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.It’s still just a machine but it’s running out of control.” He wiped tomato sauce from his plate with his last piece of bread.“Well if we’re going to have to wait here for this guy, you’d better buy us another bottle of wine…”Savonari arrived soon afterwards, a small dark man with deep-set eyes and a great beak of a Roman nose.He shook us both by the hand, then reversed a chair and straddled it, leaning towards me intently across the remains of our meal.It was only after he had been with us for some minutes that I registered that he himself had a robot with him, standing motionless by the doorway, hammerheaded, inhuman, ready to leap into action in an instant if anyone should try and attack the sergeant, its master.(It was what the American police call a ‘dumb buddy’ – three hundred and sixty degree vision, ultrafast reactions, a lethal weapon built into each hand…)Several people, it seemed, had witnessed and reported the robot’s attempt to converse with me in the Accademia – and seen it slipping away from the gallery soon afterwards – but no one else had been able to report the exact words spoken.Apparently my account confirmed beyond doubt that there had been a fundamental breakdown in the thing’s functioning, rather than, say, a simple hardware fault.The sergeant noted, for instance, that it had continued to try to talk to me when I had clearly ordered it out of the way.“These security machines are unfortunately very prone to this problem,” said Savonari with a resigned gesture, addressing himself to Freddie.“Their senses and analytical apparatus are so very acute.”Freddie, unable to understand a word, smiled vaguely and offered the sergeant a cigarette, which was declined.“Our own machines are totally reprogrammed every week to avoid this,” the Sergeant said, nodding towards his sleek minder by the door, “but not everyone is so aware of the dangers.”He made a little movement of exasperation and told me of a case he had dealt with recently where a robot farm hand had suddenly tossed its owner’s ten-year-old son into a threshing machine.I shuddered.“What did you do?”“Like all Rogues,” (the Italian word, it seems, is Incontrollabile), “the machine had to be destroyed.But that was no help to the little boy.”Again the angry gesture.“I am a Catholic, Signor Philips.Like the Holy Father, I believe that to make machines in the likeness of people is a sin against the Holy Spirit.I would like to see them all destroyed.”He snorted: “My little son had a machine once that taught him how to spell.I put it out for the dustman when I discovered he had given it a human name.”Then he shrugged and got up: “But I can only enforce the law as it stands, Signor Philips.Thank you for getting in touch.I am sure we will find the macchina very soon.”He shook our hands again and left.We heard him outside the door barking angrily at his ‘buddy’: “Pronto, bruto, pronto!”*Later as we leaned comfortably on a wall watching the bats looping and diving over the river Arno, Freddie enthused about that police machine.Apparently the things are actually made in Florence in the Olivetti labs out at the Citta Scientifica.“Beautiful design,” Freddie said.“Nothing wasted.A really Italian machine.”I liked that concept and proceeded to spout a lot of drunken nonsense about how the taut police minder was in a direct line of descent from Michelangelo’s David – how the wires and tubes under the transparent skin of the robot in the Accademia echoed the nerves and muscles in da Vinci’s sketches of dissected limbs…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
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Tematy
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Cheryl McIntyre [Infinitely Infinitely (epub)
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§ Chmielewska Joanna M. Mąż zastępczy