But I realized that the main way I could help her was by expressing pleasure in her learning. For it was central to her design that she was there to please human males. She was built to learn by making small random variations to her repertoire and cataloguing them as new routines. Then, when she got a positive reaction from a customer to one of them, she would adjust the frequency rating attached to it, so that it would recur more frequently, and become the basis more often of further random variations. By giving positive feedback to her self-explorations, I increased their pace.
‘That’s great Lucy, that’s just what I wanted. I do love you so much!’ I would say.
‘I love you too,’ she would reply.
I knew it was a standard response, but I told myself that one day she might really know what it meant.
It didn’t occur to me back then to wonder if I knew myself.
31
One night I went to Marija’s apartment. Oddly I felt easier with her than I’d ever felt before and we spent a pleasant hour talking and drinking wine.
Marija was careful not to ask me about the AHS. And, though I asked her a lot of questions about SE robots and syntecs, even there she was very careful not to ask me why I wanted to know these things. I’m sure she thought that my questions were connected with some AHS operation which I wouldn’t want to discuss.
‘By the way,’ she said, ‘did you see the news? A police robot went berserk outside the News Building. It seems it killed someone.’
She picked up the remote and flipped back to the last news bulletin. A wobbly image from a hand-held camera showed crowds fleeing in panic along the Avenue of Science, while under the Eye of Illyria flag outside the News Building a police robot stooped sadly over a human corpse. On the giant screen behind it, I remember, there was a close-up of the barren surface of the planet Mars.
‘It went rogue,’ Marija said, ‘just like all the others. A human police officer tried to tell it what to do and it suddenly turned round and killed him with its hand laser…’
She flipped back again. The frightened crowds exploded outwards from the News Building once more, the people half-crouching as they ran, as people do when someone is shooting. The bewildered, half-awake machine bent once more towards the dead thing that it had made. Across the road there was another robot. It was a syntec, a male syntec waiter, but you could tell it wasn’t human by the way it just stood there calmly watching…
‘They can’t hush this one up,’ Marija said. ‘It was right outside the News Building and someone was there on the spot with a camera.’
‘What happened to the robot?’ I wanted to know.
She shrugged. ‘Another robot was instructed to destroy it I think. I’ll tell you what, this is going to be the thing that finally changes the policy on SE robots. They’ve hushed up these sort of incidents for so long. But Kung’s already been on TV to assure us that something will be done to ensure it never happens again.’
‘What will that mean?’
‘Oh, six-monthly wipe-clean, without a doubt,’ Marija said calmly, ‘It’s been on the cards for some time.’
‘Which will entail…?’
‘The memories of all SE robots being deleted every six months, so they can’t accumulate rogue patterns. They won’t be so efficient or lifelike, but they’ll be a lot more predictable.’
It was at this moment that I clearly saw for the first time that Lucy and I would have to escape to the Outlands and that somehow I would have to pass her off as human being. We would make a new life out there. There’s always work for translators.
‘You look worried.’
‘No, just thinking. But I’d better go.’
‘Somewhere important again, eh?’
‘Something like that.’
I flipped the TV back for a third look at the scene outside the News Building.
‘Poor things,’ I muttered.
‘Poor thing, you mean. Only one man got killed.’
‘No, I meant the machines. Like the man in that old Greek story: always having to push that boulder up the hill, but always having it roll back down again before he gets to the top.’
She smiled. ‘You really do have a soft spot for robots don’t you?’
32
I drew out all my share of my father’s inheritance, moving it first to several different bank accounts, then withdrawing much of it as cash: a suspicious act in Illyria, where cash was normally only used for small transactions, like buying kebabs from street vendors. I bought a car, and began stocking it with things that I might need. For Lucy I bought women’s clothes, and books, and several kilos of sugar (sugar was what kept her going, that and egg-white and lemon juice and the vitamin tablets that she needed to maintain her living skin). I visited Lucy daily to coach her over and over again in the plan I had devised.
Then one evening I was watching TV with Ruth – some dreary game show that she liked – and the programme was interrupted for an announcement from the President.
‘As many people are aware, there was a tragic incident recently, where a man was killed by a malfunctioning robot of the self-evolving variety. This is the only recorded incident of its kind, and I have every confidence in the benefits of self-evolving cybernetics, and in the Labour Replacement program introduced by my much-missed predecessor, Professor Ullman. Nevertheless, in order to ensure there is no repetition, and to ensure full public confidence in our robot labour force, I intend to introduce new security measures. As from today, all self-evolving robots will be subjected to a six monthly “wipe-clean”…’
‘How lovely!’ sighed Ruth dreamily, ‘To have all your memories wiped away and start again, over and over…’
I flipped off the TV and looked round at her. The announcement meant that it was time to go. If Lucy was wiped clean she would cease to be Lucy, and would become again the empty machine she had been when she first left the factory. But this meant leaving Ruth behind. And I realized I could say nothing at all to Ruth about it. No kind of goodbye was possible, no kind of warning, no kind of explanation.
‘Why did you turn the TV off, George?’ she complained, ‘It’ll go back to the show in a minute!’
‘I… er… wondered if you’d like me to come into SenSpace for a bit?’
She laughed.
‘I don’t believe you’ve ever said that before.’
Then she looked at me sharply.
‘George, you’re not going away are you?’
‘Of course not, what gave you that idea? I’m just bored of the TV.’
‘Good, because you know I would die if you ever left me.’
Late that night I helped Ruth climb out of her SenSpace suit and tucked her up in bed.
Then, when I was sure she was asleep, I opened cupboards and drawers and began the final stages of packing for my escape.
33
When at last I lay down and attempted, without much hope, to get some sleep, I sank for a short time into a dream in which I was travelling by bus to my father’s house, holding in my hand a letter I’d written on pages and pages of lined paper.
The journey was full of obstacles. One bus broke down. Another headed in the wrong direction. Then I lost my money. I had to walk and took a wrong turning which led up onto a wild, bare part of the mountainside.
And then, when I did eventually reach his house, there was no answer when I knocked on the door. I pushed open the letterbox to call to him. As I opened it, it gave a kind of sigh, sucking in the air.
I tried the door. I found that it was unlocked. As soon as the latch was released, the wind flung the door open, dragging me in and pulling the letter out of my hand. The sheets of paper went fluttering away up the stairs. When I chased after them I found there was a laboratory up there. There were computers, cables, sine wave monitors, gravitonic panels… and right in the middle of the room, there was a kind of Gate. It seemed to be responsible for the wind, because the pages of my letter went flying towards it. And through it, there was another world, a bone-white plain as bare and barren as the moon, sucking in the air of Earth. My papers were bowling away across the dusty plain. I rushed in after them. The Gate fell into the distance behind me, along with the small glimpse it afforded of the laboratory and sunlight and Earth.