Engines of Empathy (Drakeforth Series Book 1)

by Paul Mannering

  ‘Well then,’ Drakeforth straightened up and dusted his hands off. ‘Perhaps we should just give ourselves up now?’

  ‘No.’ I started pushing the trolley again. ‘If we quit now and later on realise that things could have got an awful lot worse, we’ll kick ourselves for giving up when things were going quite well.’

  Drakeforth pondered my reasoning for a moment and must have found it sound. He put his back into it and we kept the trolley rolling through the meadow-like carpet.

  The final gap was narrow, but it was enough. I was panting by the time we reached the back of the bookshelf door.

  ‘Well. Open it,’ I wheezed at Drakeforth.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said, hands pressing against the smooth wooden surface. ‘There’s no handle on this side.’

  Chapter 17

  I waited for Drakeforth to laugh, to grin, to remind me that his cutting sarcasm was part of his charm. Instead he scrabbled to get his fingers in the crack between door and wall.

  ‘Really?’ I said, still unsure.

  ‘No, I just thought it would be more fun to dig my way out using my fingernails.’ Drakeforth sounded tense.

  ‘Okay,’ I said and took a deep breath. ‘This is what we are going to do.’ I didn’t feel concerned that I was speaking to Drakeforth as though he were one of my clients who couldn’t get their printer drivers to install properly. ‘Step back, and take a breath. Let’s look at the problem in a different way.’

  ‘It’s a door, with no handle on this side. It’s closed and I want to open it,’ Drakeforth said through gritted teeth.

  ‘Great. Now we have a better understanding of the problem, we need to look for a solution.’

  ‘I’d rather look for an axe,’ Drakeforth muttered.

  ‘Is there some other way of opening the door?’ I couldn’t see one but it was important to get the obvious questions out of the way first.

  ‘Gaaaaaaah!’ Drakeforth yelled and started kicking the door. I waited till he had finished, mentally dismissing the steps involving turning the appliance off and on again, as well as reinstalling driver software.

  ‘We could look for another door?’ I suggested.

  ‘Great. Why don’t you go and look for one?’ Drakeforth said with exaggerated calm while regarding the blank wall with loathing. I left him to it and went searching. Most of the antiques and bric-a-brac stored in this room pre-dated empathic technology. My old desk was made from living oak; everything else here seemed as dead as the fruit bat wearing the wedding dress in the lithograph album.

  Moving around the walls, I tapped and prodded. Nothing sounded different and no doors opened. I kept going, one hand braced against the wall as I climbed over a sculpture composed of dozens of boot scrapers. A pulse of empathic energy rippled under my hand. I felt the zing of an elevator rushing past. The adrenaline rush of zooming upwards in a joyful flight. The feeling was so strong it took me completely by surprise.

  I scrambled back to the floor and placed both hands flat on the wall panels. The lift descended this time and I felt, rather than heard, a whoop of delight as it plummeted. The sensation felt stronger on my right. I pulled framed pictures, a dismantled table-top and racks of century-old clothing away from the wall. I pressed my hands and cheek against the cool panel. I could feel the vibration now. There was an elevator shaft on the other side of this wall. The lifts in it were thrumming with double-e flux. The force of their propulsion made the fine hairs on the back of my hand stand up.

  ‘Hello?’ I whispered. The ascending elevator stopped. I felt the rattle of the doors opening through the wall. I stepped back and examined the plaster panel in front of me. The wall was lined with cheap plaster board. Breaking a boot scraper off the sculpture I bashed away at the plaster, bringing chunks of it down and eventually revealing a dark empty space behind the wall.

  ‘Drakeforth!’ I made the hole larger while I waited for him to negotiate his way across the crowded room.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he announced. ‘You’ve completely failed to find a door.’

  ‘There’s a lift shaft behind this wall. We can get the desk out this way.’

  ‘Keep bashing away, I’ll bring the desk over.’

  It took me quite a while to open the wall up wide enough to fit the desk through. By the time I was done, a fine white dust covered me from head to foot and all I could taste was plaster.

  ‘Please stop so we can get a ride,’ I said to the dark lift shaft. The lift flashed past, coming to a halt just in front of me so hard it almost bounced. A set of elevator doors slid open with a sigh.

  ‘Well, don’t just stand there! Give me a hand,’ Drakeforth said from the other end of the desk. The lift waited, its doors open. We rolled the trolley in, leaving white powdery wheel-tracks on the floor that were only slightly less suspicious than the gaping hole hacked in the wall.

  The desk took up a lot of space, and fitting in around it proved challenging. ‘Can you get the floor button?’ Drakeforth said from somewhere at the back.

  ‘I can’t see it.’ I strained and scanned the wall panels next to the door. ‘There’s no buttons.’

  ‘Terrific. What an excellent idea this was. I can only hope we asphyxiate before we die of embarrassment.’ Drakeforth’s tone started to sound petulant.

  ‘Drakeforth, if you are going to start crying, please do it quietly. Some of us are trying to think.’ He went quiet at that. I focused on the elevator around me. Newer and so much more alive than the ancient carriage in the Python building. It couldn’t hurt to reach out.

  ‘Hello,’ I said softly. ‘We’d like to go down, please.’ The doors slid shut and the elevator seemed to tense like a sprinter dropping into a crouch. A moment later we were pressed down into our shoes as we rocketed upwards.

  ‘Thank … you … but I wanted to go down …’ I managed. Seconds shot past as we ascended. The lift stopped and I felt a nausea-inducing moment as gravity scrambled to keep a hold of us.

  The lift doors opened. The hallway looked familiar. The avenue of statues depicting the strange evolution of the artificial people we saw being assembled in the factory were the same as we had seen outside Pretense’s office. The guards with guns pointed at us, however, were a novel surprise.

  Each of them looked as if they had stepped down from the display platform behind them. Identical twins to the human-shaped machines. I made a leap to a conclusion that jarred my brain.

  *

  ‘Curious,’ Drakeforth said as we were dragged into another room. It had an executive office feel to it. A desk to our distant left filled one end of the chamber. The throne-like office chair behind it was turned away from us, facing a floor-to-ceiling screen that showed a swirling pattern of primary colours, much like the view into an empathic energy flux generator.

  Two aquariums sat side by side on the opposite wall. One was a living rainbow of brightly coloured fish flitting between green strands of living plants and zipping through a gentle stream of bubbles. The other was dark with congealed algae and stagnant water. The few fish I could see were floating belly-up on the surface.

  ‘It’s an assessment tool,’ I said. ‘You enter the room and are presented with two images. One an aquarium full of life and vitality, the other death and decay. The observer notes your reactions.’

  ‘I wonder if anyone asks the fish how they feel about living next to a cess pit?’

  The guards ignored his question and tied us to a pair of chairs.

  ‘Hindsight, being what it is, compels me to say we should have taken the lift down,’ Drakeforth said from his position tied to a chair behind me. The guards finished their task and left the room without comment.

  ‘How are you at untying knots with your hands tied behind your back?’ I asked as soon as we were alone.

  ‘A doctor comes to see a man in hospital,’ Drakeforth replied. ‘The doctor says to him, I have good news and I have bad news. The man says, I’d like the good news please. The doctor says, you have only twent
y-four hours to live. Arthur’s Beard! says the man, what’s the bad news? I should have told you yesterday, the doctor replies.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I replied. ‘I was a bit preoccupied with trying to escape and wasn’t listening.’

  ‘It’s the only joke I can remember,’ Drakeforth continued. ‘It haunts me. I mean, it’s funny, I suppose. But why is it funny? Is it hysterical because the man is about to die? That just seems macabre. What about the doctor? Why did he inflict such pain on the man by telling him that he was going to die imminently? That’s not funny either. That’s psychotic.’

  ‘I suppose it is funny because we are glad it isn’t us facing certain death.’

  ‘If that were true, we should be rolling around on the floor laughing now. Being tied to chairs notwithstanding,’ Drakeforth said.

  ‘The patient isn’t laughing, and right now we are the patient.’

  ‘Well, excuse me for trying to lighten the mood,’ Drakeforth said.

  I found it hard to focus on Drakeforth’s chattering. The amount of empathic energy flowing through the building around us roared like a waterfall in my head. I didn’t so much hear it in my ears as feel the reverberation deep inside myself, setting my kidneys flapping.

  Our bonds had been tied by professionals. Maybe they didn’t write the book on tying people up, but they had certainly studied it, highlighted key passages and written notes in the margins.

  I continued to struggle in vain, the ropes pulling tighter around my wrists until I couldn’t feel my hands.

  ‘If this was a sense-media, the villain would appear and lay out his fiendish plot in comprehensive detail,’ Drakeforth mused.

  ‘I though he did that already?’ I replied while trying to visualise the pattern of the cords digging into my flesh.

  ‘I’m not sure Pretense Dilby is the evil genius we’ve been searching for. And I’d say what we experienced was more a presentation of the key points. What we need here is an in-depth review that highlights flaws in the mastermind’s plan.’

  ‘Well, under different circumstances I am sure he would be open to us tendering a contract for data analysis services. But I don’t think any such offer is going to change our situation greatly right now, do you?’

  ‘It’s quite boring sitting here, just waiting for something to happen,’ Drakeforth said after another minute of silence.

  ‘Have you tried occupying your time by say, working the knots loose?’

  ‘Oh, I did that already.’

  ‘You what? Why didn’t you untie me?’ I twisted in the chair, trying in vain to see Drakeforth over my shoulder.

  ‘We can’t be sure we aren’t being watched,’ Drakeforth replied. ‘We want to maintain our grip on the element of surprise.’

  ‘Well, you have certainly surprised me.’

  The door we had been dragged through opened again. A dozen agents, all with perfectly formed identical faces, entered and took up positions around the room. The man who followed them in looked the same, except his straight, dark hair lay swept back along the sides, leaving a fringe that dropped over his piercing green eyes. He stood beside us, so we could both turn our heads and see him smiling.

  ‘I trust you are comfortable?’ the man enquired pleasantly.

  ‘Let us go!’ I demanded.

  ‘You have caused me a great deal of trouble. I am going to release you, however not in the way you might expect.’

  ‘Pushing us out a window would raise suspicions,’ Drakeforth said.

  ‘The windows on this building do not open,’ the man replied.

  ‘Down the stairs, then?’ Drakeforth suggested.

  ‘Messy, and I don’t just mean the physical clean-up required. The paperwork for workplace accident reports is a nightmare to complete. Just another thing that will be rendered obsolete by our restructuring program.’

  ‘What?’ seemed like the obvious question, so I asked it.

  ‘I rather hoped that the owner of this place would be here. I would like to ask them some questions about their attitude towards fish,’ Drakeforth said from his seat.

  ‘Why are we here?’ I demanded, straining against my bonds. ‘You have no right to keep us here. No right at all!’

  The man smiled, ‘You are correct. However, sacrifices must be made. For the greater good, you understand.’

  ‘Pudding? You’re not currently armed with a gun are you?’ Drakeforth asked, staring hard at the smirking executive.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘Just who do you think you are?’ I demanded.

  ‘Who do you think I am?’ the man replied.

  Drakeforth spoke up before I could, ‘You are the current Godden. The latest incarnation of unspeakable evil,’ he spoke as if making introductions.

  Godden nodded, ‘I am the current senior representative of the Godden Corporation. I cannot speak to being an incarnation of evil. That seems to be a subjective view on your part.’ He moved around us with a dancer’s grace that was a pleasure to watch. I reminded myself he was the enemy.

  ‘You went in search of patchouli oil. Why was that?’ Godden asked, settling himself against the front edge of the desk, an altogether more casual position for the on-going conversation.

  ‘I have an antique desk and—’ I started to say.

  ‘And,’ Drakeforth interrupted, ‘We understand that patchouli oil is the best for preserving and treating the wood. We would like to see it maintained in its current mint condition.’

  ‘Patchouli oil? You would be better with linseed, or that paraffin-treated mouse fat. It really brings out the tones of the grain,’ Godden said.

  ‘We are talking genuine living oak. Linseed would clog the pores, and who can afford patremofa in the required quantities?’ Drakeforth rolled his eyes.

  Godden nodded, his expression sympathetic to the plight of the underprivileged working class, who could not afford exotic bars of wax infused with mouse blubber.

  ‘In fact, we had procured a source of patchouli oil, when,’ I gave a dry laugh as if telling an amusing story, ‘we were assaulted by an entire squad of armed thugs, dragged from our car and bundled onto a helicopter. Only to find ourselves forced into this concrete fortress, with no explanation or reason,’ I concluded.

  ‘Where we then passed an intolerable amount of time in the company of one Dilby Pretense,’ Drakeforth chimed in.

  ‘He made some very odd threats,’ I added.

  ‘A regrettable incident,’ Godden said, nodding.

  ‘Regrettable?’ I blinked. ‘Why have you had us brought back here, then?’

  ‘The Godden Corporation has an interest in those who seek to acquire patchouli oil. You were picked up in a routine sweep.’

  ‘Routine?’ I mentally scolded myself for repeating everything he said.

  ‘A regrettable incident,’ Godden confirmed.

  ‘Well, there’s no reason for us to keep you. I’m sure you are a busy man, running a global corporation and all.’ Drakeforth stood up, brushing the rope off his wrists and straightening his suit jacket.

  ‘Before you go, perhaps you could answer a question for me?’ Godden’s eyes gleamed a metallic green. ‘Exactly what are you doing here now?’

  ‘We liked it so much the first time, we wanted to come back,’ Drakeforth said without so much as a twitch.

  ‘We believe you have stolen something of mine,’ I said, determined to play this straight.

  ‘Stolen? My dear Miss Pudding, I can assure you that we do not steal.’

  I erupted. ‘Of course not, you are so far above the law you are in orbit around the planet! You wouldn’t know a moral if it turned up with a home-made tuna casserole to welcome you to the neighbourhood! You call yourselves corporate citizens when really you are parasitic, blood-sucking ticks swollen with the tears and sweat of the little people that you lord over like a gigantic, misery-filled gas balloon!’

  Drakeforth swung his fist and landed a hefty blow on Godden’s jaw. It sounded like he had
punched a plastic bucket full of concrete. Godden’s head didn’t move.

  ‘Pythagoras!’ Drakeforth hissed, clutching his hand. His face drained of colour.

  ‘Another regrettable incident,’ Godden said.

  I struggled against my bonds, ‘What are you?’

  ‘The culmination of a dream of decades,’ Godden said, straightening up from the desk and sweeping his fallen fringe back from his unmarked face. ‘You see, Godden was a visionary. Not only did he discover the secret of empathic energy and use it to revolutionise the way the world powers its technology, he also had a dream of creating a new kind of machine, one that would be free of human frailties and failings. An independent device that would be capable of utilising the power of empathic energy to its utmost.

  ‘An artificial man?’ Drakeforth whispered, his voice hoarse with shock.

  ‘Powered by love and positive emotions. The essence of empathic energy. Sophisticated enough to be powered by the double-e flux. Strong enough to guide humanity towards a brighter future.’

  ‘We can find our own way into the future, thank you very much,’ I stopped struggling as a sense of unease tightened its grip on my shoulders. ‘What I don’t understand is what any of this has to do with patchouli oil, or why we have been picked up in a routine sweep, regrettable or otherwise.’ I said, to make sure that Godden thought we knew less than we did about whatever was going on here.

  ‘Your interest in patchouli oil is a matter of energy security. Energy security is what keeps the world at peace. Citizens of all types benefit when energy security is maintained,’ Godden said.

  ‘Well,’ Drakeforth said with a brittle politeness, ‘It was lovely to meet you, but we really must be going.’ He turned on his heel and came back to the chair I was bound to. With a few quick twists of rope, he loosened the knots. I stood up on numb feet, rubbing feeling back into my wrists and hands.

  Godden appeared unconcerned. ‘The first of us were clockwork. Can you imagine? A clockwork man, powered by the crudest of empathic resonators. But Godden was devoted to his task. Right up to the end, he enlisted great minds to continue his work after his death.’