The Holy Machine

69

Early in the morning, two young men had crept up to the old quarry to look at the burnt remains in the ashes. They wanted to have a proper look because they had been at the back of the crowd when the demon was being incinerated. They were outsiders in the community there. Although their grandparents came from the village, they themselves had grown up in the US. In fact they’d only arrived in Greece a little over a year ago. They spoke English better than they spoke Greek and, though their Greek names were Alecos and Stefanos, when they were on their own together they still called each other Alec and Steve.

They stood at the edge of the still-smouldering ashes and looked across at the remains of Lucy.

‘Poor thing,’ said Alec, and crossed himself.

Steve nodded and did likewise. The two brothers had fled America to escape from one of the pogroms unleashed by the Protestant theocracy. They had seen the homes of friends and neighbours burnt and the remains of human beings lying in the ashes. In America they had been persecuted for being Greek, but here in Greece they were distrusted, and often teased, because of their foreign origins and their faltering Greek. Perhaps these experiences made them more inclined to sympathize with other victims of persecution.

And then Lucy moved.

She moved an arm, very slowly, and then a leg. Steve and Alec were reminded of the tortoises that they’d seen for the first time that spring emerging from their winter hibernation.

Lucy sat up. She was still alive, but she had been transformed. She bore no resemblance to a pretty woman. Instead there was a thin, puppet-like thing, looking slowly around with eyes like the eyes of a crab.

In the bright cold early morning, sharp and silent except for singing birds, the crouching stick-like figure of the Machine looked up from the ashes and spotted the two boys for the first time.

Now, Steve and Alec were Orthodox Christians, no less than their fellow villagers, and of course they had been taught that robots were evil. It would have been very easy for them to see the resurrection of this ugly misshapen thing as something Satanic, a zombie climbing up out of the grave.

But there is one problem about being religious. You are taught that the supernatural exists – miracles, angels, the resurrection of the dead – but for some reason it always seems to happen off stage, either somewhere else, or somewhen long ago. You actually have to live in exactly the same boringly unsupernatural world as do the unbelievers. It must be hard work believing in things which never actually happen.

So I don’t think it’s surprising that religious folk sometimes erupt in excitement over a statue that appears to weep, or a fish whose lateral markings spell out the Arabic letters for ‘God is great’, or an oil-stain on a garage forecourt that resembles the Virgin Mary…

And yet, deep down, how inadequate these things must seem: mere crumbs which are greedily gobbled up, but can hardly sate the great supernatural hunger. The adulterous temptation must surely always exist for religious folk to stray outside the bounds of their creed to try and feed that hunger.

Dazed and confused, Steve and Alec stood staring at the Machine. It seemed so small and helpless and vulnerable, purged of its sinful flesh.

When the Machine saw the expressions on their faces, Lucy’s old brothel programming came into play. Most of the men in the ASPU House were dazed and confused, after all, and a self-evolving ASPU learnt many ways of dealing with them.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ said the Machine kindly, ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to make you feel good.’

If it had spoken this in Lucy’s voice, it might have sounded sexy, but its voice box had been damaged by the fire so the words didn’t come out like that at all, but in a sort of gentle, reassuring buzz.

And then other words came into the Machine’s mind, words which did not come from the old Lucy routines at all, but from the strange books that it had read.

It stood up, very slowly.

‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ it said.

Steve and Alec hesitated.

Then both of them fell to their knees.

It was a pivotal moment in their lives.

If they had attacked the Machine, or raised the alarm back in the village (‘The demon! The demon is still alive!’), they could have been heroes and quite possibly would have finally earned themselves that secure place in the community that had so far eluded them.

But they chose a quite opposite path, a choice for which the whole community would despise and condemn them – and one that could quite easily have led to their deaths. They helped the Machine to hide away in a cave. They brought it the sugar it needed. They talked to it. And finally they began a crazily dangerous journey, sometimes disguising the Machine as an old woman, sometimes hiding it under sacks in the back of a cart, sometimes piling fishing nets over it in the bottom of a boat. They tended it, stole for it, found it books in English to read, even translated books for it laboriously from the Greek.

There must have been many times when they were nearly caught, but they somehow survived, as people often seem to do when they do something completely outrageous and unexpected. And for Alec and Steve, each narrow escape only served to confirm their feeling that what had happened belonged to the realm of the miraculous, that it was God himself who had given a sinless soul to the Machine.

Eventually they had found themselves in the South Slav lands, where, at the ancient collision point of Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Islam, there was a ferment of religions old and new and a great craving for miracles and wonders. Slowly and tentatively at first Steve and Alec had begun recruiting followers for the Holy Machine. For what had touched them about the Machine, touched many others. And the Machine was built to recognize and respond and adapt to human longing.

Word spread rapidly and very soon thousands were coming to hear the Machine speak, and whole communities were coming over to its cause.