The Clockwork Steed (Part One)

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

Bucephalus's gas piston driven steel hooves beat out a steady, relentless rhythm as she crossed the rough, rubble strewn wasteland beyond the settlement. Though Alexander the Great's horse, the original Bucephalus, was male, in Coolibah's eyes his mechanical namesake was most definitely female. “You're not going fast enough, you heap of scrap,” the equine mechanoid's rider growled. “Speed it up a bit, me old hoss. Faster, boost your motors up to mad bastard mode. Now to silly fucker level. Go on, give it a bit more, you know you want to push those powerful new hind legs I made for you to see how far they'll go.....”

“That would be unwise, my Prince,” Bucephalus said with Glenda Jackson's strong, refined but long dead voice, a voice that Coolibah had selected from thousands on the internet. “If I carry you much faster than this the slightest bump will hurl you off, and at this speed you're unlikely to survive the fall.”

“ARE YOU FUCKING DEAF? I SAID GO FASTER!” Coolibah roared, slapping the mechanoid's flanks in excitement as if the action would force it to increase its speed. The Clockwork Steed, as he sometimes fondly called his machine, galloped across the plain at almost a hundred and forty miles an hour, an unheard of speed for a machine with legs, but then in the history of human technological achievement machines with legs had never been particularly common apart from military robots designed to cross rough terrain.

“What on Earth made you build it with frigging legs?” Peter Bannister, a long retired engineer that Coolibah met on the internet said when he first clapped eyes on the improbable matt black contraption after an extended online exchange of ideas. “The technology is nothing short of marvellous, man, the concepts you're toying with are most innovative and your artificial intelligence system, utilising well known and not so well known technology in rather odd configurations, is incredible - for once in my life I'm almost lost for words. I wouldn't have thought it possible, your robot is learning phenomenally quickly and talking with it is just like conversing with another human being.

Despite the fact that you're working on a shoestring with materials that you beg, steal or borrow your results are incredible. But, and it's a big but, if this project is going anywhere you have to ditch this stupid mechanical quadruped idea and focus on something with wheels; or wings and wheels if you must – I understand that this thing flies, but so far you've been unwilling to demonstrate that part of its performance because, you tell me, you're still ironing out a few technical glitches. You need to show your ideas to some big company, Mr. Coolibah, you need major financial backing, because although you claim to have a mystery benefactor who prefers to remain anonymous, sooner or later the cash will run dry and your venture will go under.”

Shortly after that conversation Coolibar had stifled the old Phillistine with a pillow and fed his body to Bucephalus, who was good at eating shit. The old fool was just that, a fool, and he proved it because he was daft enough to admit that he lived alone and not a soul knew where he was. Bannister wasn't the visionary that he had seemed, he couldn't see the right way forward, and he was too conceited for Coolibah's liking. And he knew too much, so sadly he had to die. And then, just a few weeks later out of the blue it became necessary to kill again, but this time he intended to coerce Bucephalus into doing the dirty work.