Крис Бекетт: The Holy Machine

I sat against another tree and watched her. I wondered whether she had ever cradled me like she cradled that mutilated thing?

‘It can’t survive more than two hours,’ Dr Hammer’s parting words had been. (By ‘it’ he meant the body of course. He would have referred to the syntec vehicle as ‘she’).

He had been hoping no doubt that reason would still prevail in time and that Ruth would return her body and resume her carefree life in SenSpace.

‘Not more than two hours at the outside,’ he had repeated.

After an hour or so had passed, Ruth lay the strange bundle carefully on the ground and took from me the garden trowel we had bought earlier. She found a suitable spot between the olive trees and began to dig.

It was a cheap trowel and the earth was hard and stony. When the job was only halfway done, the handle broke off. Ruth swore. She threw away the useless handle and began to dig with her hands. Time was running out for her. I offered to help but she swore at me too, savagely, like a snarling dog. She tore at the dry stony earth with those clumsy syntec hands until the flesh came away in bloody strips from the plastic fingers.

Finally she was satisfied. She turned aside from the shallow hole and gently picked up the box of organs and flesh. Then she pulled awkwardly with her broken fingers at the plastic skin covering the face – if you can call such a thing a face. And when one cheek was open to the air, she bent and kissed the moist and pallid skin…

…and at the same moment as she gave the kiss, she felt it – the warm lips of some unseen being touching her gently on the cheek.

Ruth smiled and placed the bundle carefully into the hole she had dug for it, covering it up again with a mound of earth – just leaving the breathing nozzle sticking out, so she could fade away rather than suffocate.

And that was the last that the world saw of little Ruth Simling, who it had never noticed much, preferring as she did the company of machines, and the safety of solitude.

But she was to speak one more time.

When she had finished her work, Ruth’s redheaded vehicle lay down beside the mound with one arm protectively draped over her own grave, and waited. Two hours had gone by now and nutrient levels were very low in the blood that still pulsed around beneath the soil, but Ruth was still, just, awake.

‘This isn’t suicide you know, George,’ said the body under the ground through its syntec mouthpiece, ‘This is the opposite of suicide.’

I nodded. The Vehicle lay back and became completely still. The wind whistling in and out of the yellow nozzle became gradually fainter.

The Vehicle stood up.

‘I am not getting any more instructions via SenSpace,’ it said to me. ‘I would be grateful if you could return me to the hire facility. There’s a deposit payable on my safe return.’

I nodded and the redheaded robot and I walked back through the olive grove to my car.

I felt quite calm at first as if nothing much had happened. With the beautiful syntec beside me, I drove back towards Illyria City through the bright landscape of summer.

But then I began to shake, and soon I was shaking so much that it was impossible to drive. I pulled over on the side of the road. That pressure from behind my eyes was stronger than I’d ever felt it.

‘Mummy,’ I whispered, while the beautiful empty syntec sat impassively beside me, staring straight ahead, its torn hands resting in its lap, ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy…’

I couldn’t have said it to Ruth herself. She never liked being Mum.

Then the dam broke and the tears came pouring down from my eyes for the first time since I was a little child.

‘Help us! Help us!’

‘My little boy, Holy One, he’s blind!’

‘Please help my mother. She’s in so much pain!’

‘Holy One, here! Please! Please!’

Standing in the back of a Toyota pick-up, supported by Alec and Steve on either side, the Holy Machine turned its head slowly and stiffly from left to right to take in the enormous crowd. Everywhere there were faces looking up at it, crying faces, imploring faces, adoring faces. Crammed into the dusty square, tens of thousands waved, screamed, wept, climbed on each other’s shoulders in the hope of a clearer view of the small, fragile figure wobbling along in the back of the battered truck.

‘Me, Holy One! Please look at me!’

‘Turn water into wine like you did at Vlora!’

‘Make mannah for us to eat like you did at Skopje!’

‘Bless us, Holy One!’

‘My little boy…’

‘…look at me…’

‘…please…’

‘…he’s only six and he’s blind…’

Such adulation would surely have made any human being go crazy. Under the pressure of all this love, men or women of flesh and blood would soon believe themselves capable of the miracles imputed to them, soon feel that they were truly at the centre of the universe, the avatars of God.

But the Holy Machine was not susceptible to such pressures. It looked round at the scene from the back of the pick-up, scanning slowly from left to right and back again, just as it might have looked round at an ordinary street or the white cloisters of the monastery that was its home. It had no desire for fame or aggrandizement, not because it was exceptionally virtuous or strong, but simply because the prerequisites of such feelings had never been part of its make-up.

It existed to serve humanity. Humanity seemed to want to hear its insights. So it shared them.

The Toyota edged its way forward.

‘Make way, please! Make way!’

‘Just a touch, Holy One!’

‘Make way!’

Again the Holy Machine looked from left to right and back. The scene was blotchy and grainy to its eyes and suddenly its whole field of vision seemed to invert and then black out altogether.

‘Have I finally gone blind?’ thought the Holy Machine calmly, while its minders tightened their grip to prevent it from falling.

It moved forward slowly in darkness. Then the truck stopped, there was a fuzz of colours in front of its eyes and a patchy vision returned as the minders helped it up onto a wooden dais. It saw a vast sea of faces, most of them just a blur but some, here and there, for some reason oddly distinct.

The Machine clung to the rail. Its vision had been deteriorating for months, along with its hearing. Its right leg would no longer bend in the middle. Its disciples had done what they could to help. They had sent as far as Athens and Milan and Belgrade in search of engineers who still had some expertise in computers and robotics, and a few minor improvised repairs had been made. They had even tried Illyria itself, although help had been refused from that quarter. But the truth was that the Machine was falling apart, and very probably even the Illyrian engineers who had built it could have done little to stave off its imminent end.

‘My friends,’ began the Holy Machine at last, ‘my friends, thank you for inviting me to come and talk to you here in Tirana…’

It paused while an interpreter repeated its words in Albanian. In the Machine’s blurred and blotchy field of vision the face of an Aromune shepherd boy become suddenly distinct, brown-skinned and tousle-haired, the distant descendant of legionaries from ancient Rome. And then the strong, firm, austere face of a middle-aged woman stood out from the blur, a peasant woman from the Buret mountains, a leader in her community and the mother of nine sons.

Their bodies renew themselves, thought the Machine, they reproduce themselves, they come from a line that has existed unbroken for millions and millions of years. Not only their minds are self-evolving but their bodies too: slowly changing, slowly adapting, taught and shaped and refined by the world itself.