The Holy Machine

37

Ambulance sirens went whooping through the streets, like I so often heard them do down there in the abyss as I stood on our fiftieth floor balcony, looking out at the towers and the sea. But this time they were not going to attend to some stranger. They weren’t going to deal with one of those dramas that happen to other people. They were going to our block in Faraday, our apartment. They were going to the place that no one visited, the place where nothing ever happened.

A strange group emerged from the elevator at the fiftieth floor: the paramedic and his robot assistant, two police officers and their robot assistant and the plastec janitor Lynda with her smooth pink face…

No one answered the front door of the apartment, and it was locked. Lynda the janitor emitted a signal in ultrasound giving the override code and instructing the door to unbolt. It duly did so, but still could not be opened because of the two manual bolts that Ruth had had fixed on the inside.

‘There’s a Mr Simling lives here too, apparently,’ said one of the police officers. They had checked with Central Records.

‘He has not been here since Monday,’ reported the robot janitor.

‘We know that,’ said the police officer. ‘We know that he…’

The police robot interrupted politely. It had just received more information from Central Records which said that I had crossed into Epiros on Monday afternoon. Also: that I was suspected in being involved in a theft involving a syntec. Also: that I was the subject of a classified security file entry.

Some data input clerk somewhere had slipped up. These pieces of information had up to now been filed in different locations and the obvious connections had not been made…

The police officers looked at each other grimly:

‘This is going to look bad. Someone’s going to be in trouble…’

But at least the someone wasn’t going to be either of them.

The police robot and the paramedic robot smashed in the door.

The whole crowd – three humans and three robots – entered our neat little apartment.

‘Mrs Simling? Mrs Simling?’

No answer. Charlie came whirring out of the kitchen where he’d been waiting for five days for instructions.

‘Hello, can I be of any assistance?’ was the message that was sent to his voice box by his small electronic brain. But we’d still not got that voice box repaired, and all that came out was the faintest of buzzing sounds.

They checked all the rooms and found that the door of the SenSpace room was locked on the inside. So the robots broke it down. The vibrations knocked an ornament from a shelf, a little china cup painted with a tiny red rose, Ruth’s one souvenir of her Victorian porcelain collection back in Chicago.

In the middle of the room Ruth was dangling in her SenSpace suit, like an empty coat dangling from a hook…

When they cut her down they found that all four of her limbs were ulcerated and gangrenous. So were her eyes. Her whole body was covered with septic sores. Her water bottle had run out two days previously. She was critically dehydrated. She’d been marinating all this time in urine and faeces and pus. I hadn’t been around to get her out of the suit at nights, that was the problem. She’d grown to rely on me to do that, and I hadn’t been there.

Charlie came trundling clumsily up to the paramedic, jogging him. The older policeman pushed him gently out of the door of the room and closed it behind him.

‘An X3!’ he murmured to his colleague. ‘Takes me back a bit! I haven’t seen one of those in years.’