Cyril the Cyberpig - A Tale of Artificial Stupidity

I can't remember when I wrote this, but it was a long time ago, during that strange hiatus when everyone was acquiring a home computer but before many people had heard of the internet. It was written on an Amstrad PCW. So it's a bit dated and is set in "the near future". The French still had conscription at this point.

OKAY CYRIL, I WANT YOU TO TAKE ALL THIS DOWN AND STORE IT. If you fall into the hands of the authorities, you are to repeat this to them. Got it?

Good.

The beginning. Lordy, where's the beginning? I don't know. Something like this. . .

Back around the turn of the century, when taxpayers' money was still being chucked at anything with an 'ach', 'll' or 'ff' in it, I worked at an animation company in Cardiff, turning out unimaginative kids' stuff in Welsh. They were nice people, but I was getting restless.

Then I bumped into Maria at the Cardiff International Animation Festival. She and I had been part of the same crowd at university. Though we hadn't met in years, I sometimes read about her in the trade press - she was at a London house, fast becoming the queen of the tasteful sanitary towel advert. We hung out together at the Fest and halfway through her boyfriend James, an account manager for one of the big ad agencies, showed up. We stayed up late and talked a lot of shop.

That's when we decided to form Jam Productions. It made sense; Maria is a ferociously gifted designer and artist, I would cover the electronics and James is a charismatic salesman who never needs to resort to bullshit or insincerity.

They wanted out of London, I wanted to leave Cardiff, so we set up in Bristol, a small place but one which was already home to several successful animators, so the talent and the support services would be available.

Two years on, we were doing okay, thanks to James finding the work - mainly in advertising - and stopping us from spending the proceeds too fast. One day, he mentioned that that Penn & Warburton, the big confectionery company, were in the market for an animated kids' series to sponsor on satellite and cable.

I went home that evening, a Saturday, shagged out after 15 days' solid work on a cinema ad for Greene's Gin. I slumped into the sofa and turned on the TV. They were showing 'Robocop 2' on the Classic Movie Channel. I'd already seen it, but was too tired even to pick up the remote and switch it.

The film was long over when I awoke. Now they were showing some daft thing from the 1970s, all Afro hair and loon pants. One of the characters referred to the police as "pigs".

I picked up the phone at one in the morning. By one fifteen I had convinced James and Maria that we should make a pilot of my idea.

To earn his keep, Cyril the Cyberpig had to be really cheap. Our only chance was to make story and characters as interesting as possible. Cyril, half-pig and half-machine, was a wiseacre crime-fighter. His arch-enemy was Doctor Obnoxor, a fairly shameless ripoff of Dick Dastardly, a cartoon character nobody remembers anymore. Obnoxor was my favourite (and the kids', too); a sneering swine who, in between attempts at world conquest, indulged in wholly gratuitous acts of petty sadism. The annoyingly cheerful Cyril would speak in a sort of Cockney argot, rolled around in mud a lot and liked eating the most disgusting combinations of food we could think of (Marmite Black Forest Gateau, haddock boiled in Lucozade. . . you get the idea).

Maria lent a hand, but it was mainly my baby. I did the sketches, wrote the script and made the pictures move. The children of friends, relatives and complete strangers were systematically kidnapped to test audience reaction and, in between regular work, I turned the pilot around in two months, largely by not sleeping very much.

James lunched all the right people, Penn and Warburton bought it, and we went into regular production. In a few months, it was showing in 15 different countries, including the US and Japan. He wasn't nearly as successful at this point as he became when he passed out of our hands, but he was honest toil, and by the time we contracted for the third series, the trade press was saying that Jam Productions was on its way.

We never suspected that at that moment, our little partnership was being discussed in the boardroom of the world's fifth-largest corporation.

The Longman-Bertorelli-Mayer Group (LBM) owned Penn & Warburton. They had all kinds of other interests, mainly in media and leisure and now they planned to open a huge theme park near Paris.

It was to be called Mondo Future - cod-Esperanto coined by the marketing drones to get the meaning across in as many lingoes as possible - a complex of hotels, restaurants and media and science-based attractions. It would be taking Disney head-on; while it was the same kind of junk-food funfair, they claimed it would be more 'educational' and more 'European' than its competitor, which is like saying that French fries are better for you than cheeseburgers.

Attractions at Mondo Future were to be based on the Group's media holdings. Though he was sponsored by one of their companies, they didn't have the rights to Cyril, and they probably wouldn't have bothered with him, but - I'm speculating here - some pushy young suit with an MBA saw an article in New Scientist about neural interface technology and had an idea.

Why not make Cyril the Cyberpig for real? Why not take a pig, replace half his brain with a fifth-generation computer, put a voice simulator in his throat, build a machine-gun into his snout, armour-plate half his body, give him a stainless steel front leg with various useful attachments and an artificial back leg with a mule's kick?

The technology existed. On paper, it looked possible.

We knew none of this at the time. What we did know was that LBM were offering us ten million Ecus for the whole Cyril, oink and all. We assumed they wanted to broaden Cyril's market potential with bigger promotion, merchandise, games of course, and maybe feature films. They also hinted that they wanted to go virtual with him; after all, Mondo Future was sure to have loads of virtual rides and feelies.

Cyril had been good to us, but ten million eeks was a sight gooder. With no hesitation whatever, we sold. I bought a house in Clifton, James and Maria finally married and bought a big house and Maria and I bought loads of new Japanese toys. The business flourished. Better still, I had recently started going out with a Media Studies lecturer called Carol; this was the big one - we were spending a lot of time getting doe-eyed in front of log fires and going for long walks hand in hand. If I could freeze-frame my life, it would be then.

The way I hear it, 50 pigs died in secret labs in Switzerland before a fully functioning Cyril was led out at a press conference in Paris to mark the launch of Mondo Future.

The talking pig generated all the expected publicity. Some said it was cruel and immoral to interfere with poor defenceless animals in this way. They were right - but if a talking pig tells you it's never been happier, that it has no problems with the fact that a whole bunch of perfectly viable organs have been yanked out to make way for machinery, and that it's thrilled to bits to be a lead player in the theme park of the 21st century, what do you do? Tell it that it's just a dumb animal and that humans know what's best for it?

So the moral issue becomes sufficiently blurred to open a path of least resistance along which money can travel.

I have a tape of the conference, which was held in English, the international language of greed. The astonished journalists raised the cruelty issue pretty quick.

"Lissen," says the pig, standing on a raised platform between a bunch of lobotomised, grinning Mondo Future suits, "you can't tell me I've been treated badly if you've ever eaten pork - 'cos that's the only use pigs are to you lot otherwise. There ain't many people keep pigs as pets. Tell you something else - once you've got talking pigs, you're gonna think twice about eating them, ain't you? I could be the best thing that's happened to my species since the Law of Moses. Oinkee oinkee!!"

His mouth moves in synch with the voice box. He's very credible, and has this luvverly London accent, just like his cartoon forebear. "People are gonna say that I'm just some kind of gimmick, a circus act. It's true I have to earn my keep by entertaining the guests at Mondo Future. But the same is true of everyone in this room. We all got a job to do."

The hacks are nodding "good point."

Now comes the coup de grace: "If you don't respect me, that's allright. I can live with that 'cos I know that I'm going to make a lot of people - 'specially kids - happy. But the really important thing is this; the scientists have learnt a lot developing me, and that knowledge will benefit the whole of mankind."

Pure pigshit - but the way Cyril was talking, he represented the end of all human misery. His implants, nanotechnology, anti-rejection systems, his blood sugar energy plant and sense/command interfaces promised a future in which the blind would see, the lame would walk and the irredeemably stupid would cast away Sky Television.

But the press won't let him off just yet. They want to know whether this is really him talking, or if his control computer has been programmed to fend off such questions. And if it really is him talking does he mean it, or is he just saying his lines because there's a butcher sharpening his knives backstage if he fluffs it?

Cyril goes into a long talk about how that part of his brain which controls his motor functions is still there, and how it's linked to an artificial brain controlling speech, sensory responses and suite upon suite of memory/reaction software to act out his role in the theme park and ask for anything he wants.

So, says a reporter, that means your previous responses to our questions about the morality of artificially altering pigs was pre-programmed.

"You gotta remember I'm a pig," says Cyril. "My everyday concerns are different from yours. Pigs don't deal in abstract reasoning. But that don't mean I don't believe what I said. . ."

Got that? He's admitted he's been programmed to talk crap, then contradicts himself. Everyone's confused.

A TV reporter jumps up. "Cyril, do you have a, um, girlfriend. . . uh, someone special in your life?" I'm sure it's no coincidence that this woman, who has steered the press away from an embarrassing area, works for one of the networks owned by LBM.

Cyril says something about not having had much time for courting lately. He's been busy going through exactly the same ‘customer care’ course that all team members at Mondo Future have been through.

This was about two years after LBM had bought the rights to Cyril. Cyril in the flesh (pork?) was just as much a surprise to us as it was to the reptiles of the world's media. When I first saw this on the TV news, I was fascinated, but didn't feel like it had much to do with me. I still didn't until a few days later when a friend at Euronews sent me the tape of the full conference.

It's towards the end, and a Dutch newspaperman won't let go of the moral thing.

"Cyril, do you believe in God?" says the guy. Some of the other journalists look irritably at him. This isn't the angle they're interested in.

"I believe in Christian values," said Cyril, "of law and order, of people helping one another, of family life and personal morality." One or two cynics snigger.

"But who created you, Cyril? How did you get here?" says the Dutchman.

"My creator is Andrew Davies," said Cyril. "He is a British animator who first came up with the idea of Cyril the Cyberpig. He made the first drawings, and he was responsible for my early cartoons on TV."

I got to calling it The Argument. At parties, receptions, in the pub, discussion with friends and strangers alike would eventually turn to Cyril.

They'd say it was terrible to interfere with a pig in this way.

I agreed.

They said it was a sick charade to make money for a bloated capitalist concern that didn't give a toss about ordinary people.

I agreed.

They said it was propaganda for the vivisection industry and wouldn't advance human medicine one iota.

I agreed.

They said that the military-industrial complex was probably behind it and that whole armies of soldier-Cyrils were being bred right now and that the old balance of nuclear terror would be replaced by a balance of Cyril terror.

I agreed.

So if you agree, they would say, why did you let them do it?

I would try to explain that having sold the rights, we had no control over Cyril at all. We weren't even making the bloody TV cartoons anymore (these had been put out to a sweatshop in the Czech Republic). The ruder ones would say that I had sold out my principles for money, adding that I should try and get the rights back. As if I wanted to commit all I owned to a case I would almost certainly lose. I went right off intellectuals, idealists, environmentalists, animal libbers, vegetarians and liberals at that point. The trendy novelist Daniel Concannon - whom I have never met - wrote an article in one of the Sunday papers naming me as the living Englishman he most despised (I’m Welsh, actually, Concannon you imperialist twat!), because I hadn't spoken out against Mondo Future's outrageous violation of nature. In between getting most of his facts about me wrong, he suggested that I would happily connive at vivisection of babies if I could secure a regular supply of fresh ones.

What really hurt was that Carol couldn't really decide whether she was my girlfriend or a limp liberal Media Studies lecturer. She understood that there was nothing I could legally do about Cyril, but she kept on at me to publicly denounce him, take some kind of stand. One of our rows ended with us not speaking for two weeks.

With fifty different flavours of idiot inviting me to flush my career down the toilet, pure pig-headedness (sorry) decided me to say nothing. If someone's mugging you in a back alley, do you tell them that you fully understand their point of view?

Meanwhile, Cyril had become a major international celebrity. The tabloid papers and moron TV stations were giving away tickets to Mondo Future in competitions, running their Cyril the Cyberpig clubs for the kids (and the students and squaddies of course), and doling out thousands of Cyril T-shirts and pairs of Trotter trainers. What I hated most were those car-horns that went "oinkee oinkee!" I even saw a bumper-sticker once that said "OINK IF YOU LOVE JESUS."

However much the chattering classes fretted, ordinary folk, particularly their children, loved Cyril. He was the star attraction at Mondo Future, repaying the investment in him quite handsomely, what with the animated series and all the merchandise - the Pig Out lunchboxes, the comic ('Porkies') and the appalling Cyril's Swill range of novelty foods (tuna and strawberry pizzas, for Chrissakes! Vegan Cybersausages!) When everyone thought it could get no bigger, the feature film came out. Cyril Saves the World starring Cyril himself, and with dear old Alan Rickman camping it up as Dr Obnoxor, broke box office records everywhere. It was, I gladly admit, a slick, very funny film that made both children and adults laugh by not taking itself at all seriously.

Just as all my friends had got tired of picking on me, the Great Mondo Future Massacre took place.

There must have been at least 2,000 people with palmcorders and microcorders there that afternoon. CNN scooped up footage from 35 of them as a job-lot. I've seen it all.

The cartoon Cyril had a built-in machinegun, the barrel of which poked out of his snout. The strict rule was that Cyril would only fire in self-defence and would never actually hit anyone; the last thing you want in a childrens' cartoon sponsored by a sweetie company is blood and guts all over the shop. Which is a shame, really, because that's precisely what the kids want, but I digress.

When they built Cyril, they installed a Heckler and Koch machine pistol surrounded by a clever insulating system to stop the gun's heat turning him to rashers from the inside. Magazines would be inserted under his neck, which was also where you'd find the cocking-lever. Naturally, Cyril only ever fired blank propellant.

When he wasn't appearing on TV chat shows or making movies, Cyril worked at Mondo Future in a full-sized replica of the Roman Colosseum. Three times a day, he'd do a show in which he chased a bunch of bad guys led by the evil Dr Obnoxor, climaxing in a shoot-out; they'd fire at him, he'd roll around and take cover, shout witty defiance, and pop off at them with his gun. They would then try and get away in a car, which he would charge side-on. Half a ton of armour-plated ham would easily knock the car over, and he'd round up the scum and hand them over to the police before settling down to a celebratory roll in the mud, followed by a meal of curried turnips in chocolate.

It would take me ages to work out how to tell the background story. So here's a cutting from a feature about the episode from one of the Sunday heavies.

"The real villain was not Cyril, but Xavier Kellerman, aged 19, one of a team of people who looked after the pig.
"For those working there, Mondo Future is a small community, with all the intense, petty passions that go with it. Kellerman was devastated when his girlfriend, Heloise Fabre, threw him over for Dieter Model, the 25-year-old who played Dr Obnoxor in the Colosseum three times a day. Fabre probably considered the more mature actor a better catch than a teenage swineherd.
"The show was very tightly scripted; ad-libbing was a sacking offence. In the act, Model was the first person Cyril fired his gun at, and this is where Kellerman saw his chance. Visiting his parents in Brussels one weekend, Kellerman went into an underworld bar and bought a clip of live ammunition to fit the gun. Back at work, he replaced a magazine of blanks with it while nobody was looking.
"This was not the stuff of which perfect murders are made. The youth said later that he was insane with hurt and jealousy; he did not care what happened to him later and, no, he agreed that he had not had the guts to have it out with Model man-to-man. Besides, there was always a chance, no matter how slight, that he might get away with it."

That afternoon, the show started as normal. The bad guys went through their bank robbery routine, and then, to uproarious applause, Cyril entered. On one of the tapes, you can already see the group of yobs sat down at the front knocking back the beers and acting like idiots. In close up, you can clearly see the Union Jack t-shirts, the sweaty faces, the tattooed foreheads, the short hair, the broken teeth. . .

There are six of them, but they're making enough noise for 50. Now one of them, his shirt dangling from the back of his shorts, gets on top of the low wall in front of them and faces in towards the crowd. Like an orchestra conductor, he leads the chorus. . .

"Nice one, Cyril! Nice one, son! . . . "

A couple of people further back gesture him to sit down and shut up. Others visibly flinch away, not wanting to fall foul of les hooligans. Over to the left, a man in a red t-shirt is speaking into a radio. A couple of other red t-shirts appear at the top of the crowd. One points towards the lads.

The guy on the wall falls backwards, dead drunk, flopping into the dirt right in front of Cyril. His mates laugh and jeer and start throwing beer cans at both him and Cyril. One hits Cyril on the nose; it doesn't just bounce off, but thuds to the ground. It must have been almost full.

One of the lads stands and holds up a half-eaten hot-dog and, quite clearly, says "'Ere, look, Cyril! Pork! I'm eating pig! Might be your mum!"

The others collapse in laughter. The red t-shirts are now coming at them from the top of the auditorium, and from either side with such grim purpose that you know they aren't going to get their money back.

Just what is going through Cyril's head isn't clear, but something in there cracks. He turns towards the main group of hooligans, who are all standing now, and he fires.

The noise isn't the stutter you expect with a machine-gun. The thing he's got shoots so quickly that it sounds more like tearing cloth, and it's very quiet; most of the noise is masked inside Cyril's bulk. The magazine is empty in a few seconds.

Two of the yobs have been virtually cut in half, a third has the top of his head sliced off like an egg. The others, aside from the one who fell into the sand a moment before, are seriously injured.

A woman sat behind them is grazed in the thigh by a bullet; it's a miracle that no other innocent bystanders were killed. People scream, people groan, others stand open-mouthed, unable to take in what's happened. Children cry, men and women in red t-shirts yell obscenities into radios in four different languages.

Even I got hauled in. I was flown to Paris to meet the juge d'instruction, the investigating magistrate, Théodore Soustelle, who wanted to talk to anyone who might assist in apportioning blame fairly. By then, he knew that Xavier Kellerman had slipped Cyril the live ammunition in an attempt to assassinate Dieter Model. In his immaculate English, he cheerfully disclosed that the police had already beaten the crap out of Kellerman, and that by pleading crime passionel, he would almost certainly be out of prison inside ten years, if not five.

Soustelle was far more interested in Cyril's guilt.

Cyril had always acted out his script to the letter, but on the one occasion he happened to be loaded with live ammunition, he turned on some members of his audience and shot them. The machine part of Cyril's brain had been programmed with more or less the personality which I had originally conceived, and it was about this that Soustelle quizzed me. I explained that Cyril was a cartoon character and had some amusingly disgusting habits, but his métier was to fight crime and injustice, to protect the weak and to only use his weapon in self-defence.

"So, Mister Davies," he said, "which part of Cyril's mind do you believe urged him to shoot the hooligans? The pig's brain, or the artificial one? If the pig is guilty, we will have him killed as a dangerous animal. If the computer is guilty, then we will have to prosecute Mondo Future. . ."

I couldn't know the answer. It appeared, I said, that the pig itself was guilty. I had not created a cartoon character prone to violent over-reaction, and I was sure that the Mondo Future biotechs never intended to construct something which might damage business by damaging customers.

Soustelle nodded, pursed his lips and shook my hand.

The French adore a good argument, and here was one de premier cru.

Some said the owners of Mondo Future were patently guilty of the deaths because they had manufactured Cyril. A prominent bande-desinée artist said that he felt a powerful empathy with Cyril's cartoon creators, who could not possibly have foreseen the monster that vulgar consumer capitalism would create. He urged all cartoonists and animators to legally insulate their work from such brutal philistinism.

Others said Cyril's only sin was to lash out in anger against a bunch of English hooligans, which was hardly a crime at all really. Perhaps he could be employed as a sort of honorary cop.

A newspaper columnist headlined an article 'J'Accuse' and lambasted the entire French establishment for making Cyril a scapegoat for the maladies in French society - the break-up of family life, loss of sovereignty to the EU, street-crime, bad driving and the declining quality of table wine. Their hypocrisy, he said, would be complete if they could only send Cyril to Devil's Island.

A leftist politician said Cyril represented a sick hybrid of violent machismo and capitalist repression, the product of a value system which held that problems can be solved simply by having a machine-gun up your nose. This, he postulated, was an American conceit, and since the earliest days of Hollywood, America had screwed up the rest of the world by pretending there's an easy answer to everything. A criminal? Shoot him dead. Short of money? Go and work hard. Fallen out with your Mom? Have a cup of coffee and a hug. They were French first, he said, then Europeans, and in any event definitely not Americans. The best thing to do was make a bonfire of Mondo Future and spit-roast Cyril on the top.

In the middle of all this, Théodore Soustelle, either a courageous man, or (more likely) a gleeful troublemaker in the finest French tradition, gave the answer few wanted to hear. He was convinced that the Mondo Future management had done all they could to create a safe and reliable Cyril, that the pig's own brain had decided to waste the yobs, and since this was the first time Cyril had ever deviated from his script, he did so knowing he was carrying live rounds. Soustelle recommended that the EU consider banning the production and use of cybernetic animals as a matter of urgency. He was also applying for Cyril to be humanely put down as dangerous and uncontrollable.

An international pressure group called The Friends of Cyril had already formed; volunteers co-ordinated press campaigns and rattled collecting tins in the streets. Mercifully, the projected Cyril Aid concert at Wembley never happened, but several musical has-beens revived their careers when they recorded the nauseating A Prayer for Cyril, which topped the charts for six weeks. Personally I preferred the thrash metal band Noise Annoys' pastiche of the old Paul McCartney/Stevie Wonder song, ‘Ebony and Ivory and Ham’ which didn't even make the top hundred.

Britain's tabloid papers hesitated, then acted decisively. On the not-disproved assumption that their readers were all xenophobic animal-lovers, they took the line that the tragic deaths of some high-spirited British lads was the fault of Mondo Future, not the pig. The French, they said, should not be allowed to execute an innocent animal in cold blood. This led to headlines like 'DON'T LET CYRIL BE A FRENCH FRY!', 'BRING HOME CYRIL'S BACON!', the surreal 'IT'S THE FROGS WHO ARE THE PIGS' and the scary 'NUKE THE BASTARDS! - TORY MP'.

The Friends of Cyril amassed a formidable war-chest which could have been spent on a million more deserving causes. They hired the sharpest lawyers in Europe to fight Soustelle's decision. After all, the Napoleonic Code is pretty ambiguous about the machine gunning of English yobs by pigs.

Meanwhile, all my nice educated friends held their noses and jumped into the ideological cess-pit with the scum press. The same people who had previously been hassling me to denounce the Cyberpig, were now whining about how I should make a public appeal for Cyril's life to be spared.

No way!

If they killed the pig, they would kill the movies, the TV series, the merchandise, the disgusting food. . . If they did all that, I would have peace and quiet once more. I wanted Cyril dead, dead, dead! Call me vindictive if you want, but hey, I'd rarely been so in touch with my true feelings.

Even Carol wanted me to beg for mercy. But when I told her about my true feelings, she called me a selfish, cynical coward. At the climax of her rage, she called me a pig. That cracked me up. I couldn't help it. I collapsed in tears of laughter. Two minutes later, she walked out.

I re-examined my true feelings.

Yep! I still wanted the Cyberpig to go the way of the dodo. More than ever now that he had come between me and the the woman I loved.

Despite what the British papers said, few in France wanted Cyril dead either. There, he had attained the status of Joan of Arc, Alfred Dreyfus, and Napoleon all mixed up. So his precise location was kept secret.

Actually, it was at a naval barracks in Toulon.

Action Verte are hardliners; no namby-pamby monkey-wrenching or tree-hugging for them. These paladins of the planet have killed those who violate the earth for profit.

As to how they found out where Cyril was, I have a theory.

Cyril embarrassed the French establishment, who wanted him out of the way. At the same time, nobody hates environmental activists more than the French secret services - it's a fine old tradition that goes way back to the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. Fifty grand to a handful of pigshit bets that the cloak and dagger boys leaked Cyril's whereabouts to Action Verte, hoping they'd try and spring him. The spooks would wait, then have a nice gun battle in which a group of terrorists would be productively slaughtered without any annoying paperwork, and in which Cyril would (tragically) die in the crossfire. Quel dommage!

One of the greenshirt cells took the bait and decided to rescue Cyril in the name of animal rights.

For what happened next, I have had to rely on newspaper reports. Certain details may be wrong, but there's no doubting the basic facts.

Remember that Brother Gaul still has to do his national service. A lot of these kids would much rather be doing something else and some, young and idealistic, sympathise with Action Verte. Two such were to prove vital in Cyril's escape, giving the terrorists a map of the base, precise instructions as to where they would find him, and suggesting a way of sneaking in.

Very early each morning, the camp took delivery of a vanload of fresh vegetables. On the day they struck, the cell's four men and two women put on naval uniform, hijacked the van, drove it down a side-street, emptied half of the contents and concealed themselves in the remainder, one constantly keeping a gun trained on the driver's head.

Successfully through the gates, they drove towards the kitchens, then turned away to the guardhouse where Cyril was being kept. Because the terrorists were in uniform, none of the detail set to guard Cyril suspected anything until they produced guns and grenades. By then it was too late; the custodians of the most dangerous pig in the world had their hands in the air and were being gagged and herded into an empty cell.

Cyril's cell was opened, the van was backed up to the guardhouse entrance. They chivvied Cyril into the back of the van and ordered the terrified driver to leave by the normal route at normal speed.

They took the van to a suburban garage, bound and gagged the driver and transferred to another van. Now they took the road for Marseilles, where a fast motor-boat was waiting to take Cyril to a mountain hide-out in Corsica.

The circumstantial evidence is that the guardhouse had been watched all along; although the military could have just creamed Cyril and the greenshirts there and then, they needed to convince the public that Cyril's death hadn't simply been a quiet assassination. They let the vegetable van get away, and in moments, unmarked cars were tailing it. Now it was just a matter of getting enough firepower into position. Fifty heavily-armed commandos and 200 equally well tooled-up policemen had been sitting around waiting for this for weeks.

The terrorists ran into the roadblock just outside the seaside resort of La Ciotat. Not just uniformed flics, but also really big men with really short hair, and really black body-armour.

As the van slowed, the terrorists probably saw the flashing lights of other police cars coming up behind them, of armoured cars pitching into position in the fields to either side of them. The men and women in the van at that moment must have known that even if they surrendered, they would not necessarily be permitted to live. They stopped the van and decided to take some of the enemy with them.

As soon as all the cars in front of them had passed through the roadblock, the shooting started. The terrorists and Cyril spilled out of the back door and took cover among the cars still lined up behind them. The innocent cowered in their vehicles, covered their children with their bodies, screamed, or tried to crawl to safety.

Rocket-propelled grenades hit the van from either side. It destructed in a ball of red and white flames. Cabbage-leaves were still falling to the ground a minute later.

Again, I know this not because I was there, but because cameras were.

Among the vehicles behind the van was a local TV crew on their way to La Ciotat to do a boring story about a yachting regatta. While you or I would be cowering and snivelling and letting Jesus into our hearts, TV camera operators see stuff like this as a career opportunity. This crazy woman gets out of the car and scurries over to where two of the terrorists are crouching, along with Cyril. She reaches them in time to see one of them plug a magazine into Cyril's neck, pull back the cocking-lever, pat him on the head and say something about going out and getting some of the bastards.

Cyril has no such intention. Cyril has been programmed to fight crime, defend the weak, do the right thing (etc., etc.)

Whether he realises he's in mortal danger, or whether he thinks it's all play-acting is a moot point. But he now turns his nose on the terrorists beside him, and shoots both stone dead with two short bursts.

He then scampers off around the car, with the camerawoman in pursuit, to where two other terrorists were shooting at the police. These, also, he wastes.

Further along, he ignores one who is already wounded in the neck, but shoots the other.

The shooting stops as the police realise that nobody is firing back at them.

Now he emerges from cover, something the camerawoman is unprepared to do.

"Ne tirez pas! Les terroristes sont morts! J'ai tué les tous! Je vous ai aidé messieurs! Ne tirez pas!" he yells quite clearly in cockney-accented French. "Cyril saves the day again! Oinkee oinkee!" he adds in English.

Talk about ingratitude! Up to now Cyril has been described by some as an artificial intelligence, but artificial stupidity would be nearer the mark.

As he walks out into the open, a storm of gunfire opens up, twice as intense as previously.

The Cyberpig I designed had half his hide covered in bulletproof armour. When they built this Cyril, they took the design literally. I suppose they thought it might be neat to shoot real bullets at him at Mondo Future and have him delight audiences by emerging unscathed. The side that Cyril is presenting to the police is one of shiny aluminium, but beneath that there's enough Kevlar and ceramic plate to absorb anything at that range except a high-velocity rifle bullet.

About a dozen shells thud uselessly into him before he gets the message and runs for cover again. Cyril, programmed to believe that policemen are his friends, is perplexed.

"Blimey!" the camera records him saying to himself. "They was trying to kill me!"

The shooting stops. Drivers who have been stuck in the crossfire slam their cars into reverse to get out of this mess. Cyril is left standing in the middle of the road with the camerawoman.

Score: five dead terrorists to Cyril, one wounded one to the police, who have also scored three innocent bystanders dead and five injured.

Cyril was prime-time news across the world once more. He had eliminated five murderous terrorists, and yet the ungrateful French police tried to kill this hero on the spot.

Invited to a dinner party in one of the more boho parts of Bristol that night, I cried off, feigning illness. I knew damn well that the same people who wanted me to try and save Cyril a few weeks before would now be lecturing me on how he was a proto-fascist vigilante who, by killing the terrorists in cold blood, had no respect for human rights.

I spent an hour driving around, looking for somewhere I could get some old-fashioned pork sausages for my dinner, just to prove my lack of respect for pigs' rights. Oh, and some black pudding for breakfast, please.

While the lawyers delightedly added this new factor into the debate over what to do with Cyril, Soustelle said it changed nothing. It was further proof of Cyril's instability.

But Cyril, now in a police cell in Marseilles, was making plans of his own.

He bust out - literally. On the 14th of July, during a noisy Bastille Day parade while his captors were drunk, he used his armoured bulk to smash through the walls of his cell and ran off into the night.

People said this was just another plot to quietly dispose of him, but, as the weeks passed and nothing more was heard of him, he was forgotten. It was later announced that Mondo Future had made a huge loss that year and may well close.

I was sitting down to dinner at my place one Friday evening in August, looking forward to a quiet (well, lonely) weekend when the doorbell rang. Cursing, I got up and opened it. There stood a short, muscular, middle aged man in working clothes.

"Meester Davees?" he asked. His expression was fierce. He looked like one of those farmers who would dump trailer-loads of Golden Delicious apples in the streets of Paris in protest at something the EU had or hadn't done.

"Yes," I said cautiously.

"I 'ave somezheenk belonging to you," he said, his mouth cracking into a combination of pained grimace and malicious grin.

Beyond him, there was a Peugeot van parked in the street. "My cheeldren wanted to keep 'eem, but I detest 'eem. 'Ee is ruining my farm. 'Ee wanted to meet you. So I 'ave, 'ow do you say, smuggled 'eem over here through the Manche Tunnel."

This only six months since the European Commission had finally forced Britain to do away with formal border controls. The bastards!

I may have literally got down on my knees; I certainly babbled in English and GCSE French about this being nothing to do with me and he should take the bloody pig to the authorities.

He ignored me, turned and whistled. A boy of about ten climbed from the cab, walked around and opened the back doors. In the dusk, I saw the spark of a tear refelecting the street-lamp on the kid's face.

"Thomas! Vite! Il faut partir tout de suite!"

Cyril the Cyberpig clattered out of the van and onto the road. The kid bent and kissed him on the head. Cyril muttered something in French about his little friend and started trotting up my garden path.

Ain't life awful? Cyril arrives at the house of someone who hates him, and walks out of the life of a kid who loves him.

I was yelling at the miserable frog-eating peasant, offering him money - anything, dammit - but he was already pulling away.

"Are you gonna invite me in then, or what?" said Cyril, looking up at me. "I'm a fugitive from injustice. I'd feel happier indoors." In person, he reminded me a lot of Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday.

"Um, yes," I said politely, like he was some annoying relative I didn't want to offend.

In the living room, the first thing his senses picked up on was my dinner, plus side-salad on the table.

"Luvverly! Nosh!" said Cyril. "I haven't eaten for ages." With that, he put his forelegs onto the table and tipped it towards him. The food came sliding to the floor, he stuck his snout in and ate.

I picked up the telephone. When a dangerous killer that the French police will want to extradite comes into your house and starts eating your dinner off the carpet, you dial 999, don't you?

An operator answered the call, asking which service I wanted. Then the line went dead.

Cyril was standing beside me, retracting the scissors in his robotic leg. The telephone cord dangled uselessly at my feet.

He belched. "Luvverly grub," he said, "what's for afters? You got any pizzas? I could go a couple of pizzas."

"What did you do that for?" I asked.

"I'm a fugitive from injustice," said Cyril. "I'll take anyone in a fair scrap, but everyone's against me. We only call the police in when we clear my name."

"We?" I said, horrified.

"Yeah," he said, "you an' me. You're my creator. You are responsible for me. I've travelled across France to get to you. You're the only one who can help me."

"What the hell," I shouted, "makes you think I can help you?"

His front shoulders arched in a porcine shrug. "I don't know. You're the creator. I hoped you could tell me."

Then he pissed on the carpet.

I went into the kitchen and came back with my biggest, sharpest Sabatier. "Out! Out! Out!" I screamed, waving the knife in front of his little piggy eyes. "I am not your fucking creator! I created a cartoon. You were created by a bunch of faceless biotechs in Switzerland. You are nothing, I say nothing, to do with me!"

"I don't understand," said Cyril. "I don't know what I've done wrong. I don't remember very much. All I know is that the police tried to kill me when I was helping them. I remember walking across France, at night, to avoid being spotted. I remember hiding in a barn where Thomas found me and said he'd help me and take me to you. . . "

While all this may sound sorry and pathetic, he still spoke in that irritatingly jolly cartoon voice.

"You killed people, Cyril. You shot some spectators at Mondo Future. Do you remember that?"

"Yes. No. I dunno. I remember something hit my nose and hurt it. I was narked."

"Did you know that there was live ammunition in your gun?"

"Dunno."

"And what about the terrorists you killed?"

"Who? I don't remember. It's not my job to kill. I'm not sposed to hurt anyone. It's my job to entertain people by helping the police and protecting the weak. . . You sure you haven't got any pizzas?"

No matter how mad I was, I didn't have the guts to kill him.

I had a few Lean Cuisines in the freezer, which I microwaved and gave to my voracious guest. ("Naaah! S'Allright, slop it all into a pile on the floor, mate").

I thought about climbing out of a back window and running for help. But I could just see myself showing up at the local nick and trying to explain to the desk sergeant that Cyril the Cyberpig was in my living-room. Even if they believed me, even if I wasn't packed off to the nuthouse, they wouldn't want to know. Forgetting Cyril was favourite by everyone, apart from young Thomas.

So Cyril stayed at my place. That night, I tried to explain to him what had happened, but it was impossible. Neither his pig's brain nor the computer could comprehend what he had done wrong. He had little subjective memory; aside from his programming, he could only communicate his basic urges (feeding and scratching). He could tell you about all his adventures in cartoons, at Mondo Future and on the cinema screen. He had, in his memory, saved the world from the evil Dr Obnoxor and other criminals, hundreds of times. He was a hero, loved by all, a fearless crusader against crime. He remembered the police shooting at him allright - it had so traumatised him that he got it into his head that his creator was the one who could help him. He called himself a victim of injustice - which he was - but he was parroting a line from one of his scripts without really understanding it. And he kept forgetting my requests that he not piss and defecate on the carpet. I'm untidy at the best of times, people say my place looks like a pigsty, but this was ridiculous.

Cyril had a powerful need to understand, to know where he slotted into the Great Jigsaw of Being, but he didn't have the brains to take it all in, no matter how simple I tried to make it.

He had a hell of an appetite, so I had to go shopping next morning. My mind was still working overtime, trying to figure out what to do with Cyril. I thought of finding a phone booth and calling James and Maria, but I decided it wouldn't be fair. After years of trying, they'd just had their first baby, and it didn't seem fair to spoil their happiness with my problems just yet.

When I got home, the pig was up against the desk in the corner of the living room, with a jack extended from his cybernetic front leg into my PC.

"I'm going to have to report you for this, you know."

"What!?"

"I was looking at your tax-returns and your accounts. You've broken the law. You've been rounding up your expense figures. You owe the Revenue an extra £3.20."

"Cyril! Shut the fuck up! I am your fucking creator! I am God, I can do anything I damn well please and I'll thank you not to go prying into my personal affairs."

He noticed the shopping bags. "Great!" he said. "Nosh! I'm famished!"

While he grunted and snorted his way through the groceries, planning his menus for the weekend, a little lightbulb came on over my head. If I couldn't tell Cyril the meaning of his life through his ears, I might make it via his computer.

"Cyril," I said, "if I explain everything to you, will you promise to go away and leave me alone for ever."

"Dunno," said Cyril, preoccupied with the food. "Are you gonna get cooking, or what?"

"No," I said, "it'll have to wait a while." I was opening drawers, looking through all my bits and pieces, and making a mental shopping-list. Then me and my credit cards got online and ordered a load of memory, one of those fast book-scanners, the best assemblers that money could buy and various other bits of wire, all to be delivered prontissimo.

It cost a bomb, but I figured it would be worth it. I could claim some of it against tax.

When I finished, Cyril was watching TV. A farming programme on the Business Channel about pig-breeding.

"Worrrrr!" he said, not bothering to look my way. "Lot at the dangly, wobbly things on that one! I'd like to climb on the back of that and, then, then. . . "

"And then what, Cyril?"

"I dunno. Something."

"I think the expression you're looking for is 'pork her'."

The Mondo Future bosses hadn't wanted a tourist attraction prone to unpredictable and urges. The castration had probably been the first operation on the list.

After Cyril's lunch - five pizzas, three veggieburgers, a pineapple and two litres of Happy Shopper cola, I set to work. I now knew how to dispose of him. Some friends, she a novelist, he a poet, had bought a smallholding in a remote part of Scotland to grow beans and pursue their muses in tranquillity. They had no money; I had. I would give Cyril the gift of understanding (I hoped), then drive him up there and pay them whatever they asked to look after him and keep quiet about it until the bastard died of rust or old age. He might even be useful about the farm. He'd certainly scare the bejeezus out of burglars.

I jacked into his brain, and as I did so I was seriously tempted to kill him anyhow and hack this wonderful machine out. This was a computer to die for, a custom-built box packed with optically-networked artificial neurons AND two dozen of the smallest processors you’ve ever seen, all running parallel. Cyril was more intelligent than everyone in America put together!

There was plenty of spare capacity, but what I needed even more. Leaving the motor and sensory systems in place, I first wiped his ability to speak French, German and Japanese. Then I knocked out all the Mondo Future bullshit, the storylines of most of his previous adventures and sundry other rubbish. It would, of course, have been a sight easier if I could have just wiped everything in there and let him revert to being a regular pig. But he had once been a valuable piece of property and there was no overriding the core and anthropomorphic behaviour systems short of cutting him open and pulling them out.

Now for the clever bit: I got out my SPAM files. SPAM, or Serial Personality Action Memory is a little media trick used for storing fictional characters. We use low-grade versions at the firm, but they're more generally employed by soap opera scriptwriters. With SPAM you can ask what a certain character would do in a certain situation, what s/he would say, and what vocabulary (slang, regional expressions, etc.) they'd use to say it. SPAM also avoids continuity errors; if someone says she loves strawberry ice-cream, she doesn't say she's always hated the stuff in an episode five years later. Soap addicts notice little mistakes like that and, say its fans, SPAM gives your characters more depth and credibility because it means they can have opinions. I once held a half-hour conversation with a SPAM; aside from its grinding banality and the fact that it was done via a VDU, you'd swear you were passing the time of day with some daft old codger on a bus. We're not far off the times when soaps will be written entirely by machines.

A TV producer friend, looking for a successful young businessman with a creative edge for a soap he was planning, made a SPAM of me a year ago on the understanding that I would remain anonymous. I agreed to do it for a laugh, because I thought it might be an interesting memento for my grandchildren (if I ever had any), but mainly because I owed him a huge favour after borrowing his mixing-desk for a series of ads that needed some highly specialised sound effects. On and off, he spent six months quizzing me about everything from my political attitudes through to the history of my love-life. I would never have got involved if I'd known it would take so long. In the event, the soap never got made, and he gave me the discs, promising he'd wiped any copies.

These I now took and updated. After that it became rather like one of those stews you make when you're a student. I threw in everything; press reports on me and on Cyril, my own fitfully-written diary since I was 12, the contents of my personal organisers, both paper and electronic. I even thought of going and getting my favourite love-letters from the attic and putting them through the scanner, but then I figured that if it went wrong and Cyril was to go around parroting the juicy bits, it might all prove rather embarrassing. I mean, your adolescent diaries are embarrassing enough.

Many, many hours later, I downloaded the lot into Cyril and went to bed, letting him chew it all over, assemble meaning from the written stuff, file it all in the right place and try and figure it out.

He was still humming away, putting every little scrap into its proper place when I drove off to work on Monday morning.

I came home early from work that evening, having still spared James and Maria my news. As I opened the door, I still didn't know what to expect. Cyril might have gone apeshit and trashed my house, or he might have just walked off into the sunset.

The living-room had been sort of tidied, and Cyril was lying on the floor with a book on art history in front of him, opened at one of my favourite paintings. He was also jacked into my PC. He had gone into files I had made down the years for what I call my Masterpiece Project, the great work of animator's art I'm going to do one day because it's important and not because I want the money.

It's to be a feature-length animation, an ancient Roman/Greek/English fantasy with artwork based on paintings by Millais, Burne-Jones, Alma-Tadema, Rossetti and Holman Hunt. It would be filled with grand spectacle, subtle detail and ravishing colours. I was going to bring the Pre-Raphaelites to life!

I first had the idea years ago when I fell in love with H-H's painting, ‘Isabella and the Pot of Basil’. It had been inspired by a Keats poem, and depicts a woman nuzzling up to a flowerpot in which she's hidden the severed head of her lover who's been killed by her brothers and which is now fertilising the herbs very nicely. The model was Hunt's beautiful young wife Fanny; they'd been married a few months and had moved to Florence. He was absolutely besotted with her, and so eager to paint her that he made her pose for hours in fierce heat, even though she was pregnant. The tragedy in the painting was to be matched in real life, as Fanny died six weeks after the birth of the child, a boy.

(They called the child Cyril, by the way, a coincidence whose meaning I still haven't figured out.)

"She is adorable, ain't she?" said Cyril, pointing his nose to the picture.

"I thought you only fancied pigs with dangly, wobbly bits, Cyril," I said, not entirely sure what was going through his mind.

"Not any more. And that Jane Morris, the woman Rossetti used for Proserpine, she was a bit of allright, wasn't she? I don't think much to the Alma-Tadema women, mind. Right old dogs if you ask me. . ."

"Cyril! Don't be so judgmental! You're no Adonis yourself!"

"You fucking hypocrite!" he said. "I'm only repeating your opinion."

"That's as may be. We like Alma-Tad for his exquisite colours."

"Yeah. An' we like the way he does the marble. Paints a luvverly bit of marble, does Alma-Tad. . . I can't wait to get started. I want to make Jane Morris and Fanny Hunt move. I want them to live again."

"That's my line, Cyril."

"I know. You programmed it in, remember? Y'stupid bastard!"

I was one up on Holman-Hunt. He had only reproduced his wife in oils. I had reproduced myself in pork. Cyril was no longer a chirpy cartoon pig, but a driven, intolerant, egotistical, obstinate, foul-mouthed know-it-all.

I was getting to like him more already.

The second night, I brought back all the kit that he'd need to start work on the animation.

The third night, when I got home, he showed me what he'd done on the TV screen. Six whole seconds of Fanny Hunt, her head resting on the pot, her chest rising and falling slightly. She sighs. A faint breeze ripples her hair and swings the lamp that hangs close by.

It was a bit naff, but we were on our way. All I needed now was a script. Cyril and I could knock up the storyboards together and he could do all the grafting. We might finish it inside three years.

Then the doorbell rang.

It was Carol, my own great love who had walked out on me months ago. "I got your message," she said.

"My message?"

"E-mail . . . "

"Oh. . . " I said, "right. Yes. Um, hold on a minute."

I left her standing at the door and dashed back to the living-room. I noticed that my PC had been plugged into the modem. Cyril winked and sauntered off to the kitchen. I went back and ushered Carol in, tidying the plates and takeaway wrappers and newspapers and other rubbish off the sofa. She looked around the room. "It smells horrible in here," she said.

"Yes. I think a cat must have got in an open window and sprayed the place," I improvised.

We sat. "So," I said, "how are you getting on?"

"Look, I . . ." we both said at once, then laughed nervously.

"I didn't know you wrote poetry," she said.

No, nor did I, unless . . . Oh my God! The adolescent diaries!

"I came really to find out why you did it. It wasn't all that good. It's not some kind of wind-up, is it?"

"Carol," I said, trying to look her in the eye, "I'm really glad you came, but it wasn't me who sent the message, well, it was, but only sort of, um . . . Oh hell!" There was nothing for it. I went over to the door, opened it, and in walked Cyril.

"This must be Carol," said Cyril. "I'm really pleased ter meetcha. Sorry about the awful poem, but it was the best he could do. Gawd! Has anyone ever told you you look just like that Lizzie Siddal in Rossetti's ‘Beata Beatrix’?"

It was only then that Carol screamed.

Cyril, programmed with most of my personality, could not really be described as 'cute', or even 'interesting'. He's actually slightly worse than me (I hope), a consequence of my having fed my diaries in. The diaries have always tended to catharsis, so they're full of moaning and bitching.

You could say that all I've got is a souped-up computer with an attitude problem that accounts for three quarters of our weekly grocery bill, but I'm sort of attached to him. So is Carol. She likes to think she can complain about me by telling him off. He says that she never picks on him unless I'm in the room.

He couldn't be at the wedding, but it felt like he, and not James, should have been my best man. I sold my share of the company to James and Maria and have set up my own little firm, not because I wanted to break away from them, but because Carol and I bought the middle class dream and now have a nineteenth century farmhouse in the Cotswolds that we can't really afford. Carol is working on a book and Cyril, his whereabouts still a mystery to the rest of humanity, works with me on the as-yet untitled masterpiece. When the time is right, the world will hear of Cyril the Cyberpig again.

Assuming I don't kill him first.