The Affinity Bridge (39 page)

“Thank you.” Newbury inclined his head in gratitude and approached the door to the workshop. He didn’t bother to knock, instead reaching out for the handle and giving the door a gentle shove. It swung into the room to reveal the same cluttered workbench they had seen before, buried beneath a vast array of components, but no sign of the man they were looking for. Newbury ushered the others through, then closed the door behind him.

Bainbridge was frowning. “Where the devil are those damnable fellows hiding?” He cast around, trying to make sense of the cluttered workshop. He looked flustered, as if he thought that the two men had somehow managed to get away.

Newbury was just about to respond, when Veronica tugged on his arm. “Look!”

He followed her gaze to where she was pointing. The automaton in the corner—the demonstration model they had seen during their previous visit—was rising out of its chair and edging towards them, its left arm outstretched, its fingers opening and closing like the shining brass pincers of a crab. Its feet clacked on the tiled floor as it walked. Bainbridge, seeing the sinister-looking device making a beeline for him, grabbed his cane with both hands and gave the brass knob a sharp twist to the right. “Oh no you don’t!”

The shaft of the cane began immediately to unpack itself, and now that he had a better opportunity to observe the mechanism, Newbury was even more impressed. Small hinges unfurled at the top of the cane, causing thin brass rods to uncouple from the main shaft of the weapon so that they formed a kind of metal cage around the device. The central column began to spin rapidly, generating sparks of light within the cage itself. There was a sudden flicker, and then blue light arced along the length of the weapon, running back and forth along the conductor rod with a sharp electrical hum, from the handle all the way down to the tip of the shaft. Bainbridge, raising the weapon before him like a rapier, wasted no time. He jabbed the point of the cane towards the chest of the shambling automaton, the sharp tip actually managing to pierce the brass plate and bury itself deep in the heart of the clockwork device. Pulsing electrical energy leapt from the cane into the delicate internal mechanisms of the automaton, which either overloaded the device or caused its delicate clockwork brain to seize. There was a grinding sound from deep within the machine, the stink of burning oil, and then the device gave a spasm and dropped to the floor, rendered useless by Bainbridge’s attack.

Newbury edged forward and leaned over the unit. The blue light that had flickered beneath the porthole in its chest had gone out and its eyes had ceased spinning.

He looked up at Bainbridge, who was busy repacking his cane. “Good show, Charles!”

Bainbridge smiled. “Now you see why I always endeavour to have the device by my side. One never knows when it may come in handy.”

Veronica sidled up beside them. “When you two gentlemen are finished congratulating one another, I have something interesting to show you.” She stepped away again, crossing the room to where the automaton had been sitting when they first entered the room. Newbury couldn’t help but emit a short chuckle when he saw the scowl on Bainbridge’s face. He made his way over to Veronica. “What is it?”

“Here.” She ran her hands over the wall, demonstrating the thin outline of a door, hidden in the wall behind the automaton’s chair. “I wonder if this is where we’ll find our quarry.”

Newbury put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re to be congratulated, Miss Hobbes. I’ll wager this is
exactly
where our quarry will be hiding. Stand back, won’t you?” He waved the others back from the wall to give himself room to manoeuvre the chair out of the way. Then, returning to the wall, he ran his fingers around the edges of the door. Bizarrely, it appeared to have been cut directly out of the wall, as if someone had simply chopped a section of the wall away and then reattached it on a pair of well-placed hinges. It was decorated in the same dark wood panelling as the rest of the room. Newbury admired the handiwork; it was an exceptional piece of engineering, and if Veronica had not noticed the thin outline of the door it was likely they would have abandoned their search of the workshop and moved on. He ran his hands over it again. There were no obvious switches, handles or triggers in the vicinity. Not knowing what else to do, Newbury gave the door a push and felt it give a little. He pressed more firmly, until there was a clicking sound, and then stood back as the door swung free towards him. He caught hold of it in his left hand as it came towards him, peering cautiously into the brightly lit chamber revealed on the other side.

Pierre Villiers stood beside a low mortuary slab in a room that had been fitted out like a hospital surgery. White tiles covered the floor, walls and ceiling, and bright gas lamps burned with intensity in fixtures situated along each of the walls. A trestle table had been set up beside the slab, holding an array of tools, knives, lenses and other items of surgical equipment, and Villiers himself was stooped over the empty skull of an automaton, preparing to transfer a human brain into the cavity. The organ itself rested beside him on the slab, suspended in a large glass demijohn filled with a yellowish fluid that bubbled effervescently, as if it were connected to an air supply of some sort. The entire setup reminded Newbury disconcertingly of the morgue: cold, clinical and filled with the overwhelming stench of death.

Villiers did not look up as Newbury, Bainbridge and Veronica filed into the room, their shoes clicking on the porcelain tiles. He was alone, with no sign of Chapman to be found. Newbury cleared his throat. After a moment, Villiers looked up with the briefest of glances, before turning away and continuing with his work. He talked as his fingers danced around inside the automaton’s brass skull. “Sir Maurice. I did not expect to be seeing you again so soon.”

Newbury laughed. “I think, Monsieur Villiers, that you did not expect to be seeing me again at all.”

The Frenchman shrugged. “As you say.”

“They’re not quite as infallible as one has been led to believe, are they, these automatons you’ve created?”

Villiers reached for one of the tools on the trestle table beside him and began cranking something noisily within the brass head. “No. But they are beautiful though, are they not? A wonder of modern science? Do not tell me that you are not intrigued, Sir Maurice, that you are not at least a little bit interested in how I managed to make them work.” He glanced up, looking at Newbury, although his eyes seemed to be focused on something else that the others could not see. He cleared his throat. “Here, let me show you what I am doing.”

Bainbridge started forward, brandishing his cane, but Newbury put an arm out to stop him. “Just a few moments, Charles. It pays to know what we’re dealing with.”

Villiers laughed heartily. “I knew it!” He moved around the mortuary table, turning the automaton’s head towards Newbury, so that the Crown investigator could see clearly inside the empty skull. There was a short brass spike at the base of the cavity, with four exceptionally fine filaments trailing out from a separate point just below the tip of the spike itself. Villiers put his hand inside the cavity. When he spoke, his voice was full of arrogance and pomp. “The human organ is placed in this cavity, here, lowered gently onto the brass spike to hold it firmly in place. The wires are then threaded precisely through the cortex until they engage with the sensitive response centres in the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Electrical stimuli, generated by the movement of the automaton device itself, are then fed back and forth along these wires to create a simple neural interface that enables the organ to receive input from the world outside of the machine’s casing.” He clacked his tongue against his teeth. “I call this my ‘affinity bridge,’ the device by which my creations may learn to interact with the external world.” He grinned, as if satisfied that his audience was giving him his due attention. “Once it is working we pack the rest of the cavity with a preserving jelly to ensure the organ does not degenerate or become damaged if the device is required to make any sharp movements.” He paused, drumming his hand on the table before reaching for the large glass jar that held the harvested brain. He slid it across the tabletop so they could see. Newbury heard Veronica swallow.

“But what about the original personality, the person whose brain you have stolen? Doesn’t that present itself once the organ is connected to this ‘affinity bridge’?”

Villiers practically scoffed. “We bypass the original personality, of course! Consciousness is simply a by-product of the human organism. It is not necessary for life to be self-aware. It is certainly not necessary for an automaton to be self-aware. In truth, in attaching a human brain to the affinity bridge I am simply engaging the neural structure of the organ, making use of the existing nervous system and the brain’s inherent processing functions. It is a much cheaper and less time consuming option than building a new component to do the same job, although, as you’ve seen, the latter is indeed possible.” He smiled. “At its most basic level, Sir Maurice, the human being is essentially a machine.”

Newbury nodded, appalled by Villiers’s arrogance and yet somehow still intrigued enough to want understand the elaborate details of the process the man had developed; the melding of man and machine. “So what went wrong?”

Villiers glowered at him. “Nothing! My device functions perfectly.”

Bainbridge, impatient and keen to draw the conversation to a close, decided to speak up at that point. “Poppycock! What about the airship crash, and all these reports we’ve had of your machines going haywire?”

“The human organs!” Villiers sounded enraged. “Joseph brought me faulty organs.” He banged his fist on the mortuary slab. “In the early days I had no mind to enquire where Joseph was obtaining the human brains that I needed for my work. Frankly, I had no reason to care. At least not until some toffee-nosed art dealer began claiming his machine had been exhibiting dangerous and unruly behaviour. I had the machine brought here for testing, and when I opened up the skull cavity I found the organ riddled with signs of the revenant plague. I asked Joseph where he’d laid his hands on the organs, and that’s when he told me he’d engaged a third party to retrieve them from the Whitechapel slums. Of course, by that time the plague had already begun to spread far and wide, and we had no way of telling which of the devices might already have been affected. We had no choice but to continue.”

Veronica spoke softly. Her voice sounded remarkably calm. “So that’s why
The Lady Armitage
went down?”

Villiers nodded. “Yes. Joseph had the pilot unit removed from the wreckage before the police arrived. The device was returned to my workshop. The casing was badly damaged by the flames, but there was no mistaking the signs. The brain had practically been reduced to a sponge inside of the brass skull, all malformed and rotten with plague.”

Newbury glanced at Bainbridge before stepping forward towards Villiers. “If the technology had developed in different circumstances, without the need to resort to murder, you would be heralded as a genius, Monsieur Villiers. I’m ashamed to say that the path you have taken in this instance, however, has reduced you to nothing but a common criminal.” Newbury put his hand on the automaton’s head to hold it still. “You do understand that you’re going to have to come with us?”

Villiers nodded slowly. “May I just—”

There was a terrifying
bang.

The sound seemed to reverberate around the entire room. Villiers slumped to the floor, blood streaming from a bullet hole in his forehead, just above his right eye. The white tiles on the wall behind him were spattered with a bright spray of blood and brain matter. Veronica screamed. Newbury spun around on his heel to see Chapman framed in the doorway, clutching a revolver that he turned to point directly at: Newbury’s face. Smoke curled in lazy curlicues from the end (of the discharged barrel.

“Never could keep his mouth shut, the arrogant bastard.” Chapman flicked his hair away from his face, eyeing the three of them carefully. Veronica shifted slightly and Chapman waved the gun at her. “Not a single move, Miss Hobbes, or your beloved Newbury gets a bullet in the head, just like poor old Pierre.” These last few words were delivered with a nasal sneer. He took them all in with a sweep of the barrel. “Now we’re going to do things my way.” He indicated with his head. “Newbury. Over there, with the girl.”