Much excitement at a specially convened meeting of the Holist League!
Only two weeks after his famous ‘Militant Reason’ speech, President Ullman had died. There had been a state funeral, solemn speeches. Ullman was eulogized as the ‘father of Illyria’, the founder of the Fellowship of Reason, the creator of the ‘Zionism of Science’. And there had been big words about his work living on after him, about every Illyrian striving to make his dream into a reality…
‘Even Illyrians seem to believe in some kind of afterlife!’ drily observed the handsome Brazilian Da Vera, who had become the dominant figure in the little group.
The new acting President was Senator Kung, an altogether harsher figure, who had been partially paralyzed as a result of torture in the Chinese Reaction, and now walked on robot limbs, a kind of syntec from the waist down. No one doubted that the Senator would soon be confirmed as Ullman’s permanent successor. The office of President was in the gift of the Fellowship of Reason, the organization which had purchased the territory of Illyria and masterminded the migration of refugees to their newly-created homeland, and Senator Kung had been Chair of the Fellowship’s ruling Council for some years.
Kung’s first act had been to create by decree a new police agency, the Office for Order and Objectivity, soon to be known and feared as ‘O3’. Its task would be to increase surveillance of all subversive activity and to root out sources of irrationality that might weaken the authority of the scientists’ state.
And in his very first Presidential speech Kung spoke of subversive elements within the Illyrian population itself, children of refugees who chose to forget the sufferings of their parents and thought it clever to dabble with the ‘seductive baubles of religion, with their phoney promises and phoney claims to re assuring certainty.’ These elements would be dealt with no less harshly than subversives in the guestworker community, he warned. They too could be deported if necessary, to the countries from which their parents had escaped.
Now, no member of the Holist League was so vulgar as to believe in things like the Trinity, or the infallibility of the prophet Mohammed, or the Virgin birth, or to believe that some old book was the final truth about the universe. And perhaps these were the kinds of things that Kung had in mind when he spoke about ‘baubles’. But the League
did
dabble in the idea that Illyria had gone too far, had overreacted against the Reaction, had thrown away babies with the bathwater.
‘Have no doubt that the likes of us will come to the attention of this new secret police!’ warned Da Vera.
Everyone agreed with him. There was a lot of talk about ‘fear’ and ‘outrage’ and ‘having our backs up against the wall’, though it seemed to me that for most people present these feelings were actually quite agreeable, an exciting frisson, nothing more.
After the meeting, they all went down, as they normally did, to drink in the bar below, the
New Orleans
. Marija, with one arm already slipped through Da Vera’s, took my hand as I was about to sneak away.
‘You always slink off, George! Why don’t you come with us for once? It would be good to get to know you better.’
I really didn’t want to but I liked Marija very much and didn’t want to displease her.
‘Just for a short time,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a lot of work on. I really need some sleep.’
And then I went red, as I normally did when I spoke to her.
So Marija went down to the bar between Da Vera and I, arm in arm with both of us: the suave Brazilian, and the odd, stiff translator, who lived at home with his mother, and was rigid all over with self-consciousness and fear and guilty secrets.
Yes, and her arm through mine was the most intimate touch I had received from a woman of my own age. I mean from a
real
one of course.
They all knew each other. They had well-established patterns, collective habits. They all knew who drank what, how many bowls of potato chips to buy, how they would share out the bill. They had in-jokes, they knew things about each others’ lives. Each of them had well-known foibles for which they could be teased, and party pieces which the others recognized with a laugh or a cheer or an affectionate groan. In short, in the
New Orleans
, the Holist League transformed itself from a debating society into a group of friends.
And, though I’d been to their meetings, I wasn’t part of that group. I sat with them round a table, but I was outside the circle. I felt charmless and empty and, in my misery, I told myself I didn’t like them anyway. I told myself how shallow and self-important they were, this little debating society, getting drunk and loud after their meeting, each one playing out an assigned and cliché-ridden role.
But Marija was kind. She turned away from Paul Da Vera as he held forth amusingly to the group at large, and attempted to engage me in conversation. And suddenly remembered I
did
have something to tell her, something
really
interesting which I’d been specially saving up.
‘I meant to tell you,’ I said, ‘I found that robot janitor.’
‘Janitor? You don’t mean Shirley?’
‘Yes, or a robot just like her. It was hanging from a scaffold down in Ioannina.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes, Shirley and about half-a-dozen others. Some children were using them for target practice.’
Marija was impressed. She nudged Da Vera.
‘Paul, listen to this!’
So Paul listened, and to my alarm the whole group of more than twenty also shut up and listened, as I told the tale of the gibbet and the stone-throwing children and the broken limbs on the ground, and what the taxi-driver Manolis had said about ‘demons’.
Da Vera shook his head.
‘Amazing. Quite amazing. It just confirms what you’ve been telling me Marija.’
Marija nodded.
‘My company is very edgy about these problems with the SE robots. I mean it’s always been known that if they were allowed to self-evolve for too long they might go off the rails in some way but it’s happening much more quickly than anyone planned for. And the odd thing is that, when it does happen, wandering off is typically what they do. We find most of them of course, but there’s always been some that never show up again. I suppose we now know why.’
Paul laughed: ‘It’s wonderful isn’t it? They are made specifically to replace irrational human beings, and then they evolve an irrationality of their own. It sums up everything we’ve talked about! The whole can’t be predicted from the parts!’
‘Some people are saying they should be completely reprogrammed as often as every six months or so, instead of every five years,’ Marija said. ‘But the company is fighting this because that defeats the whole point of self-evolution. Just when the robots were starting to get good at mimicking people, all their learning would be wiped away, and they’d have to start again.’
Marija considered.
‘But why do they wander out
there
?’ she exclaimed after a moment. ‘Think of the – the
determination
involved: crossing the border and then just walking and walking and walking until some outlander finds them and kicks them to pieces. Isn’t there something tragic about it?’
I agreed with her, but Paul Da Vera gave a derisory snort.
‘Now you’re being sentimental, Marija. You shouldn’t waste your pity on machines! If you want to pity someone, pity the poor guestworker who’s chucked out of the territory when they build a robot to do his job! Pity the janitors, the nightwatchmen, the dustcart drivers. My God, even the
whores
have been put out of business now! We live in a country where we even
fuck
machines!’
Everyone else laughed. I shrank back inside myself, like a snail pulling back into its shell.
‘I actually think the outlanders have got basically the right instincts about this,’ Paul said. ‘There
is
something really abominable about building a machine to mimic a human being.’
Marija shrugged.
‘Well, perhaps, but I still feel sorry for them,’ she said, and she looked at me, almost as if
I
was one of the robots she felt sorry for: this stiff creature, struggling to find the spark of spontaneity, of naturalness, of life…
I ran to Lucy’s. I wanted the feeling that Lucy gave me, however illusory, however temporary, of being welcomed, of being accepted, of being
let in
.
But when I got there, Lucy wasn’t free.
‘Perhaps you’d like to choose someone else for a change?’ the syntec receptionist suggested.
‘I don’t want anyone else!’ I snapped. I was shocked by the dangerous edge in my own voice, the scale of my rage at being thwarted.
‘I’m very sorry, sir, but I’m afraid she’s engaged.’
‘That’s no fucking use is it?’
I took a pace or two away, my fists clenched, my head fizzing with violence. Then I came back to the receptionist.
‘Okay, I’ll wait then. How long will she be?’
The robot receptionist passed on my query, via House Control, to Lucy up there in her room:
‘
Another subject is enquiring after you. Please give estimate of time with present subject.
’
‘
Subject is using special facilities
,’ Lucy replied in her batsqueak machine voice, quite inaudible to the customer, who only heard her simulated gasps of pleasure as he played with her surface layer of flesh. ‘
For your reference re duration of earlier visits
,
subjects credit code is 4532 7865 6120. Own estimate of remaining time: forty-five minutes
.’
House Control checked the estimate with its own records, and found it to be accurate. It relayed this back to the receptionist.
‘About forty-five minutes sir,’ said the receptionist, hardly more than a second after I had asked my question, ‘You could wait in the bar, or you could make another selection in the lounge…’
I hesitated. Absurdly I felt murderously angry with Lucy for not being there for me.
‘I’ll pick another one,’ I said.
I chose one as different from Lucy as possible: a syntec in the likeness of a large black woman called Sheba. She had huge silky-skinned breasts, broad, muscly thighs and a wonderful thick dark mat of pubic hair into which I plunged greedily.
Yes, greedily is the word, for I seemed then to fall into a kind of feeding frenzy. No sooner had I finished with Sheba than I went straight back down to the lounge and picked up another ASPU called Lady Charlotte, made to look like a sophisticated aristocrat from eighteenth century Europe, complete with beauty spot and layers of petticoats.
And when I’d finished under those petticoats, I went down for still more. It was as if the emptiness left behind by one ASPU could only be filled by another – and so on and on and on. I picked out a machine called Helen, in the likeness of a worldly schoolgirl with a small scar on her upper lip, and screwed her from behind in a place made out to look like a high school locker room.
On the way down, I met Lucy coming up with another man.
The syntecs were programmed to recognize regular customers. She looked at me and smiled. And her sweet smile went right through me like a knife.
‘Oh Lucy, I do love you,’ I whispered.
And I kept on whispering it to myself outside in the street, with that dull ache pressing out from behind my eyes: ‘I love you Lucy, I love you, I love you, I love you…’
When I’d walked a couple of blocks, I was startled by the sound of an explosion not very far away. Even the ground seemed to tremble – and somewhere behind me in the street some small glass object fell to the ground and smashed.
A silence fell on the city.
And then from the distance, in several directions, came the sound of emergency vehicles, drawing quickly nearer and then rushing whooping through the blocks on either side of me.
I didn’t know it then, of course, but the front of the Fellowship of Reason building had just been blown away by a bomb. It was the first ever action of the AHS – the Army of the Human Spirit.
I remember that night, or a night soon afterwards, I had a vivid dream.
I was in a dark building searching along corridors and up and down stairs for a room which I knew I’d found there once before. It was a quiet light room, with chairs and a window overlooking a courtyard. But I couldn’t seem to find it, and the wider I searched the more forbidding the building became. Corridors were narrower. Staircases had missing railings or gaps where steps should have been. My hands became clammy with vertigo as climbed them. And the rooms that I found were either windowless or bare or were already occupied by other people.
Tony Vespuccio was in one, the playboy of the Word for Word office, whiling away an afternoon with a pretty young woman and a bottle of champagne.
‘Your own room?’ he laughed incredulously. ‘That needs a lot more guts than you’ve got George.’
In another a group of women were bathing in a plunge pool. When they saw me they looked at one another and shrieked with merriment.
In another room I peeked through a doorway and saw Marija naked on a bed, with Paul Da Vera moving above her.
And then I found myself in the basement, where it was cold and damp. There was a big room there like the lounge in the ASPU House, but it smelt of urine and drains. And the syntecs in there didn’t even vaguely resemble humans. They were just wooden marionettes with genitals painted on in red, jerking around on strings…
I ran from them, climbing a narrow, grubby little spiral staircase that led nowhere at all except to a single door at its top.
When I opened the door, there was Ruth dangling in her SenSpace suit.
I was at my desk at Word for Word a few weeks later, just before lunchtime, when the receptionist called me to say I had a visitor. We still had a human receptionist in those days, and she sounded oddly excited.
‘Who is it?’ I asked.
‘Well, she says it’s a surprise.’
‘Are you
sure
it’s me she wants to see?’
‘Definitely.’
This time the receptionist could not quite prevent herself from giggling.
I went down to the reception area. There was only one person waiting there, a very elegant young woman. She looked up at me and gave a warm smile of recognition. My blood froze.
It was
Lucy
!
…or so it seemed for a moment. After a second or so I realized that, although my visitor was blonde like Lucy and had the same kind of gentle, flawless beauty, she did not have the same face.
‘Hello George!’ she said, standing up, ‘I wondered if you’d like to come out for lunch?’
The receptionist looked from her to me, smiling.
‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled, red to the roots of my hair, ‘I don’t think I know you…’
The young woman laughed.
‘Do you really not recognize me, Georgie?’
I didn’t recognize the face or the voice, but there
was
something in the tone – half-teasing, half-plaintive – that seemed familiar…
‘I’m sorry, I…’
The stranger laughed.
‘Aren’t you going to give your mother a kiss?’ she said.
A half-stifled splutter of incredulous laughter came from the receptionist behind me.
‘This is a Vehicle!’ Ruth told me excitedly in the lift, talking through the mouth of the pretty blonde. ‘It’s a new SenSpace facility. Isn’t it amazing? It’s a…’
But of course by then I’d worked it out for myself. A Vehicle was a robot or syntec which was remote controlled by the SenSpace net, and could be hired by SenSpace subscribers.
‘I know what a Vehicle is,’ I said coldly. ‘Please don’t ever make a fool of me like that again.’
She pouted. ‘I thought you’d be pleased to have a pretty young woman come and take you out for lunch!’
I didn’t reply to this.
‘I think it’s a great idea, George. I can be a different person, I can go out on the streets and have fun, and yet be quite safe all the time.’
A young man eyed the Vehicle with furtive admiration as we crossed the road and Ruth giggled.
‘It’s quite nice to be looked at, too.’
We went to a snack bar opposite my office. I ordered coffee and chicken sandwiches for myself. Ruth’s Vehicle ordered coffee.
‘It must cost a fortune to hire,’ I muttered as we sat down.
I found myself glancing at the Vehicle’s shapely legs.
‘It does cost a lot, but why not once in a while? Like I said, it’s fun and it’s safe.’
‘Safe! It’s not as if Illyria City is such a dangerous place!’
‘It is now, with bombs going off and everything. It was on the news this morning by the way, they’ve found two of the bombers. Would you believe they were both Illyrian citizens, not squippies. Imagine! Illyrians! Senator Kung says he’s going to put more money into O3 and give them more powers, and he’s bringing in tough new laws too.’
I shrugged: ‘New laws that will tell us there’s only one way we’re allowed to think. It seems pretty much like America or the Outlands all over again.’
Oddly enough I’d already almost become accustomed to this syntec being my mother. The face was different, the body was different, the voice was different, but the spirit that animated it – the body-language, the inflections of speech – were so manifestly hers.
‘Anyway, Ruth, how come you’re not at work?’
The Vehicle looked evasive. ‘Oh, I’ve got a day off.’
‘You were off last week too. You’re only supposed to have three weeks leave a year.’
‘I… Well okay, if you want the truth, George, I’ve given up my job.’
‘Why?’
‘I wasn’t enjoying it. I don’t need the money, so I thought, why not?’
It was true that she didn’t need the money. Nor did I actually. My father had been a wealthy man.
But Ruth’s work had been the only place where she ever met other people, the only place she ever went outside of our apartment.
‘What are you going to do with your time? Moon around in SenSpace all day until it gives you ulcers?’
It occurred to me then that in fact even
now
she was actually in the apartment dangling in her SenSpace suit. The door of her SenSpace room was shut. The door of the apartment was triple-locked. She was utterly alone, three kilometres away across town making the movements and gestures that this syntec was faithfully reproducing, while goggles over her eyes were projecting onto her retinas the images from the Vehicle’s video camera eyes.
‘What’s wrong with being in SenSpace a lot if you like it?’ she said through the Vehicle, ‘There was a thing on TV the other night about a man who’s been paralysed in a car smash. They’ve got him all wired up to SenSpace so he could live and move about in there, if not in the outside world. Some people on the programme were sorry for him, but I thought, why? What could be nicer than living in SenSpace day and night? You could always hire a Vehicle like this if you wanted to look outside.’
‘Yes but you’re
not
that man. You’ve got the use of all your limbs. I mean, if you’re just going to hide in SenSpace you might just as well be dead!’
The pretty Vehicle looked at me. I think speaking through a Vehicle made her bolder in what she said, in the way that some people are bolder when they are wearing dark glasses, or a mask.
‘I
might
just as well be dead,’ she said very calmly. ‘You are absolutely right. And do you know the only thing that keeps me from that?’
Just for a moment I thought she was going to say
me
, but I needn’t have excited myself on that account.
‘I don’t want to sound like a religious person,’ she said. ‘I’m not talking about heaven or hell or anything like that. But I do sometimes wonder: how do we know what death is? What happens if it’s not the end? What happens if it turns out that life is the one thing that does go on and on and won’t end however much you want it to?’
I had an awful momentary vision of a solitary being at the core of the universe, a solitary being, unable to die, doomed to exist alone forever.
‘Why don’t you take the afternoon off, George?’ she asked in a completely different tone. ‘I was thinking we could go to Aghios Constantinos. The
real
one I mean. I’m not scared of going places when I’m going as a Vehicle!’
‘No, sorry. Too busy,’ I said shortly.
In fact I was to visit Aghios Constantinos again – and with Ruth in vehicle form as well. But a good deal was to happen before then.