Крис Бекетт: The Holy Machine

Ruth answered just as I was about to put it down.

‘Yes? Ruth Simling here. Little Rose. Hello? Hello?’

‘It’s George.’

There was a short silence.

‘George?’ her tone was almost nonchalaent, ‘Oh. Where are you?’

‘Here. In IC. I’ve just been to the apartment and I hear you’ve moved.’

‘Yes. I’m in SenSpace all the time now.’

‘Nothing new there then! But where’s your address.’

‘I don’t have one.’

‘What you mean? You must be somewhere.’

‘Yes, but you don’t want to go there. You’ll have to come and see me in SenSpace.’

Reluctantly, I found a SenSpace access point and climbed into a suit.

‘George Simling? This is a nice surprise!’ purred the familiar intimate voice of the SenSpace Corporation. ‘Welcome back to SenSpace! Long time no see! Any special place you want to be?’

I found myself beside a carp pool, where Little Rose was sitting watching the fishes.

‘He’s just about to do it,’ she said, with a little, empty laugh, ‘wait a moment. Yes, there ! One side of the pool to the other! A fish with Discontinuous Motion.’

I sat down beside her.

‘They work on a one-hour cycle, these fishes,’ said Little Rose. ‘A cheapskate program really. They could have put in a self-evolving system.’

‘I was involved with the AHS, you know. I had to get away. I’ve been in the Outlands: Greece, Albania, Dalmatia… I ran away with a syntec, a beautiful syntec, but she got burned in this dreadful village down in the Peloponnese.’

‘There he is again look. In an hour’s time it’ll happen again – whoosh – right across the pool.’

‘I was in the middle of the Holy Wars. I saw hundreds of corpses. You remember Marija? She lives with her uncle now. He’s an Orthodox priest with a beard and his hair tied up in a bun at the back. You’d be amazed at the things people believe out there.’

‘I told Sol about it. He said they’d get it fixed, only this isn’t a particularly popular world, so the investment doesn’t really come this way. It’s all in the big worlds, like Nine and City. Actually that’s one reason I like this place. It’s sort of a quiet backwater and nothing much happens. No one apart from me wants to spend more than a few minutes here. In fact Sol says that if it wasn’t for me they’d probably shut it down…’

I let her wander on like this for several minutes.

‘Do you want to know what I’ve been doing?’ I asked.

‘If you want to tell me.’

I shrugged. We fell to watching the fishes once again.

‘So how much time do you spend out of SenSpace now?’ I eventually interrupted.

‘I never leave it.’

It took me a little while to grasp what she meant. And when I finally did, I got angry.

‘And now you’re going to tell me it’s all my fault I suppose! If I hadn’t gone away and left you it would never have happened, is that right? It was all because of George being selfish as usual! Well you listen to me. It wasn’t my job to look after you. You were the parent not me. I tucked you up in bed and I held your hand when you cried, but it wasn’t my job! It wasn’t my job .’

But Little Rose completely ignored this unprecedented outburst.

‘I didn’t think it was so terrible at first,’ she said. ‘In fact I thought to begin with that it was just what I always wanted: to be able to live in SenSpace and never come out. But I’m tired of SenSpace now. I do hire a Vehicle sometimes and walk around outside a bit, but I haven’t really got anywhere to go. No one to visit. And anyway a Vehicle isn’t the same. You can’t feel the air for one thing.’

We watched the electronic fishes swimming around in their pool.

‘Charlie got thrown out when they cleared the apartment.’

‘I suppose that was going to happen sooner or later.’

‘Yes,’ Little Rose exclaimed with real indignation, ‘but they shouldn’t have just thrown him out without asking me.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘I want to get out of SenSpace,’ Ruth said, after some time had passed.

‘Well that’s impossible now, isn’t it?’

‘No, not impossible. You see, I’ve got a plan…’

The plan surprised me. It took more courage than I thought Ruth possessed.

‘But that will mean,’ I said, ‘that will mean that you…’

Little Rose laughed. ‘The hour’s up. Look! Whoosh ! There he goes again!’

I met Ruth in a Vehicle Centre. She wasn’t recognizable as Ruth of course. The vehicle was a syntec in the form of a pretty young woman with long red hair.

‘Walk up and down the room a bit,’ said the technician, ‘it always feels a odd at first when you’re used to a virtual body.’

‘Yes, I know, I’ve used Vehicles before,’ said the redhead, taking a few steps.

‘This downward pull!’ she said to me, ‘this planet, this mass of rock pulling you towards it! You forget what gravity really means in there!’

It was strange to hear her talk like that, as if for the first time she was actually trying to savour her existence.

‘You can’t trip up in SenSpace,’ she said, ‘you can’t experience an impact that causes pain, you can’t…’

She broke off and went over to the window. The Vehicle Centre was on the tenth floor of the SenSpace Corporation offices, one block away from the sea front.

‘The towers always seem so small !’ she exclaimed.

‘Everyone says that!’ laughed the technician. ‘Even though they are the tallest towers in the world. Like you say we have to take account of gravity out here in dull old Reality.’

Ruth sighed.

‘I used to think it was dull old reality, but you know it’s good looking at a tower and knowing that every tonne of concrete had to be lifted into place against the pull of gravity. In SenSpace making a building is nothing – like doodling on a bit of paper.’

We went down in the elevator and out into the street. It was a bright, hot, summer day. For a while we just stood and watched the people go by. To me, having been so long in the Outlands, they looked well fed, well cared for and shockingly sexy in their scanty summer clothes. But to Ruth, used to the physically perfect denizens of SenSpace, they looked exactly the opposite: clumsy, overweight, ill-proportioned, with clothes that didn’t fit properly or crumpled in the wrong places.

‘Real people are so ugly !’ she said, smiling.

We joined the human stream. Ruth was looking round at everything, taking it all in. She had no sense of smell, no sensation of breathing and – since all her sensations were being transmitted to her brain via SenSpace – her visual field had the same slightly grainy quality that it had within SenSpace itself. But still, she could look around at the people and know that, for them, this truly was reality.

We walked the streets for a little while, and along the sea front. At the head of the Beacon the Ferris wheels extended, gathered speed, drew in again, stopped.

We turned into the Avenue of Science.

‘ROBOT MESSIAH BRINGS SKOPJE TO STANDSTILL’, said the headline outside the News Building, and the huge screen showed a picture of vast crowds in the Macedonian capital, and then a library picture of the Machine itself. ‘NEXT STOP TIRANA’

I smiled. Tirana was not to far away and I decided I would go there to hear it preach. After all, if was not for me the Holy Machine would not exist, and all those hundreds of thousands of excited people wouldn’t even now be heading towards the capital of Albania. I might be alone in this world but I had certainly made a difference to it.