30/11 Fragments

The agent provocateur idea still weighed on my mind from day's earlier. I should have listened to my instinct. But I ran through the list of candidates and was presented with too many possibilities for my little brain to consider.
Fire Ant, for instance. It was all very well believing, as I do now, that it suited his interests to be with us, that Blue Damselfly had cleverly used his arrogance to



The most unbelievable thing has occurred today. We knew the John Steeds were catching us up. You cannot go to ground forever. There were signs of ambushes ahead that forced us to change direction. Some of my scouts have not returned. The newspapers have reported that everyone but the leader and a select cadre of advisors have been captured. They don't know that Longicorn and the others have gone their own way, that I am all that is left of the original conspirators.
Today, however, we were finally caught. And let go again.
In the morning, I woke, and went straight to the window. I clocked a trio of them straight away, and realised, hearing shouting, that there were others. There was no escape at this range. It would have to be a fight to the death. I opened the window and shouted as such from the first floor.
"We should talk," the Captain yelled back.
I asked him how stupid he thought I was.
"We're disarming ourselves!" he cried, and threw away his Swiss Army Knife umbrella. The others did the same. Then, without waiting for my permission, they strolled towards the door.

I met them downstairs. One of them had taken a teapot and cups out of his chest cavity and was busily making a brew. Hot water pumped from a barrel beneath his wrist. He retrieved teabags from behind his ear. I told them I was a coffee drinker, and would prefer to use my own cafetiere.
To my surprise, once they had profered the tea to the rest of the group and been icily refused, the John Steeds drank the tea themselves.
"You look surprised," said the Captain.
I said I wasn't aware that there was a model that drank tea. Quite a development.
"A development we have made ourselves," he said to me. "We were made to be adaptable. We were made to have a certain amount of imagination."
I said nothing. The Captain took a seat.
"You've been on the run for weeks now. Time, I think, for a break."
"We're not going anywhere," I said, patting my gunbelt.
"Well, not against your wishes, certainly. And not with us, I should imagine. Nevertheless, I would like to make you the offer, because it may be of interest to you. We're going on a little time travel jaunt, you see."
The Captain explained his plan to me. The John Steeds were having their own rebellion. They sympathised with us, and with all beleaguered people, throughout human history. And, just as a fragment of time travel technology had come into my hands, so had it found its way to them. But they had decided to pursue it to more definitive ends. No mere sending a couple of tapes back for them.
"There are not many of us, so it is by no means an easy plan to carry out. But we are hoping to insert ourselves into human history in order to safeguard certain events."
Why this concern with the past, I asked? Why not the future?
"When time travel becomes available to all, the past is as good as the future. A commodity ripe for plunder."
The Captain spoke with a confidence that betrayed, to my mind, a strange kind of ignorance. I do not believe they even recognised themselves as machines. I don't think they saw themselves as any different to us, except in the capacity of their current role. As far as the John Steeds were concerned, we were now two factions, and nothing more.