The Holy Machine

5

When I got home, Ruth wasn’t in SenSpace as I had expected, but pacing round the living room with Charlie trundling after her, helpfully proffering tranquillizers, tea, brandy and a sandwich with his four spindly arms.

‘Oh George, where have you been? I wish you’d say when you’re going to be late. I needed you here. It’s Shirley! Someone’s coming round to see us. I’m going out of my mind with worry…’

I told Charlie to put down the other things – the tea was slopping all over the floor – give her the brandy and then fetch another one for me. I took her by the shoulders and made her sit down. She grabbed my hand and clung on so tightly that it hurt. Then she started to cry.

‘What do you mean, it’s Shirley?’ I asked her, prizing my hand free from hers.

Shirley was another robot, one of three robot janitors in our tower, who cleaned the lifts and stairs, carried out simple maintenance jobs, and took turns on desk duty in the lobby. They were ‘plastecs’. Cheaper and much more common than syntecs, plastecs had rubbery plastic skins rather than actual flesh. Our landlord had installed them about a year previously, taking advantage of government subsidies to replace the three middle-aged Macedonians who’d previously performed these tasks.

‘She’s gone off. I saw her in the street, just walking away. I even spoke to her. I said “Hello Shirley” and she just looked at me and walked straight past. You know how friendly she normally is? You know how she says “Hi there, Ruth!” Well, she didn’t. She just looked at me and made…’ Ruth began to sob again, ‘She just looked at me and made this kind of growl…’

I laughed angrily then got up and walked over to the window, gulping down my brandy.

Beyond the towers, the sea was blue and hazy. There was a white ship far away in the distance.

I turned round.

‘Listen Ruth, Shirley is a machine. Maybe she’s gone wrong in some way. Machines sometimes do that. I was dealing with a translation system only yesterday that had started putting the word ‘not’ into every Serbian sentence…’

‘I wish you didn’t do that work, languages and foreign countries. You’ve got no idea how dangerous those people can be. They hate us out there, George!’

‘What I’m telling you is this: if a machine goes wrong it’s no big deal. Now let’s get some supper. Charlie, what have we got in the freezer other than pizza?’

Charlie trundled towards us: ‘Steak, lasagne, cod, plaice, Irish stew…’ he began.

‘Someone’s coming to see me about it!’ Ruth whimpered, ‘Someone from the robot company. They phoned every apartment in the building. A whole team of them are coming round to interview everyone who saw Shirley in the last ten days.’

‘…French fries, waffles, chocolate ice-cream, strawberry ice-cream, lemon sorbet…’ Charlie broke off the list to pick up an ultrasound transmission from the door.

‘Someone to see you Ruth,’ he announced, ‘Her name is Marija Mejic, from the Illyria Cybernetic Corporation.’

She turned out to be a young woman of about my own age. She was friendly, intelligent and rather pretty, which immediately threw me into confusion. I was very frightened of attractive young women in those days.

‘Very sorry to bother you,’ she said, when I’d shown her to a seat. ‘I think you’re aware that a robot janitor has gone missing, and we need to find out why so as to ensure that any problem is put right.’

In spite of her South-Slav name she spoke her Illyrian English with a slight Antipodean accent.

‘It seems a lot of fuss about one defective robot,’ I said.

She looked up at me quickly with a smile. Her manner was alarmingly direct.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘It’s just that…’ she hesitated, ‘It’s just that ICC believes in being thorough about these things,’ she said.

And she went on briskly to ask a whole list of questions. When had we last seen Shirley? How often had we seen her in the last ten days? Had we noticed any discernible changes in her behaviour? What about her verbal responses? Her voice? Her posture…?

‘Does this happen a lot?’ Ruth asked her at the end.

‘Well yes, the truth is it has been happening quite a lot recently. A lot of different robots. It’s not dangerous or anything. No one’s been harmed. So the government doesn’t really want us to, you know, alarm anyone…’

‘A lot of robots?’ demanded Ruth. ‘Any sort of robots? What about our Charlie here?’

She reached down and rubbed Charlie’s shiny ‘head’, from which the original painted face had long since been worn away.

Marija Mejic glanced down at him and laughed.

‘Oh no. It’s just the ones with SE systems. You know? Self-Evolving? They are meant to learn by trial and error, so they’re actually designed to generate small fluctuations in behaviour. But every now and again, a combination of circumstances may flip them outside of their original parameters. We always knew it could happen. That’s why they are supposed to be reprogrammed every five years – wiped clean as we call it. It’s just that it seems to be happening a bit more quickly than we…’

She stood up, went to the window and glanced out.

‘The funny thing about it is that these things were supposed to be more reliable than human beings!’ she said with her back still turned to us. ‘ The whole point was they wouldn’t lose their heads!’

Then she turned round with a small laugh.

‘But that’s just a personal observation of mine, and strictly between you and me!’

I got up to let her out. She extended her hand to shake as I opened the door.

‘Very nice to meet you, Mr Simling.’

As her eyes met mine, I felt as if she could read in my face where I had been earlier that day: the red room, the sickly muzak, the syntecs with their scented flesh, the sweat streaming down the face of fat Paddy Malone…

I blushed.

‘Very nice to meet you too Mr Simling,’ I blurted.

Of course this visit had done nothing to allay Ruth’s fears.

‘What did she mean flip? What could they do? I thought they were supposed to be safe George! Not like those horrible Macedonians brooding about God and the Devil and whatever else those Outlanders think about. And now she says they’re dangerous too!’

‘She didn’t say they were dangerous. She just meant they wander off sometimes, or stop doing their job…’

‘Well, she shouldn’t have said all that. I’ve got a good mind to report her to the company.’

‘For being honest with us? Would you prefer people to lie?’

‘Perhaps one of them might kill somebody. How do you know what she meant by flip?’

‘I just guessed’ I snapped.

I didn’t care at all about what the robots might or might not do, but I was flustered and shaken, as I always was after any social encounter.

‘Why can’t anything be safe?’ Ruth complained. ‘Why is there always a snake in the grass?’

‘Oh give it a rest, Ruth, can’t you? Why don’t you just go into SenSpace for a bit and forget it, eh? There are no snakes in there. Not unless you want them to be, anyway.’

Ruth looked at me, almost cunningly.

‘Only if you come too,’ she said.

I hesitated. I hated SenSpace and the total surrender that it involved. It gave me the queasy feeling of being swallowed alive. But just now this didn’t seem so unappealing.

I shrugged.

‘Okay. It’s a deal.’