Evolution Expects

by Jonathan Green

  “Move!” he commanded Eliza, pushing her ahead of him.

  They hadn’t gone more than a few yards when, with a ghastly, aching groan, a hundred tons of earth and rubble came down on top of them as the roof caved in.

  “NIMROD!” ULYSSES SHOUTED for the umpteenth time. “Can you hear me? Are you there?”

  He listened intently for a reply, anything at all that might tell him that his manservant was still alive, trapped on the other side of the cave-in but alive nonetheless. But all he could hear was the slosh and surge of the Fleet as it continued to churn through the chamber, now forced to find another way out through the maze of tunnels.

  “Jack? Anybody?”

  “It’s no good, I’ve told you already, they can’t hear you,” Eliza pointed out grimly. “If they’re even alive at all.”

  Ulysses picked up a broken brick from the pile of rubble that had blocked of the chamber so effectively and hurled it away into the black water, giving voice to a frustrated, angry shout.

  He looked like he was about to try to tear down the barricade with his bare hands, but then his shoulders sagged, the passion that had burnt within his eyes suddenly extinguished. Wading thigh-deep through the fetid soup of the sewer he returned to where Eliza sat on the ledge of the footpath, keeping her feet clear of the foul waters, her shawl pulled close about her shoulders, her arms folded across her chest.

  “You really know how to show a girl a good time, don’t you?” Eliza grumbled.

  “It was you who insisted on coming with us.”

  “I know, and I wish I hadn’t!”

  “Well that makes two of us then!”

  Clambering back onto the walkway, Ulysses turned his torch on the tunnel ahead of them and set off.

  A disgruntled Eliza hurried to keep up.

  “Where are you going now?”

  “Getting out of here!” came his reply, echoing hollowly from the darkness of the tunnel.

  “Here, slow down! I’m coming with you!”

  The two of them continued in uneasy silence, following the course of the buried river for what felt like hours. They followed the twists and turns of the tunnel, sometimes having to leap across it to reach the path on the other side when the ledge they were following ran out, sometimes having to duck, as the ceiling sank lower to accommodate who knew what within the roots of the city above.

  And then at last the tunnel widened as it entered a vast colonnaded hall, its roof soaring away above them, now resting on great pillars of stone.

  Shining his torch into the massive subterranean chamber, Ulysses saw other pillars ten, fifteen, twenty yards away to both left and right, the waters of the Fleet filling this vast man-made cavern like a lake. A distant rhythmic hammering and the staccato clatter of ceaseless machinery could be heard coming from the far side of the vast space, the sounds of implacable industry reminding Ulysses of another underground complex he had visited, nine months before. He couldn’t help wondering if he would find a connection between the two. He hoped that it wasn’t going to be a repeat experience, but then, from everything he had seen so far he was beginning to fear that it might be.

  Negotiating the cavernous vault by means of criss-crossing, corroded, rust-red walkways, they came at last to an arched opening that spilled muted light out into the chamber.

  From beneath the entrance, five feet down in the brick built wall, a stone pipe protruded from the wall. From it spilled an oily liquid the colour of coffee, run through with streaks of lurid yellow and green. An acrid stench rose from the brown soup being vomited into the lake, the discharge creating a foamy residue that was then borne away by the flow of the Fleet.

  Seeing movement, Ulysses looked down. He caught the impression of something like a rat, but with too many coiling limbs, slithered away over the mouth of the pipe, before plopping into the stagnant soup.

  “This is the place,” he muttered to himself, as if there had ever been any doubt.

  “What place?”

  “The place we’ll start to find some answers.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “How could it be anything else?” Ulysses said, pointing through the archway into the bottling plant beyond.

  “I DON’T BLOODY believe it!” Eliza gasped as she stared through the brick archway.

  Before them, in an underground hall the size of one of the East End’s vast warehouse storage barns, a complicated arrangement of clattering conveyor belts, vast hoppers, brewing vats and endless miles of metal piping, worked tirelessly to one purpose and one purpose only.

  “Incredible!” Ulysses gasped, a look of unadulterated amazement on his face. He stepped through the archway and down a flight of stone steps onto the factory floor.

  “Here, what do you think you’re doing?” the strumpet hissed after him.

  Ulysses paused and looked back up at her. “Taking a look around. What does it look like?”

  “But what if somebody sees you?”

  “Take a look for yourself!” he said, shouting to be heard over the noise of the machines, making Eliza shoot anxious glances left and right, fearful that he might give them away. “Do you see anybody here?”

  Eliza peered along the aisles before her, at the platforms and grilled iron walkways above. Ulysses was right; she couldn’t see anyone.

  “It’s fully automated. There doesn’t need to be anybody here.”

  The noise was incredible, an unending rattling, crashing, whooshing, whistling, thudding cacophony of industry. And all of it was focused on churning out one innocuous product, a stubby brown glass bottle. Miles of snaking conveyor tracks ran the length of the vast hall, doubling back on themselves, coursing under and over in a never-ending circuit.

  Fascinated by the rattling machinery and amazed by the scale of the operation, Ulysses set off along one of the broad aisles, between the massive hissing steam engines that powered it all, as he tried to follow the bottling process back to where it began.

  To his right was the end of the line, groups of the stubby bottles being deposited, rattling, into wooden crates, which then jolted on their way, over a rollered conveyor, through an aperture to another part of the processing plant.

  Tracing the progress of the bottles back from the packer, Ulysses came to the labelling machine. Before that the glass bottles were stoppered with corks, held in place with tightened wire cages.

  “Look at this,” Eliza said, now trotting along at his heels, lifting a bottle from the rattling production line, “my mate swears by this stuff.”

  Ulysses glanced at the garish label:

  The beaming face of Dr Feelgood, with his gaunt features, half-moon spectacles and pronounced goatee beard, leered out at them from the gummed paper label, claiming that his patent panacea was a cure-all for:

  “Renowned Doctor-Scientist?” Ulysses muttered to himself, turning the bottle over in his hand. “I’d not heard of him before he started peddling his go-go juice.”

  There were no ingredients printed upon the label, as if he had really thought there would be.

  “Your friend swears by it, eh?”

  “Says it stops her catching the clap or getting in the family way.”

  “I have a feeling it does a lot more than that.” Ulysses set off again, tracing the production line.

  A bitter, hoppy smell permeated the hall. As Ulysses proceeded deeper into the bottling plant it grew stronger until it was a miasmic haze hanging in the air above a steaming vat from which, via a complicated network of plumbing, the bottles were being filled, before they rattled off along the line to be stoppered.

  He paused to watch as a dozen bottles were filled simultaneously, pumped full of dark steaming liquid in a matter of seconds, before trundling on their way to make room for another twelve.

  “Just how many bottles does this place produce?” Ulysses wondered aloud. “What is this stuff?”

  “It’s Doctor Feelgood’s Tonic Stout, isn’t it?” Eliza said, giving him a confused look. “I thought
you were meant to be a bright spark.”

  “I mean, what is it really? Something tells me that it could be the missing link we’ve been looking for to connect those poor ‘unfortunates’ back at Bedlam.

  “There must be another chamber, come on.” Ulysses set off at a brisk pace, possessed by the spark of excitement again.

  It did not take him long to find the arched entrance to the second hall beneath the wall of steaming pipes. Eliza scampered after him.

  The dimensions of the second chamber were on a similar scale to those of the bottling plant. The hot, humid air smelt even more strongly here. The unpleasant, nose-wrinkling mix of chemicals and malted hops hitting them like a wall as they entering the brew-house, making both Ulysses and Eliza reel and take a step back, blinking in the face of the heat.

  Like the first, this chamber was also devoid of any human presence. And, like the first, it was packed with a forest of pipework, huge bubbling vats and clouds of noxious steam.

  “Oh my God!” Eliza spluttered, unavoidably inhaling a great lungful of the noisome gases. “I can hardly breathe. Can we get out of here now?”

  “Just give me a moment,” Ulysses wheezed, almost choking from the noxious stench.

  “But haven’t you seen enough?”

  But Ulysses was already distractedly gazing up at two of the vast vats steaming away in front of him, roaring furnaces beneath them making sure that the liquid was kept at a constant simmer.

  And then he was away, up a metal staircase bolted into the brickwork of a wall, to the grilled walkway twenty feet above, from which he could look down into the bubbling vats.

  Eliza staggered after him, dragging herself up to the aerial walkway. Thankfully up here the air quality was better. Whatever the miasmic gas-clouds were formed from, it appeared that they were heavy enough to sink to floor level, even through the warm air of the brewing chamber.

  “What is it?” she puffed.

  “Look!” Ulysses said with something like triumph in his voice, pointing at the vats.

  The liquid inside the right-hand vat was a lurid, oily green while the brew in the left-hand cooker was a nasty jaundiced yellow, unpleasantly reminiscent of pus, the stirring paddles disturbing the iridescent sheen marbling its surface.

  “There are two different substances being produced here.”

  “I can see that. What’s your point?”

  “Well the contents of this one,” the dandy said, pointing to the right-hand vat, “is being pumped through these pipes” – his finger traced the route of the plumbing – “and into the bottling chamber.”

  “You mean that disgusting stuff ends up in Dr Feelgood’s Stout?”

  “I know, vile isn’t it? But the contents of this container, this yellow gloop, is being transported elsewhere.” He pointed to a different set of encrusted pipes that led through the opposite wall.

  “So where’s that going, then?”

  “My thoughts exactly. I think it’s time we took a look for ourselves, don’t you?”

  Ulysses turned, looking for a way through to the, as yet, hidden, adjoining chamber, and then froze. He looked at Eliza, a haunted expression on his face.

  “Don’t move,” he said quietly.

  It was then that Eliza heard the staccato pattering, like metal pins tapping on pipework. It was a tinny rattling sound, like she imagined robot crabs would sound scuttling on the hull of a sunken iron ship.

  Unable to help herself Eliza turned, appalled eyes looking behind and above her, and it was then that the first of the approaching clockwork spiders launched itself at her face.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Storm Warning

  GIVING A STARTLED yelp, Eliza flung up a hand to protect her face as Ulysses grabbed her other arm and pulled her sharply backwards. The metallic spider clattered onto the walkway in front of the terrified girl and, in an instant, was on its feet again, looking up at Eliza with its single camera-lens eye. The rest of it was made up of a small steel box, containing the clockwork guts of the mechanism and from which sprouted multiple, steel legs. Each of these jointed steel limbs obviously utilised hydraulics in their construction and ended in machined dew claws that allowed the device both to cling to practically any surface whilst also providing them with the means to defend themselves or attack.

  “This way!” Ulysses shouted.

  As she staggered backwards, unable to take her eyes off the device, Eliza saw another set of steel limbs reach over the hand-rail of the walkway, like the flexing fingers of a mechanical hand. As the claws found purchase, a second spider-bot pulled itself up onto the walkway. Its single camera lens eye swivelled round to fix on Eliza.

  A split second later, the spider-bot pounced.

  Ready for it this time, Eliza ducked, pulling her hand free of Ulysses’ grasp as she did so.

  The device sailed over her head, the harlot giving voice to a wail of revulsion as one of its limbs caught in her hair for a moment, before landing on the walkway behind her.

  She crouched and spun round in time to see Ulysses hoof the spider-bot over the railing, sending the strange automaton sailing into the vat of green goo. It remained trapped upon the surface tension of the stuff in the vat, limbs whirring and flexing pitifully, until a stirring paddle pushed it under.

  Eliza felt a momentary flicker of relief until she remembered the first of the machines, still stalking her.

  “Keep moving and don’t look back!” Ulysses shouted, dragging her towards the far wall of the brewing chamber.

  But she looked back nonetheless.

  The original spider-bot was describing a zigzagging path across the walkway, scuttling from one side to the other, steadily closing the gap between them. The metallic tapping of its many legs provided a strange counterpoint to the ringing of their own running footsteps on the bolted iron sections beneath their feet.

  It suddenly dawned on Eliza that there were too many drumming footfalls for even something with seven legs. The tapping was coming from all around them now, a hollow knocking against the pipes, from the walkway, the railings, even the deposit-encrusted boiling vats.

  Eliza looked up, and immediately wished that she hadn’t.

  Crawling along a vast pipe running the length of the walkway above them were half a dozen more of the spider-bots.

  Each one was slightly different from its fellows, but every single one had the same cyclopean stare and a disproportionate number of legs.

  Their polished carapaces glittering with the reflected iridescent lights of the brew-house, the clockwork creepy crawlies scurried towards the whore and the dandy.

  Another flash of reflected electric light caused Eliza to look down.

  Clinging to the underside of the walkway were yet more of the scuttling horrors. They were completely surrounded.

  One of the arachnid-automata launched itself at Eliza.

  Screaming, Eliza instinctively made a grab for the ’bot before it could latch on and scratch out her eyes with its sickle-tipped limbs.

  Its metal body felt cold and heavy as it wriggled within her grasp, legs spasming as it tried to get even the slightest grip on her. She could hear servo motors whirring and gears grinding in mechanical frustration. And always that single camera eye squealing as it zoomed in and out, trying to focus on her face.

  At last, with an almighty heave, she hurled the spider-bot away from her. It clattered against a railing, knocking another of the advancing automata clear, sending it plummeting to the factory floor.

  But now another spider-bot was running towards her and, this time, Eliza didn’t think that she’d be quick enough to defend herself.

  The retort of the pistol was loud in her ear, making her jump. Sparks burst from the metal shell of the advancing spider-bot. The second shot shattered the lens of its single camera eye. Its legs went rigid, and the spider collapsed onto the floor of the walkway.

  “That’s three down,” came Ulysses voice from behind her. “Now, how many times do I have to
tell you? Get moving!”

  ULYSSES RAN, DRAGGING the panicking girl after him. He could hear the clatter and crash of the spider-bots landing on the walkway behind them and Eliza’s stifled screams told him when one was getting too close.

  He twisted round and brought down another of the scuttling automatons with a deft shot. Through the ‘eye’ seemed to be the way to do it.

  His attention was drawn to the reflected gleam of light cast by something scuttling along a pipe upside down above him. In a split second he had taken aim and fired. The ’bot clattered onto the walkway twitching and sparking, its clockwork guts spilling out, pieces of precision-engineered internal mechanisms dropping through the gaps in the grille to rain down onto the stone-flagged floor in a hard shower of cogs, gears and springs.

  They were disturbing creations. Most automata were given some manner of human appearance, to make them more acceptable to those who worked and lived alongside them. But these things were totally alien. He wondered what manner of machining process could create such utterly unique creations when every other large scale automaton producer replicated robot after robot to an accepted design.

  Ulysses fired again but this time missed his target by a hair’s breadth. His next bullet took the spider mid-leap, before it could grab hold of Eliza’s shawl. The shot entered through its base-plate, between the joints of its eight legs. And then he was out of bullets and there was no time to reload.

  But the end of the walkway was in sight now and he could see another stone archway at the bottom of the flight of stairs. He sprinted for the staircase and down it, forcing Eliza to stumble after him.

  The girl screamed as a ’bot latched onto her. In a state of shock she missed a step and fell onto Ulysses. The two of them tumbled to the bottom, a handrail giving way as both of them fell against it.

  They landed in a heap, the sundered pole of the handrail beneath them, Eliza screaming as Ulysses struggled out from under her. Scrambling to his feet, he saw the automaton clinging to her back as well as the growing scarlet patches now soaking her ruined blouse.