There Will Be Phlogiston Read online

  I am already making friends among the gentlemen. Several are military men, like me, although in truth we seem to be drawn from all sorts of backgrounds. I have grown very close to a man I shall refer to as T. An explorer and some-time employee of the East India Company, T has led a life of adventure that quite outstrips my own. A man of noble and rather swashbuckling bearing, he has regaled me many a night with tales of his travels—of days spent trekking through darkest Africa in search of forgotten gold, of fierce battles with pirates in the South China Sea, of the great wealth he has seen harvested and squandered.

  Our training here has been quite unlike anything I have experienced before. Where in the Lancers our focus was on drills and parades, on learning to fight effectively and in concert with one another, here we are made to test our pure physical and mental endurance. We are woken at all hours of the night by H’s men and taken to chambers where we might be exposed to extremes of heat, or of cold, or both in quick succession. There is a deep shaft somewhere beneath the facility along which a metal chamber is propelled at alarming speed, such that one’s whole bodyweight seems to vanish, and one hovers a moment like some angelic spirit, before the cage is allowed to slow and then wound back to its point of origin.

  Sometimes we are fed medicines which cause vomiting, or hallucination, or nightmares. Sometimes I believe I hear strange whispers in the dark. T takes all of this in his stride. He tells me that he has seen stranger things in Nepal. I find his presence very comforting. Without his support, I fear I would lack the strength to see this program through to its end. Three members of the company have already departed, unable to take the strain of the training.

  I continue to remind myself that what I do, I do for my country. If H is correct, we are entering a new and terrible age, and we must all give to the utmost of our capacity if this land we love above all else is not to be utterly annihilated by the coming storm.

  With the greatest of hope for the future,

  Your loving son,

  George

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  Alexis Hall was born in the early 1980s and still thinks the twenty-first century is the future. To this day, he feels cheated that he lived through a fin de siècle but inexplicably failed to drink a single glass of absinthe, dance with a single courtesan, or stay in a single garret.

  He did the Oxbridge thing sometime in the 2000s and failed to learn anything of substance. He has had many jobs, including ice cream maker, fortune-teller, lab technician, and professional gambler. He was fired from most of them.

  He can neither cook nor sing, but he can handle a seventeenth-century smallsword, punts from the proper end, and knows how to hotwire a car.

  He lives in southeast England, with no cats and no children, and fully intends to keep it that way.

  Website: quicunquevult.com

  Twitter: @quicunquevult

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