Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [182]
So she gives Tamara a smug smile and says, ‘You can scan my skull if you like, and you’ll see me for yourself.’
‘S’pose your body’s a copy? A clone?’
Dee hasn’t thought of this before, and the idea shakes her more than she cares to show. She shrugs. ‘It’s possible.’
‘There you go,’ Tamara says. ‘That’d make whatever it was with that guy just a case of mistaken identity. No worries.’
She guns the engine again. Swept from the walls’ dank ledges, seal-rats squeak indignantly in their wake.
‘It isn’t her,’ said the robot, its voice more like a radio at low volume than a human speaking quietly. ‘So forget it. Chasing after her won’t get you anywhere. She’s just a fucking machine.’
Wilde had trudged back up the tunnel, apologised to the barkeeper, paid for the breakages and ordered a stiff drink as well as a large beer to accompany his grilled fish. The robot, propping itself up with a chair opposite him, had attracted no comment.
Wilde wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and glared at the machine.
‘She didn’t look like a machine. She looked like a real woman. She looked like –’
He stopped, in some distress.
‘Cloned,’ the machine said implacably.
‘But why? Why her? Who would –?’
He stared at the impervious pod. ‘No!’
‘Yes,’ said the machine. ‘He’s here.’
2
Pleistocene People
I remember him leaning his elbow on the bar in the Queen Margaret Union, waiting for our pints, and saying: ‘We’ll be there, Wilde! We’ll see it! One fucking computer, that’s all it’ll take, one machine that’s smarter than us and away they’ll go.’
Reid’s eyes were shining, his voice happy. He was like that when an idea took hold of him, and he prophesied. It sounds prophetic enough now, but it wasn’t an original idea even then, in December 1975. (That’s AD, by the way.) He’d got it from a book.
‘How d’you mean, “away”?’ I asked.
‘If we,’ he said, slowing down, ‘can make a machine that’s smarter than us, it can make another machine that’s smarter than the first. And so on, faster and faster. Runaway evolution, man.’
‘And where does that leave us?’
Reid pushed a heavy mug of cider towards me.
‘Behind,’ he said happily. ‘Like apes in a city of people. Come on, let’s find a seat.’
Glasgow University’s original Students’ Union dated back to before women were accepted as students. It still hadn’t quite caught up. The female students had their own union building, the QM, which did allow students of both sexes. It was therefore the one in which the more radical and progressive male students hung out, and the better by far for picking up girls.
Which was what we had in mind: a few pints with our mates in the bar for the first part of the evening, and then down to the disco about ten o’clock and see if anybody fancied a dance. The reason for getting in as much drinking as you could beforehand was that diving into the queue in front of the disco bar was best reserved for when you had to buy a round for your companions or – better – a drink for a girl who’d just danced with you.
The bar – the union bar rather than the disco bar – was fairly quiet at this time in the evening. So we got a good seat in the place, the one that ran most of the way around the back wall, from which we could see everybody who came in and – just by getting up slightly and turning around – could check out the state of play on the dance-floor below.
I rolled a skinny Golden Virginia cigarette and raised my pint of Strong-bow.
‘Cheers,’ Reid said.
‘Slainte,’ I said.
We grinned at our respective manglings of each other’s national toast – to my ear, Reid had said something like ‘Cheeurrsh’, and to his I’d said ‘Slendge.’ Reid was from the Isle of Skye, where his great-grandfather had come to work as a shepherd after the Clearances. I was from North London, and we were