‘Let’s not get all paran—’
‘Look, when NASA pulled out on us I started thinking. Haven’t you ever wondered why nobody else is running a project like this? I mean nobody. Oh I know there’s a few dozen AI projects in different places, but they kinda stand still, don’t they? They work on a pattern-recognizer or a language analyser; they keep on working on it and they keep on keeping on. I checked a few places. No significant advances in the past ten years.’
‘Where is this leading?’
‘Let him go on,’ said Fong. ‘This is where it gets sinister.’
‘So I started checking on private robot projects — you know, the kind of crank stuff or maybe not so crank, stuff you see in articles in Micro-Ham, CPU Digest, you know.’
‘I never read the amateur journals.’
‘You should. Because you find funny things. Like this commune in Oregon, all the neat things they were doing with something they called a “Gestalt guesser”, really it was just — but anyway, just when it was getting interesting they had this fire.’
‘So?’
‘So it was just like the fire they had in Tuscon, where this little micro club were trying to set up a little thing to write short stories. Then this old guy in Florida I forget what he was making but when it hit the local papers suddenly he got snuffed by a prowler. Then a nurse in Oklahoma City smashed her customized processor and killed herself, and so did a guy in Kansas, ran a feed store, only upstairs he had—’
‘Are you sure? I’d have to check some of these myself.’ Franklin forgot to smooth his moustache. ‘Anyway a few cases don’t
‘You don’t get it, do you? All these people were safe as long as they kept quiet. And when we thought NASA was our boss, we kept quiet too. We didn’t publish anything, we didn’t give any interviews, we kept a tight security lid on this. Only now…’
‘You think we’re targets for some kind of — ?’ Franklin flicked ash on the floor. ‘Find this a little hard to swallow. I mean why? Who would, I mean why?’
‘Who knows? I mean, who knows why anything? Why do we suddenly have to move the lab upstairs? Everybody you ask just says they got this computer transfer order, this paper here says we gotta move. I don’t know who or why, I mean I know what’s way behind it, but that’s not much help. I know it’s just something like the old species trying to zap the new one before it gets started, that makes sense but it’s kinda depressing all the same.’
‘Especially if they try to zap us with it,’ Fong said. ‘Anyway the kid’s right, let’s quit while we’re ahead.’
Ben Franklin wasn’t listening. Smoothing his moustache, he said, ‘Can’t be the military, they’d be happy as shit to get their hooks on a robot, to hell with wider implications. Bet it’s some government agency, probably connected to a think tank, bunch of “futurologists”, bet you any damn thing. Bastards sitting there working out their “scenarios” as if the future were some kind of big-budget movie, they want us on the cutting-room floor, do they? Well I say we fight, can’t let ’em get away with four years of our — fight, damnit, expose the whole vicious—’
‘What for?’ Dan smiled. ‘Is it really worth it?’
‘What kind of bullshit scientist are you to ask a thing like that? Is it worth it? Is it — ?’
Fong was tugging at his sleeve and making faces. Ben finally saw that he’d written something; and leaned over to read it:
The fight’s already over. We won.
But keep quiet about it.
Four years, he kept thinking, four years. As though repeating the number could magically call them back, restore his career, his wife, whatever it was that had deserted him…
‘I don’t believe you.’ He pushed past Dan and reached for the door (noticing now how like a shrunken head the stain really looked). ‘I don’t believe a fucking word.’
As he entered the men’s room an unkempt student jumped back from the graffito he had obviously been inscribing next to the mirror. He looked at Ben and quickly turned away, probably to conceal the port-wine birthmark on his cheek. Then hurried out, capping his fibre pen as he went, and leaving Ben to consult his own blank mask. Perfect. Unblemished even by expression.
Automatically he began to wash his hands. He studied them as though he were Ambroise Paré, that military surgeon whose first elaborate designs in jointed iron provided not only new limbs (for those who reached the Peace of Augsburg without them) but also new work for unemployed armourers. There were times when Ben felt as though his entire body were a prosthesis, perfect, ready to work, but untenanted. Even his mind seemed no more than an ingenious engine for grinding through facts (and a part of the engine now reminded him that this was Darwin’s complaint) but to no purpose. He felt as hollow as that chess-playing Turk exhibited by Baron von Kempelen in 1769 (and later borrowed by Maelzel, delighting the world even more than his borrowed invention of the metronome).
He dried his hands and folded them tentatively in prayer. Well, no. No point in investing in that unnecessary hypothesis, pie in the sky for the ghost in the machine… And yet. Even a prosthetic hand could not function properly unless its wearer retained some of the ‘feeling’ in his ghostly limb. Why couldn’t he, Benjamin Waldo Franklin, be waiting just for such a feeling?
‘Holy Ghost in the machine?’ He tried to make it sound ironic. All the same, a moment later he went into one of the stalls and sat down on the lid and asked for guidance.
It was a gamble, but then a Jansenist God might approve of that; had not Pascal proved that there was nothing to lose and everything to gain? The venue was strange, but then a Lutheran God was used to that; had not the first Lutheran also uncovered certain fundamental truths in a privy?
What Ben found was a paperback book on the floor. For a moment he simply stared at it, reading the title over and over: God is Good Business. A sign? No. A sign? No!
He could hardly call it a sign, with its gaudy yellow-and-black cover, its red sunburst proclaiming ‘18,000,000 copies sold!’ The back cover showed a grey portrait of the author, a smiling businessman with the unlikely name Goodall V. Wetts III.
Just say to yourself when you get up in the morning, ‘God WANTS me to win! God wants ME to win! God wants me to WIN — TODAY!’ With this simple formula plus the Ten Rules of Faith Dynamics, you—
Ben shut the book and put it back on the floor. But on second thoughts he picked it up again. Might be good for a laugh some time… you never knew.
And what greater test could God put him through, than asking him to abandon all pleasures of the intellect and accept — this?
Washing his hands again, Ben studied his face for changes. He was leaning forward, trying out a confident slow smile, when suddenly he realized he was not alone. A janitor stood leaning on a mop, watching him.
Jesus Christ! Ain’t enough you spend an hour in the john, you gotta spend another hour seein’ if your lipstick’s on straight. I gotta clean this joint, buster, howsabout fuckin’ off?’
‘Oh I… sorry…’
‘You will be sorry, if you write any more porno on my walls.’
Ben’s gaze flicked to the place whence the graffito had already been scrubbed.
‘Look I’m not responsible—’
‘You tellin’ me, anybody writes crap like that oughta see a shrink. You like fuckin’ clocks, do ya? Or just drawing dirty—’