The Revolt of the Machines

by Brian Stableford

  He had, all things considered, no reason to love me, but he’s mourning me; his conduct was the fatal result of circumstances for which he is not culpable, but he’s deploring it; it’s the illogicality of every thought that life crushes. While vain remorse torments him, I understand him and I absolve him—to tell the truth, without afflicting myself with his condition, without sympathizing with his undeserved anguish, without my stillness being in any way troubled by his grief, for afflictions are frozen along with the blood.

  With the supreme intelligence of things that I feel within me, I also feel the supreme indifference. In the same way that I have escaped all the laws of human morality, and now finally understand relativity, I have fled the tyranny of the heart. I have no more hatred for those who made me suffer than gratitude for those who have loved me. The good and bad hours that I owe to the commerce of human beings are now too distant for me to be able to make any distinction between them.

  Every day, in life, does one not experience agreeable or painful sensations of which one does not retain any memory? No one, for example, thinks for days on end about the pleasure he had experienced in a scented bath, or a good meal, or entering into a warm room after having suffered from cold, any more than the pain caused by a pinprick or bumping into a door. Well, my great joys and my great pains, those that caused me to wander the streets with a my chest on the point of explosion, those which made me, an adult, weep as a child weeps, all of that is as distant, as faded, as depleted as the thousand fugitive impressions that every day bears away and replaces. How, then, can the slightest rancor against those who have afflicted me subsist in me, since the pain has gone? And how can the slightest affection, since the memory of individuals no longer awakens anything within me…?

  …My son and my wife have always detested one another. This morning, a few hours before the burial, they seemed to be reconciled by their common mourning and remorse; they wept together. But the crisis of despair passed; they started talking about ordinary things, about me, and suddenly, in response to something my wife said, an argument burst forth. They blamed one another reciprocally for my death.

  “You’re the one that killed him!”

  And I learned, thus, new details regarding both of them. While I was alive, by virtue of a kind of tacit complicity, they closed their eyes to their respective faults, helping one another if necessary, in spite of the fact that their intimacy was less powerful than their self-interest. Now the common enemy is no longer there; they can tear one another apart at their ease. They display before me their improper actions: how the adulterous affairs began; by what methods of dissimulation they kept them hidden for a long time.

  “Your chambermaid knew everything; at what price did you buy her silence?”

  I learn that my son’s theft was not the only one he committed in my employ; that when he started on that path, he was driven by a long series of dishonorable faults.

  “Wasn’t it me who paid for your first mistake? You didn’t ask me then where I got the money?”

  I also learn about my own defects: I was too demanding for everyday life; I complained needlessly about unimportant things; I had ridiculous manias, the manias of an old man of which my wife made fun; I frightened everyone around me with my severity…what do I know now?

  Perhaps all that was true—but what does it matter?

  The quarrel continues, although the time is approaching when they will come to fetch my body. I know them better now than I ever did, better than I knew myself. I see that, even just now, I was entertaining illusions on their account; their tears deceived me; perhaps they were false; perhaps they were putting on an act and juggling their sentiments in order to fool themselves.

  And yet, I persist in my judgment: they’re neither better nor worse than anyone else; human beings are malleable dough, which things fashion and soil at their whim; they’re passive mirrors in which images leave their reflection, sometimes pleasant to behold and sometimes repulsive; the bed of an eternal stream over which filth and flowers flow. It’s life that forms them; life alone is guilty and dirty.

  Questions of money come up incessantly in their dispute. Suddenly, my wife goes pale, struck by a sudden idea: she has been wrong to irritate my son.

  “My God!” she cries. “What will become of me if he hasn’t made a will?”

  My son replies: “What good is a will? He’s ruined.” And he adds: “It’s your expenses—you, who came into the house like a beggar….”

  She interrupts him, standing up in front of him: “Didn’t you leave it like a thief?”

  They’re white with anger, both trembling; their sadness and their remorse have disappeared.

  He moves toward her, his arm raised. She doesn’t recoil.

  “Oh, hit me! Hit me! You’re cowardly enough for that. But be careful! I’ll defend myself!”

  She picks up a knife that happened to be close at hand. Are they going to fight, here and now, without waiting for me to be taken away?

  My son retreats slowly. He stops on the threshold and says: “Hurry up and marry one of your lovers, so that we can be rid of you!”

  He says that very loudly; if any servants were passing in the corridor, they would have been able to hear it. My wife has drawn closer to me, as if to ask for protection….

  …It seems to me that I can hear, very distantly, a storm. The same rumbling that might perhaps make passengers on a ship howl in terror, lulls me like a gentle murmur. The wind, which is tearing sails and breaking masts out there, is a fresh breeze brushing my face like a beloved breath. Because of the distance, the sea seems to me to be scarcely rippled, and I take the vessels, tossed and twisted, overturned, for motionless dots. The anguish of the unfortunates struggling desperately finds no echo in me, so replete am I in the sentiment of my security….

  …I am no longer paying any heed to the miserable quarrels in which I once took part, and it will not be long before I’m separated forever from human beings by the earth heaped on top of me….

  …That desired moment is approaching; the supreme ceremony is beginning.

  I can hear the sound of sobbing; anger has given way once again to tears, more appropriately. There are whispers. People are there.

  The lid of my coffin is lowered. I can no longer see anything. I can scarcely perceive the noises in the room. The nailing begins; at the first blow of the hammer all the voices have fallen silent, as if frightened by that harsh sound, which is imprisoning me in the supreme solitude. Then, that task finished, footsteps resume, a dull agitation. How many times I have waited, in bereaved houses, for the signal to follow the coffin, in the crowd of relatives and guests; and almost always, thoughts of matters other than death followed me….

  …I am hoisted onto the hearse, slightly astonished not to feel any shock; it appears that I am separated from material sensation, without having lost all consciousness of what is happening around me. The procession sets off; the noise of horses’ hooves, wheels and footfalls is only a muted buzz for me. It requires a mental effort for me to imagine myself being transported from one place to another; the notion of movement no longer exists. All of space seems to me to be constituted by this tiny corner that I occupy, in which everything is without any movement. If I did not have memories and experiences, I could easily believe that the world is rotating, and that while it rotates, specific objects remain eternally in place….

  …Prayers for the dead are chanted, which the organ accompanies with its purring. From time to time, the halberd of a Swiss Guard sounds a dry click on the paving stones, or the hand bell instructs the assembly to kneel down….

  When I was alive, I had fits of atheism in which I wanted to overthrow the Church. I detested its religious ceremonies, which I found puerile to the point of derision. Well, I judge them differently now; I don’t feel any need for God, of course; I have no more idea than before whether He exists or not, in Heaven or elsewhere. It seems to me, however, that those monotonous chants might soothe and appease th
e dolor of the living, that they might engender vague hopes—deceptive but consoling—in hearts still full of doubt. As for the dead, that last echo of human voices that reach them, those genuflections that they represent in memory, the movements of the costumed priests…all of that summarizes admirably the nullity of their lives, and all life; if any regret for the things left behind still subsists, it will fade away completely into that supreme solemnity.

  I am carried away, and we walk for a long time. My thoughts still wander over religious questions. I can’t make up my mind whether God is a useful or a harmful invention; undoubtedly, He doesn’t matter, like everything else that humans have found.

  I am lowered into the ground; the spadefuls of earth that are thrown down rattle on my coffin. This is the moment when all the affection that there is in living human hearts for the dead feels stirred to the depths by the dry thud that a slightly larger pebble sometimes renders sonorous. Among the murmur of those desolations, the priest resumes his prayers…I know that, although I cannot hear them; I can no longer hear anything. The separation from the living is accomplished; I can no longer even perceive the noise that the people I loved are making as they leave; I have no knowledge of the final tears that are being shed for me….

  …Time has moved on, but nothing can any longer allow me to distinguish the minutes or the hours, the seasons or the years. I shall not know when the flowers bloom whose roots will soon plunge into my being. I shall not feel the warmth of the summer sun; I shall not be cold when the snow extends over the dead grass like another shroud; in spring, I shall not hear the chirping of the birds in my cypress, in which the sap is rising. And I experience a kind of voluptuousness in thinking about the confusion of everything into which I am disappearing. There was a time when, although I remained motionless and awake, the minutes seemed long to me; now, the minutes melt into one another to form eternity, as drops of water do to make a river, and they draw me gently into their flow….

  …Gradually, my memories dissolve. I can scarcely recall my life. It seems to me that I can see a long way, and very high. I am no longer merely the traveler whom the mirages of arrival deceive as to the distance covered; I am the aeronaut suspended in space, at heights that humans have never reached. He no longer sees the cities, the mountains seem to him to be imperceptible pimples, the seas puddles, and of all the noise that creatures make, no murmur reaches him; above the drifting and disintegrating clouds illuminated by strange light, he floats as if in a new element.

  The events of which my life was formed are gradually erased: my poor childhood, my youth full of struggles, my years of prosperity, the sadness of my latter days, all draw away and melt into a uniform hue. I forget the differences between pleasure and pain. I no longer know that I once loved; no memory of any kind whatsoever can trouble my thoughts, which continue to flow nevertheless, but slowly and with an exceeding limpidity, like a body to which nothing can form an obstacle.

  One last concern remains in me—or rather, one problem whose solution still interests me: I seek to know by what series of successive impulsions my will had determined my suicide, which required so much effort.

  I rediscover the motives, by an effort of memory, but I no longer understand how the dread of ruination, regret for a dead woman, fear of malady, the dolor of being deceived—all those abstractions—were able to change into a brutal fact, to provoke a positive resolution and a real suffering.

  Certainly, I don’t regret having killed myself; in the space where I am, there is no room for regret; but I can’t explain to myself how the motives for my action were able to emerge from the indifferent monotony of things and act upon me to the point of making me exchange one condition for another. The acuity of the sorrow, the force of affections, the tenacity of anguish—those are the notions that escape me. The veil that, at a time that I can no longer measure, already enveloped and hid my memories of time past, and has thickened. Everything that once happened to me appears as material objects appear, in an increasingly profound darkness. Vague forms move heavily in my thoughts; I imagine that during the long nights of the Arctic regions, the blocks of ice move in the same way….

  …At times, I amuse myself with efforts to recover the details of my life or the faces of those I loved, and the very futility of those evocations satisfies me. When I was alive, it sufficed for me to close my eyes immediately to see faces that had long disappeared, and so clearly that I could have believed myself to be beside them. At present, in this obscurity in which my eyes are always closed, I seek in vain; the images are no longer designed; and it’s without the slightest regret that I observe the flight of those shades, however dear.

  Thus, everything fades away, as if Time, which marches on without my hearing it, were destroying gently, one by one, the impressions engraved within me….

  Indeed, I remember that a few hours ago—or a few minutes, or a few days; I no longer know—certain events of my past became exact to me again, preoccupying me. At present, I can no longer locate them; I am, therefore, escaping myself; the sentiment of my own personality is fleeing me, like the memories, like all fatiguing impressions. I no longer know exactly what my self is; I seems to me that I’m melting into millions of beings, that I’m disappearing into things, that I’m no longer anything but one with a formidable unity….

  If humans succeed in imagining that which cannot be seen, cannot be heard and cannot be felt; if, above all, they have a presentiment that one only arrives by a slow gradation at the conditions of which I’m on the brink, disaccustoming the self to past habits…they would not longer fear Death. That king of terrors, as their sages call it, would bring them an unalterable peace, the delights of a slumber whose duration is unmarked, on a bed so soft that it cannot be felt. In the great silence and the great obscurity of the tomb, nothing exists but soothing sensuality, which becomes ever more gentle, like fading gleams, like dwindling harmonies….

  I sense that my brain is still alive—but my thoughts are deliciously asleep….

  Emile Goudeau: The Revolt of the Machines

  (1891)

  Dr. Pastoureaux, aided by a very skillful old workman named Jean Bertrand, had invented a machine that revolutionized the scientific world. That machine was animate, almost capable of thought, almost capable of will, and sensitive: a kind of animal in iron. There is no need here to go into overly complicated technical details, which would be a waste of time. Let it suffice to know that with a series of platinum containers, penetrated by phosphoric acid, the scientist had found a means to give a kind of soul to fixed or locomotive machines; and that the new entities would be able to act in the fashion of a metal bull or a steel elephant.

  It is necessary to add that, although the scientist became increasingly enthusiastic about his work, old Jean Bertrand, who was diabolically superstitious, gradually became frightened on perceiving that sudden evocation of intelligence in something primordially dead. In addition, the comrades of the factory, who were assiduous followers of public meetings, were all sternly opposed to machines that serve as the slaves of capitalism and tyrants of the worker.

  It was the eve of the inauguration of the masterpiece.

  For the first time, the machine had been equipped with all its organs, and external sensations reached it distinctly. It understood that, in spite of the shackles that still retained it, solid limbs were fitted to its young being, and that it would soon be able to translate into external movement that which it experienced internally.

  This is what it heard:

  “Were you at the public meeting yesterday?” said one voice.

  “I should think so, old man,” replied a blacksmith, a kind of Hercules with bare muscular arms. Bizarrely illuminated by the gas jets of the workshop, his face, black with dust, only left visible in the gloom the whites of his two large eyes, in which vivacity replaced intelligence. “Yes, I was there; I even spoke against the machines, against the monsters that our arms fabricate, and which, one day, will give infamous capitalism
the opportunity, so long sought, to suppress our arms. We’re the ones forging the weapons with which bourgeois society will batter us. When the sated, the rotten and the weak have a heap of facile clockwork devices like these to set in motion”—his arm made a circular motion—“our account will soon be settled. We who are living at the present moment eat by procreating the tools of our definitive expulsion from the world. Hola! No need to make children for them to be lackeys of the bourgeoisie!”

  Listening with all its auditory valves to this diatribe, the machine, intelligent but as yet naïve, sighed with pity. It wondered whether it was a good thing that it should be born to render these brave workers miserable in this way.

  “Ah,” the blacksmith vociferated, “if it were only up to me and my section, we’d blow all this up like an omelet. Our arms would be perfectly sufficient thereafter”—he tapped his biceps—“to dig the earth to find our bread there; the bourgeois, with their four-sou muscles, their vitiated blood and their soft legs, could pay us dearly for the bread, and if they complained, damn it, these two fists could take away their taste for it. But I’m talking to brutes who don’t understand hatred.” Advancing toward the machine, he added: “If everyone were like me, you wouldn’t live for another quarter of an hour, see!” And his formidable fist came down on the copper flank, which resounded with a long quasi-human groan.

  Jean Bertrand, who witnessed that scene, shivered tenderly, feeling guilty with regard to his brothers, because he had helped the doctor to accomplish his masterpiece.

  Then they all went away, and the machine, still listening, remembered in the silence of the night. It was, therefore, unwelcome in the world! It was going to ruin poor workingmen, to the advantage of damnable exploiters! Oh, it sensed now the oppressive role that those who had created it wanted it to play. Suicide rather than that!