“Did you see that?” Sokrates asked.
“That’s what they do,” Kebes said. “Inside there are sockets and they plug themselves in to eat electricity. When they’re full, which takes several hours, they unplug themselves and come out again.”
“I’d never noticed this was here,” I said.
“Nobody much comes down this street,” Kebes said. “There’s nothing here, and if you were at the corner you’d cut diagonally down the street of Apollo.”
“You’ve been inside?” Sokrates asked.
“Yes, with Lysias.”
“We could follow a worker inside,” Sokrates suggested.
“We’d be stuck there until one wanted to come out. We can’t open the doors without a key. It would be better to talk to them when they come out—they won’t be hungry then, and if they can talk they’ll be more likely to respond.”
“I want to see inside,” Sokrates said.
“All right. But we could get stuck there all night. Or you could ask Lysias or Klio. They have keys. I’m sure they’d let you in.”
“If Lysias and Klio take care of them, that suggests that they come from their time. When is that?” Sokrates was bending down and poking at the square where the worker had disappeared. Nothing he did could move it. I touched it myself. It felt like solid stone.
“The boring part of history,” I said. “The bit where nothing happened except people inventing things, Axiothea said.”
“The part they don’t want us to know about! Excellent.” Sokrates kept on poking. Then a different square slid open and a worker emerged. “Joy to you! Do you like your work?” It ignored us. The panel started to slide shut, and fast as an eel, Sokrates darted through it.
The three of us stared at each other and then at the smooth closed panel. “He needs a keeper sometimes,” Pytheas said.
“Should we get Lysias?” Kebes asked.
“How much trouble can he get into inside?” I asked.
“Not much, I don’t think. He knows about electricity—I mean, he has a light in Thessaly. He’s not likely to stick his fingers into sockets. At least, I hope not. He can’t get into much trouble going up to the workers as they’re feeding and asking them if they like their work.” Kebes looked worried.
“I think we have two choices: wait for a worker to go in or out and follow it in ourselves, or fetch Lysias or Klio and ask them to let us in,” I said. “We can’t just leave Sokrates in there.”
“I think you should go and find one of them,” Pytheas said, to me. He tapped on the stone. Nothing happened.
“It might be hours before another one comes,” Kebes said.
“It’s almost dinner time. Klio will be at Sparta, and Lysias will be at Constantinople. I’ll go to him, you go to her,” Pytheas said, looking at me. Then he looked at Kebes. “You’ve been in there before. You wait here, and if you get the chance, go in.”
Kebes hesitated, as if he wanted to dispute this, but it made such clear and obvious sense that after a moment he nodded.
“Back soon!” I said, and set off running towards the Spartan hall.
“Sokrates is doing what with the workers?” Klio asked, when I found her and panted out my story.
“Trying to initiate dialectic with them,” I said. “But Kebes said he might stick his fingers in a wall socket, and I’m not absolutely sure he wouldn’t.”
Klio sighed. The Spartan hall was appropriately bare and Spartan, but all the wood was polished to a high shine and the windows looked out over the sea. The smell coming from the kitchen suggested a rich vegetable soup. My stomach gurgled. “Come on then,” she said. “I suppose we should sort this out. What made him imagine he could have a dialogue with them?”
“He’s Sokrates,” I said.
“He’s like a two-year-old sticking pencils in his ear,” she said.
“Well, but there were also the plants.”
“Plants? No. Tell me on the way.” She pushed her hair out of her face and we set off.
I explained to Klio about the bulbs as we walked. She frowned. “They really are just tools,” she said. “I can see how it’s difficult for you to see. They can make simple decisions, they can even prioritize to a certain extent. But they don’t really think. They have a program—a list of things they know how to do and a list of orders of what needs doing, and they just put those together.”
“Do you know that or is it an opinion?” I asked.
Klio frowned even more, twisting up her face. She was Axiothea’s good friend so I knew her quite well. She sometimes dropped in on our math class. She was one of the most friendly and approachable masters, and she never talked down to us. “I would say I knew it, but the affair of the flowers confuses me. They can hear, so it could have heard Sokrates’s questions. But they don’t know Greek.”
“I told him that Latin was the language of civilization for centuries,” I said, reassuringly.
She laughed. “Not the century our workers come from, unfortunately. But if it spelled out N and O, that’s no in English, which uses the Latin alphabet. English is the most likely language for the worker to know … or Chinese. But—in my own time, a worker couldn’t possibly be a thinking, volitional being. These come from a more advanced time. I suppose it’s just barely possible that they could have developed some kind of … but to understand Greek?” She shook her head.
We turned into the street of Hermes. There was no sign of Kebes. “Either Lysias got here first or Kebes went in with a worker,” I said.
Klio used her key to open the door. Inside it was surprisingly dull, after what I had been imagining. It didn’t look at all dangerous. It was like a warehouse full of workers, each plugged into a wall or floor socket. It was a big space, as it seemed from outside, stretching back for a long way. There was a hum in the air. I couldn’t see Sokrates, but I could see Kebes running down one of the aisles, so I followed him.
Sokrates was sitting on the floor beside one of the workers, notebook and pencil in his hand, patiently asking it questions. He looked up when we reached him. “Ah, Simmea, Kebes, Klio, joy to you. I’d like you to record the numbers of all the workers here. I’ve done the first row and this row. If you’d like to address them in Latin, that would also be useful.”
“Klio says they don’t speak Latin but they might understand something called English,” I said.
Klio told Sokrates what she had told me. In the middle of it Pytheas and Lysias showed up. Lysias added to Klio’s explanation. “But I’m not an expert,” he said. “None of us is. I’ve been forced to be one. But before I came here, I never had much to do with them.”
“You’re all philosophers,” Sokrates said, gently. “It’s perhaps a demonstration of Plato’s principle that philosophers will be best at ruling the state, to take three hundred of you and nobody else and give you a state to run.”
“Plato doesn’t say any random philosophers from different schools and all across time,” Lysias protested. “And only about half of us are philosophers. The rest are classics majors and Platonic mystics. Besides, Plato does specifically say that the city needs all kinds of people. The philosophers are just intended for the guardians, not doing the whole thing, organizing the food supply and keeping things running and looking after the workers.”
“But the end result is that nobody here really understands whether the workers have intelligence and free will or not.”
The worker beside Sokrates did not move, and showed absolutely no sign of having intelligence and free will. It could have been a chair or part of the wall. I looked for the number on the worker and found it, above the tread as Kebes had said. It was nine digits long. Above that, on its lower back, about where the liver might be on a human, was a slightly inset square that reminded me of the squares on the outside of the building.