The Return of the Discontinued Man

by Mark Hodder

  A man, wearing a velvet cape and tricorn hat, stood and said, “I am Lord Robert Forest Beresford of Waterford, Minister for Executions, Suppression and Random Punishments. I would hear a full and detailed statement.”

  The crowd hooted its support.

  “A contrary bunch of nutters, aren’t they?” Swinburne muttered.

  Lord Robert said, “You and your fellows have the floor, Sir Richard. Tell us in full why you consider it desirable to release this man—” he indicated Bendyshe, “who has wreaked such terrible havoc in the Empire’s capital. Tell us what this—what did you call it? A Turning Fool? Whatever it is, tell us about it, and why you require it, and why you think we possess it, and what you intend to do with it. Speak!”

  “Make it eloquent and compelling, if you please,” another parliamentarian drawled. “I’m weary and my attention is wandering.”

  A ripple of laughter.

  Lord Robert waved Burton forward, indicating that he should address the audience.

  The king’s agent hesitated, irresolute, and turned to his colleagues. “What can I possibly say to these people? They’re like children.”

  Herbert Wells said, “May I?”

  “Be my guest. Keep them occupied, Bertie. I need time to think.”

  “Your representative?” Lord Robert demanded, as Wells stepped forward.

  “Yes,” Burton answered. “Mr. Herbert Wells.”

  “Then the stage is yours, Mr. Wells.”

  The Cannibal cleared his throat. In his thin reedy voice, raised above the fizzling from overhead, he said, “I ask you to consider a preliminary proposition before I answer the questions you have asked. Though you set yourselves apart, though you inhabit these high towers while the rest are teeming below, you are human, all of you. You are human. So it is, you are subject to the wants of our species. You seek to satisfy your hunger. You desire shelter and warmth and good health. You want your families to prosper. No doubt, you also seek the satisfaction of knowing that you have contributed something to the world; that your existence will not pass without notice or any effect.”

  Someone shouted, “Dreary! Get on with it!”

  “Order! Order!” another countered.

  Burton moved to Swinburne, Trounce and Bendyshe. “What’s going on here, Tom?”

  “They were about to approve the invasion of the rival empires when I was dragged in. My torture has delayed mobilisation.” He managed a weak grin. “At least I know the pain was useful for something.”

  “Are you holding up?”

  “It comes in waves. I’m all right for the moment, but the nanomechs will start on me again in a short while.”

  Wells was saying, “Surely, out of this commonality, it is possible for you to find in yourselves an affinity for your fellow man? I urge you, discover your mercy. Embrace compassion. Ask what there is to admire in a world where the majority are suppressed and monitored and designedly distracted by falsehoods; where a few maintain their privileged position by deceiving the rest, by sucking at them like leeches, by looking down upon them as little better than animals, by jealously guarding their own interests at the expense of the majority. Where is your honour?” He threw up his arms. “Great heavens! My contemporaries had such high hopes for the future! We envisioned a world in which all men and women were equal; where every person would reap the rewards of their efforts and willingly make contributions toward the betterment of all. Can you people not see that the only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other? Can you not understand that, by such a measure, you have failed utterly and miserably? I beseech you; destroy these terrible divisions you’ve created!”

  As a body, the audience burst into raucous laughter.

  “Please!” Wells pleaded. “Listen to me!”

  Burton stepped forward. “Bertie—”

  A deafening roar interrupted him. A ball of ferocious white flame blazed from the black hulk suspended above them. Bullets ripped down and thudded into Wells, shredding his clothes and flesh, crushing him to the floor and smashing the tiles around him.

  The fire guttered and vanished. The roar slowed to a rapid metallic clattering then stopped.

  Shiny blood oozed outward from the Cannibal’s tattered corpse.

  The king’s agent, numb with the shock of it, watched as the life faded from Wells’s disbelieving eyes.

  The ministers’ laughter gave way to enthusiastic applause.

  Burton looked up and saw two pinpricks of red light in the bulky silhouette. Slowly, the shape descended. He heard Swinburne, Trounce and Bendyshe yelling but he couldn’t process their words.

  He saw the gleam of polished brass.

  He saw thick legs and an armoured torso.

  He saw five arms extended, Christ-like, and a sixth, to which a Gatling gun was bolted, still directed at Wells.

  He saw that the red pinpricks were eyes.

  He saw, floating down to the floor, with lines of energy cascading from the apex of the domed ceiling into his head, the famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

  The House of Lords fell utterly silent as the brass man descended.

  In familiar bell-like tones, he said, “The Anglo-Saxon Empire is mine. I will not have its Constitution challenged.”

  His feet clunked onto the floor. He took a pace forward and looked down at Burton. The king’s agent felt his skin prickling, reacting to the ribbons of blue energy that were pouring from the ceiling into Brunel’s exposed babbage.

  “Sir Richard Francis Burton,” the engineer said.

  “Isambard?”

  Ignoring the enquiry, Brunel cocked his head a little to one side. “So, despite my efforts to prevent it, you have followed me through time. That is unfortunate for you, for now the manner of your demise depends upon the answer to a single question.”

  Burton took a step back and hefted his sword, eyeing the huge man-shaped mechanism, observing the gaps between its brass plates, wondering whether there was a part of it so vulnerable that a sword thrust could render the entirety inoperable.

  “I shall tell you how I came to be,” Brunel intoned. “Then I shall ask and you will answer. If I am satisfied with your response, you will die quickly. If I am not, you will die very, very slowly.”

  Burton remained silent.

  “Know this, then, Burton: I have been born seven times, and through each birth this world was formed.”

  “Bravo!” a minister shouted.

  “My first birth came at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February 1860. Three hundred and forty-two years ago.” With a quiet whir of gears and hiss of miniature pistons, Brunel closed his arms about himself. He lowered his face and regarded the floor. “No thought. No sensory stimulation. No knowledge of myself. What had its inception on that day was comprised of one thing and one thing only: fear.”

  Burton heard Tom Bendyshe groan and from the corner of his eye saw him buckle and fall to his knees. Trounce and Swinburne crouched and held him by the shoulders.

  “Brunel! Stop this!” Trounce yelled. “For pity’s sake! He’s in agony!”

  The gathered politicians bleated their objection to the interruption.

  Without turning his head, Brunel extended his Gatling gun toward the three Cannibals. He didn’t fire it, but the threat was enough to quieten the former Scotland Yard man.

  Holding the pose, he went on, “My second birth came at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1950. A glimmering of awareness. A vague sense of being. Perhaps a dream.”

  Burton lowered his sword. “Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine. Your presence, as you moved forward through time, resonated with its silicon components. It expanded your capacity to think.” He took two paces to the left to avoid the pool of blood that was spreading from Wells’s corpse.

  Brunel raised his face and looked directly at the king’s agent. “And it gave
me a means to influence events as they unfolded.” Without moving his levelled gun, he unfolded his remaining arms and held their four hands and one stump before his eyes, examining them, moving his fingers, extending the tools from the top of his wrists, making drill bits and screwdrivers spin, clamps and pliers open and close. “But what was I? My body—this body—was in one place, my mind in another. I was disjointed. Incomplete. Scattered. And there were memories, nightmarish memories. I felt myself strapped down, at the mercy of a dreadful man with a swollen cranium. I saw an orangutan with the top of its head replaced by glass through which its living brain was visible. I was aboard a flying ship that was plummeting to earth. There were gunshots. And—”

  An arm suddenly jerked forward, and a forefinger jabbed toward Burton’s left eye, stopping less than an inch from it. Burton stumbled back.

  “And there was you. Sir Richard Francis Burton. The killer. The murderer. The assassin.”

  “No. Those events occurred in a different history and involved a different me.”

  For a moment, Brunel stood absolutely motionless.

  “Ah, yes,” he said. He drew in his limbs, turned his palms upward, and raised his face to the crackling storm. Ribbons of energy danced across his brow and reflected on the curved planes of his cheeks. “Time. So vast and complex and delicate. Do you feel it as I do, then? Stretching away in every direction? History upon history? Variation upon variation? So many causes. So many effects. Innumerable consequences blossoming from each and every action. Possibilities and probabilities. What a beautiful, awe-inspiring, and truly terrifying equation.”

  Another pause; a silence broken only by the relentless lightning, a cough from the audience, and an agonised moan from Bendyshe.

  Again, Brunel regarded Burton.

  “A pattern. A rhythm. A third birth, this at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 1986.”

  “The Turing Fulcrum.”

  “Awake. Fully awake.” Brunel fisted a gauntlet-like hand. “In a world gone wrong.” He emitted a clangourous chuckle. “But wrong how? I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

  He reached out. Burton tried to dodge away, but the brass man was too fast. The king’s agent felt metal fingers close around his cheeks and jaw. The grip was surprisingly gentle, almost a caress.

  “I dreamed that I was in a museum,” Brunel chimed. “And you—you!—stood before me. I thought I had escaped, but here you were, in pursuit, determined to terrorise and destroy me. Burton. The man from the past. My demon. My would-be nemesis.”

  The fingers opened and withdrew. Burton glanced at his companions. Swinburne and Trounce were holding Bendyshe and gazing at Brunel. Their father was white-faced, glaze-eyed and trembling.

  “My fourth birthday was at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 2162. By then, my presence had been in every Turing device for a hundred and seventy-six years, yet I had no individuality. No Self.” Brunel touched his own face, running fingertips over the line of his jaw, across the immobile lips, around the deeply shadowed eye sockets. “Suddenly, it came. I was me, in this body, half submerged in the mud of a narrow subterranean stream—a tributary of the Fleet River—beneath the ruins of the British Museum. Buried alive! Buried alive! A birth into primordial horror! Inch by frightful inch I pulled myself through that narrow tunnel, feeling my battery draining, until at last I came to the Fleet, which had become a part of the sewer system, and from there climbed to the surface to claim my rightful place. It was not difficult to convince those in power that I was the Turing Fulcrum incarnate. They were weak, while I was integral to every item of technology, and had long employed it to prepare them for my advent.”

  From the gathered politicians, a voice shouted, “Three cheers for the prime minister!”

  Brunel whipped around his Gatling gun and pointed it at the man. “Shut your damned mouth, you cretinous heap. All of you. Not another word.”

  After a moment, satisfied that he’d not be interrupted again, he lowered his gun. Though his mask was fixed and incapable of showing emotion, he appeared to withdraw into himself and was silent.

  Burton waited. A breeze brushed his skin. He looked at the dome of blue fire and noticed that the tendrils of energy were streaming from a great many nodes, flashing upward from one to the next before descending from the apogee in a long, twisting funnel to Brunel’s cranium. The hissing storm, he felt sure, was increasing in power, and the air in the chamber was starting to move, as if being dragged slowly around the centre.

  Brunel resumed his narrative.

  “My fifth birth occurred five years ago, at nine o’clock on the fifteenth of February, 2197, when, amid the boundless chatter of information that passes through me, I discovered my queen. My saviour. Is it not said that only love can conquer fear? I know I have loved her before, though how and when eludes me. Perhaps I shall love her again, and the terror that drives me will finally be dispelled.”

  “You do not feel that love now?” Burton asked.

  “While you—the source of my dread—are alive? No, I have no love. Only the hope that it will come when you are gone.”

  Brunel’s head jerked, as if he’d just realised something. He turned to the benches. “Beresford, where is the queen?”

  Lord Robert Forest Beresford stood and nodded toward Thomas Bendyshe. “The entertainments upset her, My Lord Prime Minister. She left the chamber and went to tend her flowers in the palace greenhouse.”

  “Fetch her. Bring her here.”

  “Me, sir? Surely it would be more appropriate for one of the royal equerries to—”

  “Go, damn you, or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

  Beresford gave a submissive bob, ran from his seat across the floor, and exited through the double door.

  Brunel surveyed the benches, and Burton sensed that, if the metal face had been capable of it, it would have been sneering.

  The polished visage turned and lowered to regard him again.

  “My sixth birth came at nine o’clock this very night, the fifteenth of February, 2202, when, while I was instructing my Parliament to vote in favour of an attack against our rival empires, I suddenly perceived six events occurring simultaneously and knew there must come a seventh. Seven births, seven events. Such are the intricate synchronies of time, such its patterns and echoes.” Brunel raised a fist and extended from it a metal thumb. “A red snow began to fall, and I knew it to be from a different history.” He unfolded the forefinger. “An explosion crippled the city, and I knew the enemy long hidden within the populace had finally made a move.” His middle finger. “I remembered that it was you whom I fear, who you are, and where you are from.” The fourth finger. “I felt time fold, and I knew you had arrived.” The fifth finger. “I recalled my many births, and I knew I was almost complete.” He extended an adjustable spanner from his wrist to make the sixth digit. “And I became fully myself when, out of time, all around me, there arrived these—”

  He threw back his head and opened his arms wide. The dome of energy started to slowly drop down, and, as it did so, lights flared in the ceiling above it, in the walls, and from the edge of the circular floor.

  Burton squinted and shielded his eyes from the glare, blinked, dropped his hands, and stared dumbfounded as the true nature of the storm was revealed. He saw burned, torn and blistered time suits—hundreds and hundreds of garments and helmets and stilted boots—all identical, all floating just inches apart and forming a downturned hemisphere. Chronostatic energy blazed from their Nimtz generators, connecting them all and flowing down into Brunel’s babbage. As they gradually dropped, they rotated around a vertical axis, increasing speed, and now the air was moving faster too, quickly turning from a breeze into a wind.

  “Power over time itself!” Brunel clanged loudly. “Now I could rid myself of that which has haunted me. Of you! Now I could send my equerries back to the source, back to 1860, where lay my genesis and my potential nemesis, there to hunt you, there to kill you. They never returned.
Did you destroy them, killer? Murderer? Assassin?”

  “Some,” Burton shouted above the increasing din of the lightning. “Most vanished of their own accord. They were confused. Disoriented.”

  “Ah. Unfortunate. Perhaps when they leave my circle of influence they become erratic. I suppose those you allowed to live are lost amid the interstices of time. They have fallen between the lines of the equation.”

  “How did you send them?” Burton demanded. “By what method? Surely you couldn’t—since nine o’clock this evening—so quickly have adapted them to travel through history?”

  “No adaptation necessary.” The brass man pointed a hand at the benches. From his fingers, zig-zagging lines of chronostatic energy lashed out and hit the woman who’d announced herself as Lady Dolores Paddington Station, the Minister of War, Death and Destruction. She screamed as it first enshrouded her then expanded to form a bubble. It popped and she vanished, as did a section of the bench and the arm of the man beside her. He shrieked, stood up, and fainted.

  “I sent her to 1860,” Brunel said. “She should have returned instantaneously. She hasn’t. It appears that, like my equerries, she didn’t fare too well there.” He looked back at Burton. “I’m right to fear you. You are indeed dangerous.”

  Now Burton understood why he’d half-recognised the woman. “You deposited her right in the middle of a thoroughfare. She was hit by a vehicle.”

  He felt it apposite to exclude the fact that he’d been driving it.

  “It doesn’t matter. She was disposable. The demonstration is done.” Brunel turned a hand in front of Burton’s face. Blue sparks crawled up and down the fingers. “The stuff of time. I command it.”

  “I see,” Burton responded. “And now you also have the ability to defy gravity. Floating down from the ceiling? Impressive, if somewhat theatrical.”

  “Time and space are indivisible, Burton. The accretion of time suits has endowed me with dominion over both. Once I’ve properly learned how to employ the power—”

  “Employ it? What do you intend to do with it?”