Freddie just laughed.
Our days settled into a routine. We were woken in the morning by the humming of a little box-shaped domestic robot, which let itself in through a hatch in the door (and drove Freddie crazy by trying to vacuum up coins, paperbacks, socks and anything else which he’d left on the floor). Then we wandered round the corner to a café and had breakfast together before splitting up for the day: me heading for the museums and churches, Freddie for the Virtual Reality arcades.
In the evening I’d meet him in one or other of the arcades (looking like a gentle Nordic giant among the wiry Italian kids as he piloted a landing on Mars, or led a column of armoured sno-cats through an Alpine pass). He’d take off the headset and we’d go to a trattoria for a meal. Then we’d find a bar on some busy street or square, so we could sit outside and watch the city go by.
After a while you start to see not just a single city but several quite separate ones. There is the city of the Florentines themselves… There are the high-tech pan-Europeans from the Citta Scientifica, wearing Japanese fashions and speaking Brussels English, larded with German catchphrases… There is the city of the tourists: Americans, Japanese, foul-mouthed British kids on school trips, earnest Swedes clutching guide-books (all different, but all of them alike in the way that they move through the famous sights as if they were a VR simulation)… And then there is the city of the dispossessed: the Arabs, the Ethiopians, the Black Africans from Chad and Burkina Faso and Niger – hawkers, beggars, hustlers, climatic refugees from the burnt-out continent, climbing up into the belly of Europa along the long gangway of the Italian peninsula…
About the fifth or sixth day into the holiday, Freddie picked up a book somewhere called Illicit Italy (with a cover photo of a transvestite hooker, learning on a Roman bar). While we sat drinking in our roadside café in the evening he kept chuckling and reading passages out loud.
“Listen to this, Tom! ‘The Bordello Sano, or Safe Brothel, recently legalised by the Italian government in an attempt to curb the AIDS epidemic, can now be found on the outskirts of all the major Italian cities, staffed entirely by what the Italians call sinteticas, robots with living human skin…’”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. Freddie read on cheerfully:
“‘The obvious advantages of sinteticas are (a) that they are very beautiful and (b) that they are completely safe. But some say that the biggest advantage is the fact that they have no soul…’”
He read on a bit to himself, then looked up. “Hey, we should go and have a go Tom. It’d be a laugh!”
I have to admit that I knew about the Bordello Sano in Florence and had already considered a discreet visit, just to have a look. But discretion is not my little brother’s style. The whole way over there in a crowded bus, he chatted cheerfully about the sinteticas in an embarrassingly loud voice.
“Apparently they build them to look like famous models and film-stars. There’s some old woman who used to star in porn-movies when she was young and then got elected an MP. She sold her genes to a sintetica manufacturer. She said she was bequeathing her body to the men of Italy!”
I grunted.
“Another thing,” Freddie said, “there’s actually been cases of women pretending to be sinteticas because sinteticas are more popular and make more money. Weird isn’t it? A real woman pretending to be a fake?”
But when we actually got there, Freddie went very quiet. It was ruthlessly hygienic and efficient, quite terrifying in its cool matter-of-factness. You walked through the door and a receptionist gave you a sort of menu, illustrated and in the language of your choice. Then you went through into the lounge where the sinteticas waited under reproduction Boticellis in fake gilt frames, with canned Vivaldi twiddling away in the background.
They were extremely beautiful – and looked totally human too, except for the licence plates on their foreheads. (According to Freddie’s book you can check whether you’ve got a real sintetica by seeing if the licence plate is bolted on or just glued.)
A tall blonde in a black leather miniskirt came over to Freddie and offered her – its – services.
In a small dry voice he muttered: “English… No capito…”
“Oh I’m sorry,” it said in faultless Euro-English, “I said would you like to come upstairs with me?”
Freddie looked round at me helplessly. (The kid is only eighteen years old. I could at least have tried to keep him out of this.) I shrugged and attempted to smile as the sintetica led him away.
Then it was my turn. The creature that approached me was curvaceous and dusky-skinned, with a face so sweet it set my teeth on edge. And she wore a dress of white lace which left her graceful shoulders bare and showed most of the rest of her through pretty little patterned peepholes.
“Hi, I’m Maria. I’d be pleased if you decided to choose me.”
I felt myself smiling apologetically, shrivelling in the cool frankness of her gaze. I had to struggle to remind myself that this was not a ‘her’ at all. Under the veneer of real human skin and flesh was a machine: a thing of metal and plastic and wires…
Upstairs in a room full of mirrors and plastic roses and pink ribbons, the beautiful robot spread itself appealingly on the bed and asked me for my order. I remembered the menu thing clutched in my hand and started to read it. You could choose various ‘activities’ and various states of dress or undress. And you could choose from a selection of ‘personalities’ with names like ‘Nympho’, ‘La contessa’ and ‘Virgin Bride’.
You could ask this thing to be whatever kind of lover you wanted. But instead (God knows why) I blurted out: “I don’t want any of those. Just be yourself.”
The friendly smile vanished at once from the syntetica’s face. It sagged. Its mouth half-opened. Its eyes became hollow. I have never seen such terrifying emptiness and desolation.
Freddie told me later that I read too much into that expression. It was no different from the blank TV screen you get when you push a spare button on the channel selector… Well, perhaps. But at the time I was so appalled that I actually cried out. And then I fled. I literally ran from the room, and would have run straight outside into the street if the bouncer at the door hadn’t stopped me: “Excusi, Signor. Il conto!”
There was a bill to pay and I had to wait to pay it because the receptionist was settling up with another customer who was paying extra for damage to the equipment. (“A hundred Euros, signor, for a cut lip, and fifty each for the black eyes… Thank you, Signor – oh, thank you very much, you are most kind – we look forward to seeing you again as usual…”)
As the other customer turned to go I saw the Roman nose and realised it was Sergeant Savonari of the Carabinieri, the very same who lined up with the Pope on the Robot Question.
I didn’t wait for Freddie. Male human company seemed about the last thing in the world I needed just then – and I guessed he would feel the same. So I spent a couple of hours wandering the streets by myself, in between those different cities that occupy the same space but hardly touch each other at alclass="underline" the city of the Florentines, the city of the Euro-techs, the city of the tourists, the city of the displaced…
And it suddenly struck me that there was another city too which I hadn’t noticed before, though it had been there all the time: