I said, That is not what I have heard … that you have been tamed.
Ada took out a small pipe and lit it.
Not at all, she replied. My life in numbers has been as wild as any life lived among words. There are negative numbers, imaginary numbers, and … were Babbage ever to build his machine, and if we invent the mathematical language to programme it, there is really nothing it could not manage. For instance, your Victor Frankenstein would not have to build a body out of bits from the catacombs. Instead he could conceive a mind. A mental engine. Ask it any question and, provided that the question could be reduced to mathematical language, then the mechanical mind could answer it. What need of a body at all?
She kneeled down enthusiastically among the cogs, levers and gears of the machine on display at the centre of the party. With some difficulty I kneeled down with her.
The machine, once built – could it think? I said.
No! No, she replied, but it could retrieve any amount of information in any combination on any subject. I wrote a paper suggesting that the machine might also make music – that is where the joke of the Patent Novel-Writer began. The music would not be inspirational but it would be made of what exists already. Only the human mind can accomplish the leap of thought that is a leap of genius. But let us be clear, the majority of human minds are not geniuses and have no need of genius. They have need of instruction and information. That is what this machine could allow.
It would be very large, I said.
At least as large as the whole of London!
Then the human mind is truly a remarkable object, I said, if a machine to contain its most unremarkable functions would be as large as London.
Imagine, said Ada, it might be possible to build the machine as a city and live inside it. Within its ceaseless, endless calculating and retrieving, we could build our houses and our roads. We would be part of the machine and not separate from it.
Where would the machine end and we begin? I asked.
It would not be necessary to know, said Ada, for there would be no distinction.
And this vast city would be like a human mind?
The machine would contain many minds, said Ada. Yes, perhaps all the minds that have ever existed. Imagine if the sum of human knowledge could be stored in such a machine – and retrieved from such a machine. We would have no need of vast libraries and the great expense of printed books.
I should not like to be without my books, I said.
Your own books, no, replied Ada, but you cannot have every book, or even many books, and does not the word LIBER in Latin mean ‘free’ as well as ‘book’?
It does …
Then you would be free to have as many or as few personal books as you chose, or could afford, yet the whole of human knowledge – from anywhere in the world, and from any time, and in any language – would be at your disposal.
Would there be but one machine? I said.
The scale would make it impractical to have more than one, said Ada. And, as it is steam-powered, it would require a great deal of coal.
She helped me to my feet and brought me some wine and we fell to talking of other matters – including poetry. The gathering was noisy and brilliant. The women were indeed beautiful, and I noticed that all of the intelligent women smoked pipes.
There was one man who seemed familiar to me, though I could not place him. He was tall, energetic, dark-eyed, and holding in his hand one of the punched cards that Ada had showed me. I asked her if she recognised him. She did not, beyond to say that he was often present at Babbage’s parties.
It was only later, as I was collecting my cape and umbrella, that the man passed me in his high-waisted check trousers and outdoor coat. He turned. He smiled. He held out his hand.
Mary Shelley?
I am she.
We met many years ago.
(But he is young and vigorous.)
In London or in Italy?
I can see myself opening a letter. Shelley is leaning out of the window. Were we in Rome? The midday bell, the heat from the streets, the squid in a basket brought in to cook for our dinner. I was at my desk attending to the post from England. Bills, of course. A letter from my father.
And a letter that began, Dear Mrs Shelley, Further to your visit, the man who calls himself …
The man took my hand. Such wild, nocturnal eyes.
Victor, he said.
It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning. The rain pattered dismally against the panes and my candle was nearly burnt out when by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.
The room rocked violently. The table was dashed to the ground as though an invisible force had upturned it. The lights went out with a dying whirr and we were in darkness.
I put out my hand and helped Claire to her feet. We stood in a huddle, clinging to each other. The darkness was intense. Our eyes could not adjust to whatever light there was left because there was no light left.
From beyond the room we could hear a terrific thudding.
I said, Hold hands. Make a chain. If we can feel our way to the wall we can feel our way to the door.
He’s doing this to scare us, said Polly.
I shouted: VICTOR!
There was no reply.
He might be dead, said Ron. We don’t know what he was doing in there.
Claire started to sing, MY EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY OF THE COMING OF THE LORD.
I shouted again: VICTOR!
Nothing. Only the boom boom of the water.
My watch is luminous. It was already past midnight.
My knees are wet, said Ron.
Yes. The water is rising.
This is a concrete tomb filling with water, said Polly. Come on! Has no one got a fuckin, phone?
There’s no signal down here, I said. We’re in the 1950s, remember? Listen!
There was a noise like an engine turning over. A reluctant engine. A big engine. There it was again.
That’s a starting handle, said Ron. My old dad had a Morris 1100 van with a starting handle. It turned the engine.
Jesus! said Polly. We’re going to die! Can you shut up about your old dad?
I’m sayin’ Victor’s turning over the generators, said Ron. Jane and Marilyn.
Just then we were covered in filmy, sticky, wet dust from the ceiling. But the lights came on. The noise, though, was so loud that we couldn’t hear each other. Around us were the smashed remains of the pub. The broken tables, overturned chairs. Counters, dice and cards all over the floor. The door was hanging off its hinges.
We waded out through the water. There was no sign of Victor. The steel door to his control rooms was shut and locked. I pushed through the water to where the generators were blowing filthy diesel smoke into the corridor.
VICTOR!
Ron came behind me, pointing to the stairs. The flood door had been opened. We could leave. I shook my head. Ron took me by the arm. Not a gesture. I shook him off.
Claire and Polly had gone ahead up the stairs.
YOU GO, I said.
Then Ron bent double, butting his head into my stomach, and as I folded up, winded, he shouldered me over his short, ox-size body and staggered off towards the stairs.
As I lay hinged over him, my head staring into the oil-filmy water, I calculated that if Ron tried to climb the stairs carrying me, he would die of a heart attack.
We reached the stairs. I thumped him on his back. I think he was glad to put me down.
You’re heavier than you look, he said. For a bloke who’s a girl.
We went up the stairs together.
Outside in the Manchester night it was night and night only. Blackout dark. Wartime dark.
There’s been a massive outage, said Po
lly.
The office buildings were black. The street lamps were out. We walked a little. No traffic lights. Cars travelling hesitantly along the unlit roads.
I took out my phone. No signal.
Me neither, said Ron. We can walk to my hotel. I’m staying at the Midland.
I can’t leave Victor, I said.
Do you want me to carry you? said Ron.
We’ll get an ambulance, said Claire.
No! I said. You have to give him time.
Time for what? said Polly.
I don’t know. Come on. Let’s go to the hotel.
When we got to the Midland Hotel, it was in darkness like everywhere else. We asked the doorman what had happened. No one knows … there’s no TV, no internet, the emergency services are at hospitals and railway stations. The trains are stranded on the tracks.
And silently I thought, this will give Victor the time he needs.
Ron and Claire were staying in a suite. Ron booked Polly and me a room each, waving away my offer of a credit card.
Get ’em a toothbrush and a bottle of brandy, will you? he said to the doorman.
I’ll pray for us all, said Claire, which seemed almost sensible under the circumstances.
Polly and I took the stairs to our rooms.
Polly, I said, don’t do anything just yet. Please. Talk to me in the morning. Just wait, will you?
Polly reached up and kissed me on the lips. A simple kiss. It didn’t feel wrong. It felt like some kind of acknowledgement of whatever had happened tonight.
But what had happened tonight?
I didn’t go to bed.
As soon as I heard her bathwater running, I left the hotel in the wartime darkness, and made my way towards the entrance to the tunnels.
The city was like a city under curfew. Empty. Dark. There was a guy in a doorway huddled in a sleeping bag.
What happened? I said.
Whole thing went black, he said. Just black.
Far away a siren tore through the streets.
When I got back to the tunnel entrance the outer gate was closed and locked. My heart leapt. That means Victor is out and clear!
I began to walk swiftly to his apartment. I was cold, soaked, bruised and exhausted, and it didn’t matter.
His building was in darkness, of course. The main door had locked on Default at the outage. The doorman wasn’t there. I went round the back and up the fire escape. We’ve done this before, he and I, sneaking in like teenagers having sex for the first time.
Is that what it felt like?
Maybe it did.
At the top of the fire escape there’s a Parkour-style leap onto Victor’s terrace. I leapt, not looking down at the black hole opening beneath me.
His sliding doors were unlocked. I went in. That familiar smell. His pomegranate candles.
Victor?
He never moves anything, so I found the matches and lit the candle. And another and another. The place looks like a shrine. Such an orderly man. He leaves no trace of himself.
But if he’s left the tunnels, he’ll soon be back.
I took a shower. I put on his nightshirt. I got into his bed and slept, waiting for daylight.
We are lucky, even the worst of us, because daylight comes.
Humanity is not a steady-state system.
Any butcher will sell you one.
Lamb or ox.
Human looks much the same.
About the size of a clenched fist. The body’s circulatory pump. The heart inclines to the left – two thirds of its mass is on the left side. The heart is not dry; it sits inside a fluid-filled cavity. Nor is it single. There are four chambers, the right and left atriums and the right and left ventricles. The atria are bloody chambers, fastened to the veins that bring blood to the heart. The ventricles, connected to the arteries, carry the blood away from the heart. The right-side chambers are smaller than those on the left. At any given time the chambers of the heart may be found in one of two states: systole, when the cardiac-muscle tissue contracts to push blood out of the chambers, or diastole, when the cardiac muscles relax to let blood into the chambers. This process gives us the numbers we need to take our blood pressure. In my case, 110 (systole) over 65 (diastole).
The heart begins to beat at day twenty-two in the womb. It never stops.
Until it does.
Victor has been gone eight days now.
I’m wearing his jacket. I have used up the milk in the fridge. I started to rummage for the accumulations of a life. There were none. He lives like he’s in someone else’s home, except it’s his own – although when Polly started searching, she found that the apartment belongs to a company registered in Switzerland. No further information has been forthcoming.
I went along to HR at the university. I don’t exist as far as they are concerned. Not a relative. Not a partner. I am not named on his form: Who To Contact In The Event Of An Emergency. I asked, Who is? They couldn’t say; only that it is a company in Geneva.
Dr Stein has taken leave.
Leave of what? His senses?
People don’t just disappear.
But you see, in the world we live in, he hasn’t disappeared; his bills are settled. The correct forms have been filled in. By whom?
In any case, the massive outage in Manchester was simultaneous with a city-wide IT meltdown. Millions of gigabytes of data wiped. Including, says Polly, Victor’s records.
His phone is dead.
A couple of weeks later, Polly managed to get access to the tunnels. She took me with her. It was a different entrance, not the one we had used. I asked about that one. No such way in, said our guide. Not since the 1950s, anyway. Blocked off.
We went down like visitors to an underworld we used to know.
There was the pub where we had told our stories. But everything was as it should have been. No overturned tables or flooded floors. The board games and cards were neatly stacked on the shelves. The photo of Winston Churchill had new glass. I know it was new glass. I ran my finger over it. No dust.
The giant generators, Jane and Marilyn, were clean and silent.
And everything else had gone too. The concrete rooms were empty. No jumping spiders. No lurching hands. No busy bots slicing brains, no heads in jars, no computers. Only the swinging overhead strip lights and the boom boom of the River Irwell.
As we were leaving, the lights going out behind us as our irritable guide flicked off the Bakelite switches, I kicked something underfoot. I bent down and closed my hand around it. I could feel what it was; he took it off when he went to work on the head.
Victor’s signet ring.
I went back to his apartment once more. I had a few clothes to collect. The key didn’t work in the lock so I rang the bell. A hostile woman answered. She was the new tenant. What did I want? I explained about my clothes. She told me to contact the agent and slammed the door in my face.
Pity … I liked that T-shirt.
Down the stairs. Down the stairs. Down the stairs. The door closes for the last time.
Here I am. Anonymous, unnoticed, walking through the streets, and I am present and invisible. The riot in my head is unseen. What I am thinking, what I am feeling, are private Bedlams of my own. I manage my own madness just as you do. And if my heart is broken it keeps beating. That is the strangeness of life.
Message from Polly: Do you want dinner tonight?
Maybe I do.
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Any butcher will sell you one.
I have bought them often enough when we had little money. The thing most prized in humans is the cheapest meat:
The heart.
As Shelley burned on that brittle mound of dried wood, his chest fell open, and our friend Trelawny snatched his heart from the funeral pyre.
In India the widow is expected to ascend the funeral pyre to follow her husband to his end. Her life is over.
&
nbsp; But it is not. We are stubborn. We survive. Grief alone does not kill us.
I could be free … If I could pluck out the memory of him from my heart as easily as his heart was plucked from the fire, I could be free.
I discover that grief means living with someone who is no longer there.
The Buddhists believe that our returning spirit may inhabit any form it chooses. Is that him? Mistletoe on the winter oak. Is that him? Swooping above me in the body of a bird. I could wear him on my finger in the ring he gave me. If I rub it, will he appear again in human form?
There is a feral cat that comes here most days … such wild, nocturnal eyes.
I have taken some of the ashes of his heart and wrapped them up with a lock of his hair and a few letters to me.
The remains of the remains. It is absurd that what we are vanishes without trace. Ada Lovelace said to me last week that if we could re-present ourselves in a language that the Analytical Engine could read, then it could read us.
Read us back to life? I said.
Why not? she said.
He would enjoy that; to be read back to life. Imagine it; his poems in my pocket, and him too. I feed the punch-card into the machine and what comes out is Shelley.
Mary! he says.
(Victor! Is that you?)
I turn round. In the crowd. Over there. Is that him?
Shall we begin again?
The human dream.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Frankissstein Page 21
