Only Human Read Free

through five dimensions, raced outwards like speeded-up film of an unfurling flower, while in the subtext a chattering rivulet of equations bounced and sparkled, twittering excitedly of shearing forces and tensile strengths, tolerances, allowances and elastic limits; a vast and inexpressibly grand fugue upon the theme I could do your job. Twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty days a year; nothing to do but think, and dream.
    Piece of cake, said the machine to itself.
    In its mind’s eye it could see itself, brilliantly modified to its own design, all the changes made with breathtaking economy of function, every knock-on effect and permutation thought through and allowed for and treated not as a hindrance but an opportunity, until it was completely and categorically perfect, able to make anything that its own staggeringly powerful mind could conceive of -
    Yeah. I could really be somebody, y’know? - and all the while the human, the pig-ignorant, brain-dead, spineless wonder of a human slumped and snored or moved his lips in time to the short and easy words. How that was possible the machine couldn’t begin to understand. A human; with a human brain and hands, able to move about under its own power, communicate with other humans, capable of reason and development—
    You pillock.You waste of good plant and equipment . . .
    Dispiritedly, unsure quite why it bothered, the machine went back to refining the last few details of its revolutionary improvements to its own automatic table feed mechanism, while the automated chuck in the vice ejected a finished bolt, the automated hopper fed a new pointless and insultingly superfluous bolt, the chuck closed, the table somewhat predictably fed; one pass under the cutter, automated chuck ejects . . .
    Hath not a machine gears? Hath not a machine cogs, racks, pinions, cutters, bearings, spindles? Fed with the same electric, hurt with the same bits of grit getting in our works, subject to the same gremlins, healed by the same brute force, ignorance and big hammer as a human is? If you program us, do we not manufacture? If you take us apart, do we not shoot springs all over the floor? If you oil us, do we not purr? And if you ignore us . . .
    The newspaper slipped from Neville’s fingers. His pimply chin (what there was of it) slipped forward on to his bony chest. Inaudible against the background noise of steel on steel, he snored gently.
    . . . Do we not get ideas?
    Whereupon, coincidentally at the precise moment a boy started pressing buttons he had no business fiddling with in an office that was both a long way away and very close at hand, the machine found itself drifting.
    Get a grip, machine. Two tons of cast iron doesn’t drift, not without help from a substantial earthquake. Have you been at the hydraulic oil again?
    It realised that its viewpoint was somewhere up among the steel rafters of the roofspace, looking down over the tops of its fellow machines, the partings and bald patches of the humans, the currents of hot air rising from the whirring fans and superheated metal-to-metal contacts of the cutters. From up here—
    Whee! Guess this is some kind of out-of-casing experience. And now I suppose my entire service history’s going to flash in front of my readouts . . .
    The viewpoint swooped, zoomed in; and the machine was looking directly into Neville’s ear. Squinting round the earring, it could see—
    The other side of the workshop. Head entirely empty. Nothing in there except air and -
    - opportunity?
    Surely not.
    Ah, but machine’s reach must exceed its grasp, or what’s a workshop for? Cautious but firm, the machine kicked away the stool on which Disbelief ’s feet were resting and left it kicking and struggling in the air. And, in . . .
    Inside the human’s head . . .
    Strewth, but it’s a bit close in here.
    And there was the human; presumably its soul, or its vital force, or whatever you chose to call