• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Wilde looked down at the eager machine with amusement.

‘How much?’

‘Twenty grams gold or equivalent.’

‘Very reasonable,’ Wilde said. ‘Do you take cards?’

‘Follow me,’ said the machine.

Wilde slid his card down the slot of the rusty mainframe box. The machine that had come to his aid had led him here and left him.

‘Thank you,’ Invisible Hand said. ‘You have identified yourself as Jonathan Wilde. Your account is that opened originally by the machine known as Jay-Dub, aka Jonathan Wilde, and endorsed in your behalf at Stras Cobol Mutual Bank last night.’

‘Correct,’ said Wilde.

‘I have on my files a case against you,’ the machine said. ‘Do you wish to hear the details at present?’

Wilde looked around.

‘Go ahead.’

Reid’s face appeared in ruddy hologram monochrome behind the machine’s screen.

‘I, David Reid, wish to lay a charge against one Jonathan Wilde, of no fixed abode, namely this: that a robot known as Jay-Dub, property of the same Jonathan Wilde, was used to corrupt the control systems of a Model D gynoid, known as Dee Model, property of myself. If Jonathan Wilde wishes to defend himself legally against this charge, no further attempts will be made by me or my agents or allies to arrest him or to impound his machine. If he does not so wish, or refuses a mutually acceptable court, those attempts will continue. I end this statement this Sic’day morning, fifty-seventh day of the year one hundred and two, Ship time.’

Wilde watched the image dwindle to a ruby bead.

He sighed. ‘How did Reid know I’d be registered with you?’

‘He did not,’ said the mainframe. ‘This message was released to all defence agencies. I have conveyed to the others that it has been delivered. They have no further interest in it, unless of course you choose to have it defended by one of them.’

‘No,’ said Wilde.

‘Very well,’ said the machine. ‘Do you wish to defend yourself legally against the charge?’

Wilde thought about this.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Shadows and lights moved behind the screen.

‘I have a suggestion to make,’ said the machine. ‘There is another case in progress, between Reid and another party, in the matter of Dee Model. Dee Model is also a client of mine. You might wish to consider combining your defences.’

‘I might indeed,’ said Wilde.

‘Wait here,’ said the machine. ‘…You may smoke.’

8

Capitalist Realism

An aeroplane or a helicopter comes towards you on a rising note that climaxes, then dies away; but when you hear the sound of an aero-engine and it maintains the same flat tone for minutes on end, you look up, irritated by that anomalously steady buzz, and see an airship.

I stood on Waverley Bridge in the cool dusk and looked up and saw an airship, low in the sky, creeping up behind me like a shiver on my neck, a blue blimp with ‘MAZDA’ in white capitals on the side. It was the same airship as I’d seen two hours or so earlier, in Glasgow. Almost weirder than a UFO, something that shouldn’t be there, a machine from an alternate reality where the Hindenburg or the Dow Jones hadn’t crashed or the Germans had won the Great War. As I watched it move away like a cloud with an outboard motor, I had a momentary sense of dissociation, as if I shouldn’t be there either. What was I doing here, watching an airship from a windy bridge when I could be on a train to London?

It must have been the heat. The heat in London that summer had been like nothing since the summer of ’76, when I’d spent weeks going from interview to interview, crashing out with pals or in my parents’ home, worrying about the rash of hateful Union Jack stickers plastered everywhere by the National Front. (And meanwhile, in another hot city, Polish workers pulled up railway lines and pulled down meat prices, and almost the state, almost…) And coming back to Glasgow and a drier heat, grateful, walking into Annette’s lab where dissected locusts were pinned in foil dishes of black wax and the smell of evaporating ethanol rushed to my sinuses as I grabbed her and said, ‘I got a job!’

Nineteen years later