Only Human (14 page)

In much the same frame of mind, Karen picked up the phone, tucked it under her ear and said, ‘Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits UK Helpline Desk, can I help you?' She knew what was going to happen; at the other end of the line there'd be some frustrated, confused keyboard jockey who'd just watched the entire July figures spiral away into cybernetic oblivion, desperate to find somebody to blame.

In a sense, she often thought, the KIC helpline was like the Samaritans, in that people only tended to call up on it when they were at the end of their rope and suicidal. The difference lay in the fact that where the Samaritans are there to stop the punter killing himself, the Helpline's function was to channel the helplessness and despair into basically therapeutic rage against the poor fool who answered the call. Hi, I'm Karen. Blame me.

‘Hello?'

Karen frowned. The voice seemed very faint and far away, and was quickly replaced by the sound of payphone pips. These lasted rather a long time; long enough, in fact, for the caller to have gone away and earned the coins by playing the guitar in the bus station waiting room.

‘Hello?'

‘Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits UK Helpline Desk, Karen speaking. How can I help you?'

‘Hi,' said the voice. ‘I'm calling from—' The pips went. Puzzling; there wasn't anywhere in the country, as far as Karen was aware, where ten pence bought a mere seventeen words. More expensive even than consulting a lawyer.

‘Hello?'

‘Hello,' Karen said. ‘What can I—?'

‘It's this computer,' said the voice. ‘It's not working properly.'

‘I see. Can you give me the model number and—'

The pips, again. Karen swore. There had to be a better way to do this, one rather less likely to fuse her brain into one solid lump of aggravation. Accordingly, when the pips cleared for the third time, she cut in quickly.

‘Give me your number,' she said. ‘I'll call you back.'

‘Um. There could be a problem with that. You see, I'm rather -'

‘- a long way away. And I'm not sure this phone takes incoming calls anyway, you see, because—'

Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep
.

Karen took a deep breath. ‘Let's try, shall we?' she said.

The caller started to dictate a number. It was very long and quite unlike any phone number she'd ever come across before, and the
beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeeps
went twice while she was taking it down. Still, she reflected, I'm here to help, and it's not my phone bill. She put the receiver down and tapped the number in.

‘Hello?'

‘Hello. Right then, now where were we? If you could give me the model number and year of manufacture . . .'

The voice sounded a trifle sheepish as it interrupted her. ‘I don't think there is a model number,' it said. ‘Custom job, you see. Only one of its kind.'

‘Oh yes?' Karen pulled a face. KIC didn't do custom jobs; so the caller was either ignorant, thick or using some cobbled-together mess that probably bore no ongoing resemblance to anything the company had ever made, with the possible exception of the stuff they fished out of the shredder bins once a fortnight. ‘Any identifying marks at all?'

‘There's a name,' the caller replied. ‘Mainframe.'

‘Well, I'm afraid -
what did you say?
'

‘Mainframe,' the caller repeated. ‘That's what it's called. Or at least that's what we call it. Ring any bells with you?'

Karen pursed her lips. ‘Only the ones on the other leg,' she replied. ‘There's only one KIC called Mainframe and that belongs to - well, there's only one. What's yours
really—
?'

‘This is that one,' said the voice, sounding slightly higher and more querulous. ‘The one and only, so to speak. Really and truly. And it's not working properly. Look, are you going to help me? You're my last hope.'

It was at this point that Karen finally lost her temper; or, to be precise, put her temper carefully away in a safe place where she'd be sure to find it again. ‘Look,' she said, ‘I don't know who you are, but I'm fairly certain you're not the President of the United States, so obviously your computer isn't Mainframe, and—'

‘Is that who they told you owns Mainframe? Gosh.'

‘Yes, it is, because he does. Now, I do have other callers waiting, so—'

‘Is that really what they told you?'

There is, unfortunately, a rule which says that KIC helpline operators can't slam the phone down. They can't even tell callers what they think of them. It's calculated that the repressed energy wasted by KIC helpline operators not being allowed to let off steam under these circumstances would be enough to light Boston for a week. ‘Yes,' Karen said. ‘And now...'

‘I've found a code number, if that's any help.'

‘Huh?'

‘There's a little bit of paper, with a number scribbled down on it, wedged in this operator's manual, and someone's written
KIC security code.
Shall I read it out to you?'

Karen sighed, audibly, producing a sound like an InterCity train just entering a tunnel at top speed. ‘If you must,' she said. ‘Then I really do have to—'

‘All right,' said the caller. ‘It's One.'

There was a moment's silence, during which Karen's jaw dropped like share prices on a bad day. ‘Could you repeat that, please?' she eventually croaked.

‘Sure,' the caller replied. ‘One.'

‘Please hold.' Karen put down the phone, blinked four times and rummaged in her desk drawer for the loose-leaf binder where she filed the office memos. After she'd flicked through forty-odd pages of sternly worded directives about paperclip conservation and taking empty coffee cups back to the kitchen after use, she found the one she'd been looking for. She read it, read it again, muttered something under her breath, and picked the phone up.

‘Are you still there?' she asked. ‘Sir?' she added.

‘Still here.'

How to put this? A difficult question to phrase. She did her best.

‘Are you sure,' she said, ‘that you're not the President of the United States?'

‘Pretty fair average sure,' the caller replied. ‘It'd be a difficult thing to be without noticing. People'd keep phoning you up, for one thing.'

Karen kept calm. Not easy; the orchestra who finished their set while the
Titanic
went down under their feet couldn't have managed it, but Karen did. She glanced at the folder, open at the memo she'd just looked up. It said, in capitals, italics and bold face, whatever code number One tells you, believe it. Oh well, she told herself.

‘In that case,' she said, ‘who are you?'

‘Ah,' replied the caller.

 

Sleep, the thief who breaks into our bodies at night and steals a third of our lifetimes, fancied he heard someone coming and legged it out of Len's brain, abandoning the bag marked
Swag
. It contained an idea.

Accordingly, when Len came round and found himself lying on his back with a crick in his neck and his mouth open, he discovered a perfectly finished, mirror-polished inspiration lying on the floor of his mind, for all the world as if the stork had left it there. He examined it.

‘Yes,' he said aloud. ‘Why not?'

He sat up, and at once looked across the workshop at the machine. For one horrible fragment of a second he thought it wasn't there any more; then he moved his head a little and saw it, and thought
Ah, that's all right then.

According to the physicists, there's this stuff called potential energy. It's what a large stone or a ton weight has in that split second between toppling off the edge of a high cliff and starting to fall. In that moment, all the effort and strength taken in lugging the wretched thing up there suddenly comes to life, as it were; then gravity pounces, like an independent financial adviser leaping upon a defenceless lottery winner, and takes it all away again.
Bump!
goes the stone on the ground below, and the energy earths itself and runs to waste, leaving the physicist's assistants with the cheerful job of heaving a ton of research material on to the pallet truck and hauling it back up the hill.

In the pale light of morning, filtered through a cobwebbed window, the machine glowed with enough potential energy to blow all the fuses in the National Grid. Len stood up, walked over to it and patted the table gently.

‘Down, boy,' he muttered. ‘Be with you in a minute.'

First, he had to empty some fluids out of his body and put some solids into it. Then he'd need a large sheet of paper, a ruler, a set square, a protractor and a sharp pencil. And some materials, as well; lots of them, specialised stuff like titanium and palladium and tungsten and beryllium copper, as well as twelve different kinds of steel and nine flavours of aluminum alloy. And a computer, of course, and a three-horse electric motor, and a few other bits and pieces. And then . . .

Was it his imagination, or did a fat blue slug of potential energy just arc across the gap between the cutter and the table? Better hurry, because we've got a busy day ahead of us, you and I.

One of the glorious things about the city of Birmingham is that there are people you can call up on the phone and ask for six feet of three-inch-section square titanium bar; and they don't say ‘Huh?' or ‘What in the name of fun's three-inch-section square titanium bar?' or anything like that. They just ask you if you want it delivered, and whether you're paying cash or on account.

‘Um,' Len replied. ‘I haven't actually got an account with you, but . . .'

‘Cash, then,' the voice on the other end of the line said. ‘That's fine, if you can just drop by at the office. Soon as we've got the money, I'll get the stuff to you.'

Money. Curse. Len sat down, frowning, and applied his mind. He was going to need rather a lot of the stuff, and he had the idea that Neville wasn't good for that much, even if he sold his collection of CDs and his cowboy boots. What to do?

Fool. Now you're starting to think like a human. What do you do if there's something you need, but haven't got? Easy. You make it.

So he called up another supplier and ordered a hundred feet of seven-eighths brass rod, which Neville's Visa card could just about afford without selling anything. When it arrived, he sliced it up into nine thousand six hundred discs, each an eighth of an inch thick; a job which took the machine just over three hours. While he'd been waiting for the brass to arrive, he'd milled up two hardened steel dies and adapted the machine's vertical feed to make a high-power press. Add a knurling wheel in the power tailstock, set up a simple automatic feed and collect the resulting newly minted pound coins in a sack as they're spat out of the hopper at the back end, while phoning the supplier for more brass rod with the other hand.

At the end of a very boring but rather productive day, he had six plastic dustbins full of the things, which solved one problem. He'd also drawn up the plans, worked out the quantities and ordered the materials. There was another spate of thefts by the sandman, and then he was ready to start.

First, he pressed the body shells out of eighth-inch gauge-plate, ending up with something that looked like a space-age suit of armour, or C3PO's party frock. Next, the action parts, milled from titanium and carbon steel. The frame next; mostly high-tensile aluminum alloys and stainless steel - foul stuff which produces long strings of razor-sharp swarf, like a garrotter's cheesewire suddenly come to life. The fiddly bit came next - lots of electrical contacts, cut out of material as soft as butter and as sticky as mud, bogging down the cutters and causing Len to dredge the undersilt of Neville's memory for a wide selection of abstruse synonyms for ‘Bugger!' After that, there were odd bits and pieces; bearings and bushings and gaskets and the like, which had to be pressed out of compacted phosphor bronze, a process remarkably similar to building a suspension bridge out of tapioca pudding. There were a few setbacks, the odd broken cutter and misaligned hole, further ramraids from Mr Sleepy, a shortfall of precision-made little brass discs that had to be made up before the suppliers would part with a lousy few grams of nickel barium, and a rather ticklish moment when a homicidal strip of knife-edged swarf chased him three times round the workshop before wrapping itself round the chair. Nothing, though, that he couldn't handle. Piece of cake, really.

Man's reach may exceed Man's grasp; but it doesn't take Einstein to come up with the idea of a pair of lazy tongs. The question which kept on hammering away on the inside of his mind was, Since it's so easy, why haven't They ever done this?

All the components made; just a question now of putting it all together. He laid the parts out on the floor of the workshop, consulted the diagram and set to work. It helped, of course, that he'd taken the time to think it all through beforehand, so that everything could be fitted together without needing six pairs of hands and a seventh to catch the little flying springs and tumbling grubscrews. Even so, when he thought of the hash his predecessor had made of his version of the same basic concept, he couldn't help wondering how the guy had got into this line of business in the first place. Someone who tries to make high-quality precision machinery out of a length of second-hand rib must be either bizarrely imaginative or as thick as a triple-decker sandwich.

And when it was all done, the end product sat up, opened its eyes and spoke. What it actually said was, ‘Doctor Frankenstein, I presume,' but Len can be forgiven for that. He'd been working non-stop for seven days and hadn't had much sleep.