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

by Paul Crilley

  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?”

  “You sound like you're on their side,” said Tweed.

  “I'm not. I had to get out. I knew that if I stayed there much longer I'd come to think that the greater good was the most important thing. More important than people. I'd seen it happen, and I didn't want to be like…”

  Horatio trailed off, his eyes cast downward. Finally, he looked up at them. “The Ministry is cloaked in shades of grey. There is no black and white. Everything can be explained. Everything can be justified if you try hard enough. I just couldn't live like that.”

  The cab trundled to a stop. Horatio opened the door and climbed out. Tweed followed next, then Octavia stepped out onto the ground.

  She looked around. They were in a rundown area, a small side street with three-story buildings hemming them in on either side. To her left, about thirty feet away, the side street fed into a busier road. People walked past, as did automata, carriages, and cabs.

  But in this side street they were alone.

  She frowned at the trash: old newspapers, sodden and sticking to the curb; pieces of old fruit crates, smashed to pieces by bored street children; all now turning black with rot.

  “Why are we here?” she asked, turning her attention to Horatio.

  The man stood before a wall. “Because I want to show you something. Follow me.”

  Horatio took a step to the side—

  —and simply vanished. At least, that's what it looked like. Octavia stepped forward and saw that what she'd at first thought was the wall of a building was actually something of an illusion. There were in fact two walls, one slightly behind the other. But the brickwork, and even the painted insults daubed on the brickwork, flowed across them both in such a way that it looked like a single wall. Anyone looking in or even walking up the side street wouldn't be able to see the gap. It was only when you turned around and looked back from the bricked-up end of the alley that it was visible.

  She and Tweed entered the dark opening and found themselves in a dingy corridor. Horatio waited for them at the top of a flight of stairs.

  “Come on,” he said. “We have to be quick.”

  They followed him down the steps. There was a dim light coming from somewhere, but when Octavia looked around she couldn't find its source.

  They walked for about five minutes, all the while descending beneath the streets of London. Finally, the stairs leveled out and they found themselves on a tiled platform. The dim light had a slight green tinge to it that tinted the white tiles a sickly bilious color. The light throbbed, stronger and weaker, stronger and weaker—almost as if it were breathing.

  Octavia walked forward to the edge and looked down onto a set of train tracks.

  “What station is this?” she asked in surprise.

  “A secret one,” said Horatio. “It was abandoned about thirty years ago. Never used. At least,” he corrected himself, “never used by the public.”

  The platform was distinctly eerie. It wasn't just the light. Every station Octavia had ever been to was filled with people—angry people, happy people, rushed people, bored people—but here it was empty of life. Even the walls were bare. At all the other stations, every available space was covered with advertisements for something or other. Here there was just…nothing.

  Horatio hopped of the edge of the platform and straight onto the tracks. Tweed followed Horatio, and Octavia jumped down
last. The tracks receded into a dark tunnel. Octavia eyed them nervously, but she had no choice. She'd come this far, and she certainly wasn't going to show any kind of fear in front of Tweed.

  Horatio led them only a short way along the tunnel before coming to stop. He folded his arms and waited for Octavia and Tweed to catch up.

  “Why have we stopped?” asked Tweed.

  Horatio nodded over Octavia's shoulder. She turned around to find another door, this one made of solid-looking metal. There was no handle on it, just a slightly raised panel.

  “What's this?” asked Octavia.

  “A way into the Ministry,” said Horatio. “If Barnaby is being held by them, you'll find him somewhere in there.”

  Octavia's eyes widened. She stared at the door hungrily. It was possible her mother was somewhere in there, too, then.

  “How do we get in?” asked Tweed.

  Horatio reached into his dirty jacket and pulled out a tatty cardboard file. It was thick with papers, tied closed with an old piece of leather. He handed it to Octavia.

  “What's this?” she asked.

  “The layout of the Ministry compound beneath London. All twenty square miles of corridors, offices, prisons, rooms, laboratories…everything, really. Plus intelligence on security. You'll need that.” Horatio shook his head. “It's a suicide mission, mind. But that might help you.” He started to walk back along the track.

  “Wait,” called Tweed. “Why are you doing this? You put yourself in danger by bringing us here.”

  “I told you,” said Horatio. “I want Lucien dead.”

  “No,” said Tweed. “There's more than that.”

  Octavia could just make out Horatio smiling in the darkness. “Smart lad, aren't you? Fine. I'm helping because I used to be friends with your father, boy. The man you call Barnaby Tweed? He used to be a Mesmer. Just like me.”

  Tweed paced back and forth in the front lounge of Jenny and Carter's house. He had shoved the table and couch against the wall so he could get a good stride going while he tried to assimilate what he'd read in the file and what he'd been told by Horatio.