by Ian Hutson
‘If I may make a suggestion my lady, perhaps your best course of action might be to carry on as the great families always have. This too shall pass.’
Lord Kensington-Chelsea looked thoughtful as he weighed the suggestion.
‘Business as usual you say eh? Will that be possible?’
Parminter gave the slightest suggestion of a shrug. ‘With minor adjustments, my lord, with minor adjustments. Immediately after the unfortunate news broke I sent word to the London house to have the shutters rolled down and the regular delivery of oysters and truffles cancelled. Jenkins is at this moment fitting the shatter-proof windscreen and the run-flat tyres to the horseboxes. Ammunition and supplies of comestibles are, as my lord will already be aware, always kept high against just such emergencies as this. We shall not be found wanting should the great unwashed seek us out.’
‘Grr’ said his lordship.
‘Arg’ agreed Lady Kensington-Chelsea, stepping over the remains of Harrison where the Chihuahuaii (the collective noun for Chihuahua) were feeding. ‘It sounds like such a vicious, uncaring sort of world. Are we never to be at peace again?’
‘Not until we crush the last Labour politician beneath our heel, m’dear, no. As Parminter alludes though, we are made of stern stuff and we can wait. We may weather the storm if we gird our loins and look to our laurels.’
‘Grr. Loins...’ said Lady K-C, salivating.
‘Laurels...’ said Lord K-C. ‘Arrgh, that rather reminds me, Parminter – would it still be possible to call my tailors and have a couple of dozen of these run up in my usual cloths? I’m getting rather comfortable with the toga and the certain freedom of movement it affords may benefit one in the struggles to come in days future eh? There’s nothing like bein’ able to get one’s knee up swiftly if it comes down to face to face negotiations. They don’t like that, you know, they don’t like that at all.’
‘I shall make the call this morning my lord. Sandals to match?’
‘Brown sandals for the country, black for town of course. If we may ever actually venture back to town until this unpleasantness is sorted. Let’s look on the bright side – order the black too anyway.’
‘Of course, my lord.’
‘Now we must make plans. We shall have a crisis meeting – we must meet this menace head-on if we are to survive as bastions of civilisation. Grr. One hour, Parminter, then send up the estate manager, the head game-keeper and the Vicar. We must build our battlements against evil. Meantime, is that tasty little minx who used to light the fires in my library still on the books?’
‘I believe that she is, my lord.’
‘Splendid, then send her up immediately. Lady Kensington-Chelsea and I will second-breakfast before the meeting. We must keep our strength up if we, the right sort, are to win the day. Have the rest of the family woken and dressed, they must be warned and advised of the dangers. No-one is to go off the estate until we have the measure of these blood-curdling savage socialists.’
‘Must we restrict them so?’ interjected Lady K-C. ‘It will so dampen their spirits. Might we not let them sleep in another day or two? Who knows when we shall sleep soundly in our beds again. Argh.’
‘We must. The world has changed, the countryside will be awash with these ravening beasts and we must take action. The sooner we act the sooner we shall have acted. And so forth. Grr. My god, they’ll eat us all alive given half a chance.’
The sun continued to rise in the sky of course, although to those of the estate it felt a little cooler, as though it were shining on others in addition to the long-standing righteous. The little people outside the estate gates cavorted and revelled in their new-found chaos, and they built their houses of cards upon the quicksand of vulgar commerce and cheap social fashion. The stones of the great houses cooled a little, naturally, but they would never grow completely cold as long as the thronging masses hobbled themselves with shackles of morality and with individual self-interest, while the ancient families walked the path of ageless generations, holding the land itself firm and embracing a slightly longer-term view.
Inside the great house, as through all the ages, those who would die cared for those who already had and yet who never really would, who never really could. Barely capable of conscious thought, slow of movement and devoid of all human affection, those unshackled by any morality or urge beyond the survival of their lineage reached out and fed upon us all, made us fear for our lives, made us look over our shoulders and sleep a sleep without depth. The ancient ones, the truly never-dead, those who would eat us alive without salt, pepper or gravy, do not walk among us, indeed do not walk openly at all for when hunger strikes we walk with arms outstretched to them. The great houses and the great families continue, as ever, to be the bedrock upon which relative horrors come and relative horrors go. Why else do you think they store their family protein in marble mausoleums if not against just such times?
‘Grr, arg, my lord’ said the acolyte, tugging at a forelock and wringing his cap, not quite certain who was really living and who was really just undead.
* * * * *
Robots knitting with rubber needles
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Two-Six quite enjoyed the process of walking. He walked to work, he walked home at lunch break to let the dog out and he walked home again in the evenings. There was something comforting about the rhythm of his ratchets and levers, step step whirr, lean forward and swing those arms. It eased the tension in his mainspring and warmed the thick black grease on his joints. Of necessity, Two-Six added to his walking routine a walk to the Great Grimsby Institute for the Mental Health of Local Automata. He opened a large event log for this new walk, since he would be performing it for many weeks and months to come.
The Institute was an imposing series of buildings – they had previously seen decades of service as a workhouse, correcting robots that had fallen on hard times or fallen into fallen ways. Entry was through a claustrophobic and imposing arched walkway through the main facade. Above the arch and carved in stone was the legend “UHRWERK MACHT FREI”. Roads and pavements outside followed the familiar network pattern and were dotted with trees and garden hedgerows and traffic lights and people walking dogs among stout post-war housing and trim pre-supermarket gardens. The world beyond the archway though opened up onto a world organised around some quite different and – to the unqualified civilian eye – unfathomable intent. The pathways seemed organised not to facilitate easy transportation but to reinforce professional territories.
There were roads and pavements inside the complex, but they seemed disconnected, stunted and dreadfully abused things, not at all the proudly functional structures of the open world. Some were dedicated to pedestrian traffic only, others to odd electric carts and ambulance parking. Yellow lines and a plethora of signs bore dire warnings in re retributions of vast expense and lengthy inconvenience should regulations not be adhered to. There were trees, but these trees seemed to be living on borrowed time, to be frightened refugees, each sheltering in a square yard or less of exposed earth between the tarmac and the flagstones, and pinned down, shackled beneath cast iron grids with slots to allow just enough rainwater to penetrate for their survival, and no more. The exposed earth had the look of something that had long-since been sucked dry of all nutrients and it was doubtful that any worm could have broken his way through the crust on the surface, even on a rainy day. Each tree, each shrub seemed to have been planted in the dust from a hundred vacuum cleaners.
The buildings of the complex were many and varied and each had been carefully perverted from its original architectural intent. The laundry, originally where the workhouse inmates took in the washing of the townsfolk, now housed a long corridor of vending machines offering sugar, saccharine, salt and snack-sized sachets of Three-In-One oil. The original communal living quarters were now the workshops and the high-ceilinged, green-painted operating theatres. Administration offices filled the old Master’s House which had grown extensions and alterat
ions the way an old dead oak grows fungi, ivy and mosses. These offices were covered in mysterious damp fungi, ivy and mosses, and the old oak by the windows appeared to be dead, or at least to be wishing that it were so.
It was not a happy place.
Not a happy place at all.
It was all about as encouraging as the sight of an approaching enema-trolley with a squeaky wheel and being pushed by a trainee nurse called Gertrude Shovenhose whose ears had been cauliflowered by years spent as a prop-forward in the hospital’s rugby team.
The original factory of the workhouse complex sat in the middle of this tired and dusty confusion and almost hummed with its power over all else. Nurses in oddly impractical uniforms – almost always in pairs – either gyrated around this central building as though in close orbit, or rushed to and from it like probes and comets. Chaps who must, from their mannerisms, have been doctors and consultants parked their Mercedes like guardians on the threshold of every door, and they sauntered in and out with an easy disregard for the orbiting nurses.
Two-Six scanned the nearby signage for anything useful. Parking a vehicle of any kind close to where he was standing would cost him a stupendous fine, towing fees, storage fees and retrieval fees plus the displeasure of the Institute’s Authorities on the first offence, rising to express opprobrium on the third or subsequent offences. Ambulation in any direction other than towards the vast doors of the reception office seemed to be forbidden unless undertaken by an individual with a current and valid Staff Number and three forms of identification. Two-Six theorised that it was just possible that should he wander off this one approved track all of the nurses, orderlies, porters, doctors and consultants would freeze, then turn to him, point and scream in some unholy alien key. He decided to walk the indicated path. Even so, as he moved he felt himself registered and scanned from the periphery, all of those about were aware of his civilian presence even if they were unwilling to make optical contact due to concerns that he might present a problematic agenda requiring reallocation of already fully scheduled individual resources. Heck, he might even ask directions or something!
A blood-curdling and anguished scream escaped from the fabric of the stone building. No-one else seemed willing to notice.
Two-Six began to whistle, although even he himself could not have named the tune, and he approached with not some little ware.
The doors before him were obviously the doors to the inner sanctum, to some centre of operations. They were twice Two-Six’s height and made of thick wood reinforced with riveted and bolted panels of steel. The locks – and there were many – looked to have been made by locksmiths of Norse legend and made as exemplars of their craft. One or two of them would need keys that might only be turned by hairy giants fed on cattle (eaten whole). Others seemed to require some intricate sequence of buttons to be pushed, probably to demonstrate that those wishing to gain entry were familiar with a secret sequence of Fibonacci primes.
Two-Six – as advised by a small painted invitation – rang the bell and stepped back. Only ringing the bell had been recommended but taking a step back somehow seemed wise. He checked overhead, possibly in response to some deep-seated trace memory from an earlier life involving boiling oil or burning coals. It was just possible that the inmates might harvest their own nuts and bolts to heat to white hot and then rain them down upon unwelcome guests.
In fact the door opened to the turn of a single, well-oiled handle and Two-Six was greeted not by something with a bolt through its neck and size eighteen slippers, but by a smile and an inviting and slick sweep of the hand. Do come in, said the oily voice.
‘Hello, I’m here to visit...’
Two-Six found himself interrupted by something that looked like the Consultant of Consultants, the Doctor of Doctors, the Director of Directors. His hand was out to be shaken in greeting (but always somehow also just out of reach) as he glided over the ancient linoleum on Italian leather soled wheels and a cushion of buoyant arrogance. Two-Six was tempted for a split nano-second to ask whether this figure of authority’s name might be Ozymandias.
‘Welcome, welcome!’
‘Hello – I’m here to visit...’ tried Two-Six, again, in vain.
‘Yes, yes, you’ve come to look upon our mighty works. Well, don’t despair, we’re awfully proud and terribly happy to welcome all. Come in, dear boy, come in and I’ll give you the grand tour.’
‘Thank you, but I just want to visit...’
‘Of course, of course, and that’s a large part of what we do here but you must see more, there’s so much more and we do feel that our duty of care extends beyond those lunatics we lock away and encompasses their visitors too. Education is the name of the game and an ounce of prevention outweighs any patient premium paid quarterly in arrears, even if we are constantly seeking new funding for our new clinic, as you know. Let me guide you through our benefits.’
With that and with one of Two-Six’s wrists clasped firmly in the proud doctor’s grasp they began, and the door was closed behind them by some unseen mechanism called Nurse PA. Immediately it closed the air in the hallway absorbed and subsumed the fresh atmosphere that had leaked in from without, cloaking it in over-warm, humid, fetid exhalations. It seemed that anyone still human locked in behind those doors might struggle to find enough oxygen in the mix to sustain successful respiration. The air seemed laden with fluids and with mysterious moistures, as though each molecule – otherwise so sweet and salty by the sea or cold and crisp on windswept mountains – were personally scurrying about and emptying tiny bedpans and transporting kidney dishes filled with green and yellow used dressings. Two-Six felt a sudden empathy with his air filters, and briefly worried whether they would be up to the task. It was like breathing in some soup made from evaporated patients and atomised body-wastes. It hung around the interior like the aroma of a cheap Eau de Colon.
Another all-out scream rocked the building on its foundations and, just as police sirens head in the opposite direction to a fleeing crowd, so nurses rushed to the epicentre to administer a medical stifling.
‘Really, I just want to see...’
‘Of course, of course, and we’ll show you it all. We’re very proud of what we do and we have no secrets. Follow me, follow me dear chap and I’ll show you that there are no lengths to which we will not go in our work.’
Two-Six already didn’t doubt it.
‘Our guests – for I discourage the use of the term “patients” or “inmates” or “nutters” as a little too negative – our guests come from all walks of life and some do so voluntarily and some find their way to us via two doctors and the practical operation of the Automaton Mental Health Act. The moment they walk, or indeed are carried, screaming and strapped to a porter’s trolley, through those doors my good fellow we are responsible for their wellbeing and recovery. We maintain our treatments at the cutting edge of Artificial Neuroscience. No treatment is too expensive or too experimental if it will help improve the lives of our guests.’
At this point the good doctor somehow dodged while also making it plain that he refused to acknowledge an explosion of brass nuts, bolts and enamelled body panels from a door to a side-ward, followed by a crash-trolley of tools being rushed in and the door gently, but very firmly being closed. It appeared that a guest had suffered some sort of disastrous mainspring discomnobulation during an expensive treatment.
‘The cog and cam brain, while of course the greatest wonder of the sentient universe, is, as you will know of course, prone to certain maladies and morbidities. My work here at the Institute is focused on our becoming a centre of excellence, is focused on helping in some small way to both alleviate the sufferings of those brought to our attention. We seek only to progress the science of automata-psychology, cog-psychiatry and cam-based neuro-surgery.’
An orderly hurried past towards the scene of the discomnobulation, carrying a huge monkey-wrench. Dr Ozymandias saw all, acknowledged nothing – even when the orderly jogged his elbow as he passe
d.
‘To that end we eagerly embrace all of the teachings of the masters; Maiilard, Vaucanson, Friedrich von Knauss, Baron von Kempelen, Pierre and Louis Jaquet-Droz, Abbot Mical, and Kintzing.’
There was a barely audible “ding” from a timer, and Dr Ozymandias stopped briefly at this point in the tour while a personal assistant wound the key in his back, and did so with a reverence bordering on the manner of the acolyte. Dr Ozymandias detained the assistant and with an expansive gesture enquired whether Two-Six’s mainspring might be in need of refreshment. Two-Six indicated that it was not, but expressed gratitude for the kind offer. The acolyte looked somehow relieved, as though he had just escaped being called upon to work out of his assigned and long-held high grade. Two-Six suspected that, had a few turns of the old key-in-the-back been required or accepted, an awful lot of OCD-esque hand washing would have ensued soon after in some well-plumbed side-room.
The good doctor led Two-Six through to a glaringly bright suite of rooms, the door to which bore the proud legend “Triage and Initial Therapy”.
‘When a guest comes to us, in but whatever manner, they are first assessed and initial palliatives are administered to determine whether perhaps their condition may be tractable to the simpler, more mundane treatments known only to those in the profession. Why, we sometimes work wonders in this room!’
Two-Six’s optics swept across a waiting room that was full to the brim of tearful female automata and of swivel-eyed, gibbering males. The curtain to a treatment cubicle had fallen open and an Institute nurse could be seen inside, repeatedly slapping a patient and recommending strongly that she “pull herself together”.
The patient appeared to not be responding positively, remaining instead indolent and unresponsive. She held onto her handbag as though it were a Teddy bear, and her free fingers clenched and unclenched on the thin pink paper of her examination gown. Her treatment was then escalated to a violent shaking of the shoulders followed by a glass of water and then more applications of finely-judged medical slapping about the face. Dr Ozymandias stepped forward, smiling contentedly, nodded approval to the nurse and tugged the cubicle curtain closed.