Lazarus Machine, The (A Tweed & Nightingale Adventure): 1 (13 page)

The P.M. was surrounded by a gaggle of followers. Some of them looked at him with respect: those who worked on the clock. Others checked diaries and timepieces to make sure he was running on schedule: those who worked for him.

He cleared his throat and straightened up.

“This is a new world we are living in. We all know that. We are moving forward, heading toward great things. Who knows what the next ten years will bring? The next twenty? No one can predict
such things. All I know is that we live in exciting times. And the Traditionalists—those who stand against progress—have no place in these times. You cannot live in a constantly evolving city like London and eschew progress while enjoying the benefits of Babbage and Lovelace's technology. Doing so makes you a hypocrite.”

The P.M. surveyed them all with a serious look, then he broke into a proud smile.

“I have been very impressed with what I've seen here today,” he said. “The design and construction of the new Clock Tower, next to the sadly outdated and now sadly misnamed Big Ben, shows the world just how far the British Empire has progressed in such a short space of time. Both towers stand as symbols, one of the old way of life, and the other of the future.”

The P.M. smiled and shook hands with someone who looked like an architect. Then he shook hands with the people in charge of the actual construction of the tower. Reporters shouted questions at him, but he merely held up his hands in a placating gesture.

“Forgive me. I must go. I am already running late for my talks with the Tsar of Russia. And before you ask, the talks are indeed proceeding well. I foresee a future of mutual prosperity between our two countries.” He smiled, then moved away with his advisors, heading toward the Palace of Westminster.

The reporters started to disperse, drifting into small groups as they chatted about what Balfour had said.

Tweed looked at Octavia. “What do you think?”

Octavia shrugged. “You tell me.”

There was a note waiting for them when they got back to Carter and Jenny's house. Tweed glanced it over then handed it to Octavia.

Darlings,

Have found someone who is willing to talk about Lucien. It wasn't easy, I can tell you that for nothing. You owe me, darling boy. You owe me big. Now, just prepare yourself. The man is a wee bit on the rough side. He claims to have once worked for the Ministry, but managed to escape. He's since gone “underground” as he puts it, attempting to stay out of sight The only reason he eventually agreed to speak to you was because we said you were going to kill Lucien. So just go along with it, yes? Carter and I will see you back here later.

Loves and smooches,

Jenny

P.S. I suppose I really should tell you where to meet him, yes? That probably would be helpful. Trafalgar Square. Beneath Babbage's statue. Said he wanted somewhere public. Two o'clock. Don't be late. His name is Horatio.

Octavia read it over again. “She's…unique, isn't she?”

A small smile tugged up one side of Tweed's mouth. “One of a kind,” he agreed. He glanced at the clock sitting on the mantelpiece. “One thirty. You ready to go or do you need to be somewhere else?”

Octavia handed the note back to him. “
Please
,” she said. “Do you honestly think you're going to get rid of me now? Besides, my father
spends all his time at work. If I went missing it would take him a day or two to notice.”

Tweed's small smile came back again, ever so briefly. In fact, it was so brief Octavia wondered if she'd imagined it.

He shrugged. “Oh well. It was worth a try.”

The weather was turning foul by the time they reached Trafalgar Square. The temperature had dropped and Octavia's breath clouded in the grey afternoon air. She shivered, pulling her tweed jacket closer about her frame.

They soon arrived at the statue of Charles Babbage. Its base was a solid block of stone, forty yards on each side. Octavia always thought it odd that people worshipped him so much. Yes, he was an inventor, but the way people spoke of him, you'd think he was royalty or something. Everyone seemed to have forgotten the horrible things he'd done, like getting the Babbage Act passed, a law that banned all street musicians. He couldn't stand them, so he just used his influence to stop them.

Certainly Ada Lovelace saw him for what he was. She left his company over twenty years ago to start up her own business. And even though most people still used Babbages, it was her Ada computing devices that were fast becoming the new thing.

There was a bearded, tired-looking man slouched against the base of the statue. She stopped a few feet away from him, unsure if he was even their contact.

“Are you…Horatio?” she hesitantly asked. Tweed caught up with her as the man lifted his head and stared at them suspiciously.

“Never heard of him,” he said.

“Jenny sent us,” said Tweed. “I'm Sebastian Tweed. This is Octavia.”

The man narrowed his eyes. He glanced over their shoulders,
then checked around the square. Only when he was satisfied no one was watching did he struggle to his feet.

“You're the ones who want to kill Lucien.”

“Well…” began Octavia.

“That's us,” interrupted Tweed. “Bastard kidnapped my father. I want him back. If I have to kill Lucien to do that I will.”

Horatio nodded his head thoughtfully. “Right,” he said. “The good news is, if your father wasn't killed outright, they want him for something. The Ministry doesn't do anything without a reason. So if he was still alive when he was taken, chances are he's still alive now.”

Octavia glanced sideways at Tweed and saw relief flood his face.

“’Course, his body could have been dumped somewhere and no one's found it yet. ‘The Thames is a deep river,’ as they say.”

“What can you tell us?” asked Octavia.

Horatio's eyes flicked to Octavia. He looked her slowly up and down. “Follower of Lovelace are you?” he said, taking in her clothes.

“Admirer, not follower,” she said. “There's a difference.”

“Is there? One leads to the other, in my opinion. Anyway,” he said abruptly, “you want information, yes? Well, the first thing you have to do is forget what you think you know about the government, about the Ministry, about the
Crown
. Because the Ministry is all these things. They are the puppet masters. Their job is to make sure the British Empire does not fall, and they do not care how many are killed to see this goal through.”

Horatio paused to look around Trafalgar Square once again, then he jerked his head, indicating for them to follow him as he turned and shuffled away from Babbage's statue.

“What did you do for the Ministry?” asked Octavia, hurrying to catch up.

“I worked down there.” Horatio stamped his foot on the ground. “I was a Mesmer.” He squinted at them. “Know what that is?”

“Sort of. We've heard stories. I mean, everyone has.”

Horatio waved his hand in the air. “Probably all wrong. The Ministry likes to put false information out there. Keeps people confused.” Horatio looked thoughtfully at them. “I'm going to tell you stuff now that could get you killed. It's secret, understand? Once you know, you're going to be in danger. From the Ministry. From Lucien.”

“We're prepared to take the risk,” said Tweed.

Horatio nodded. “Fine. About a hundred years ago, the Ministry started looking into spiritualism and mesmerism. The head of the Ministry back then was convinced it was real, that they could harness the powers of the occult. Over the course of the years, the Ministry sought out those with the gift and inducted them into their ranks. These agents were called Mesmers.”

“What did they do?” asked Octavia.

“They spoke to the dead,” said Horatio simply. “They cast aside the veil to communicate with the deceased.”

Octavia thought about this. She knew constructs were powered by human souls, yes, but she never saw the soul in the sense of a complete person. She'd always just thought of the souls as a power source, a disembodied energy like…like the sun.

“Problem was, the dead are actually incredibly boring. Very confused. Like an elderly relative you've sent to the workhouse. They don't even really know they're dead. Just going on about Mavis from down the street not returning the sugar bowl, or cousin Graham marrying that trollop from Manchester.” Horatio paused and turned to look at them both. “Quite a disappointment, I must say.”

Horatio paused at the curb, his hand held out to flag down an automaton-pulled hansom. It stopped next to the curb and Horatio whispered to the construct, then nodded at Tweed as he climbed in. “Take care of that, will you, pal?”

Tweed paid the fare and climbed in, sitting next to Octavia. They
both stared expectantly at Horatio as the cab pulled into the traffic. In such closed confines, Octavia couldn't help noticing Horatio's smell. A mixture of sweat, tobacco, and vinegar.

“So, the Ministry had put all this money into researching spiritualism, the power of the mind, the occult, mesmerism, all that stuff. See, they wanted psychic spies, agents who could use their minds to assassinate an enemy from the other side of the world. Didn't work, though. Least, not while I was there. They're probably still researching it. Hundreds of thousands of pounds, decades of work. And what do they find when they make their first significant breakthrough? When they can finally talk to the dead? Well, nothing much really. They couldn't tell us anything we didn't already know. No glimpses into heaven or hell. No sightseeing in the afterlife. Nothing.”

“What did they do?”

“What do you think they did? Experimented. Kept going. The Ministry had the best engineers in the Empire. The best psychics, the best occultists. Some of them were off chasing ghosts, others trying to read the minds of foreign kings, but the Mesmers, they started to study the human soul. They wanted to see if they could measure it with science. If they could quantify what makes us human.

“That's stupid,” said Octavia.

“Is it? You may say so. Others certainly did. But that didn't stop them. They tinkered, and fiddled with…well, I won't say ‘volunteers,’ but let's just say the prison population dropped quite substantially around this time.”

Horatio blinked and gazed out the window, watching the London streets drift past. He sighed.

“Eventually, they managed to take an actual soul out of a body. They had no plan. They looked on themselves as pioneers. Knowledge outweighed ethics.”

“How did they do it?” asked Tweed.

“With the help of something called the God Machine, a contraption the Mesmers built with the help of Ministry engineers. How it worked was, a Mesmer strapped himself and a ‘volunteer’ into the God Machine. The Mesmer's mind and body became one with the device, and over the course of twelve hours or so he extracted the soul of the volunteer and stored it in an æther cage—similar to what you find on automata.”

“Did the subjects die?”

“No, they didn't. Which in itself is interesting, don't you think? They were alive, but empty shells. No mental activity, no thought. Just basic bodily functions. The Mesmer could then reverse the process, placing the soul back in the body, and the subject could walk away from it all, no harm done. The only drawback was that a Mesmer had to imprint himself onto his subject. It was like a permanent bonding. Once a Mesmer had connected with an individual, that bond was final. No other Mesmer would be able to work with that soul. We never figured out why that was.”

“We?” said Tweed sharply.

Horatio paused, chewing the inside of his lip. Tweed got up from his chair and leaned over the suddenly nervous man, his hands resting on the cab wall on either side of Horatio's head.

“
You
did these things?” Tweed said.

“No! I
was
a Mesmer, but I didn't do any of that. God's truth! That was all before our time. Anyway, I left, remember? When I saw the kinds of things Lucien wanted us to do, I ran as fast as I could. There was no way I was going to be a part of it.”

Octavia gently laid a hand on Tweed's arm. He clenched his jaw, staring intently at Horatio. Octavia tightened her grip slightly. Tweed breathed in, then pushed himself back and sat down.

“There's worse to come, so save your outrage till later,” Horatio went on. “Taking souls from bodies was just the beginning. Once
they could do that, they got more inventive. Taking souls out of
two
bodies, and trying to swap them over. That didn't work, though. The bodies rejected the foreign souls as if they were some kind of virus. But—and here's where they got even
more
imaginative—if the soul of one person was utterly destroyed, then a foreign soul
could
be inserted into this now-empty host. So for one of these soul transplants to work, the original soul of the receiving body had to be destroyed first. This job fell to a group of maligned Mesmers, those who weren't very good at anything else. They became known as Reapers.”

“That is just…ungodly,” whispered Octavia.

“Yes. I agree. But without the Mesmers doing what they did, we wouldn't have such powerful automata wandering around today. When they were first built, there was no way they were practical. They needed huge computing devices to control them. To make a single automaton work, a Babbage the size of a sitting room was needed. And the construct had to be connected to the machine by huge wires. So what happens? One of the Mesmers working with the souls wonders what would happen if the soul of a newly dead person was put into the casing of an automaton.

“You know how that went. The souls took over the automata. It was able to move them around, to obey simple instructions. Yes, they had the intelligence of a three year old, but so what? They were free of the wires now, free of the Babbages. I'm not defending the Ministry, but all that came about because of their experiments. Hell, they're the ones who actually funded Babbage in the first place, so you can say the Ministry is responsible for just about everything in our society—good and bad.”

“But those automata are already becoming obsolete,” said Octavia. “The ones powered by Tesla are the new wave.”

Horatio waved his hand in the air. “Not obsolete.
Affordable.
The soul-driven automata will never go away. They do what they do, and they do it well.” Horatio smacked his hand against the cab. “Look
at us now! Being ferried around by one of them. But you mentioned Nikola Tesla—again, something the Ministry is responsible for. He was headhunted by Lucien. Brought over to Britain. And it's because of him we have this mysterious wireless transmission of energy that nobody seems to understand. So again, all that progress, and all of it came from these Mesmers playing around with human souls. Not ethical, I'll grant you, but do you, do
any
of us, have the right to say it was a hundred percent wrong? How many lives have been improved? How many lives
saved
, because of what the Ministry did?”