The Holy Machine

68

‘I… I committed a crime,’ I burst out. ‘It was against one of your own kind. Her name was Lucy. She was a syntec. She looked like a beautiful woman, but she was a machine like you. I thought I loved her for herself, but I couldn’t love her without her human guise. I suppose that means I didn’t really love her at all. And I…’ I faltered as months of shame and grief came welling up. ‘I…. Well, through my fault, she was destroyed in a fire.’

The Machine watched me.

‘Obviously I wish now that it had never happened but I can’t undo it. I want to know if there is a way of being forgiven, or of forgiving myself. I confessed to a priest once, but he couldn’t even understand what my crime was. These stupid religions, they are just as materialistic and literal-minded as…’

My head swam as fever gnawed at the edges of my lucidity. Strange shapes moved on the fringes of my field of vision.

‘I don’t know what I’m trying to say really. Mind and body. You know? Body and soul. We can’t seem to get it straight… Even when a man says he loves a real human woman, or a woman loves a man, sometimes I wonder if it is so very different from me and Lucy. Would that kind of love survive if the woman could tear off her skin?’

The Machine said nothing.

‘Not that I’m making excuses for myself.’ I laughed ruefully. ‘Well, maybe I am. We humans are just a kind of animal I suppose. Like you’ve just been saying, we’ve got these instincts. We respond to certain stimuli…’

Confused images came into my mind of the arcades on the sea front in Illyria City, the lurid murals in the church on the lake at Ioannina…

‘We respond to certain stimuli,’ I repeated. ‘We get confused and…’

Was it confusion though? I remembered that terrible valley of the little boys with cut throats, and the young girl who’d been raped. There was no confusion there. She was what she appeared to be, a real human being, but that hadn’t stopped the good Catholic soldiers from treating her as a thing.

And then it came back to me that something similar had happened to me as well that very morning.

‘I was raped!’ I said.

The pressure welled up, pushing out against the insides of my eyes.

‘They could see I was a real live human being. They could see that perfectly well. That was exactly why they wanted to hurt me. They did it out of hate. And yet at other times people call it making love.’

I looked up at the Machine’s face. Well, actually it wasn’t really a face at all, just a sort of skull of tarnished plastic. Yet it did seem to convey a kind of compassion.

‘Sex and love, body and soul, science and religion…’ I muttered. ‘How do you sort it out? How does it all fit together? I suppose that’s what you’re trying to help us with, is it?’

The Machine was silent for a few seconds.

‘This syntec… Lucy,’ it then said in its buzzing voice. ‘Are you quite sure she was destroyed in the fire?’

I laughed angrily.

‘Of course I bloody am! The flames went up ten metres into the sky!’

The robot made its fuzzy, chuckling sound.

‘No doubt her human flesh was burnt, but you know George, our bodies are extremely tough when it comes to fire.’

‘Yes, but…’ I stopped. ‘How did you know my name?’

‘Because I know you.’

I stared at the thing, and then became angry:

‘Oh no you don’t! Don’t try that one on me! I told the monks my name. That’s how you know! I see now. This is a con-trick, after all.’

‘I know you,’ the Machine repeated calmly. ‘Are you sure you don’t know me?’

And it reached out and ran its thumb over the place on my wrist where I had once worn my credit bracelet.

It took me several seconds to take this in.

‘But… but they said you were a he!’

The Holy Machine laughed its electronic laugh: ‘Oh George I am not a he or a she. I am a machine. Is that still so hard for you to understand?’