The Heart is a Void: Ashes to Ashes

The group immediately clustered around Deep Afterglow, surprised at how much the automaton's head resembled a human's. Its metallic head was softened by a coating of something like clay, which was formed on the right side into the likeness of a pale beige human face. The face looked almost hopeful or awed, with its painted eye widened and its chin dropping slightly. Unlike the others, its posture sagged slightly, making the large cape on its back droop convincingly onto the ground. It was also more mobile, and as it wrote its upper body would occasionally shift slightly.

It was sat to the left of the room. As they approached, they soon noticed that the left side of its face was clearly made of an array of silver metal with no pretensions to being skin, as if its face had melted away on that side to reveal a machine.

"Why the uneven face?" Danemy asked.

"We based it on the creator's face," Sharak said calmly. "But we could only see half of that, because the rest had burnt off."

"It's appropriate," Crucis said. "People try to get blood from a stone or emotion from a written page, and this maudlin sheen falls away like the day - like, um, Polonius falls down heavily beside an arras, just like if one pronounced 'arras' with a sharp falling intonation it would sound like 'arse.'"

"An appropriate analogy, since the face's owner is also dead. But almost macabre."

"It's ubac, because I am a machine. And a good thing too. What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets."

"Sadly, you're not, or we'd be pleased to keep you here. But still, try to tone down the macabre, in order not to disturb your genteel audience," Fahiz said facetiously, gesturing towards Sharak on saying 'audience.'

"That would be enough to disturb them? Just wait till they see my Protocols - but I digress. Instead of conspiring as to disturbing the Gentiles — as one myself, I should not like to be so disturbed — would you mind explaining why Endymion here has a helmet? Is it eager for a fight?"

He pointed to the automaton on Afterglow's right, which had a helmet on its head and wore a long, white kurta with the word 'Endymion' in deep black on the back of its collar. It was a strange sight, like a Western medieval knight wearing a kurta. This was compounded by its choice of footwear: sandals.

"Good question," Fahiz replied. "Maybe call it names, and we'll find out."

"There might be an easier way. Does he have a sister named Ophelia, who happens to be dead?"

"Admittedly, there are few people named Ophelia and still living. But he has no sister, so you'll have to resort to a string of insults."

"I see. What kind of insults? Would some sort of freestyle rap work? I hear that aggressive raps are almost guaranteed to start fights, and that's why gang culture is so violent in some neighbourhoods. Gang violence is due primarily to cultural and economic factors, especially rap music. Therefore, a peaceful, conclusive solution to it is to abolish flow and rhythm."

"I mean, you'd still have Kanye West's rap, after that," Danemy said.

"I mean, nobody's likely committing murder over a Kanye West song, so he had to resort to dramatic interviews to bolster the attempt. It's not easy to be street. Being real isn't like graduation, bro. It's - honestly, I don't listen to much rap music, so I couldn't tell you. Honestly, as a non-rapper, my grip on reality is so tenuous that sometimes I wonder if I'm a fiction. But perhaps it's not so bad, perhaps I'm just truth wearing a mask? Sometimes we are all Pilates."

"The automatons aren't fond of 'rap,' but they'll typically ignore it," Sharak said. "Maybe Afterglow will occasionally go on a rant about the 'rap singers,' like, 'The rap singers, you've seen 'em, they stole your bicycle, they ran off and, worst part, they escaped on a skateboard.' But he's a miserable git sometimes."

"Alright, a pity." Crucis looked over to the far right of the table, where he saw a beaked automaton dressed in black and white robes, with a black turban. "Which one is that?"

"Ibis," Sharak answered. "It is mostly used for miscellany, it gathers and organises knowledge very well. It is also adept at giving formatted information. We've found it quite useful."

"Does it write poems or stories as well?"

"Yes, it reflects them if asked," Fahiz said. "But in a strange way, like the moon reflected in a pond of epilepsy-unfriendly fishes. I tell Sharak that we just need to find it a task that's avant-garde enough, but currently it's too busy getting information about recent happenings in Kruxol."

"If it 'reflects' things," DicingDevil asked, "could it help rephrase sentences or reorder them?"

"We typically use Endymion for that, it's more prosaic," Sharak replied. "Ibis wouldn't rephrase, but it might illuminate — or just go crazy, which is also fun."

"Alright. It's not for our Guild as such, it's for a scripted heckler who we're using as a prop for Darys. Some guy's alt. The script still sounds a bit like us, maybe we could scramble the words a bit."

"Tell you what, you could borrow our typewriter and write it out, then we'll have Endymion process it. At the start, print the words 'Rephrase this,' with an exclamation mark in front, and it should understand."

DicingDevil sighed. "A typewriter? Retro. But I'll figure it out, sure."

He followed Sharak out of the room.

In Sharak's absence, Fahiz became more talkative, and invited any questions about the automatons.

"These write very well for machines," Danemy said, slightly distracted as he watched Endymion write. "Did that surprise you?"

"Not at all," Fahiz replied with gusto. "After all, 'great' human writers are impromptu machines, so why shouldn't machines be good writers? Alright, occasionally they do surprise me."

"I guess you're familiar with the automaton, so you'd be less easily surprised —but what do you mean about human authors?"

"It's my view that, in a 'great' author, there is firstly an extreme automaticity. They are like Alopos, a famed charioteer, who drove long distances across crowded roads and in the end never had any recollection of consciously navigating traffic and obstacles. He steered among the crowds, and hilly areas, but was in such a trance that it hardly registered as he was doing it. He is known as 'The Wheeled Sleepwalker.'

"The persistent, solid architecture of major works, its patterning, is a trained pattern that the authors could reproduce without effort or consideration. While most writers must tediously build and test structures, these 'great' writers could churn them out as if in a trance and 'sleepwalk' for much of a novel or play. It is why the critic is typically a bad author — although they self-aggrandisingly claim to worship these 'great' works, they are too myopic and caught up in trivial details to know anything about art.

"Regardless, the great author is like a machine trained in a temple. It can be carried out to a forest, and it will still find vast temples among the leaves. There can still be excellent - perhaps better - authors who do not write like this, who excel through being more witty or intelligent, but often these do without the solidity of the 'great' author's works. Yet intelligence is such a thing as the masses cannot even think of. Even an automaton is too witty and freewheeling for them. So greatness is cold as the clay — whispers of ancients buried by dust."

"Automaticity sounds interesting, I sometimes get that kind of trance while climbing around here. Could you give an example of the automatic writing you mean?"

"Say there's a story about a haughty aristocrat or gentleman and his disgruntled servants. A typical didactic novel would say, for instance, 'This haughty man is bad, people should be equal,' or, 'These servants are mere rebels, how awful.' But a more 'great' novel might envision the gentleman's strut as if walking on a raised altar or chancel above the others, who only see him occasionally as if through a rood screen or leper window. With this physical architecture, the story has something to work with.

"Say, the gentleman is not seen at the beginning, because he has gone to climb a mountain. He comes back and feverishly restores the order of the house, laying down the law on the servants who had relaxed during his absence — like a bizarre reborn Moses. As the servants crouch down to clear up, they are astounded by his haughty gait as he walks behind them in straight posture and inspects, occasionally comparing them disfavourably with some industrious monks, sherpas, or guides on the mountain. They try to glance back occasionally to see if he is angry, but they only catch a sight of his large robe or suit. As he beats one of them for standing up from under a cramped, dusty area, he calmly explains that they are creatures of the ground, a 'filthy place,' and they belong there. He then walks to the second floor verandah, and remarks that it feels like he is on a mountain.

"The servant protagonists left downstairs, meanwhile, remark that the gentleman seems to be ill-tempered, as if seeing the mountain has caused him to wish that his feet had never touched the ground. They speculate about why he's so attached to the mountain, whether he had some kind of religious experience, etc. Maybe one suggests that he did, the other replies incredulously that it's not like the gentleman was climbing the Greek mountain where the gods lived. The first replies that maybe the gentleman didn't see God, but maybe he saw the Virgin, only to be curtly met with a reply to the effect of, for instance, when has our master ever pined after a virgin? I've never seen him to marry anyone who doesn't spend all her spare time sleeping around, etc. Or the reply is, say, you know mountain girls, they all act innocent as virgins until you get to know 'em. No way to tell except by checking the hymen. Or he says that the master is a Lutheran and wouldn't care so much if he saw anyone other than God Himself, so maybe the first one was right to begin with, since, well, it's not like they'd tell us if gods were on a mountain nearby, it might give us ideas. Or something. Look, Monty Python made whole skits out of characters with the amicable, faintly rogueish servant archetype saying zany things, in fact a whole film where King Arthur was put on a pillory for all manner of rogues to pelt him. There's probably something that can be done.

"Plenty of directions you could go from there. Say, they are sent to work on the verandah, but accidentally break a hole in it because it's unstable. They then wait for a reprimand with a sinking feeling, and the gentleman returns at the end of the play. Or the tension gets worse, and they find themselves caught in a difficult position as the gentleman becomes more tyrannical but they can't leave safely due to an economic crisis. Or something. Who cares, anyway? Fine novels are for bores.

"It can be robust, and fairly adaptive. But there is something tirelessly positivist about such methods, that could even create firm architecture in a world gone mad. Even Shakespeare often exploits the architectural role of the monarch, posing it a site of great expectations and vertigo, but also an exalted one. Sometimes this is slightly lax, as with Duncan in Macbeth or King Hamlet in Hamlet — their death is used to set off the play, but much of its drama derives from them simply being Kings, as if removed keystones. When lax, it almost resembles moralism, though the author is often reluctant with this. But whether lax or not, it's a feature of Shakespeare's plays and bolsters the extreme highs and lows which give rise to his dynamism. But still, such a conceit is not visionary or truly deep, it merely describes things in a comforting fable, or in an alarmist one like Animal Farm. The true architectural significance of the monarch is shown by the guillotine — he is indeed a thing, of nothing."

"A good conclusion." After a few seconds of pause, Crucis spoke up suddenly from beside Endymion. "How long do the automatons think they have been here for? Were some here before you?"