Queen Mechanical (Inspired by the Queens 90th Birthday).

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a queen; Queen Bethazelle the 2nd was unexpectedly killed when she was thrown from her elephant during a badger hunt.
But the Queen had no heirs who could take her place upon the throne and so it was decided by her chief ministers that, to preserve the monarchy and the wealth and power of the ruling class that supported it, a mechanical queen was to be constructed that would resemble the queen in every detail and could do all of  same things that the queen had done and that the queens common subjects would simply be told that the queen was still alive.
Ofcourse there were those within the Queens government who were sceptical of the plan.
"A mechanical automaton cannot replace a human being and do all the same things that a human can", was the common objection.
But the queens scientists, those who belonged to the Royal Academy, when consulted,
were certain that they could create an automaton that could do the job and, while the Queens subjects were told that she was convalescing in bed after her hunting accident, they set to work building one.

 

It took a long time; a lot of tinkering and experimenting to produce mechanical arms that could give royal waves and grant knighthoods; a mechanical mouth and eyes that could smile convincingly for photographs and a miniature radio device that could deliver speeches but eventually the new mechanical queen was presented to the Queens ministers and all of them were astounded by how much she resembled the old Queen.
And not only did the mechanical queen convince the ministers; it also fooled the general public who, standing in their big crowds outside her palace, cheered and waved their flags and said how charming the queen was just as they always had.
Ofcourse the Queen had a lot of other duties to perform; she had to travel round the world as an ambassador for her country and meet foreign dignitaries but she always had a big entourage to go with her; not of servants, like an ordinary queen, ofcourse but of mechanics and electricians and people to operate her by remote control and speak words into a microphone that would appear to come out of her mouth.
And all in all, the Queens ministers came to see their creation as quite a success.
Unfortunately, one day a Prince from a very important, wealthy and powerful country fell in love with the mechanical queen and wanted to arrange a marriage between them.
All of the Queens ministers started to panic.
"What are we to do?", said the chief minister to his colleagues, "Such a marriage would bring great advantages to us both economically and militarilly but the Prince would never agree to the marriage if he knew that the Queen was made out of clockwork".
After debating the issue for sometime, finally ministers decided upon an ingenious plan.
The Prince would indeed marry the clockwork Queen, they decided, but on their wedding night, before the Prince could discover his brides true nature, a professional assassin paid by the government but dressed up as a bolshevik terrorist with a flat cap and large fake beard would break into the palace and pretend to kill the queen.
And so the royal marriage went ahead and it was beautiful, like a picturebook fairytale and the mechanical queen looked as stunning as a shop window mannequin in her white bridal gown and all her subjects cheered and waved their flags and said how beautiful the 'happy couple' looked.
But then, on their wedding night, things did not go as the Queens ministers had expected because, aswell as their fake bolshevik assasin; real revolutionaries broke into the palace.
You see, not everyone in Bethazelles queendom was happy.
Deep below the surface of the Queendom, in subterranean cities of perpetual night and upside down tower blocks that sank as deep as the skycrapers on the surface reached high, lived the poor of the Queendom and while the rich of the land were living happy lives of plenitude and comfort, throwing away enormous salaries on extravagant parties and luxuries, the poor were living miserable lives of deprivation and neglect.
But rather than aiming to assasinate the queen like the Governments fake bolshevik, the real socialist revolutionaries broke into the room from which the queen was being remotely controlled and then, to the surprise of the prince and everyone in her palace, the queen came out onto the balcony of her room to address all of the crowds who were gathered in the street below.
"People of our Nation", she said, "You have all been decieved; decieved by the institution of monarchy that portrays the gross division between rich and poor as a happy, glamorous, fairytale when it is really a terrible injustice perpetuated by a system that is inherently evil. It is nothing less than an inhumane crime that the rich have so much money while there are people in this country that are too poor to properly feed and clothe their children or give them proper homes to live in; nothing but an inhumane crime that the land and resources of our nation are all in the hands of a tiny minority, making them richer rather than making money to help everyone".
But then the Prince, thinking that his wife had gone mad, went outside and grabbed hold of her arm to pull her back inside but he pulled so hard upon her arm that the arm came off and, instead of making her come back inside, he fell backwards off of the balcony, landing in a tree below.
Then the assassin who had been hiding under the marriage bed came out from under it and fired a gun at the Queens head, knocking it off with the bullet and knocking the body of the mechanical queen to the ground but when the headless Queen got back up and, putting the head back onto her shoulders, continued to speak, the assassin, unable to believe his eyes, ran off in terror.
"As you can see", said the mechanical Queen, "I'm not the real queen. The real queen died years ago. I am the robot who was put in her place by the ruling classes to decieve you so that the charade of Monarchy could go on".
But then, at the order of the Queens ministers, the palace guards came onto the balcony with guns and shot the mechanical queen until she was riddled with holes and fell face first from the balcony onto the ground below.
After that the socialist revolutionaries who had broken into the palace were arrested but it didn't matter because the truth had come out; the people knew that they had been decieved and even when the Queens ministers tried to claim that the robot had been made by the revolutionaries as part of a plot to bring down the government, because they could not produce a real queen, no one believed their story.
So then, the revolutionaries gaining popular support, the poor people came up out of their underground cities to reclaim the sunlight; they overthrew their oppressive government, replacing it with the peoples government of a socialist republic and they put all of the land and property of the nation into the hands of the people and used the money generated by it to serve everyone.
Then all the people of that republic lived happily and equally ever after.