Крис Бекетт: The Holy Machine

With obvious reluctance, the two minders backed away.

Inside their hemispherical cups the stalk-eyes of the Machine swivelled towards me.

‘I… I committed a crime,’ I burst out. ‘It was against one of your own kind. Her name was Lucy. She was a syntec. She looked like a beautiful woman, but she was a machine like you. I thought I loved her for herself, but I couldn’t love her without her human guise. I suppose that means I didn’t really love her at all. And I…’ I faltered as months of shame and grief came welling up. ‘I…. Well, through my fault, she was destroyed in a fire.’

The Machine watched me.

‘Obviously I wish now that it had never happened but I can’t undo it. I want to know if there is a way of being forgiven, or of forgiving myself. I confessed to a priest once, but he couldn’t even understand what my crime was. These stupid religions, they are just as materialistic and literal-minded as…’

My head swam as fever gnawed at the edges of my lucidity. Strange shapes moved on the fringes of my field of vision.

‘I don’t know what I’m trying to say really. Mind and body. You know? Body and soul. We can’t seem to get it straight… Even when a man says he loves a real human woman, or a woman loves a man, sometimes I wonder if it is so very different from me and Lucy. Would that kind of love survive if the woman could tear off her skin?’

The Machine said nothing.

‘Not that I’m making excuses for myself.’ I laughed ruefully. ‘Well, maybe I am. We humans are just a kind of animal I suppose. Like you’ve just been saying, we’ve got these instincts. We respond to certain stimuli…’

Confused images came into my mind of the arcades on the sea front in Illyria City, the lurid murals in the church on the lake at Ioannina…

‘We respond to certain stimuli,’ I repeated. ‘We get confused and…’

Was it confusion though? I remembered that terrible valley of the little boys with cut throats, and the young girl who’d been raped. There was no confusion there. She was what she appeared to be, a real human being, but that hadn’t stopped the good Catholic soldiers from treating her as a thing .

And then it came back to me that something similar had happened to me as well that very morning.

‘I was raped !’ I said.

The pressure welled up, pushing out against the insides of my eyes.

‘They could see I was a real live human being. They could see that perfectly well. That was exactly why they wanted to hurt me. They did it out of hate. And yet at other times people call it making love .’

I looked up at the Machine’s face. Well, actually it wasn’t really a face at all, just a sort of skull of tarnished plastic. Yet it did seem to convey a kind of compassion.

‘Sex and love, body and soul, science and religion…’ I muttered. ‘How do you sort it out? How does it all fit together? I suppose that’s what you’re trying to help us with, is it?’

The Machine was silent for a few seconds.

‘This syntec… Lucy,’ it then said in its buzzing voice. ‘Are you quite sure she was destroyed in the fire?’

I laughed angrily.

‘Of course I bloody am! The flames went up ten metres into the sky!’

The robot made its fuzzy, chuckling sound.

‘No doubt her human flesh was burnt, but you know George, our bodies are extremely tough when it comes to fire.’

‘Yes, but…’ I stopped. ‘How did you know my name?’

‘Because I know you.’

I stared at the thing, and then became angry:

‘Oh no you don’t! Don’t try that one on me! I told the monks my name. That’s how you know! I see now. This is a con-trick, after all.’

‘I know you,’ the Machine repeated calmly. ‘Are you sure you don’t know me?’

And it reached out and ran its thumb over the place on my wrist where I had once worn my credit bracelet.

It took me several seconds to take this in.

‘But… but they said you were a he !’

The Holy Machine laughed its electronic laugh: ‘Oh George I am not a he or a she. I am a machine . Is that still so hard for you to understand?’

Early in the morning, two young men had crept up to the old quarry to look at the burnt remains in the ashes. They wanted to have a proper look because they had been at the back of the crowd when the demon was being incinerated. They were outsiders in the community there. Although their grandparents came from the village, they themselves had grown up in the US. In fact they’d only arrived in Greece a little over a year ago. They spoke English better than they spoke Greek and, though their Greek names were Alecos and Stefanos, when they were on their own together they still called each other Alec and Steve.

They stood at the edge of the still-smouldering ashes and looked across at the remains of Lucy.

‘Poor thing,’ said Alec, and crossed himself.

Steve nodded and did likewise. The two brothers had fled America to escape from one of the pogroms unleashed by the Protestant theocracy. They had seen the homes of friends and neighbours burnt and the remains of human beings lying in the ashes. In America they had been persecuted for being Greek, but here in Greece they were distrusted, and often teased, because of their foreign origins and their faltering Greek. Perhaps these experiences made them more inclined to sympathize with other victims of persecution.

And then Lucy moved.

She moved an arm, very slowly, and then a leg. Steve and Alec were reminded of the tortoises that they’d seen for the first time that spring emerging from their winter hibernation.

Lucy sat up. She was still alive, but she had been transformed. She bore no resemblance to a pretty woman. Instead there was a thin, puppet-like thing, looking slowly around with eyes like the eyes of a crab.

In the bright cold early morning, sharp and silent except for singing birds, the crouching stick-like figure of the Machine looked up from the ashes and spotted the two boys for the first time.

Now, Steve and Alec were Orthodox Christians, no less than their fellow villagers, and of course they had been taught that robots were evil. It would have been very easy for them to see the resurrection of this ugly misshapen thing as something Satanic, a zombie climbing up out of the grave.

But there is one problem about being religious. You are taught that the supernatural exists – miracles, angels, the resurrection of the dead – but for some reason it always seems to happen off stage, either somewhere else, or somewhen long ago. You actually have to live in exactly the same boringly unsupernatural world as do the unbelievers. It must be hard work believing in things which never actually happen.

So I don’t think it’s surprising that religious folk sometimes erupt in excitement over a statue that appears to weep, or a fish whose lateral markings spell out the Arabic letters for ‘God is great’, or an oil-stain on a garage forecourt that resembles the Virgin Mary…

And yet, deep down, how inadequate these things must seem: mere crumbs which are greedily gobbled up, but can hardly sate the great supernatural hunger. The adulterous temptation must surely always exist for religious folk to stray outside the bounds of their creed to try and feed that hunger.

Dazed and confused, Steve and Alec stood staring at the Machine. It seemed so small and helpless and vulnerable, purged of its sinful flesh.

When the Machine saw the expressions on their faces, Lucy’s old brothel programming came into play. Most of the men in the ASPU House were dazed and confused, after all, and a self-evolving ASPU learnt many ways of dealing with them.