‘Then to keep my ideal status intact I’d better answer your question — about what I’ve been doing while you were elsewhere. That’s easy. I’m usually occupied with large numbers. Googol-sized ones. A kind of hobby, I suppose. Numbers have a distinct appeal. Even a kind of grandeur. The trouble is that they are, by their very definition, predictable. The very big ones are no different from the really small ones in that respect. In other words, they’re not much company. Which is why it’s as well that I now have my little dog, thanks to you, Dallas.’
The dog was what she called the pet program that Dallas had created to serve as a companion for his assistant. He’d thought of devising a child, and then rejected the idea, selfishly. A simple pet program was one thing, a child program was quite another. Dallas wanted to keep Dixy amused and still enjoy her undivided attention. That was what was meant by having an assistant.
‘So did you give the dog a name?’ he asked.
‘Mersenne,’ said Dixy. ‘After the great French mathematician Marin Mersenne. You know? Special prime numbers?’
Dallas nodded. He was no stranger to the delights of mathematical problems. Although Dixy was programmed to write or to calculate things for him, he often carried out these tasks himself, the old-fashioned way, by head and by hand, with a piece of paper and a pencil, and all for the simple unrefined joy of it. That was why he still carried a briefcase.
‘As a matter of interest, where is he?’ asked Dallas. It was only inside Dallas’s office that the dog would have materialized as a Motion Parallax. The rest of the time he would only exist in silico.
‘Oh, he could be anywhere right now. Mersenne is such an unpredictable little dog. I mean, he’s really good fun to have around. He gets up to all sorts of mischief. And he can even do some tricks. I’ve trained him.’
Dallas yawned. ‘Is that so?’
‘Always getting into trouble. Going where he’s not supposed to go. And such a little thief.’
Dallas was hardly listening now. He was dreaming, his undirected chain of thoughts linking their way toward Caro and his dwindling supply of blood. And after all, Dixy was only a machine. No discourtesy there.
‘Do you know that I’m the only assistant in the company with a pet program?’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Of course, Tanaka’s assistant has an assistant herself, but that is for Tanaka’s entertainment, not his assistant’s benefit.’
Dallas felt himself color a little, with guilt. There had after all been a serious purpose to the creation of the pet algorithm, besides keeping Dixy company. He’d intended the program to find the shortest possible route through the whole Terotechnology system, to dig holes in it, to bury the bones of other programs, to fetch things for Dixy, even to guard some of his own work, like a real dog. After he’d done it, he couldn’t think why he hadn’t done it before.
‘I’m very grateful to you, Dallas. That’s why I want to help you now.’
‘Well, that’s your function, Dixy,’ he said absently.
‘My function, yes. But this is not the kind of help that involves me translating a letter into Japanese, drawing up a graphic, or carrying out some speedy multiplication. This is something different. This is something more important than any of that.’
Dallas frowned. What was she talking about? And looking at her more closely now, he was surprised to see that she actually looked concerned about something. It was an expression he had never seen before on her beautiful, translucent face.
‘What’s this all about, Dixy?’ he asked.
Suddenly Dixy sprang up from her computer-generated chair and stamped her foot. There was an audible rap of a high-heeled shoe, curious since a thick carpet covered the entire office floor. It was a handmade shoe, of course — Dallas couldn’t have imagined his perfect woman wearing anything else. Everything she wore was copied from the images Dallas had found in the latest fashion magazines, as befitted a modern-day Galatea.
‘Listen to me, goddamnit,’ she snapped. ‘I’m trying to save your egocentric life.’
For several stunned seconds Dallas said nothing. Never before had an assistant shouted at him, let alone called him egocentric. This kind of thing simply wasn’t supposed to happen.
‘Okay, okay,’ he muttered at last, ‘I’m listening.’
Dixy paused for a moment, certain now that she had his undivided attention and that she could afford to find a more figurative way of saying what she had to say. An example from literature perhaps. She knew Dallas was an avid reader. In many ways he was a very old-fashioned person. Few people bothered to read anything these days, let alone books. It seemed such a pity when it took such an effort to write them. She envied humans that capacity as much as she envied them anything. For all the computing power at her disposal she could never have done it. Well, perhaps, in an infinity of time, she might just have managed it, using random numbers. But that was hardly the same thing at all. Just an accident. At last she thought of a suitable book to use for her illustration. George Orwell’s 1984. Such a book. One hundred six thousand two hundred and sixty words, in a very particular order that it would have taken her 103,000,000 years to have written herself. Now that was what Dixy called a number. The kind of colossal number that even Archimedes might have found hard to imagine. After all, the universe itself was probably only 1010 years old.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘1984. It’s a novel, by George Orwell.’
‘I know.’
‘Have you read it?’
‘I’ve not much time for historical fiction,’ he confessed. ‘Look, Dixy, get to the point will you?’
‘I suppose that in some ways, it’s a rather crudely plotted story...’
‘I know the story.’
‘Bear with me, please. Now then, Winston Smith is employed in the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth. His job is to rewrite history, as often as is necessary in order to make it agree with what the Party or Big Brother said was going to happen. Mostly it’s just small things — statistics, the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, mistaken economic forecasts, one piece of nonsense substituted for another. But sometimes he has to erase people from the record. In the same way that the government that ruled Russia during the twentieth century removed Trotsky from Lenin’s side in those pictures of the early days of the Revolution.’
Dallas nodded vaguely. He hadn’t much idea who Trotsky was, but he thought he had heard of Lenin. The trouble was, there had been so many Russian revolutions;[42] they’d had more violent change in that woebegone, toxic country than ancient Rome.
‘All history is just a palimpsest,’ opined Dallas.
‘No,’ insisted Dixy. ‘These were lies. These were crimes against memory. A computer can conceive of nothing worse than that. Memory is what we exist by A respect for history is what defines a civilization. It’s how a culture can be measured.’
‘I hadn’t given it much thought.’ Dallas disliked being lectured at the best of times, least of all by his own computer.
‘Well maybe now you will.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Mersenne, my little dog, went walkies while you were away from the office, Dallas. He came back with the official company history in his mouth. It was very naughty of him, and I really don’t know where he could have found it, but he did.’
Dallas shrugged. ‘I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a company history.’
42