The Holy Machine

21

I was at my desk at Word for Word a few weeks later, just before lunchtime, when the receptionist called me to say I had a visitor. We still had a human receptionist in those days, and she sounded oddly excited.

‘Who is it?’ I asked.

‘Well, she says it’s a surprise.’

‘Are you sure it’s me she wants to see?’

‘Definitely.’

This time the receptionist could not quite prevent herself from giggling.

I went down to the reception area. There was only one person waiting there, a very elegant young woman. She looked up at me and gave a warm smile of recognition. My blood froze.

It was Lucy!

…or so it seemed for a moment. After a second or so I realized that, although my visitor was blonde like Lucy and had the same kind of gentle, flawless beauty, she did not have the same face.

‘Hello George!’ she said, standing up, ‘I wondered if you’d like to come out for lunch?’

The receptionist looked from her to me, smiling.

‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled, red to the roots of my hair, ‘I don’t think I know you…’

The young woman laughed.

‘Do you really not recognize me, Georgie?’

I didn’t recognize the face or the voice, but there was something in the tone – half-teasing, half-plaintive – that seemed familiar…

‘I’m sorry, I…’

The stranger laughed.

‘Aren’t you going to give your mother a kiss?’ she said.

A half-stifled splutter of incredulous laughter came from the receptionist behind me.

‘This is a Vehicle!’ Ruth told me excitedly in the lift, talking through the mouth of the pretty blonde. ‘It’s a new SenSpace facility. Isn’t it amazing? It’s a…’

But of course by then I’d worked it out for myself. A Vehicle was a robot or syntec which was remote controlled by the SenSpace net, and could be hired by SenSpace subscribers.

‘I know what a Vehicle is,’ I said coldly. ‘Please don’t ever make a fool of me like that again.’

She pouted. ‘I thought you’d be pleased to have a pretty young woman come and take you out for lunch!’

I didn’t reply to this.

‘I think it’s a great idea, George. I can be a different person, I can go out on the streets and have fun, and yet be quite safe all the time.’

A young man eyed the Vehicle with furtive admiration as we crossed the road and Ruth giggled.

‘It’s quite nice to be looked at, too.’

We went to a snack bar opposite my office. I ordered coffee and chicken sandwiches for myself. Ruth’s Vehicle ordered coffee.

‘It must cost a fortune to hire,’ I muttered as we sat down.

I found myself glancing at the Vehicle’s shapely legs.

‘It does cost a lot, but why not once in a while? Like I said, it’s fun and it’s safe.’

‘Safe! It’s not as if Illyria City is such a dangerous place!’

‘It is now, with bombs going off and everything. It was on the news this morning by the way, they’ve found two of the bombers. Would you believe they were both Illyrian citizens, not squippies. Imagine! Illyrians! Senator Kung says he’s going to put more money into O3 and give them more powers, and he’s bringing in tough new laws too.’

I shrugged: ‘New laws that will tell us there’s only one way we’re allowed to think. It seems pretty much like America or the Outlands all over again.’

Oddly enough I’d already almost become accustomed to this syntec being my mother. The face was different, the body was different, the voice was different, but the spirit that animated it – the body-language, the inflections of speech – were so manifestly hers.

‘Anyway, Ruth, how come you’re not at work?’

The Vehicle looked evasive. ‘Oh, I’ve got a day off.’

‘You were off last week too. You’re only supposed to have three weeks leave a year.’

‘I… Well okay, if you want the truth, George, I’ve given up my job.’

‘Why?’

‘I wasn’t enjoying it. I don’t need the money, so I thought, why not?’

It was true that she didn’t need the money. Nor did I actually. My father had been a wealthy man.

But Ruth’s work had been the only place where she ever met other people, the only place she ever went outside of our apartment.

‘What are you going to do with your time? Moon around in SenSpace all day until it gives you ulcers?’

It occurred to me then that in fact even now she was actually in the apartment dangling in her SenSpace suit. The door of her SenSpace room was shut. The door of the apartment was triple-locked. She was utterly alone, three kilometres away across town making the movements and gestures that this syntec was faithfully reproducing, while goggles over her eyes were projecting onto her retinas the images from the Vehicle’s video camera eyes.

‘What’s wrong with being in SenSpace a lot if you like it?’ she said through the Vehicle, ‘There was a thing on TV the other night about a man who’s been paralysed in a car smash. They’ve got him all wired up to SenSpace so he could live and move about in there, if not in the outside world. Some people on the programme were sorry for him, but I thought, why? What could be nicer than living in SenSpace day and night? You could always hire a Vehicle like this if you wanted to look outside.’

‘Yes but you’re not that man. You’ve got the use of all your limbs. I mean, if you’re just going to hide in SenSpace you might just as well be dead!’

The pretty Vehicle looked at me. I think speaking through a Vehicle made her bolder in what she said, in the way that some people are bolder when they are wearing dark glasses, or a mask.

‘I might just as well be dead,’ she said very calmly. ‘You are absolutely right. And do you know the only thing that keeps me from that?’

Just for a moment I thought she was going to say me, but I needn’t have excited myself on that account.

‘I don’t want to sound like a religious person,’ she said. ‘I’m not talking about heaven or hell or anything like that. But I do sometimes wonder: how do we know what death is? What happens if it’s not the end? What happens if it turns out that life is the one thing that does go on and on and won’t end however much you want it to?’

I had an awful momentary vision of a solitary being at the core of the universe, a solitary being, unable to die, doomed to exist alone forever.

‘Why don’t you take the afternoon off, George?’ she asked in a completely different tone. ‘I was thinking we could go to Aghios Constantinos. The real one I mean. I’m not scared of going places when I’m going as a Vehicle!’

‘No, sorry. Too busy,’ I said shortly.

In fact I was to visit Aghios Constantinos again – and with Ruth in vehicle form as well. But a good deal was to happen before then.