The Holy Machine

9

Well who cared? What did it matter? Why did I need anyone? I was hurrying through the streets, dodging between cars, looking at no one. There was no stopping me. I was in the Night Quarter, I was inside the red room with the sleepwalkers and the dreamy half-human voices that crooned baby, baby, baby love…

Lucy was wearing a short, sleeveless denim dress and dangly earrings, sitting on a sofa with her bare legs curled up underneath her. I headed straight for her. She smiled at me and started to get up. I felt wonderfully empty, as if I was made of air…

‘Would you like to come upstairs with me?’

I nodded. Her smile broadened, seemingly with pure delight.

‘I’m afraid my room’s a bit of a tip,’ she said. I noticed that her speech was British, with a faint regional burr.

‘What’s that accent?’ I croaked.

‘Wiltshire,’ she said, ‘It’s in the south of England. My dad was a postmaster there.’

She glanced at me, smiling almost mischievously, as if acknowledging the absurdity of this life story with which she’d been provided along with her vat-grown human flesh.

We crossed the landing and she opened a door. It was a student’s room: a single bed, a desk, a computer, a reading lamp, a couple of mugs, a jar of freeze-dried coffee, some underwear draped over the back of a chair, a half-finished bottle of red wine… There was even a shelf of discs and books, though the books seemed to have been bought at random from some second-hand place and had no coherent theme: History of Western Thought, Pygmalion, The Cell Biology of Plants, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, Principles of Self-Evolving Cybernetics, The Song of Wandering Aengus, Byron in the Balkans….

Lucy handed me a kind of menu that lay on the bedside table, next to an edition of Dickens.

‘Is there anything special you want?’

I swallowed. ‘No. Just for you to undress and… kiss and…’ She nodded and smiled. Briefly she took my left hand and ran her thumb over my credit bracelet. (Her thumb contained a barcode reader, invisible to the naked eye). Then she put her arms round me and kissed me quickly and warmly on my lips before standing back and slipping off her dress, leaving nothing on but the dangly earrings.

It was the first time I’d ever been kissed.