The Stone Gods

  ‘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 the 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-3War …’

  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 × 72 to work, grab the post, dump the rubbish, fasten my coat, hands in pockets, sweaty smell up both nostrils – into the Tube.

  I take my usual place in my usual 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 cafés. 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 warni
ng 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.

  ‘Is it a story?’

  ‘Yes, but there will be no time for reading today. It says on my timesheet that today is for Mobile Data Recognition.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We’re going for a walk.’

  Among humans she will find an archive of the heart – the one thing she can never have. In the centre of ourselves, which isn’t in the middle, is the heart.

  I lifted her head from its titanium plate and fitted her into the perfectly made Authorised Personnel Sling. Two colleagues will have to sign us out, and I will have to take a WristChip to monitor us. Spike is encouraged to walk in the gardens of MORE-Futures, an artificial rainforest two acres square that cools the MORE HQ.

  Off we went, a normal day like every other, and then I saw that the gate from the garden into the street was open. We went and stood in the liminal opening – parrots and vines behind us, electric trams ahead. I had a strange sensation, as if this were the edge of the world and one more step, just one more step …

  ‘Where are we going, Billie?’

  Wreck City

  Wreck City – where you want to live when you don’t want to live anywhere else. Where you live when you can’t live anywhere else.

  The eco-tricity tramlines stop about a mile away from Wreck City. The bomb damage hasn’t been cleared in this part of town, and maybe never will be. People live in the shells of houses and offices, and they build their own places out of the ruins.

  On the edge of Wreck City, its unofficial boundary and no man’s land, is a long, long, low, low drinkers’ dive, constructed out of railway carriages laid end to end. These carriages work like an ancient city wall, ringing the inside from the outside, except that here it’s the outside that’s ringed from the inside, so that bandit-architecture has found a way of making the official part of town, Tech City, into its own banlieu.

  Wreck City is a No Zone – no insurance, no assistance, no welfare, no police. It’s not forbidden to go there, but if you do, and if you get damaged or murdered or robbed or raped, it’s at your own risk. There will be no investigation, no compensation. You’re on your own.

  They call the perimeter bar the Front.

  We took the tram to the last stop and got off, walking the last mile over the pocked and pitted scar tissue of bomb wreckage. The fires never go out, smouldering with a molten half-life, the wind blowing ash and flakes of metal into your clothes and hair. Ahead of you is the ring of railway carriages, untwisted from their reared-up tracks, and welded into a linked circle like a charm bracelet – Great Western, Great North Eastern, Virgin, EuroStar and, right in pride of place for the tourists, half of the Orient Express.

  Tourists come here, this far, to drink and meet girls, but you can’t pay in jetons, it has to be real money. Dollars they take, and silver and gold: you can pay with jewellery. You can barter. Guns are accepted, as are sexual services.

  In Tech City there’s a crackdown on alternative currency. The ‘Jetons Are Us’ campaign is on hoardings all over town. The Black Market is Bad Capitalism: MORE is against the Black Market and Bad Capitalism.

  MORE employees are discouraged from visiting the Front. In any case, the theory is that as we’re paid in jetons, and as we don’t own anything we can sell or barter, the Black Market and Wreck City will eventually die their own death, deprived of energy like a burned-out star.

  That’s the theory. In fact, most of us have pre-War stuff we can trade on the Black. I have dollars, from an account I emptied just in time, lots of dollars, and I bring them here to Wreck City.

  We went forward and stepped up into the Lalique carriage of the Orient Express. A couple of girls were kissing on a plush four-seater. They were drinking champagne – pre-War vintage. That’s a lot of Black money.

  A boy with tattoos was arguing over the price of a bull terrier he’d got sitting up on the bar. He wanted to sell the dog to get drugs. The dealer didn’t want the dog. Did the barman want the dog? No. The boy ran out, smashing a glass. The dog whined. I went to stroke him and he tried to bite me.

  ‘The dog is suffering from rejection,’ said Spike, who has taken extra modules in Counselling.

  ‘So are we all,’ I said, ‘but we’re not allowed to bite. You stroke him.’

  ‘As yet I have no hands,’ said Spike, reasonably, ‘but please put me next to the dog. I would like to observe him.’

  Carefully I put down the five-million-dollar – not counting research costs – head on top of the rough wooden bar made out of railway sleepers, and next to the bull terrier. Spike smiled. The dog lay down with his nose in the fibre-optics of her neck.

  An unshaven man built like a mobile burger trailer came towards us. ‘You want whisky, beers, champagne? That’s it.’

  I asked for whisky and put down the dollars. He took them. ‘You want doubles or triples?’

  ‘Singles,’ I said.

  ‘This isn’t a singles bar. I’ll give you triples for the price of doubles. Who’s your friend?’

  ‘I’m educating her. She’s a robot.’

  ‘She’s got no body.’

  ‘She’s designed to think.’

  He nodded, and poured freehand into the thick, short tumblers. ‘What’s she designed to think about?’

  ‘War, money, the future.’

  He nodded. ‘She’ll need a drink, then.’

  He went back into his den, watching television, his heavy back and shoulders hunched away from us and towards the screen.

  I took the drinks – triples – which, as robots don’t drink, meant double triples for me.

  Spike was looking around, thinking. Not much else for her to do.

  ‘What is this for?’

  ‘The bar?’

  ‘No. Why is it here? MORE provides everything that anyone needs or wants. There’s no need for a ghetto.’

  The man in the back heard and turned. ‘This is no ghetto – nobody forced nobody here. This is Wreck City – you should get out more.’

  ‘As yet I have no legs,’ said Spike.

  ‘Get your friend to carry you – we don’t do disabled-access here. We got no laws, no rules, no quotas, but if you got no legs, somebody will carry you, and if you got no arms, somebody will stroke the dog for you.’

  He loomed out of the back, massive and grinning. ‘This is real life, not some puppet show.’

  ‘Are you calling Tech City a puppet show?’ I said.

  ‘Somebody’s pulling the strings in that place, and it ain’t me and it ain’t you.’

  ‘I am being designed to make decisions for the betterment of the human race,’ said Spike.

  ‘Thanks, but I’ll mess up for myself,’ said the barman.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but did you want elected politicians behaving like dictators to mess up for you? You didn’t make the War and neither did I, but we lived through i
t, and now we’re here.’

  ‘Wrong,’ said the barman. ‘You’re there.’ He pointed a finger the size of a fifteen-centimetre drill-bit out of the door and towards Tech City. ‘I’m here.’

  ‘And when they blow us up again? Then where will you be?’

  He shrugged. His shoulders were like brick hods. ‘Another bar, another burned-out place. You know what I’m talking about – politicians, robots, it makes no difference.’

  ‘Robots are apolitical,’ said Spike. ‘We can make reasoned decisions in a way that humans cannot.’

  ‘It’ll never work,’ said the barman.

  ‘It’s going to work,’ I said. ‘She’s the future.’

  ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘We’ll do as we want right where we are. This is where the spirit is, and no robot is changing that.’

  He went to switch bottles for the girls in the corner. They were drunk. One of them was eating sardines out of a tin. I love tinned sardines.

  ‘Don’t get fish-oil on the velvet,’ said the barman, grinning.

  ‘Sardines are rich in omega-3,’ said Spike, inconsequentially. She can’t help it. We have to program it out of her – but for now she has to make available any information, however trivial. It’s the way she learns communication with the human interface – i.e., how to talk to us.

  An electric whirring noise outside the door made us all look round. I got up to see what was happening.

  Three electric golf-buggies were pulling up outside the bar. Inside the golf-buggies were twelve smiling Japanese people, wearing identical pre-War Burberry hats and macs. Their tour guide was explaining something to them in Japanese, and gesturing at the perimeter carriages.

  The barman came to the door, stooping his hulk under the buckled frame. ‘Saki bar is in the Bullet car, eight carriages down,’ he said, but the tour guide, smiling and waving, came forward and addressed him.

  ‘This is International Peace Delegation wishing to bring Aid and Sanitation to War Refugees.’

  ‘We don’t need Aid and Sanitation,’ said the barman. ‘And we’re not refugees.’

  The tour guide or interpreter, or whatever he was, went on smiling. Then he bowed. ‘You are all people displaced by War and unable to live a normal life.’