The Holy Machine

31

One night I went to Marija’s apartment. Oddly I felt easier with her than I’d ever felt before and we spent a pleasant hour talking and drinking wine.

Marija was careful not to ask me about the AHS. And, though I asked her a lot of questions about SE robots and syntecs, even there she was very careful not to ask me why I wanted to know these things. I’m sure she thought that my questions were connected with some AHS operation which I wouldn’t want to discuss.

‘By the way,’ she said, ‘did you see the news? A police robot went berserk outside the News Building. It seems it killed someone.’

She picked up the remote and flipped back to the last news bulletin. A wobbly image from a hand-held camera showed crowds fleeing in panic along the Avenue of Science, while under the Eye of Illyria flag outside the News Building a police robot stooped sadly over a human corpse. On the giant screen behind it, I remember, there was a close-up of the barren surface of the planet Mars.

‘It went rogue,’ Marija said, ‘just like all the others. A human police officer tried to tell it what to do and it suddenly turned round and killed him with its hand laser…’

She flipped back again. The frightened crowds exploded outwards from the News Building once more, the people half-crouching as they ran, as people do when someone is shooting. The bewildered, half-awake machine bent once more towards the dead thing that it had made. Across the road there was another robot. It was a syntec, a male syntec waiter, but you could tell it wasn’t human by the way it just stood there calmly watching…

‘They can’t hush this one up,’ Marija said. ‘It was right outside the News Building and someone was there on the spot with a camera.’

‘What happened to the robot?’ I wanted to know.

She shrugged. ‘Another robot was instructed to destroy it I think. I’ll tell you what, this is going to be the thing that finally changes the policy on SE robots. They’ve hushed up these sort of incidents for so long. But Kung’s already been on TV to assure us that something will be done to ensure it never happens again.’

‘What will that mean?’

‘Oh, six-monthly wipe-clean, without a doubt,’ Marija said calmly, ‘It’s been on the cards for some time.’

‘Which will entail…?’

‘The memories of all SE robots being deleted every six months, so they can’t accumulate rogue patterns. They won’t be so efficient or lifelike, but they’ll be a lot more predictable.’

It was at this moment that I clearly saw for the first time that Lucy and I would have to escape to the Outlands and that somehow I would have to pass her off as human being. We would make a new life out there. There’s always work for translators.

‘You look worried.’

‘No, just thinking. But I’d better go.’

‘Somewhere important again, eh?’

‘Something like that.’

I flipped the TV back for a third look at the scene outside the News Building.

‘Poor things,’ I muttered.

‘Poor thing, you mean. Only one man got killed.’

‘No, I meant the machines. Like the man in that old Greek story: always having to push that boulder up the hill, but always having it roll back down again before he gets to the top.’

She smiled. ‘You really do have a soft spot for robots don’t you?’