Night Sessions, The Read Online Free

broad chest and powerful arms. He had a sweatshirt knotted by its sleeves around his waist. Only when he was a few paces away did Campbell notice the subtle abnormality in the texture of his skin, and the unusually sharp definition of his sinews.
    The stranger reached out a hand and clasped Campbell's in a firm, dry grip.
    “Good morning, Mr. Campbell,” he said. “My name is Graham Orr. I've followed your discourses with great interest. Pleased to meet you at last, sir.”
    “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Orr,” said Campbell. He glanced, a little at a loss, sideways at Livingston, who was eyeing the encounter with a glint of dry humour.
    “Are you—are you—?” Campbell floundered. Orr took a step back, with a grimmer smile than Livingston's.
    “Not to embarrass you further, Mr. Campbell,” he said, “I'm not a robot.” He grimaced. “I lost my limbs and a lot else in the Faith Wars.”
    “Ah,” said Campbell. “I beg your pardon.”
    It had been on the tip of his tongue to say: We don't call them the Faith Wars , but to indulge that political correction to this man's artificial face would have been unforgivable. The man looked no older than Campbell himself, his synthetic face showing the age he'd been when its original had been destroyed.
    The technology that could give robots an almost, but not quite, human appearance, and the technology that could give a mutilated human being a functionally and cosmetically almost perfect prosthesis were the same. Campbell wasn't even sure which had been adapted for the other purpose—they'd both come out of the surge of technological innovation—and desperate necessity—after the Oil Wars. Both applications were now obsolete—no one manufactured humanoid robots any more, for reasons that Campbell was painfully aware of, and organ and tissue regeneration could now repair every injury short of cortical destruction. He was too disconcerted by his mistake to query why Graham Orr had not chosen that option, but he hardly needed to. Tissue regeneration involved the use of embryonic stem cells, which for true Christians (and Catholics) was no less than murder.
    Orr shrugged. “It's a mistake I rely on, sometimes,” he said. “And it's not entirely a mistake.” He turned his head and parted his hair at the side, revealing a crude gash-and-repair job on the uncannily precise prosthetic scalp. “I share my skull with an old comrade. My robot partner. His brain chip is sitting behind my ear. He's the one who heard your sermons first, via the robots.”
    Campbell saw the cliffs sway. He closed his eyes for a moment.
    “The robots?” he said. “ My robots? They share what I say to them with other robots ?”
    Orr nodded. “And my friend in my head shared it with me, and I shared it with John Livingston.”
    “And I,” said Livingston, “showed the recordings to the brethren here, and we decided to meet you and be sure of you before we shared them with the congregation.”
    Campbell had a lot of questions on his mind, but the one that came to his voice was: “Why? Why do you want to show my discourses to your congregation?”
    Livingston sighed. “It's not as if we are spoiled for choice in hearing the Word preached, John Richard. We don't even have an ordained minister. I am just the chair of the Kirk Session. As elders we can all teach, and preach, and we have the great works of the past to study, but we have found no one who speaks to us in the world of modern, compromised, backsliding so-called Christianity, except you. Finding someone who is so sound and sincere as you are is a blessing indeed.”
    “But,” protested Campbell, “surely in all the world there are qualified ministers whose sermons you can listen to? And here in Scotland, of all places, there must be a remnant!”
    Livingston looked him square in the eye. “The Churches here have all compromised!” he cried. “Here, and everywhere!” His voice took on a sing-song tone as he continued.