Крис Бекетт - The Holy Machine

The next day she didn’t answer when he knocked. This was unusual. It was rare for Ruth not to spend most of her time in SenSpace, and unheard of for her not to be there at the times that Mr Gladheim had said that he would call.

The next day she still didn’t answer.

Or the next.

Mr Gladheim was being operated by the self-evolving artificial intelligence at the time and it recognized that for Ruth not to be there three days in a row was extremely atypical. It checked with SenSpace Centre, which monitored the entry and exit of customers into the SenSpace world. Centre looked into the matter very thoroughly and after nearly three microseconds it came back to the Welfare AI with the surprising information that Ruth was in SenSpace and indeed was currently projecting into the ‘City Without End TM’ Conceptual Field, though there was no sign of activity.

The AI notified the duty Welfare Officer, a human being, a woman in fact, who pulled the full ‘Connection Profile’ from Centre onto her screen – and was alarmed by what she saw.

‘This is going to look bad for the Corporation,’ fretted the Welfare Officer. ‘Someone is going to be for it.’

She e-mailed her senior with the whole profile. The senior shook his head.

‘This’ll be egg on our face, that’s for sure.’

He forwarded the profile to his own manager, marked urgent.

‘The service is going to come badly out of this,’ he commented in a covering note.

The Profile showed that Ruth had been connected continuously for five days. For the last three days, though she had still been connected, there had been no detectable output from her SenSpace address.

The manager told the senior to tell the Welfare Officer to contact the emergency services. Not the imaginary emergency services, the real ones, the ones in Illyria City.

Ambulance sirens went whooping through the streets, like I so often heard them do down there in the abyss as I stood on our fiftieth floor balcony, looking out at the towers and the sea. But this time they were not going to attend to some stranger. They weren’t going to deal with one of those dramas that happen to other people. They were going to our block in Faraday, our apartment. They were going to the place that no one visited, the place where nothing ever happened.

A strange group emerged from the elevator at the fiftieth floor: the paramedic and his robot assistant, two police officers and their robot assistant and the plastec janitor Lynda with her smooth pink face…

No one answered the front door of the apartment, and it was locked. Lynda the janitor emitted a signal in ultrasound giving the override code and instructing the door to unbolt. It duly did so, but still could not be opened because of the two manual bolts that Ruth had had fixed on the inside.

‘There’s a Mr Simling lives here too, apparently,’ said one of the police officers. They had checked with Central Records.

‘He has not been here since Monday,’ reported the robot janitor.

‘We know that,’ said the police officer. ‘We know that he…’

The police robot interrupted politely. It had just received more information from Central Records which said that I had crossed into Epiros on Monday afternoon. Also: that I was suspected in being involved in a theft involving a syntec. Also: that I was the subject of a classified security file entry.

Some data input clerk somewhere had slipped up. These pieces of information had up to now been filed in different locations and the obvious connections had not been made…

The police officers looked at each other grimly:

‘This is going to look bad. Someone’s going to be in trouble…’

But at least the someone wasn’t going to be either of them.

The police robot and the paramedic robot smashed in the door.

The whole crowd – three humans and three robots – entered our neat little apartment.

‘Mrs Simling? Mrs Simling?’

No answer. Charlie came whirring out of the kitchen where he’d been waiting for five days for instructions.

‘Hello, can I be of any assistance?’ was the message that was sent to his voice box by his small electronic brain. But we’d still not got that voice box repaired, and all that came out was the faintest of buzzing sounds.

They checked all the rooms and found that the door of the SenSpace room was locked on the inside. So the robots broke it down. The vibrations knocked an ornament from a shelf, a little china cup painted with a tiny red rose, Ruth’s one souvenir of her Victorian porcelain collection back in Chicago.

In the middle of the room Ruth was dangling in her SenSpace suit, like an empty coat dangling from a hook…

When they cut her down they found that all four of her limbs were ulcerated and gangrenous. So were her eyes. Her whole body was covered with septic sores. Her water bottle had run out two days previously. She was critically dehydrated. She’d been marinating all this time in urine and faeces and pus. I hadn’t been around to get her out of the suit at nights, that was the problem. She’d grown to rely on me to do that, and I hadn’t been there.

Charlie came trundling clumsily up to the paramedic, jogging him. The older policeman pushed him gently out of the door of the room and closed it behind him.

‘An X3!’ he murmured to his colleague. ‘Takes me back a bit! I haven’t seen one of those in years.’

Forty-eight hours later Ruth woke up in a bed in the Ullman Memorial Hospital. She didn’t know how much time had passed, or what had happened, or where she was. Strange pins-and-needles sensations were coming from her fingers and arms and toes, and her vision was blurred and flat and grainy.

In fact she was seeing through a temporary electronic eye spliced to her right optic nerve. The world resembled an early attempt at Virtual Reality, before the days of high resolution images.

‘How are you Mrs Simling?’ enquired a syntec nurse, while simultaneously sending an ultrasound signal to Hospital Control to say that patient RS/5/76 was awake.

Some time later a young male doctor arrived. He looked down at the mutilated object on the bed. His palms began to sweat disagreeably as he steeled himself to say what he had to say.

‘You’ve had a very nasty thing happen to you, Mrs Simling,’ he began.

Ruth didn’t react much.

‘I’m afraid,’ he tried again, ‘I’m afraid we’ve had to perform some rather drastic surgery.’

He looked uncomfortably across at the syntec, which offered a beautiful smile. The doctor smiled back. The syntec was much more agreeable to look at than Ruth, and, like all syntecs, was wonderful to flirt with.

He looked down again at the body of my mother, resenting her now for being so ugly and so unlucky and so entitled to be distressed.

‘I’m afraid Mrs Simling that your limbs were very badly damaged and we’ve had to amputate them.’

There now, he’d told her. He’d have to be sympathetic for ten minutes or so and then he could quite justifiably go on to other things and forget about the whole unpleasant business. He was only covering for a colleague anyway. He didn’t really belong in this ward.

Ruth nodded. She seemed to be taking it very well, thought the young doctor hopefully. Well, why not go for broke? He shrugged, quite visibly in fact, though he didn’t intend the shrug to be seen.

‘Also, there was a problem with your eyes and…’

The doctor tailed off.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you needn’t worry about hospital charges and so on. The SenSpace company have already said they’ll cover everything that isn’t covered by your medical insurance, including long-term care. The only thing is: you might want to get a lawyer to look at that offer sometime, Mrs Simling, because confidentially you’ve got the SenSpace people over a barrel…’