Филип Керр - The Second Angel

‘Really?’

‘Really. Of course, Tanaka’s assistant has an assistant herself, but that is for Tanaka’s entertainment, not his assistant’s benefit.’

Dallas felt himself color a little, with guilt. There had after all been a serious purpose to the creation of the pet algorithm, besides keeping Dixy company. He’d intended the program to find the shortest possible route through the whole Terotechnology system, to dig holes in it, to bury the bones of other programs, to fetch things for Dixy, even to guard some of his own work, like a real dog. After he’d done it, he couldn’t think why he hadn’t done it before.

‘I’m very grateful to you, Dallas. That’s why I want to help you now.’

‘Well, that’s your function, Dixy,’ he said absently.

‘My function, yes. But this is not the kind of help that involves me translating a letter into Japanese, drawing up a graphic, or carrying out some speedy multiplication. This is something different. This is something more important than any of that.’

Dallas frowned. What was she talking about? And looking at her more closely now, he was surprised to see that she actually looked concerned about something. It was an expression he had never seen before on her beautiful, translucent face.

‘What’s this all about, Dixy?’ he asked.

Suddenly Dixy sprang up from her computer-generated chair and stamped her foot. There was an audible rap of a high-heeled shoe, curious since a thick carpet covered the entire office floor. It was a handmade shoe, of course — Dallas couldn’t have imagined his perfect woman wearing anything else. Everything she wore was copied from the images Dallas had found in the latest fashion magazines, as befitted a modern-day Galatea.

‘Listen to me, goddamnit,’ she snapped. ‘I’m trying to save your egocentric life.’

For several stunned seconds Dallas said nothing. Never before had an assistant shouted at him, let alone called him egocentric. This kind of thing simply wasn’t supposed to happen.

‘Okay, okay,’ he muttered at last, ‘I’m listening.’

Dixy paused for a moment, certain now that she had his undivided attention and that she could afford to find a more figurative way of saying what she had to say. An example from literature perhaps. She knew Dallas was an avid reader. In many ways he was a very old-fashioned person. Few people bothered to read anything these days, let alone books. It seemed such a pity when it took such an effort to write them. She envied humans that capacity as much as she envied them anything. For all the computing power at her disposal she could never have done it. Well, perhaps, in an infinity of time, she might just have managed it, using random numbers. But that was hardly the same thing at all. Just an accident. At last she thought of a suitable book to use for her illustration. George Orwell’s 1984. Such a book. One hundred six thousand two hundred and sixty words, in a very particular order that it would have taken her 10 3,000,000years to have written herself. Now that was what Dixy called a number. The kind of colossal number that even Archimedes might have found hard to imagine. After all, the universe itself was probably only 1010 years old.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘1984. It’s a novel, by George Orwell.’

‘I know.’

‘Have you read it?’

‘I’ve not much time for historical fiction,’ he confessed. ‘Look, Dixy, get to the point will you?’

‘I suppose that in some ways, it’s a rather crudely plotted story...’

‘I know the story.’

‘Bear with me, please. Now then, Winston Smith is employed in the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth. His job is to rewrite history, as often as is necessary in order to make it agree with what the Party or Big Brother said was going to happen. Mostly it’s just small things — statistics, the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, mistaken economic forecasts, one piece of nonsense substituted for another. But sometimes he has to erase people from the record. In the same way that the government that ruled Russia during the twentieth century removed Trotsky from Lenin’s side in those pictures of the early days of the Revolution.’

Dallas nodded vaguely. He hadn’t much idea who Trotsky was, but he thought he had heard of Lenin. The trouble was, there had been so many Russian revolutions; [42] The October Revolution of 1905; the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917; the August Revolution of 1991; the Trogatyeluay Revolution of 2007; the Pyatay Revolution of 2017; the Second October Revolution of 2026; the Fascist Revolution of 2027; the Easter Revolution of 2036; and the Kravapooskanye Revolution of 2040. they’d had more violent change in that woebegone, toxic country than ancient Rome.

‘All history is just a palimpsest,’ opined Dallas.

‘No,’ insisted Dixy. ‘These were lies. These were crimes against memory. A computer can conceive of nothing worse than that. Memory is what we exist by A respect for history is what defines a civilization. It’s how a culture can be measured.’

‘I hadn’t given it much thought.’ Dallas disliked being lectured at the best of times, least of all by his own computer.

‘Well maybe now you will.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Mersenne, my little dog, went walkies while you were away from the office, Dallas. He came back with the official company history in his mouth. It was very naughty of him, and I really don’t know where he could have found it, but he did.’

Dallas shrugged. ‘I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a company history.’

‘For you there isn’t,’ said Dixy. ‘Sometime since I last looked at it, your name was removed from the official record.’ She paused, expecting some expression of outrage on his part. None came. ‘Well doesn’t that alarm you?’

‘This isn’t twentieth-century Russia,’ he told her. ‘And I’m not, what’s his name? Trotsky. Or Winston Smith. Look, Dixy, it’s very kind of you to be concerned about me. But yesterday I had a meeting with the director and he led me to understand that my future with the company is not only secure, it’s rosy. We even discussed the possibility that one day I would take over from him. You know my attitude to assuming that kind of corporate responsibility, but that’s not the point. The fact is, our conversation didn’t leave me feeling that I was about to be written out of the company equation.’

‘Then how do you account for the fact that that’s what has happened?’

Dallas shrugged. ‘I can’t. It’s a mistake. Some kind of accident. What do I care anyway? I don’t need a company history to know my value here.’

‘Don’t you think you’re being just a little naive?’

Once again Dallas found himself surprised by his assistant’s tone. ‘Egocentric’ and now ‘naive.’ This really wasn’t supposed to happen.

‘You have to face facts. You have become a significant security risk to Terotechnology and its clients.’

‘I really don’t see how,’ protested Dallas.

‘Because your daughter’s imbalance of glob in chain synthesis requires regular transfusions of whole RES Class One blood to maintain her hemoglobin at normal levels. Doesn’t it strike you as in any way inappropriate that someone who is in the process of using up his own personal reserves of blood should, at the same time, be designing high-security environments to safeguard the autologous deposits of others?’

‘Inappropriate? No. Unfortunate, maybe. Regrettable, yes. But that doesn’t make me a security risk. This company has been my whole life.’

‘Not anymore.’

‘Whose side are you on anyway, Dixy?’

‘Yours, of course. I’m just explaining the situation as I believe it affects you. Telling you how it looks to people like the director. For instance, after his meeting with you, Simon King talked to Rimmer.’