The Holy Machine

25

I was with Little Rose, my child-mother, in a leafy suburban street of white clapboard houses. The sun was shining. A yellow aeroplane droned overhead, towing a sign that simply read ‘Having a good time?’

Wholesome-looking housewives were chatting over garden fences, wholesome-looking husbands were fixing cars in the street, wholesome-looking kids on cycles were tossing rolled newspapers into mailboxes. And every one of those wholesome-looking people greeted both Ruth and I.

‘Hi there, Little Rose! How ya doing, George?’

The SenSpace Corporation had introduced another new facility. It was called ‘City without End^TM’ because you could move through it indefinitely without ever reaching an edge, although the same pattern of streets, buildings and parks repeated themselves every five virtual kilometres.

Ruth had subscribed to it at once.

The thing about City without End^TM was that you could simply wander through the streets until you found a house you liked that was vacant, and make it your own. (If you found one you liked that wasn’t vacant, you could just jump forward another five kilometres, or another ten, and there its exact copy would be.)

And when you’d chosen your house, SenSpace provided you with a vast catalogue of improvements and fittings to choose from. Wallpapers, paint, carpets, furniture, partition walls, extensions… all could be instantaneously installed, instantaneously replaced. And yet, because this was SenSpace – an illusion not only three-dimensional but tactile – the instantaneous furnishings could really be sat upon and the instantaneous walls really felt hard to the touch.

‘You must come and see my little house, George,’ she kept telling me – and I had finally, reluctantly agreed.

‘Hi there, Little Rose! How ya doing George?’

The neighbours knew who I was because they were ‘extras’: projections of SenSpace like the houses and the trees. Travel five kilometres to the next identical street and you would find exactly the same people, doing exactly the same things, the same again after ten kilometres, after fifteen, after twenty… When someone moved into a house, the extras who inhabited it before were simply deleted. Only in streets fully occupied by SenSpace subscribers, were the fictional neighbours no longer present at all.

But their illusory nature didn’t stop Little Rose from greeting them:

‘Hello there, Gramps… How are you, Bessy…! Don’t miss out my mailbox will you, Delmont?’

And she looked around at me with a pleased smile, almost as if she expected me to be impressed by the number of people she knew.

Only one person in the street did not greet us, and was not greeted by Little Rose. A pale figure in a white suit, he slunk past, avoiding our eyes.

‘Who is that?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘A subscriber. He moved in the other day to the house next door but two. It’s a shame, there was a really nice friendly family in there before and…’

But now her face lit up. She gestured towards a little house covered in bright pink roses.

‘There it is! Rose Cottage! What do you think?’

So I was shown the striped wallpaper in the lounge, the yellow-and-white in the hallway, the pink in Little Rose’s cosy bedroom. Her bed with its fluffy pink and white cover really felt soft. The room really had a feminine smell of lavender and talc.

‘This is your room,’ said Little Rose, showing me into a sickly pastiche of the bedroom of an adolescent boy. I cringed and was about to protest when a telephone chirruped downstairs.

I looked at Little Rose. She giggled.

‘Yes, it’s a real phone. I’m in SenSpace so much I’ve got it fixed so I can take calls in here. Will you get it for me?’

The phone, the virtual phone, was ringing in the hallway. The electronic projection of my arm reached out and picked up this electronically created mirage.

But the voice on the end was a real one, coming from the outside world.

‘Is this George Simling? I’m phoning about the advert in the paper. I understand you’re interested in making a purchase?’

It was a woman’s voice with a faint German accent.

‘Advert? No. I think there must be some mistake.’

‘No,’ the voice was very, very firm. ‘There is no mistake. I assure you of that. You were interested in making a purchase. If you’ve changed your mind, of course, that’s fine.’

The door to the kitchen of Rose Cottage was open. Beyond it, through the kitchen window, I could see an electronic ginger cat picking its way across the sunlit, electronic garden.

‘Listen, I really haven’t…’

And then, with a chill of pure fear, I understood. It was the call from the AHS.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ‘I remember now. Yes, I am still interested in making a purchase.’

‘Who was it?’ said Little Rose when I went back upstairs. She’d been trying out different kinds of curtains in her bedroom window, which overlooked an idyllic scene of children playing in immaculate back yards, with the wholesome homes of the City without End^TM stretching away into the distance.

‘Oh, just someone from work,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take this helmet off Ruth. I’ve got a headache. I need some real air.’