The Revolt of the Machines

by Brian Stableford

  The excuses offered, and their cringing tone, became utterly commonplace thereafter, and anyone interested in the development of that kind of fiction will have seen dozens of examples. I thought it worthwhile to reproduce this one, however, as an illustrative early specimen.

  Brian Stableford

  X. Nagrien: A Prodigious Discovery

  (1866)

  I. The Announcement

  All Paris was occupied one morning with an unsigned text distributed in profusion during the night whose contents were as follows:

  People who are in the Place de la Concorde next Sunday, the first of June, at noon precisely will witness the first manifestation of the greatest of revolutions past and future.

  The word revolution ought not to frighten anyone. This one is not political—or, at least, its political and social consequences, although they will be considerable in the future, will not be produced in an immediate and direct manner.

  The invention of printing, gunpowder and the steam engine and the discovery of America also produced immense revolutions in the world’s destiny. It is in the same sense that the word is employed here—except that the importance of all those revolutions put together is nothing compared to that of the revolution that is in preparation.

  Those who see the first manifestation will be able to inscribe in their personal memories a date memorable forever in the annals of humanity.

  The manifestation in question will commence at noon exactly in the Place de la Concorde. It will continue until five o’clock in the Champs-Élysées, the Jardin des Tuileries, the public promenades, the boulevards and the quais—everywhere that the width of the routes of communication permits crowds to gather.

  The authorities should take wise organizational measures to avoid accidents. They should also take precautions, if they think it appropriate, in view of any possible events, but all that they have to fear is excessively large crowds.

  Those who take a foolish pride in affecting incredulity on the subject of this announcement; those who will be tempted to see it either as the delusion of a madman or as some ridiculous hoax, have only to reflect on the mysterious manner in which this message has been distributed to convince themselves that this time, the most intelligent are not the least credulous.

  Striking proof will be provided in the Place de la Concorde on Sunday June the first, at noon precisely.

  This text was distributed throughout Paris five or six weeks before the first of June, after a dark and rainy night. All modes of distribution had been employed, including the most incomprehensible.

  Many people received it through the post, some in registered letters. Others found copies in the courtyards of houses, on balconies, windowsills, gutters beneath mansards, on staircases, or in fireplaces where no fires had been lit in view of the warm spring weather. Street-sweepers and rag-pickers collected a certain quantity in the street from dawn onwards. There were copies in all the monuments with openings that had not been closed during the night, in the markets, the churches, the theaters, the public rooms of the Bourse and the Palais de Justice, public ballrooms, and railways stations. They were seen caught in the branches of trees, clinging to lightning conductors, stuck up here and there, at all heights, on nails, hooks and any little projections on walls, shutters and roofs. They were floating in the Seine, falling from ledges and entablements from which the wind had carried them.

  The Luxor obelisk in the Place de la Concorde was garlanded with them. It was circled, at all heights, all the way to the summit, by crowns of rope from which pieces of thread hung down bearing strings of copies that were floating in the wind. It was necessary to go to a great deal of trouble, with the aid of numerous ladders, to clear the venerable monument of the unusual ornamentation.

  Although it was started early, the operation in question could not be finished quickly enough to prevent many people witnessing the fact. Those who had been out in the streets the previous night in spite of the bad weather related that copies had fallen onto their umbrellas. On that day and the following day, birds of every species—pigeons, sparrows, swallows—were found in and around Paris with the text attached to their necks by a thread. Some were seen in flight long afterwards; they were killed as far away as Belgium, Corsica and Algeria.

  That was not all, but it was already enough to cite public curiosity and put the police on the alert.

  The public was far less occupied with the contents of the text than the manner of its distribution. People remembered the story of a house peppered with stones one night in 1848 without anyone ever being able to find a satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon. Everyone tried to explain this also, but no one succeeded. There was agreement on only one point: the distributors must have been numerous, and had given proof of discretion and skill. What was their objective, and what was behind it all?

  According to the most widely credited opinion, it was a colossal hoax, a monstrous belated April fool’s joke. No one, in spite of the plausible enough reflection that the text contained, dared to believe that it was something real. It was recognized that the hoax was not worth either the trouble or the money that it must have cost, but did a practical joker take account of such things? Many stories were told about messages thrown into apartments through open windows, of window panes broken by a gloved hand that a few people had glimpsed, but no one gave any credence to those old wives’ tales. The most sagacious assumed that it was commercial advertising, the author of which was waiting to be sufficiently talked about before making himself known in order to reveal to the world a new insecticide or anti-baldness lotion. As for going to the Place de la Concorde on the first of June, everyone protested that they would not take a single step admitting to such a naïve credulity.

  Deep down, however, and without saying anything, the most skeptical promised themselves privately to look out of their windows if they provided a view, no matter how limited, of the boulevards or the quais. Those who did not have that advantage meditated upon a plausible pretext for being outside and, if they could, passing through the Place de la Concorde at midday on the first of June. Everyone, seeing everyone else incredulous, thought they would be the only ones there.

  The police and the authorities shared the impressions of the public, very nearly, but were preoccupied with something else. Behind the pretended hoax, there might some political agenda, perhaps a conspiracy. Who could tell whether it might not be an ingenious method of drawing an enormous crowd outdoors and provoking popular movements? It was resolved, in any event, to take precautions, but without having the appearance of doing so, in order not to compromise the dignity of those in power by seeming to attach any importance to what might be nothing but a trick. A resolution was also made to leave no stone unturned in getting to the bottom of the mystery. Two orders were issued, one by way of the police, the other by judiciary.

  The police order had no need of any pretext. Police Commissaires received instructions to put together all the information that their various agents could collect and send it to the Prefecture, where it would be centralized. As for the judiciary instruction, it was sufficiently justified by the circumstances of the enigmatic distribution. To begin with, it was an unauthorized text; then again, the text itself had neither been declared not deposed; it bore no printer’s name and was assumed to be a clandestine product of a private press. Perhaps it did not contain any clearly identifiable criminal offence, although it was unstamped and might be considered, strictly speaking, to be treating matters of political and social economy, but there was talk of a few broken windows, a veritable punishable infraction. All that was more than enough to motivate an instruction whose objective was the search for the authors of the actions, more or less delinquent from various points of view.

  The police order produced a mountain of documents. The agents conscientiously collected all the gossip whose echoes they could grasp. The they says were running riot. No one was talking about anything else in drawing rooms, clubs, cafés, restaurant tables, at the B
ourse, at the Palais—everywhere that people chat. It was in concierges’ lodges and the shops where cooks gathered, most of all, that anecdotes circulated, attaining every degree of implausibility. Unfortunately, it was almost impossible to identify their sources. It would be pointless to repeat all the incidents to which imagination gave birth, which had grown in their passage from mouth to mouth. There were many that were repeated with few variations, but there was also ardent persistence on points very different from one another.

  Thus, a student lodged in a high room in the Latin Quarter recounted that, at about two o’clock in the morning, being unable to sleep, he had gotten up to get a book when one of his windowpanes had shattered noisily and an object had fallen into the room. The obscurity had not permitted him to distinguish anything. He had run to the widow and opened it, but had not seen anything outside. Then he had lit a candle and found a round object wrapped in paper on the floor, near the window, on which was written: for the broken window. He had unfolded the paper, which contained a five-franc piece, and had writing inside; it was a copy of the famous text.

  Others, in the Mouffetard, Bastille and Opéra quarters, in the Champ-Élysées, at Montmartre, Vaugirard and Montrouge, related that they had been woken up with a start by the noise of breaking glass, and had then found a five-franc coin wrapped in the same fashion. Others, going into their drawing rooms in the morning, had found the same thing, always near a broken window. It seemed difficult to believe, though, after expert inspection of the broken panes, that they could have been produced simply by throwing a five-franc coin.

  One notable circumstance was that the breakages, located in windows indiscriminately situated in streets and courtyards, were never committed to a lighted room. It was certain that the perpetrators of the nocturnal distribution, evidently very numerous, had taken great care to avoid being seen. Some people, however, affirmed that they had seen something; in view of the gravity of the affair, they were sent to the examining magistrate.

  The investigation had been confided to a magistrate of rare sagacity. The voluminous reports centralized at the Prefecture of Police were forwarded to him. He pruned all those that presented a character too obviously fabulous, like the inadmissible declarations of people who claimed to have discerned a black mass in the air, affecting a vaguely human form, between two other formless masses that seemed to be supporting him, gesticulating like a fantastic sower, and moving with a velocity about half way between that of a swallow in flight and that of a cannonball.

  The examining magistrate only retained those accounts presenting some plausibility, or at least possibility. He heard all the people whose windows had been broken and had received five-franc coins, which were temporarily retained as evidence. Neither their dates nor anything about their appearance, however, provided any useful clue. Nearly two hundred were collected, which already added up to a thousand francs of expense simply for those objects.

  The texts distributed by post, impossible to number precisely, but which tallied more than two thousand, had cost, even at the cheapest rate, more than two hundred francs, not counting the registration charge on fifty letters. All the inquiries made at the post office revealed was that they had been handed in at the counter by an individual whom no employee had thought of looking at or remembering the face. He had given the name “Nagrien,” recognized as fictitious, and a similarly false address.

  It was observed that the broken windows had been produced in quarters very distant from one another, if not simultaneously, but at moments too close together for the conclusion of a great number of distributors not to be drawn—at least fifty and perhaps more than a hundred, independently of those, more numerous still, who had spread the documents everywhere. It was in vain that the autographic characters, the writing on the envelopes received by post, the paper employed, and the ropes and pieces of string attached to the obelisk were subjected to expert analysis. Inquires made of sellers of paper, rope and birdcages did not produce any results.

  The declarations of certain people, of whom there had been loud discussions, and who had claimed to see more than others, were written down with the utmost care. To begin with, there were six young women who had eaten supper together and played cards after leaving a theater, and in the home of one of them: a rather small room on the fourth floor. At about three a.m., someone had opened a window to renew the air, saturated as it was with tobacco smoke. A moment later, a handful of the pieces of paper had been thrown into the room from outside via that window. They had not been able to see anything outside, except that one of them thought she had made out a black form slipping behind a chimneystack on the roof of the house opposite. All the inhabitants of the house opposite were questioned carefully, but they had been unable to offer any useful revelation, except that the following day, one of them had found a few copies in the fireplaces of his apartment.

  In another quarter, there was a physician whom someone had come to fetch during the night to attend to someone who was ill. A precious hazard had determined that his domestic servant, holding a candle, had opened the door of his master’s room at the exact moment when a windowpane was noisily broken. The physician and the manservant affirmed very categorically that, between the little curtains of the glass panel fitted into the door that had just been opened, they had seen a hand wearing an extremely thick glove, like those of which one makes use for fencing, break the pane, drop an object onto the carpet, and disappear. They had not been able to see anything at all outside.

  Two other people, a husband and wife, on waking up at the moment when a pane on their bedroom window had been broken, said that they, too, had seen the gloved hand, albeit rather vaguely, thanks to the light projected by a gas jet in the street.

  Needless to say, a large number of other depositions were collected, but it was impossible to arrest anyone on suspicion of being an accomplice or for having any participation whatsoever in the event. All those momentarily suspected justified themselves in the most triumphant fashion, and their pursuit had to be renounced.

  The conclusions that the Prefect of Police drew on the one hand and the examining magistrate on the other from their research were that nothing could be affirmed regarding the nature or objective of the distribution, but that the purpose was evidently serious, and that there were no grounds for thinking that it was merely a trick, the distributors having been too numerous, having gone to so much trouble and having given evidence of an extraordinary skill; the secret had been too well guarded! As for the explanation of the means involved, it was recognized that it was impossible to determine, for the moment. It would probably be discovered later, but it was urgently necessary to be ready for anything.

  All of that had an effect on the public. It was known that there had been an investigation, in the course of which numerous witnesses had been heard. The general incredulity was shaken somewhat.

  The newspapers had reported and commented on these events, each in its own way. On the first day, there were simple news items about the distribution, which was presented as something rather bizarre, but devoid of any particular importance, every reporter applying himself to warning his readers against the exaggerations and fables with which the stories, audible here and there, seemed to be mingled. The following day, however, those stories had multiplied to the point at which it was necessary to give a few details. The text itself was reproduced by all the newspapers. Each one accompanied it with its commentary, generally dictated by a perfect skepticism. They might perhaps have paid no further heed to the story after a few days if one of them had not decided to take the matter seriously, thus provoking unanimous laughter.

  The naïve periodical in question was the Universel. On the fourth day it published a long article in which it first enumerated all the circumstances, a number of which were inexplicable, that seemed well established. It reasoned from that to the effect that the people capable of having accomplished the feat could not be vulgar hoaxers or charlatans, and that it would be more intelligent, if
not to believe blindly in the discovery, at least to wait until after June the first before denying it categorically. Its writer admitted that, so far as he was concerned, he was more inclined to belief than doubt. He even risked a hypothesis; it seemed probable to him that a method had been discovered of steering balloons. The nocturnal distributors were, according to all appearances, aeronauts trained and indoctrinated by the inventor. And who could tell whether hundreds of balloons might not be seen in the first of June, traveling over Paris, obedient to all the impulsions given to them by conductors manning their nacelles.

  The Universel was attacked with fewer good reasons than sarcasms. Hardly anyone deigned to observe that an invention of the kind suggested, necessitating a multitude of trials, could not remain so profoundly unknown. One could not imagine less than three hundred distributers; how could it be admitted that three hundred dirigible balloons had been manufactured without anyone suspecting it, that they could have been inflated in advance—a long operation requiring the employment of numerous personnel—and then accomplish their progressions over Paris during a single night without a single person perceiving even one of them? Besides which, had it not been scientifically demonstrated that the dirigible airship was a pure chimera, for want of being able to find sufficient resistance in the air and by virtue of the necessity of giving the balloons dimensions out of all proportion to the force of any possible aerial motor? All of that was said incidentally in endless epigrams.