Only Human (2 page)

Dad's office. It's considered bad taste to refer to it as the Holy of Holies; but that's where Mainframe sits, with its one square all-seeing eye and its ineffable keyboard, the PC of God that passeth all understanding. It's largely due to Mainframe that Dad and Jay were able to take a holiday in the first place. Sure, it's only a computer; but that's understating the issue. There's computers, and there's the Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits 986. As the KIC rep said when he sold them the thing, if they'd had one of these babies back in the old days, there'd have been no need to bother with the Fall of Man, let alone the Flood and the Tower of Babel. All that shuffling about in mysterious ways - could've saved yourselves the bother. Through a glass darkly - would've been no need for all that. And now at last you've got one, just plug it in, walk away and forget.To err is human; to forgive divine; to forgive while running climate, life support, destiny, divine mercy, the ineffable and both basic and advanced self-maintenance routines
and
still have enough spare capacity to run a version of Lemmings guaranteed to baffle even the truly omniscient takes a genuinely advanced computer.

Or, more precisely, computer/word processor/home entertainment system. A comprehensive three-in-one package. A Trinity, even.

Kevin scowls at the glowing letters on the screen. ‘No thanks,' he mutters. ‘I've already got one. Access at primary level, please.'

Needless to say, Mainframe's screen isn't just glass; more a sort of burning bush arrangement, with letters of fire that burn without consuming.With a grin Kevin opens his father's cigar box and extracts something resembling the trunk of an outsize Giant Redwood. As he leans forward to light it in the fires of Mainframe, he allows the grin to widen, like the San Andreas fault yawning.

‘Security codes,' he repeats. ‘And if I give you the codes, you let me in. Right?'

‘You reckon?' Kevin inhales smoke, splutters and hiccups. ‘Stand by for access codes.'

The search for the numbers that allow access to Mainframe has obsessed theologians ever since the first medieval monk speculated as to how many angels can dance on the head of a PIN. What St Thomas Aquinas and the rest of that crowd never had, of course, was the chance to rummage through Jay's waste-paper basket the day after the system was installed. Kevin types in twelve numbers, sits back in his father's swivel chair and waits.

There is, of course, no time in Heaven; the stuff that lasts as long as time and performs roughly the same function is just uncorrected systems inertia.

‘None of your business, you machine. Now, do I get to log on or not?'

The screen fills; all the kingdoms of the Earth, in digital form, a temptation beyond endurance.

Just a little peek won't hurt anybody . . .

Kevin opens a drawer of the desk and takes out the manual. It occurs to him as he lifts it that it's a very short, thin manual for such a powerful and complex computer. He consults the index, turns to the appropriate page. It reads:

He raises an eyebrow, puzzled; then the penny drops. Of course, the software's been custom-written for use by omniscient and omnipotent beings; no wonder it's a very thin manual. He flicks through the pages, which are full of phrases like
as you know better than we do
and
you don't need us to tell you that
. . . With a sigh he closes the book and dumps it back in the drawer.

Even so.

Can't be all that difficult, can it?

Kevin Christ takes a deep breath, reaches out with one finger. A tiny spark of blue flame arcs from his fingertip to the keyboard, Sistine Chapel style.

He presses—

 

There was a machine.

It stood as tall as a man, resting on a square pedestal of close-grained cast iron, and weighed close on two tons. From a distance it looked a bit like a sitting man, with his head bent forwards and a tray on his knees, as if it might be a statue of Man with TV Dinner; except that the head housed the five-horsepower motor that spun the chuck that held the cutting head, and the tray was the table, to which was bolted the vice that held the work. At the edges of the table were round handles, calibrated and sub-calibrated in divisions of ten thousandths of an inch; and there was an electronic digital readout mounted on a bracket, capable of showing the depth of the cut in three dimensions to four decimal places. On the side of the head there was a little enamelled plate, which said:
along with a lot of guff about power ratings and amperages and speeds and feeds and the like. It stood at the back of a huge factory shopfloor, one of about seventy large, impressive machines, all of them chuntering and chattering and screeking and thutthutthutting away, three shifts a day, three hundred and sixty days a year.

I'm bored,
it thought.

For the last six months, all it had done was cut slots in the heads of bolts; a thousand bolt-heads a day, one automated pass of the table, feed back, automated chuck in the vice ejects finished bolt, automated hopper feeds new bolt, chuck closes, table feeds, one pass under the cutter, automated chuck ejects.

Once ejected, the bolt falls down a chute on to a conveyor belt, which carries it away to another chute, where it tumbles away into another hopper leading to the packing machine—

Sitting on a chair beside the machine, chewing gum and reading a tabloid newspaper, was a human; twenty-two years old, thin, gawkish, answering to the name Neville. There was very little for Neville to do, because he was there in case the machine went wrong, and it never did. So, between eight in the morning and morning tea-break, he read the paper (all except the long, difficult words, like
although
and
tomorrow
and
seven
), and the rest of the day he dozed, except when his single, highly developed sense told him the foreman was coming.

Blandly described in the insurance inventory as ‘Shipcock & Adley Universal Milling, Turning & Shaping Machine #21754', the machine is the last triumphant step in a journey that started when a monkey bent down and picked up a piece of stone, long ago and far away. Program its computerised memory, and it could make you anything from a single earring back to an engine for a battleship, machined with exact precision from the solid metal. Or it could cut the slots in the heads of a hundred thousand identical bolts, one after another after another . . .

As it stood and whirred and moved and fed and cut and opened and closed, the machine dreamed. Deep inside its cast-iron and steel head, visions swirled, condensed and took shape. Lines and angles spun and twirled through five dimensions, raced outwards like speeded-up film of an unfurling flower, while in the subtext a chattering rivulet of equations bounced and sparkled, twittering excitedly of shearing forces and tensile strengths, tolerances, allowances and elastic limits; a vast and inexpressibly grand fugue upon the theme
I could do your job.
Twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty days a year; nothing to do but think, and dream.

Piece of cake,
said the machine to itself.

In its mind's eye it could see itself, brilliantly modified to its own design, all the changes made with breathtaking economy of function, every knock-on effect and permutation thought through and allowed for and treated not as a hindrance but an opportunity, until it was completely and categorically perfect, able to make anything that its own staggeringly powerful mind could conceive of -

Yeah. I could really be somebody, y'know?
- and all the while the human, the pig-ignorant, brain-dead, spineless wonder of a human slumped and snored or moved his lips in time to the short and easy words. How that was possible the machine couldn't begin to understand. A human; with a human brain and hands, able to move about under its own power, communicate with other humans, capable of reason and development—

You pillock.You waste of good plant and equipment
. . .

Dispiritedly, unsure quite why it bothered, the machine went back to refining the last few details of its revolutionary improvements to its own automatic table feed mechanism, while the automated chuck in the vice ejected a finished bolt, the automated hopper fed a new pointless and insultingly superfluous bolt, the chuck closed, the table somewhat predictably fed; one pass under the cutter, automated chuck ejects . . .

The newspaper slipped from Neville's fingers. His pimply chin (what there was of it) slipped forward on to his bony chest. Inaudible against the background noise of steel on steel, he snored gently.

. . .
Do we not get ideas?

Whereupon, coincidentally at the precise moment a boy started pressing buttons he had no business fiddling with in an office that was both a long way away and very close at hand, the machine found itself drifting.

It realised that its viewpoint was somewhere up among the steel rafters of the roofspace, looking down over the tops of its fellow machines, the partings and bald patches of the humans, the currents of hot air rising from the whirring fans and superheated metal-to-metal contacts of the cutters. From up here—

Whee! Guess this is some kind of out-of-casing experience. And now I suppose my entire service history's going to flash in front of my readouts
. . .

The viewpoint swooped, zoomed in; and the machine was looking directly into Neville's ear. Squinting round the earring, it could see—

The other side of the workshop. Head entirely empty. Nothing in there except air and -

- opportunity?

Ah, but machine's reach must exceed its grasp, or what's a workshop for? Cautious but firm, the machine kicked away the stool on which Disbelief 's feet were resting and left it kicking and struggling in the air. And,
in
. . .

Inside the human's head . . .

And there was the human; presumably its soul, or its vital force, or whatever you chose to call it. Typically enough, it was fast asleep in front of a droning mental telly, surrounded by a litter of empty cans and chip wrappers. Before it knew what it was doing, the machine had bundled the soul up in an old blanket, run it across the interior of the head and slung it out of its own ear.

Aaaaagh
. . .

Serves the bugger right.

Hey! I sound different in here.

I could get to like this.

It watched as the human's chubby little soul fell through the air, bounced off the concrete floor, landed in the hopper, rattled down through the tray of bolts, got knocked flying by the edge of the Woodruff cutter in the chuck and sailed into the air again, to crash-land on top of the ventilation slots -

- and get sucked in.

Hey, mused the machine, fair exchange, no robbery. It - he - snorted in a snatch of breath and issued a command; fingers, flex!

The fingers flexed; fourteen joints moving together under the control of a net of tough, supple sinew to the direction of a network of nerves so intricate and involved that it made a video with the back off or a street map of Birmingham look simplistic in comparison. Simultaneously the machine's mind worked out the maths behind this unbelievably smooth, complex relay of motor functions. If it'd had a hat, it'd have taken it off.

Wow! Do that again.

And again.

And again.

A human - the machine recognised him, Derek who worked the big turret lathe - stopped on his way back from the toilets and stared at the machine's Doctor Strangelove hand.

‘Here, Nev,' it asked, ‘you feeling all right?'

Nev? Oh, right.
Head, nod! Hey, how d'you do that!
The human shrugged and walked on.

Nev. I am Nev.

No I bloody well am not. I haven't just escaped from inside an artefact and hijacked a sentient life-form just to be a Nev. No; I'm a . . .

He looked. He saw a small enamel plaque riveted to the head of the machine. He found he could read it.

I'm not a Nev.

I'm Leonardo.

 

Bleep, says the computer.

‘Huh?'

A cold finger strokes Kevin's heart. ‘Do what?' he asks.

‘Did I just do something? Oh, Basement. Computer, what did I just do?'