The Return of the Discontinued Man

by Mark Hodder

  She displayed the gap in her teeth. “We’ve already done it. Look, you see? We’re at the museum.”

  Burton heard Swinburne’s voice. “My hat! Where’s a good peasouper when you need one? My eyes are too full. Look at all these people. How did the city become so overcrowded?”

  Algernon. And Daniel Gooch. Mick Farren, too.

  The latter shook his head at Burton. “It’s doing my head in, man. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you.”

  The king’s agent straightened and squared his shoulders. “I’m quite all right, Mr. Farren. Quite all right. Shall we proceed?”

  “Yes!” Swinburne and Gooch pleaded in unison.

  Lorena Brabrooke led them up the museum’s steps and into the entrance hall. It was like reliving the scene they’d earlier viewed on her Turing—an eerie repetition—and it continued as they ascended the stairs and navigated through corridors toward the Isambard Kingdom Brunel display.

  And there he was.

  The great engineer.

  The brass man.

  Suddenly, Burton felt perfectly fine.

  It was a winter Tuesday, and early in the morning, so there were few other people around, and none near this particular exhibit.

  Burton, Swinburne and Gooch stood and gazed at their old friend. Acting on an instinctive respect, Farren and Brabrooke withdrew a little.

  Brunel, kneeling on one knee, was posed on a plinth in such a manner as to appear deep in contemplation. His hulking body was clean, polished, and glinting beneath a spotlight, which threw the eye sockets of his mask into deep shadow, serving to emphasise his stillness, as if his mind was so far withdrawn that a void had taken its place.

  The big Gatling gun was raised up.

  Tools extended from his wrists and fingers.

  One of his arms ended in a stump.

  He was just as he’d been a hundred and sixty-two years ago.

  Brunel! The man around whom a cult of science and engineering had grown; the man they called “the Empire Builder,” who upon receiving hints of future technologies had used his boundless imagination and the materials of his era to reproduce ingenious approximations of them, transforming the civilised world, initiating the Great Age of Steam.

  “He’s regarded as a national treasure,” Lorena Brabrooke said.

  Burton glanced back at her. “The Anglo-Saxon Empire wouldn’t have existed without him, Miss Brabrooke. He was there at its inception, fighting alongside us to prevent the sabotage of the alliance between Britain and the Central German Confederation.”

  She nodded, her eyes fixed on the exhibit.

  The king’s agent stepped closer to the plinth. He leaned forward and peered up into Brunel’s eyes.

  “Hello, my friend. It’s been quite some time.”

  Nothing.

  Swinburne asked, “Shall I kick him?”

  Farren whispered, “Look to your right.”

  The poet did so. Burton followed his gaze. On the other side of the large chamber, a constable was standing guard beside a door, its hands clasped behind its back, its small glittering black eyes upon the visitors. The pig creature was identical to the ones they’d seen in 1968, except that its stilted uniform was white.

  They hastily turned their faces away from it.

  Swinburne mumbled, “All right. No kicking.”

  Brabrooke said, “Try again, Sir Richard.”

  Conscious of the guard’s scrutiny, Burton kept his voice low. “Isambard, do you recognise me? It’s Burton. I’m here with Algernon Swinburne and Daniel Gooch. You remember Gooch, don’t you? All those projects you worked on together? The transatlantic liners? The atmospheric railways? Hydroham City? By heavens, man, he built your body!”

  Gooch moved to Burton’s side. “Mr. Brunel, what happened to you? Won’t you speak? We’ve come a long way to see you. Do you know what year it is? 2022!”

  “Babbage helped us,” Burton went on. “He designed a Nimtz generator. It allows the Orpheus to travel in time. What an undertaking that project was! The whole of the Department of Guided Science was given over to the job. All of your people laboured on it night and day, every man and every woman; that’s the measure of their loyalty to you, old man.”

  Brunel didn’t respond, didn’t move. Not even a click emerged from him.

  Swinburne pushed between them, stood on tiptoe, reached up, and snapped his fingers inches from the brass face. “Wake up, you confounded lazybones!” he demanded. “Get off your metal arse. We need your help.”

  The chamber suddenly echoed with the tock tock tock of stilts as the guard crossed it.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Lorena Brabrooke said. Under her breath, she continued, “Just follow its orders and, without incriminating yourselves, agree with whatever it says. Be careful.”

  As the pig man drew closer, Burton whispered, “Behave, Algy.”

  The constable stopped in front of them and snarled, “Don’t touch the exhibit.”

  “I didn’t,” Swinburne objected. “I was just seeing how my hand reflected in its face.”

  “T-bands,” the pig said. “All of you.”

  Lorena Brabrooke stretched out her arm, showing the bracelet. Burton, Swinburne, Gooch and Farren followed her lead.

  The guard reached out and knocked his own bracelet against theirs, one after the other.

  “Jeremy Swinburne,” he stated. “Scriptwriter. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

  “Um. Yes,” Swinburne agreed.

  “Richard Burton. Actor. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

  “Yes,” Burton said.

  “Daniel Gooch. Director. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Michael Farren. Producer. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

  Farren coughed. “Yeah.”

  “Lorena Brabrooke. Production Assistant. Bendyshe Entertainments.”

  “Yes, sir. We’re doing the initial research for a docudrama about Isambard Kingdom Brunel. We have to study him closely, but we won’t interfere with the display.”

  The guard wrinkled its snout. “Shut up. I’m doing a background check.” Its beadlike eyes focused inward for a couple of seconds. “All right. You’re clear. Continue. Don’t touch.”

  It turned and stalked back to its post. Tock tock tock.

  “Phew!” Swinburne said. “What a perfectly dreadful brute.” He addressed Brabrooke. “Bendyshe Entertainments? We’re doing what with the what for the what?”

  “Never mind,” she said. “It’s all a fiction.” She frowned at Burton, who was staring wide-eyed at Brunel. “Sir Richard?”

  He didn’t reply.

  She touched his arm. “Sir Richard?”

  “It’s really over,” Burton murmured. “My world. The time I inhabited. He built it and now it’s all ended.”

  They considered Brunel.

  “A brief span and then we are gone,” Burton said. “Time is cruel.” He straightened and sighed. “I thought he, of all of us, would live forever.”

  They remained in the museum for a further thirty minutes, standing close to Brunel, discussing his many projects and the people he’d known, hoping that Gooch was wrong and a spark of life remained, that the reminiscing would sink into the engineer and hook a memory, something to bring him out of his long, long fugue.

  It didn’t work, and when the guard showed signs of renewed suspicion, they gave up.

  Led by Brabrooke, the chrononauts left the exhibition hall.

  Behind them, Brunel remained silent and frozen.

  When Burton glanced back before passing through a doorway, it was from such an angle that, due to the spotlight reflecting into the engineer’s shadowed eye sockets, it almost appeared as if two little glowing pupils were watching them depart.

  An illusion.

  Isambard Kingdom Brunel was dead.

  “What’s your opinion, Sadhvi?” Burton asked.

  The king’s agent was sitting in the lounge of the Orpheus with Raghavendra, Swinburne, Gooch,
Trounce, Krishnamurthy, Lawless, Wells, Farren, and the Cannibals—Patricia Honesty, Marianne Smith and Lorena Brabrooke.

  “Daniel was worst affected,” Raghavendra said. “You, Richard, considerably less so, while Algy and Mick were dazed but remained coherent.” She patted Swinburne’s knee. “Our resident poet appears to have a strong resistance to what Mr. Wells has dubbed time shock.”

  Wells said, “I compare it to the disorientation one experiences when travelling in an exotic culture, but it’s far more pernicious.”

  Raghavendra said to Burton, “Your history as an explorer has given you a degree of resilience—”

  “Not enough,” he interrupted. “I don’t recall a damned thing about our return from the museum.”

  “Whereas Mick,” she pressed on, “is only fifty-four years ahead of his native time period, so 2022 feels a little more familiar to him.”

  Farren blew cigarette smoke out through his nostrils, obviously not in full agreement.

  “On this occasion, poor Daniel bore the brunt,” Raghavendra said.

  Trounce looked across to Gooch and muttered, “And I know exactly how you felt.”

  Gooch compressed his lips, nodded at the detective inspector, and asked Raghavendra, “What makes Algernon more resilient, do you think?”

  “He has a unique brain,” she responded. “He’s extremely odd.”

  “Steady on!” the poet squealed. He jerked his leg, convulsed an elbow, and crossed his eyes.

  “It’s apparent to us all,” Burton observed, “that his brain is arranged in a different manner to the normal.”

  “Disarranged, I should say,” Trounce muttered.

  “I say! Let’s settle with unique, shall we?”

  Burton continued, “My fear is that, for the rest of us, the effects are liable to get worse and the recovery time—providing we can recover—considerably extended. On this occasion, it’s taken five days for us to properly regain our faculties. We’ve been safe enough, cooped up aboard this Concorde, hidden away in Bendyshe Bay—but what will we find at our next stop? What if the bay no longer belongs to the Cannibal Club?”

  “The groundwork laid by your brother and Thomas Bendyshe back in the 1860s was pure genius,” Patricia Honesty said. “It’s endured all this time, and, with each successive generation, the Bendyshes have developed it and adjusted it to suit the period. I’m pretty certain the bay will stay in our hands, and if it doesn’t, the Cannibals will have plenty of time to find another means to keep you safe.”

  “Be that as it may, we need our wits about us, and we’ve come to the point where the doses of Saltzmann’s required to counter the time shock are almost as ruinous as the condition itself. The bottles delivered in the Beetle’s final shipment aren’t nearly as addictive as those that preceded them, but we still have to be cautious with the medicine.”

  “Ha!” Swinburne cried out. “You’ve changed your tune.”

  Sadhvi Raghavendra nodded her agreement.

  “Nevertheless,” Burton said.

  “We’re not even halfway through our voyage,” Trounce observed. “How are we to endure the rest?”

  “Nine years away from the halfway mark,” Krishnamurthy added. “A hundred and eighty years until 2202, and I doubt our stay there will be brief.”

  “Give me a bottle of the tincture,” Patricia Honesty interrupted. “I should have thought of this before. Chemistry has advanced. We’ll analyse it. Reproduce it. Or something similar.”

  Her daughter gave a gesture of approval. “In the space of fifty-four years, we’ll probably create something considerably more effective and without any addictive qualities.”

  “You’ll have twice as long,” Burton said. “I intend just one more stop before our target date. If Spring Heeled Jack has integrated himself with this Turing Fulcrum of yours, he has power over a considerable portion of the world. Let’s see what he makes of it by 2130. Will one of your number join us?”

  “Not this time,” Patricia Honesty said. She handed him The History of the Future, volume three. “We haven’t the personnel to spare. Besides, there’s a little something we’ve been experimenting with that makes it unnecessary for us to supplement your crew. Hopefully, you’ll see what I mean a hundred and eight years from now.”

  A little over a century later, the chrononauts gathered by the ship’s hatch and welcomed a single Cannibal aboard. His name was Thomas Bendyshe.

  “You’re the spitting image of your ancestor!” Burton exclaimed as he shook the man’s hand.

  “Hallo!” Bendyshe said. “I’m a great deal of him, but explanations must wait until later. First, let’s replace your bracelets and transfer you to the new Orpheus.”

  Though he didn’t appear to do anything to prompt it, the bands around the chrononauts’ wrists instantly snapped open and slid down to their knuckles. Bendyshe collected the bracelets and put them into a cloth bag. Setting this aside, he then took a small container of pills from his pocket and distributed them among the chrononauts, two each, a blue one and a yellow one. “Swallow. They’ll release AugMems, CellComps, BioProcs and other nanomechs into your bloodstream.”

  From his visions of Edward Oxford, Burton vaguely comprehended these terms. He knew that AugMems were capable of overlaying a man’s perception of reality with an artifice. Oxford had used them in his suit’s helmet, so when he arrived in 1840 to observe the attempt on Queen Victoria’s life, it would initially resemble his own time. He’d planned to slowly reduce the AugMems’ influence, revealing the reality of the past little by little. In the event, he’d acted too eagerly, removing his headpiece moments after his arrival, exposing himself to the past all at once. Burton was sure the resultant shock played its part in Oxford’s subsequent decision to interfere with his ancestor’s assassination attempt.

  “Nanomechs,” he said, testing the word. Its meaning played at the peripheries of his mind; Oxford’s knowledge, not his own.

  “Molecular-sized technology,” Bendyshe said, “blending biological and artificial components.”

  “By Jove!” Trounce muttered in a sarcastic tone. “I’m glad you’ve cleared that up.”

  “Are they safe?” Herbert Wells—now fully recovered—asked.

  “Perfectly,” Bendyshe responded. “They’ll integrate without any ill effects. They’ll carry your false identities, in case the authorities check, and will also enhance your senses.”

  “I’m in,” Mick Farren announced. He swallowed the pills.

  “Ah yes, the 1960s,” Bendyshe said. He laughed. “I’m afraid they’re not recreational pharmaceuticals, Mr. Farren.”

  “No? Enhance in what way, then?”

  “They’ll show you whatever the government wants you to see.”

  Farren made a noise as if choking and stuck out his tongue, trying to regurgitate the pills. He spat an epithet that caused Sadhvi Raghavendra’s eyes to widen. “Now you bloody well tell me!”

  “Mr. Farren, your misgivings are entirely justified,” Bendyshe said. “Fortunately, we Cannibals have developed a means to intercede with the nanomechs’ functioning and turn them to our advantage. Provided you behave normally, nothing about you will raise suspicion. In addition, you’ll not register on any surveillance net, your movements will be cloaked, and communications between us will evade all monitoring.”

  “That,” Farren replied, “I like.”

  “Providing we behave normally,” Swinburne echoed doubtfully.

  “Algy has a point,” Burton said. “To us, what you might regard as normal becomes ever more abnormal the farther forward into history we travel. There is also the matter of our behaviour being affected by the environment. Will the AugMems cause us to perceive this future world as a copy of our own? Do they render Saltzmann’s Tincture unnecessary?”

  “No, Sir Richard, there’s a very good reason why they can’t give you an illusion of 1860s London. You’ll understand why later. However, there’s a compound in the yellow pill that’ll act much like Saltzma
nn’s, only without the side effects. You’ll need to take one every twenty-fours hours. I’ll leave you with a supply.”

  “Then Patricia Honesty was true to her word,” Burton noted.

  “She was always the most reliable of us,” Farren murmured. A strange expression crossed his face. Burton sympathised. It was difficult to process the notion that people who were alive yesterday were now long gone.

  “If you all follow my lead,” Bendyshe said, “you’ll be fine.”

  Sadhvi Raghavendra sighed. “I’m not wildly enthused by the prospect, gentlemen, but nothing ventured—” She swallowed the pills. Her colleagues followed suit.

  Bendyshe stepped back to the hatch. He signalled to a group waiting outside the Concorde. They responded by ascending the stairs, entering the ship, and silently filing past the chrononauts.

  “My team will carry your luggage to the new ship before transplanting the Nimtz generator and the babbage. Captain Lawless, Mr. Gooch, Mr. Krishnamurthy, will you assist with the engineering?”

  “Of course,” Lawless said. “We’re becoming rather adept at it.”

  “For the rest of you, it’s off to London we go.”

  “Our third visit to the capital of the future,” Burton commented. “What shall we find there this time?”

  “You’ll see indisputable evidence that Spring Heeled Jack is manipulating history. It will, I hope, give you some idea of what you’ll face when you reach 2202. As for whether it’s safe or not, we’ve done everything we can to disguise your presence. You should be able to move around freely and undisturbed. I do urge you, though, to watch your words in any circumstance where you might be overheard. Information is currency, and informers are everywhere.”

  Burton gestured for Bendyshe to proceed. The Cannibal led them outside. It was an overcast night, and Bendyshe Bay was ill lit. They could see nothing beyond the field in which the Concorde had landed, though, in truth, they didn’t try, for their eyes were fixed in incredulity upon the two flying vessels beside which their own had landed.

  “Rotorships!” Captain Lawless exclaimed.

  Bendyshe pointed to the vessel on their left. “The Orpheus.”