“Ninth floor, Signor,” creaked the tinny voice of the lift.
I went down the windowless corridor from number 901 to number 963 and opened the door, dreading the empty anonymous room. But Freddie was already there.
“Fred! Am I glad to see you!”
Freddie laughed. “Yeah? Beer’s over there Tom. Help yourself.”
He was lying on the bed playing with his Gameboy and had already surrounded himself with a sordid detritus of empty beer-cans, ashtrays, pizza cartons and dirty socks. He had the TV on without the sound.
My little brother doesn’t speak Italian and has no interest whatsoever in art. He had spent his day in the streets around the hotel, trying out bars and ice cream parlours and throwing away Euros in the local VR arcades. I told him about seeing the girl killed outside the Accademia.
“Jesus Tom, that’s a bit heavy. First day of the holiday too!” He thumbed back the ring-pull of another can. “Still, nothing you could have done.”
I had a shower and we went out for something to eat. We were just finishing off our first bottle of wine when I remembered the robot.
“I meant to tell you. A weird thing happened to me in a museum. This robot security guard tried to talk to me about one of the sculptures.”
Freddie laughed. “Probably just some dumb random choice program,” he said with a mouth full of spaghetti. “Easy to set up. Every hundred visitors or whatever it spins random numbers and makes one of a hundred possible remarks…”
“But this was the Accademia, Fred, not Disneyland!”
Fred shoved a big chunk of hard Italian bread into his mouth and washed it down with a swig of wine. “What did it say exactly?”
My brother acts like a complete dickhead most of the time – he is a complete dickhead most of the time – but cybernetics is his special interest. He reads all the mags and catalogues. He visits the chatrooms. His accumulated knowledge is immense. And by the time I had told him the whole story, he had stopped eating and was looking uncharacteristically serious.
“It sounds very much like you met a Rogue there, Tom. You’d better call the police.”
I laughed. “Come on Fred, you’re putting me on!”
“No really. Those things can be dangerous. They’re out of control. People can get killed.”
I got up (“I’m warning you. This’d better not be a joke!”) and asked to use the phone. The police said that regretfully cibernetica were not under their jurisdiction and I should contact the carabinieri. (What other country would have two separate police forces operating in parallel!) I phoned the carabinieri and got through to a Sergeant Savonari in their Dipartimento di Cibernetica. He took the whole thing alarmingly seriously. There had been several reports already, he said, about the same macchina. He asked me to stay at the trattoria and he would come out immediately to see me.
Somewhat shaken I went back to our table.
“Christ Freddie, I had no idea. I obviously should have contacted them this morning. Is it really likely to kill someone?”
Fred laughed. “No, not at all likely. But a Rogue is out of control. So you just don’t know what it’ll do.”
“So what is a Rogue exactly? Like a Robot that’s picked up a virus?”
“Not really. A virus is something deliberately introduced. Robots go Rogue by accident. It’s like a monkey playing with a typewriter. A sophisticated robot is bombarded with sensory information all the time – they’ve got much better senses than ours mostly – and every now and then a combination of stimuli happens by chance which screws up the robot’s internal logic, unlocks the feedback loops…”
“And the robot comes alive?”
“No it doesn’t,” Freddie was irritated by my naivety, “no more than your electric razor comes alive if the switch gets broken and you can’t turn it off. It’s still just a machine but it’s running out of control.” He wiped tomato sauce from his plate with his last piece of bread. “Well if we’re going to have to wait here for this guy, you’d better buy us another bottle of wine…”
Savonari arrived soon afterwards, a small dark man with deep-set eyes and a great beak of a Roman nose. He shook us both by the hand, then reversed a chair and straddled it, leaning towards me intently across the remains of our meal. It was only after he had been with us for some minutes that I registered that he himself had a robot with him, standing motionless by the doorway, hammerheaded, inhuman, ready to leap into action in an instant if anyone should try and attack the sergeant, its master. (It was what the American police call a ‘dumb buddy’ – three hundred and sixty degree vision, ultrafast reactions, a lethal weapon built into each hand…)
Several people, it seemed, had witnessed and reported the robot’s attempt to converse with me in the Accademia – and seen it slipping away from the gallery soon afterwards – but no one else had been able to report the exact words spoken. Apparently my account confirmed beyond doubt that there had been a fundamental breakdown in the thing’s functioning, rather than, say, a simple hardware fault. The sergeant noted, for instance, that it had continued to try to talk to me when I had clearly ordered it out of the way.
“These security machines are unfortunately very prone to this problem,” said Savonari with a resigned gesture, addressing himself to Freddie. “Their senses and analytical apparatus are so very acute.”
Freddie, unable to understand a word, smiled vaguely and offered the sergeant a cigarette, which was declined.
“Our own machines are totally reprogrammed every week to avoid this,” the Sergeant said, nodding towards his sleek minder by the door, “but not everyone is so aware of the dangers.”
He made a little movement of exasperation and told me of a case he had dealt with recently where a robot farm hand had suddenly tossed its owner’s ten-year-old son into a threshing machine.
I shuddered. “What did you do?”
“Like all Rogues,” (the Italian word, it seems, is Incontrollabile), “the machine had to be destroyed. But that was no help to the little boy.”
Again the angry gesture.
“I am a Catholic, Signor Philips. Like the Holy Father, I believe that to make machines in the likeness of people is a sin against the Holy Spirit. I would like to see them all destroyed.”
He snorted: “My little son had a machine once that taught him how to spell. I put it out for the dustman when I discovered he had given it a human name.”
Then he shrugged and got up: “But I can only enforce the law as it stands, Signor Philips. Thank you for getting in touch. I am sure we will find the macchina very soon.”
He shook our hands again and left. We heard him outside the door barking angrily at his ‘buddy’: “Pronto, bruto, pronto!”
Later as we leaned comfortably on a wall watching the bats looping and diving over the river Arno, Freddie enthused about that police machine. Apparently the things are actually made in Florence in the Olivetti labs out at the Citta Scientifica.
“Beautiful design,” Freddie said. “Nothing wasted. A really Italian machine.”
I liked that concept and proceeded to spout a lot of drunken nonsense about how the taut police minder was in a direct line of descent from Michelangelo’s David – how the wires and tubes under the transparent skin of the robot in the Accademia echoed the nerves and muscles in da Vinci’s sketches of dissected limbs…