STAR TREK: TOS #80 - The Joy Machine Read online

  Kirk’s success had always been based on persistence. He knew that negatives could never be proved, but he also pursued all the evidence available until it was exhausted. “This building is five stories tall,” he said. “There must be offices in the floors above.”

  Tandy pointed to a door beside the front entrance. When it opened for them, a stairway was revealed behind. Kirk started up determinedly. The two girls followed more hesitantly.

  Three doors on the second floor opened on three empty rooms. Three doors on the third floor opened on three empty rooms. Three doors on the fourth floor opened on three empty rooms. Four doors on the fifth floor opened on four empty rooms, and three doors in the middle, above the entrance hall, opened on three empty rooms. The fourth opened onto a small staircase.

  “This place has only five stories,” Kirk said. “Where do these stairs lead?”

  “Maybe to an attic,” Tandy said.

  Noelle nodded. The higher they had climbed the more apprehensive they had appeared. Kirk didn’t know whether it was because of the building’s empty rooms or his own grim unwillingness to accept the way things were—or the way things seemed to be. Kirk moved up the stairs, and the girls followed even more slowly.

  At the top was a small, dusty room. From the absence of footprints, nobody had entered the room in months. In the middle of the room was a medium-sized computer, about one and a half meters high and [47] a meter on each side. It was covered by a gray metal hood, perforated for dissipation of heat. A fan provided the only sound, and a slight movement of hot air. Other than that, lights flickering underneath the perforations provided the only evidence that the computer was active.

  The little room was warm. Kirk felt himself start to sweat. “Computer,” he said, “do you respond to voice?”

  “Wor ... king ...” the computer began in a voice like an old man silent for so long he had forgotten speech. And then it continued with greater assurance, “What do you wish to know?”

  “Are you in charge here?” Kirk asked.

  “I am a servant of the people,” the computer said.

  “Where are the other public servants?”

  “No others are necessary,” the computer said.

  “Isn’t that a bit arrogant?”

  “I am stating fact, not opinion.”

  “But you take all planetary responsibilities on your shoulders,” Kirk said.

  “I have no shoulders,” the computer said, “but I serve as best I can.”

  “Water purification?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sewage.”

  “Yes.”

  “Communications?”

  “Yes.”

  “Transport? Air control?”

  “Yes.”

  “Work classification?”

  “Yes.”

  “Job assignment?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a great deal for one small computer.”

  “I am small,” the computer said, “but I am powerful and well constructed.”

  [48] Kirk took a deep breath. “And do you record the productivity of every citizen and calculate his or her progress toward a payday?”

  “Yes.”

  “And deliver it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do they call you?”

  “They call me the Joy Machine.”

  Aboard the Enterprise, McCoy looked away from the faceted report on the screen. “Jim isn’t being careful,” he said to Spock. “That is a very powerful computer in spite of its size.”

  “If De Kreef managed to perfect room-temperature superconductivity,” Spock said, “the Joy Machine is clearly big enough to perform almost any function necessary. I agree that the captain is taking undue risk in confronting the Joy Machine, even though he believes that his daring is the secret of his success, that and his judgment about when to exercise it.

  “Computer,” he said, “is the Joy Machine big enough to perform the functions it claims?”

  “The size of the computer cannot be judged by its appearance,” the Enterprise’s computer said. “What you see may be only the communication center, and the Joy Machine’s actual size may be more accurately depicted by tracing its circuits throughout the system it serves, just as my size is more accurately the circuitry throughout—”

  “That’s enough,” McCoy said. “Clearly,” he said to Spock, “the computer is in contact with every citizen by means of his or her identification bracelet. It not only keeps track of the amount of work performed, it notifies citizens when their payday is due, and delivers the payday by means of various devices located throughout the city.”

  “We should consider how an electronic brain might be affected by delivering extreme pleasure to the people it was constructed to serve.”

  [49] “What are you driving at, Spock?”

  “An advanced computer must be heuristic—that is, it must be capable of learning. What is the Joy Machine learning? How has it changed since it was first constructed?”

  “That’s something we will have to find out when we have more information,” McCoy said. “Right now I’m more concerned about the fact that if the Joy Machine contacts every citizen through his or her bracelet, it must know that Jim’s bracelet is a fake.”

  “You are not a citizen of Timshel,” the computer said.

  “That’s true,” Kirk said. “But how did you know?”

  “Your bracelet does not respond.”

  “I am visiting the Marouks. These are his children.”

  “That’s so,” Tandy said.

  “I offer my services,” the computer said.

  “And what does that involve?” Kirk asked.

  “You must become a citizen by accepting a working bracelet,” the computer said. “You will be entitled to one free payday as your reward for becoming a citizen. After that you will work at the job assigned you and receive your payday according to the rate of pay established for that task.”

  “And if I respectfully decline?” Kirk asked.

  Kirk could feel the two girls looking at him in surprise.

  The computer hesitated almost unnoticeably. “That will not be permitted,” it said. “You have one day to accept citizenship.”

  Kirk did not ask the alternative. The computer’s responses left no doubt that the alternative would be unpleasant, perhaps even unthinkable. For a computer constructed to provide joy to the people it served, it radiated an aura of menace all the more threatening because it was phrased in language innocent of good or evil. And, although the computer seemed small and [50] defenseless. Kirk suspected that it possessed safeguards against any threat to its existence. To think otherwise might be fatal to his mission.

  Surely, in the history of the recent revolution, others had tried to destroy the Joy Machine. And failed.

  The three of them had retraced their steps until they reached the main floor. “Take me to De Kreef,” Kirk said grimly.

  [subspace carrier wave transmission]

 

  >volition interrogate<

 

  >volition

  must contemplate<

  Chapter Four

  De Kreef

  NEOLLE WAS WIDE-EYED as the three of them stopped at the top of the stairs leading down toward the plaza, and Tandy was trying to act as if nothing important had happened. Their easy acceptance of the De Kreef Revolution had been alarming, but Kirk understood. Young people are like that: they experience so many transformations in themselves, they accept change as the nature of things. And although they cling to stability in their everyday lives as anchors for their own protean existences, they are always ready to tear down the world and start over. That was why young people were in the front ranks of any revolution, ready to lay down their lives for ideals they could barely pronounce.

  Now Tandy and Noelle had seen the mechanism behind the world that until now had revealed to them only a face contort
ed with joy. Like the sight of sausages being made or laws being passed, the view of the way their world really works can shatter anyone’s illusions, much less those of a child and a near-adult. And the mechanism behind this world was a machine.

  [53] “Where will we find De Kreef?” Kirk asked.

  “Oh,” Tandy said, as if startled out of introspection, and then once more was herself, a young woman striving for sophistication. “We’ll have to check out a few places.”

  “We could have asked the computer,” Noelle said wickedly.

  “No thanks,” Kirk said. “It has given me one day to get out of town, and I’d rather it didn’t know any more about my whereabouts than it can gain through its normal channels.” He laughed to let the girls know that he wasn’t really concerned. But he was. The Joy Machine’s tentacles could be anywhere.

  Timshel citizens in their jeans and workshirts still toiled to keep the plaza spotless. Tandy led them through the workers and across the plaza to a theater where, Kirk remembered, he had once seen an opera performed—Dark Galaxy, he thought it was. Inside, the splendid foyer with its great chandelier under which he had sipped Timshel champagne had been converted into a shipping center, and workers were accepting electronic equipment from moving belts and packing it into cartons that other workers were stacking, by hand, near an exterior door.

  “Couldn’t that be done better using machines?” Kirk asked.

  “It wouldn’t be work,” Tandy said.

  “Of course,” Kirk said. “It’s difficult for me to think in terms of the De Kreef Revolution rather than efficiency.”

  Noelle sneaked a glance at Tandy. “Work is good,” she said. “Work is noble.”

  “If people do work that a machine can do as well, or better,” Kirk said, “it turns them into machines.”

  “Machines can’t get a payday,” Tandy said.

  Tandy and Noelle had been searching the faces of the workers and then shook their heads. They led the way through the doors that once had opened into the theater itself, from which the moving belts now [54] emerged. The seats had been removed; in their place were assembly lines at which workers labored over the electronic equipment that was being packed in the converted foyer, while policemen supervised from what had once been the theater’s stage. Here Kirk could see the equipment up closer: it was an electronic black box with plug on one end and a socket on the other, apparently to accept a lightbulb of some sort. Kirk was reminded of the rosy glow that had enveloped Dannie last night and wished he could get a better look at what was being put together here, but by this time one of the policemen had accosted them.

  “Your presence is a distraction,” the policeman said. “Identify yourself and explain your business here, or I will have to place you under arrest.”

  Before Kirk could speak, Tandy had said, haughtily, “I am Tandy Marouk, and we are here on the authority of Kemal Marouk.”

  To Kirk’s surprise, the policeman bent his head in acknowledgment, but he continued, “Nevertheless, I would be derelict in my duties and subject to cancellation of points if I did not insist that you leave the premises immediately.”

  “Oh, all right,” Tandy said, and turned to lead the way from the big room. As soon as they had passed through the converted foyer into the plaza outside, she said, “He’s not there either.”

  “De Kreef?” Kirk asked.

  Tandy nodded.

  “I don’t understand,” Kirk said. “Why would you look for the Paymaster in a place like that? Does he have to work, too?”

  “You’ll know soon enough,” Noelle said. “Daddy said we should let you see things for yourself.”

  “But he didn’t expect us to encounter the Joy Machine,” Kirk said.

  “I didn’t know about the Joy Machine,” Tandy said. “Daddy never told us about that.” She looked apprehensive, as if she had just discovered that her [55] father might not know everything about the world she would soon enter, or was capable of concealing an important fact about her world.

  Kirk wondered how many other Timshel citizens were not aware that a small, gray computer sat at the heart of their capital city, like a spider weaving invisible webs, or if knowledge of the Joy Machine was imparted when children graduated into adulthood, like a rite of passage. Kirk imagined a group of sixteen-year-olds filing into that little attic room to be introduced to the machine that would preside over their emotional existence for the rest of their lives and, beamed upon by proud parents, fitted with the jeweled bracelet that was their emblem of maturity.

  Kirk shook the picture from his head. It wouldn’t be like that. It would be the simple fitting of a bracelet and the assignment of a job. No need to bring in the Joy Machine. Maybe no one knew the full extent of what De Kreef had done except De Kreef himself.

  Kirk filed that possibility away for future reference and wished that he had been able to take away one of the electronic devices from the shipping room. Spock and Scotty might have been able to figure out what it was capable of doing and how it went about doing it.

  Instead he had only the microchip he had managed to filch from the assembly line.

  They went into two more cultural buildings converted into factories. One made couches such as Dannie had laid herself upon last night, and another assembled gardening equipment from parts manufactured elsewhere: harrows, hoes, shovels, trowels, rakes. ... Finally they entered the building that once had been known as the Museum of Humanity. Kirk was familiar with its exhibits and dioramas depicting the rise of humanity from single-celled creatures through the various stages of its evolution and civilizations to its diaspora across the galaxy. He had spent hours studying humanity’s struggle for existence and [56] definition, watching the displays shifting in response to his questions, listening to the interactive guide sticks, and admiring the diversity of humanity’s adaptation to Earthly and extraterrestrial conditions. Here, he had thought, was what the Federation was all about, and, later, what the Starship Enterprise was all about. This was what he had taken from Timshel and what, in large part, he had brought to his job as captain: the adaptability of humanity and its ability to recognize that it had been shaped and conditioned by environment and yet could choose to do otherwise.

  Now all that was gone. The exhibits had been stripped from the building and replaced by assembly lines. These lines were putting together bracelets. Even from a distance Kirk could see that the undersides were incised with circuitry. He could not tell anything about the imitation rubies; no doubt they were part of the apparatus as well, since they fit into the couch sockets, but maybe they were only connections. Or maybe they were half-alive in some way, biological artifacts that wedded themselves to the wearers’ systems like symbiotes. Or like vampires.

  What he was certain about, however, was that he didn’t want one of them placed upon his wrist. “Why so many?” he asked.

  “Why so many what?” Tandy asked.

  “Bracelets,” Kirk said. “By now every adult has one. This factory alone must turn them out by the hundreds every day, maybe by the thousands.”

  “The next generation must be equipped,” Tandy said.

  “Yes, and some must get broken, or malfunction and be replaced,” Kirk said. “But all that could be taken care of by a day’s production in this factory alone.”

  He filed it away as another fact to be fitted into the puzzle that was Timshel.

  “There he is,” Noelle said excitedly. She pointed to an elderly man stooped over the assembly line [57] inserting imitation rubies from a box on one side into bracelets as they came before him in an unending series. The man had once been tall, but now he was stooped from labor or from age. His white hair had grown so thin on top that his pink scalp shone through, and what had once, perhaps, been a trim goatee had become a scraggly beard.

  “De Kreef?” Kirk asked, puzzled.

  Tandy nodded and glanced at the policeman on the far side of the room seated in a chair on tall legs, like stilts, so that he could see the entire floor. T
he policeman was looking in their direction.

  Kirk realized he had only a few minutes. He stepped forward and placed a hand on De Kreef’s shoulder. “De Kreef,” he said. The old man shook off Kirk’s hand and continued inserting the rubies into the bracelets moving in front of him. “De Kreef!” Kirk said again. His peripheral vision picked up the policeman climbing down from his perch.

  The old man shook himself again as if ridding himself of an unwelcome burden and continued his labor.

  “I must talk to you,” Kirk said. De Kreef, if it truly was De Kreef, the creator of the Joy Machine and the Timshel way of life, gave no evidence that he heard or was aware of their presence.

  Tandy was tugging at the sleeve of Kirk’s shirt. “We’d better go before we get into trouble,” she said.

  Reluctantly, Kirk released De Kreef’s shoulder and accompanied Tandy and Noelle from the converted museum. “I don’t understand,” he said, once they were outside and beyond, apparently, the territory the policeman was assigned to oversee. “What was wrong with De Kreef?”

  “Nothing,” Tandy said.

  “That’s what you told me about Dannie,” Kirk said, trying to control his exasperation.

  “That was normal,” Tandy said. “Both times.”

  Kirk looked at Noelle. She nodded.

  [58] “Work does that to people?” Kirk asked.

  “People are different,” Tandy said. “Some get so involved they fall into a trance. It’s even got a name: ‘focused-task hypnosis.’ Lots of people think it’s a blessing.”

  “I’ve heard that FTH may be a side effect of payday for some people,” Noelle said.

  “A kind of residual aspect of induced sleep?” Kirk asked.

  “Or too much pleasure,” Noelle said.

  “But that’s nonsense,” Tandy said sharply. “Stories to frighten children.”

  “What I can’t understand,” Kirk said, “is why the Paymaster is working on an assembly line.”