The Stone Gods

  I get out my Omni – the phone that does everything – and it automatically accesses the Parking Bureau Help Line. A sympathetic face flashes up in blonde pixels on my phone. ‘due to …’ I slam her off before she gets any further.

  D is for Due to. Whenever anybody calls to complain, a sympathetic person – well, a sympathetic robot, actually, because they are programmed to be more sympathetic than persons. Anyway, this sympathetic robot says, ‘due to’, and you know that due to a high volume of calls, due to heavy demand, due to staff shortages, due to difficulties, due to system failure, due to freak storms, due to little green men squatting the offices, well, due to, nobody is going to speak to you, at least not in this lifetime.

  Fuck it fuck it fuck it. F is for Fuck it.

  And in the middle of this hi-tech, hi-stress, hi-mess life, F is for Farm. My farm. Twenty hectares of pastureland and arable, with a stream running through the middle like a memory. Step into that water and you remember everything, and what you don’t remember, you invent.

  My farm is the last of its line – like an ancient ancestor everyone forgot. It’s a bio-dome world, secret and sealed: a message in a bottle from another time.

  The soil is deep clay and the cattle make holes in it where they herd to feed. The holes fill with water, then ice over, and the birds crack open the ice to drink. The woodland belts that hold the fields are thick with branches thick with birds. At evening the sky above the wood is dark with the wings of birds.

  The rough fences, the uneven ground, the tussocks of grass, the tiny blue violets that grow where the cattle go, the poppies that change the furrowed earth into a red sea that hares part. The distance the eye follows to whatever moves and dives, the life that fills every bit of uncultivated hedge and verge. The burrows, tunnels, nests, tree-hollows, wasp-balls, drilled-out holes of the water voles, otter sticks, toad stones, mice riddling the dry-stone walls, badger sets, molehills, fox dens, rabbit warrens, stoats brown in summer, ermine in winter, clean as bullets through the bank. The trout shy in the reeds. The carp dozing on the riverbed. Dragonflies like Annunciations. A kingfisher on wings of blue light. A green-headed duck and a white swan dropping under the white-foamed fall of the green water to the bottom of the clough where the frogs wait patiently to be in a fairytale.

  There is no magic wand here. If I don’t move the Solo in the next five minutes, yellow will change to orange will change to red, not the way the sun changes, to mark the day, but so that my fine gets bigger. Press the button, Billie. Press the bloody button. B is for Billie, button and bloody.

  THANK YOU! says the parking meter. You are ready to drive away.

  There won’t be any parking meters on the new blue planet. That alone makes the visit worth the trip.

  I have an appointment today with a woman who wants to be genetically reversed to twelve years old to stop her husband running after schoolgirls. It’s possible, but it’s illegal. She wants to take her case to the Court of Human Rights. She’s already seen a psychiatrist and a Consultant specializing in Genetics. Now she has to talk to me, woman to woman, because Enhancement is here to Listen when You have Problems.

  I key in my destination co-ordinates, and the Solo makes its way across to the Business Lane. This is peak-hour driving and I am paying the price mile by mile. In the Leisure Lane, nobody is paying at all but, then, nobody is moving either.

  The first pictures of Planet Blue are beginning to appear on the smart-skins of the buildings. It’s as though we are driving straight towards it. There it is, pristine, diamond-cut, and the zooms show miles and miles of empty beauty. Everyone on the highway is watching. It doesn’t matter: magnetic rebuff stops anyone driving into anyone else. We just stay in line and get there some day. Yeah, we’ll get there some day, blue planet, silver stars.

  The Solo is beeping. Voice Announce tells me to turn right, and the wall-screen on the corner of the road flashes a picture of a bell. This must be Belle Vue Drive. Etymology was one of the victims of State-approved mass illiteracy. Sorry, a move towards a more integrated, user-friendly day-to-day information and communications system. (Voice and pictures, yes; written words, no.)

  As I make the turn, I drive straight towards a BeatBot.

  BeatBots: direct descendants of a low-paid State Functionary that used to be called a Traffic Warden. As everyone knew, these types were inhuman, and it made more sense to build them than to hire them, so as soon as the technology became available, that was what we did.

  The BeatBot waves me over, and buzzes out his question in his trademark synthesized voice that sounds like wasps in a dustbin. BeatBots don’t have to sound like this, but they do: Why was I hesitating on a busy turn from a main highway?

  I tell him I was just waiting to see the road sign. He mumbles something into the radio that is an extension of his chin, and the next thing I know, a couple of Nifties are checking out the underside of the car with mirrors.

  Nifties: annoying little micro-Bots that scuttle around in drains and fix underfloor heating. Most people keep a couple in the car in case they want something picked up off the floor or need a foot massage. Nifties have no personality, and they look like a box on wheels with a retractable aerial at each corner. They were designed for busy people on the move – which is all of us, because staying still is so last-century.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ I ask the Bot, but he won’t answer, because BeatBots have very limited powers of speech.

  I must not get paranoid – Bots are a typical happening on a typical road here in Tech City, because Tech City is where every single robot in the twenty-two geo-cities of the Central Power is designed and made. Naturally, or unnaturally, I suppose, we have a lot of them.

  R is for Robot.

  There’s Kitchenhand for the chores, Flying Feet to run errands or play football with the kids. Garagehand – that’s the big hairy one that’s good with a spanner. There’s Lend-a-Hand too, for the temporarily unpartnered.

  We have Robo-paws, the perfect pet – depending on your definition of perfect. We have TourBots, for hire when you visit a new place and need someone to show you round. We have bottom of the range LoBots, who have no feet because they spend all their time on their knees cleaning up. And we have BeatBots. Yeah.

  Mine has finished chewing over the car, and issued an Offence Code. I don’t know what my offence is – but I do know it’s impossible to argue with a BeatBot. I’ll have to take it up with the Computer later.

  The BeatBot shuffles off in his oversize nano-parka with intelligent hood. The hood is the bit that processes information – the rest of the Bot is just a moving lump of metal – which is what all robots are, when you come down to it, until the big breakthrough.

  Robo sapiens.

  As far away from a BeatBot as Neanderthal Man is from us. No, I have to revise that because we are regressing. Oh, yes, it’s true – we have no need for brains so our brains are shrinking. Not all brains, just most people’s brains – it’s an inevitable part of progress.

  Meanwhile, the Robo sapiens is evolving.

  The first artificial creature that looks and acts human, and that can evolve like a human – within limits, of course.

  There are not very many of them, and they are fabulously expensive to make. If you want the ultimate piece of personal-wealth display, you get a Robo sapiens. The President of the Central Power keeps a pair who work as his PA and BodyGuard. They remember everything – faces, information, numbers, conversation – and they can make connections. These are robots who join the dots. Ask them for advice, and they will give it to you: impartial advice based on everything that can be known about the situation.

  Ask them what you were doing this time two years ago, and they will tell you. Ask them what you ate at your wife’s first G party and they have the menu off by heart. Except that they don’t have hearts.

  Heartless. Gorgeous. Even so, I have never seen one as impressive as the one they took with them to Planet Blue. She was built especially for the
job, but did she need to be so beautiful too?

  Inter-species sex is punishable by death.

  Looking down the street at the numbers, it seems that my client is throwing a G party. In the past, people had birthdays. I have charted all of that through the Central Archive. Now birthdays don’t matter because they mark the passing of the years, and for us years don’t pass in the way that they once did. G is the day and year you genetically fix. It’s a great day to celebrate.

  I park the Solo on the meter outside the house. Hi there! says the hateful familiar voice. I ignore it and key in my override code, which Enhancement officers can do when on work-related calls. All set! See you later!

  I kick it for fun. Nothing happens, of course.

  The house – number twenty-nine – is festooned with pink pumped-up balloons. There are enough balloons on this house to qualify it for personal take-off. Batting aside the ones in my way, like giant mammaries, I lift the knocker.

  A pink LoBot opens the door and brushes my (black) trainers with a pink brush.

  Ducking under more pink balloons to follow the LoBot, I am able to enter the rosy sitting room. It should be a sitting room, in that it is off the hall and on the ground floor, but it is faked out like a teenager’s bedroom, and stuffed with celebrity holograms the way people in the past used to stuff their lounges with china ornaments. The problem with the hologram craze is that even if you scale them down you’re still surrounded by dwarf-size replicas of movie stars and pop idols. Of course, you can walk right through them, but I find it creepy. This place is like a Hall of Fame. I can hardly shift for three-foot-tall Goliaths of the film industry. The LoBot is at just the right height to dust them top to bottom. She gets out a pink duster and sets to work.

  ‘I love celebrity,’ says my client, Mrs Mary McMurphy, ‘but they need dusting. Even holograms attract dust. A lot of people don’t realize that so they get allergies – from the dust, y’know, trapped in the hologram.’

  Celebrities are under pressure, no doubt about it. We are all young and beautiful now, so how can they stay ahead of the game? Most of them have macro-surgery. Their boobs swell like beach balls, and their dicks go up and down like beach umbrellas. They are surgically stretched to be taller, and steroids give them muscle-growth that turns them into star-gods. Their body parts are bio-enhanced, and their hair can do clever things like change colour to match their outfits. They are everything that science and money can buy.

  ‘I want to look like her,’ says Mrs McMurphy.

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Like Little Señorita.’

  Little Señorita is a twelve-year-old pop star who has Fixed herself rather than lose her fame. She sees no point in growing up when she is famous for not being grown-up. Understandably, as she has no talent, she wants to live in the moment for as long as she can.

  Her parents support her. Her boyfriend says he’s delighted.

  ‘My husband is mad about Little Señorita. I want to be her.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to be her for the rest of your life?’

  ‘I can change later if it doesn’t work out.’

  Yes and no. Genetic reversal has strange effects on the body. The last time it was done, the reversal couldn’t be contained, and the girl got younger and younger until she was a six-feet-tall six-month-old baby.

  Fixing is simple. Unfixing to age naturally is pretty simple, though it is only ever done for medical research. I am explaining this to Mrs McMurphy and getting nowhere.

  ‘My husband likes girls.’

  ‘Legal sex starts at fourteen,’ I reply.

  ‘But everybody does it younger. Y’know that!’

  ‘Does he have underage sex at home?’

  ‘Oh, no, he always goes out. But I don’t want to lose him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She seems baffled by this question, and shifts among her cushions the colour of Turkish Delight, then hitches her school uniform, her pink school uniform, slightly higher. Any higher and it will just be a scarf round her neck, or maybe a hairband.

  ‘Do you think you can stop him having sex with young girls by becoming one yourself?’

  ‘Y’know, that’s not my aim. He can do what he likes as long as he doesn’t do it in the house,’ she makes him sound like a golden retriever, ‘and as long as he comes home now and again and does it with me.’ He is a golden retriever. ‘We don’t have sex any more. He says I’m too old.’

  A pair of Kitchenhands, got up to look like pink rubber gloves, comes into the sitting room, bearing two tall tumblers of a foaming liquid.

  ‘I swear by Nitrogen Ginseng,’ says my client.

  While Mrs McMurphy takes and drinks hers eagerly, I take the opportunity to look more closely.

  I guess she has been Fixed at twenty-four. Now that everyone is young and beautiful, a lot of men are chasing girls who are just kids. They want something different when everything has become the same.

  ‘I need to speak to your husband too.’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Well, he should be here. This is an official appointment. Where is he?’

  ‘He’s at the Peccadillo.’

  She has the grace to blush – no, I think she’s blushing because it matches her outfit and the cushions and the wallpaper. It’s all one childish, knowing, pre-teen turn-on. There is no point in staying. I gather my things and get up to leave. The hovering Kitchenhands lace their separate fingers and park quietly on top of a pot plant. The LoBot scurries towards the door.

  ‘Are you excited about Planet Blue?’ I ask Mrs McMurphy, by way of ending the conversation.

  She looks vague and smiles. ‘Yeah, y’know, it’s a great idea. I’m entering the celebrity competition to win a trip. The beaches look amazing.’

  Outside, the windshield of my Solo is flashing yellow. What? This is crazy. Have all the stupid parking meters gone crazy? I don’t even bother to ring the blonde pixellated robot on the due to line. I ring Manfred. He sounds shifty.

  ‘Have you got all you need for your report?’

  ‘I have to find the husband. He’s at the Peccadillo.’

  ‘You can’t go there in work time.’

  ‘Then I can’t make my report. I need to speak to her husband.’

  ‘We have to nail this, Billie. Media want to interview her, and they’ll need your notes before the story breaks. This Human Rights case is going to be the Next Big Thing after Planet Blue.’

  ‘You mean that when we’re bored to death with the news of a new world, the one we dreamed about for millennia, we’ll go back to sex stories?’

  ‘You’re always so negative!’

  ‘Sorry, you’re right, it’s going to be wonderful here on Planet Lolita. Why go anywhere else?’

  ‘It’s not your job to moralize.’

  ‘So I’m going to the Peccadillo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you’ll clear my parking?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We both hang up trying to hang up first. It’s time I found a new job. Even polishing LoBots would be better than this. Even getting a job as a BeatBot would be better than this.

  At the Peccadillo parking is private, so I drive underground, leave the keys with Security, and take the elevator up to the Members’ Floor. A hunchback bows me in.

  There are a couple of translucents serving behind the bar.

  Translucents are see-through people. When you fuck them you can watch yourself doing it. It’s pornography for introverts.

  Peccadillo is a perverts’ bar, and we’re all perverts now. By that I mean that making everyone young and beautiful also made us all bored to death with sex. All men are hung like whales. All women are tight as clams below and inflated like lifebuoys above. Jaws are square, skin is tanned, muscles are toned, and no one gets turned on. It’s a global crisis. At least, it’s a crisis among the cities of the Central Power. The Eastern Caliphate has banned Genetic Fixing, and the SinoMosco Pact does not make it available to all its
citizens, only to members of the ruling party and their favourites. That way the leaders look like star-gods and the rest look like shit-shovellers. They never claimed to be a democracy.

  The Central Power is a democracy. We look alike, except for rich people and celebrities, who look better. That’s what you’d expect in a democracy.

  So, sexy sex is now about freaks and children. If you want to work in the sex industry, you get yourself cosmetically altered in shape and size. Giantesses are back in business. Grotesques earn good money. Kids under ten are known as veal in the trade.

  Today at the Peccadillo it’s a Veal Special so I’m not surprised to see a blond-haired guy, who looks like a golden retriever, heading for the Jacuzzi with a ten-year-old boy on his shoulders and a ten-year-old girl in his arms. Both of them are Caliphate kids. We buy them. We wouldn’t do it to kids born in the Central Power because (a) it’s illegal and (b) we’re civilized.

  As I hurry across the floor, my way is barred by an enormous woman with one leg, hopping along on a diamond-studded crutch. I am on a level with her impressive breasts – more so, because where I would normally expect to find a nipple, I find a mouth. Her breasts are smiling, and so is she.

  ‘Are you hungry for a playmate?’

  ‘No, thank you. I’m just visiting the Jacuzzi.’

  ‘Oh, don’t waste your time in there. That’s for kids. Come to the Fun Room. I can take four men at a time – front, rear, here and here.’ She pats her accommodating breast-mouths, or is it mouth-breasts?

  ‘I’m a girl.’

  ‘Yeah, but you can watch, and when the boys are done, we can have some fun. You’re not straight, are you?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Well, then, come along.’

  ‘Look, I have to catch up with a guy who looks like a golden retriever.’

  ‘Does he work here? I don’t recall a Dog Man. We have a Dog Woman, hounds included.’