The Return of the Discontinued Man (A Burton & Swinburne Adventure)

by Mark Hodder

  “Brunel!” the chrononauts chorused.

  Brabrooke touched a small circle on the screen, and a voice sounded from the device. “Isambard Kingdom Brunel, born on the ninth of April 1806, was an English mechanical and civil engineer and the founder of the Department of Guided Science. His designs, which revolutionised public transport, also allowed for the rapid expansion of the Anglo-Saxon Empire, and are generally regarded as—”

  A flick of Brabrooke’s finger caused the volume to decrease until it was barely audible.

  “Magic!” Swinburne whispered. “Utterly impossible!”

  The girl gave a small smile. “The devices are used for work, study, communication and entertainment, and—like I said—they can access any public information. That’s the problem.”

  “Ah,” Burton said. “Public.”

  Farren, who’d paused in his distribution of coffee to watch the display, said, “Information is controlled?”

  Marianne Smith gave confirmation. “Yes. Tightly. Extreme restrictions. Also, all activity on Turings is monitored.”

  “All?” Burton asked. “But you said everybody has one. How can sense be made out of so much information?”

  “By a central machine. The Turing Fulcrum. It reports to the authorities anything it interprets as illegal or suspicious activity.”

  Brabrooke said, “If I used my Turing to write T-mail to a friend—”

  “T-mail?” Farren interrupted.

  “A message. Like a letter but without any physical existence.”

  Patricia Honesty interrupted, “And you should know that there’s no longer any other way to send a written communiqué.”

  “—and in it,” Brabrooke continued, “I criticised government policies, I’d soon find the authorities knocking at my door.”

  “A police state?” Farren asked.

  “Very much so.”

  “With pigs on stilts?”

  “Yes. The constables.”

  Burton raised his arm. “And these bracelets?”

  “They generate power from the motion of your arm and transmit it to the nearest Turing. They’re also used for communication, to transfer funds when making a purchase, and they monitor your health and location.”

  “So why do I find myself with one on my wrist?”

  “Because it’s illegal for any citizen of the Empire to not wear one. Anyone seen without a bracelet is immediately arrested.”

  Patricia Honesty patted Brabrooke’s arm. “Lori is our technical expert, Sir Richard. She’s given each of you a false identity and a credible background. Every member of the Cannibal Club has the same. Our Turings are altered, too. They hide themselves. We—and our activities—are all invisible. That’s a far more complicated achievement than it sounds. If it wasn’t for her, you’d not be able to leave the Orpheus.”

  “By which statement,” Burton said, “I presume you feel it apposite that we do.”

  “Yes.” The old woman entwined her gnarled fingers and rested them on her lap. “The intelligence in each Turing is contained within microscopic squares of crystalline silicon.”

  “Got him!” Daniel Gooch cried out. “Silicon crystallises in the same pattern as diamond. If it’s resonating at the same frequency as the gems in the time suits, the Oxford consciousness could easily enter it.”

  She nodded. “Precisely. Silicon is at the heart of the technology Alan Turing created, so it’s quite possible that the insane intelligence which vanished from beneath your noses in 1860 has gradually been gaining influence since the 1950s.”

  Mick Farren pressed a hand down onto his great bush of hair and shook his head. He glared at Patricia. “How could you have let this happen, Pat? We were meant to overthrow the straights. Now they’ve got shackles on the whole population!”

  “Consumerism conquers all,” she answered. “Everything threatening was repackaged as something bright and cheerful and harmless. Whenever there’s a challenge to the system, the system transforms it into a product and uses it as a weapon to keep the people distracted. We create our own oppression. Even the war has been reduced to entertainment.”

  “Whose war?” Burton asked. “America’s, still?”

  “Yes. Since your last visit, it has expanded into South China. The U.S.A. and United Republics of Eurasia are at it hammer and tongs. Their economies are suffering badly.”

  “And the Anglo-Saxon Empire?”

  “During the seventies, the A.S.E. continued to offer cautious support to the States while managing to avoid any direct involvement with the conflict. Then Thatcher happened.” The old woman produced a handkerchief and wiped her nose. “Our politicians are entirely lacking in ethics. It’s a problem that has magnified with each subsequent generation, and it achieved its apotheosis in the last of our prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher. She came to power in 1979. Seven years later, she announced the cessation of the Empire’s trade alliance with the States. The declaration came on the same day the first Turings went on sale—the day after, we suspect, the Fulcrum was activated. In fact, we think the withdrawal from the alliance was probably its first recommendation.”

  “Why?” Farren asked.

  “Because it was such a contradictory turnaround. Rather than taking any notice of the people’s opposition to America’s aggression in South East Asia, the government, especially under Thatcher, had been ruthlessly curtailing the public’s right to express it. By the eighties, the authorities had the power to limit how many people could gather, where, and for how long. Protest marches were made illegal. Why then, the sudden change of policy, the sudden bowing to the will of the populace? The answer wasn’t clear until about twenty years ago, when one of our own people—a Cannibal descended from your friend, James Hunt—discovered that the British government was secretly supplying arms to both sides, to the U.S.A. and to the U.R.E.”

  “Despicable!” Swinburne shrilled.

  Burton slid his fingers into his hair and felt his scars. “Abdu El Yezdi worked tirelessly to create a history free of world wars. Spring Heeled Jack appears to be working equally hard to undo everything he strove for.”

  “It seems so. And while we assist in our neighbours’ destruction of one another, we’ve been steadily increasing our own power, based on an industrial and agricultural foundation of genetically enhanced animals and adapted human workers. Our global dominance is rotten and immoral through and through, but, of course, we are told a different story. According to the government, we’re the bastions of civilisation, while the Americans and East Eurasians are little better than barbarians.”

  “That sounds familiar,” Burton murmured. “My contemporaries depicted the Africans in the same light. It made it easier for us to justify the theft of their lands and resources.”

  Honesty nodded. “The A.S.E. has consolidated its grip on almost a third of the Earth’s surface and a quarter of its total population. Its citizens are constantly warned of the threat posed by the U.S.A. and U.R.E. while also kept occupied by an endless supply of trivial entertainments and meaningless pleasures. Consumerism and war. Extremes of indulgence and fear. No one can think straight. No one has the will to muster resistance. The government can sneak in any policy it likes, and people don’t even notice.”

  Burton sighed and shook his head sadly. “What did you mean by the last prime minister? What have you now? A president?”

  “I meant the last of the human prime ministers,” Honesty replied. “These days, the government is formed by, and follows, the Turing Fulcrum.”

  “You’ve given over governance to a machine? How could it have come to this so rapidly?”

  “It may feel rapid to you, but it crept up on us like a patient and cunning predator.”

  “Bloody hell,” Daniel Gooch muttered. “Spring Heeled Jack is in control.”

  Krishnamurthy said, “This Turing Fulcrum—where is it?”

  “Nobody knows. It’s the most closely guarded secret in the world. I sometimes think we’d have a better chance at locati
ng the Ark of the Covenant. Nevertheless, we must do our best, which is exactly why we want you to leave the ship and come with us to London.”

  “With the intention of destroying the bloody thing, I hope,” Farren growled.

  “Ultimately, yes, Mick. But one thing at a time, hey? First, let’s find it.”

  “What do you propose?” Burton asked.

  Patricia Honesty turned to Lorena Brabrooke, who, responding to the prompt, said, “We believe the Turing Fulcrum was first activated at nine o’clock in the evening on the fifteenth of February 1986.”

  Burton started slightly. That date again! Nine on the fifteenth of February!

  “Based on what evidence?” he asked.

  Brabrooke held up her Turing, the flat panel of which still bore the image of the Brunel exhibit in the British Museum. “Based on Isambard Kingdom Brunel. There’d been no sign of life from him since 1860, but at that precise instant, he said two words.”

  The chrononauts recoiled in surprise.

  “What?” Krishnamurthy whispered. “He’s alive?”

  Gooch slapped his right fist into his left palm and cried out, “Good old Brunel!”

  Brabrooke shrugged. “He didn’t move and he’s never spoken since. Repeated examinations have found nothing—no activity at all in his babbage.” She shrugged again. “Just two words in nearly two centuries.”

  “What did he say?” Burton asked.

  “I am.”

  The king’s agent frowned. “I am? I am what?”

  “We don’t know, but our theory is that when the Turing Fulcrum was activated it sent out a pulse of energy that resonated with the Nāga diamond fragments in Brunel’s babbage. The words might have been an echo of the machine’s first moment of self-awareness. That’s why we regard Brunel as a possible key to the Fulcrum’s location. If there’s anything of him remaining, if we could possibly wake him up, he might be able to tell us what direction and distance the pulse came from.”

  “A long shot, admittedly,” Patricia Honesty murmured. “But worth a try.”

  “Miss Brabrooke,” Gooch interjected. “I’m an engineer. The thing you have in your hand—the Turing—is so far beyond my understanding that I can’t even properly focus my eyes on it. What they tell me I’m seeing, my brain is trying very hard to reject. With progress having achieved such miracles, how is it you can’t revive Mr. Brunel yourselves, yet you believe that we nigh on two-hundred-year-old fossils can?”

  “Fossils!” Honesty protested. “You’re younger than I am!”

  “Shock,” her daughter Marianne interjected.

  Gooch looked puzzled. “Pardon?”

  Burton muttered, “Yes, I see it.” He addressed the engineer. “Daniel, Isambard has no notion of our mission. We’d lost him before even conceiving of it. If he has any sense of the time that’s passed, the very last thing he’ll be expecting to see is us. The surprise of it might knock the wits back into him.”

  “Fair enough,” Gooch replied, after a moment’s thought. “I suppose it might work, though personally I still think it more likely that his personality was completely erased. Beyond that, however, I have another, rather more serious reservation.”

  “It being?”

  “That if we are so bedazzled by that,” he jabbed a finger toward Brabrooke’s Turing device, “then I fear whatever else we see might be so staggering that, before we can knock sense into Brunel, it’ll knock all the sense out of us!”

  With the world having changed so dramatically, they decided to keep their expedition to London small. A large party was more liable to attract attention, and, as Gooch had suggested, the excursion could be disrupted by an occurrence of mental instability. Fewer personnel meant a lesser chance that one of them would, as Swinburne put it, “start rolling his eyes and spitting foam.”

  The poet, Burton, Gooch and Farren—all well dosed with Saltzmann’s —departed Bendyshe Bay in a small boat piloted by a Penniforth. Lorena Brabrooke went with them. During the voyage across the northern stretch of the Channel, she told them about the current Cannibal Club, revealing that, though the group was still funded by Bendyshe investments—currently run by two sisters and a brother—the Foundation itself had been broken up into a large number of much smaller organisations. They were more likely to evade scrutiny than the megalithic institution the original body had become.

  Membership had grown more exclusive, currently consisting only of direct descendants. Those who hadn’t been “blood members”—such as the Blanchets, von Lessings and Griffiths—were now absent.

  “The younger ones in the group have all adopted the original surnames,” she said, “even those that weren’t born with them. It’s a matter of pride.”

  “But why the dwindling numbers?” Burton asked.

  “It got dangerously bloated back in the seventies.” She addressed Farren. “Your lot were full of zeal, but you weren’t exactly subtle.”

  “We didn’t know we needed to be,” he protested.

  “The system is cunning, Mr. Farren. It manipulates people’s fears and hopes, their insecurities and aspirations, and it ensures that all opposition is bogged down in a quagmire of prejudice, stupidity, propaganda and selfish motives. In your era, resistance was fun. In mine, it’s potentially a death sentence.”

  “In my era?” Farren said. “The sixties weren’t so long ago. How old do you think I am?”

  “In your seventies, I guess.”

  “Christ! I’m twenty-five!”

  “Anyway, like I was saying, the methodology the Cannibal Club employs to evade detection and keep an objective eye on developing history has had to change. It’s all digital now.”

  “Something to do with fingers?” Gooch said. “The way you used your Turing device?”

  “It’s technical term. It refers to an extension of the systems your Mr. Babbage devised. Thanks to him, nowadays oppression and resistance do battle in the same arena, it being the realm of information, which he, after a fashion, created.”

  “Do you regard Babbage as a villain, then?” Gooch asked. “I’ve always thought of him as a hero, if a rather unpredictable one.”

  “I think of him as a genius, sir. If he knew how his systems were eventually employed, I expect he’d be horrified.” An expression of pain crossed her features. “But I wish I’d never read Abdu El Yezdi’s second report.”

  Burton, who’d been listening to the conversation with interest, said, “The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man. I can understand your reservation. The affair was initiated when a different iteration of Charles Babbage, in a variant history, attempted to achieve immortality in order to pursue his intention to eliminate the working classes. He wanted to replace them with machines. The idea might not have been wholly villainous, but it was certainly inhumane.”

  Gooch looked thoughtful and muttered, “If we return, perhaps we should refrain from telling him about the path his work has taken. It might send him over the edge.”

  “We already know something will,” Burton observed.

  Swinburne, who was gazing ahead with Saltzmann’s dilated pupils at the east coast of England—grey beneath a grey dawn—said, “He’s already loopy, if you ask me. But Babbage aside, you say there’s a sort of information war being waged, Miss Brabrooke? Surely, if this horrible government of yours is to be overthrown, there’ll be a need for something more substantial. Armed revolutionaries.”

  “I’m an armed revolutionary,” Brabrooke replied. “But people like me don’t shoot anymore, we just aim.”

  Burton frowned. “Aim?”

  “Access. Infiltrate. Manipulate.” Brabrooke offered a crooked and gappy smile. “I acquire information I’m not supposed to have, I alter it without being detected, and I withdraw leaving no evidence that anything untoward has occurred. That’s how I registered you all with the Department of Citizenship.” The boat bounced and she put a hand to her midriff. “Ugh! I hate the sea. Would that Saltzmann’s stuff of yours settle my stomach?”

/>   The king’s agent curled his upper lip, exposing a long canine in what might have been a smile but more resembled a sneer. “Do you know what it is?”

  “Oh. Yes. It’s—” she swallowed and went very pale. “Swinburne juice.”

  Mick Farren groaned. “Yeah, what was all that about? A red jungle?”

  Burton gestured toward the poet. “You can ask it in person.”

  Swinburne smiled happily and winked. “Alternate futures! Strange events! Ripping adventures!”

  “And in one of them you turned into a gigantic plant,” Farren said flatly. “Weird.”

  “Indeed so,” Burton agreed. “But my companions and I are here—and on our way to 2202—at the jungle’s behest.”

  “Okay,” Farren replied. “Weirder.”

  Perhaps appropriately, that was the last word the chrononauts were properly aware of for the duration of the next ninety minutes. From the moment the boat docked at Gravesend, time passed in an unintelligible smudge of sensations that overburdened them to the point where the king’s agent—in a brief interval of near clarity—had no option but to dazedly pass around a bottle of the tincture that they might further dose themselves.

  As the liquid radiated through him, he found himself gradually able to separate one thing from another, dragging from his jumbled senses first sound—mainly the roar of traffic—then smell, which delivered oily odours, and finally sight. This latter, a fragmentary mass, slowly congealed into the shape of the British Museum, though the blocky structure appeared to be floating amid a whirling storm of utterly indecipherable objects.

  He realised that Lorena Brabrooke was peering up at him. “Sir?” She clapped her hands in front of his face. “Please. Say something. Snap out of it. I don’t think I can do this for much longer.”

  He turned his head aside, coughed, closed and opened his eyes, looked back at her, and said, “Do what?”

  “Lead you around like you’re a pack of zombies.”

  “Zombie. Haitian. Supposedly an animated—” He stopped and blinked again. “Miss Brabrooke. We were on a train.”

  “Yes, we were. From Gravesend. Then we took the London Underground.”