The Holy Machine

36

‘Oh Sol, roses, how lovely! You really shouldn’t have! You put yourself to so much trouble!’

‘Don’t mention it my dear! I’ve got to have some excuse to come and see you! How are you? You seemed a little down last time I saw you!’

There are parts of this story that I didn’t discover until a lot later on, and one of them was this:

In the months before I escaped from Illyria, Ruth had fallen in love. She had fallen in love with a handsome Jewish-American man called Solomon Gladheim, who every day visited her with a fresh bunch of flowers.

Mr Gladheim was about fifty-five years old. He had a fine physique and a magnificent head of grey hair. He had the demeanour of one who has been through struggles and looked tragedy in the face but emerged strengthened, setting the past behind him and looking forward to whatever the road ahead might bring. Perhaps he had lost some loved one? Or maybe he had built up a prosperous business out of nothing by sheer hard work, only to have it all taken from him by a crooked business partner in whom he had mistakenly placed his trust? He wouldn’t say. He wouldn’t impose his troubles on others. Whatever had happened to him in the past, Sol Gladheim was never bitter, never self-absorbed. He hardly ever talked about himself at all. And his kind friendly smile was never far away.

He had just one limitation, however, not necessarily a flaw, of course, but nonetheless undeniably a limitation. He was not real. In fact, insofar as he was genuinely human at all, Sol Gladheim was the projection of a small group of people, some male, some female, assisted by an Artificial Intelligence. He was constructed of information. He had no physical existence at all.

Real human beings, let’s admit it, seem to rather elude us Simlings.

‘Hey, Little Rose, you’ve been changing things around again! Where do you find the energy? I was just getting used to that room in pink and white and now you’ve done it in yellow! Nice, though. Very nice indeed!’

Mr Gladheim was one of a number of entities whose job was to patrol the SenSpace Worlds, seeking out the regular users of SenSpace and offering them support, friendship and counselling.

These so-called Help Entities had been created to conform to a number of popular ideas about the characteristics of helpful people which had been established by market research. They were animated by the staff of the SenSpace Corporation’s Welfare Service, an agency which the company had set up to head off public criticism that SenSpace exploited the vulnerable and lonely.

Most of the time Help Entities ran automatically, like Little Rose’s electronic neighbours in the City without End. But they were monitored by duty workers at the Welfare Service, who could assume direct control if needed at any time. From the point of view of the customer, such switches of control were invisible and seamless. Mr Gladheim looked the same, smiled the same way and spoke in the same sort of New York American English whether he was animated by a female welfare worker aged 23, a male worker aged 41, or by a Self-Evolving Artificial Intelligence.

But, real or not, it was Mr Gladheim who saved Ruth’s life four days after my departure. His imaginary knuckles saved her, knocking on the imaginary door of the imaginary house of imaginary Little Rose.

Ruth had fallen in love with him. She talked to him for hours. She told him secrets. She giggled and flirted. Each day she dressed up for him in new imaginary dresses, each morning she racked her brains for things to tell him about.

The Welfare Service, seeing the need, arranged for him to visit daily. It was no bother. He could be in many different places at the same time. They set him to visit daily with bunches of flowers, and to pay attention to her in a style which lay somewhere between indulgent father and respectful suitor, with a dash of professional counsellor thrown in.

He visited the day after my departure, and Little Rose told him she was worried about me. She said I was very selfish and never thought to tell her what I was doing or whether she might need me. Mr Gladheim clucked his tongue.

The day after that, my third day in Epiros, he visited again. Little Rose said she was very tired and Mr Gladheim asked if she was well and if she needed any help. She said no, but a hug would be nice. So he gave her a hug, a fatherly imaginary hug.

The next day she didn’t answer when he knocked. This was unusual. It was rare for Ruth not to spend most of her time in SenSpace, and unheard of for her not to be there at the times that Mr Gladheim had said that he would call.

The next day she still didn’t answer.

Or the next.

Mr Gladheim was being operated by the self-evolving artificial intelligence at the time and it recognized that for Ruth not to be there three days in a row was extremely atypical. It checked with SenSpace Centre, which monitored the entry and exit of customers into the SenSpace world. Centre looked into the matter very thoroughly and after nearly three microseconds it came back to the Welfare AI with the surprising information that Ruth was in SenSpace and indeed was currently projecting into the ‘City Without End^TM’ Conceptual Field, though there was no sign of activity.

The AI notified the duty Welfare Officer, a human being, a woman in fact, who pulled the full ‘Connection Profile’ from Centre onto her screen – and was alarmed by what she saw.

‘This is going to look bad for the Corporation,’ fretted the Welfare Officer. ‘Someone is going to be for it.’

She e-mailed her senior with the whole profile. The senior shook his head.

‘This’ll be egg on our face, that’s for sure.’

He forwarded the profile to his own manager, marked urgent.

‘The service is going to come badly out of this,’ he commented in a covering note.

The Profile showed that Ruth had been connected continuously for five days. For the last three days, though she had still been connected, there had been no detectable output from her SenSpace address.

The manager told the senior to tell the Welfare Officer to contact the emergency services. Not the imaginary emergency services, the real ones, the ones in Illyria City.