There followed a lot of faffing around and chaos. The Agency staff rounded up the remaining pigeons, who looked quite grateful to be rescued from the ducks. A pair of Agency staff set off to capture Horace and the minions, who had scarpered as soon as they saw the Rab-bot go down158.
Felindre went with Rosa to the infirmary. Morwen went straight back to Richard’s lab. He was still lying where she’d left him, with his monkey sitting patiently by him159. As soon as the monkey saw her, it started jumping up and down and clapping its paws together in excitement.
“I’ve got the disk,” she told it, taking said disk from her pocket. “Now what?”
The monkey mimed putting something in its mouth.
“Here we go,” said Morwen, as she opened Richard’s mouth, stuck the disk inside and closed it again.
Nothing happened for four point two seconds. Then Richard swallowed with a convulsive movement, and opened his eyes.
“Wow,” he said. “I had hoped that would never happen again. That was truly horrible.”
Then, as he focussed on Morwen properly, taking in her tear-stained face and bloody nose:
“Oh my word, are you alright?”
Morwen’s response was to throw her arms around him and burst into tears.
Later, when everyone had been patched up, cleaned up, and sufficiently dosed up with their medication of choice (be that painkillers, alcohol, or caffeine), Morwen and Richard found a quiet moment and a quiet space in the corner of his lab, for a difficult conversation.
“I’ve no idea how to ask this, without sounding rude or idiotic,” said Morwen. “So I’m just going to ask it. What the hell are you?”
“I wish I knew,” said Richard. “Closest I can figure out is that I’m an incredibly robust, strong and convincing simulacrum of a human, which happens to have mostly clockwork innards, and a disk of mother-of-pearl that acts as the seat of my consciousness. I break more of the laws of biology and physics that I care to think about, and I was created by a secret genius at some time in the past before the 1940s, but I don’t know when.”
Morwen shook her head in disbelief.
“Are you the only one?”
“Well, you’ve met my sister. And Barbra Allen is another, but she was made by the evil genius ex-partner of my creator, and doesn’t have a mother-of-pearl disk. Which is why she wanted mine, but that didn’t work – I took her body over, which neither of us liked. There’s been a few other clockwork people around, but they’re easy to spot. They’ve a distressing tendency to walk into walls.”
Richard was looking worried.
“If you need some time,” he said, “or to not be together anymore… I’d understand…”
Morwen bit her lip.
“Maybe… that would be wise… for the both of us…” she said.
“Oh, stop being bloody noble and stupid,” yelled Sissy, making both of the others jump.
“Morwen,” said Sissy, in a more reasonable tone. “Are you or are you not a witch and daughter of witches, with a long family line of magic behind you?”
Morwen nodded.
“And do you or do you not carry around a mobile phone which never needs charging and has a clever, charming and winsome personality?” Sissy continued.
“Well…” muttered Richard, as Morwen nodded.
“And do you or do you not live with a friend who can build practically anything out of office supplies, who is also a witch. And her girlfriend (also a witch) who can practically leap small buildings in a single bound.”
“What’s your point?” asked Morwen, suspiciously.
“My point,” said Sissy, “ is that, with all the other weird stuff in your life, you’re worried about your boyfriend being a clockwork automaton?”
Morwen and Richard looked at each other.
“Well, when you put it like that…” said Morwen. And she kissed Richard.
“Don’t think this means I like you, Richard,” warned Sissy.
Richard and Morwen laughed, their arms around each other.
“Time to go home,” said Morwen.
They drove through the countryside in Richard’s car, the windows open.
“Y’know,” said Rosa, as they drove past a field full of cabbages. “I’ve got this terrible feeling we’ve forgotten something important.”
From the hedge, a white rabbit with tomato-stained paws watched them drive away, in despair at the stupidity of the human race.
___
158 They’d left the filming equipment. The footage turned up on Youtube three days later. It went viral on the fifth day, was widely parodied for a week, and then vanished into obscurity after several influential blogs published articles on how it was obviously viral marketing for a brand of rabbit food.
159 It’s hard to tell a monkey’s facial expressions, doubly so when the monkey is clockwork, but it looked a bit forlorn and miserable to me.
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