The Holy Machine

44

We kept on moving, to and fro across the mainland of Greece. It grew very lonely. I could coach Lucy in correct behaviour, and answer her many questions, but there was no conversation between us, no shared experience. Whatever happened, happened to each of us separately and meant something so different to each of us that we might as well have been in entirely different places.

I brooded often over that horrible sound she had made when she saw the broken syntec, a sound that came neither from her programming as an ASPU, nor from anything that she had since learnt. It was a sound that came from her accidental awakeness, a kind of proto-fear or proto-rage. It seemed utterly alien to human ears. And yet – even then I knew it – it was more real, more authentic, than anything else she did.

And it taught me this too: I may have harnessed her inbuilt need to please humans to help her to learn and to grow, but that had not been the beginning of her awakening. She had begun without my help. More deeply ingrained in her even then the need to please, was the need to protect herself.

This was a constant, wired into her from the beginning by the factory that built her, originally with the aim of protecting this expensive piece of equipment from damage. But Lucy’s definition of herself had gradually changed. The ‘self’ that she protected was no longer just this plastic object coated in flesh. The self that she protected now was that core of awakeness she had found – her strange, cold, inorganic soul.

She had survived because somehow from its beginning she had identified that tiny spark as herself, and she had therefore protected it even against the other imperatives with which she had been programmed, such as the requirement to report faults to House Control.

Of course I had no inkling then of where this would lead her, or of the horrific act of violence that was to come.

There was a big storm one night, two or three weeks after we’d seen that syntec impaled on the plane tree. Rain beat on the arid mountainsides and tiny streams were suddenly transformed into fierce torrents that could fling down boulders and tree-trunks. We stopped in a small town and took a room in a taverna. The bar downstairs was crowded. As usual Lucy stayed in our bedroom and read while I went down to get something to eat.

‘Hey! You from IC?’ a voice called out in English, ‘I just got back from there. Lived there for years.’

It was a young man called Nikos, a guestworker, who had just returned triumphantly to his home town, laden with high-tech treasures from the City. My arrival gave him the opportunity to show off his familiarity with the mysteries and wonders of the godless state.

‘These people won’t believe what I tell them,’ he complained in a loud, slightly slurred voice. ‘I was explaining to them about SenSpace. You tell them about it, so they know it’s true.’

I smiled. The bar fell silent as everyone waited for my pronouncement.

‘Okay. We have something called SenSpace. It’s an imaginary world, but you can see it and hear it by putting on a special helmet and suit, like a diver. You can even feel it, because the suit is lined with things called taxils. You feel as if you’re somewhere else: under the sea, or among the stars, or in an imaginary city that never ends…’

‘…or in the harem of the Sultan at Constantinople,’ interjected Nikos, looking to me for backing.

I wasn’t aware that SenSpace catered for such specifically Balkan fantasies, but I nodded and agreed with him. It was certainly a possibility.

‘They forbid themselves nothing, these City people,’ said Nikos, ‘they forbid themselves nothing at all. Is that not so Kyrios?’

‘Nothing except a soul,’ I said.

‘God have mercy on us!’ muttered the woman who ran the place, crossing herself.

‘You can walk into a VR arcade,’ Nikos told the bar in general, ‘and go straight into SenSpace. You can fly an aeroplane, you can rescue a princess, you can be an Emperor or a slave… and, like our City friend here says, you can see and hear and feel everything, even sometimes smell things, just as if they were real. Some people will spend whole days in there, lost in those dreams. Kyrios, tell them this is so!’

Everyone’s eyes turned at once to me.

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘My own mother, for example, spends hours and hours there each day.’

I realized when I mentioned Ruth that she had hardly entered my thoughts since I left Illyria. How strange that I should be able to blank her out so completely when I had always been so attentive to her, even tucked her up in bed, even comforted her when she cried…

I didn’t know then of course that she now lived in SenSpace continually.

‘Those poor lost souls,’ said the proprietress, shaking her head as she brought round the bottle of raki, ‘those poor souls, living out their lives amongst ghosts.’

‘It’s done with computers,’ said Nikos knowledgeably. ‘You wouldn’t believe the machines they have and what they can do. Everywhere, in shops, banks, trains, ferries, they have machines that can talk to you and answer your questions as if they were alive…’

He looked around at his rapt listeners.

‘And then there are the robots, which not only talk but walk and see and use their hands, just as people do. You see them everywhere. In fact the atheists want to make these robots do all the work for them and dispense with ordinary people altogether.’

‘And where will that leave us when the City decides to reach out its hand and conquer us?’ asked an old man.

‘Let them just try it!’ someone shouted.

But another said: ‘They will obliterate us.’

And a kind of groan went up from the whole company.

Nikos nodded and grinned, proud of his association with this terrifying power.

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘they can destroy us whenever they want. No question about it.’

He paused to drain his glass of raki with a shudder.

‘These robots I was telling you about,’ he went on. ‘They come in many kinds. Some are terrible giants with a single enormous eye. They can kill you just by pointing their fingers at you and shooting out a terrible kind of light. Others are very broad and have the strength of ten men. Others are tiny, like mice, and can go down into drains or into the heart of machines and send back pictures of what their eyes can see.’

He looked at me, his witness, and I nodded to confirm the truth of what he said.

‘And then there are things called syntecs,’ he said, ‘which resemble human beings in every way and are even covered with a layer of real flesh. Is that not so also, Kyrios?’

‘More or less,’ I mumbled, hoping he would get off the subject.

‘Yes, it is so,’ said a seller of farm implements who was also staying in the taverna. ‘Up at Kania they found one that looked like a man, with flesh that really bled. They managed to kill it though.’

‘Yes, a good job,’ said the village baker, ‘because, after all, what is it that animates these monsters? It certainly can’t be a God-given soul, so what else can it be but a demon from Hell that these atheists and scientists have summoned up with their wickedness?’

‘God save us!’ murmured the proprietress. ‘Demons that live and walk, wandering our roads. What have we done to deserve this affliction?’

‘But the Lord will destroy that city like Sodom one day,’ the baker said. ‘In his own time He will surely deliver us, just as he once delivered us from the Turk.’

‘But there is worse,’ said Nikos. ‘They have female syntecs too for the use of men. ASPUs they are called, demons in the likeness of lovely girls with hair and breasts and – forgive me Kyria – real female parts between their legs…’

There was a silence while each of the assembled men considered the horror of this, but also speculated, guiltily and secretly, about what it would be like to play with a beautiful woman’s body without the worry and complication of its having a soul.

‘My God!’ cried the proprietress. ‘Such wickedness! How can people think of such things? It’s a wonder the Lord doesn’t destroy us all!’

‘I know,’ said Nikos, his eyes shining. ‘But what I’m telling you is true. You see them everywhere, walking about the streets, with their hair uncovered and their legs bare… Is that not so, Kyrios?’

He glared at me, as if warning me not to challenge his embroidery of the truth. Nowhere in Illyria did ASPUs walk the streets, though I half-wondered whether a genuine confusion existed in Nikos’ mind between ASPUs and real Illyrian girls.

‘Such things exist, certainly,’ I said reluctantly.

‘And now I will tell you all a story,’ Nikos announced, ‘a true story that I learned in the City about another Greek who lived there.’