The Promethean

by Owen Stanley

  “No boasting about that,” was the general verdict of the pub, and Frank’s display of virtuosity was actually very well timed.

  Tussock’s Bottom was due to have a darts match in a week with the nearby village of Greater Slaughter, and that very evening they were making up the list for the team that would uphold the village honour. Frank was urgently pressed to join the team, particularly by their captain, a quiet bearded man called Teddy. After Frank agreed, and declared he would be very pleased to join their team, he took his drink and asked if he could join Teddy at his table.

  “By all means,” said Teddy. He was just putting the finishing touches with some sandpaper to a handsome walking stick he had carved. It was the type known as an ashplant, with a bulbous handle that, as Teddy explained, fitted very comfortably into the palm of the hand when walking. Frank had never heard of a walking stick before.

  “But why do you need a stick for walking?” he asked. “Do you have a bad leg?”

  Teddy laughed. “No, that type is usually made of lightweight metal with a rubber grip on the end. People like these sticks to swing as they go along—seems to make walking easier, more enjoyable in some way.”

  Frank, curious as always, was interested to try the experiment, and asked Teddy if he had made the stick for himself or if he was willing to sell it.

  “Well, I was going to keep it, but I can easily make another. Give me a tenner, and it’s yours.”

  Frank had no hesitation in bringing out the wallet that Harry had given him, extracting a ten-pound note, and taking possession of his stick.

  At around half-past ten he said good night to his new friends at the Drunken Badger and set off home, not realising that some of the Cornshire Constabulary’s finest were lying in wait.

  Two constables in their patrol car were parked up near the pub, under the village’s only streetlamp, hoping to score an arrest or two of local drunks. One policeman was Jack Barnsley, a morose and oafish man who had recently been demoted from sergeant to constable for throwing a drunken woman onto the floor of her cell, breaking her nose, and knocking out some teeth.

  Narrowly escaping dismissal, he nevertheless considered himself to have been thoroughly hard done by and wanted to get his own back on an ungrateful society. His partner Berny was a decent enough young constable who had only recently joined the force. So when Frank walked past swinging his new walking stick, Barnsley said, “Gotcha! Just what we’ve been waiting for.” Gleefully lowering his window, he said, “Excuse me, sir. Can we see that stick?”

  “Certainly,” said Frank, “though as you can see, it’s just an ordinary walking stick.” He held it up so the policeman could see it, but kept a firm grip of it.

  “It’s an offensive weapon,” said Barnsley. “Hand it over.”

  “If you consult the relevant legislation, Constable,” replied Frank, activating his criminal law module on offences against the person, “you’ll find that an offensive weapon either has to be designed to cause bodily harm, like a knuckle-duster, or specially modified to cause it. If I had filled the head of this stick with lead, you would have good reason to think it an offensive weapon, but as it is, it is nothing more than a walking stick being utilised by an individual going for a walk and not threatening physical violence.”

  “Don’t you lecture me on the law, sunshine,” snarled Barnsley, getting out of the car. “You’re a Yank, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “We don’t like your sort around here. You’re under arrest!” Barnsley gestured for Berny to get out of the car to assist him.

  Frank looked at them calmly. “You have no lawful justification for arresting me. I advise you both to be very careful.”

  This defiance enraged Barnsley who raised his side-handle baton and aimed a smashing blow at Frank’s head. With his lightning reflexes, Frank caught the weapon when it was only a few inches from his face, tore it from Barnsley’s grasp, and, with no apparent effort simply broke it in two and tossed the pieces over his shoulder.

  Barnsley was a very slow thinker, which is why he immediately sprang violently at Frank. It was only when he was flying through the air into the nearby ditch, which was full of water, that he finally worked out that perhaps it was not a very good idea to attack a man who could break police batons in half with his bare hands. While Berny was aghast at Barnsley’s behaviour, he felt he had no choice but to defend the honour of the Cornshire Constabulary, and fired his taser at Frank. It had not the slightest effect, of course, and Frank simply pulled out the darts. Walking up to Berny he then took the useless taser from the constable’s trembling hand and threw it into the hedge.

  Meanwhile, the unpleasant Barnsley was crawling out of the ditch, covered in green slime and threatening extremely violent reprisals. Frank could not, of course, injure a human being, and he calculated that the most effective way to extricate himself from the situation without harming either of the policemen was to take the handcuffs from Barnsley’s belt, drag him struggling to the metal field gate close at hand, cuff him to it, and then throw away the key. As soon as he had done this, he walked off into the night back to the factory. Berny tried desperately to free Barnsley, but the keyhole of the handcuffs was blocked by sludge from the ditch, and Berny couldn’t get his own key to work. He radioed to the station for backup, but due to police economies there was no one available, so Berny decided to go back to the station and fetch an angle grinder.

  Before he could get back to rescue his colleague, however, some other customers from the Drunken Badger, on their way home, found Barnsley first. As they recognised him in the light of the streetlamp, the delighted cry went up. “It’s Bugger Barnsley.”

  He was easily the most detested of all the local coppers, was widely regarded as a bully and a thug, and the situation was therefore recognized by most of the pub-goers as an opportunity sent from heaven.

  “Tried to arrest yerself did yer, yer thick bastard,” said one of them, as they all fell about laughing and began filming him on their smartphones.

  Viewers of YouTube were soon being entertained by the sight of an enraged and humiliated policeman, chained to a gate, soaking wet and covered in green slime, cursing, blaspheming, and swearing to be revenged on all of them, especially “on that sodding Yank.”

  It suddenly dawned on the pubgoers that by “Yank” the constable meant Frank, their new darts-throwing champion.

  “Blimey,” Bill Coppings declared, “he must mean Frank Meadows. How’d he do it? Bloody brilliant! We all owe ’im a round for that!” And Frank was instantly promoted to local hero.

  The revellers finally had enough and left Bugger Barnsley to his fate, which was not excessively prolonged. Berny soon came back with an angle grinder and managed to remove the handcuffs, after which he took Barnsley back to the station, where Sergeant Clough did not make him feel welcome.

  Berny had already filled the sergeant in about Barnsley’s unlawful behaviour, and someone else, probably one of the revellers, had phoned him about the footage on YouTube, which had horrified him, so he was not at all amused as a sodden and filthy Barnsley sat down in front of him at his desk.

  “Well, what’ve we got, then? The ‘sodding Yank,’ as you call him, is apparently the stepson of the local American millionaire, who has enough legal firepower to blow the Cornshire Constabulary clean out of the water. From what Berny says, you also made an unprovoked assault on the young man. Where have we heard that before, eh? And then you managed to get yourself chained to a gate, covered in shit, where the locals filmed you and put you on bloody YouTube!”

  Sergeant Clough glared at the constable, then opened his laptop. “Do you want to have a good look at yourself, you bloody cretin? You’re a disgrace to the force, and the Chief Constable is getting my report first thing this morning. Suspension and then dismissal without notice would be my guess. So piss off home, and I suggest you see about finding yourself a new job, probably as a bin man if they’ll have you!”

  Chapter I
X

  The police waited nervously for a reaction from Mr. Hockenheimer to this highly discreditable incident, and were mightily relieved when, for some reason that was not clear to them, nothing happened at all.

  Unbeknown to them, the American billionaire actually knew nothing at all about that eventful night. Frank had calculated that it would be wisest to remain entirely silent in case Harry thought it was not safe to allow him out again on his own. Harry would certainly have thought exactly that, since a visit by the police to question Frank would have shown them at once that he was an illegal immigrant, and the only way of disproving this would have been to demonstrate that he was not a human being at all and give away his secret.

  As it was, the only concrete result of the embarrassing encounter was that the Cornshire Constabulary removed the odious Barnsley from their payroll as soon as the formalities could be completed, and he was last heard of stacking shelves in a supermarket in Swineborough, where he was regularly taunted by those who knew of his former employment.

  (If shelf-stacking in Swineborough had existed in the Middle Ages, those church wall paintings of scenes in Hell would probably have included it.)

  Harry was, however, concerned by Frank’s impending participation in the darts match with Greater Slaughter. Frank had told him about his extraordinary prowess that evening at the Drunken Badger, and the invitation to join the village team, thinking that Harry would be pleased to know that this aspect of his programming had been so successful. But Harry was worried that this growing intimacy with the regulars at the Drunken Badger might jeopardise the illusion of Frank’s humanity and lead to the premature disclosure that he was really a robot.

  He decided, therefore, that the only solution was to pretend that Frank had come down with something, and was too ill to participate, but this presented them with a challenge. Since they had so callously ignored the guidelines demanded by the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, Frank’s designers had not anticipated his possible need to simulate disease, and he could produce none of the usual symptoms of the sick, such as a runny nose, a brow beaded with perspiration, or a hacking cough that suggested hidden depths of mucus about to erupt.

  The best that could be done was to tune his opto-electronic skin to a very nice shade of sickly green, and to induce tremors in his limbs by clever manipulations of his muscle tone. So, on the day before the darts match was due, he tottered down to the Drunken Badger, where his symptoms were sufficiently convincing to win him a considerable amount of sympathy and good wishes for his speedy recovery. Fortunately for the honour of Tussock’s Bottom, his services proved to be unnecessary, as the dart-throwers of the Drunken Badger easily crushed their counterparts from the Old Weasel in Greater Slaughter.

  Following his unsatisfactory conversation with Harry about the church at Tussock’s Bottom, Frank was impelled to give much more attention to religion than his previous superficial enquiries. He now had considerably more time for private study on the Internet, particularly by downloading books. After having surveyed a large amount of historical data, he concluded that the claims that most of the warfare in history had been caused by religion were very wide of the mark. By his calculations, only about 6.98 percent of the recorded wars in human history could reasonably be described as religious in origin, with many of these cases involving Islam. It was also obvious that the vast slaughters of the twentieth century, in particular, involved political ideology and had nothing to do with religion at all.

  At the end of his survey, he finally concluded that religion was merely one of the many issues that humans were willing to fight over, such as language, honour, physical appearance, nationality, and land.

  He also assessed the claims he had read that religion was inherently irrational since it could not be definitively proved by evidence. This seemed perfectly correct, but then, a great deal of what most humans believed in general seemed to be largely unsupported by evidence as well. This was especially true of politics, where vast and unsubstantiated claims were constantly being made that this or that political party would be able to bring about some kind of paradise on earth. Human rights, in particular, seemed to attract the same kind of fanatical and credulous devotion of which religious believers were always being accused, but he observed that they rested on no evidence whatsoever.

  In fact, Frank decided, religious thought seemed no different from most other kinds of thought, except perhaps for the physical sciences.

  His studies of religion also showed that believers constantly referred to “religious experience” as something of great value that was very real for them but very hard to put into words, such as “the peace of God which passes all understanding.” As a robot, he knew he was quite unable to participate in such types of experience and was therefore not qualified to assess their validity or value one way or the other.

  He concluded that from the scientific point of view, which was the only one open to him as a robot, the claims of religion could be neither proved nor disproved, and that the proper scientific attitude should therefore be one of strict agnosticism. He realised that, as the incident of the Belgian undertaker on the TV had demonstrated, religious attitudes among people in general were significant factors that would have to be taken into account when analysing any social situation.

  His survey of religion therefore showed him that Harry’s assessment of it was shallow and uninformed. But when he presented his findings to Harry, his maker was bored and dismissive, and made no serious attempt to engage him in discussion. His only substantive response was to tell Frank, again, to not to waste his time on such fluffy stuff. Having concluded from this that it was pointless to continue discussing the social aspects of religion, Frank moved on to economics and political science, and devoted considerable attention to sociology and anthropology as well.

  He also read widely in modern philosophy without finding it to be of much practical value, or even credibility. The idea that there could be a general body of abstract theory called philosophy, which experts could then apply to fundamental problems in physics, mathematics, history, art, psychology, or the social sciences, struck him as wholly implausible. Addressing such problems clearly required the specialist knowledge of experts in the relevant subjects.

  Armed with this intellectual background, in the days that followed Frank talked to Harry about business and finance, the American political scene and the workings of its government, international relations and the global economy, and currently fashionable ideas in Western culture. He gradually came to the conclusion that while Harry was shrewd, and very well informed about the world of business, his knowledge did not extend very far beyond those matters that might be relevant to making money. But even in economics, which might have been thought of genuine interest to a businessman, he found it difficult to engage Harry in meaningful discussion.

  Whether it was the flaws in the theory of maximizing shareholder value or the failure of trickle-down economics to raise Gross Domestic Product, the fallacy that more education increased productivity, the limitations of market rationality, or the need for government regulation and investment in key industries, Frank found Harry curiously reluctant to discuss what he had to say.

  When Frank pointed out that in Sub-Saharan Africa, literacy had increased from 40 to 61 percent from 1980 to 2004, but GDP had declined by 0.3 percent each year, and that generally there was no clear link between education and economic growth, that maximizing shareholder value had severely diminished investment to such an extent that it was the leading cause of General Motors’ bankruptcy, that trickle-down economics had allowed 90 percent income growth in the United States to go to 10 percent of the population while economic growth had simultaneously declined, and that governments, particularly in East Asia, had actually proved themselves very effective at picking out industries in which to invest, Harry simply accepted what he had to say but refused to engage in discussion with him on the subject.

  The truth was that Harry was increasingly disturbed by
Frank’s obvious intellectual superiority, and if he had ever read P.G. Wodehouse, he might well have felt an uncomfortable similarity between himself and Bertie Wooster when confronted by the greatly superior intellect of his omniscient valet Jeeves. Fortunately for Harry, he had never heard of the great English humourist, let alone read any of his books, so the ignominious comparison could not occur to him, but nevertheless, Harry resolved never to get into an argument with Frank, but simply to use him as a sort of walking, talking Wikipedia.

  Frank, for his part, was unable to feel superior to Harry and thereby be tempted to become disobedient. He simply came to the pragmatic conclusion, as he had already done in the case of Harry’s knowledge of religious matters, that his owner was not an individual who was qualified to give him more than rudimentary guidance about the affairs of men.

  A human would have felt conflicted in this situation of being expected to obey the orders of a boss who was his intellectual inferior by a very considerable margin. But Frank felt no conflict at all. He knew from his basic psychology programming that humans did not enjoy being told that they were ignorant and stupid, even if it were obviously true, and were liable to feel something called anger, which usually involved a good deal of shouting and sometimes physical violence.

  Frank knew that anger was not only harmful to human health but also prevented rational discussion, so that he must keep Harry in a favourable state of mind at all times. He accomplished this by complimenting him wherever possible and avoiding arguments. Fortunately, this diplomacy was entirely compatible with his essential nature as a truth-telling machine. Indeed, if his programming had equipped him with the complete arsenal of oriental flattery, including terms such as “Protector of the Poor,” “O King, Live Forever,” “Healer of the Sick,” “Friend of Widows and Orphans,” or even “O Fragrant Cloud of Jasmine,” he would have used them without compunction as the honeyed words for persuading Harry to accept his advice.