‘In many cases that is true. However, true believers in Arthur consider themselves capable of transcending to a higher state of being. The reality, of course, is that very few are able to be incorporated directly into a full e-flux resonator and maintain their sense of self.’
‘Like my great-grandfather in the Python building …’
‘Like your great-grandfather in the Python building.’
We sat in comfortable silence after that. The sermon of the Returned and Abruptly Retired Arthur went on well into the night and at times sounded like a bar-room brawl. Drakeforth argued against what he called their cosmic foolishness until he was blue in the face. The Arthurians dutifully wrote down everything he said for debate over the decades and centuries to come.
He found me in a guest room in the early hours. ‘How did it go?’ I murmured, my voice thick with sleep.
‘People have so much potential, then they latch on to some ridiculous ideas and go completely stupid,’ Drakeforth seethed. ‘I thought they were bad enough last time, but no. Fifteen centuries later they’re still desperate to believe anything you tell them, as long as it isn’t the obvious truth.’
‘Well, if you’re the living Arthur returned, you should be able to do something about it,’ I said into the soft down pillow.
‘Like I said, I’ve retired. They’re on their own.’
‘Bhlargle,’ I mumbled.
The next day we left with enough patchouli oil to marinate a dozen desks. The ranks of Arthurians at the monastery had swelled as the news spread among the faithful. We drove down the forest road, past a long queue of cars and walkers going the other way.
‘Mopheads! Inarticulates! Golf-ball chewers!’ Drakeforth had an angry label for each one of them. We stopped and had a picnic under the trees off the highway, watching the cars and trucks humming past on their way to important destinations.
‘Do you think people will care?’ I asked, lying back against a tree while peeling an oblat.
‘Of course they will care, and then a moment later they’ll find some reason to justify their sordid comforts. I mean, look at us. We possess the proof of the most disturbing crime against humanity ever perpetrated and what do we do? We go on a picnic.’
‘I think sometimes the world doesn’t want saving. It’s like everyone is happy just getting along, making their mortgage payments, going on holiday, paying passing adherence to Arthurianism or whatever other god suits them. Just don’t mention where that comfort comes from. Don’t mention the unfortunate truths about empathic energy.’
Drakeforth sighed and wriggled against the grass. ‘The alternative is a world run by what? Some form of energy that isn’t user friendly? A world operating on a power source that doesn’t run more efficiently if you are pleasant in your interactions with the machine? Sounds like a grim place to me.’
‘Empathic energy isn’t really people,’ I said, handing Drakeforth wedges of the juicy oblat, while staring up at the green canopy above. ‘It’s the energy we create by living.’
‘There you go justifying it to yourself. If you couldn’t you’d end up like the Arthurians. Providing double-e flux to the GEC and then never using it yourself unless absolutely necessary because you know exactly where it comes from. Just another hypocrisy.’
‘I’d like to know what the message hidden in the desk says,’ I said.
‘The letter from your great-grandfather isn’t enough?’
‘No, there is more. The recorded message. Someone wanted that kept, and the Goddens wanted it kept secret. Just because one Godden is gone, we haven’t changed the world. I think that people should know. Then they can make up their own minds about what they want to do.’
‘If this leads to a surge in Arthurian converts, I will be mightily vexed with you,’ Drakeforth said.
We went home and painted the desk’s roll top with fresh patchouli oil. Then Drakeforth went to work, pressing his fingers against the panels and slats, massaging the hidden tones. Slowly the entire recording came wafting out on the smell of the herbal vapours. When it was completely released the conversation from over one hundred years earlier went like this:
The Original Huddy Godden: This is remarkable! Who else knows about this?!
Vole’s great-great-uncle, Wardrock Drakeforth: Only the three of us.
My great-grandfather, Spaniel Pudding: I fear our veil of secrecy will not last long, gentlemen.
Godden: It must. The profit we could make from our discovery!
Pudding: While I agree that we must capitalise on this phenomenon, it should be considered a gift to all mankind.
Godden: It was a wise man who said that three men may keep a secret only when two of them are dead.
Drakeforth: Are you threatening me, Huddy?
Godden: Not at all, Wardrock.
Pudding: Gentlemen. Please … there is glory enough for all in our discovery. We shall publish jointly and share the accolades equally.
Godden: What if we dared to keep this to ourselves? Empathic energy is a living force. We’ll need a steady supply of it and we can’t just suck it out of people and use it to meet the energy demands of the modern world!
Drakeforth: Indeed we can and so we shall. We take the living essence of our fellow man and imbue it with immortality. We are transferring a degree of their very sentience!
Pudding: It sounds rather ghoulish when you put it like that, Ward.
Godden: No one can ever know of this. Their outrage if they discovered the full potential of double-e flux on the inanimate would get us lynched.
Drakeforth: Spaniel’s work has shown we need very little. Just the tiniest amount extracted from a few volunteers. It’s enough to imbue anything with greater function.
Godden: Gentlemen, are you familiar with the beliefs of the Arthurians?
Drakeforth: Of course, a collection of gibbering gallbladders intent on wishing themselves into some higher plane of existence.
Pudding: We can extract it from ourselves only. To inflict this process on anyone else would reveal too much.
Godden: Arthurians believe in the ascendance of man into pure energy. I’m sure they could be convinced that we have discovered the path to their nirvana. We get all the double-e flux we require, they get to become one with the universe.
Pudding: You are talking about murder, Godden.
Godden: It’s not murder if they volunteer. The real question is, what do we tell the rest of them?
Drakeforth: Them? The great unwashed mob? Tell them it’s generated by natural radiation and human emotions.
Godden: Positive human emotions. Our experiments have already shown the risks if we have people acting negatively around empathy-sensitive machinery.
Pudding: We three must swear to never reveal the truth of where empathic energy comes from. This secret we take it to our graves.
Drakeforth: Long may they stand empty.
The voices faded to silence. We stood together in muteness for a long minute.
‘Your great-grandfather, Spaniel Pudding, wanted that conversation to be recorded,’ Drakeforth said eventually.
‘He …’ I cleared my throat, ‘He did seem to have concerns about the plan.’
Drakeforth glowered. ‘And yet he went along with it and turned the world on its head. One hundred years ago? The first buildings powered with empathic energy? The Python building?’
I nodded, ‘And the cine-plex over in Tytal. A Godden Model Six empathy engine. The empathic energy and sentience of our ancestors has been running those two buildings for nearly a century.’
‘No wonder they’re tired,’ Drakeforth said.
‘If the recorded conversation is true, then the revelation of sentience in empathic engines could have serious consequences,’ I said.
‘The desk and our discoveries about Arthurianism,’ Drakeforth said and sighed. ‘That full sentience is only in the oldest engines. Modern technology is so miniaturised you’d barely get a flicker of an actual person out of anything. B
esides, all that energy getting churned up together, there’s no way you could discern an individual’s distinct empathic field.’
I stared at the desk, ‘So no one would care. The worst thing that would happen is that they would replace the empathic resonators in the Python building and put in some new multi-port system to replace great-granddad.’ Mum and dad were gone. Ascott was alive, but far away, and the thought of losing any aspect of a long-lost relative concerned me.
‘Well, it’s not like there is anything we can do about it.’ Drakeforth gestured defeat.
‘You’re right. We should just forget it. Look, I have to go to work. I’ve got to explain my absence for the last few days and frankly that’s going to take some time.’
‘Sure, I’ll catch up with you later?’
I smiled at Drakeforth, ‘Yes. I would like that very much.’ I resisted the silly impulse to kiss him goodbye at the door.
Chapter 20
‘It’s a remarkable claim, but you’ll never be able to prove it.’ Pretense put his tablet down on the desk between us. It shut itself off immediately.
‘I wasn’t aware proof was necessary. Besides, you haven’t heard my proposal.’
‘You are dying. It’s unfortunate, butdemanding compensation or hush money from the Godden Energy Corporation is pointless. You’ll never live long enough to receive it, let alone spend it.’
‘I don’t want your money. You’re going to extract my living self and place me in an empathic engine. Not in a million empathic engines, dispersing my living sentience across a million toaster ovens and computer components. But in one single empathic resonator.’ I smiled at Pretense’s surprised reaction. ‘Yeah, I figured it out.’
‘Does the concept repel or frighten you?’
‘Neither. I mean, it’s weird. We are taught that empathic empowered technology isn’t sentient, but the reality is there’s a piece of someone’s soul in every one.’
‘Not soul, sentience. Such a tiny piece that most installations could never be considered self-aware, or alive beyond the most cursory degree.’
‘But not in the big engines, not in engines like the one in the Python building on Calgary, or the cine-plex in Tytal.’
‘The final resting places of the sentiences of Spaniel Pudding and Wardrock Drakeforth.’ Pretense’s full disclosure told me that we had a deal.
‘You get me, but you don’t get the desk,’ I said, feeling it was essential to clarify that restriction.
‘Well, the board no longer feels that it is necessary for the desk to be acquired. With the recent change in senior management they feel that any revelations that may be made public can be mitigated as a forgery.’
‘Godden Energy Corporation was being run by a mechanical man, intent on harvesting all of humanity for our life-force. That’s almost as disturbing as how you source the empathic energy. Why does no one know about that?’ I asked.
‘Because people don’t want to know. There are those who have an idea, usually people with high empathy quotients. People like you who work closely with empathic technology.’
I thought of Liz at the auto-clinic and Mulligrubs the technician.
‘My doctor has told me to set my affairs in order. He says my only treatment options are palliative. The only family I have is my brother Ascott, but we’re not close. Drakeforth is the closest thing I have to a friend right now.’
‘We can take care of all the arrangements.’ Pretense pressed a space on the tablet’s blank screen. A page rolled out of a printer slot, dark with densely packed lines of legal prose.
‘This is a contract, by which you agree to sign the sum total of your empathic energy over to the Godden Energy Corporation. We in turn agree to use it in empowering technology. Most people don’t have a choice about how they are integrated. But I am authorised to make an exception in your case. Due to your high EQ and ancestral connection.’
‘The Python building,’ I said without hesitation.
‘Is old, and may be torn down in time.’
‘It’s where my great-grandfather’s spirit is entombed. His living sentience powers that building.’
‘And he is failing,’ Pretense sighed. ‘The original engine cannot be replaced without dissipating the empathic energy contained within it. Your ancestor will be lost to us if we try to save him.’
‘So install me in a new engine next to him. The e-flux capacitor can relay the energy flow through a cross circuit and reservoir in the second engine,’ I repeated the technical explanation that Milligrubs had given me.
‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Pretense stood up and I signed the form without reading it. Then I went home to prepare for my funeral.
Epilogue
I’m leaving this manuscript in the living oak desk, along with great-granddad Pudding’s letter. I rang Drakeforth and told him that I was going to an Arthurianist spiritual retreat, and I would like to see him when I returned next week. He accused me of blind bigotry against rational thought and swore that if I returned a blathering convert to such religious quackery he would see me publicly flogged.
I’ve put a front door key in the post to him, along with a request that he forgive the desk and look after it for me.
The new empathic engine is to be installed at the Python building tomorrow. My body will die tonight, and my complete sentience will be transferred intact into the new machine. They say it will be like going to sleep, and awakening to a thousand new senses beyond description.
I’m mostly looking forward to meeting great-granddad and finally asking where the scents of tobacco and Indian ink came from.
We hope you enjoyed Engines of Empathy. To contact Paul Mannering or find out more about his horror and sci-fi writing, visit his Facebook page.
Engines of Empathy is the first in a planned trilogy about the retired Arthur and his attempts to further meddle in the lives of mere Puddings. Turn the page to read the first chapter of Pisces of Fate, in which Charlotte’s brother Ascott, having run to the edges of the Earth in the wake of his parents’ deaths, encounters an unwelcome visitor …
Pisces of Fate – Chapter One
In the warm tropical waters of the Aardvark Archipelago swims a fish that no one likes. The consensus is that the species, Deiectio Piscis, colloquially known as the ‘Poo Fish’, is a bit of a jerk. Inedible to both predators and humans, the Diarrhoea Fish has evolved explosive bowel evacuations as a defensive mechanism when threatened.
Ascott Pudding stopped typing and looked up, staring out from under the palm-leaf roof of his beach hut veranda. He gazed over the sunlit crystal waters of the lagoon, past the jagged fangs of the coral reef where the waves burst into foam, all the way to the horizon, where he saw the pale smudge of a man striding across the low waves.
‘This,’ he announced to the parrot that was drawing with crayons and paper on the table, ‘May require pants.’
‘Bithcuith,’ the parrot replied around the stub of Hibiscus Yellow clamped in its beak.
By the time Ascott had dressed in shorts and a loose shirt, and walked to the end of the small island’s narrow dock, the man was crossing the lagoon. Even at low tide, the water was two metres deep. As far as Ascott could tell, the man wasn’t walking on stilts, or wearing some kind of boat shoes. He was barefoot and walking across the pristine surface of the sea with the same casual stride of someone crossing a well-tended lawn.
‘Morning!’ Ascott called. The man raised a hand and shaded his eyes. From the dock Ascott could see the walker was wearing the first pair of trousers he had seen in nearly two years. The man also wore a loose white shirt, a white hat and dark sunglasses. A pair of white sneakers hung around his neck by their laces and he clutched the handle of a small suitcase in his hand.
‘Ascott Pudding?’ the man said, looking up as he reached the water below the dock.
‘Yes?’
‘Son of Daedius and Krismiss, also known as Dorothy, Pudding?’
‘The very same.’ Ascott stepped back as
the man climbed on to the dock and set his suitcase down.
‘And you are?’ Ascott said as the slender man removed his sunglasses.
‘You have a sister named Charlotte?’ the man asked, ignoring the earlier question.
‘I have a sister named Charlotte, yes. Look, what is this all—? AARRGH!’ Ascott fell back on the dock, blood streaming from his nose.
The man put his sunglasses back on and said, ‘I’ve travelled a long way to punch a member of the Pudding family in the face. Now that chore is over, how about a cup of tea, hmm?’ He picked up his suitcase and walked away towards the small house above the beach.
*
The tea tasted of blood, which Ascott assumed was because he couldn’t smell anything through his bruised nose. He pressed a damp cloth against his face and regarded the man sitting across from him. The stranger had introduced himself as Vole Drakeforth and, when he wasn’t punching strangers in the face, he looked almost civilised, like a crocodile in a business suit. Inside the clothes he seemed tall and thin, with dark hair and skin that looked as manicured as his nails. His eyes were a piercing blue and he wore an expression of mild contempt that seemed habitual.
‘So … you’re a god?’ Ascott said eventually.
‘I’m a retired god. I’m Arthur, the founder of Arthurianism.’
‘I thought you said your name was Vole Drakeforth?’
‘It is Vole Drakeforth. I also happen to be Arthur.’
‘Aren’t you supposed to have a beard or something?’
‘The problem with religion,’ Drakeforth said, ‘Is that everything becomes codified.’
‘Which is why you don’t have a beard?’
‘Which is why I’m retired.’
‘You’ve retired to a small island in the Aardvark Archipelago?’ Ascott blinked. The island was small enough without sharing it with anyone else.
Engines of Empathy (Drakeforth Series Book 1) Page 18