The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats

  Grass scraped between his toes.

  A voice: “Line up! Line up! Move yourselves! Move! Hurry now! In line!”

  Falling.

  The ground thumping into his ravaged back.

  More water.

  He opened his mouth and swallowed some of it.

  A figure, bending over him, slapped his face.

  “Up with you! Come on, Sir Richard!”

  Commander Kidd.

  “Wha—?” Burton croaked.

  “Pull yourself together, man,” Kidd insisted. “The most important moment of your life has come. The last moment. Pay attention.”

  The explorer weakly extended his hands, fumbling for a hold around Kidd’s throat. The commander laughed and brushed them aside. He straightened and swung his booted foot into Burton’s ribcage.

  “Up!”

  Rolling onto his front, Burton heaved himself to his elbows and from there to his knees. His skin was slick with blood. He was dizzy and disoriented. His eyes wouldn’t focus. He swayed and began to fall.

  “Help him,” Kidd said.

  Metal hands slid under his arms. He was yanked to his feet. His vision adjusted. He saw the camp’s prisoners all lined up, rows of them fading into the fog. He saw a scaffold and a noose.

  “Let’s make a good show of it,” Kidd whispered to him.

  The commander turned to the assembled detainees and bellowed, “Gentlemen, as you are all aware, the British Empire is faced with dire peril from the Far East. In order to meet this threat, great sacrifices must be made. You men have been selected for a special task. You have all seen HMA Eurypyle arriving and departing each day. When your turn comes, you will board that vessel and it will take you to France, and from there you will be transported by rail and steamship to India to aid in the construction of its defences against neighbouring China. Let every man do his duty, that, when the time comes for him to return home, he can do so with his head held high, knowing that he has helped preserve the greatest civilisation to have ever existed.” Kidd indulged in a dramatic pause then raised his right hand, index finger pointed at the sky. “But! But! But! Not all are as diligent as you. There are some present here today who scorn the many benefits the empire has brought to our world. They seek to undermine it. They would have you capitulate to Chinese rule.”

  Incredibly, despite that they’d been detained without warning or charges, half-starved and brutally mistreated, some of the gathered men booed and jeered.

  “This man,” Kidd declared, lowering his pointing finger so that it was directed at Burton, “is foremost among the traitors. He has defied our prime minister. He has associated with fugitives and quislings. He has fomented dissent. He has attempted to escape from this camp. Today, he will pay the price.” He addressed the guards. “Onto the scaffold with him.”

  Burton was dragged to the wooden structure and hauled up its steps to the platform. Kidd followed, took hold of the noose, and pulled it down over the condemned man’s head, tightening it a little around his neck.

  He spoke softly into Burton’s ear. “Old Dizzy will give me a medal for this. Rigby, on the other hand, will tear me off a strip. He’d much prefer to kill you himself. However, this camp and its inhabitants are my responsibility, and I’ll be damned if I allow that lunatic to take all the honours.”

  Burton wanted to say, “You’ll be damned whatever you do,” but the words emerged only as a dry rattle.

  Kidd stepped to the front of the platform. “Men!” he cried out. “Let it be known that the execution you are here to witness has been authorised by—”

  He stopped and looked up.

  A large shadow was dropping out of the sky directly overhead.

  There came a loud thrumming of engines.

  The fog boiled and flattened and fled to the borders of the park.

  Prisoners, heedless of discipline, scattered in all directions.

  The Orpheus, bristling with guns, set down.

  Burton’s knees were like rubber. They gave beneath him. The noose tightened. He started to choke.

  The door in the side of the ship opened, and the ramp slid out and down. A man appeared at the top of it. He raised a rifle and a report echoed.

  Commander Kidd took two steps backward then turned to face Burton. He had a sickly smile upon his face. Blood spurted from a hole in his chest. “That—” He paused and winced. “That is not what we arranged.”

  He fell to his knees and toppled forward, his head hitting the boards with a resounding clunk.

  Vaguely, Burton, his face blackening, wondered what the commander’s final words referred to.

  The man with the rifle ran down the ramp and across the grass toward the scaffold.

  Behind him, thick gun barrels, projecting from the sides of the vessel, swung toward their targets. Through narrowing vision, Burton identified the weapons as a variation of the new Gatling guns.

  His pulse thundered in his ears. His heart hammered. His mind became increasingly detached. He watched as green guards and SPG units suddenly reacted, pouncing forward to intercept the running man.

  The Gatling guns coughed and roared. Metal heads were torn to shreds. Some exploded. Others simply disintegrated into clouds of shrapnel.

  Burton blacked out but came to just moments later as the noose was dragged up over his head. He slumped against his rescuer.

  “Look sharp,” the man said. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

  “Hallo, Pryce,” Burton mouthed soundlessly.

  Wordsworth Pryce was Captain Lawless’s second officer. He’d been part of the Orpheus’s crew during the explorer’s African expedition.

  “Hellos and how-do-you-dos later,” Pryce said. “Are you able to stand unassisted?”

  Burton tried.

  “I’ll take that as a no.”

  The airman threw aside his rifle, which he couldn’t operate one-handed, drew a revolver from a holster on his hip, and wrapped his left arm around the explorer.

  An SPG unit met them at the foot of the scaffold’s steps. It raised its twin truncheons.

  “Halt! Your presence is unauthorised. Your actions are illegal. Surrender to me immediately or you will be forcibly subdued in the name of the King.”

  “Subdue this!” Pryce barked. He drilled three bullets into its head.

  “Unacceptable!” the machine responded. “You are under arrest. You will—kaaaark—fyaaar—”

  Its head burst into flames.

  Pryce hauled Burton away from it and toward the Orpheus.

  To the left and right, only a few clockwork men were close enough to pose a threat, and the ship’s guns quickly mowed them down.

  “Wait!” Burton croaked. “The others. The Cannibals.”

  “No time,” Pryce said, dragging him into the ship.

  “Can’t—can’t leave them.”

  “We have no choice.”

  The airman propped Burton against a bulkhead, and turned as Maneesh Krishnamurthy’s cousin, Shyamji Bhatti, joined them. “Help me close her up.”

  The two men slid the hatch shut. When the bolts were locked into place, Pryce turned and shouted through the door to the bridge, “All done, Captain!”

  Immediately, Burton felt heavier as the ship shot upward.

  “Man the stern gun,” Pryce said to Bhatti. “Police vessels will be on us at any moment.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  As the young Indian ran to the stairs leading to the lower deck, the second officer gave support to Burton and hurried him toward the lounge.

  “Transported to—to India. The Cannibals. Slavery.”

  “If that happens,” Pryce countered, “we’ll mount a rescue mission and get them back. First things first.”

  They arrived at the lounge. Other men—crewmen who, for the most part, Burton knew—came forward and helped to move him to a couch.

  “Doctor Quaint isn’t with us,” Pryce said. “This is McGarrigle, our new medical orderly.”

  The young man indi
cated nodded a greeting. “I’ll dress your wounds as best I can, but you’ll require proper attention later.”

  Burton was hanging on to consciousness by a thread.

  “Quaint—dead,” he managed. “Murdered in—in front of me.”

  Pryce paled.

  “Stand aside!” a voice commanded.

  The men around the couch stepped back. Burton saw what had been, until now, blocked from his view. It was a massive armchair, and his even more massive brother was occupying it.

  “What a bloody shambles,” the minister said. “You’ve managed to stumble from one crisis to another, and you’ve achieved precisely nothing. Now I’m left with no option but to take a hand in matters. Pathetic, Richard! Pathetic!”

  “I had no—”

  “Shut up. I don’t want to hear anything from you except for the location of Swinburne, Trounce, and Gooch and his people. We must gather them up.”

  “Norwood,” Burton said. “Cemetery. The catacombs.”

  His brother addressed Pryce. “Tell the captain to shake off whatever pursuit there is before landing the ship in Norwood Cemetery.”

  Pryce nodded. “We’ll head east, outrun them, then circle back to approach Norwood from the south.”

  “I don’t need to know the details. Just get it done. Bhatti, fetch me a bottle of ale. McGarrigle, apply your ointments and bandages. I want this man on his feet. Fill him with morphine and brandy if you have to. The rest of you, go about your business.”

  Burton felt a drumming vibration beneath him. His stomach turned. The floor slanted.

  “Guns,” McGarrigle murmured, leaning over his back and examining the terrible welts upon it. “And evasive manoeuvres. Nothing to worry about. The Orpheus can outrun even police rotorships.”

  I’m very familiar with the ship, Doctor Baker. We sailed her to the Nile’s headwaters. We landed her beside the vast lake in Central Africa. Poor Speke was right. The Nyanza is the source. I thought Tanganyika, but that lake’s waters run westward. Tell me, old fellow: have the swallows all gone? There was one tapping at my window the other day. It’s a bad omen.

  He yelped.

  “Sorry,” the medico said. “Your hand is rather badly burnt. I’ll make a poultice for it later but, for the moment, it’ll be best to let the skin breath. Just a light bandage to protect it.”

  He got to work smearing a greasy substance onto Burton’s back and neck. The patient was made to swallow a glass of dissolved powders, a small bottle of foul-tasting potion, and, to his relief, a very large measure of brandy.

  Burton felt his weight continuing to shift disconcertingly as the Orpheus banked and veered, and at one point he saw through the nearest porthole a burning vessel plummeting past.

  Twenty minutes later, the ship levelled out and flew more steadily, and he divined that it had outrun its pursuers.

  Edward sat and drank ale and stared scornfully and wordlessly at his sibling.

  Pryce returned to the lounge. “We’re clear and out over the Channel. Captain Lawless is going to keep us here until nightfall. We’ll fly back in without lights at about three in the morning.” He hesitated before adding, “No lights and the prospect of landing in a thick fog. I’ll admit I’m a mite nervous.”

  “Attend to your duties,” the minister responded.

  A further two hours passed before Burton felt fit for conversation. Having been bandaged, provided with a loose white linen shirt, dark trousers and soft shoes—all from his old quarters in the ship—and supplied with a Havana cigar and another glass of brandy, he was functional, if nothing else.

  He sat and contemplated his brother.

  The two men were now alone in the lounge.

  “Edward, when did you become aware of Disraeli’s plans?” he asked. “Obviously, he had some sort of scheme in place even before the Orpheus returned from the future. I suspect it started with his and Babbage’s meeting in October. Am I correct?”

  Edward nodded, his chins wobbling. “Babbage’s notion that labourers could be replaced was foolish. The working classes of the empire are far too numerous to supplant, and what would they do with time on their hands? But just as Babbage disdains the common man, so too does Disraeli disdain the far less numerous middle class, whose recent emergence and engagement with politics is, in his view, potentially destabilising.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they will never vote to maintain the status quo. Always, they’ll demand more. Always, they’ll support policies that promise to improve their lot. Thus will economics be thrust forever on the back foot. Babbage’s proposal gave the prime minister the solution. Don’t replace the lower class; replace the middle. They are much fewer in number, and their function, in terms of employment, can be reduced in description to matters of appraisal, allotment, division, and distribution, all of which can be handled with aplomb by probability calculators. Your account of future history provided the impetus to get the project started, for it revealed to him that such a class of people could weaken the empire to such a degree that its leaders would become utterly impotent.”

  Burton frowned and winced as the laceration on his forehead gave a pang. “He’s aiming at the wrong target.”

  “Your view of the aristocracy has not been ignored. What perhaps you don’t realise is that you brought back with you a solution to the decay you perceive in them; a means to bestow upon them a strength and permanency that will endure beyond even the far off future you visited.”

  “I did? To what are you referring?”

  “To this ship’s Mark Three babbage. It has provided an example of how crystalline silicates can be employed in the same manner as the black diamonds. I know we are accumulating the latter at a ridiculously prodigious rate, but they nevertheless remain relatively scarce. This material from the future solves that problem. It is easily manufactured and offers the same capacity to store subtle electromagnetics as the gems.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Disraeli is having the minds of the aristocracy transferred into silicates and the silicates fitted into the babbages of clockwork men.”

  Burton’s jaw dropped. In a flash, he realised that Flywheel had not been Henry Thomas Hope’s private secretary at all, but Hope himself.

  Grabbing at his brandy glass, he gulped at the liquor. He coughed and squeezed his eyes shut. “Madness!”

  “Immortal rulers at the top,” his brother intoned, “whose experience and skills can only grow and improve; synthetic intelligences in the middle, requiring no reward and offering nothing but tireless service; and workers at the bottom, whose quality of life will gradually improve as the social and economic structure refines itself.”

  “You cannot possibly be serious.”

  “Disraeli is.”

  “And what does the king think about all this?”

  “I rather expect that our formerly blind monarch is delighted with his newfound visual acuity. The mechanical sensory apparatus is, apparently, more acute than natural vision.”

  Burton was speechless. He made to stand—he felt the need to pace—but his back had tightened, and the movement caused such a stab that he loosed a groan and fell back, the brandy glass falling onto the carpeted floor from suddenly numb fingers.

  Edward cast him a look of uncharacteristic sympathy.

  “Stay put, Richard. You need to rest. Close your eyes. Forty winks. It’ll be a while before we head for Norwood.”

  Burton nodded wearily. Gazing at his bandaged hand, he asked, “Why did you flee? Where did you go? Why didn’t you contact me?”

  “The prime minister would have attempted to procure my involvement. I preferred to observe from afar in order to better gauge the merits or otherwise of his scheme. I fled to a secret location, which I’ve maintained for some years. When one is involved with the underbelly of British politics, as I have been, it is wise to keep a bolthole. From there, I summoned Lawless. He was in high dudgeon after the Orpheus was ordered to put on some manner of cheap sho
w for public entertainment, so he and his crew were more than willing to abscond with the vessel and join me.”

  “You’ve become a singular and rather frightening man.”

  There came a pause. The minister’s eyes didn’t, for even an instant, stray from Burton’s.

  “Perhaps I have. The same might be said of you. Are you ready to tell me the truth, Richard?”

  “Truth?”

  “About how your expedition ended. About whatever or whoever you brought back with you, aside from what you’ve admitted to.”

  Burton frowned. He didn’t understand what his sibling meant, though he felt as if he should.

  “You know everything I know.”

  “And the inconclusive final chapter of your document?”

  “Perhaps my descriptions lacked clarity. Events were rapid and confusing.”

  “Lawless says much the same, and also claims not to have been present when you confronted Spring Heeled Jack.”

  “He wasn’t. He stayed on the ship. Do you want me to rewrite the report?”

  “That won’t be necessary. Go to sleep.”

  The couch was sufficiently long that Burton was able to stretch out on it. He did so, lying face down, and quickly eased into a state of suspended consciousness, a daze wherein his eyes remained half open, but his mind ceased to function. He saw Edward take up his two walking sticks and sit with his hands propped on them and his eyes shut as if meditating. He saw a crewman enter and silently clear glasses and ashtrays from the table. Another refilled decanters. A third crossed to the door that led to the passenger cabins and observation deck but found it to be locked. Snapping his fingers irritably, as if kicking himself for forgetting, he retraced his steps and departed.

  Bhatti appeared, leaned over the minister, and whispered in his ear. Edward, without opening his eyes, gave an almost imperceptible nod.

  Like a drug slowly seeping through his veins, a faint perturbation infiltrated Burton’s mind.

  Wake up. Think. Observe. What has disturbed you? What is making you uneasy?

  He remembered that, when the clothes he was currently wearing had been collected from his old cabin, the crewman had carefully unlocked the door before entering the passenger section and relocked it after exiting.