Futuretrack 5 by Robert Westall Read Free Book Online Page A

“What about the phases of the moon? Mean distance from the sun? The proton shower from the stars? The weather inside my body, inside my soul? Do you really think we can shut ourselves off from weather? Look at those rotting peaches there. While we’ve been talking one molecule of peach has entered your body and one molecule of me has entered the peach. Can you disprove that, Tech brat? Heh, heh? You’re assuming stillness, boy. Can you guarantee stillness? D’you think you’re God?”
    “No, I’m the tea boy.” “Pour it, then, pour it. Two sugars.” It seemed I was not going to be thrown downstairs immediately.
    The months I spent with Idris were never easy. But they had high spots. He cared for nobody; made indecent suggestions to Headtech daily. But the night he made an anatomical suggestion to the Prime Minister made me realise how much power he and Laura had. In the thirty years since Idris built her, from stolen parts, in a locked loo of this very toilet, Laura had gathered all knowledge to herself. Before Laura, there’d been many computers: police, military, public health. By electronic stealth, Idris had burgled them all. Even the sewage computer, on principle. The Ests found out after a year, when Idris started correcting other people’s programs. By then, it was too late. The Ests demanded Laura be revealed and dismantled. Idris retaliated by sending the Treasury computer berserk. It stampeded the money markets and in one day Britain lost a thousand million Eurocredits. The Ests surrendered…
    Most of the time, Idris behaved himself. His work load was fantastic. One moment Laura would be concluding a copper deal with the primitive home-grown Nigerian computer, swindling it blind on behalf of the nation. The next, she’d print out the air-pollution pattern for Europe, which she’d worked out simultaneously. Russian missile servicings; the French president’s pattern of phobias…
    Late at night, when she’d circuits to spare, Idris let me play with her. I’d request the day’s births in, say, Glastonbury. Pick out one child; get the state biographies of both parents, a genetic forecast of the child’s future health including life expectancy. Plans of the house where he’d live; details of the house’s construction and history…
    You could only do it for Est-children, of course. No records of Unnems. I tried tracing Rog… nothing.
    “She’s not just a calculator,” Idris would plead, gripping my shoulders. “Relate to her; ask her what she’d like to do.”
    Always a creepy moment.
    There were worse. The drunken nights when Idris sang duets with her. The old Bing Crosby number, “True Love.” That old cracked man’s voice and Laura’s smooth female voice uplifting it, backing it with infinite sadness:
    “For you and I have a guardian angel On high, with nothing to do, But to give to you, and to give to me Love forever true. …”
    Or the nights he quarrelled, damning her machine logic, trying to twist it in knots. And Laura always so reasonable, till he pounded the gilt table in fury, and drunken tears dribbled down his three-day growth of whiskers.
    But the worst nights of all were the nights when he began muttering about somebody called Scott-Astbury. Scott-Astbury had tricked him, when he was a new and lonely chief analyst. Scott-Astbury called by with bottles of the best Scotch, talked about salmon fishing. Scott-Astbury had news of the human Laura, just snippets.
    One night, in a half-drunken argument, Scott-Astbury had cast doubts on the power of the new electronic Laura…
    “I told him,” said Idris, hiccuping, “I told him me and Laura could do anything. He bet me a whole crate of whisky we couldn’t do… something.” He would always seal his lips tight at that point and stare at me like a frightened child. “But we did it, Laura and me. Proved it could be done. Won the bet. He took away the printout of what we’d done. For a joke… just for a joke, to show his