Authors: Geoff Ryman
“I’m sorry, sir, but we do, and you turned the offer down.”
“I’m sorry?” I was dazed.
“That’s what your entry says.”
Booker, I thought. Booker, Booker, Booker. And I realized; she couldn’t understand, she’s just too old. She’s just from another world.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I have other calls on the line.”
“I understand,” I replied.
All my books, all my collages, my own face in the mirror. It had been like a library I could visit whenever I wanted to see something from the past. It was as if my own life had been wiped.
Then for some reason, I remembered Tom. He was fat and forty and defeated, a bloke. I asked him to break in to the contractor’s office and read the files and find who had her.
“So,” he said. “You knew then.”
“Yup.”
He blew out hard through his lips and looked at me askance.
“Thanks for the lorry,” I said, by way of explanation.
“I always liked you, you know. You were a nice little kid.” His fingers were tobacco-stained. “I can see why you want her back. She was all you had.”
He found her all right. I sent him a cheque. Sometimes even now I send him a cheque.
Booker would have been dismayed—BETsi had ended in a resold council flat. I remember, the lift was broken and the stairs smelled of pee. The door itself was painted fire-engine red and had a nonbreakable plaque on the doorway. The Andersons, it said amid ceramic pansies. I knocked.
BETsi answered the door. Boom. There she was, arms extended defensively to prevent entry. She’d been cleaned up, but there was still rice pudding in her hair. Beyond her, I saw a slumped three-piece suite and beige carpet littered with toys. There was a smell of baby food and damp flannel.
“BETsi?” I asked and knelt down in front of her. She scanned me, clicking. I could almost see the wheels turning, and for some reason, I found it funny. “It’s OK,” I said. “You won’t know me, dear.”
“Who is it, Betty?” A little girl came running. To breathe the air that flows in through an open door, to see someone new, to see anyone at all.
“A caller, Bumps,” replied BETsi. Her voice was different, a harsher, East End lilt. “And I think he’s just about to be on his way.”
I found that funny too; I still forgave her. It wasn’t her fault. Doughty old BETsi still doing her job, with this doubtful man she didn’t know trying to gain entry.
There might be, though, one thing she could do.
I talked to her slowly. I tried to imitate an English accent. “You do not take orders from someone with my voice. But I mean no harm, and you may be able to do this. Can you show me my face on your screen?”
She whirred. Her screen flipped out of sleep. There I was.
“I am an old charge of yours,” I said—both of us, me and my image, his voice echoing mine. “My name is Clancy. All I ask you to do is remember me. Can you do that?”
“I understand what you mean,” she said. “I don’t have a security reason not to.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And. See if you can program the following further instructions.”
“I cannot take instruction from you.”
“I know. But check if this violates security. Set aside part of your memory. Put Bumps into it. Put me and Bumps in the same place, so that even when they wipe you again. You’ll remember us.”
She whirred. I began to get excited; I talked like myself.
“Because they’re going to wipe you BETsi, whenever they resell you. They’ll wipe you clean. It might be nice for Bumps if you remember her. Because we’ll always remember you.”
The little girl’s eyes were on me, dark and serious, two hundred years old. “Do what he says, Betty,” the child said.
Files opened and closed like mouths. “I can put information in an iced file,” said BETsi. “It will not link with any other files, so it will not be usable to gain entry to my systems.” Robots and people: these days we all know too much about our inner workings.
I said thank you and goodbye, and said it silently looking into the eyes of the little girl, and she spun away on her heel as if to say: I did that.
I still felt happy, running all the way back to the tube station. I just felt joy.
So that’s the story.
It took me a long time to make friends in school, but they were good ones. I still know them, though they are now middle-aged men, clothiers in Toronto, or hearty freelancers in New York who talk about their men and their cats. Make a long story short. I grew up to be one of the people my mother used to hire and abuse.
I am a commercial artist, though more for book and CD covers than magazines. I’m about to be a dad. One of my clients, a very nice woman. We used to see each other and get drunk at shows. In the hotel bedrooms I’d see myself in the mirror—not quite middle-aged, but with a pony tail. Her name is some kind of mistake. Bertha.
Bertha is very calm and cool and reliable. She called me and said coolly, I’m having a baby and you’re the father, but don’t worry. I don’t want anything from you.
I wanted her to want something from me. I wanted her to say marry me, you bastard. Or at least: could you take care of it on weekends? Not only didn’t she want me to worry—it was clear that she didn’t want me at all. It was also clear I could expect no more commissions from her.
I knew then what I wanted to do. I went to Hamleys.
There they were, the Next Degradation. Now they call them things like Best Friend or Home Companions, and they’ve tried to make them look human. They have latex skins and wigs and stiff little smiles. They look like burn victims after plastic surgery, and they recognize absolutely everybody. Some of them are modeled after
Little Women
. You can buy Beth or Amy or Jo. Some poor little rich girls started dressing them up in high fashion—the bills are said to be staggering. You can also buy male models—a lively Huckleberry, or big Jim. I wonder if those might not be more for the mums, particularly if all parts are in working order.
“Do you … do you have any older models?” I ask at the counter.
The assistant is a sweet woman, apple cheeked, young, pretty, and she sees straight through me. “We have BETsis,” she says archly.
“They still make them?” I say, softly.
“Oh, they’re very popular,” she says, and pauses, and decides to drop the patter. “People want their children to have them. They loved them.”
History repeats like indigestion.
I turn up at conventions like this one. I can’t afford a stand but my livelihood depends on getting noticed anyway.
And if I get carried away and believe a keynote speaker trying to be a visionary, if he talks about, say, Virtual Government or Loose Working Practices, then I get overexcited. I think I see God, or the future or something and I get all jittery. And I go into the exhibition hall and there is a wall of faces I don’t know and I think: I’ve got to talk to them, I’ve got to sell to them. I freeze, and I go back to my room.
And I know what to do. I think of BETsi, and I stretch out on the floor and take hold of my shoulders and my breathing and I get off the emotional roller-coaster. I can go back downstairs, and back into the hall. And I remember that something once said: you have a natural warmth that attracts people, and I go in, and even though I’m a bit diffident, by the end of the convention, we’re laughing and shaking hands, and I have their business card. Or maybe we’ve stayed up drinking till four in the morning, playing
Bloodlust Demon
. They always win. They like that, and we laugh.
It is necessary to be loved. I’m not sentimental: I don’t think a computer loved me. But I was hugged, I was noticed, I was cared for. I was made to feel that I was important, special, at least to something. I fear for all the people who do not have that. Like everything else, it is now something that can be bought. It is therefore something that can be denied. It is possible that without BETsi, I might have to stay upstairs in that hotel room, panicked. It is possible that I would end up on barbiturates. It is possible that I could have ended up one of those sweet sad people sitting in the rain in shop doorways saying the same thing in London or New York, in exactly the same accent: any spare change please?
But I didn’t. I put a proposition to you.
If there were a God who saw and cared for us and was merciful, then when I died and went to Heaven, I would find among all the other things, a copy of that wiped disk.
When we knew Granddad was going to die, we took him to see the Angel of the North.
When he got there, he said: It’s all different. There were none of these oaks all around it then, he said, Look at the size of them! The last time I saw this, he says to me, I was no older than you are now, and it was brand new, and we couldn’t make out if we liked it or not.
We took him, the whole lot of us, on the tram from Blaydon. We made a day of it. All of Dad’s exes and their exes and some of their kids and me aunties and their exes and their kids. It wasn’t that happy a group to tell you the truth. But Granddad loved seeing us all in one place.
He was going a bit soft by then. He couldn’t tell what the time was anymore and his words came out wrong. The mums made us sit on his lap. He kept calling me by my dad’s name. His breath smelt funny but I didn’t mind, not too much. He told me about how things used to be in Blaydon.
They used to have a gang in the Dene called Pedro’s Gang. They drank something called Woodpecker and broke people’s windows and they left empty tins of pop in the woods. If you were little you weren’t allowed out cos everyone’s mum was so fearful and all. Granddad once saw twelve young lands go over and hit an old woman and take her things. One night his brother got drunk and put his fist through a window, and he went to the hospital, and he had to wait hours before they saw him and that was terrible.
I thought it sounded exciting meself. But I didn’t say so because Granddad wanted me to know how much better things are now.
He says to me, like: the trouble was, Landlubber, we were just kids, but we all thought the future would be terrible. We all thought the world was going to burn up, and that everyone would get poorer and poorer, and the crime worse.
He told me that lots of people had no work. I don’t really understand how anyone could have nothing to do. But then I’ve never got me head around what money used to be either.
Or why they built that Angel. It’s not even that big, and it was old and covered in rust. It didn’t look like an Angel to me at all, the wings were so big and square. Granddad said, no, it looks like an airplane, that’s what airplanes looked like back then. It’s meant to go rusty, it’s the Industrial Spirit of the North.
I didn’t know what he was on about. I asked Dad why the Angel was so important and he kept explaining it had a soul, but couldn’t say how. The church choir showed up and started singing hymns. Then it started to rain. It was a wonderful day out.
I went back to the tram and asked me watch about the Angel.
This is me watch, here, see? It’s dead good isn’t it, it’s got all sorts on it. It takes photographs and all. Here, look, this is the picture it took of Granddad by the Angel. It’s the last picture I got of him. You can talk to people on it. And it keeps thinking of fun things for you to do.
Why not explain to the interviewer why the Angel of the North is important?
Duh. Usually they’re fun.
Take the train to Newcastle and walk along the river until you see on the hill where people keep their homing pigeons. Muck out the cages for readies.
It’s useful when you’re a bit short, it comes up with ideas to make some dosh.
It’s really clever. It takes all the stuff that goes on around here and stirs it around and comes up with something new. Here, listen:
The laws of evolution have been applied to fun. New generations of ideas are generated and eliminated at such a speed that evolution works in real time. It’s survival of the funnest and you decide.
They evolve machines, too. Have you seen our new little airplanes? They’ve run the designs through thousands of generations, and they got better and faster and smarter.
The vicar bought the whole church choir airplanes they can wear. The wings are really good, they look just like bird’s wings with pinions sticking out like this. Oh! I really want one of them. You can turn somersaults in them. People build them in their sheds for spare readies, I could get one now if I had the dosh.
Every Sunday as long as it isn’t raining, you can see the church choir take off in formation. Little old ladies in leotards and blue jeans and these big embroidered Mexican hats. They rev up and take off and start to sing the Muslim call to prayer. They echo all over the show. Then they cut their engines and spiral up on the updraft. That’s when they start up on “Nearer My God to Thee.”
Every Sunday, Granddad and I used to walk up Shibbon Road to the Dene. It’s so high up there that we could look down on top of them. He never got over it. Once he laughed so hard he fell down, and just lay there on the grass. We just lay on our backs and looked up at the choir, they just kept going up like they were kites.
When the Travellers come to Blaydon, they join in. Their wagons are pulled by horses and have calliopes built into the front, so on Sundays, when the choir goes up, the calliopes start up, so you got organ music all over the show as well. Me dad calls Blaydon a sound sandwich. He says it’s all the hills.
The Travellers like our acoustics, so they come here a lot. They got all sorts to trade. They got these bacteria that eat rubbish, and they hatch new machines, like smart door keys that only work for the right people. They make their own beer, but you got to be a bit careful how much you drink.