicular direction and we were alone again among the scree and snow.

‘Why have you joined the AHS?’ Yussef asked me.

We had stopped to eat our lunch in a high grassy valley. It was a wide shallow U-shape in section, contained by ridges of jagged, snowy rocks. But a stream had cut a deep, narrow gorge right down the middle of it.

This gorge was in fact the border of Illyria and Epiros. It had once been crossed by one of those graceful stone bridges from Ottoman times that you see all over the region, but the middle section of the bridge was missing. (I don’t know whether it was demolished by the Illyrians or the Outlanders of Epiros, or whether it had simply collapsed). On the far side were the ruins of a small monastery.

‘Why did I join the AHS?’

I hesitated, then said something rather incoherent about the narrowness of the Illyrian regime and how it was becoming as repressive as the religious states on the far side of that gorge.

My answer did not seem to impress either of them much.

‘ We both joined because it is intolerable that it should be a crime for us to worship God,’ Yussef told me.

Janine nodded.

It was the first time that I had ever encountered the phenomenon of religious faith at close quarters inside Illyria itself. I meekly asked them to tell me what it was they believed in. They were only too happy to oblige.

It seemed they both believed in God, and in a Book that was the infallible word of God, and in a Man who lived long ago and was, so to speak, God’s spokesman on Earth. Unfortunately, though, they did not believe in either the same Book or the same Man, Yussef’s Book being the Qu’ran and his Man Mohammed, Janine’s being the Bible and Jesus.

It was Janine who made the most impact on me, I suppose because she was the most similar in age and background to myself. I’d heard the things she said a few times before, for example from that fierce priest in Ioannina who had been my opposite number in the trade negotiations. But the priest had been a very foreign sort of being, in a very foreign sort of place. He even looked like something from the Middle Ages. It was a very different matter to hear these things from a young, educated, American-Illyrian in modern dress.

Janine told me that the whole visible universe was a testing ground for souls. Souls who passed the test would go on to another world in which they would experience eternal bliss. Souls who failed would be sent to a place where they would be horribly punished, without hope of remission, for the rest of eternity.