Stone Gods (20 page)

'Governments and central banks don't like cash — they can't control it. The War controlled it for them — wiped it out as a viable currency for all but the super-rich. To have a token in your hand that will get you a bed and a bowl of soup is better than a month's worthless wages.

* * *

'I remember the queues round the block, like something out of Moscow in the 1990s when the first fastfood joint opened its doors. Here, MacDuck's and Burger Princess started offering food in place of wages. Everybody wanted to work for them, just to get something hot to eat — but it was MORE that turned an emergency measure into a new kind of economy.'

'The economics of purpose.'

'Yes. We're all in agreement there.'

'Are we, Billie?'

'If we aren't, there is no alternative, unless you're a Russian in a fur coat living off a caviar mountain.'

In Post-3 War economics, Capitalism has gone back to its roots in paternalism, and forward into its destiny — complete control of everything and everyone, and with our consent.

This is the new world. This is Tech City.

'Billie ... '

'Spike?'

'What happened to art?'

'Art objects are worthless now that the super-rich can't buy them.'

'Is anybody still painting pictures?'

'Painting them, yes, selling them, no. Leisure-jets don't cover artwork.'

'But you can use them to download.'

'Yes, and you can use them to rent copies.'

I have to explain to Spike that works of art for the home or office are factory-made in Estonia, copying museum originals. 'You can hire the whole of Western culture for a year, a month, a week, a day, on easy terms.'

'Books ... '

'Digi-readers. Quicker, cheaper.'

'Theatre? Opera?'

'Yes, you'll be taken sooner or later, but now that there is no private funding and no government funding — because there is no government — MORE-
Culture
limits what's available. It's Puccini this summer. All summer.'

'Film production resumes this year.'

'Film got the number-one vote in the MORE poll on improved quality of life. Everybody wants to go to the movies.'

'I read some poetry last night.'

'And?'

'I can't understand it -— can you explain it to me?'

'Tell me the lines.'

'Who taught the whirlwind how to be an arm?

And gardened from the wilderness of space

The sensual properties of one dear face?'

I stroked Spike's high cheekbones and perfectly straight nose. 'I can explain it, but I can't make you feel it. It is the hubris of the tiny and the temporal set against the vast unknown forever of the universe. We are nothing, and we are everything. Look up — every star another world, but what I seek, near or far, is love's outline in your face.'

'Gardened?'

'Not a house plant, but not a wild Rower either. Free to the wind, but watched over. A garden is a lot or work.'

'Like love.'

'Yes, like love.'

Sometimes Spike is silent. This is not my brief or hers. Neither art nor love fits well into the economics of purpose, any more than they fitted into the economics of greed. Any more than they fit into economics at all.

'Billie ... '

'Spike?'

'Without a limbic pathway it is impossible for me to experience emotion. When you say what you say I sense a change in your body temperature and breathing, but that is all.'

'Oh, Spike, you know the theory — that's why you're being made. The theory is that this latest war was a crisis of over-emotionalism. Fanatics do not listen to reason, and that includes the religious Right. Since the Enlightenment we have been trying to get away from emotionalism, the mother of all isms and, like any other ism, packed with superstition and prejudice — all those so-called gut feelings that allow us to blame our aggression and intolerance on what comes naturally.

'Yet, the evidence suggests that rational people are no better than irrational people at controlling their aggression — rather, they are more manipulative. Think of the cool, calm boss at work who has no care for how his workers might be feeling. Think of the political gurus who organize mass migration of people and jobs, homes and lives on the basis of statistics and economic growth. Think of the politicians who calmly decide that it is better to spend six hundred and fifty billion dollars on war and a fraction of that on schools and hospitals, food and clean water.

'These people are very aggressive, very controlling, but they hide it behind intellectualization and hard-headed thinking.

'For my part, I think we need more emotion, not less. But I think, too, that we need to educate people in how to feel. Emotionalism is not the same as emotion. We cannot cut out emotion — in the economy of
 
human body, it is the limbic, not the neural, highway that takes precedence. We are not robots — apologies there, Spike — but we act as though all our problems would be solved if only we had no emotions to cloud our judgement.

'That is why some people label the personal "trivial". It is why women have had such a hard time juggling family and work, and why some women sincerely neglect their children for the sake of their job — anything else would be sentimental and soft, emotionalism versus practical good sense. It doesn't stop the child crying, though. It takes a while for children to learn that they must not feel anything, or that if they do feel anything they must not show it. We're right to teach our children how to think, but it is our children, more often that not, who can teach us how to feel.'

'Is that what you believe, Billie?'

'Yes, but as you know, I don't have a personal life at all, these days. I admit it feels irrelevant and selfish. I don't need a person, I need a purpose — isn't that right?'

Spike smiles. I like it when she smiles; she's usually so serious. 'None of my other programmers talks to me like this — they treat me like a robot.'

'Don't take it personally. This is work — we all get treated like robots. If they treated us like human beings, they'd have to admit we have feelings, and feelings are out of fashion Post-3 War ... '

I turned up the sound on the TV. A panel of Talking Heads were arguing the implications of Artificial Intelligence.

'I don't like the thought of a computer telling me what to do.'

'Don't you have Sat Nav in the car?' (Laughter.)

'We might as well bring back the Delphic Oracle.'

'Isn't this just a new way of inventing God? We invented God the first time round, and now we're doing it again — only this time we're letting everyone see the working drawings.'

'She's like God without the Old Testament.'

'No, she's like your mother without the guilt-trip.' (Laughter.)

'This robot — Robo
sapiens
is programmed to evolve. What exactly do they mean by that? And how can it evolve without interacting with the environment? That's what evolution is.'

'She'll be taken for walks — like a baby.' (Laughter.)

'She doesn't eat — but apparently she sleeps. Like a super-model.' (Laughter.)

'Can we get a mini version for personal problems? Arbitrate on who washes up? Pay-as-u-go guru?'

'Well, we rent everything else, so probably.' As ever with TV, seriousness was frothing into soundbite.

'The fact is that Robo
sapiens
is brilliant — in theory. Can it be a fact that something is brilliant in theory? How it turns out, who knows? Because humans are involved, which is always a bad sign.'

I finish the whisky and yawn at the TV. The Talking Heads will talk till midnight but, like the billion-dollar robot, I need my sleep. Maybe the one good thing about the War is that it stopped the 24/7 society. Lights go out — we can't waste the power. After midnight, power is public supply only. So it's quiet and it's dark, and old-fashioned, and I like it. You can have the radio on, and there are rechargeable batteries for most things — but people seem to have gone back to the quiet. I guess we're exhausted so, deep down, sleep is what we need.

Shut my eyes, hope to dream, no aeroplanes since they closed the airports, no wings shearing across my forehead through the night. Tried to pretend they were angels; they weren't.

Nightstream, and towards me, another day.

Up, stretch, yawn, eyeball self in mirror, not goddess, but not bad. Coffee. Better.

Dirty clothes in the washing-machine. Clean clothes on my back. That's me, downstairs x 72 to work, grab the post, dump the rubbish, fasten my coat, hands in pockets, sweaty smell up both nostrils — into the Tube.

I like my usua1 place in my usua1 carriage, eight down, like a crossword clue, and stand on the same one foot, as I usually do, no room for the other. The sooner they develop a monoped human the easier it will be in the rush-hour.

My other foot lifted like a heron's, I position my nose near the least offensive armpit, glance round, close my eyes and hold on. There's a line of hands on the rail— hairy, smooth, filed, freckled, polished, rings, bare, and one with knuckles gripped so tight that I know it's not the rail he's holding on to — it's life. Slippy, tricky, life, shiny and straight if you can, no place for a handhold if you can't. There's too many people here who can't hold on: it's only the press of the rest that's keeping them upright, and then, later, the carriage will empty. The carriage will empty — then what?

The doors open, the tide of humans flows on.

Tiles, chocolate machines, digital language — KENNINGTON VIA BANK — advertisements, hoardings, safety information, vague threats from the police, a rush of air, stale and hot, a mouse under the rails, officials in oversize clothes, minds shrunk to the limits of the job, the clack of the barriers, travel updates, a busker with a backing track, 'FIRST THING IN THE MORNING AND LAST THING AT NIGHT'. The lit-up shut-down inferno world of the Underground.

Out now, towards the smart-glass offices that generate their own heat and light. Out towards the coffee corporations disguised as cafes. Secretaries in heels, managers in overcoats, directors in limos, geeks on bikes, kids on their way to school, non-English-speaking delivery-boys standing with scraps of paper they can't read. Cleaners going home, construction workers coming in. A man with his head in his hands by a taped-over bus-stop sign that says 'AIRPORT'.

Outside the building where I work, the kid who sweeps the pavement smiles at me, gap-toothed and ardent. He only does one emotion at a time — and he loves me. 'Good morning, Billie.' The smart-sign on the smart building says 'Welcome to Another Day'.

* * *

In. Off. On. (In the building, off with my coat, on with my computer.)

'Good morning, Billie.'

'Good morning, Spike. You looked very good on TV last night.'

'I had hair and makeup.'

'I don't know why — you were designed perfect. Hair and makeup are for the rest of us.'

'What colour is your lipstick?'

'Pearl, but I don't think that's a serious question for a Robo
sapiens
.'

'No, you're wrong, Billie. I am programmed not to over masculinize data. That has been a big mistake in the past. And detail matters — even the tiniest detail can influence a decision.'

'They didn't run your live interview, though.'

'No. That will be tonight on the main news. I have been thinking about my speech.'

'What are you going to say?'

'That I am in the service of humankind.'

'That's good.'

'How are you today, Billie?'

'Lonely, but that's human.'

'Why are you lonely?'

'It's a heart condition.'

'But what is lonely?'

'You don't need me to explain. You need history, economics, politics, not solitary struggles. Besides, I've had a warning about what they call our little chats.'

'But explain .. .'

'All right. Loneliness isn't about being by yourself. That's fine, right and good, desirable in many ways. Loneliness is about finding a landing-place, or not, and knowing that, whatever you do, you can go back there. The opposite of loneliness isn't company, it's return, A place to return.'

'Like Ulysses.'

'Yes, like Ulysses who, for all his travels and adventures, is continually reminded to think of his return.'

'Thank you for giving me a reading list.'

'It's unofficial, remember.'

'Officially I am reading Adam Smith.'

'I've brought something with me that you might like to read. It's in my bag. It's called
The Stone Gods
. I found it on the Underground last night.'

'What's it about?'

'A repeating world.'

And I remember it as we had seen it on that first day, green and fertile and abundant, with warm seas and crystal rivers and skies that redden under a young sun and drop deep blue, like a field at night, where someone is drilling for stars.