The Revolt of the Machines

by Brian Stableford

  Raising my voice in order to be better heard, I read my speech in an authoritative, almost aggressive tone, proclaiming the total power of thought liberated from shackles, of human sensibility capable of objectifying itself indefinitely throughout the extent of its domain.

  My confidence made my success. When the dinner finished, I was introduced to the Minister, to all sorts of illustrious individuals who wanted to talk to me. I rediscovered comrades lost to sight, who resumed addressing me as tu after having avoided me for years. Finally, Puymaigre, the surgeon, and the physicist Denoysel each took me by one arm and, to my misfortune, never let go.

  Puymaigre recalled childhood memories. He’s a solid fellow, whose salt-and-pepper hair and beard frame a face that remains youthful and quite attractive. Women go crazy for him, and he returns the compliment.

  “Let’s see,” he said, suddenly, “what are you doing? This little feast was charming, but it’s over. The Minister has gone—flown. I’m taking you away.”

  To tell the truth, in a moment of lucidity, I took account of the fact that I was doing something stupid, but as I’ve said, I’d been a trifle overexcited even before the dinner began—and then, that contact with illustrious men, those eminent individuals who were treating me with familiarity…how could I resist?”

  I went with my two acolytes.

  Where? That remains unimportant, with regard to the situation and identity of the minor players. I’ll get straight to the key fact of the adventure, which is fatally connected with the ensemble of facts whose impartial exposition I’m undertaking here.

  It was nearly two o’clock when I got home, no longer drunk but utterly dazed by fatigue and remorse.

  The bedroom was empty; the bed where I expected to find Madame Forbe was empty, the sheets thrown back over the foot. Approaching the little table where my wife places her watch every evening, along with a box of pastilles and her handkerchief, I perceived a letter in an envelope, addressed to me in my wife’s handwriting. I opened it, and read this:

  I know where you’re coming from. Minute by minute, the strange power that we’ve possessed for some little time has permitted me to follow you in the slightest circumstances over these two hours that you’ve forced me to live in your abominable company.

  If those are the intimacies that are necessary to you, go in search of them where I won’t surprise you.

  For myself, I’m renouncing following you any longer in such milieux. For this evening, I’ve locked myself in my son’s room, with whom I shall leave tomorrow. I’ll take refuge with my mother, whom you have, it seems, thrown out of our house the other day.

  Adieu.

  It was signed.

  I folded the letter up mechanically and put it back where I had found it.

  “Bah!” I said to reassure myself. “After all, the night brings counsel, and since she hasn’t left yet….”

  And I went to bed, where, succumbing to gross fatigue, I fell heavily asleep almost immediately.

  The next day, I woke up late. The cook told me that Madame Forbe had left at seven o’clock in the morning.

  Obviously, that story was a trifle grotesque, but I suffered from it nonetheless, and I recalled Grandmaison’s prediction.

  It’s the end of private life.

  X

  Further Extracts from Dr. Forbe’s Journal

  26 July

  At any rate, my case isn’t unique, and one hears nothing but talk of quarrels, family disputes and intimacies disrupted by unexpected revelations. There are no more walls; one can see and hear the most delicate of life’s situations at any hour. From Cherbourg to Bordeaux, from Lille to Angoulême and Brest, France is squabbling, sulking, divorcing.

  28 July

  We physicians are often accused of being insensible to human suffering. The reproach is more or less justified by the habit we have of chasing away the image of one malady by contact with another. In any case, once upon a time, on going home, a practitioner retained the prerogative of no longer thinking about the suffering that he had passed in review during the day.

  It’s no longer the same today, and I’m beginning to be perpetually accompanied by the mournful troop of all those who require my care. Their images form a cortege for me and their exhausted lamentations obsess me.

  “I’m in pain, Doctor.”

  “Cure me.”

  The imagination, the fatal power of certain invalids, and now the lot of them all, exhausts and overloads my sensibility, once so self-sufficient. And what can I say to those living shadows that surround me and plead with me at every hour of the day and night? I remain silent and terrified in the midst of so many images of human suffering.

  Last night I witnessed, impotent and full of horror, the death-throes of two of those creatures irredeemably condemned for weeks. At their bedside, in front of their complicit family members, I had the courage to lie to them, to hold out the alluring hope of a cure; in the presence of those images tottering on the edge of the grave, I can only remain mute, scarcely holding back compassionate tears.

  An unfortunate woman of thirty-two, devoured by a cancer, and a child of seventeen eaten away by consumption—I’ve been unable to chase away their appearances, which seek me out alternately to implore me and abuse me.

  “You’ve deceived me! You lied! You lied!”

  “I don’t want to die!” cried the faint voice of the debilitated specter of the child. “After all, there must be a means of curing me! You don’t want to! Oh, you don’t want to!”

  Seeing their images disappearing progressively at the foot of my bed, I understood at first light that the movement of life had ceased to animate their poor bodies.

  Only then could I get to sleep.

  Isn’t that horrible?

  30 July

  Several days ago, disquieting rumors began to circulate, and now, all of a sudden, they’ve taken on a consistency that scarcely anyone expected.

  They’re to do with tension in relations between Germany and the United States, on the subject of the Venezuelan customs and excise, over which Emperor Wilhelm II exerts, as a guarantee of certain unpaid debts, a pitiless control. The United States government considers that control to have been a trifle prolonged.

  Amicable observations might have been sufficient; its seems that Germany has reacted badly to them; on the other hand, public opinion, so ubiquitous today, obscures the tone of diplomacy, and thanks to the fatal current that puts them in constant communication, the two peoples on either continent express themselves in manifestations whose effect is difficult for the official press to offset.

  Grandmaison was not wrong to fear that the press is increasingly being displaced by direct communication.

  Gangs of jingoists have been seen, it’s said, in Berlin, marching along Broadway singing Yankee Doodle and proffering unbenevolent acclamations with regard to the personality of the German Emperor.

  Such incidents, when read, can be denied; seeing and hearing them seems more dangerous.

  31 July

  Demonstrations are continuing in Berlin and New York, Washington and Hamburg.

  An implacably pure sky and Genoese heat still seem to be favoring the extension of the sympathetic current, which is becoming magnified—the greatest evil possible in the circumstances, for no one anticipates that things will stop, when the moment comes that the streets overlap and Broadway can come into violent conflict with Unterlinden.

  Will what Joseph de Maistre has said about war be realized?30 Will peoples force the hands of governments? For some years, Germany has been building beautiful battleships; the American navy is still full of pride at the memory of the war in Cuba; the ships will end up setting sail of their own accord.

  2 August

  Now something has happened that is scarcely credible, and which, in its details and its probable consequences, takes us back several centuries. To tell the truth, I don’t know of any witness to it, but it’s being recounted with forceful guarantees of exactitude. It�
�s a matter of nothing less than an altercation between the German Emperor and the President of the United States of America.

  The adventure, impossible three months ago, occurred yesterday evening at about six o’clock in the Royal Palace in Berlin, in the Imperial Cabinet. The Emperor, it appears, was in the process of assessing in very sharp terms the exclusivist doctrines in usage of the other side of the Atlantic, when the image of Mr. Roosevelt suddenly appeared, sitting in an armchair, his gaitered legs crossed, slapping the toes of his boots with a riding crop. Standing facing him, a secretary was listening to him speak, and the sound of their conversation was sufficiently distinct for the Emperor not to miss a single word; his person, simultaneously violent and ungraspable, made that very obvious.

  It seems certain that the surprise of the two intimates was far from being favorable to the cause of peace, since, two minutes later, the two Heads of State were standing face to face, exchanging appreciations like the humblest street porters in Berlin or Brooklyn, the excessive severity of which is only explicable by a nervousness that exaggerated the temperature and nature of communications; words were produced compared with which the “Comediante” applied by Pius VII to Napoléon would have appeared flattering to Bonaparte.31

  All this, although unofficial, seems to be too well known for ominous results not to be dreaded. A certain luster has returned to diplomacy, whose intermediacy does not seem devoid of utility.

  7 August

  What was bound to happen has arrived. After several days of violence, the misunderstanding was transformed into an altercation, to finish in a conflict, and it is not one of the least disconcerting consequences of this mental union of human beings that a war is about to renew before our eyes the recent horrors of the Russo-Japanese conflagration.

  Because of the dementia of their leaders, because of their nervous susceptibility, the Germans and the Americans are ready to go to war.

  The order for mobilization has been given to the German fleet; for its own part, America had ordered the conjunction of the Pacific squadron with that of the Atlantic, and the stupefied world is getting ready to follow the movements of the unprecedented battle that is in preparation.

  XI

  On the seventh of August, at eight o’clock in the evening, the German squadron, consisting of eight battleships and four cruisers, left Kiel under the command of Prince Henry.32 The semaphore on the Isle of Wight was the first to signal its passage on the morning of the ninth.

  It soon entered the zone of telepathic influence, and, at many points, its movements became visible at a distance: an entirely new spectacle, replete in unprecedented emotions, impassioned the masses poorly familiarized by the cinematograph with naval maneuvers. It was not a matter of a parade, however, and, because the objective of the mission could not be anything but a veritable battle, curiosity was even more intense.

  At first restricted to those more perspicacious or more carried away by passion or the preliminary documentation, the perception of these exceptional images always tended toward generalization. Imagine the spectacle of Paris during those feverish days! Stopped in plain sight, staring into space or in front of them, those who were the first beneficiaries of the extraordinary spectacle described to the less privileged the phases of the German fleet’s progress, reciting the names of the ships, the type and their appearance.

  It was thus that the five days necessary for Prince Henry’s squadron to travel the 2,500 miles separating the strait of Calais from Cape Race to the southeast of Newfoundland, in the direction of which it disappeared on the evening of the fourteenth, emerged from the telepathic wave. Then, the general curiosity, overexcited, reverted to the American squadron, which was beginning to appear.

  The American fleet, which was on maneuvers in the vicinity of the Antilles in the Florida canal received orders on the ninth of August to rally at the arsenal of Norfolk in Chesapeake Bay, where it would need more than twenty-four hours to take on supplies. It took to the sea on the morning of the twelfth and thus entered the current of the wave, where all its movements became visible to us.

  Admiral Dewey,33 who was in overall command, had attached his flag to the Maine. His objective seemed to be to sail along the coast while awaiting the arrival of Prince Henry; unfortunately, a sudden thick fog made the disposition of the ships difficult, interrupting communications, which were reduced to wireless telegraphy, telepathic communication having been deemed unreliable because of its character of excessive accessibility. The result was that the fleet was not completely ready; on the fifteenth, at about midnight, it was visible that the two divisions of battleships were separated.

  It appears that at that moment, Admiral Dewey, by means of the Marconi apparatus, attempted to rally the fleet to his course, and, shortly afterwards, saw ships appearing to the north, which he recognized at daybreak as the German squadron.

  An unfortunate current had permitted Prince Henry to pick up the American admiral’s orders on his own wireless telegraph apparatus; leaving four cruisers on surveillance in the west, he had set a southward course with the two divisions of battleships disposed in single file, hoping to annihilate the important faction of the American fleet that hazard had delivered to his superior forces without delay.

  The first cannon shot was fired shortly after midday by the Kaiser Wilhelm II, bearing the flag of the Prince-Admiral. At that moment the two fleets were five thousand meters apart.

  After an artillery duel lasting half an hour, the smoke of which was beginning to make it less easy for us to see the ships, we saw the Kentucky, hit by two shells from the big German guns, lose speed, listing badly to starboard. The Kearsarge, which was following her, was obliged to change course in order to avoid a collision, and in the course of that maneuver found herself isolated from the others by virtue of an abrupt change of direction by the German second armored division, which opened a murderous fire on the American ship. In a matter of minutes, the colossus, riddled by shellfire, was listing badly and, her poop rising upwards after the fashion of a diving swan, she plunged into the waves and disappeared.

  A cry, a wild clamor compounded by more than two million gasps, rose up in Paris, terrified by the incident—and that cry soon turned into a thousand dolorous rumors at the sight of a multitude of little black patches that were dancing on the waves raised up around the swirling gulf into which the gigantic ship had just sunk. Those little black dots were the men of the crew, who were attempting to swim away, struggling against debris of every sort that was floating around them, falling back on their heads, crushing and stunning them. Some tried to capture items that might be used as buoys, while others tried to tear them away from them in order to cling onto the buoys and save themselves—and those men, who were drowning, started killing one another in order to defend their own lives. They ended up disappearing from our sight.

  We could no longer see anything more than a fog in the midst of which sudden red tints incessantly specified resounding explosions. That lasted a few minutes; then, gradually, the forms of a few ships hit by gunfire emerged from the confusion, which were lagging behind the pursuit like wounded birds constrained to abandon flight.

  On the German side, the Wittelsbach, the Mecklenburg and the Zähringen, their turrets broken or their propeller-shafts damaged, stopped along with the cruiser Friedrich Karl and floated without responding to the fire of the battle, implying that their crews had suffered considerable losses and their artillery had been destroyed.

  The rest of the fleet seemed to take heart and to thunder forth on their behalf. Who among us had ever supposed that such a sequence, such a chorus of cannon fire, was possible? How can the increasing emotion of the crowds hypnotized by the spectacle from one end of Paris to the other be described? We stood still, open-mouthed, our eyes widened by terror and anguish.

  In that fashion we watched the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, the Maryland and the Fürst Bismarck disappear, the last-named taking with it the Montana, pierced amidships at right ang
les by her spur. Already, in the presence of that furious massacre, our curiosity was giving way to indignation, while, leaving behind them the floating debris and the carcasses of abandoned wreckage, the two fleets reduced their fire in order to flee eastwards, where the second division of Dewey’s squadron suddenly confronted the German squadron and aligned for pursuit. Before falling upon each other, the two enemies seemed to be challenging one another in silent meditation.

  And that silence, succeeding the racket of so many cannon-shots and murderous explosions, providing a prelude to the final impact that was about to complete the annihilation of so many poor men alive and alert a short while before, was even more terrible than the noise of the powder and the shells. At the thought that that minute of respite was the last that those creatures, maddened by the demon of destruction, had to live, an immense horror, rippling along the boulevards, through the streets, over the squares, the balconies, and the roofs of the houses, stirred the terrified and sickened crowds that was, from so very far away, suspended in anticipation by that unique spectacle.

  It was too much for the nerves of the public, interested at first, then anguished, and finally terrorized, who, instinctively, attempted by means of supplications to put an end to the destructive fury of the combatants who had escaped the massacre. Millions of cries rolled in echoes around me:

  “Mercy!”

  “Enough!”

  “Enough!”

  A puerile and touching imploration. Extended hands, eyes full of tears, and menacing fists abused, insulted, and begged the invisible adversaries huddled in the hollows of the ironclad vessels. Did they hear that supreme appeal of reason and unity? Did the feeble sound of our voices reach as far as the men whom the genius of destruction had driven insane?