Крис Бекетт: The Holy Machine

‘Don’t be afraid,’ said the Machine kindly, ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to make you feel good.’

If it had spoken this in Lucy’s voice, it might have sounded sexy, but its voice box had been damaged by the fire so the words didn’t come out like that at all, but in a sort of gentle, reassuring buzz.

And then other words came into the Machine’s mind, words which did not come from the old Lucy routines at all, but from the strange books that it had read.

It stood up, very slowly.

‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ it said.

Steve and Alec hesitated.

Then both of them fell to their knees.

It was a pivotal moment in their lives.

If they had attacked the Machine, or raised the alarm back in the village (‘The demon! The demon is still alive!’), they could have been heroes and quite possibly would have finally earned themselves that secure place in the community that had so far eluded them.

But they chose a quite opposite path, a choice for which the whole community would despise and condemn them – and one that could quite easily have led to their deaths. They helped the Machine to hide away in a cave. They brought it the sugar it needed. They talked to it. And finally they began a crazily dangerous journey, sometimes disguising the Machine as an old woman, sometimes hiding it under sacks in the back of a cart, sometimes piling fishing nets over it in the bottom of a boat. They tended it, stole for it, found it books in English to read, even translated books for it laboriously from the Greek.

There must have been many times when they were nearly caught, but they somehow survived, as people often seem to do when they do something completely outrageous and unexpected. And for Alec and Steve, each narrow escape only served to confirm their feeling that what had happened belonged to the realm of the miraculous, that it was God himself who had given a sinless soul to the Machine.

Eventually they had found themselves in the South Slav lands, where, at the ancient collision point of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Islam, there was a ferment of religions old and new and a great craving for miracles and wonders. Slowly and tentatively at first Steve and Alec had begun recruiting followers for the Holy Machine. For what had touched them about the Machine, touched many others. And the Machine was built to recognize and respond and adapt to human longing.

Word spread rapidly and very soon thousands were coming to hear the Machine speak, and whole communities were coming over to its cause.

I stayed for a few weeks in the monastery of the Holy Machine. My bed and my meals were provided for me and my wounds were tended by the monks. The rain stopped. My fever abated. And as I re-emerged from sickness, I found myself to be free too of the burden of guilt that had weighed down on me for so long. I don’t think I have ever felt so happy as I did then, pottering around those corridors and sitting in the courtyard listening to the buzzing sermons of the Holy Machine.

Why do we struggle so much? Why do we demand so much of life, when the happiest moments are when nothing is happening at all?

But, for all that, the time came when I felt like moving on. The monks had provided me with new clothes and I began to pack for a journey. I had it in my mind that I would return to Montenegro again and see Marija. I had no idea what her feelings might be now, or what kind of relationship we might have, but I felt for the first time in my life that it was at least possible for me to enjoy some sort of intimacy with another human being.

And then Alec (the older of the Machine’s Greek minders) came and told me some surprising news: there had been a coup d’état in Illyria. Elements of O3 and the armed forces had overthrown President Kung, and now promised general elections in which all permanent residents of Illyria would be entitled to vote. An amnesty had been declared for the AHS and the constitution was to be amended to allow a wide degree of religious freedom. The new government had also indicated a wish to sign a peace treaty with the members of the Holy Alliance, and had already declared a ceasefire unilaterally as a signal of good faith.

I was pretty dumbfounded by this of course. With hindsight everyone now says that this change was inevitable, and that for the Illyrian state to wage war simultaneously with external enemies and its own proletariat of guestworkers had never been sustainable for any length of time. But then it seemed incredible that something so powerful and entrenched could so suddenly have crumbled. And it was even harder to absorb the fact that I could now return my homeland, something which I’d always assumed would be a permanent impossibility.

For the first time in many weeks I also thought guiltily about Ruth.

So rather than go back up to Montenegro again, I decided to write to Marija and suggest that she meet me in Illyria City.

The Machine had its own cell, unfurnished except for a chair and desk where it sat reading continuously day and night whenever it wasn’t out preaching. The walls of the cell were lined with books obtained for it by well-wishers. There were books on theology, on history, on biology, on cybernetics, on philosophy and also a bizzarre range of other books which had been donated simply because they were in English: blockbuster thrillers, Seventh Day Adventist tracts, maintenance manuals for obsolete cars, tourist guides, comic books, even a dog-eared pornographic magazine.

But when I entered the cell, accompanied by Alec, the Machine was staring into space.

I told it that I’d come to say goodbye.

Its eyes swivelled towards me.

‘Thank you,’ it said.

‘Yes,’ said Alec, ‘If it wasn’t for you, the Holy One would still be an automaton in the syntec House in Illyria City, being used by men and having its mind wiped away every six months.’

I can’t say that this made me especially proud. I wondered how I could ever have entertained sexual desires and romantic fantasies about this strange, chitinous, utterly asexual being.

‘You’ve done well,’ I said to it. ‘It’s amazing how far you’ve travelled.’

The Machine regarded me. My words immediately seemed fatuous. It did not need self-esteem. It did not need personal attachments. It did not experience any especial feeling in connection with partings. Certainly it was conscious. Certainly it was alive. But it had its own quite different priorities from those of human beings.

‘You too,’ it observed.

I returned to the glassy towers of Illyria, where the streets were still patrolled by silver giants under the black-and-white flag of the eye (although there was talk now of changing the flag now for something less provocative and hostile). I walked on the waterfront and past the VR arcades, I looked across the water at the Beacon and watched the people going back and forth on the bridge that linked it to the land. I went straight away to the District of Faraday and to our old apartment block. The janitor called to me as I was walking to the elevator:

‘Excuse me sir, can I help you?’

It was a doll-like plastec, not unlike its predecessor, Shirley, who I’d seen on a gibbet in Ioannina. Speaking to it felt strange and uncomfortable. I’d got out of the habit of dealing with surrogate human beings.

‘I’ve come to see my mother, Ruth Simling…’

‘I’m sorry sir, but no one of that name lives here.’

‘Oh come on. She’s not the sort of person to move! Check your records: apartment 148.’

‘Apartment 148 is occupied by a Mr Hubert.’

I went out and found a phone. The number rang for a bit and I wondered if this too would be a dead-end.