Крис Бекетт: The Holy Machine

I let the programme run on again in real time. It was called NOW ! and was a nightly current affairs round-up which gave the official government line. At the end of it Channel Nine shut down, as it always did, with the image of President Ullman, the father of our state.

He was a giant of a man, a bleak man, a man of granite. Back in America, in the terrible early days of the Reaction, Christian mobs publicly flogged him and his wife to unconsciousness for refusing to recant their work on in vitro fertilization. Mrs Ullman had died.

Now every night he was shown at close-down, grimly crumbling a clay figurine of a human form into dust. Look! There is no soul, there is no spirit, there is no ghost inside the machine.

Of course I had seen it too many times for it to make any conscious impact on me. But on this particular night I thought I’d take one more peek at the pretty robot before I went to bed and, for no particular reason, instead of just flipping back to the previous programme I got the machine to run backwards.

I saw the dust streaming upwards from the table and assembling itself miraculously in Ullman’s hands, into a human form.

And the dour old rationalist was transformed into something like the Christian God.

Ruth had gone to sleep in SenSpace again. Her body dangled from its wires, her helmeted head slumped forward. She would get pressure sores if she wasn’t careful.

I called to her, then went over and shook her. I did it quite roughly. I resented having to look after her.

‘Oh George, it’s you,’ she said, lifting the face piece and blinking at me with her owlish eyes. ‘I must have gone to sleep. Can you get me out of here?’

I sighed, unzipped her and helped her out of the dangling suit. I hated this job because she always got in there naked in order to achieve maximum contact with the taxils.

She was so little and thin. She had no breasts and barely any pubic hair. When I lifted her down it was as if I was the parent and she was the child. And yet if you looked carefully at her belly you could see the traces of my Caesarian birth.

I looked away from her and wrapped her up quickly in the robe that she’d left lying on the floor.

‘You should eat more and spend less time in there, Ruth. You’re not doing yourself any good at all.’

‘Oh I’m so tired George, could you just take me through to my room?’

‘ Carry you? Again ?’

‘Please.’

‘Goddamit Ruth, you must eat ! You’re wasting yourself away!’

But I carried her through anyway, tucked her in bed, sent Charlie through with her knockout pills, and stood and watched her while she curled up in a foetal position and began to sink back down towards sleep.

‘ Please, please sleep ,’ I whispered.

I was exhausted myself, and drained, and wretched. I longed for my own bed, my own oblivion…

‘ Please, just sleep… ’

And it really did begin to look as if for once she would do just that.

But then, no, it was not to be. My whole body clenched as I saw her shoulders beginning to shake.

‘Just sleep for fuck’s sake, Ruth!’ I wanted to scream at her, but I bit my tongue.

And as the little whimpering sobs began to come, I made myself cross the room again and sit down on her bed and hold her hand.

‘There, there,’ I repeated mechanically, ‘there, there, there…’

I don’t know much about her childhood. Something frightening must have happened to her I suppose, because I believe the reason she chose a career in science was that it was neutral, factual, safe – far away from the painful and messy business of human life. (That’s how science seemed to people in the days before the Reaction.)

She shut herself in her laboratory in Chicago with her robot assistant Joe and she worked and worked and worked, going home alone in the evenings to a neat little apartment where she tended her houseplants and her collection of Victorian china cups…

In India, the Hindu extremists massacred the industrial elite. In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox came to power in a coup, in Central Asia the vast statue of the Holy Martyr was constructed in Tashkent and every day thousands of pilgrims gave blood to keep its wounds eternally flowing… But Ruth came into work at eight every day and extracted DNA from genetically modified chicken embryos, hardly passing the time of day with anyone but Joe.

Then the Elect came to Chicago. They held mass prayer meetings at which thousands turned to Jesus and to their cause, they roamed the streets looking for the abortionists, the homosexuals, the unbelievers… Fired by fierce preachers, the ordinary people of America were rising up against the secular order that had taken meaning away from their lives. The police stood by. The authorities looked away. Everyone could see that a dam had broken. Even the President tried to make his peace with the Elect.

And Ruth had a cup of coffee at 11 a.m. and took ten minutes out to read her porcelain collectors’ magazine. She refused to hear the chanting in the street. She refused to notice the burning houses that could be clearly seen from her fourth-floor laboratory window. Until suddenly they were kicking open the door, flinging open the incubators, sweeping test tubes onto the floors…

Joe was smashed to pieces in front of her, his stalk eyes rolling, his voice box croaking out his repertoire of helpful phrases in random order:

‘Could you repeat that please… Glad to be of help… Have a nice day…’

They told Ruth she had tampered sinfully with the sacred gift of life. Her head was shaven. Dressed only in sackcloth, she was led to that infamous platform beside the lake where Mrs Ullman was later to die.

‘There, there, Ruth, there, there…’

She never talked about it, but you can reconstruct the scene from countless other stories:

The crowd murmurs and seethes. A big, handsome preacher, with blow-dried hair and a white suit, bellows like a bull about Jesus and hellfire. The first of the sackclothed figures is led forward. He is a cosmologist called Suzuki. In a faltering voice he confesses to teaching that the world began billions of years back in a Big Bang, though he knows now that it was created in six days, just five thousand years ago.

‘And you have always really known that, Brother Suzuki,’ says the preacher sternly.

Suzuki swallows. The crowd hisses. Someone throws an egg which hits the scholarly scientist on the forehead and trickles slowly down over his face. Still Suzuki hesitates. The preacher turns towards him frowning.

Suzuki lifts his head to the microphone.

‘I… have always known it. May God forgive my… my sin.’

The preacher puts his arm round Suzuki’s shoulder, ‘Brother Suzuki. Let Jesus into your heart and you will still be saved.’

The crowd surges up, and subsides and surges up again, like a restless ocean. Suzuki is led away, and a young computer scientist named Schmidt is led to the microphone.

‘I never meant to suggest that our programs were a rival to the human mind. They were only intended to model certain aspects of…’

The preacher roars at him: ‘Acknowledge your sin, brother, acknowledge your sin! Don’t compound it!’

‘ Tar him! Feather him! Tar him! Feather him! ’ storms the great dark ocean.

The computer scientist looks round desperately at the group of sack-clothed figures waiting behind him. Help me! his eyes say, What do they want me to say? But they all look away.

He turns back to the microphone. ‘I confess! Please forgive me! I blasphemed against God. Jesus is Lord! He… died… for… me… God forgive me! God forgive me!’