The Holy Machine

72

I met Ruth in a Vehicle Centre. She wasn’t recognizable as Ruth of course. The vehicle was a syntec in the form of a pretty young woman with long red hair.

‘Walk up and down the room a bit,’ said the technician, ‘it always feels a odd at first when you’re used to a virtual body.’

‘Yes, I know, I’ve used Vehicles before,’ said the redhead, taking a few steps.

‘This downward pull!’ she said to me, ‘this planet, this mass of rock pulling you towards it! You forget what gravity really means in there!’

It was strange to hear her talk like that, as if for the first time she was actually trying to savour her existence.

‘You can’t trip up in SenSpace,’ she said, ‘you can’t experience an impact that causes pain, you can’t…’

She broke off and went over to the window. The Vehicle Centre was on the tenth floor of the SenSpace Corporation offices, one block away from the sea front.

‘The towers always seem so small!’ she exclaimed.

‘Everyone says that!’ laughed the technician. ‘Even though they are the tallest towers in the world. Like you say we have to take account of gravity out here in dull old Reality.’

Ruth sighed.

‘I used to think it was dull old reality, but you know it’s good looking at a tower and knowing that every tonne of concrete had to be lifted into place against the pull of gravity. In SenSpace making a building is nothing – like doodling on a bit of paper.’

We went down in the elevator and out into the street. It was a bright, hot, summer day. For a while we just stood and watched the people go by. To me, having been so long in the Outlands, they looked well fed, well cared for and shockingly sexy in their scanty summer clothes. But to Ruth, used to the physically perfect denizens of SenSpace, they looked exactly the opposite: clumsy, overweight, ill-proportioned, with clothes that didn’t fit properly or crumpled in the wrong places.

‘Real people are so ugly!’ she said, smiling.

We joined the human stream. Ruth was looking round at everything, taking it all in. She had no sense of smell, no sensation of breathing and – since all her sensations were being transmitted to her brain via SenSpace – her visual field had the same slightly grainy quality that it had within SenSpace itself. But still, she could look around at the people and know that, for them, this truly was reality.

We walked the streets for a little while, and along the sea front. At the head of the Beacon the Ferris wheels extended, gathered speed, drew in again, stopped.

We turned into the Avenue of Science.

‘ROBOT MESSIAH BRINGS SKOPJE TO STANDSTILL’, said the headline outside the News Building, and the huge screen showed a picture of vast crowds in the Macedonian capital, and then a library picture of the Machine itself. ‘NEXT STOP TIRANA’

I smiled. Tirana was not to far away and I decided I would go there to hear it preach. After all, if was not for me the Holy Machine would not exist, and all those hundreds of thousands of excited people wouldn’t even now be heading towards the capital of Albania. I might be alone in this world but I had certainly made a difference to it.

A security robot walked by.

‘What do you make of the robot messiah?’ I asked it.

‘Beg your pardon, sir?’

‘Leave the poor thing alone,’ said Ruth with a giggle.

We went into a department store and bought a garden trowel. Then we hired a car. Ruth paid. I drove. Ruth, in the form of the redhead, got into the passenger seat: a hired Vehicle climbing into the vehicle it had hired.

We headed for the southern side of town, where the Body Maintenance Facility was located.

As we walked from the car to the main entrance, Ruth suddenly stopped.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘What do you mean, what am I doing?’

Then I realized she wasn’t talking to me. She was looking straight in front of her at some figure that was invisible to me.

‘No,’ she said, ‘please don’t try and persuade me. I’ve made up my mind.’

The figure must have said something back to her.

‘No, I am within my legal rights and so is he. I checked up on that. It’s not his responsibility, it’s mine. And I’m entitled to do it.’

Again, there must have been some reply.

‘No Sol,’ Ruth said, ‘I don’t want that anymore. You are not “fond” of me. You are not really even a person. I don’t want those games anymore.’

She turned to me.

‘Come on George. It’s just the SenSpace corporation poking their nose in.’

We carried on.

‘You have changed, Ruth,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘It was when City without End seized up,’ she said. ‘It just came to me that there isn’t a safe place anywhere, so there’s no point in looking.’

We went up the steps into the Facility, and were greeted by a stunningly beautiful receptionist.

‘Good morning! What can I do to help?’

She was a syntec of course. She was too beautiful to be a human being, and her desk was completely free of phones, screens or keyboards.

‘My name is Ruth Simling. I’ve come to collect my property.

A moment passed, while the receptionist checked the diary in her head.

‘Yes, Ms Simling, Dr Hammer is expecting you. He’ll be right down.’

‘I didn’t want to see a doctor. I just want to collect what’s mine and go.’

‘Yes, of course. The doctor understands.’

Ruth was about to say something else, then changed her mind and shrugged.

‘We’re two syntecs together, you and me,’ she said to the receptionist after a while.

The receptionist smiled brightly. ‘I beg your pardon, Ms Simling, was there something else you wanted?’

I think she’d been wiped clean recently. Her reactions were a little wooden.

Dr Hammer arrived soon after. He was a young man, about my own age.

‘Ms Simling? Pleased to meet you. If you’d like to step in here. Do you want your husband to join us?’

He meant me. I looked older, after all, than the beautiful redhead. We followed him into a small interview room.

‘I was hoping to contact you before you left SenSpace.’ Dr Hammer was anxious and tense. ‘You see, I wanted to have a proper discussion with you this step you’re proposing to take. I mean… are you aware of the consequences? There’s no question at all of survival for anything other than the briefest of…’

‘I understand all that.’

‘Obviously I have reviewed your medical records. Being in body maintenance doesn’t confer immortality of course, but the fact is that your body is really very stable. We are quite confident that all unstable tissues and organs have been identified and attended to. Where surrogate organs have had to be provided they are coping very well. In particular the cyber-neurological interface is absolutely stable and is presenting no problems whatever, whether immunological or neural. You’re looking at a body that has another ten, twenty, maybe even thirty more years of life in it.’

‘Have you tried living in SenSpace?’

‘Well, no, but I’ve visited SenSpace many times of course.’

‘Well, I’m tired of it.’

‘But surely the whole point of SenSpace is that it offers choice? If you don’t like what you find, you can always change it for something else.’

‘Well, I’m exercising choice.’

‘I see.’

The doctor turned to me for a moment, as if wondering whether it was worth appealing to me instead. I must have looked unmoveable, because he turned back to Ruth:

‘Another thing, Ms Simling. I don’t quite know what you’re expecting, but your body now isn’t the same as the body you left behind. It’s functional of course, but…’

When the lid came off, Ruth’s vehicle gave a little cry. The thing within had no arms and no legs, no intestines or pelvis or lower abdomen. Its face was an eyeless mask. Wires fed into the hollow eye sockets where hemispherical screens had been implanted against the retinae. The mouth also gaped open to admit a mass of wires and tubes. The teeth had been removed for convenience and in place of hair were thousands of fine wires that pierced through into the skull.

The thing’s torso was enclosed in a transparent box of hard plastic, out of the top of which protruded the head, itself covered in a transparent plastic membrane. On the outside of this box was a radio transmitter and an electric pump. There was a yellow plastic nozzle sticking out from the lungs through which the thing noisily breathed, completely by-passing the throat. The front of the body cavity had no cover other than the hard plastic shell, no skin or bone or muscle, so you could look through and see the organs within: the dark liver, the pulsing heart, the lungs rhythmically swelling and contracting like an empty crisp packet inflated and deflated by a child.

The heart and lungs were the only things that moved.

‘As I say,’ said Dr Hammer with a certain grim satisfaction, ‘not a pretty sight I’m afraid.’

Ruth ignored this. She just stared into the box where the thing lay.

‘Is this really the heart that keeps me alive?’

‘That’s right,’ said Dr Hammer, ‘though if we were ever to detect any sign of deterioration in your heart or lungs, we could very quickly substitute a CIRC unit which would serve equally well.’

He paused, his face becoming slightly prim.

‘But as your heart and lungs are doing just fine,’ he said, ‘we’ve left them in place. We do try not to be unnecessarily interventionist.’

‘And is it really inside this head,’ said Ruth, ‘that all these thoughts of mine are going on?’

‘Absolutely. You see these various wires are either linked to the main sense organs or directly to the sensory and motor centres in your brain. And then they are all linked via this radio transmitter here with the SenSpace web, which of course in turn is now linked to the Vehicle which you’re now…’

The doctor broke off. Ruth was obviously not listening to him.

‘As I say,’ he tried again, ‘it does all look a bit gruesome at first sight I know. But it’s only a matter of…’

Ruth – Ruth’s Vehicle – suddenly turned a radiant smile upon him.

‘It’s beautiful!’ she said, ‘It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!’