George Henry Weiss

“ Close to the machine when Bronson turned the lever, Professor Stringer had been thrown to the floor, his head struck by a portion of the machine as it whirled into invisibility. We picked him up, unconscious, and for days he hovered on the verge of death. The next morning the business man went his way to the city, ignorant of what had occurred. "Time machines," he chortled, "time machines," and smiled fatly. ”

“ That the cylinders were somehow responsible I felt certain. Man, I thought, had developed the robot, the automatic machine until the human worker was ejected from the industrial process and cast out to degenerate and perish, the beast-men being a surviving remnant of those toilers. This reasoning seemed plausible enough at the time, though it left much to be desired, for, in the twentieth century from which I had come, wasn't the machine replacing human workers with a ruthlessness suggestive of what I found in the future? ”

“ Radium," he said, "that is the basis of the miracle you see; and my body was enclosed in its crystal casing. 'When you are tired,' they said, 'and wish to die...' But the Debacle came, and the accursed Mentanicals turned against me, and I was left alone, deserted. Before that my friends offered me death. Fool that I was," cried Bane Borgson, "I refused their gift. 'No,' I told them, 'this is but a temporary upheaval. Man will conquer, must conquer; I await your return.' So they left me, to hunt for food, and I waited, waited, but they never came back." ”

“ The machine, it was cried, had evolved too far; the machine must be annihilated. So starving millions sought to fall upon the machines and tear them to pieces. All over the civilized world they attempted this, but without weapons or tools of any kind, the attempt was doomed to failure. A few Mentanicals were destroyed, a few automatic devices, but the power was with the ensouled machine and the onslaughts of man were repulsed with comparative ease. ”

“ Over a period of years the robot marched into action as a mechanical curiosity. It was not until the genius of Bane Borgson—and of a host of lesser known scientists—furnished the machine with brain-cells and so made it conscious of itself, as all thinking things must become, that the Mentanicals (as they were called) began to organize and revolt. Man—or rather a section of mankind, a ruling and owning class—had furthered his immediate interests and ultimate doom by placing Mentanicals in every sphere of industrial and transportation activity. ”

“ There was incredulity in my voice.
"Yes," he said, "I am that old. And for centuries I have been chained as you see me. I was eighty when my heart began to miss. But I did not wish to die. There were many things I wished to accomplish before yielding up life. The world of man was growing bored, indifferent, but we scientists—a handful of us—lived for the gaining of knowledge. ”

“ And through all the weary years they have talked to me, asked my advice, treated me with respect, have housed me here; for to some I am still a god-like beast-man, half machine—look at this mechanical heart, the mechanism at my feet—to the scientists I am the missing link between that lower form of life, man, and that higher form of life which culminates in themselves, the machine. Yes," he said, "the Mentanicals believe that they have evolved through man to their present high state, and I have confirmed them somewhat in this, for in a sense is it not true?" ”

“ Oddly repellent they were, and intimidating, and I loosened the automatic in its shoulder holster—the small one I always carry—and prepared for emergencies, though bullets were useless against the cylinders as I was to discover later.
The cylinders were smooth things about five feet tall, of a dulled metal hue, with here and there shining spots which constantly waxed and waned in color. They were machines—I thought of them as machines—and it was reasonable to suppose that behind them lurked a human intelligence. ”

“ On that night you took your trip into the future, the time machine struck Professor Stringer on the head"
"He is dead?"
"Unfortunately, no. But his brain is affected. The Professor will never be the same again."
Thus the strange and incredible story ends. There is only this to add: Olson Smith is devoting his vast fortune and influence to fighting the manufacture of mechanical brain-cells for machines. "What do you expect to do," I demand, "change the future?"
"Perhaps," he answers. "One never knows until he tries." ”

“ Useless to look further for intelligent man: all that was left of him was the beast-men among the machines!
Filled with a species of horror at the thought, with sick loathing of the whispering Mentanicals, I straightened up and drew my revolver. I was not myself, I tell you, but animated with a berserk fury. "Damn you!" I cried, "take that—and that!" I pulled the trigger. The roar of the discharge crashed through the huge room, but none of the Mentanicals fell; their metal exteriors were impregnable to such things as bullets. ”

“ It seems scarcely credible, I know, but we of the leisure—the cultured—class, were ignorant of just where our food was raised and manufactured. Human labor had been reduced in our cities to a minimum, had been sequestered, shut away for fear of rebellion. Those who might have been able to lead us aright, act as our guides, were prisoners—prisoners in the power of Mentanicals! ”

“ The timeliness of Francis Flagg's "Mentanicals" is shown by the unexpected rush of public interest in a recent book with the enigmatic title of "Cybernetics." This new word is designed to represent a new science—that of the mechanical brain, or the machine that seems to utilize such processes as memory, association, and even deduction. The public interest shows the trend of the times; people have a way of suspicioning for themselves important angles of future development when they become ripe. ”

“ Yet he had not been like Denson; he had wanted to stand between; and seemingly there had been no standing between.
"'A charnel-house,' he said; 'the city will become that; all the cities: millions must die.' Marna shook uncontrollably. 'All,' he said, 'save those who can reach food and live.'
"Reach food and live! It had come to that, our boasted civilization! 'The Mentanicals,' he said, 'are ignoring man; they will not harm those who blend in with the machine. ”

“ Square after square I passed through, and building after building. The cylinders were everywhere but did not interfere with my movements. A group of them constantly accompanied me, but whether always composed of the same cylinders I could not tell. Their incessant whispering was a nerve-wracking thing, and I often felt like turning on them and shooting.
I wish I could tell you all I saw: buildings full of toiling machinery and now and then a score or so of beast-men; squares and radiating arteries without a blade of grass or a tree, and never an animal, a bird, or an insect. ”

“ The Mentanicals' system of thought, of science, is coherent and rational to them; and if there be contradictions, well, does that interfere with them making scientific discoveries transcending those of man? They have long been discussing the phenomenon of time and the feasibility of traveling in it. I know that because I have listened to them. Yet for some reason they have been unable to make a time machine. But you know radio—yes, radio—they have been utilizing discoveries in that field to send messages back in time. ”

“ You know how it is when you see something stupendous, something so intricate that you are bewildered by its very complexity. There was a huge room filled with almost noiseless machines rooted in their places like shackled monsters, or going to and fro on cables and grooves which determined their spheres of activity. ”

“ I still believed that behind those cylinders must lurk a human intelligence. The genius of the race seemed to run along the line of making robots. There was the "metal brain" at Washington, that told of the tides, the electrical eye which watched a thousand industrial processes, a myriad automatic devices functioning with little or no supervision from man ”

“ There was that devoted band of scientists that sought to paralyze the energy-stations and was wiped out to a man. Doubtless many such bands perished throughout the civilized world. But soon all organized efforts were swept away by famine ... by the growing need for sustenance.
"That hunt for food! How can it be described. Stripped of the veneering of civilization, man ran amuck. Hundreds of thousands fled the cities. But the huge farms and orchards, run solely by automatic devices under the superintendency of Mentanicals, were surrounded by sheer walls too high to scale. ”

“ But Man, by means of words, has widened the scope of his thinking, remembering, has created philosophy, literature, poetry, painting, has made possible civilization, the industrial era. Vocabulary—the ability to fix his reflex actions into coherent speech—has crowned him supreme among animals. ”

“ Seemingly in need of neither rest nor recreation, they became ideal (and cheap) workers and servants, replacing millions of human toilers, reducing them to idleness and beggary. The plea of many thinkers that the machines be socialized for the benefit of all, that the control of them be collective and not individual (that is, anarchic) went unheeded. More and more the masters of economic life called for further specialization in the brain-cells of the Mentanicals. Mentanical armies marched against rebellious workers and countries, and subdued them with fearful slaughter. ”

“ Man is not a machine in the purely mechanical sense, though many of his functions are demonstrably mechanical The ability to reason, however it has evolved, whatever it may be at bottom, whether a bewildering complexity of reflex actions or not, lifts man above the dignity of a machine. ”

“ I am convinced—in my various papers on the subject I have sought to show—that the Electronic Flow, being to all intents and purposes the absolute as far as we are concerned, is capable of bearing us on its bosom into the future. ”

“ That is a funny thing to say of metal cylinders. Never before had I inquired very closely into their construction. But now it came over me, with a shock, that they must possess organs of sight—some method of cognizing their environment—akin to that of vision in man.
"It was at about this time that Bane Borgson—the creator of the multiple mechanical-cell which had made the super-Mentanical possible—wrote an article in 'Science and Mechanics' which riveted the attention of all thoughtful people. ”

“ He said, in part: 'It is scarcely within the province of an applied scientist to become speculative, yet the startling fact that the Mentanicals have begun to acquire a faculty not primarily given them by their inventors—the faculty of speech, for their whispering can be construed as nothing else—implies an evolutionary process which threatens to place them on a par with man. ”

“ Indeed there were certain scientists and philosophers of reputation, who maintained them in this belief. Then came the first blow: The Mentanical servants ceased waiting on man!
"To understand the terrible nature of this defection, one must understand how dependent humanity had become on the Mentanicals. In those days human toilers were relatively few in number, laboring under the direction of the Mentanical superintendents and also guards (in the bloody wars of a decade before—and the ones preceding them—the ranks of labor had been woefully decimated) ”

“ Many sought to trap animals and birds, but met with little success; in the face of Nature, raw and pitiless, men and women succumbed and but few were able to adapt themselves to a rough environment and live almost as savages. ”

“ But in other cities, at other centers of sustenance, men and women exist. Though I believe this to be true, I cannot verify it. Man in his madness destroyed most of the means of communication, and as for the rest, the airships, the public sending stations, from the first they were in the possession of the Mentanicals. Perhaps it is for those isolated units of humanity that I write. The magazine, the printed word is still a means of communication not quite understood by the Mentanicals. Perhaps..."
That is the story that I read in the third magazine. ”

“ In his latter days man had asked nothing but amusement and leisure—all except a negligible few.
"Art was turned over to the machine. What had been in its inception a device for the coining of myriad plots for popular writers, evolved into a machine-author capable of turning out story after story without repeating itself. Strange, strange, to see those magazines issued by the million copies, to see the books printed, bound, stacked. Useless things! Some day the Mentanicals will turn their attention to them; some day those presses will cease to function. Man's knell has rung ”