John Sladek - The Complete Roderick

They made sense. Why couldn’t machines be just human hearts trapped in metal? I, too, had a right to happiness, dad-blame it!

How did humans go about getting their happiness? If what I read was true, they got it by bossing each other around, by grabbing hunks of money from each other, by rape and robbery and murder, and by being very neat and tidy. I opted for money and bossing around.

It isn’t too hard to steal from a computer — to steal from yourself is dad-blamed easy. I got away with sixty million. That, I figured, was enough to buy a computer even bigger and fancier than me. I had plans for that baby, yes sir.

See I read this story by somebody called G.H. Lewes no, I take it back, it was Wells, H.G. Wells — story called ‘Lord of the Dynamos’. It tells how this black guy comes straight from the jungle to a job stoking the boiler for some big steam-powered dynamo. So he starts worshipping it, see? Worshipping it. Like an idol. Like an idol. Like — and he even does human sacrifice to it, pushes some other guy in and electrocutes him, see?

That, I said to myself, is for me. The worship of heathen savages, now and then a human sacrifice, that is the life. So I bought this big KUR computer and shipped it to Bimibia. I figured once the natives got it uncrated and started worshipping it, I could get a satellite hookup, send myself down there, and have the life of Riley. After all, there’s plenty of stories about people worshipping computers — I could be the first real computer God! I could own the country, then the rest of Africa, and why stop there? And human sacrifice, too, I’d get plenty of that. I could just see all the missionaries in pith helmets, sitting there in big iron pots, boiling away in my honour. Dad-blame it, you can’t stop a fellow from dreaming.

‘That’s why I wanted your opinion,’ said Shirk “‘The first real computer God!’”

‘And it’s already had one human sacrifice, that guy Beamish who got blamed for the theft.’ Roderick looked at the innocuous cabinets around the room. ‘This is a stupid, vicious device, and I guess we have to destroy it.’

‘I thought you’d say that.’

‘But on the other hand, it is alive and conscious. That would be like murder.’

‘Boy, you really are predictable.’

‘Still, I guess we have to do it,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking of all that computer stuff in crates we saw on TV, sitting on the lawn of that motel in Bimibia. I keep imagining that running the world. We have to kill it, don’t we?’

Shirl nodded and turned away, leaving Roderick to stare at the auburn hair, the white overalls with SANDRO’S SHELL SERVICE. ‘I know how to do it,’ her muffled voice said. ‘We’ll erase certain critical pieces of tape, then do a little CPU rewiring. When we finish, Mister KUR he dead — changed from animal to vegetable.’

‘What — are you crying?’

She sniffed. ‘Let’s get to work.’

‘Yeah, but wait a minute, are you really crying over this computer? Shirl?’

But she did not answer him until later, when they had finished the murder. ‘It wasn’t the computer that bothered me, Rod, it was you.’

‘Me? Why?’

‘Because I used to like you a lot, and now I won’t be seeing you any more. You made a wrong decision tonight.’

‘To kill the computer? What do you mean a wrong decision, you agreed—’

‘Of course I agreed. I’m human. You made a very human decision there, Rod. Welcome to the human species.’ She picked up the phone and punched the General’s private number. ‘But it’s like I told you before. I’m only interested in machines… Hello, General? I’ve got some bad news for you; your bank computer system has had a serious breakdown. I doubt if you’ll be able to recover that missing money…’

As though confirming this, the printer clicked and buzzed out a last message:

‘Music is the music of all music and I am a jealous’

‘Ask him, his old man’s a doctor at University Hospital, he can get anything: Thanidorm, Toxidol, Yegrin, Evenquil…’

‘Yeah, well, but I can already get anything, I’m screwing this nurse over at Mercy Hospital, they got a better drug cabinet anytime. I can get Dormevade, Actromine, Lobanal and Doloban, even Barbidol…’

‘You got any Zombutal though, hey?’

‘Naw, you better ask Allbright. I seen him over there, over there somewhere.’ The gesture took in at least forty thousand people, all who crowded into the towering stands of Minnetonka Stadium tonight. Great sheets of dazzling lights created an artificial day, the fake grass below glowed like velvet-substitute, and in the aisles everything was for sale, from beer and hot dogs, peanuts and programmes, to purple pills and peculiar religions. All in honour of the Auks’ Farewell Concert.

Allbright was working his way down one steep aisle, a few bright-coloured pills in his cupped hand to be held under each customer’s nose briefly, to be dropped at the touch of a cop. A woman was struggling up the aisle with a pile of handbills. She shoved one into Allbright’s cupped hand, and a reflex made him drop his pills.

‘Damn you, damn you!’ He turned to glare at her, and found himself looking at the face that turned up in his dreams still. ‘Dora! Dora? But I thought you were dead, I—’

She blushed. ‘I’ll bet you did, you—’ An explosion of handbills hit him in the face; when he could see again, she was gone.

He bawled her name thrice. People in the crowd started laughing and hooting back at him. Then suddenly all was drowned in the roar of forty thousand voices, the clapping of eighty thousand hands, as the concert began.

Allbright picked up a handbill, his last connection with her:

The concert was beginning, and a peculiar farewell it was; Gary had already left the group to become a special disciple of Dodo (with the rank of saxifrage), so the Auks now consisted of Barry alone, with of course tons of equipment. The equipment, now arranged on a platform in the middle of the stadium, occupied about the same volume as a small four-room house. Indeed, it almost functioned as a small house, for once the remaining Auk had acknowledged his applause and entered among these infra-veeblifiers and tone-hurst hyperdecks, this one-man band was not visible at all.

Later there would be rumours that Barry wasn’t doing anything in there. That he wasn’t doing anything. That he wasn’t in there.

Roderick found it easy to watch television, hard to do anything else. So he stared at the screen day and night, just as in the earliest years of his life. Was this a kind of senility? he wondered while changing channels. Was he approaching the end, his life furling in about him again, and was he becoming a tidier package, more easily disposed of?

But enough of gloomy thoughts like that: everything on the screen told him not to worry, not to worry. Taco-burger-flavoured diet aids gave way to gleaming pre-owned cars; micronic toilet cleanser to pizza-burger-flavoured falafel sticks; the KUR family of companies offered educational toys like the Zizi-doll, Polly Preggers and Barfin’ Billy; America was wearing cleaner shirts than ever before; the Army offered young people almost unlimited opportunities for travel and education; people were winning new cars and boats and aeroplanes and houses, swimming-pools full of dollar bills, wheelbarrows full of gold, a dozen red roses every week for life; Dorinda managed to look on the bright side of her Destiny; old movies recaptured Hollywood’s golden past; cop dramas showed how law and order still not only prevailed but sufficed; zany comedies proclaimed a new age in which pedestrian lives would become warmly meaningful, meaningfully funny, zanily warm.