The Holy Machine

18

Much excitement at a specially convened meeting of the Holist League!

Only two weeks after his famous ‘Militant Reason’ speech, President Ullman had died.

There had been a state funeral, solemn speeches. Ullman was eulogized as the ‘father of Illyria’, the founder of the Fellowship of Reason, the creator of the ‘Zionism of Science’. And there had been big words about his work living on after him, about every Illyrian striving to make his dream into a reality…

‘Even Illyrians seem to believe in some kind of afterlife!’ drily observed the handsome Brazilian Da Vera, who had become the dominant figure in the little group.

The new acting President was Senator Kung, an altogether harsher figure, who had been partially paralyzed as a result of torture in the Chinese Reaction, and now walked on robot limbs, a kind of syntec from the waist down. No one doubted that the Senator would soon be confirmed as Ullman’s permanent successor. The office of President was in the gift of the Fellowship of Reason, the organization which had purchased the territory of Illyria and masterminded the migration of refugees to their newly-created homeland, and Senator Kung had been Chair of the Fellowship’s ruling Council for some years.

Kung’s first act had been to create by decree a new police agency, the Office for Order and Objectivity, soon to be known and feared as ‘O3’. Its task would be to increase surveillance of all subversive activity and to root out sources of irrationality that might weaken the authority of the scientists’ state.

And in his very first Presidential speech Kung spoke of subversive elements within the Illyrian population itself, children of refugees who chose to forget the sufferings of their parents and thought it clever to dabble with the ‘seductive baubles of religion, with their phoney promises and phoney claims to re assuring certainty.’ These elements would be dealt with no less harshly than subversives in the guestworker community, he warned. They too could be deported if necessary, to the countries from which their parents had escaped.

Now, no member of the Holist League was so vulgar as to believe in things like the Trinity, or the infallibility of the prophet Mohammed, or the Virgin birth, or to believe that some old book was the final truth about the universe. And perhaps these were the kinds of things that Kung had in mind when he spoke about ‘baubles’. But the League did dabble in the idea that Illyria had gone too far, had overreacted against the Reaction, had thrown away babies with the bathwater.

‘Have no doubt that the likes of us will come to the attention of this new secret police!’ warned Da Vera.

Everyone agreed with him. There was a lot of talk about ‘fear’ and ‘outrage’ and ‘having our backs up against the wall’, though it seemed to me that for most people present these feelings were actually quite agreeable, an exciting frisson, nothing more.

After the meeting, they all went down, as they normally did, to drink in the bar below, the New Orleans. Marija, with one arm already slipped through Da Vera’s, took my hand as I was about to sneak away.

‘You always slink off, George! Why don’t you come with us for once? It would be good to get to know you better.’

I really didn’t want to but I liked Marija very much and didn’t want to displease her.

‘Just for a short time,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a lot of work on. I really need some sleep.’

And then I went red, as I normally did when I spoke to her.

So Marija went down to the bar between Da Vera and I, arm in arm with both of us: the suave Brazilian, and the odd, stiff translator, who lived at home with his mother, and was rigid all over with self-consciousness and fear and guilty secrets.

Yes, and her arm through mine was the most intimate touch I had received from a woman of my own age. I mean from a real one of course.

They all knew each other. They had well-established patterns, collective habits. They all knew who drank what, how many bowls of potato chips to buy, how they would share out the bill. They had in-jokes, they knew things about each others’ lives. Each of them had well-known foibles for which they could be teased, and party pieces which the others recognized with a laugh or a cheer or an affectionate groan. In short, in the New Orleans, the Holist League transformed itself from a debating society into a group of friends.

And, though I’d been to their meetings, I wasn’t part of that group. I sat with them round a table, but I was outside the circle. I felt charmless and empty and, in my misery, I told myself I didn’t like them anyway. I told myself how shallow and self-important they were, this little debating society, getting drunk and loud after their meeting, each one playing out an assigned and cliché-ridden role.

But Marija was kind. She turned away from Paul Da Vera as he held forth amusingly to the group at large, and attempted to engage me in conversation. And suddenly remembered I did have something to tell her, something really interesting which I’d been specially saving up.

‘I meant to tell you,’ I said, ‘I found that robot janitor.’

‘Janitor? You don’t mean Shirley?’

‘Yes, or a robot just like her. It was hanging from a scaffold down in Ioannina.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Yes, Shirley and about half-a-dozen others. Some children were using them for target practice.’

Marija was impressed. She nudged Da Vera.

‘Paul, listen to this!’

So Paul listened, and to my alarm the whole group of more than twenty also shut up and listened, as I told the tale of the gibbet and the stone-throwing children and the broken limbs on the ground, and what the taxi-driver Manolis had said about ‘demons’.

Da Vera shook his head.

‘Amazing. Quite amazing. It just confirms what you’ve been telling me Marija.’

Marija nodded.

‘My company is very edgy about these problems with the SE robots. I mean it’s always been known that if they were allowed to self-evolve for too long they might go off the rails in some way but it’s happening much more quickly than anyone planned for. And the odd thing is that, when it does happen, wandering off is typically what they do. We find most of them of course, but there’s always been some that never show up again. I suppose we now know why.’

Paul laughed: ‘It’s wonderful isn’t it? They are made specifically to replace irrational human beings, and then they evolve an irrationality of their own. It sums up everything we’ve talked about! The whole can’t be predicted from the parts!’

‘Some people are saying they should be completely reprogrammed as often as every six months or so, instead of every five years,’ Marija said. ‘But the company is fighting this because that defeats the whole point of self-evolution. Just when the robots were starting to get good at mimicking people, all their learning would be wiped away, and they’d have to start again.’

Marija considered.

‘But why do they wander out there?’ she exclaimed after a moment. ‘Think of the – the determination involved: crossing the border and then just walking and walking and walking until some outlander finds them and kicks them to pieces. Isn’t there something tragic about it?’

I agreed with her, but Paul Da Vera gave a derisory snort.

‘Now you’re being sentimental, Marija. You shouldn’t waste your pity on machines! If you want to pity someone, pity the poor guestworker who’s chucked out of the territory when they build a robot to do his job! Pity the janitors, the nightwatchmen, the dustcart drivers. My God, even the whores have been put out of business now! We live in a country where we even fuck machines!’

Everyone else laughed. I shrank back inside myself, like a snail pulling back into its shell.

‘I actually think the outlanders have got basically the right instincts about this,’ Paul said. ‘There is something really abominable about building a machine to mimic a human being.’

Marija shrugged.

‘Well, perhaps, but I still feel sorry for them,’ she said, and she looked at me, almost as if I was one of the robots she felt sorry for: this stiff creature, struggling to find the spark of spontaneity, of naturalness, of life…