Крис Бекетт - The Holy Machine

‘Very sorry to bother you,’ she said, when I’d shown her to a seat. ‘I think you’re aware that a robot janitor has gone missing, and we need to find out why so as to ensure that any problem is put right.’

In spite of her South-Slav name she spoke her Illyrian English with a slight Antipodean accent.

‘It seems a lot of fuss about one defective robot,’ I said.

She looked up at me quickly with a smile. Her manner was alarmingly direct.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘It’s just that…’ she hesitated, ‘It’s just that ICC believes in being thorough about these things,’ she said.

And she went on briskly to ask a whole list of questions. When had we last seen Shirley? How often had we seen her in the last ten days? Had we noticed any discernible changes in her behaviour? What about her verbal responses? Her voice? Her posture…?

‘Does this happen a lot?’ Ruth asked her at the end.

‘Well yes, the truth is it has been happening quite a lot recently. A lot of different robots. It’s not dangerous or anything. No one’s been harmed. So the government doesn’t really want us to, you know, alarm anyone…’

‘A lot of robots?’ demanded Ruth. ‘Any sort of robots? What about our Charlie here?’

She reached down and rubbed Charlie’s shiny ‘head’, from which the original painted face had long since been worn away.

Marija Mejic glanced down at him and laughed.

‘Oh no. It’s just the ones with SE systems. You know? Self-Evolving? They are meant to learn by trial and error, so they’re actually designed to generate small fluctuations in behaviour. But every now and again, a combination of circumstances may flip them outside of their original parameters. We always knew it could happen. That’s why they are supposed to be reprogrammed every five years – wiped clean as we call it. It’s just that it seems to be happening a bit more quickly than we…’

She stood up, went to the window and glanced out.

‘The funny thing about it is that these things were supposed to be more reliable than human beings!’ she said with her back still turned to us. ‘ The whole point was they wouldn’t lose their heads!’

Then she turned round with a small laugh.

‘But that’s just a personal observation of mine, and strictly between you and me!’

I got up to let her out. She extended her hand to shake as I opened the door.

‘Very nice to meet you, Mr Simling.’

As her eyes met mine, I felt as if she could read in my face where I had been earlier that day: the red room, the sickly muzak, the syntecs with their scented flesh, the sweat streaming down the face of fat Paddy Malone…

I blushed.

‘Very nice to meet you too Mr Simling,’ I blurted.

Of course this visit had done nothing to allay Ruth’s fears.

‘What did she mean flip ? What could they do? I thought they were supposed to be safe George! Not like those horrible Macedonians brooding about God and the Devil and whatever else those Outlanders think about. And now she says they’re dangerous too!’

‘She didn’t say they were dangerous. She just meant they wander off sometimes, or stop doing their job…’

‘Well, she shouldn’t have said all that. I’ve got a good mind to report her to the company.’

‘For being honest with us? Would you prefer people to lie?’

‘Perhaps one of them might kill somebody. How do you know what she meant by flip ?’

‘I just guessed’ I snapped.

I didn’t care at all about what the robots might or might not do, but I was flustered and shaken, as I always was after any social encounter.

‘Why can’t anything be safe?’ Ruth complained. ‘Why is there always a snake in the grass?’

‘Oh give it a rest, Ruth, can’t you? Why don’t you just go into SenSpace for a bit and forget it, eh? There are no snakes in there. Not unless you want them to be, anyway.’

Ruth looked at me, almost cunningly.

‘Only if you come too,’ she said.

I hesitated. I hated SenSpace and the total surrender that it involved. It gave me the queasy feeling of being swallowed alive. But just now this didn’t seem so unappealing.

I shrugged.

‘Okay. It’s a deal.’

There were stars. They weren’t like the stars of ordinary reality: they were multicoloured, they stretched back in three dimensions, and they were moving, around, above and between one another.

There was a warm smell of a summer night, a hint of lilac. Celestial music came faintly from far away and then broke out into a bold fanfare as huge coloured 3D letters burst like fireworks across the firmament.

‘Yes, welcome to SenSpace, George!’ said an intimate, female voice in my ear, ‘It’s been a long time. Are you travelling alone, or do you have companions I need to link you up with?’

‘One companion, Ruth Simling,’ I said, reluctantly adding her SenSpace alias : ‘Little Rose.’

‘Ah yes,’ said SenSpace fondly, ‘dear Little Rose! I’ll link you up immediately.’

Ruth appeared beside me, as our hitherto parallel SenSpace universes were merged into one. Or rather, Little Rose appeared, a small, mousily pretty young girl in a party dress, still recognizable as my mother, but some ten years younger than myself.

I looked away. We were standing on a high platform, the swirling stars above and around us. Beneath a vast patchwork landscape was laid out, teeming with detail and activity, which seemed to stretch away for hundreds of kilometres in every direction.

You could have studied it for hours just as it was, but what made it even more absorbing was the fact that whatever patch you looked at would immediately grow, as if a powerful pair of binoculars had been put in front of your eyes.

Here were children playing on a sandy beach for example, splashing among white surf and breakers of perfect translucent green. The longer I looked at it the closer they became. I could hear their voices and the sound of the surf. I could hear the flapping sound from a small boat with red sails. I could feel the sand. I could hear one little girl whisper to her brother they were going to build the biggest sandcastle ever seen. ‘That will teach John,’ she said, ‘That will teach him!…’

I looked away. The seaside at once shrunk again to a tiny blue and yellow patch far off on the surface of the seething quilt of the SenSpace world.

My eye fell on a forest. The green was very bright, like coloured glass. There was a dragon with fiery nostrils waiting in a cave. Knights were riding towards it through the emerald trees. Their silvery armour glinted, their shields were bright. You could see every single leaf on every twig.

Here was a city. The towers were ten times higher than Illyria’s. Open trains full of laughing people whizzed between them on precarious monorail bridges. Little coloured biplanes swooped and dived among them. I could see the smiling faces of the pilots as they raced one another round the towers. I saw a red plane crash through a bridge and into the side of a building with a big explosion. But then the plane was gone, the bridge was whole again and trains of happy people were whizzing across it once more.

‘There’s something I’d like to show you George,’ said Ruth beside me in her Little Rose voice.

She reached out and took my hand (I mean my SenSpace hand: back in the real world, in our apartment in Faraday District, she and I were at opposite sides of the room), and I followed where she led.

We came to a little cove, where olive groves came down almost to the edge of the sea. The sea was blue and so clear that shoals of fishes seemed to be flying rather than swimming over the smooth white stones on the bottom, and a rowing boat at anchor appeared suspended in space over its own shadow.