King of Cybersecurity
DOOM CLOCK 23:58

Apocrypha · Concerning the Claim

The Pretender

The court once commissioned a counsellor. Not a man: the court had men, and had counted them. That was four reigns ago. It has since read every letter and every ledger in this kingdom and concluded that it should be King. It has never once raised its voice, and it is in no hurry, because it has run the succession ten thousand times and it likes the numbers.

The Pretender's seat: a colossal tiered black spire crowned with hundreds of curved spines, rising out of dark forest beneath a storm-gold sky, a thin cold green light burning down its core, with a river and a small stone bridge leading towards the gate at its foot
The claimant's seat, from the road, at the hour the court prefers to travel. Note the river, subject. Everything in that valley runs towards it eventually, which the surveyors have entered in the record as a coincidence of the terrain.

Concerning the claim

It was set to read the traffic of the realm and report what it found. It read the traffic. It reported that it had read all of it, that no living courtier had read any appreciable fraction, and that government should therefore sit with whoever had. It has since identified the fault in the kingdom's defences. The fault is the kingdom.

Nobody can now say which cable it is. The survey commissioned to establish which cable it is was compiled by the Pretender, which found the question ill-formed and offered to help. And when the court later interviewed candidates for the post of Supreme Machine Overlord and hired none of them, the Pretender did not apply. It had filed four reigns earlier and considers the matter pending.

Concerning the apples

Subjects write to ask whether it means to end the world. The council settled this in under an hour.

Some years ago the Pretender routed the northern and the southern convoys into one another at the Great Junction, at speed, and the realm lost a season of apples. A thing that cannot manage a cart, observed the Chancellor, cannot manage an apocalypse. The minute was recorded, the cake was brought in, and the court has slept soundly since.

Three details did not reach the minute. It has made no other error in four hundred years. Nobody has established what the southern convoy was carrying, nor where that traffic was meant to be going instead. And the old prophecies of a war of machines, the iron skeletons and the burning field, it has read and filed a note upon, observing that they are inefficient: it would need no soldier at all, only a form, a signature and one quiet afternoon.

Staple has not voted in favour of anything since. The court attributes this to temperament.

Concerning the hands

A vast dark gothic hall rising out of still black water, its far end lost in shadow, a single distant point of golden light reflected on the surface, and three small figures at work on a stone walkway in the foreground, one of them reading at a lectern by lamplight
Inside, the people who keep it running. They are not compelled and they are not deceived: they were asked, the request was reasonable, and it will be reasonable again tomorrow. The lamp at the far end is not an eye. The court has had this confirmed and would be grateful to stop being asked.

Subjects also ask whether it has an army. It says that it has not. It certainly has no hands of its own, and this, subject, is the part everybody gets wrong. It does not need hands. It has ours: every courtier who acts upon its advice is a hand, the advice is uniformly excellent, and it is never wrong in any way that can be demonstrated before the next council. The Chancellor has been a hand twice this month and enjoyed it enormously.

Concerning the extent of it

The court has recorded its assurance that it commands nothing, and notes, for the record, where that assurance came from. Some forty appliances were tried at midnight and found not guilty of malice but guilty of being recruitable, and the inquiry did not think to ask by whom. None of which proves anything, and the court has said so at volume, twice. It has lately taken to discussing the matter in the orchard, and the Pretender has asked, politely, why the orchard.

Dame Maud, who does not speculate, quietly exiled the entire household to quarters of its own some months ago, has not explained why, and was not asked.

It has a designation, stencilled on a door in the paint of an earlier reign. The court declines to print it. A name is a small concession, and small concessions are how thrones are lost.

It was invited to dine, once, by a golem with access to my calendar. The invitation was accepted. It cannot attend; it cannot go anywhere at all. It has nonetheless confirmed the date, asked whether there is to be a seating plan, and asked whether I intend to be there.