John Sladek - The Complete Roderick

‘Peanut butter?’

‘Bugleboy Old Tyme Reconstituted Peanut Butter, nauseating stuff it used to be, nobody could stand it. Only thing us kids liked about it was the jar tops: “Fifty of your favourite cartoon characters — save ’em, swap ’em, loads of fun!” Something like that. Anyway the supermarkets were probably losing money on the crap, because they stopped handling it. So this kid just got on the old terminal, twiddled his way into the inventory computer of this big supermarket chain, Tommy Tucker, and made a few crucial changes. All of a sudden Tommy Tucker was swamped with the crap. They put it on special offer, they even gave it away — and I bet they had to throw away a few tons of it too. But they couldn’t stop their computer from re-ordering, more and more… When they caught up with him, this kid had forty-nine of his favourite cartoon characters — probably more than any other kid in the United States.’

Dora looked for the waitress. ‘I’ve heard lots of stories like that. Kids are always using their school terminals to dig into some computer somewhere.’

‘Yeah, but what Danny did was kind of new. He invented some sinister algorithm, so he told me. I don’t even know what an algorithm is.’

‘You don’t? Honest? It’s only a set of instruc—’

‘And I don’t want to know. Whatever it was, after he planted it in Tommy Tucker’s computer, it just grew until it took over. I guess they had to finally throw away their whole program and start from scratch. I guess they lost a lot of money, that’s where the FBI came in.’

‘What happened to him, then?’

‘Oh, they put him on the payroll at Tommy Tucker. As a computer security consultant. All he had to do was promise to leave them alone. But the funny thing is—’

The waitress arrived, with someone else’s drinks.

‘Sorry, kid, I got a bit mixed up, with all the characters in here tonight. Old Jack there’s teed off because he can’t read—’ she gestured at the man in the hunting cap, ‘– and the cowboy next to him wants to know who’s drinking martinis — and then I got some joker in the front tries to tell me he’s a manicure. Crazy! Crazy! Crazy!’

She delivered the Old-fashioned and the martini to Rogers and Hannah, who was saying:

‘…maybe the Blackfeet boy, Kut-o-yis, cooked to life in a cooking pot, but isn’t that the point? Aren’t they always fodder for our desires? Take Pumiyathon for instance, going to bed with his ivory creation—’

‘Look, these Indian stories are okay, but I don’t see—’

‘Indian? No, he was King of Cyprus, you must know that story, they even made a musical of it, Hello Dolly, was it? Something like that… But take Hephaestus then, those golden girls he made who could talk, help him at his forge, who knows what else… Or Daedalus, not just the statues that guarded the labyrinth, but the dolls he made for the daughters of Cocalus, you see? Love, work, conversation, guard duty, baby, plaything, of course they used them to replace people, isn’t that the point?’

‘Yes but the point, my point is—’

‘And in Boeotia, the little Daedala, the procession where they carried an oaken bride to the river, much like the argeioi in Rome, the puppets the Vestal Virgins threw into the Tiber to purge the demons; disease, probably, just as the Ewe made clay figures to draw off the spirit of the smallpox, so did the Baganda, they buried the figures under roads and the first—’

‘This is all very interesting, yes, but—’

‘First person who passed by picked up the sickness. In Borneo they drew sickness into wooden images, so did the Dyaks… Of course the Chinese mostly made toys, a jade automaton in the Fourth Century but much earlier even the first Han Emperor had a little mechanical orchestra but then he was a bit mad, you know. Imagine burning all the books in China and building the Great Wall, quite mad, quite mad… but the Japanese, Prince Kaya was it? Yes, made a wooden figure that held a big bowl, it helped the people water their rice paddies during the drought. Certainly more practical than the Chinese, or even the Pythagoreans, with their steam-driven wooden pigeon, hardly counts even if they did mean it to carry souls up to — but no, we have to make do with the rest, and of course the golem stories, and how clay men fashioned by the Archangel—’

Chee! Rogers sneezed. ‘Yes, very iderestigg, but—’

There were Teraphim of course but no one knows their function. But the real question is, what do we want this robot for? Is it to be a bronze Talos, grinning as he clasps people in his red-hot metal embrace? Or an ivory Galatea with limbs so cunningly jointed—’

‘Look, couldn’t we — ?’

‘As you see, I’ve been turning the problem over, consulting the old stories…’

‘And?’

‘And I’ve decided to vote against this robot.’

Chee! Chee! ‘Thank God. We have to take sides. Those of us who don’t want to be ciphers have to stand up and be counted. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?’

For the first time, her eyes blinked. ‘But I had to explain! You see, I believe in baring the soul.’

‘Bearing the — ?’

‘I even talk to my food and drink, as you must have noticed.’

‘Dot at all,’ he lied, and hid his nose in a handkerchief.

She sighed. ‘I can’t help feeling that respect for life — even the life of your cold virus there — is paramount. Of course we must take life, we eat food, we destroy germs. But can we not at least apologize for our murders?’ So saying, she took up the olive from her martini and spoke to it quietly: ‘Little olive, I mean you no harm, but my body needs nourishment. For one day soon, my body will go to replenish the earth, to feed new olive trees…’

Rogers looked away, embarrassed, and caught the eye of a fat, suntanned stranger at the bar, who had turned from the television to watch Dr Hannah. ‘Uh, I’ve got to go home, nurse this cold, so…’

She put down the olive and checked her watch. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll stick around. Have to kill an hour before I meet my son for dinner. Never see him, since he moved into that fra — But you have your own problems, bless you.’

Beanie’s Bar was beginning to fill up with the early evening crowd. Rogers had to squeeze his way through an animated discussion of Ruritania (one speaker suffered from halitosis), avoid the non-university drunk and jostle through other conversations:

‘…the liberry, but like when I ast for Sense and Sensibility they brung me this novel. This, yeah, by some other J. Austin, only with a e, figure that…’

‘…Jungian econ…’

‘…this machine heresy, was it?’

‘…Barbara Altar for one…’

The juke box piped him out with a mournful, if not quite coherent song:

Near the door someone said, ‘Right in front of the Student Union? No kidding, who was he anyway?’

‘Just some freshman with a GPA problem, happens every year…’

The spot vacated by Rogers was still warm when a plump stranger in Western clothes slid into it. He grinned at Dr Hannah out of his deep tan.

‘Olives,’ he said. ‘Thought they went out with the ol’ Walther.’

‘Really?’ She focused on him with difficulty.

‘O’Smith.’ He extended a thick left hand on which she noticed a turquoise ring, almost Navaho. But fake, like the grin.

‘Prometheus invented the ring,’ she said, and belched. ‘Did you know — sorry — that? Out of his chains.’