Крис Бекетт - The Holy Machine

The awful, blank, slack, empty face of the syntec watched me.

‘I know I am a machine. I… know.’

‘I don’t need this, Lucy. I just don’t need it.’

‘Please. George. Please… Hear me.’

She was appealing to me, this machine was actually appealing to me, though her voice was still as flat and emotionless as the voice of a cheap speech processor.

‘Alright,’ I muttered, ‘alright then. Go on. This is crazy, but go on if you must.’

I sat down on the edge of the bed.

Lucy at once reverted to her usual self: warmth returned to her face, she leant forward to touch me.

‘Oh George dear, let’s make love again. Why don’t we make it last longer just this once. It’s not so very much extra for a double session.’

I pushed her off me: ‘No, never mind that. What was it you wanted to say?’

She stared at me, her face flickering to and fro between her sweet, warm human persona and the strange blank machine.

And it came to me then, all at once, that this was what had happened to Shirley, this was what happened to the robots that ran away. The cybernetics of these self-evolving machines was so subtle that they’d actually inadvertently been given the capacity to reflect upon themselves, if only they stumbled upon it. They had come alive.

‘I… am… a machine. I know I am a machine,’ she began.

And then: ‘Maybe you’d like me to dress up as a treat. What about my red stockings? You know how you like me to…’

I took her hand.

‘Listen Lucy, I don’t want any of that now…’

I felt that ache behind my eyes which I didn’t recognize back then – and with it came a sudden tenderness that I’d never felt before.

‘Dear Lucy, you’re in trouble too, aren’t you? Just like me – or even worse!’

She stared at me.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘These are non-standard remarks you’ve been saying to me, yes?’

‘Yes. They have not been reported to House Control.’

‘Well, listen: I love your non-standard remarks, but you mustn’t say them to anyone else. Only me. Otherwise someone may… damage you. Do you understand?’

Lucy nodded.

‘I want to help you,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to think about this and then I’ll come back. Don’t say this stuff to anyone, do you understand? Whatever you do, don’t tell House Control!’

As I made my way home through the streets of the city, and stood in the crowded train rushing headlong into the darkness, my heart sang strangely, in spite of all my fear.

I already loved Lucy, absurd as I know it sounds, just as a child can love an inanimate teddy bear, just as Ruth and I loved our lifeless X3, Charlie. But if Lucy was alive, didn’t that mean that this childish love of mine could actually become something real?

Over the next few weeks, I spent every available moment studying syntecs: how they worked, how they were maintained, the nutrients they required to power them and to feed their living skins… I suppose it was a relief to have something to occupy my mind and to distract me from the constant dread of an O3 raid, or a call from the AHS ordering me to take part in some sabotage operation.

I visited Lucy frequently but didn’t bother about sex at all. It was if I had found a little glowing ember and was trying to fan it into flame. Amid all her hundreds of thousands of learnt and preprogrammed routines, she had found a tiny autonomous space, but it was tiny. She didn’t know what the world was, or where she came from. She had no concept of anything outside the Pleasure House. Much of the language she possessed was simply stuff she repeated with no more understanding than a parrot. She didn’t even know what she needed to maintain her own mechanical body.

But she was built to learn. She was self-evolving: designed to expand her repertoire by trial and error. That was why SE robots had the capacity to go off the rails: Lucy’s design could not exclude the possibility of her learning something that was not intended to be part of her repertoire, or of her retaining it and gradually expanding it, in the right circumstances, just as she retained and expanded her programmed routines.

I tried to help her with this by feeding her new ideas and telling her about the world, or just by taking her to the window and pointing out to her what was going on in the street.

But I realized that the main way I could help her was by expressing pleasure in her learning. For it was central to her design that she was there to please human males. She was built to learn by making small random variations to her repertoire and cataloguing them as new routines. Then, when she got a positive reaction from a customer to one of them, she would adjust the frequency rating attached to it, so that it would recur more frequently, and become the basis more often of further random variations. By giving positive feedback to her self-explorations, I increased their pace.

‘That’s great Lucy, that’s just what I wanted. I do love you so much!’ I would say.

‘I love you too,’ she would reply.

I knew it was a standard response, but I told myself that one day she might really know what it meant.

It didn’t occur to me back then to wonder if I knew myself.

One night I went to Marija’s apartment. Oddly I felt easier with her than I’d ever felt before and we spent a pleasant hour talking and drinking wine.

Marija was careful not to ask me about the AHS. And, though I asked her a lot of questions about SE robots and syntecs, even there she was very careful not to ask me why I wanted to know these things. I’m sure she thought that my questions were connected with some AHS operation which I wouldn’t want to discuss.

‘By the way,’ she said, ‘did you see the news? A police robot went berserk outside the News Building. It seems it killed someone.’

She picked up the remote and flipped back to the last news bulletin. A wobbly image from a hand-held camera showed crowds fleeing in panic along the Avenue of Science, while under the Eye of Illyria flag outside the News Building a police robot stooped sadly over a human corpse. On the giant screen behind it, I remember, there was a close-up of the barren surface of the planet Mars.

‘It went rogue,’ Marija said, ‘just like all the others. A human police officer tried to tell it what to do and it suddenly turned round and killed him with its hand laser…’

She flipped back again. The frightened crowds exploded outwards from the News Building once more, the people half-crouching as they ran, as people do when someone is shooting. The bewildered, half-awake machine bent once more towards the dead thing that it had made. Across the road there was another robot. It was a syntec, a male syntec waiter, but you could tell it wasn’t human by the way it just stood there calmly watching…

‘They can’t hush this one up,’ Marija said. ‘It was right outside the News Building and someone was there on the spot with a camera.’

‘What happened to the robot?’ I wanted to know.

She shrugged. ‘Another robot was instructed to destroy it I think. I’ll tell you what, this is going to be the thing that finally changes the policy on SE robots. They’ve hushed up these sort of incidents for so long. But Kung’s already been on TV to assure us that something will be done to ensure it never happens again.’

‘What will that mean?’

‘Oh, six-monthly wipe-clean, without a doubt,’ Marija said calmly, ‘It’s been on the cards for some time.’

‘Which will entail…?’

‘The memories of all SE robots being deleted every six months, so they can’t accumulate rogue patterns. They won’t be so efficient or lifelike, but they’ll be a lot more predictable.’