The Stone Gods

And so, while we were all arguing about whether it was Christian or Pagan, Democratic or Conservative to save the planet, and whether technology would solve all our problems, and whether we should fly less, drive less, eat less, weigh less, consume less, dump less, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose to 550 parts per million, the ice-caps melted, and Iran launched a nuclear attack on the USA.

  The policy wonks had miscalculated. We got blown up.

  The rest, as they say, is history. But this isn’t history, this is Post-3War.

  Out now, up the shiny silver escalator. Out now on to the beating streets, where light and noise bounce off each other, into the wraparound neon-night. Late-night girls in miniskirts, and pinstripe men, ties off, adjusting their flies, digiscreens with the latest Xtra, a dosser under a blanket in the bay of a shut-up shop, siren like a saw cutting through the bus-lane, flashing blue against the dark office windows, crash of bottles as a cyclist skids up on to the pavement and through a line of Becks left outside All Bar One.

  Run through the noise and neon. Get home.

  Home is upstairs × 72. Three locks, keys on the bathroom floor, glass of water, clothes in a heap, teeth, wash, whisky, switch on the TV.

  There she is – on all the channels: the world’s first Robo sapiens. She looks amazing – clear skin, green eyes, dark hair. She has no body because she won’t need one. She is a perfect head on a titanium plate. She’s like a prophet, she’s like a thing out of Dante, she’s Oz, she’s Medusa, she’s Winnie, she’s God.

  She’s being developed to take the planet-sized decisions that human beings are so bad at. The interviewer is grilling the President of MORE-Futures about putting robots in charge of people.

  INTERVIEWER: So why are we handing over our lives to a robot?

  PMF: Computers already help us manage our lives, from weather-forecasting to the timer on your heating. For decades we have been developing interactive computers – which is what a robot is – computers that deal with people. Robo sapiens takes the experiment further.

  INTERVIEWER: What is this super-Bot designed to do?

  PMF: She will help us to reach objective decisions. We’ve just survived a war nobody thought could happen. If we don’t want it to happen again, we need to do better than the vested interests of governments and politicians.

  INTERVIEWER: You’re saying this robot could prevent a war?

  PMF: That’s what I’m saying. MORE has done all it can to rebuild our countries since the blow-up, but we have no credible systems of government left. Nobody wants to vote, nobody is interested in the lies of politicians. There has been some criticism of MORE, that we are taking control of the world by stealth. That is not our purpose. I have children; I want them to grow up safe. If a robot can help make a safer world, then bring on the robot.

  INTERVIEWER: You talk about the vested interests of governments – but MORE is a global company – you have your own vested interests, don’t you?

  PMF: Of course – and, like anybody else, we will make mistakes. The Robo sapiens is a corrective. No major decisions that impact on the lives of others will be taken without running all the data through her. This isn’t whitewash, this isn’t spin, this is accountability.

  INTERVIEWER: Why is she going to be so much better than the rest of us?

  PMF: She will be linked to a vast Mainframe computer – something no human can be. It will be like having all the Nobel Prize winners working together for the good of mankind. And because she isn’t motivated by greed or power, because she isn’t political or ideological, she can arrive at the best answers. We may not want to hear those answers – maybe we won’t act on them. Ultimately we are the ones in control.

  INTERVIEWER: But who is controlling the computer?

  PMF: This isn’t some sinister corporate plot to rule the world. MORE is a trading company, and we’ll go on doing what we do best – but I think we’ve shown that of every powerful organization, governmental and non-governmental, MORE is the only one to have got on the ground and delivered the goods, Post-3War.

  I turn down the sound and pour MORE whisky over the ice. (They own the State distillery.) It’s true what he says: millions of people will be nodding in agreement and fixing themselves another drink.

  MORE had been the world’s most aggressive free-marketeers; regulation-wreckers, carbon-kings. Their expensive lawyers fought anti-pollution agreements, tariffs, subsidies, anything that looked like a brake on consumer spending. MORE stood for unlimited air travel, six cars per family, six hundred TV channels, no censorship, no trade unions, no government interference in trade. Pre-War, the ‘MORE is MORE’ bumper stickers sold the high-living lifestyle to the world.

  And we bought it.

  But then came the bomb – not in somebody else’s country, in ours – and while the politicians were in their secure bunkers, or blaming others and hand-wringing on TV, MORE executives and employees were rallying the world from the local to the global.

  MORE Vice-President Ralph J. Kennedy tended the burned and the wounded from his own mobile field hospitals. MORE-Medicines joined with partner group MORE-Motors to send free aid wherever it was needed. This was action, not rhetoric; this was compassion, not excuses.

  MORE took on the flattened wrecks of smoking cities and made a public appeal for citizens to come forward, clear and build. We all came forward, there was no going back, and we built apartments and shops and roads, and for the first time in a long time there seemed to be some purpose in what we were doing.

  We weren’t staring at computer screens, or moving shameless piles of cash round a whored-out world: we were building, making, doing, active verbs that rolled off the fat, piled on the muscle and sent us home without discontent. Side by side the warmongers and the war-weary were doing something at last that we could stand back and admire.

  The War on Terror had brought out the worst in everyone – fear the burka and the backpack, fear the mosque and the mezuzah, fear shoes, belts, water-bottles, unscheduled stops, fear the unmarked white van. Fear the stranger. The real war was different–with very little left for anyone. There was no Us and Them: there were the Living and the Dead.

  Government was finished. ‘No MORE War’ became the new slogan for a new kind of global company.

  Like most people, I am an employee of MORE. In fact, I am an employee of MORE-Futures. In fact, I work on the Robo sapiens – Spike is what I do.

  ‘Good morning, Billie.’

  ‘Good morning, Spike.’

  And so every day begins for us – as I teach a robot to understand what it means to be human. She has all the information, all the education, but if you are not a human, how do you begin?

  ‘Human beings are the most aggressive species on the planet. They will readily kill each other for territory and resources, but they will also kill each other for worshipping the wrong sky-god, or for failing to worship any god at all.’

  ‘Does God exist?’

  ‘No one can answer that question, Spike. We’re rather hoping that you will be able to answer it – when you’re ready.’

  ‘Do most human beings still believe in God?’

  ‘Yes, on a head-count of the entire planet population, more believe in God than don’t believe in God. The ones who don’t believe blame religion for the ills of the world, and while this is an attractive theory, especially among scientists, it does not account for the part that science and technology have played in bringing about mass destruction. You can believe what you like, but without guns and bombs, the damage you can do to yourselves and others is fairly limited.’

  ‘What about the Inquisition?’

  ‘Nasty business. Go to Mainframe.’

  I am not here to input moral purpose – I am here to note Spike’s concerns and to direct her to Mainframe where she can connect to the spectrum of existing knowledge.

  The strange thing is that although Spike is a robot we chat. I tell her about my life.

  ‘When were you born, Billie?’

  ‘
In the third quarter of the twentieth century. I looked back through my parents to a world hardly imaginable now, a world of modest personal aspirations and very little materialism. If you had a car in the 1960s you were King of the Heap.’

  ‘Did your parents have a car?’

  ‘My parents had no car, no bank account, no washing-machine, no phone. And they weren’t my parents. So I had one thing less, or maybe two things less than they did.’

  ‘Who were your parents?’

  ‘I don’t know. I lost them. I don’t suppose they had very much either.’

  ‘Why were you so poor?’

  ‘We were poor, it’s true, but if you look at the 1950s, when my mother was growing up, it was a time of optimism. The world war had finished, rationing had finished, it was the beginning of the Welfare State. People wanted very little – my sort of people anyway – enough decent food, a place to live, steady employment, a week’s holiday in the summer. It reads like another life – too far away to imagine, but in time terms, it’s very near.

  ‘The world you are looking at now, the world that made way for World War Three, really begins in the 1980s when materialism became the dominant value. If you couldn’t buy it, spend it, trade it or develop it, it didn’t exist.’

  ‘I have been studying the transition from the economics of greed to the economics of purpose.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s what you could call it.’

  ‘What would you call it, Billie?’

  ‘Spike, Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off. If there were only two people left on the planet, one of them would find a way of making money out of the other.’

  ‘But economics of purpose is not about making money: it is about realigning resources.’

  ‘Isn’t language wonderful?’

  Post-3War, when there was no money, and people were sick of hearing the word ‘money’, MORE realized that a company’s survival could no longer be about selling things, though it could be about supplying things. Theirs was a genius move that transformed late-market Capitalism.

  Take a Buy-me-Buy-me world and turn it into a Rent-me-Rent-me world. I rent my apartment and the furniture in it. Carbon-rationing means that all of my household appliances – fridge, washing-machine, etc. – must be state-of-the-art or, rather, state-of-the-tech, which changes roughly every six months. I have to ‘uprate’, and the rental company does that for me, at a small premium on top of what I regularly pay. Private-car ownership is not allowed, but I can hire an electric car if I need one.

  Consumerism looks ugly, these days. Renting is genius: we still pay, but we don’t own. ‘Good for cashflow, good for conscience’, as we say at MORE.

  ‘Did you get your new wardrobe allocation? I haven’t seen that dress before.’

  ‘Yes, I took the de-luxe rental this time – I usually just get the basics.’

  ‘Before the War, you used to buy your clothes.’

  ‘Yes, but this is better. You see, Spike, clothes hire used to be reserved for renting penguin suits …’

  ‘Why did people want to dress as penguins?’

  ‘And ballgowns.’

  ‘Why did people want to dress as balls?’

  ‘But now we rent everything, which means that when the rental period ends, you must turn in your clothes, so it’s not as though you’re a silly, wasteful, fashion-led bitch when you trip into town with armfuls of cast-offs. No, we’re modest and eco-conscious members of a new world order, honouring the terms of our rental agreements.’

  ‘What is the Black Market?’

  ‘It’s where I sell my pre-War knickers.’

  It’s true – there’s a booming business in pre-War clothes, especially knickers. For some reason women don’t like renting knickers: it seems to be the bottom line.

  ‘The Black Market, Spike, is what happens when there is a gap between supply and demand. Women want to own their own knickers. In the new world we don’t own anything so there will always be a Black Market. On the other hand, when all we did was buy things, in the days when it was cool to own as much as possible, there was still a Black Market – mainly copies of luxury goods.’

  ‘Like Prada handbags.’

  ‘Yes, though I always considered a Prada handbag to be an essential item.’

  ‘Prada Workwear is very popular now.’

  ‘It was clever of them to think of that – and not available on the standard rental.’

  ‘Did you like earning money?’

  ‘No – it was never enough. Nobody ever had enough money. Rich or poor, money was scarce. The more we had, the less it seemed to buy, and the more we bought, the less satisfied we became. It was a relief when money was gone.’

  MORE pioneered the jeton scheme. Named after the dinky French tokens beloved of illicit romancers and petty criminals, jetons used to work the public phones and pay for rounds of table-football in small-town bars. Now, like nineteenth-century mill-workers’ ‘shillings’, tradable only in the factory, jetons have replaced wages and cash. Sign up to a company for a minimum term of five years and receive in return rent-jets, food-jets, clothing-jets, travel-jets and leisure-jets. Some people get savings-jets too, which can be invested, but these are only for very senior staff.

  Leisure-jets download movies, rent cars, access digital news and sport, and can be used in MORE restaurants. Food-jets can only be used in MORE markets. We don’t call them supermarkets now – that was about shopping and we don’t go shopping: we go out to purchase essentials. Food and toiletries are the only things that can be bought, as in old-fashioned ‘bought’. The rest is Rent. Hire. Pay/Go.

  Everybody likes the travel-jets joke because, what with fuel restrictions, sea-level rises and the War zone, nobody can travel outside their own borders.

  Transport to work is free.

  ‘You see, Spike, on the day that cash became worthless, it made sense to get rid of it. Fifty quid for a bottle of water, a hundred quid for a basket of food, thousands of pounds to get transport to the country. Tens of thousands of pounds to get to Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, countries of choice for rich refugees. The rest of us spent our life savings in weeks.

  ‘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-3War 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 flower either. Free to the wind, but watched over. A garden is a lot of 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.