The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Once, one of the other cleaning ladies who worked with Mother had unplugged a disc drive-so she could plug in her vacuum cleaner-and the next night the cleaners’ supervisor had arrived and taken her off to one side (“For a quiet word,” he claimed). The woman left in tears; neither Gus nor Mother saw her again.

Since then, the cleaners had been under strict instructions never, under any circumstances, to venture inside the machine room where the Computers (with a capital C) were kept. But no one had ever changed the lock-code-X and Y together, then 3-2-Z, before turning the dull steel knob in what felt like the wrong direction-so Mother had found the best place of all to keep Gus safe while she worked.

“Get out your books, pumpkin.”

“Okay, Mum,” she said as always. “I’ll be good.”

And then she was alone.

It was true that she read the books. And that they were a mixture of titles, from War and Peace to G. A. Dickinson’s Algebraic Secrets, which were too advanced for an eight-year-old, though her mother only half-realized this.

But often Gus would slip down from the operator’s swivel chair, leaving her open books before the consoles, and simply sit cross-legged on the floor-tiles, staring at the rows and rows of black and grey boxes. And listening.

For at night, discs whisper their secrets to those with ears to hear.

Susurration. A breathing, a soft chaotic overlay of nearly-words, of almost-conversation, as if she eavesdropped upon a salon-full of ghosts from centuries gone by: with everything to gossip of, but no breath to speak.

Sometimes, they moaned.

But mostly the indeterminate sounds formed overlapping whispers from beyond, whose words would never coalesce into meaning, yet whose message would haunt Gus-who-grew-into-Augusta forever.

ASHLEY COMBE, 1843

Upon the wall, a gaslight hisses, incandescent. Ada lies back upon the chaise-longue, dabbing a dampened cloth on her too-pale forehead. On the dainty table beside her lies a small pile of notes scribbled in black ink, with loops and scrawls surrounding the strange equations, and scraps of verse-forbidden verse!-in her scratchy handwriting.

And, on one of those sheets, something new: an ink-drawn table with numbered, imperative steps of logic. Slow, for a person to work through those iterative commands: yet in her mind, burning with fever, it is Babbage’s gleaming Engine which is alive with the pseudo-thoughts she has created; it is polished cogs and shining rods which click and spin more surely than too-weak mortal flesh, undermined by moral frailty or feminine weakness.

The Pattern beneath the world…

Is she mad? Can she, a mere woman, be the first to have deduced the true possibilities of Babbage’s calculating engines? Can she, for all her disadvantages, her cursed beginnings, truly perceive the power of mechanical minds?

For she has written the devil’s code, logical steps which will execute within the power-realm of brass and steel, in stately sequence as exact and elegant as an evening’s programme at a debutante’s ball.

“But I am the Silver Lady… ” Her whispered voice trembles.

For the laudanum’s magic is upon her.

In her vision, she herself is Babbage’s automaton: the scandalous Silver Lady with which he entertains his rich and famous guests. That Silver Lady of which “Lady M” complained in an open public letter: an artificial woman whose garments were too diaphanous for polite society.

But in Ada’s dreams, it is she who is semi-clothed, with Babbage’s rough hands upon her.

O, my father! It is your Dark Nature which calls to me…

For all that her mother tried to whip the influence from Ada, Lord Byron’s spirit is within her core, tempted by all that is lascivious and compelling.

Then a voice penetrates the heavy dream-“O, my beloved Beauty”-and for a moment she thinks it is William, her too-tame ingenuous husband. But no, he is away in London; it is her dear friend, John Crosse, who takes her hand and presses it to his lips.

“Sweet, my prince…”

His hands are within her garments.

But her mind’s eye is filled with other sights: coils and bubbling vessels, the strange electromagnetic experiments of Crosse and Faraday, the very real mysteries they have explored. And this man, in whose arms she moans, is the son of Faust: for his father Andrew has generated life from electricity. Society is ablaze with the news. After leaving his electrolytic apparatus bubbling for three weeks, he has found tiny animalcules on one of the electrodes. Life, from base inanimate matter.

And Faraday, her other hero in this scientific age, has Ada’s portrait hanging prominently on his wall. Does she inspire him, even as his rough-hewn manner and sparkling intellect fire her imagination?

Inside, she burns.

Crosse moves upon her-“My darling, my Queen of Engines, Enchantress of Numbers”-repeating the title which Babbage gave her, and has now become their own.

She cries out with pleasure, not caring if the servants overhear.

“My good Doctor, creator of Life, bearer of Fire-”