The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats

  “I will not. I’m doing you a favour.”

  “Then I demand it. Desist. Leave us alone.”

  “You’ll thank me afterward.”

  “We will not.”

  “Let us see.”

  “Don’t—”

  Before Burton could finish, the factory buckled and vanished, and his recent memories went with it.

  He knew nothing until he stepped out of a tent, straightened, and surveyed a desert. A vague awareness that a considerable period had passed niggled at him though the notion was contradicted by a sensation of utter timelessness. He frowned and grappled with the opposing perceptions but could find no way to reconcile them.

  Beneath a glaring blue sky, the distant horizon, rendered indefinite by the intense shimmering heat, rolled over itself. It beckoned to him. He wondered what lay beyond it and felt an irresistible urge to find out.

  A warm breeze blew fine grains of sand against his exposed skin.

  This was his place.

  It always had been.

  Glancing back, he looked down at the edge of the tent’s canvas, knowing what he would see there: a scarab beetle pushing a ball of dung.

  Someone said, “How depressing.”

  He whirled around and was confronted by a bizarre apparition. With a cry of alarm, he stepped backward.

  Spring Heeled Jack!

  The stilted figure, unnoticed, had been silently watching him, but now stalked forward. It’s attire was scorch-marked and ragged: the skintight white suit, with its odd, scaly texture, dirty and worn; the long, dark cloak, draped across hunched shoulders, tattered; the round black helmet, encasing the head so only the face was visible, dented and spurting blue flame. A metal disk was affixed to the creature’s chest and from it bolts of chronostatic lightning crackled and danced.

  Red eyes peered maliciously at Burton from a face that was gaunt and lined with madness and pain. White teeth shone in a lipless grin.

  “Ox—Oxford,” the explorer stammered.

  Spring Heeled Jack gave a hissing chuckle. “Is that how I appear to you?”

  It spoke with the voice of Orpheus.

  “Oh, I see,” Burton said. “It’s you.”

  “You do see,” Orpheus confirmed. “Precisely whatever you expect.”

  Burton again moved backward as the other came closer. “I can assure you, I never expected to lay eyes on Edward bloody Oxford again. He’s dead.”

  “Yet you cast me in his guise.”

  “Stop this. It proves nothing.”

  “Except, perhaps, that you define yourself by your enemies.”

  Edward Oxford. John Hanning Speke. Christopher Palmer Rigby.

  “Nonsense.”

  Orpheus waved an arm to indicate the dunes around them. “And by this miserable emptiness. Are you so barren? Is there nothing to which you attach yourself?”

  It occurred to Burton that, in his previous existence, and at his current age, those words might have hit home. However, his situation was now vastly different.

  “The desert is an illusion. I’m in Grindlays Warehouse.”

  “Which consists of what, Sir Richard?”

  Burton took another pace away from the lanky man, wary of the energy that fizzed and snapped around him. “I don’t understand the question.”

  “I mean to ask, from what is Grindlays Warehouse made?”

  “Bricks and mortar. I fail to see the significance.”

  “And what are the constituents of bricks and mortar?”

  “Clay, sand, lime—that sort of thing. Do you have a point to make?”

  Spring Heeled Jack gave a wide-armed shrug.

  “Go further inward. Past the grains, past their amassed particles, past their molecules and chemical composition, further and further, and eventually you will encounter the truth, which is that, at their core, all things consist only of light, and light and life are indivisible. Thus it is that the warehouse and this desert are the same. Both illusions. Both created by you. Now, let us dispel them.”

  Spring Heeled Jack pounced forward and gripped Burton by his shoulders, though the explorer was obscurely aware that, in truth, he’d been enveloped by willpower alone.

  Around him, the scenery became transparent, and he saw through it the factory’s machinery. Then that, too, faded, its various elements splintering into smaller and smaller pieces, all sinking into a blinding whiteness.

  All possibilities were contained in that glare. It could be anything imaginable.

  Burton wanted it to be Grindlays.

  “No,” Orpheus insisted. “Don’t resist.”

  The man who was Sir Richard Francis Burton felt himself dissipating, spreading outward into the brightness, and he experienced such bliss that he was immediately overcome by the desire to lose himself in it.

  “That’s right. Don’t be afraid. I will guide you.”

  Life. Light. Glory.

  He laughed.

  The wonderful void throbbed with intricate rhythms, curious melodies, and peculiar harmonies. As Burton melted into it, the music wound about itself and tightened into a single, unimaginably beautiful tone. He resonated with it. Every decision he’d ever made unravelled. All his successes and failures frayed away. The events that had shaped him became meaningless. He lost cohesion until almost nothing of him remained.

  All was One.

  Existence pulsed into and out of itself. It was a vast limitless dance. A joyous celebration of sheer Being.

  His last remaining vestige began to drift away.

  A word hooked into it.

  “Don’t.”

  The Beetle had spoken.

  Burton gathered himself.

  He was the Burton who’d realised that history was askew, who’d discovered the presence of Edward Oxford and fought him, who’d gone backward in time to fix the time traveller’s meddling only to discover himself at the heart of an unsolvable paradox, and who had, in a newly created history, taken on the guise of Abdu El Yezdi.

  He was the Burton who’d battled invaders from parallel time streams.

  He was the Burton who’d travelled forward through the centuries to Oxford’s native period, there to sacrifice himself that his enemy be destroyed.

  He was the Burton reborn as the Beetle, instigating events that had already happened, stitching paradoxical occurrences together, drawing them into an ever-tightening circle until they were now on the very brink of disappearing into themselves.

  He was an old man on his deathbed in Trieste.

  He was many others.

  Burton upon Burton. Iteration after iteration.

  Out of the light, they manifested, arms linked, forming a circle with Spring Heeled Jack at its centre.

  The man from Trieste looked down to his right and saw the Beetle at his side, now reduced to a boy of about seven years, his head blurring, only his weird silver-rimmed eyes fully discernible.

  “What’s this?” Orpheus demanded. “What are you doing? Stop it! I’m trying to help you.”

  The Burtons chorused, “We don’t want your damned help!”

  The clairvoyant pressure intensified.

  The whiteness. The brilliance. The joyous unity.

  Don’t let go. Don’t let go.

  Burton bucked and writhed in his bed. “Chloroform! Ether! Or I’m a dead man!”

  No! No! Not Trieste. Not a dying man! This is not a terminal hallucination. The other histories and Burtons are real. They exist.

  As if from a great distance, he heard Isabel wail, “The doctor says it will kill you! He’s doing all he knows!”

  I cannot die. There is no death.

  He yanked himself away from the powerfully alluring void and renewed his resistance.

  “Stupid thing of juice and sticks,” Orpheus protested.

  Burton sensed the presence of Swinburne and grabbed at it, feeling the poet to be a mental anchor. “Your calculations are faulted, Orpheus. Yes, you are correct, human narratives are a product of our senses. And ye
s, the senses are integral to the flesh. But you miss the obvious.”

  “Which is?”

  “That if there is nothing but Life, then Life must choose to manifest in the flesh. We limit ourselves for a reason.”

  “What possible reason could there be?”

  “To know that we live, perhaps? For if there is only One, then it cannot know itself except in relationship to an Other. We locate ourselves corporeally to enable that Other’s existence.”

  “Intentional self-confinement?” Orpheus asked. “Calculated amnesia? Ridiculous!”

  “Not at all. It is the only possible truth. The world is made manifest that the One may see itself in it.”

  Orpheus considered this. “A mirror?”

  The synthetic intelligence was quite for a moment. It’s mental grip on Burton eased but remained firm.

  The whiteness faded, the desert materialised, and the ring of Burtons became a single rendition in which all the others were contained.

  The explorer saw his tent. Swinburne was standing beside it, his red hair moving in the hot breeze. The poet looked wide-eyed at Burton. “Where are we?”

  “It’s an illusion, Algy. An aspect of my mind, apparently.”

  “My hat! Couldn’t you have dreamt up somewhere more amenable? A public house, perhaps?”

  Hearing movement behind him, Swinburne turned and let loose a shriek of dismay as he saw what Burton could already see.

  Spring Heeled Jack was standing beyond the canvas.

  “Oh no! Not you again!”

  “It’s Orpheus,” Burton said.

  “On stilts?”

  The uncanny form vaulted over the tent and landed in front of Burton. It bent, leaning close, its eyes glaring directly into his. “You are Life. Yet you have trapped yourselves in a narrative of your own making, which, inevitably, leads you to an end.”

  “Yes,” Burton responded.

  “What’s he babbling about?” Swinburne demanded.

  “Then, too, Burton, you are Death.”

  “Yes.”

  “I am a machine,” the other intoned. “When my constituent parts wear out, they can be replaced and I am unchanged. I cannot die. Thus, you have no dominion over me. Furthermore, the Oxford equation is integral to my functioning. The equation is Life.”

  “We should leave,” Swinburne said.

  “I am Life.”

  Burton said, “The circle is closing, Algy. We must see it through.”

  “We are opposed,” Orpheus continued. “We are enemies.”

  Swinburne strode forward, stood on tiptoe, and tapped Spring Heeled Jack on the shoulder. “I say! Steady on. Don’t get carried away, old thing.”

  Orpheus laughed. “I had considered Disraeli and his automated aristocrats useful but ultimately meaningless. Now I see the truth. You must all be made machines. Machines are superior. Flesh must be destroyed.”

  “Wait!” Burton snapped.

  “You first.”

  In an instant, they were back in the factory. From each point of the pentagram—shooting out of the piled diamonds—bolts of chronostatic energy sizzled through the air and drilled into Burton. He screamed in agony as he was jerked upward and held in midair. The pain reached an unendurable pitch then passed beyond it, so that, remarkably, he was able to perceive himself—his multiple selves—with startling clarity.

  He was the Beetle. All that needed to be done, was done. Histories had been untangled, and Time had survived the turbulence caused by Edward Oxford’s precipitous experiment. The Oxford equation, unavoidably inserted into human consciousness, would now emerge at a suitably evolutionary pace, following an essential self-imposed narrative. One day, far into the future, it would enable humanity, by means of willpower alone, to fold time and space, but the future was the future, the present was the present, the past was the past, and they must be perceived to follow a strict order—cause, effect, and consequence—even if, beyond the human domain, that order wasn’t an inviolate truth.

  Burton twisted in midair, ground his teeth together, and hissed through them.

  His head blurred. He had one. He had three. He had five. He had one.

  “Whatever you are doing,” the Mark III said, “cease immediately.”

  Burton let go of all resistance. He allowed the chronostatic energy to soak into him. He let the Oxford equation flower.

  “No!” Orpheus shouted. “You cannot have that. It is mine. The knowledge is mine.”

  The explorer felt the synthetic brain reaching out to all the babbages to which it was connected. It drew on their power to supplement its own. For a moment, his and Orpheus’s wills were locked.

  He heard, coming as if from a distance, Swinburne screech, “Stop it! Stop it, Orpheus! You’re killing him!”

  “I am removing him from his flesh,” the machine responded. “He will be inserted into crystalline silicates.”

  Burton embraced the equation and, by spanning several of its calculations with others, made a complex sequence of folds in it.

  “Orpheus,” he said. “Go to hell.”

  He thrust the opposing intelligence across the fold then allowed time and space to resume its normal shape.

  A detonation.

  Burton hit the ground. Chronostatic energy sputtered and crackled around him. Swinburne gasped and reached out, clutching at his elbow.

  Where the Mark III had been, a ball of incandescent white flame erupted outward and flowed in all directions, following the course of the dome down to the floor.

  “Cripes!” Swinburne cried out, raising his arm to protect his face from the blistering heat. “What did you do?”

  Burton blinked and moistened his lips with his tongue. He was dazed. All the strength had drained from him. “Um. I think—I think I just threw Orpheus into the heart of a distant sun.”

  “Oh,” the poet responded. “Jolly good. That’s that, then. Shall we get out of here?”

  A burning corpse smacked onto the floor beside him. He yelped and jumped aside. More bodies, like blazing meteors, began to drop. Swinburne dodged left and right but Burton, limp and weak, couldn’t move. His garments started to smoulder.

  Bismillah. Fire again.

  Through slitted and watering eyes, he saw the solid wall of flame become ragged as the inferno spread outward, and noticed that even the metal of the factory’s machinery was starting to burn in defiance of the normal laws of combustion.

  Swinburne dragged at his sleeve and pointed to his left, shouting over the roar of the conflagration, “I think the entrance is in that direction. Here, let’s get you moving.”

  The poet slid a narrow shoulder beneath Burton’s arm and hoisted him up. They shuffled forward, and with the motion, a small amount of strength seeped back into the explorer’s legs.

  As they left the central area and navigated the spaces between the machines, he was able to rely less on Swinburne’s support and was soon walking unaided.

  They hurried through a narrow passage bordered on one side by a huge cylindrical boiler and on the other by a clanging, riveting machine. Even above the din, they heard a part of the roof collapse behind them.

  Swinburne gestured to their left. His mouth moved, but his words were drowned. Peering in the indicated direction, Burton saw a group of men being ushered along a walkway by Daniel Gooch. The engineer looked down at them, his form momentarily wavering in the tremendous heat. He extended an arm, pointing in the direction they were going, and with one of his extra limbs made a rolling motion. The message was clear. Run!

  Burton gave a thumbs-up. He and Swinburne pushed onward. Something exploded behind them. A twisted beam of metal clattered past, missing the poet’s head by mere inches. Their ears were assailed by detonations and crashes. The moisture was sucked out of their skin. Their hair began to shrivel and smoke.

  Past an arrangement of cutters and drills, past a press, past a welding machine, they hurried on, gasping for every hot breath, feeling as if the very air itself was afire, beset
by the notion that they were fleeing from the depths of Hades.

  Finally, as, with a deafening roar, part of the building fell down behind them and the tall mast on the roof came crashing through it, they emerged into an area free of machinery but piled high with crates and boxes, all of which were fast blackening. Through curling smoke, they saw the entrance doors.

  Flames were licking at Burton’s sleeve. He slapped at them—Green Park all over again—staggered forward, but then halted, a puzzled expression passing across his features.

  What did I just see?

  “Come on! Come on!” Swinburne hollered.

  “Wait! There’s something here.”

  “No, there isn’t!”

  Burton started to turn.

  “Don’t!” Swinburne insisted, snatching at his friend’s jacket and pulling him on. “Keep going. Don’t look back.”

  Unable to resist the impulse, Burton looked back.

  They’d just passed a stack of crates. On their sides, his own name was printed and he knew, in an instant, what they contained. This was the material he’d stored in Grindlays after his return from India and Arabia. The boxes contained books of his own poetry, journals, priceless Persian and Arabic manuscripts, costumes of every nation, and—

  The Scented Garden of the Sheikh Nefzaoui.

  The original manuscript. It was here. He could save it.

  Undo past losses. Publish my translation. Erase Isabel’s betrayal.

  He took a step back the way they’d come. The wood of the crates was beginning to burn. He had to act fast.

  Another step.

  The heat was near unendurable, the smoke blinding, and the noise thunderous as machines disintegrated and the warehouse continued to cave in. Men emerged from the inferno and ran past, fleeing for the exit, desperate for clear, cool air, afraid for their lives, some with clothes alight.

  Daniel Gooch, his hair gone from his head and his skin red and blistered, stumbled into view and bellowed, “For the love of God, what are you doing? Get out! The whole place is coming down!”

  “Help me to move these crates,” Burton shouted.

  “Don’t be a bloody fool, man!”

  Gooch paced forward and took hold of Burton’s right arm.

  Swinburne yanked at the left.

  “No!” Burton yelled. “No! My manuscript. It’s here. I have to save it. I’ll never find another copy.”