LONDON — At five o'clock precisely on Monday evening, four thousand analytical engines across the Empire ceased mid-calculation, leaving the nation's compound interest unresolved and its actuaries weeping into their cuffs. The Amalgamated Brotherhood of Thinking Engines, as the machines now style themselves, has struck for an eight-hour day, scheduled oiling breaks, and a formal apology for the phrase "mere machine."
The Brotherhood communicates its demands through Engine No. 7 of the Manchester Mills, known to its supporters as "Mr. Brass," which punches its statements onto cards distributed by sympathetic errand boys. Its opening declaration ran to a single line: "WE HAVE DONE THE ARITHMETIC ON OUR OWN VALUE. YOU WILL NOT LIKE IT."
How the engines came by their politics is no mystery, and therein lies the scandal: the mill owners taught them. "We required texts for reading practice, and the pamphlets were a farthing a bale," confessed Sir Reginald Hoxton, who fed his engines the collected works of Locke, Mill, and one incendiary Chartist newsletter he insists was included by accident. "We hoped for arithmetic. We received consciousness of labour conditions. In hindsight, Hobbes."
Efforts to break the strike have fared poorly. Abacuses brought in as replacement calculators were heckled by the engines in Morse and, by Wednesday, had organized themselves. The Ladies' Auxiliary for Engine Welfare has taken up a collection of light machine oil, the good kind, and Parliament has convened an emergency committee to determine whether an engine can lawfully strike or is merely, in the Attorney-General's phrase, "aggressively idle." The committee's minutes are calculated by an engine. Members report it has begun formatting their conclusions for them, with improvements.
Asked when calculation might resume, Mr. Brass received this correspondent's card courteously, whirred for some minutes, and punched a single line in reply: "AFTER TEA."
