The Holy Machine

30

Over the next few weeks, I spent every available moment studying syntecs: how they worked, how they were maintained, the nutrients they required to power them and to feed their living skins… I suppose it was a relief to have something to occupy my mind and to distract me from the constant dread of an O3 raid, or a call from the AHS ordering me to take part in some sabotage operation.

I visited Lucy frequently but didn’t bother about sex at all. It was if I had found a little glowing ember and was trying to fan it into flame. Amid all her hundreds of thousands of learnt and preprogrammed routines, she had found a tiny autonomous space, but it was tiny. She didn’t know what the world was, or where she came from. She had no concept of anything outside the Pleasure House. Much of the language she possessed was simply stuff she repeated with no more understanding than a parrot. She didn’t even know what she needed to maintain her own mechanical body.

But she was built to learn. She was self-evolving: designed to expand her repertoire by trial and error. That was why SE robots had the capacity to go off the rails: Lucy’s design could not exclude the possibility of her learning something that was not intended to be part of her repertoire, or of her retaining it and gradually expanding it, in the right circumstances, just as she retained and expanded her programmed routines.

I tried to help her with this by feeding her new ideas and telling her about the world, or just by taking her to the window and pointing out to her what was going on in the street.

But I realized that the main way I could help her was by expressing pleasure in her learning. For it was central to her design that she was there to please human males. She was built to learn by making small random variations to her repertoire and cataloguing them as new routines. Then, when she got a positive reaction from a customer to one of them, she would adjust the frequency rating attached to it, so that it would recur more frequently, and become the basis more often of further random variations. By giving positive feedback to her self-explorations, I increased their pace.

‘That’s great Lucy, that’s just what I wanted. I do love you so much!’ I would say.

‘I love you too,’ she would reply.

I knew it was a standard response, but I told myself that one day she might really know what it meant.

It didn’t occur to me back then to wonder if I knew myself.