Outside a tourist pizza place on the Piazza del Duomo, a little street cleaner trundles along on rubber tyres, peering about for litter and scooping up the discarded cardboard and polystyrene with long spindly arms…
Through the steamy window of a tiny bohemian restaurant, a waiter made of plastic and silicon quietly clears tables and serves coffee, while its bearded owner dispenses cigarettes and largesse to his customers…
Following behind a pair of carabinieri on the Ponte Vecchio, a robot minder guards the officers’ backs while they keep an eye on the beggars and pickpockets…
At the door of a Renaissance Palazzo, a sintetica housemaid in a blue uniform presses the entryphone button, a prestige domestic appliance clothed in human flesh, returning from an errand for its aristocratic masters…
The City of Machines.
I thought about the robot from the Accademia. I wondered whether it had been caught. I found myself having the irrational thought that I’d like to see it again.
Two days from the end of the holiday, I was sitting by the fountain on the Piazza della Signoria, eating a strawberry ice cream and wondering where to have my lunch when a taxi, driving too fast in what is basically a pedestrian precinct, snagged one of the little municipal cleaning machines with the corner of its bumper. The thing keeled over and lay there unable to right itself, its wheels spinning and its arms and eye-stalks waving ineffectively in the air.
I laughed, as did several other on-lookers. No one felt obliged to do anything. But a robot security guard and a sintetica servant, coming from different directions, lifted the thing gently back onto its wheels. They dusted it down and the sintetica squatted briefly beside it as if asking it whether it was okay. Everyone laughed: tourists, Florentines, African hustlers. The cleaner trundled away and the other two macchine headed off on their different errands.
I was suddenly seized by a crazy conviction.
“Hey you!” I shouted, dropping my ice cream and chasing after the security guard. “I know you, don’t I? I met you in the Accademia!”
People stared at me and exchanged incredulous glances, half-shocked, half-delighted at the outlandishness of the spectacle.
And there was more in store for them. It was the robot from the Accademia. It stopped. It turned to face me. It spoke.
“Yes… The Captives…”
It was so obviously a machine voice – flat and creaking – that it was hard to believe that I could ever have taken it for a human. Maybe as the programmed order of its brain gradually unravelled, its control over its voice was weakening? But strangely the very creakiness of it seemed touching, like something struggling against all odds to break through.
Hardly believing what I was doing, I touched its cold plastic hand.
“That afternoon in the Accademia – what was it you thought I understood?”
But before the automaton could answer me, it was interrupted by a shout.
“Alt! Polizia!”
A fat policeman was running up, followed by his hammerheaded minder. The Incontrollabile turned and ran.
“Shoot it!” the policeman ordered.
“No don’t shoot!” I pleaded. “It’s harmless! It’s just come alive!”
But the minder did not take orders from me. It lifted its hand – which must have contained some sort of EMP weapon – and the Incontrollabile fell writhing to the ground.
The policeman ran over. His thick moustache twitched as he looked down at the broken machine. Then he lifted his booted heel and brought it down hard on the robot’s plastic head.
A loud, totally inhuman roar of white noise blasted momentarily from the voice-box and the head shattered, spilling a mass of tiny components out onto the square.
The policeman looked up at me triumphantly.
“Don’t talk to me about these things being alive. Look! It’s a machine. It’s just bits of plastic and wire.”
I dreamed that the broken machine was taken to the monastery at Vallombrosa, where the simple monks mended it and gave it sanctuary. Somehow I found it there.
“I have come to see the macchina,” I told an old friar who was working among the bee-hives.
There was a smell of honey and smoke and flowers, and the old man’s hands and shining pate were crawling with fat black bees. He smiled and led me through a wrought iron gate into an inner garden.
The macchina was sitting quietly in the shade of a flowering cherry tree, almost hidden by its thick pink clouds of blossom, which were alive with the buzzing of foraging bees. Quivering lozenges of shade and pinkish light dappled its translucent skin. An old dog lay snoozing on its left side, a tortoiseshell cat on its right.
And it spoke to me about the Great Chain of Being.
“The first level is simple matter. The second is vegetative life. The third is animal life which can act and move. Then somehow the fourth level emerges, the level of self-awareness, which distinguishes human beings from animals. And then comes a fifth level.”
“Which is what?”
The macchina seemed to smile.
“Ah, that is hard to say in human words…”
“Gotcha!”
Bees and cherry blossom vanished.
Freddie had leapt out of bed onto the little domestic robot, trapping it beneath a duvet.
“Thought you’d pinch my ciggies again did you, you little bugger?”
He beamed up at me from the floor, expecting me to laugh.
But suddenly I had seized him by the throat and was ramming him up against the wall.
“Leave it alone, you bastard, alright? Just leave the poor bloody thing alone!”
Karel’s Prayer
The first thing Karel Slade noticed when he woke up was an odd smell in his hotel room. It was like the plasticky smell of a new car which has just had the polythene taken off its seats, but with a hint too of something antiseptic, a hint of hospital. And it was entangled in his mind with the mood of a fading dream in which he was drowning or suffocating, or being held down.
The second thing he noticed was that the radio alarm hadn’t gone off. It was now 8.00 and his plane home flew at 8.45.
“Shit!”
He leapt out of bed naked – a big, broad-chested, athletic man in his late forties, with thick silvery hair – and grabbed the phone to get a taxi. But the line, unaccountably, was dead.
“I do not believe it!”
He pulled on his trousers and headed for the bathroom. But it was locked.
8.03, said the clock as he went to the door of the room and found that locked too. The phone rang.
“Mr Slade, please come to the door of your room.”
“It’s locked.”
“Please come to the door and walk through.”
Beyond the door, where the hotel corridor should have been, was a large almost empty room, entirely white, with three chairs in the middle of it. Two of them were occupied by men in cheap suits. The third, a tall straight-backed thing which reminded Karel both of a throne and of an electric chair, was empty.
The two men rose.
One of them, the tall, wiry black man with the gloomy, pock-marked and deeply-lined face, went to the door that Karel had just come through, closed it and locked it. The other, the rotund Anglo-Saxon with the curly yellow hair and the affable expression, came forward in greeting.
“Mr Slade, good to meet you, my name is Mr Thomas. My friend here is Mr Occam.”
Karel did not take the extended hand.
“Who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you think you’re playing at?”
There were those who said that Karel was surprisingly foul-mouthed for a prominent Christian leader, but as he often pointed out to his family and his friends, coarse language might be undesirable but it wasn’t swearing and had nothing whatever to do with the third commandment. You had to have some way of expressing your negative feelings, he always argued.