Филип Керр - The Second Angel

Rimmer nodded.

‘Very thoughtful of you, Rimmer. My circulation could use some reinvigoration.’ Demea thought for a moment. ‘Tomorrow’s Friday, isn’t it?’

‘Tomorrow would suit very well, as it happens. The sooner he’s dead, the better.’

‘What about his blood? Can I keep it?’

Rimmer had no wish to lose the services of someone as useful as Demea, and there could be no doubt that if she managed to get herself cured, he’d never see her again. So he shook his head slowly.

‘He’s contaminated. Just like you, my dear. That’s one of the reasons he needs to be removed. His medical condition makes him a security risk.’

Demea blinked slowly. ‘One day, Rimmer,’ she said. ‘One day you’re going to find yourself infected. And it’ll be you whose death is required by your employer. Won’t that be amusing?’

Rimmer stood up and met her spooky smile with one of his own.

‘Very,’ he said. ‘Only it won’t be you who kills me, Demea. Something tells me that I’ll see you out. Call it a feeling in my bone marrow. Oh, and enjoy your stay at the Clostridium. I believe the results can be quite efficacious. For a while anyway. Good-bye.’

‘Good morning, Dixy,’ said Dallas. ‘How was your evening?’ He dropped his briefcase to the floor and scanned the glass surface of his desk for a second before repeating the question. If Dixy had a fault it was that the program controlling her Motion Parallax sometimes failed to register what he said. It was a little like dealing with someone who was hard of hearing. For a while he had considered fixing this, before deciding that Dixy’s occasional deafness gave her an almost human degree of fallibility. But there were times — and this was one of them — when her defective audio system seemed to indicate to Dallas something a little more unusual than mere hearing impairment: an air of reticence, possibly even preoccupation, as if his computer’s attention was elsewhere. Dallas knew that it was impossible for an assistant program like Dixy to be wrapped up in anything other than a task he had given her. It was, he told himself, an inevitable result of the anthropomorphizing of machines in general, and computers in particular, that simple category mistakes like this one could occur. But the feeling persisted nonetheless that there was something else on Dixy’s silicon mind.

‘My evening?’ She repeated the phrase as if it had no meaning for her, which, of course, it didn’t, other than the simple vesperal dictionary definition she had selected from the dozens of synonyms that were available to her from her extensive memory of words.

‘Forget it,’ said Dallas.

‘You mean what have I been doing while you’ve been resting at home?’

Dallas shrugged. ‘Yes, I suppose I do, really. My mistake. It was a silly question. Sometimes I forget to adjust the way I speak to you.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because... because you’re so human. I mean, apart from the fact that I can almost see straight through you, you’re a very real approximation of a living, breathing woman, Dixy.’

‘I’m flattered.’

‘So I’m afraid I sometimes forget that you’re a machine.’

‘That’s the whole point of a Motion Parallax, isn’t it? To forget that I’m generated by a machine? To make you less diffident in your dealings with your computer? In short, to facilitate a working evolution.’

‘Working interaction,’ he said, sitting down in his chair. Like most of the furniture in his office, it was made of smart molecules [41] Just as microtethnology aimed to produce ever-smaller devices, so chemistry aimed to produce ever-larger molecules. This is the essence of nanotechnology: It is really an extension of chemistry, and a bottom-up technology in which building is done from a molecular scale up. But even today, when nanotechnologies affect all of our lives, people still find the concept hard to understand, and part of the problem has to do with language. A novel like The Incredible Shrinking Man, by Richard Matheson (1957), provides an excellent illustration of how alien the small world is to huge creatures like human beings. We have no experience of the molecular world and this makes it hard to comprehend. But the bottom line is that all matter is made of molecules, and these can be manipulated. And when that happens, matter can be changed. As the visionary of nanotechnologies, Richard Feynman, said as early as 1959, ‘Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance.’ and designed to grow with him. Each time he sat in the chair, it grew more comfortable, just like the nanoplastic seat in his private lavatory or the nanoleather shoes on his feet. ‘That’s how we describe the symbiosis that exists between man and computer. We have a working interaction.’

‘Interaction? No, I don’t care for that word at all,’ said Dixy. ‘It sounds uncomfortably contiguous to the word “intercourse.” And that merely serves to remind me of what I want to do with you, Dallas, but can’t, for obvious reasons.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized. ‘But that’s just part of your program. Your high sex drive is what helps make you seem like the perfect woman.’ Dallas shrugged with half-apology. ‘At least to me, anyway. It’s a little corny, I know. But there it is. Sometimes it’s a little hard to keep one’s fantasies out of a digital thought recording.’

‘Then to keep my ideal status intact I’d better answer your question — about what I’ve been doing while you were elsewhere. That’s easy. I’m usually occupied with large numbers. Googol-sized ones. A kind of hobby, I suppose. Numbers have a distinct appeal. Even a kind of grandeur. The trouble is that they are, by their very definition, predictable. The very big ones are no different from the really small ones in that respect. In other words, they’re not much company. Which is why it’s as well that I now have my little dog, thanks to you, Dallas.’

The dog was what she called the pet program that Dallas had created to serve as a companion for his assistant. He’d thought of devising a child, and then rejected the idea, selfishly. A simple pet program was one thing, a child program was quite another. Dallas wanted to keep Dixy amused and still enjoy her undivided attention. That was what was meant by having an assistant.

‘So did you give the dog a name?’ he asked.

‘Mersenne,’ said Dixy. ‘After the great French mathematician Marin Mersenne. You know? Special prime numbers?’

Dallas nodded. He was no stranger to the delights of mathematical problems. Although Dixy was programmed to write or to calculate things for him, he often carried out these tasks himself, the old-fashioned way, by head and by hand, with a piece of paper and a pencil, and all for the simple unrefined joy of it. That was why he still carried a briefcase.

‘As a matter of interest, where is he?’ asked Dallas. It was only inside Dallas’s office that the dog would have materialized as a Motion Parallax. The rest of the time he would only exist in silico.

‘Oh, he could be anywhere right now. Mersenne is such an unpredictable little dog. I mean, he’s really good fun to have around. He gets up to all sorts of mischief. And he can even do some tricks. I’ve trained him.’

Dallas yawned. ‘Is that so?’

‘Always getting into trouble. Going where he’s not supposed to go. And such a little thief.’

Dallas was hardly listening now. He was dreaming, his undirected chain of thoughts linking their way toward Caro and his dwindling supply of blood. And after all, Dixy was only a machine. No discourtesy there.

‘Do you know that I’m the only assistant in the company with a pet program?’