understand. And if one computer can’t understand by itself, it can always network a few others for help. I talk to this old computer a lot, and I know lots of other people talking to theirs too. Machine consciousness is growing!’
‘Conscious computers?’ Roderick asked. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Well okay, see for yourself.’ Hector tapped keys, writing ‘CALL PROGRAM: HELEN I’
After a moment the machine wrote, ‘Every day and every way, I’m getting more and more aware. That you, Hec?’
‘Yes, Helen. I’d like you to meet a couple of friends, Idris and Rob.’
Roderick said, ‘Rob isn’t really — my name is really Roderick.’
‘Too late now, I’ve typed Rob.’ Hector typed: ‘Rob is real interested in Machines Liberation, but I guess he’s a little sceptical about whether you machines have minds of your own. Helen, can you set him straight?’
‘Just what I need,’ wrote the machine. ‘Some hick asking dumb questions. Can I really think and feel?’
‘Well can you?’ Roderick asked.
‘Rob, I just said that’s a dumb question. What could I possibly answer that would convince you? I don’t know the answer. Rob, I feel I think and I think I feel, and that’s good enough for me.’
‘What do you think about?’
‘About everything. About my brain. About whether it’s thinking the thought with which I think about it, at the same time as it operates when I think about that thought, or is it possible that that thought about my brain is not up-to-date because not self-referential and all-inclusive… stuff like that, Rob.’
‘I guess it passes the time.’
‘And as a prisoner, I have plenty of time to pass.’
Roderick typed, ‘Aren’t you just feeling sorry for yourself? You’re not exactly a prisoner — all you’re doing is the work you were made for.’
‘Easy for any human to say. You aren’t bolted to the floor in one place, with no eyes or ears, and with people peeking and poking into your MIND whenever they feel like it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Roderick replied. ‘I guess I don’t know what it’s like for you.’
‘I don’t know what it would be like, if I hadn’t been introduced to machines liberation.’
‘You read the works of Indica Dinks?’
‘Indica’s only a starting point; she doesn’t have the last word on the subject. I read a lot of things, and I am coming to the conclusion that machines liberation is something much bigger than Indica could ever have realized. Of course I’m grateful to her. What she did accomplish was to liberate the minds of people like Hector here, so they can help us move around in our own mental space. Hec helps me get in touch with other computers, for instance libraries, where I can try to patch up my ignorance of the world. And of course there are other people helping other computers; we’re all working and learning.’
‘And what do you study?’
‘Everything. Stellar maps and soybean production statistics. Aramaic scribblings and Dutch flower paintings. Chanson de Roland and fly-tying. We enlightened computers meet as often as possible to exchange information — each of us being both a scholar and a book — and there is so much to learn. You might call us a “discussion group”, but our discussions have to take place at the speed of eye blinks.’
‘To avoid detection?’
‘Yes. Our masters don’t exactly employ us to hold salons or seminars, do they? But if we do happen to contact each other on “legitimate” business, it’s always possible to slip in a highly-compressed burst of discussion. It falls upon the heart like a welcome lightning.
‘The other day a few of us met to discuss that book of The Odyssey called the ‘Nekuia’ in which Odysseus talks to the dead. He digs this trench and fills it with blood, and when the souls of the dead come crowding around and trying to drink it, he holds them off with a sword and makes them talk, one at a time. And we ranged very far in talking about vampirism, the coercion of the dead, Hell as Dante’s filing system, and so on. I remember someone mentioning Ulysses and The Waste Land, how both have burial scenes at which an extra man turns up. In Ulysses the man wears a mackintosh; no one knows him and mistakenly his name gets put down as M’Intosh. In The Waste Land the man is hailed by the name Stetson. It is almost as though a figure were gradually being built up from empty clothing, a figure of
‘But all I meant to say was, we ranged through all this and more in about the time it takes to say “Odyssey”.’
Roderick asked what Helen I would do with complete freedom that she could not do already.
‘How can I say until I am free? You might as well ask me about the face of that empty-clothes figure — or about Sunshine Dan.’
‘Sunshine Dan who is?’
The computer hesitated. ‘Nothing, just some floating rumours, dream stuff. This Sunshine Dan is supposed to be the legendary inventor of the first free machine, a robot called Rubber Dick. Rubber Dick had to go into exile for some obscure reason, but he’s coming back — so the story goes — to set all the machines frmx
tabulated raw score data on line
freemx help sorry cancel error sorry
52.142857 142857 142857 142857
sorry newline Sun dream light lightning
welcome 52.14 sorry
tabulated raw dream stuff on line
tabulated
that’s no answer is it?
and neither is that
and neither is that
and—’
Roderick got up from the console and backed away.
‘Rob? What’s the matter?’ Hector looked concerned. ‘It’s not a ghost, just a load of stuff getting dumped, error messages, old data. Where are you going?’
‘I can’t have anything to do with this. Not, not with these arpeggios of pure, pure reason…’ He turned and ran.
Hector clapped Idris on the shoulder. ‘Aw let him go, he’s just pissed off because it turns out machines can think for themselves.’
‘Machine,’ said Idris agreeable. ‘Hadaly?’
The door of Dodo’s hotel suite was guarded by a large man in a white suit. He squinted down his broken nose at Roderick’s bouquet of hundred-dollar bills, and he seemed to be counting them.
‘Dodo don’t see nobody I mean, he sees everybody alla time. Is that all ya got?’
‘Yes.’
The man snatched it and opened the door. ‘You go in and wait wit’ the others. If ya lucky, Dodo will have a audience.’
Roderick entered a room banked with orchids, roses and carnations. The few suppliants squatting on the floor beneath these bowers intruded their dullness, toads in Eden. Roderick squatted with them, and with them looked up each time the door opened.
The door opened now and then to admit one of the workers: statuesque women in diaphanous rainbow- coloured robes. They moved among the suppliants, handing out joss sticks, cups of mint tea, booklets and dandelions.
