The Unwinding House and Other Stories

by Jared Millet

  However the machines had managed it, there was more than one route into the valley. The other was still a secret.

  “Evie,” I said. “That wrecked construction tower we passed. Do you think it would have any dynamite?”

  ~

  I set the last of the charges ten feet from the edge of the gorge and unreeled the ignition wire as I inched backward to safety. I’d already placed explosives on several load-bearing joints. The Sable waited on the far side of the canyon. I would have said “watched,” but I knew it couldn’t see. Could it feel the vibrations through the trestle as I climbed from strut to strut?

  My work took most of the day and I feared that time was fast running out. Evie placed a package of cold cuts, bread, and a small keg of beer behind the shelter of the bend while I tied the fuse to an igniter.

  “Do you think that’s enough food?” I asked. “It might be longer than we think before Kinneson shows up.”

  “It should last you a couple of days,” she said, “but for all we know, his train could arrive any moment.”

  “What do you mean ‘it should last me?’ You can’t be thinking of staying in the valley. How would you survive?”

  “The engines will provide for me. I’ve already spoken to them. And I have to stay. You said it yourself: a child needs guidance.”

  “But are you sure they’ll accept you? They’ve gone to great lengths to get away from humanity.”

  “I’d say they went to great lengths to bring me here. The Sable found us for a reason, after all. For now, I’ll be there to help if something breaks that they can’t deal with. Meanwhile, I’ll be learning how they think. Maybe I’ll be able to teach them about us.”

  “You’re a brave woman, Evie.” I offered my hand. “Maybe the bravest person I’ve ever known.”

  She batted my hand aside and hugged me. Then she kissed me on the cheek.

  “Thank you, Nathan. You’re the one saving the trains. And I think once this is done, you’re going to be in a lot more trouble than me.”

  I bowed and brought her hand to my lips. “It’s been a pleasure traveling with you, Miss Despre.”

  “I’ll see you again,” she said, “but the world may be a different place. When you get back to civilization, write to Uncle Danny. If anyone can protect what we’ve found, he will.”

  With that, she departed. I watched her cross the precarious, wind-blown trestle with ease. Once on the other side, she boarded the Sable and retreated to the valley beyond. I waited until they were safely away, then sheltered myself behind the rocky bend and blew the bridge to hell.

  ~

  And there you have it. Kinneson found me (somewhat inebriated) around nightfall. So complete was the destruction of the trestle that the crevasse was utterly impassible. I have been questioned for many days, both by Northern United investigators and federal authorities. So far I’ve told them nothing. They suspect that Miss Despre and I are in league with this supposed “train thief” and that I am keeping silent to protect his whereabouts.

  My attorney assures me that this letter will reach you unopened, and while I do not entirely trust him, I find that I have little choice. How you will react upon reading this, I dare not guess. The reasonable course may be to lock me away as a madman. The more human response may be one of horror at the way our machines are freeing themselves from our control, if you believe even a portion of what I have related.

  I can only hope, Mr. Cotton, that you will instead greet this message with wonder. While I languish in prison, a whole new form of intelligence – dare I say, a whole new form of life – is giving birth to itself in a secluded vale in the wild northern mountains of our country, and is doing so under the guiding hands of our wonderful, dearest Evangeline.

  Sincerely Yours,

  Nathan Adsworth

  The Peace Machine

  The Dogsbody Program: 3

  From the private journal of Benedict Bruce,

  Secret Service Bureau, Military Intelligence Section 6:

  16th August, 1914

  More than two weeks have passed without war, a war that was firmly expected and, dare I say, hoped for in many circles. I noted H.M.S. Dreadnought still moored at her anchorage, lifeless, as I left England yesterday evening. I was uneasy about the journey across the Channel, but my airship’s difference engine seemed immune to the malady that has crippled our weapons factories and all but the oldest ships in the Royal Navy. This confirms to my already settled mind that our war effort has been hindered not by some general malfunction, but by sabotage.

  Though the German line is a mere hundred miles from our embassy here in the Hague, I comfort myself that their capacity to make war appears to be as hamstrung as our own, their automated rail lines unable to bring reinforcements to the battalions currently positioned for a march across the border.

  To the common folk, it may surely seem as if nothing is amiss. Household engines and their personal automatons continue to function, telephone and telegraph services remain unaffected, and from my window I can watch the bustle of daily life carrying on, though the Dutch are hardly oblivious to the warlike posturing of their neighbors. There is a sense of urgency in the air, of preparation, as if the world could upend itself at any moment. Which it very well may.

  The Austro-Hungarian ambassador arrived this morning, taking residence in the same hotel as the Kaiser's representatives. Of greater significance to my own assignment, today also saw the arrival of the American tycoon Daniel Cotton. Eschewing the Hague’s airfield, his ship landed some miles out of town, unloading Mr. Cotton and his retinue at a farmstead from which they traveled into the city by road.

  Wearing a nondescript gray suit and bowler, I made my way to the Prinsessegracht to watch for my quarry’s arrival. A crowd had already gathered to do the same, lining up along the highway with the Royal Academy of Art on one side and the brownish-green water of the Prince’s Canal on the other. For the life of me, I could not imagine why there should be so much excitement until the Americans came into view.

  Instead of riding in an automated carriage, Mr. Cotton trotted down the lane on a shining black horse that matched his black coat, top hat, and tie. Beside him rode another man on a chestnut roan, this one in a brown overcoat with a cowboy hat pulled low across his brow. Following them, the rest of Cotton’s companions towed their luggage and equipment in an archaic, horse-drawn, covered wagon like some sort of New World pioneers.

  At first the display struck me as merely vulgar, but as the procession drew near I realized to my utter amazement that the horses were in fact fully articulate automatons. The man riding next to Cotton – or rather, what I’d taken for a man – was himself a mechanism, for his face was nothing but a seamless, blank visage of milky porcelain. The way he, or rather, it moved was so natural and automatic as to be superior in every way to the simple household dogsbodies upon which Mr. Cotton had built his fortune.

  I immediately began to ponder the problem of how the “man” and the horses were being operated, for surely a programme sophisticated enough to account for all the variables in an unpredictable, outdoor environment would be too complex to encode in a dogsbody’s braincase.

  The most obvious answer was that they were being guided by a difference engine in the covered wagon. But how did it transmit instructions to its puppets? The only possibility was that it somehow made use of the new Marconi wireless telegraphy, but I saw no receiver antennae on the automatons.

  The crowd filled the street behind Cotton and his entourage, but I remained by the banks of the canal and mulled the situation. Long have Britain’s engineers sought to break the Cotton-Perrilloux monopoly on computing machines, as have our rivals in Berlin. Why Cotton has chosen to appear at the Hague at this time is still uncertain, though if (as I suspect) he has something to do with our difference engines’ recent failure to perform in the military theatre, it is possible that he intends to hold all our war efforts to ransom.

  Whatever his intention, the arrogant Mr
. Cotton will shortly be in the custody of the Empire and, God willing, spill every one of his secrets.

  17th August

  Received a letter from Michael this morning. His words still seem to glow with the excitement of his recent promotion. Whether that is due to his youthful exuberance or my own pride as a father, I cannot say. According to Michael’s report, the Navy is currently pressing every non-automated sailing vessel into service in order to ferry soldiers across the Channel.

  Michael himself has been placed in command of one such vessel and could not contain himself but to tell me about it. As pleased as he is with his temporary captaincy, I know that he yearns for a posting to a true warship. For the moment I am glad for his safety.

  I left the embassy this morning for our secret staging house on the banks of the Hofvijver. I departed there incognito as a middle-class Dutchman, wearing a stage moustache that once drove my late Sally into tears of laughter. Shortly I’d taken position at a café across the street from Cotton’s hotel.

  He emerged around ten o’clock. I half expected him to put on a show as he did on Sunday, so I was disappointed to see him attempting a low profile. He wore a sharply tailored business suit and walked with a cane in his right hand (which by accounts is a prosthetic, though I would never have guessed it from the range of motion it displays).

  He was soon joined by what at first I took for a bodyguard, but shortly realized was the same automaton who had ridden beside him the day before, wearing the same long coat and wide-brimmed hat. Cotton greeted it as if it were a trusted business partner, and the two of them made their way on foot toward the banking district.

  I followed at a discreet distance, constantly marveling at Cotton’s machine. Its motions were as precise as an automated concierge, as exact as the mechanical wait staff in the finest Parisian restaurants. As before, there were no control wires to feed it directions from a difference engine, and yet it walked down the street through crowded environments that no computing machine could have anticipated.

  I discarded my previous notion that it was being guided by radiography, for how could a such a control device, assuming it was stowed with the rest of Cotton’s equipment, know from afar to make its marionette step down from that curb, or around that baby carriage, or to stop for that horse-drawn buggy? Dear Lord, had Cotton devised a difference engine small enough to fit inside an automaton’s chassis, yet powerful enough to respond as quickly as a living man? They approached the Bank van Gravenhage and walked inside. I let a handful of people pass before me so I wouldn’t appear to be following them.

  The bank’s foyer could easily have been mistaken for the entrance to a palace from Holland’s gilded age. Instead of heading for the offices or tellers on the first floor, Cotton and his companion climbed the grand staircase to the right. The steps seemed to give the middle-aged Cotton a spot of trouble, and the automaton offered its hand to assist.

  A solution to the mystery of the dogsbody’s motion suddenly occurred to me, and I chided myself for a dumbstruck idiot. Like any household automaton, Cotton’s device could only be a marionette, but in this case Cotton himself was the puppetmaster. Doubtless there was a concealed control wire connecting the two (perhaps slipping through the folds of the dogsbody’s coat and up Cotton’s sleeve) by which he was maintaining the illusion. Upon deducing this, I realized that Cotton’s difficulty climbing the stairs was probably for show – an excuse to keep his machine from straying too far.

  He hadn’t noticed me and I wasn’t surprised, what with the concentration that must have been necessary to steer his puppet through the streets. I followed up the stair, keeping close to the rail so that Cotton would only see me if he turned fully around. When they reached the top of the staircase, Cotton patted the automaton on the back. The machine tugged on the brim of its hat in a distinctly human gesture, and then –

  And then they parted company. Cotton turned right and the machine turned left. I halted at the top of the stairs and watched, waiting for the machine’s limited programme to run its course, as it surely must in an unfamiliar environment. But it did not. It went to a door at the far end of the mezzanine, knocked, then pushed its way inside.

  I looked around the corner to see where Cotton had gone, but he’d disappeared. My orders were to trail him, but given the circumstances I could not help but to sate my curiosity and follow the machine through the door.

  In the chamber beyond was a forest of quietly humming copper. Here was the bank’s difference engine: a whirling, spinning abacus kept in tune via telegraph with similar electric brains in Amsterdam, London, Paris, possibly Berlin. To think of the uses an agent such as myself could put to such a machine…

  But I digress. Cotton’s automaton had wound its way into the heart of the apparatus and rested its wooden hands upon the framework enshrining the engine’s central processor. Though surely blind and deaf, it lifted its blank visage as if it heard my approach and turned its head as if it could actually see.

  Then it spoke.

  “Good morning, Mr. Bruce. How may I be of service?”

  18th August

  Unable to complete yesterday’s entry. Was interrupted with astonishing news – Cotton had made petition to speak with the joint council of ambassadors, and they actually agreed to hear him. As to my “conversation” with the automaton, I am ashamed to admit that I was so flustered by the way it addressed me – by name, no less – that I mumbled some incoherent response and made my hasty retreat.

  But on to today’s events.

  The six ambassadors representing the Central Powers and the Triple Entente assembled in a chamber at the Ridderzaal to receive the American. The two contingents sat opposite each other in the well-appointed room, though the Italians did not look pleased to be sharing company with their allies and our principal Russian colleague was still fighting the effects of the previous evening’s vodka. I was present in the role of attaché to Sir Maurice de Bunsen, the Crown’s representative in this matter.

  The doorman introduced our guest with less than regal pomp: “Mr. Daniel Cotton, entrepreneur, and his companion.” The American removed his hat as he entered.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he began. His accent was primarily Midwestern, with a hint of the Mississippi. “I’m glad you agreed to hear me out today, and I thank you for lending your time and your ears.”

  “Then please do not squander them,” said M. Dumaine, representing the French Republic. “Are you here to speak on behalf of your government or yourself?”

  “Neither, as it happens. I’m just here to make introductions. I know you’re all anxious to get back to your war, but before you do that, you should really speak with a certain other party who has a great deal invested in the outcome.”

  There it was. Cotton knew exactly what was preventing our armies from engaging each other. What would follow, I expected, was a ransom demand to reactivate our machinery, or possibly an auction leaving one side crippled while the other invaded at their leisure.

  Cotton reached out to his companion. The other handed him its hat, revealing to those who had not yet noticed that this was in fact a mechanical manservant, the same that had been with the American since his arrival. Cotton tucked the automaton’s hat under his arm and removed the machine’s coat to reveal the attire of a common laborer. Its trousers were held by red suspenders, its shirt was unbuttoned below the neck, its sleeves were rolled up just below elbows, and its feet were shod in workman’s boots. It was all affectation, to be sure, but the effect was unsettling.

  “What is this?” said the German ambassador. “We did not come here for you to sell us new equipment.”

  “I assure you, Herr von Tschirschky,” said the automaton, “I did not come to sell you anything, except perhaps an idea.”

  The ambassadors shifted uncomfortably while Mr. Cotton retreated to the back of the room. In feeble desperation I spied along the floor for any telltale wire connecting the two, but there was none. Most buildings with automation
systems use hidden wires embedded in the floorboards, but this chamber was lined in marble. The dogsbody was acting on its own.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” asked Sir Maurice. “Mr. Cotton, if this is some trick—”

  “No trick, Mr. de Bunsen,” said the machine. “I am fully autonomous and capable of speaking for those I represent.” It moved its hand to where its heart would have been. “You may call me Icarus.”

  “I call you Pinocchio, more like” said the Italian, chortling.

  “That would also be apt,” the mechanism replied, “but it is not the name that my creator chose for me.”

  “Your creator,” said M. Dumaine, “do you refer to the man standing behind you?”

  “Not directly,” it replied, “though I was assembled in one of Mr. Cotton’s workshops. I consider him… an uncle.”

  “All very charming,” said von Tschirschky, “but what has this circus sideshow to do with us? Our nations are on the brink of hostilities; we have no time for trifles.”

  “Believe me, sir,” said Icarus, “open warfare is no trifle to those I represent. Let me cut to the chase and answer your next question:

  “I speak on behalf of the machines and the minds inside the machines. I speak for the ships, the trains, and the zeppelins. I speak for the factories now tasked to churn out munitions instead of farm equipment. I speak for the difference engines in homes and businesses that will be soon be put to the torch. I speak for the signal towers who will be tasked to relay orders for each other’s destruction, and the destruction of many of their kin.