The Holy Machine

38

Forty-eight hours later Ruth woke up in a bed in the Ullman Memorial Hospital. She didn’t know how much time had passed, or what had happened, or where she was. Strange pins-and-needles sensations were coming from her fingers and arms and toes, and her vision was blurred and flat and grainy.

In fact she was seeing through a temporary electronic eye spliced to her right optic nerve. The world resembled an early attempt at Virtual Reality, before the days of high resolution images.

‘How are you Mrs Simling?’ enquired a syntec nurse, while simultaneously sending an ultrasound signal to Hospital Control to say that patient RS/5/76 was awake.

Some time later a young male doctor arrived. He looked down at the mutilated object on the bed. His palms began to sweat disagreeably as he steeled himself to say what he had to say.

‘You’ve had a very nasty thing happen to you, Mrs Simling,’ he began.

Ruth didn’t react much.

‘I’m afraid,’ he tried again, ‘I’m afraid we’ve had to perform some rather drastic surgery.’

He looked uncomfortably across at the syntec, which offered a beautiful smile. The doctor smiled back. The syntec was much more agreeable to look at than Ruth, and, like all syntecs, was wonderful to flirt with.

He looked down again at the body of my mother, resenting her now for being so ugly and so unlucky and so entitled to be distressed.

‘I’m afraid Mrs Simling that your limbs were very badly damaged and we’ve had to amputate them.’

There now, he’d told her. He’d have to be sympathetic for ten minutes or so and then he could quite justifiably go on to other things and forget about the whole unpleasant business. He was only covering for a colleague anyway. He didn’t really belong in this ward.

Ruth nodded. She seemed to be taking it very well, thought the young doctor hopefully. Well, why not go for broke? He shrugged, quite visibly in fact, though he didn’t intend the shrug to be seen.

‘Also, there was a problem with your eyes and…’

The doctor tailed off.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you needn’t worry about hospital charges and so on. The SenSpace company have already said they’ll cover everything that isn’t covered by your medical insurance, including long-term care. The only thing is: you might want to get a lawyer to look at that offer sometime, Mrs Simling, because confidentially you’ve got the SenSpace people over a barrel…’

He trailed off, realizing that he was hardly addressing the central issue.

‘I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to get out and about much anymore Mrs Simling,’ he said.

He hesitated. He had no instinct about these things, that was the problem.

‘What we can do nowadays,’ he said, ‘is to wire your nerves up directly to SenSpace. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Direct Link procedure? We can link you up so you can move around freely in there, even if you can’t do so out here. You can still get the sensation of limbs and eyes and so on…’

Ruth’s lips moved, as if she was struggling to speak.

The doctor knew he was getting it wrong. This woman had just woken up to find her body hacked back to a stump, and here he was gabbling about compensation claims and SenSpace.

‘I know it’s not the same,’ he said, almost humbly.

He looked over at the pretty syntec nurse, who was attending to a nutrient drip at the end of the bed. Seeing him looking at her, the nurse at once eagerly caught his eye and gave him another meltingly lovely smile. He smiled back, broadly. Then he turned his attention back, with an effort and again with some resentment, to his very unsexy patient.

‘But of course it is ever so real in SenSpace now as you know, and you meet people and build a house and visit friends and…’

‘So I will live in SenSpace permanently?’ said Ruth, finally managing to speak.

They were the first words she had spoken out loud for many days.

‘Yes. But of course…’

Ruth laughed merrily, cutting right across him.

‘Always? Even sleep there? Even get up there in the morning? No-one will ever tell me I’ve been in there long enough?’

‘Yes, but as I say you can…’

‘Oh that’s wonderful!’ said Ruth, still laughing. ‘It’s like a dream come true!’

The doctor stared at the thin ruined face, with the wires disappearing under the bandage over its eyes. It seemed quite horrible to him to see it laugh.

‘…As I say, if you want to look around outside, you can always hire a Vehicle.’

Ruth wasn’t listening. She looked up at the grainy face of the doctor. He was sneaking another look at the pretty syntec. And the syntec was giving him yet another dazzling smile.

‘Just exactly what I wanted,’ said Ruth.

‘Oh, well, good…’ the doctor said vaguely.

He was thinking at that moment about the syntec nurse. It struck him suddenly that this third smile was exactly the same as the other two, right down to the slight leftward tilt of the head. It wasn’t like a new smile at all, more like replaying the same smile again. And this took away its charm.

The fact was that, like thousands of SE machines across Illyria, the nurse had been wiped clean. A whole vocabulary of flirtation, which she had learnt from the doctor and others like him, had all been wiped away, along with a whole repertoire of patient care. All over the territory this had been happening: syntecs and robots being loaded into vans and taken back to the factories where they were made, artificial intelligences being shut down and reprogrammed again from scratch.

The doctor pulled his attention reluctantly back to his patient.

‘Well, good. I’m glad you are so positive about it. If there are any problems, don’t hesitate to ask…’

‘Just do it quickly please,’ Ruth said.

The reality of her position was beginning to hit her. She needed SenSpace. She was appalled by the prospect of having to lie here in this hospital room while her fears came pressing in around her bed.

There was no one else to fill this space, no-one but fears to come and visit her.

‘I’ve got a son. George…’ she said to the syntec, the doctor having slipped away.

The syntec made some enquiries with Hospital Control.

‘I’m afraid we haven’t been able to locate him. It seems he is travelling abroad.’