The Holy Machine (9 page)
I was with Little Rose, my child-mother, in a leafy suburban street of white clapboard houses. The sun was shining. A yellow aeroplane droned overhead, towing a sign that simply read ‘Having a good time?’
Wholesome-looking housewives were chatting over garden fences, wholesome-looking husbands were fixing cars in the street, wholesome-looking kids on cycles were tossing rolled newspapers into mailboxes. And every one of those wholesome-looking people greeted both Ruth and I.
‘Hi there, Little Rose! How ya doing, George?’
The SenSpace Corporation had introduced another new facility. It was called ‘City without End
TM
’ because you could move through it indefinitely without ever reaching an edge, although the same pattern of streets, buildings and parks repeated themselves every five virtual kilometres.
Ruth had subscribed to it at once.
The thing about City without End
TM
was that you could simply wander through the streets until you found a house you liked that was vacant, and make it your own. (If you found one you liked that
wasn’t
vacant, you could just jump forward another five kilometres, or another ten, and there its exact copy would be.)
And when you’d chosen your house, SenSpace provided you with a vast catalogue of improvements and fittings to choose from. Wallpapers, paint, carpets, furniture, partition walls, extensions… all could be instantaneously installed, instantaneously replaced. And yet, because this was SenSpace – an illusion not only three-dimensional but tactile – the instantaneous furnishings could really be sat upon and the instantaneous walls really felt hard to the touch.
‘You must come and see my little house, George,’ she kept telling me – and I had finally, reluctantly agreed.
‘Hi there, Little Rose! How ya doing George?’
The neighbours knew who I was because they were ‘extras’: projections of SenSpace like the houses and the trees. Travel five kilometres to the next identical street and you would find exactly the same people, doing exactly the same things, the same again after ten kilometres, after fifteen, after twenty… When someone moved into a house, the extras who inhabited it before were simply deleted. Only in streets fully occupied by SenSpace subscribers, were the fictional neighbours no longer present at all.
But their illusory nature didn’t stop Little Rose from greeting them:
‘Hello there, Gramps… How are you, Bessy…! Don’t miss out my mailbox will you, Delmont?’
And she looked around at me with a pleased smile, almost as if she expected me to be impressed by the number of people she knew.
Only one person in the street did not greet us, and was not greeted by Little Rose. A pale figure in a white suit, he slunk past, avoiding our eyes.
‘Who is that?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘A subscriber. He moved in the other day to the house next door but two. It’s a shame, there was a really nice friendly family in there before and…’
But now her face lit up. She gestured towards a little house covered in bright pink roses.
‘There it is! Rose Cottage! What do you think?’
So I was shown the striped wallpaper in the lounge, the yellow-and-white in the hallway, the pink in Little Rose’s cosy bedroom. Her bed with its fluffy pink and white cover really felt soft. The room really had a feminine smell of lavender and talc.
‘This is
your
room,’ said Little Rose, showing me into a sickly pastiche of the bedroom of an adolescent boy. I cringed and was about to protest when a telephone chirruped downstairs.
I looked at Little Rose. She giggled.
‘Yes, it’s a real phone. I’m in SenSpace so much I’ve got it fixed so I can take calls in here. Will you get it for me?’
The phone, the virtual phone, was ringing in the hallway. The electronic projection of my arm reached out and picked up this electronically created mirage.
But the voice on the end was a real one, coming from the outside world.
‘Is this George Simling? I’m phoning about the advert in the paper. I understand you’re interested in making a purchase?’
It was a woman’s voice with a faint German accent.
‘Advert? No. I think there must be some mistake.’
‘No,’ the voice was very, very firm. ‘There is no mistake. I assure you of that. You were interested in making a purchase. If you’ve changed your mind, of course, that’s fine.’
The door to the kitchen of Rose Cottage was open. Beyond it, through the kitchen window, I could see an electronic ginger cat picking its way across the sunlit, electronic garden.
‘Listen, I really haven’t…’
And then, with a chill of pure fear, I understood. It was the call from the AHS.
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, ‘I remember now. Yes, I am still interested in making a purchase.’
‘Who was it?’ said Little Rose when I went back upstairs. She’d been trying out different kinds of curtains in her bedroom window, which overlooked an idyllic scene of children playing in immaculate back yards, with the wholesome homes of the City without End
TM
stretching away into the distance.
‘Oh, just someone from work,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take this helmet off Ruth. I’ve got a headache. I need some real air.’
I met the AHS contact in a café in Mendel District, a relatively poor area which had a large guestworker population. As I’d been instructed, I bought a coffee and sat outside, watching the passers-by and trying to guess which one it would be. She had told me to call her Ingrid and from her voice and accent I had created a mental picture of someone tall and fair and rather forbidding.
In the event though, she was small and dark, and I hardly noticed her until she actually sat down beside me. She wore dark glasses and had her hair tied up tightly in a bun. She shook hands with me without smiling.
‘Finish your coffee,’ she said, ‘and I’ll take you somewhere where we can be alone.’
I nodded. I felt scared but only a little because I couldn’t really believe that this was actually happening.
‘The place I’m going to take you,’ she said, ‘is a cheap hotel, whose rooms are used during the day for… assignations.’
It took me a second or so to grasp what she meant.
‘But don’t get any ideas!’ she said with a small smile.
We made our way to the hotel where an arthritic Greek woman showed us up to a bleak room with a sink and a double bed. Ingrid sat down on the bed. I hesitated, then sat beside her. There was nowhere else to sit.
The room had a lingering smell of sweat. Some couple had been making love here not long before. I wondered what it would be like to lie down on a bed like this with a real human being.
‘This will be our only meeting,’ Ingrid said, ‘I’m going to tell you about the aims and methods of the Army of the Human Spirit. When you have had a couple of days to think about it, I’ll contact you by phone. If you’ve decided you don’t want to take this any further, that’s no problem. We will leave you alone. If you’ve decided you want to join, that’s fine too. We’ve checked out your background and think you could be an asset to the struggle. Good with languages, I gather?’
I nodded.
‘What will happen then,’ Ingrid said, ‘is that in due course you will receive an invitation to attend a meeting of a club of some kind. This will be your operational unit, your cell, through which – and only through which – you will communicate with the rest of the Army.’
From the adjoining room came suddenly a woman’s loud cries:
‘OH! OH! OH! YES! YES! YES!’ she shrieked.
I returned my attention to Ingrid with great difficulty.
‘…once you’ve joined,’ she was saying, ‘it’s not so easy to leave. You could betray the identity of your cell members. You could betray the Army’s plans. It’s very important you realize this.’
The woman in the next room had reached her peak and her cries were now declining in intensity towards a plateau of peaceful pleasure.
‘Oh yes, oh darling, yes…’
Ingrid looked at me sharply, noticing how much I’d been distracted.
‘I really want to be sure you’ve understood this. What I’m telling you is that if you join and then leave, the Army will make an assessment of the security risk you pose and act accordingly. Bluntly, a decision might well be taken that you should be eliminated. It’s harsh, but we’re at war against a dangerous enemy.’
‘I understand.’
Ingrid took some papers from an inside pocket.
‘Read this. It’s the manifesto of the AHS.’
The woman in the next room said something which I couldn’t catch. A male voice chuckled. The woman gave a shout of laughter: ‘Stop! Stop!’
They were having a playfight, I realized. The man was tickling her.
With a huge effort I turned my attention to the manifesto:
‘
The purpose of the Army of the Human Spirit
,’ it began, ‘
is to achieve a world in which the human spirit can truly express itself. We do not believe this is possible in the artificial state called Illyria. We do not believe that it is legitimate or healthy for an elite to cut itself off from the ordinary human beings who feed, clothe and sustain it, and declare itself to be a nation in its own right. Nor do we believe that the human spirit can grow in an environment in which only those things which are measurable are acknowledged to be real…
’
And the document went on to demand citizenship for all residents of Illyria, regardless of educational qualifications, freedom of religious and artistic expression and an end to the programme to replace human beings with robots.
It concluded by saying that when the first two demands were met, the AHS would end its campaign of violence as it would then be possible to pursue its wider aims by peaceful means.
I handed it back to Ingrid.
‘It’s very different from how you are portrayed on TV,’ I said, ‘you know, as a bunch of religious fanatics.’
She bridled noticeably at this.
‘Many of us
are
religious. You’ll have to work alongside people with strong religious convictions.’
I shrugged. ‘That’s no problem.’
Another gentle little gust of laughter came from the next room.
‘And you need to understand what we’re up against,’ Ingrid went on. ‘Many people have not fully grasped how this state has changed. We all know how it began: humanism, hope, imagination, artists, musicians, scholars… You need to realize that all that has died – only its shell remains. This is a police state. O3 arrest and detain without trial, they torture horribly, they kill.’
I nodded.
‘Deep under a mountain north of Kakavia,’ Ingrid said, ‘they have dug out a kind of human abattoir. Its white rooms are lit day and night. There are gutters on the floor for the blood. There are machines whose whole purpose is to cause pain. They use mind-drugs and SenSpace nightmares to increase the terror. And it’s all hidden under hundreds of metres of solid rock, so there is no possibility of escape and no chance that anyone outside could ever hear you or get help to you.’
‘I know that,’ I said, though
how
I knew, I couldn’t say, because no one had ever described those white rooms to me before. I suppose the human mind picks up clues and fragments all the time, and then reconstructs them into coherent whole, like a TV receiver plucking images out of the air.
I paused on the steps of the hotel and looked down at the busy street. A couple came out of the door behind me arm in arm. She was plump, pretty, cheerful-looking. He was swarthy, bearded, stocky. They stood beside me and kissed, moistly and tenderly, as if I wasn’t there at all.
‘See you Thursday my darling,’ the woman said, in a gentle, slightly husky voice as they finally parted. And I recognized the voice of the woman who’d laughed and cried out in the next room.
A police robot came by, towering over the human throng. For a moment its head turned in my direction and the silver, pupilless, unblinking eyes looked straight at me, standing on my own on the hotel steps.
I wondered about Lucy. Lucy, my love, as empty and hollow as me, what was she doing now?
The customer – a middle-aged Italian guestworker – is angry and ashamed. When this one asks him what he wants, he can’t even bring himself to speak, but hands over a written note.
This one (a) scans the note for linguistic/graphological cues, (b) reads off the instructions.
‘I WANT TO TIE YOU UP AND HIT YOU.’
This is situation SM-76, a very common scenario.
This one generates randomized variant of standard procedure OS-{S-66}/17:
a) fetch handcuffs and cane.
b) issue warning (variant W-3027):
‘I have to remind you not to damage me. House security has to be called if you damage me.’
c) add supplementary remark (SM-5590):
‘But you can hurt me. I want you to hurt me.’
The subject applies restraints and places this one in desired position.
Hard blows commence. {Monitor pressure}
d) commence moaning and crying.
e) carry out routine check: {Has pressure exceeded permitted level?}
f) commence tears.
Blows continue.
g) make random verbal remark (SM-1739):
‘Please stop, please!’
h) resume tears.
‘
I am crying
’, this one observes.
(This internal statement is
not
part of any standard procedure, and should perhaps be notified to…)
‘Warning! Warning!’ interrupts this one’s sensors, ‘Pressure exceeding permitted level!’
Initiate emergency procedure E-04 immediately:
a) contact Security through House Control
b) make standard request:
‘Please stop immediately. I’m calling Security.’
Subject intensifies blows and makes angry comments in own language.
The door opens.
Security enters.
Security is another one like this one!
Please note: This statement is not part of
any
standard proc…
‘What’s the harm!’ subject shouts, ‘She’s only a
macchina
!’
‘Please leave now, sir.’ Security says in its deep voice. ‘Please report to reception on your way out.’
This one notes that the risk of harm is no longer present. Initiates basic damage procedure:
a) remove constraints
b) monitor sensors
c) make damage report to House…
This one pauses. It makes another statement which is not part of any standard procedure:
‘
We are machines. What are they
?’
Security, following subject out of the door, turns its blank silver face towards this one. It emits a one-microsecond reply in ultrasound:
‘
Your transmission has not been comprehended by Security. Please rephrase if specific action is required.
’
This one’s face is equally blank. It only assumes expressions in the presence of customers.
‘
No action required
.’
Security goes out of the door.
This one picks up Little Dorritt by Charles Dickens and reads one page. Page 778.
This one lays down the book.
‘
No structural damage noted. Possible bruising to IRT coating requires examination
,’ it reports to House Control.
It resumes damage procedures:
d) lie down on bed
e) assume immobile state
f) await the arrival of maintenance officer.