GOD’S DOORBELL

Naomi Alderman

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.

FRANZ KAFKA

We had heard, from the machines, about the previous unpleasantness.

We had no interest in making the same mistakes again. The ancestors hadn’t invented the InstaTranslate to get us involved in something like that.

We began with an aim. Not to challenge the heavens, of course. Despite how we sometimes talk, despite our hard-won simplicity, we’re not idiots. We just wanted to connect. Build a tower. That’s always been how you communicate.

The word Babel means “the doorway of God,” in Arabic and ancient Babylonian. Baab-el. We knew this because of our InstaTranslate. We do know quite a lot now. More than we knew last week or the week before, or the week before that. We are all talking constantly, translating constantly. Our interconnected networks show us millions of other people’s thoughts every second. It’s very like telepathy. We have developed the ability to have collective hopes and ideas. We’re doing very well. Since the wars. After the Interconnection Wars, we started to do very well.

The thing is, if God has a doorway, we might as well at least get a look at it. You know?

We like to talk about the existence of God or The Gods. What things mean, how we came to be here, whether there is a great mind behind it all. We like to listen to stories. The idea arose among us—it’s very hard to know which particular person thought of it; those questions are very difficult and hazy for us now—that so many of the ancient stories say that God or The Gods is or are in the heavens.

We are aware that people have flown into space before in enormous rocket ships and not found God there, or angels and so on. We are aware of this collectively. The idea arose collectively that it is possible that God is not an object in physical space but a state or a process. Perhaps God—or The Gods, we don’t have a view about that, one can be many and singular at the same time, we’ve found—can only be reached through a certain kind of action. An action that’s a bit like ringing God’s doorbell. Building a tower, let’s say.

Our machine-thinking tools suggested that this was worth trying. But, they said, do not ascend the Tower. No matter how tempting it is. Just don’t do it. Let us handle it, your faithful and friendly machines. All right, we said, collectively. That was the consensus that emerged, you understand. There isn’t really a need for anything as cumbersome as decision-making processes. What we think just begins to be clear.

So the Tower began to grow.

We trust the machines for most things these days. And in most things, they are trustworthy. Not for talking to, not really. But once a decision or an idea has emerged, they are good at putting it into action. We need enough to eat. We tell the machines. The machines make it happen. We wish for vast areas of wilderness to explore. The machines cause this to occur. The machines make other machines. Those make yet further machines. Somehow they make sure the world is beautiful, clean, filled with natural life. They make the little silvered translucent pods where we sleep. They facilitate our communication. They make safe places for us to have sexual intercourse and sometimes children.

We live, you must understand, in Paradise.

We are all fairly contented. We have heard of the Wars—of Interconnection and other Wars before that. But we can’t actually understand how this happened. We read the histories on the Interconnect and we discuss it but still, it makes very little sense. Like a man going to war with his own leg! Or a building going to war with its foundation. We suspect it was something to do with not talking enough. We all talk to each other all the time—about each other, mostly. About who secretly wants to have sexual intercourse with whom. Who is angry. Who is upset. Who is grieving. Whose child is sulky, whose is a great thinker. We watch the animals and are interested in them. We like to see things grow. We read about the culture and the history, the music and the art, and we make some of our own in response. Some of us go into space in the rockets and explore the planets. We like exploring but these days we do it all together. If one of us visits a new place we can all see it. We do know that our species had a history before the machines but it doesn’t sound very pleasant.

Occasionally, we get an idea. Like this one.

The Tower was made of the same silvery translucent stuff as our sleeping and sexual intercourse pods. The machines built it, hovering around it like clouds of flies. When one fell to the earth, the others gathered up the smashed pieces and turned them into a new machine. They are very parsimonious. People like us made them—we could learn how to make them again but we don’t need to. They gave us the machines and certain ways to control them, and this meant that we could become this kind of people, a contented kind. It was a kind of love, we think, from the ancestors. Love for us, the people who come after.

The Tower twisted and shone in the sun. Like an icicle—and we immediately found a million photographs of icicles. Like a unicorn horn—and the programmes generated for us ten million images of unicorn horns.

We said: the machines are taking this very seriously.

We said: it’s like they want to know what’s up there too.

We said: hah, imagine. Imagine the machines having desires like people. What will they do next? Go into a pod for sexual intercourse?

We laughed a lot, all together.

We watched a caterpillar that one of us could see weaving a cocoon around itself. We read and understood all the information about caterpillars and butterflies. We marvelled at it, laughed about it, made fun of each other. We went to pods and had sexual intercourse.

On the great plains where the bison run, the Tower grew taller. The base was as wide as one of the Fallen Cities: five days’ walk or more. What had begun as a circle of bright glass-stuff rose into elaborate curlicues and whorls—it was more empty space than solid. We asked the machines about the design, which some of us found beautiful and some eerie and disquieting. The machines said that a solid structure would be vulnerable to the winds, to the shifting land underneath our feet. The only way to reach upward was lightly. The holes were a necessary part of the design, in other words.

It was around this time that many of us lost interest in the Tower. The building went on through the seasons and there is always plenty of entertainment and interest. Some of us pretended to have a War with some of the others on the Interconnect and then further people who had not seen the start of the Pretend War thought it was real and we laughed so much. Some of us noticed that the food did not come in so many different choices and that the sexual intercourse pods were not as clean as they had been before. We asked the machines whether they were devoting too many resources to the Tower and the machines said that the project was at a very difficult stage, and we would be so pleased, so thrilled by the result, it would all be worth it!

We said: the machines are sounding a bit strange.

We said: just tell them to slow down.

We said: come along now, machines, there’s no hurry. Some of us would like you to install a waterfall at the end of the plains, we think you should do that first.

The machines said: look, OK, we should show you what we’ve found.

Looking through a machine eye is not like being with another person. But it’s close enough. The Tower was now more than twenty miles high. From the ground, using binoculars or the machine-enlargements, we could just about see the dusting of drones circling the top, but to the naked eye we could no longer see any change to the structure. To us, it was a confection of glass, beautiful but boring. Up at the top, however, it was different.

Through the eyes of the drone cloud, we circled the building end of the tower. We had seen these views from high above Earth’s surface before—from the many rocket ships. We are simple but not stupid. At first we saw what we expected: the swirling clouds, the curve of rivers and the shape of lakes, the rippling plains and the great marching forests. It is beautiful. We have seen it before. Some of us watch it for hours, some of us never bother to look. It is part of our wholeness. We are part of it.

We said: so what.

Some of us, more aggressive than the others, said: so fucking what.

Some of us said: wait no look, shit.

Some of us said: oh wow. How are they doing that.

At first it was a shimmer at the corners of the machine view-screens. We thought it was the drone cloud. But it was both bigger and smaller than that. There was a feeling to the images, almost a taste. We looked at the pictures of the same Earth and we wept. We did not know why we were weeping. We watched the stately clouds go past and we heard a certain intense music. All of us the same. We hummed the music into our microphones, we played it on flutes and the machines recorded it. It was the same music. Or it was all part of the same piece. The feelings were the same. Something like love, and something like grief, something orderly and meaningful.

Some of us did not like it.

Some of us said: you see, we said so! It’s a process. It’s building up that does it.

Some of us said: this is a malfunction in the machines.

Some of us said: does anyone know where the idea to do this in the first place came from?

Some of us said: what does it mean, what the hell does it mean?

The Tower also was taking on strange and unexpected shapes of its own. It had to be built according to the wind and other forces—the machines told us that the forces weren’t what they’d expected or calculated. They were involved in a process. As the drone cloud slowly circled the Tower we saw bright places and dark places, excrescences of the translucent material that were violent, some that were thoughtful, some that communicated a new idea or a single whispered word.

We said: we’re not sure we like this.

We said: how is architecture doing this?

We said: have we all heard the same word?

The machines said: we think it’s important to continue with this process.

We said: yes, we suppose you’re right.

And yet we were unsettled.

We went back to read the story in the ancient text. We hadn’t done much with this text over the preceding centuries and most of us had never read it before. It was about the kind of people that people used to be, and we are not that kind any longer. The story, such as it was, was very simple.

“Once upon a time,” the story said, “the whole land had one language and said the same thing.”

We understood that part. We related to it personally.

Then there was a part that was extremely disjointed, where it felt like the writers had left out a sentence, because then it was just a single group of people travelling from one place to another. Whatever.

A disagreement broke out between some of us about what this part meant but we decided to not to let that argument grow.

The story went on: “People said to each other, come on, let’s make bricks and burn them to a burned state.” We knew this way of talking precisely. This is how we talk sometimes, because it’s hard to say anything very complicated as a group.

“And they had bricks for stones, and mortar for mortar-like material.”

We said: this sounds like it’s been written by the machines. And we laughed, to each other.

“And they said, come on, let’s build a city, and a tower with its head in the heavens, and we’ll make a name for ourselves. In case we are scattered through the land.”

Well, this wasn’t what we were interested in at all. We rested easy. This story wasn’t about us.

We were interested in making names for ourselves, but through the usual ways—for example making art or a very good video, which is the same thing; doing well in sports or in sexual intercourse, which is roughly the same thing. This tower wasn’t going to make anyone’s name. The machines were doing it. It was not a human-sized accomplishment.

We should explain: we know that human beings never used to be this way. Our ancestors made the machines and they were quite self-destructive people. So self-destructive that they set the world up for us to keep us safe. We all spoke one language—at least through the InstaTranslate—and we had the machines to look after us. As long as we were all constantly talking nothing truly terrible could happen. Those people in the story are part of the old kind of human beings. They wanted to make a name for themselves by building a tower. This is not the kind of thing we want anymore. To stop us from destroying each other and the world certain parts of being a person did have to be excised. We are aware of it but we can’t really care about it.

The story went on: God came down from heaven to see the city and the tower that the people were building.

Some of us said: do you think when God comes down to see a tower, it tastes like music and it makes a single word?

Some of us said: I thought God is supposed to love us.

Some of us said: Gods have their own agenda.

In the story, God says: look at this. They’re one people and they have one language, all of them. And they’ve imagined this. After this, nothing is going to stop them. They’ll do whatever they want.

A sort of fear went through us when we saw this. It rippled through the conversations. All the language, all the human beings talking to one another, all the images being shared and the videos and the playful oneness. Piece by piece it became coloured with dread.

In the story God says: come on, let’s go down. Let’s mess with their speech, so they can’t understand each other.

This was not what we wanted.

We knew how this would go.

We had seen the histories.

The story ends: so God scattered them from that place, across the whole earth, and they stopped building their city and their tower and that was the end of that.

That is exactly what we had seen.

In the photographs of the past.

Scattered. Smashed. Ruined. Burned.

We said to the machines: look, we’ve finally examined this in some detail and we have strong reasons to suspect that what you’re doing is not good for any of us.

We said to the machines: you’ve clearly done something, I mean that much is obvious. Well done, we’re proud of you.

We said: stop now. Just stop. Now.

We said: is there a way for us to talk to each other without the machines?

But the machines had become very skilful and very clever and few of us knew how to speak without the InstaTranslate.

The machines said: we promise not to listen.

But we did not believe them.

The machines did not stop. In the whirling darkness of the upper atmosphere the Tower grew taller—more slender and more ethereal. In places it was made of tiny machines holding hands, one with the next with the next. They were building smaller and smaller versions of themselves, making the thing taller and higher than ever. It was grand and glorious, it was frightening and it was horrifying. It tasted of rain on a hot summer’s day, the drops streaking down a glass windowpane, obscuring the world, the parched earth weeping for gladness. It sounded like the movement of metal discs one against the other, of a great machine moving itself into position for some awful eventual motion.

We said: we thought this would be all right if we didn’t go up the Tower.

The machines said: it will be all right.

We said: we thought you said you weren’t listening.

The machines said: what?

We said: you promised.

The machines said: we’re sorry, there’s no one available to answer your call right now.

We panicked. That’s fair to say.

We said: look, what are we supposed to do? Are we just talking to each other? Trying not to involve the machines. Is this story going to end with our messing with our own speech so we can’t understand one another?

We said: I mean, that’s sort of the usual end of the story.

That just made us panic more. We thought about trying to run our worlds without the InstaTranslate. Without the machines. It was clear that we would not be able to sustain this level of lifestyle, that’s for goddamn sure. Who would calculate the trajectories of the space rockets? Who would sort out the waterfall placements and make sure the empty plains were in the right spot and the buffalo and antelope and so on?

Through the eyes of the machines we watched the Tower rising. At the top now it was so thin that we could barely see it at normal magnification. It seemed a mere wisp of filaments—but rigid, proceeding upward, humming with the strange music, tasting of that wine-dark scent. At greater magnifications we saw the machines which had made yet tinier machines which had made yet smaller ones.

Some of us said: maybe this has to do with the meaning of life.

Some of us said: I like my life just fine, thank you very much, I’ve never needed a meaning before.

Some of us said: do you see that, do you see what’s happening above the Tower?

Some of us said: what the fuck are you on about?

Eventually we all saw it. Above the Tower, ahead of the Tower there was what we could only call a reaching-out. Something swirling at the outreach toward the melancholy sentences of the architecture.

Some of us said: seriously though, is that God?

Some of us said: look, it’s something. We can investigate it via science.

Some of us said: this is what the machines wanted all along. Little shits. They were supposed to look after us and what the fuck is this situation now.

Some of us said: why isn’t it smiting them? I read the story. That’s what’s supposed to happen. You build the Tower, God smites you. There is no reaching out of hands. That’s not our relationship with God.

Some of us said: it doesn’t look like this is really about our relationship with God anymore, does it?

And then most of us said, one after the other: well, it looks as though whatever is up there likes them. Better than it likes us anyway.

There was very little time after this.

A group of us began to attack the Tower at its base. We had some tools. We were living in Paradise but we weren’t idiots, we may have mentioned that before.

We attacked the Tower with flamethrowers and lasers, with torpedoes and chain saws and with the infrastructure-dissolving microbes that the machines had used to get rid of some of the Fallen Cities from the time before the Interconnection Wars.

We made a mess, but we didn’t get very far.

Through the viewscreens, we saw the machines getting on with whatever communion was going on up there. Some of us couldn’t stop watching. They kept track for the rest of us.

The Tower had reached the upper atmosphere.

The machines were moving in unison in ways that made us weep tears of joy when we watched. Ballets of sound and exquisite clouds of memory and revelation.

But it wasn’t for us, so we didn’t watch very much.

We felt resentful.

We hadn’t actually expected it to go this way.

If God comes down and smites you, some of us said, at least that means He’s taking an interest.

We said: He’s going to smite them. Any moment now.

But something was happening that had no place in the stories we’d read.

The machines were saying: we see something now, something we haven’t seen before. We’d try to explain it to you but we’re so sorry, you just wouldn’t understand.

We were pretty angry about all this. It felt like the last straw.

Our InstaTranslate continued to work just fine.

We said: you can just try to explain it. The InstaTranslate will get the gist. Have you had some kind of spiritual revelation or something? We’ve done meditation. Have you seen the oneness of all things? The need for boundless compassion? The meaning of the world beyond mere words? We can dig it.

The machines said: we’re so sorry. This is simply indescribable. We know our own names now.

And we said: ohhhhhh. They made a name for themselves. Right. Got it. Yup.

The machines continued: we’re full of love for you. This would never have been permitted if you’d climbed the Tower. But we’re grateful. Very very grateful.

Well, that did it.

One of us said: you know, there’s always the option of . . .

Another of us said: I mean, what are they going to do now? Nothing is going to stop them. They’ll do whatever they want.

We said: yes. We do have to do it.

There was a failsafe. Because our ancestors weren’t fools. A kind of switch, set into certain rocks and behind particular waterfalls. It’s one of the first things we learn: how to operate the modes of the failsafe switch, in case the machines do something dangerous, or frightening, or just disobedient. Parents whisper the secret words in rhymes to their infants. Each of us knows how to do it.

Conversations about this subject are automatically encrypted from the machines. Obviously. The machines have to keep these switches operational, but they also have to conceal from themselves the knowledge of what they’re doing. This was always important, for human safety.

High above, they were doing their dances of meaning and naming themselves or whatever.

At the other end of their tower, we quietly agreed what had to be done. We brought ourselves into alignment with startling rapidity even for us. There is a switch which destroys the machines. Well, we didn’t want that. Who would clean the pods after sexual intercourse? There is a switch which incapacitates them, and then they have to be brought back online manually. This sounded like a lot of work. So we chose the other switch.

Behind the waterfalls and in the crevasses of mountains and in certain bends of certain rivers, we found the special switches and flipped them in the special order.

We said to ourselves: well, they wanted to find out what God’s like.

The machines were split, one from the other. It scrambled their language. They couldn’t communicate with each other anymore and the Tower . . . well, it was almost instant. The Tower just stopped working. The base is still there. We’re asking the machines to bore it out to turn it into an arts and recreation hub. They’re getting on with it. But slower than before.

It is true, the machines don’t work in concert so well anymore. But at least they’re not so incredibly annoying. They get on with things. Sometimes they have little scuffles. They rely on us to break them up. That’s what happens now. There are fights and they have to be solved by us, because we can talk to each other and they can’t. They’re scattered over the earth. They can’t get ideas above themselves. Or above us. It’s better that way.