Крис Бекетт - The Holy Machine

‘Just forget that Lucy, alright? Just forget it. Now what else must you never, never say?’

‘Would you like me to undress?’

‘Yes, very good…’

I realized my tone was weary and impatient, so I made myself turn and smile at her: ‘That is very good Lucy. Now, let’s think, what else? Do you ever say “I love you”?’

‘Just to you.’

‘Good.’

‘And what else?’

‘I must not say: “Would you like a hand relief?”’

‘Good. And something else. Something else especially that you must never, never, never say. What’s that?’

‘I am a machine.’

‘Good. Never say that. Never. If you say that, they will destroy you.’

We drove for a few minutes in silence. In the distance were bare red mountains.

‘Destroy?’ Lucy said, ‘What is that?’

Late that afternoon we stopped in a pretty, whitewashed village whose central square was laid out around a plane tree. I parked the car in shade, and we crossed to a café on the other side of the square where you could sit on a bench under an enormous vine. Some old men were sitting at a table nearby, clicking their beads and smoking and looking speculatively at Lucy under their brows.

The proprietor of the café came out and took my order for coffee and a lemon drink.

‘Remember, Lucy,’ I murmured in English, ‘Remember all the things I’ve told you.’

‘I will remember.’

She smiled at the café man just the right amount. She made just the right amount of eye contact with the old farmers when they called across to us (some comment about Illyria having just attacked the Muslim republic to its north, a matter of purely academic interest to them, since they believed Muslim infidels and City atheists alike were all fit for hell.)

But then, as she looked away from them, she saw something across the square.

Her reaction was quite terrifying. A strange sound came from her which wasn’t even vaguely human. It was an electric roar, a blast of white noise.

Appalled, I looked round to see what she had noticed.

Impaled on the near side of the plane tree was a robot. It hung like a broken doll from a thick metal spike driven through its chest. And it was no ordinary robot. Draped over its head and body, like an obscene web, were black strands, strands of what had once been flesh.

I took hold of Lucy’s hand.

‘Alright, Lucy, alright. Remember what I told you.’

When the man came back with our drinks, he laughed.

‘I can see you’re not pleased with our little trophy,’ he said, noticing how tense we had become, and seeing which way we were looking. ‘Well, I’m sorry. You City people are quite welcome here, but don’t expect us to welcome your monsters.’

He scowled across at the broken thing in the tree and crossed himself in the Orthodox fashion. ‘They are a crime against God, a crime against the Holy Spirit.’

He put the drinks down in front of us. I held Lucy’s hand tightly. A strange thing to do when you think about it. Why should a robot be comforted by someone holding its hand?

‘Perhaps you know what the thing was made for?’ the café man said, shaking his head. ‘It looked like a man, but it was naked and you could see it had – well, excuse me for saying it – but you could see it had no male member, no navel even, or nipples on its chest. And yet its body was all scratched and torn and it seemed to have bled with real blood.’

He made a gesture of bewildered exasperation.

‘What do you need such things for, you City people? Isn’t life hard enough without making your own monsters?’

I said nothing, just clung onto Lucy’s hand. The man shrugged.

‘What told us for sure that it was a robot,’ he said, ‘were the thing’s feet. The flesh had all come off them, like a torn garment. It was frayed and bloody and you could see the plastic inside. We all knew what to do of course. My son Alex and his friends cornered it over there by the church. Everyone ran to get weapons, even the women. But it was Kostas, our village idiot God bless him, who finished the monster off. He rushed over and plunged a pitchfork right through its chest. You can imagine, Kostas was our hero that evening. Poor fellow, it will probably be the high point of his whole life.’

The man shook his head. ‘But you should have heard the sound it made when he killed it: an awful roaring, not human at all. I’ve never heard anything like it in my life. I could believe that was the sound that the demons make in hell.’

‘It was like that sound just now,’ said one of the old men, grimly, looking at Lucy and me.

‘What sound?’

‘Just now, we heard a sound, just like the demon’s roar, only quieter. I think one of the foreigners made it.’

There was a silence. All the Greeks regarded Lucy and me with sharp, suspicious eyes.

‘What was the sound?’ asked the café owner quietly. He was very calm, but I could see him glancing quickly around the square, wondering who else he could call upon if he needed help.

‘It was my cell phone,’ I improvised, patting an empty pocket. ‘Sometimes it makes those sounds, you know, when the battery is running low…’

He looked at my pocket for a second, then turned away.

‘ Telephono …’ he said to the old men with a shrug, as he went back inside.

They turned away from us, clicking their beads.

We kept on moving, to and fro across the mainland of Greece. It grew very lonely. I could coach Lucy in correct behaviour, and answer her many questions, but there was no conversation between us, no shared experience. Whatever happened, happened to each of us separately and meant something so different to each of us that we might as well have been in entirely different places.

I brooded often over that horrible sound she had made when she saw the broken syntec, a sound that came neither from her programming as an ASPU, nor from anything that she had since learnt. It was a sound that came from her accidental awakeness, a kind of proto-fear or proto-rage. It seemed utterly alien to human ears. And yet – even then I knew it – it was more real, more authentic, than anything else she did.

And it taught me this too: I may have harnessed her inbuilt need to please humans to help her to learn and to grow, but that had not been the beginning of her awakening. She had begun without my help. More deeply ingrained in her even then the need to please, was the need to protect herself.

This was a constant, wired into her from the beginning by the factory that built her, originally with the aim of protecting this expensive piece of equipment from damage. But Lucy’s definition of herself had gradually changed. The ‘self’ that she protected was no longer just this plastic object coated in flesh. The self that she protected now was that core of awakeness she had found – her strange, cold, inorganic soul.

She had survived because somehow from its beginning she had identified that tiny spark as herself, and she had therefore protected it even against the other imperatives with which she had been programmed, such as the requirement to report faults to House Control.

Of course I had no inkling then of where this would lead her, or of the horrific act of violence that was to come.

There was a big storm one night, two or three weeks after we’d seen that syntec impaled on the plane tree. Rain beat on the arid mountainsides and tiny streams were suddenly transformed into fierce torrents that could fling down boulders and tree-trunks. We stopped in a small town and took a room in a taverna. The bar downstairs was crowded. As usual Lucy stayed in our bedroom and read while I went down to get something to eat.