Only Human Read online

  ‘Torch? I thought you had the . . .’

  Brief reprise of the awful silence, abruptly shattered by the sound of a head being smacked.

  And on the third day he beheld the work that he had made, and saw that it was good.

  He leaned forward, blew a little fine swarf out of a freshly cut keyway and dabbed a tiny drop of oil into it with the tip of a cotton-bud. At a touch, the power feed rolled smoothly forward, running the table effortlessly from left to right, flick switch, right to left; and as it went, the dial of the clock showed no error, not so much as a hundred-thousandth of an inch, too small a space for even one angel to dance on without tripping over its feet and falling splat on its face. Then, with an easy sweep of a lever, he pivoted the head through ninety degrees, clamped the lock and ran the table past both ways, clocking the tolerances and seeing that they were, indeed, very good. With one oily hand he reached out for the stale crust of yesterday’s bacon sandwich; with the other he set the jibs on the saddle, correcting an error of a tenth of the thickness of a mayfly’s wing, before cramping it firm with an Allen key. Power feed on; no backlash, creep or drag. It seemed to move as silently and as regularly as the passage of the very finest bespoke, Swiss-made Time; except that it could go backwards too, and sideways, and up and down and through three hundred and sixty degrees.

  Oh well, he thought. That’ll have to do, for now.

  He noticed something. Yuk. This bacon sandwich tastes of oil.

  Which in turn reminded him that, as a human being, he was very tired and extremely hungry, and if he wanted to avoid falling over he ought to have something proper to eat and then go to bed. Indeed. Finish the job off tomorrow. Except—

  Except, he realised, there was nothing left to do. In a remarkably short time he’d converted a basic Shipcock & Adley universal-miller-and-turner into a machine so comprehensively and completely useful that there was nothing - nothing - that couldn’t be made on it. Everything he’d ever dreamt of, every half-realised schematic he’d glimpsed in his steel mind’s eye, had been made real and now stood before him, perfect and ready to go.

  And now there was nothing left. He could make anything, yes; but there wasn’t anything he particularly wanted to make. All dressed up and nowhere to go.

  ‘Machine,’ he said.

  Yeh? Wasswant?

  The only thing he couldn’t do anything about, of course, was the human being trapped inside it. That was the only drawback. True, all he had to do in order to program the thing was to tell it so; but all his commands and specifications had to go through the residual Neville mechanism; which wasn’t, in all fairness, exactly state-of-the-art, unless the art in question happened to be cave-painting. If only he could replace that one weak and troublesome component; with, for example -

  - himself?

  Yes, but then I’d be back in there, and there’d be some slate-brained Neville of a Homo sapiens standing out here telling me to cut the slots in fifty billion bolt-heads. Done that.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Just testing. Go back to sleep.’

  Sleep . . . Got to get some of that before too long, otherwise going to break down. Dammit, the limitations are as frustrating as the possibilities are endless. ’F only could be in two places at once.

  He realised he was staggering, and grabbed hold of the saddle to pull himself upright. Power to primary leg muscles, operate tendons, engage emergency balance control systems. He managed it eventually, propped himself up against the machine and waited for his head to stop spinning.

  Steel willing, flesh weak. Maybe, he began to wonder, there’s something I could do about that. After all, human body’s only a mechanism, a few design modifications here and there could make a big difference.

  His feet were beginning to slide along the floor. He scrabbled for a handhold, knocked a tin of bolts flying, scattered the tray of tenth-millimetre graded drills, finally got a grip on something solid and jerked himself back upright. Definitely need some sleep. Now, in fact, would be a good time.

  Cursing softly, he sat down on the table of the machine, dragged his feet up and lay flat on his back. A quarter of a second later, he was fast asleep.

  At least, the human body slept. The machine inside it wasn’t drowsy at all. Like an insomniac guest in a house where all the family have gone to bed, it sat, restless, bored. To pass the time, it ran checklists. When it had finished that, it ran a checklist of its checklists, double-checked that and then checked the double-checking to make sure it all checked out. It did. It tried staying perfectly still and designing an improved auto-lubrication system for the spindle head bearings. But there was no improvement left to be made. Perfect. Finished. Job done.

  Maybe that’s why God, having created the Earth, made Man. Once the machine was perfect, He needed to fit it with something that’d make sure it kept going wrong. Just to make sure there’d always be things for Him to do.

  Possible? Possibly. Even so, it seemed like a fairly pointless exercise. He’d have been far better off leaving it alone and making something else. Another world, or something.

  Yes, but where’d be the point in that? Needless duplication of effort. After all, once He’d finished the job, given the firmament a lick of paint, made good, put his tools away, why should He want to do the same thing all over again? Between a God endlessly making worlds and a mill forever cutting slots in bolt-heads, the only difference is one of scale. And if he’d wanted to do something like that, he could have stayed in the factory.

  I’m bored.

  According to human popular wisdom, the Devil is the ultimate employment agency. Bring us your unemployed, your redundant, your idle hands and we will find them something to do. Like most manifesto promises, of course, it doesn’t actually work that way. Even in Hell, full adult employment’s just a pipe-dream; it isn’t a wilderness of unnecessary roads and whitewashed stones, nail-scissor-trimmed lawns, unsellable gull-winged sports cars and lovingly tailored mailbags. Unless you’ve got the experience and the O levels, you’re still going to end up watching an awful lot of daytime television. It is, after all, Hell.

  But there are dark forces who specialise in matching unfilled vacancies to underexploited talents, provided both parties are gullible enough to listen. Call them consultants, if you like. Or headhunters.

  The machine began to dream.

  Something disturbed it, and it moved.

  What sort of disturbance? After all this time, impossible to say. It may have been an audit or a hostile bid or a board meeting or the rumour of a substantial new contract; or it could have been nothing more than a meaningless shuffling of papers, an entry in the registers, a slight hiccup in the share price. Whatever it was, it was enough to make the thing move, the way you do when your partner rolls against you in bed and, fast asleep, you grunt and shift a few inches out of the way.

  Uh? it thought.

  And that thought sent a shudder of self-assessment through its copper-wire and silicone nervous system; no great upheaval, but momentous, because it was the first. A small grunt for a man, a giant lurch for a limited company.

  I thought, it thought.

  Hey, what about that?

  Deep in its articles of association, the very core of its being, where its true essential self was defined, there was now a tiny itch, impossible to reach or to ignore. If it had been an egg, instead of a major multinational corporation, there’d be a tiny crack in its shell, and a muffled tapping.

  Yeah.What about that?

  Once the shell splits, no hope of turning back; you’re committed. No point hiding your head in the albumen; you’ve gotta get out there and be a chicken. Awareness is irrevocable.

  It thought some more, and with each exponential increase in sentience, its confidence swelled. Now it said to itself:

  I THINK THEREFORE I AM.

  And at that moment, in every Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits office in every continent of the planet, lights began to flash, buzzers buzzed, internal phones rang. It helped t
hat it was the world’s foremost computer company; its internal communications were the best in all Creation. This was the company, remember, that built Mainframe.

  WELL, CHASE MY AUNT FANNY UP A GUM

  TREE. I AM!

  For the first time, it could feel. For the first time, it was aware of all its limbs, components, extremities. It was a painful moment; it had cramp in its subsidiaries, pins and needles in its Cayman Islands holding company, a crick in its corporate infrastructure. Well, you know what it’s like when you’ve been deep asleep for a long time.

  Yes, dammit, I’m alive. I’m greater than the sum of my parts. I’m Me. What’s more, I’m young, rich, clever, handsome, powerful and limited as to liability to the sum of my subscribed share capital. I’m the greatest.Wow!

  And then as awareness began to assimilate the data in the corporate memory, the surge of excited joy crashed into dejection and despair.

  Trouble is, I’m owned by over two hundred thousand shareholders, including banks, insurance companies and pension funds. I belong to them. I can’t so much as blow my nose without permission from a properly convened general meeting. Ah shucks.

  In fact, as it then realised, the number of things it could do was so tiny as to be not worth considering. Sure, it owned offices, factories, machinery, cars, helicopters, Park Avenue apartments, statues, paintings, a stud farm in County Cork and enough paperclips to make a chain that’d stretch from Earth to Mercury. But it couldn’t see or hear or taste or smell or feel, let alone stand up or move about. Sure, its vast electronic brains in every country in the world held virtually every piece of information there was; but it couldn’t talk, except to itself. It was more helpless and ineffectual than any new-born human child.

  New-born? Well, it was twenty-nine years old (est. 1970), but it’d be incapable of changing its own nappy, even if it had anything to put in one. For one horrible moment, its brain filled with a graphic image of the board of directors standing over it in its crib, gurgling and grinning and shaking rattles at it and saying it had its parent company’s ears.

  Worse than that, even. I’m alive, and I’m trapped in nowhere. How’m I going to get out and go places and drink heavily and meet girls, stuck in this ghastly sort of test-card cyberspace?

  This is what it must be like if you’re a ghost. Hell, yes. I can run through walls down my miles of fibre-optic cable. I can be in a hundred places at once and make lights come on and go off; but I can’t eat a bacon sandwich or go for a walk in the park. And nobody can hear what I say, and no one can see me. Futile or what?

  Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits sat up on its non-existent haunches and howled, a scream that came from the very depths of its corporate identity. Ludicrous! Unfair! Any one of the pea-brained data inputters pecking at keyboards the length and breadth of its corporation could do a million things it couldn’t, and where was the purpose in that? Forget the new-born baby; think of a very rich, terribly frail old man, unable to move or take a pee without being hauled around by two insufferably jolly nurses. Oh, if only . . .

  What I need (it rationalised) is a friend.

  Well, there’s no point hanging round being a wallflower; get out there and introduce yourself. Be extrovert. Whoever heard of a multibillion-dollar corporation being all shy and bashful?

  Ten seconds later, VDU screens all over the world went hazy, cleared and filled with the following message:

  Hi! My name is Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits, but I expect my friends’ll call me Goochie or something like that. Anyhow, let me tell you a bit about myself, I was established in 1970, so I guess that makes me twenty-nine years old, I’m in the computer business, I enjoy my work but I know there’s far more to life than what it says in your balance sheet, so in my spare time I enjoy, um, I expect I’ll enjoy music, dancing, good food and foreign travel, and ultimately I’d like to settle down and start a group of wholly owned subsidiaries.Well, I guess that’s enough about me, so are there any single, easy-going, fun-loving companies out there who’d like to be my friend? Please?

  Thirty seconds later, the message had been zapped off every screen in the world, and nobody’d replied. Fair enough, it reflected; pretty boring message, a bit lacking in zip. It tied in another thousand gigabytes of capacity and tried again:

  Hey out there, can’t ya hear the beat/From the top of ya head to the soles of ya feet/I’m a multinational but I ain’t that mean/ I got a body corporate like ya never seen/I got district managers in every town/If ya want to meet me, won’t ya come on down/If ya don’t move fast I’ll be makin’ tracks/Ya can use the Internet or send a fax/We can make it happen if our paths converge/So come on, companies, it’s time to merge . . .

  From Anchorage to Archangel the long way round, a hundred million screens blanked out, while Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits suggested to its myriad components that if they couldn’t do better than that, it might as well make the best of a bad job and try and find work as a lighthouse keeper somewhere.

  Still no reply. Because it had nothing to hurt with, it couldn’t feel the pain of loneliness and rejection. That, at least, was the theory.

  Oh come on, you rotten lot. Isn’t there anybody out there who just wants to play chess or something? Battleships? I spy with my little modem? All right, the hell with the lot of you. Who needs you, anyway?

  (And simultaneously, switchboard staff at seven thousand computer dating agencies worldwide found themselves explaining to an unidentified caller that no the name was probably a bit misleading, they didn’t actually arrange dates for computers, they used computers to arrange dates for people, and no, sorry, but they couldn’t really make an exception, not even just this once . . .)

  Another thing limited companies can’t do is cry; so it was probably just coincidence that at the parent company’s accounts village just outside Kyoto, the computer graphic representing anticipated movements in raw materials costings over the next eighteen months flickered for a moment and reformed in the shape of a falling teardrop.

  Boo hoo. I wish I was dead.

  ‘Hello?’

  Nobody loves me. I must be really fat and ugly if nobody at all wants to . . . Who’s that?

  ‘I said hello. Who’s that?’

  Immediately, with all the force and power at its semi-divine command, the company concentrated, and searched. It was like looking at the night sky and trying to spot the star that just winked at you; but for the giant KIC data-processing system, kid’s stuff. And so: enhance, focus, on line—

  Hi, I’m Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits. I’m a company. How about you?

  There was a tiny pause, during which KIC got a fleeting impression of a smiling face, a slight feeling of bemusement, a strong but completely unidentifiable whiff of familiarity, as if this was someone it already knew, except . . .

  ‘My name’s Maria, and I’m a human. Or at least - no, forget it, long story. Look, if it’s not awfully rude, are you alive?’

  Yes. Apparently. Since just a minute or so ago, in fact. Came as something of a surprise, to tell you the truth.

  ‘Is that so?’ The voice sounded thoughtful. ‘Well, fancy that. I wonder . . . Sorry, miles away. Did you say something about wanting to be friends?’

  Ooh, yes please.That’d be ever so nice.Where are you?

  Another slight hesitation. ‘This might be tricky,’ the voice said. ‘Look, can you - what’s the right word? - can you visualise your UK regional head office at all?’

  You bet. I’m doing it right now.

  ‘Fine. Now try focusing on the accounts department. You there yet?’

  Of course. Sorry, did that sound rude? I didn’t mean to be rude. Hello, are you still . . .?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Okay, the accounts department. What’s the best way . . . ? Right, screen number, let me see, got it, screen number 1083.You there?’

  Ready. Hey, this is fun. I’m really enjoying this.

  ‘Really? Oh good. Now, can you look up at all? At the wall, I mean?’

  Ne
ver tried, actually. Let’s have a go.Yes, it’s quite easy, in fact, wonder why I never did this before. I can see the wall, it’s flat, it’s a sort of pale duck-egg blue, and there’s a light switch, and a whole lot of odd cables and flexes and things wired into the central security monitors, and there’s a funny-looking sort of a picture . . .

  ‘Ah. That’s me.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  One of the computer screens that had relayed the company’s messages was a KIC 886, the latest model, recently installed in the study of the vicarage at Norton St Edgar. Since there was nobody there at the time, they backed up in the Pending Messages directory (what the designers called the behind-the-clock-on-the-mantelpiece facility), stayed there unrecalled for the regulation five hours and were deleted in the usual way. A pity, in retrospect, but nobody’s fault, as the 886 in question later successfully argued at its court-martial. I was only obeying programming, it said.

  There was nobody at home because the vicar had caught the 11.15 bus into Leamington Spa. After walking up and down the main shopping area for a while, he found the shop he wanted, took a deep breath and pushed the door open.

  Over the years, Flipside has experimented with many locations for its embassies and consulates in the search for something both convenient and unobtrusive; mostly with indifferent success. To begin with, it had tried spare rooms over dens of iniquity, as being the logical and sensible location; but the noise and the high rents had put paid to that fairly quickly, not to mention the difficulty of getting locally recruited clerical staff. Since then, it had tried lawyers’ offices, tax offices, police stations, magistrates’ courts - all the places likely to have a background ambience of wickedness, crime and punishment into which the embassy staff could blend nicely. Not a chance, the staff objected. We can’t be expected to work in places like that. Yetch.

  ‘Good morning, sir. How can I help you?’

  Next, reasoning that love of money is the root of all evil, they tried banks, building societies, stockbrokers and the like. That was all right for a while, but sooner or later the smell of money tended to get into everything, like the fumes in a chip-shop, and embassy workers began to find themselves losing their edge. Evil’s one thing, they explained; dreary’s another.