The Holy Machine

73

So we left the Facility with Ruth carrying her own true self in its plastic case. She had wrapped it in a blanket and carried it like a baby. We got back into the car and I drove us down the coast to that little cove of Aghios Constantinos.

We parked the car on the road and walked through the olive groves until we were overlooking the sea. Then Ruth sat down with her back against a tree-trunk and unwrapped the body. With so much of its lower half missing and with no limbs, it was really no bigger than a small child. She cradled it in her arms. Its breath whistled in and out of the nozzle sticking out of its chest. The electric pump faintly hummed. The heart throbbed steadily beneath her surrogate hand.

I sat against another tree and watched her. I wondered whether she had ever cradled me like she cradled that mutilated thing?

‘It can’t survive more than two hours,’ Dr Hammer’s parting words had been. (By ‘it’ he meant the body of course. He would have referred to the syntec vehicle as ‘she’).

He had been hoping no doubt that reason would still prevail in time and that Ruth would return her body and resume her carefree life in SenSpace.

‘Not more than two hours at the outside,’ he had repeated.

After an hour or so had passed, Ruth lay the strange bundle carefully on the ground and took from me the garden trowel we had bought earlier. She found a suitable spot between the olive trees and began to dig.

It was a cheap trowel and the earth was hard and stony. When the job was only halfway done, the handle broke off. Ruth swore. She threw away the useless handle and began to dig with her hands. Time was running out for her. I offered to help but she swore at me too, savagely, like a snarling dog. She tore at the dry stony earth with those clumsy syntec hands until the flesh came away in bloody strips from the plastic fingers.

Finally she was satisfied. She turned aside from the shallow hole and gently picked up the box of organs and flesh. Then she pulled awkwardly with her broken fingers at the plastic skin covering the face – if you can call such a thing a face. And when one cheek was open to the air, she bent and kissed the moist and pallid skin…

…and at the same moment as she gave the kiss, she felt it – the warm lips of some unseen being touching her gently on the cheek.

Ruth smiled and placed the bundle carefully into the hole she had dug for it, covering it up again with a mound of earth – just leaving the breathing nozzle sticking out, so she could fade away rather than suffocate.

And that was the last that the world saw of little Ruth Simling, who it had never noticed much, preferring as she did the company of machines, and the safety of solitude.

But she was to speak one more time.

When she had finished her work, Ruth’s redheaded vehicle lay down beside the mound with one arm protectively draped over her own grave, and waited. Two hours had gone by now and nutrient levels were very low in the blood that still pulsed around beneath the soil, but Ruth was still, just, awake.

‘This isn’t suicide you know, George,’ said the body under the ground through its syntec mouthpiece, ‘This is the opposite of suicide.’

I nodded. The Vehicle lay back and became completely still. The wind whistling in and out of the yellow nozzle became gradually fainter.