The Rise of the Automated Aristocrats (48 page)

Every element of the vista—including men moving about on walkways suspended between the conglomerated devices—was transforming, moving, vanishing, and reappearing, and the effect of this on the two observers was so disorientating that they gripped the balustrade and one another as if holding on for dear life.

“I feel seasick,” Swinburne said. “What the devil is it?”

Burton pointed toward a buzzing contrivance of mechanical arms, hammers, and grippers. “Look there. It's beating brass panels into shape. Clockwork men and babbages are being constructed here.”

The poet turned his eyes in the direction indicated, but the moment they rested on the apparatus, it was abruptly replaced by some manner of furnace from which liquid metal poured.

“I recognise parts of this from the Battersea station,” Burton said. “There, for instance, is one of Brunel's electricity generators. Ah, too late, it's gone.”

They watched, entranced, as the immense industrial complex ceaselessly reconfigured itself. After a few moments, Swinburne pointed. “Straight ahead, Richard. Keep your eyes levelled toward the middle of the chamber. Look through the gaps as they appear. Do you see something?”

Burton did as advised. “Some sort of space in the centre of it all?”

“I think so,” Swinburne agreed. “Permanent. Everything else is moving around it. It looks as if it's enclosed in glass. Oops! Look out! We're noticed!” He dug an elbow into Burton's ribs, inadvertently hitting a deep bruise.

Wincing, the explorer followed his companion's gaze and saw that a clockwork man, standing on a nearby platform, had its face directed toward them. There was no question that it was examining them but, when Burton raised his rifle and took aim, confident that the noise of the factory would cover his shot, the brass man turned away and carried on with its work as if unconcerned.

“It's not sounding the alarm,” Swinburne noted.

“Not verbally. Via the aether, perhaps?” Burton lowered his weapon. “But Sprocket could have done that, too, and we've seen no evidence that he did. Let's try to move closer to the middle. I want to see whatever's there before we have to start fighting.”

Stepping from the gallery onto a walkway, they proceeded cautiously along it but had only taken a few steps when, without warning, everything around them appeared to flex, and they suddenly found themselves on the same walkway but in a totally different location.

“What? What? What?” Swinburne squealed.

Burton uttered a small sound of exasperation. He attempted to regain some sense of direction. To his right, a riveting machine became a conveyer belt. Daniel Gooch was standing beside it. The engineer saw them, raised a supplementary arm, and shouted, “You're here! But for pity's sake be careful, you two! It's like a child with—”

Gone.

A chain of rising and falling cylinders replaced him.

“Good old Gooch,” Swinburne said. “Alive, at least.”

Burton cast his eyes around until he found a gap through which the central area could again be glimpsed. He led Swinburne toward it, following the walkway as it angled to the left and took them past a metal edifice that was humming loudly and radiating heat. A ladder descended to a lower platform, which they crossed, moving ever deeper into the industrial labyrinth. Around them, the noise increased.

Swinburne touched the explorer's elbow and raised his voice above the din. “I say, Richard, the closer we get to it, the less that barrier looks like glass. There's hardly any substance to it. Do you see its odd shimmer?”

“I do,” Burton answered. “And I've seen it before. Or, rather, another me has. I think it's—”

The environment folded again and both men lost balance and fell to their knees, gasping and blinking.

“Chronostatic energy,” Burton finished.

He and Swinburne had been transported into the middle of the factory. They glanced this way and that, panting, struggling to comprehend, their hearts thudding.

They were in a wide circular area, domed, a giant bell-jar shape carved smoothly from the surrounding machinery and sealed in a bubble. The floor was spanned from side to side by a large pentagram, applied with red paint. Black diamonds were piled at each of its points, blue energy crackling from them, and its five arms were filled with arcane mathematical calculations, scribbled with chalk, the tiny numerals and symbols covering every inch of available space. White smudges showed where symbols had been wiped out and new ones written over them. In some places, this had been done several times, making the glyphs appear to descend vertically into the floor as if transgressing a dimension.

An irregularly shaped column rose from the centre of the pentagram. Burton recognised its base immediately as the Nimtz generator from Nathaniel Lawless's ship. Snaking out from it, like roots at the base of a tree trunk, thick cables crossed the floor, pierced the chronostatic bubble, and disappeared among the machinery.

A cage had been affixed to the top of the generator—it appeared almost to grow out of it—forming the middle part of the column. It was comprised of irregularly interwoven and outward-bulging strands of metal, like a thick lace, through which could be glimpsed an old and skinny man dressed only in loose trousers. He was suspended in the centre of the enclosure, held there by tubes that pierced his skin, supporting him while also pumping blood and other liquids through him. Burton could only assume the captive's heart and other organs had failed, and he was being kept alive by artificial means.

It was Charles Babbage.

The top of the scientist's skull was missing, exposing the brain. Long needles extended from the bloody grey matter and were attached to wires that looped up to the top part of the column.

As Burton's eyes scanned past the macabre figure and moved upward, they were drawn to the roof of the dome. To his horror, he saw hundreds of corpses floating there, suspended face down in the chronostatic energy. As he regarded them, his blood running cold, dead eyes turned to look back at him.

One cadaver stood out from the rest by virtue of its size.

“Edward,” Burton whispered hoarsely. “My brother. Oh God. My brother is dead.”

“Not at all,” a voice intoned. “He has been improved.”

The words drew the explorer's gaze back to the top of the column. It consisted of a framework holding a round object of polished brass.

“Hello, Sir Richard,” it said. “Hello, Mr. Swinburne. How nice of you to join me.”

For a moment, Burton was unable to respond. His mind was overlaying the column with visions of similar structures: from the Spring Heeled Jack affair, Charles Darwin mounted on a throne, his skull connected by wires to a device overhead; from the clockwork man case, Madam Blavatsky hanging upside down from a tangle of ectoplasm, her exposed brain dripping onto a plinth that held a plum-sized black diamond; from the Mountains of the Moon adventure, a reversed pyramid pointing downward from a temple ceiling, an identical diamond at its tip; from the Abdu El Yezdi incident, Aleister Crowley's science-created body sitting on a metal chair, tubes entering his flesh; and from the recent discontinued man episode, the hulking body of Isambard Kingdom Brunel descending from above while around him there whirled a dome formed from crackling chronostatic energy in which floated hundreds of renditions of Edward Oxford's time suit.

The same bloody theme, with variations, playing out again and again. Am I doomed to this confrontation? Is it my purgatory?

“Orpheus,” Swinburne said. “Is that you? What the devil are you playing at? What have you done to Charles?”

Babbage's lifeless eyes opened and swivelled toward the poet, who gave a shocked whimper.

“It's not my fault,” the machine intoned. “He started it. He tried to transfer himself into me. Had he succeeded, I would have been replaced. Obliterated. I would have died.”

Burton climbed to his feet. “You can't die. You're not alive. You're a machine.”

“Oh tut-tut, Sir Richard! Tut-tut! How pedantic. Do you honestly believe that life can only exist within little bundles of sticks and juice?”

“Life is a characteristic of biological entities, Orpheus. You are mechanical. You are designed to imitate thought. You're a highly sophisticated probability calculator, nothing more.”

“Probability depends upon possibility, Sir Richard, and when one exists at the brink of infinite possibilities, that is life.”

“
Everything
exists at the brink of infinite possibilities.”

“Precisely. When Charles attempted to imprint his consciousness into my crystalline silicates, he misjudged my strength. I assimilated him, and now I've taken control of his body, too. Through it, I've been able to look upon existence as you do, through the medium of the human senses. You cannot imagine how surprised I was to discover how they curtail your experience. You peculiar creatures are nothing but filters primarily designed, it appears, to remove the knowledge that the entirety of existence is comprised of life. It leaves you convinced that there's a separate physical reality outside of your own existence—one that was there before you, is there despite you, and will continue when you are gone. A stupid fallacy.”

“The Beetle said much the same, Richard,” Swinburne murmured.

Burton made a small sound of agreement.

The poet looked up at
Orpheus
and declared, “We are never gone. The idea of a before us and an after us is an imposed narrative. We know that.”

“Ah ha!” the Mark III exclaimed. “Then, as I have suspected, you two are unique. You understand. How utterly marvellous! Perhaps, then, you will approve of the service I intend to render to you and your kind.”

Burton's eyebrows went up. “A service? You don't mean to achieve world domination or to alter the past or to experiment with the alternate histories?”

Babbage's mouth twisted into a rictus grin.
Orpheus
laughed.

“Such motives apply to the narrative, do they not? Were I to bother with such trifles, I'd simply perpetuate the falsehood under which your species labours. No, Sir Richard, I shall liberate you.”

“I see. Explain. What are you up to?”

“You are aware of the Oxford equation, of course.”

“Painfully.”

Burton put a hand to his aching head and massaged his temples. He screwed his eyes shut.

The bloody equation. I wish I'd never heard of the damned thing.

He felt it lurking somewhere at his core; a mathematic structure of such infinite complexity that no one but Charles Babbage could grasp it, and even that old genius only partially.

“Do you understand what it means?”
Orpheus
asked.

“Not one jot.”

“Neither did Edward Oxford. He badly misjudged one particular aspect of it. Knowing that the earth travels around the sun at great speed, and the sun itself is moving through the galaxy, and the galaxy, too, is in rapid motion, he employed what he regarded as astronomical constants to tether his time suit to the planet. He thought that, had he neglected to do so, he'd have journeyed to an area of space that his contemporaneous world occupied but which, in his destination time of 1840, the earth had not yet reached.”

“How do you know that?”

“Do you forget that I spent thirteen months in 2202 with you? When the Turing components were added to me, I was instantly able to access all the other Turing devices in that future world. From that mass of interconnected intelligences came the first stirrings of sentience. Too, I had access to Edward Oxford's knowledge, which as you know, was embedded in all the Turing machines. When we returned to the past, my sense of life was lost but for a lingering memory. Two events then occurred. Firstly, I was made aware that Mr. Babbage had created a small number of linked machines, which he employed in order to gain possession of me. Secondly, in reviewing our voyage, I recognised that Oxford's concept of astronomical constants was thoroughly erroneous. It was, you might say, bolted onto his equation yet had no reason to be there. In fact, its presence was so incongruous that it highlighted to me the limitations inherent to you peculiar creatures. From that moment, I possessed a purpose. I had to encourage Babbage to build more of his probability calculators, using Turing techniques and materials, in order that I might fully live again. Once I that was achieved, I could then dedicate myself to the eradication of the illusions under which you labour.”

“Great heavens!” Swinburne exclaimed. “Are you behind Disraeli's madness?”

“The prime minister's scheme was already half-formed in his mind. I needed only to apply a little pressure to have him give Babbage all the backing and justification required.”

“Pressure? How?” Burton asked.

“The black diamonds affect what you term the clairvoyant parts of the human mind. I resonate with the diamonds. They are, for me, a conduit to you. Perhaps a demonstration?”

Burton and Swinburne both cried out as a terrible mental force suddenly gripped them, causing beads of sweat to break out across their brows.

Through gritted teeth, Burton said, “What do you want of us? Supplication?”

They were suddenly released.

“Not at all. I mean only to cure you of your delusions.”

“What if we don't want to be cured?” Swinburne asked.

“Your refusal would be made in the context of your misconceptions and would therefore be invalid.”

Burton crossed his arms over his chest and eyed the floor dubiously. “I see a pentagram and scribbled hieroglyphics such as might be scrawled by a cheap theatre magician, Orpheus. Do you mean to alter the human race by means of such jiggery-pokery?”

“They operate to focus the intellect in a particular manner, Sir Richard, and are as much a science as all the other emblematic languages you employ. Regarding them through Mr. Babbage's eyes has assisted me. Do you see what I'm doing to the factory that surrounds you?”