Ghost in the Machine (Steam and Cyber Series Book 1)

by SJ Davis

  “It is unlocked. I’ve merely been organizing its contents. But there is nothing of interest inside.”

  “Idiot boy. Perhaps there are in hidden drawers underneath.”

  Bodhi felt underneath. “Nothing but a smooth surface. No drawers.” He stood and shrugged.

  “What you feel is of no importance to me. You are a moron,” said Anson. “And you,” he pointed to Caroline, “an ignoramus.”

  She laughed, “You must mean ignorama? I am obviously quite feminine in form.”

  He grinned. “You are nothing.” He turned to Bodhi. “Both of you are nothing but tools of the Luddites,” he said. He coughed a thick wetness and spit into a handkerchief. “Stealing a machine from a older gentleman is a shameful act.”

  “We are not Luddites,” said Caroline.

  “Indeed? So where is your third filthy partner? Rolls’s daughter?”

  “Nowhere you will ever find her,” said Bodhi.

  Putting his soiled handkerchief in the pocket of his overcoat, Anson squatted to look closely at the desk. He ran his hand up and down its smooth mahogany then fingered underneath. “Damn. Nothing.” He spat on the ground.

  Caroline looked at his phlegm with disgust. She covered her mouth with the back of her hand as she stifled a gag reflex.

  “Why do you want my machines?” he asked.

  “We don’t want them nearly as much as other interested parties,” said Bodhi.

  “So you are mercenaries? Terribly unsavory behavior for a Lady, dear Caroline.”

  “I act in favor of my ideals, that is all. I am not a mercenary,” she answered.

  “Perhaps I have a better offer for you, perhaps we can dismiss your evil crime as a youthful, spirited, yet hideously misguided adventure. Perhaps you fell under a terrible influence. We can even go about like your thievery never happened.”

  “No thank you,” said Caroline.

  “It may be the only way to see your friend again. That filthy pants-dresser.”

  “You have no idea where she is,” said Bodhi, keeping his emotions in check.

  “Don’t I?” said Anson, raising his long eyebrows. “I have good reason to doubt that it is you that doesn’t know where she is. And certainly not how to get her back, isn’t that right?”

  Bodhi pushed the papers of the desk and lunged towards Anson. “Additionally,” Anson scowled as Bodhi grabbed his lapels, “there is the unfortunate situation of a certain guest residing at Madame Francesca’s.” His gray brows jutted out at ninety-degree angles, the black ones remained in place. “Residing is the wrong word. Let’s see. Hiding. Yes, that’s better. Hiding out like a common criminal. But not hiding from his past, no. He is hiding from his future.” Caroline felt a strong urge to give the insolent Anson a swat with her parasol

  “You are a vicious man and you smell,” said Caroline. She coughed and covered her face with a handkerchief.

  “You know him. I know you do. That strange American youth.”

  “One of your hired men you mean?” Bodhi challenged. “See, perhaps we know more than you do.”

  Caroline looked at Bodhi, questions and surprise surrounded her demeanor. “What?” said Caroline. “Nico? Employed by Anson? Is this true? ”

  “Hush Caroline,” said Bodhi, “this is between me and Anson.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Anson.

  “No,” objected Caroline. “It’s between all of us.”

  Bodhi stepped around the desk and stood an entire head’s length above Anson. “You come here seeking a missing mechanical device. You stand before me demanding it, claiming knowledge of Josephine and implying sinister actions towards our safety. You may leave immediately and go back to the sewer from whence you came.”

  “I came as a friend, with mutual interests,” said Anson, retreating towards the door. “You are the ones fixated on my ruination. I am the one who should feel affronted.”

  “You will never be a guest here,” Bodhi’s voice remained controlled but angry. “You murdered the man who designed and built this very room you intrude upon.”

  “You cannot possibly be serious about such an irrational accusation. I am a scientist and man of progress. I am no murderer.”

  “Yes, I am quite certain of my accusations. You may hire people to do your evil deeds, but they are still your deeds. Now go. Leave,” said Bodhi.

  “Whose goggles are those?” asked Anson, turning to Bodhi quickly. He stood on his toes to look atop Bodhi’s head. “Those! Up there?” He pointed like an overexcited hound at a hunt.

  Bodhi hurriedly reached up and shoved the goggles into his pockets. “I will show you out myself.”

  Anson’s hand flew to Bodhi, clawing for the goggles.

  “Unhand me, madman!” said Bodhi, pushing Anson to the floor. His weight was much less than Bodhi anticipated.

  Anson smiled. “Those are my goggles. I made them. I handed them to a lonely little serving boy in a whorehouse years ago. He’d disappeared when I returned for them.” He scurried to Bodhi, standing toe to toe, examining him. “It was you,” he said. “Yes, I can see it was. You are Francesca’s serving boy!”

  “You are mad,” said Caroline. “This is Mr. Rolls’s private studio. Everything here belonged to him. Nothing of yours is here.”

  “Think, wench! Rolls would never possess goggles that could manipulate images like those. The mechanics would have terrified him. You remember, don’t you Bodhi? At Francesca’s many years ago.”

  “You lived with Francesca?” asked Caroline, her voice sounded as if the world had just changed, as she knew it. “She raised you?”

  Bodhi felt something jab his side, pressing his ribs, something sharp like a needle but white-hot. He lowered himself to the floor sideways. As he knelt, his weight felt wrong, as if he gained weight. The back of his throat tasted sour and chemical and he tried to swallow.

  He heard, “Don't move, bitch,” before everything went black.

  Anson dodged to the edge of the room by the foyer. In his mouth a small bronze tube rested on his lower lip. He had ejected a syringe from it that immobilized Bodhi. Caroline ran towards Bodhi. “What have you done?” she said, her voice shrill.

  She pulled the mouth-propelled syringe from Bodhi’s ribcage with a quick jerk. “It’s still half full,” she whispered. Caroline held the point away from her, tightly clenched in her fist. She ran towards Anson and stabbed him with all her force in his upper chest. She pulled it out as he grabbed for her wrists. She continued stabbing him with the slender projectile, two more times in his face and then last in his neck.

  On the other side of the elevator door, a figure stood in the shadows. “Not possible,” said Anson as he reached into his pocket for a handkerchief. “Charles?”

  The glass slid open, revealing the young eyes of a confident man. Charles walked forward and looked at each of the room’s occupants. “You always knew how to make a mess of things, Anson.”

  “Charles. I don’t understand,” said Anson, starting to wobble. “How are you here?”

  “I don’t really need you to understand,” said Charles. “I’m here to fetch my boy, Nico.” He took a deep breath and stretched his shoulders. “And when I’m finished, you and your boy Tranny are sunk.” Charles cracked the seal of a red bottle and drank.

  “Sunk?”

  “Yep. Sunk,” said Charles. Anson’s eyes closed, his body frozen. “And this lovely lady must be Caroline Ratcliffe? And the hunched mess on the floor is Bodhi?”

  Caroline stepped forward, “Yes, I am Lady Ratcliffe. And you must be the American, Charles Watson? I’m quite confused as to why you are here and how you found us.”

  “Course you are, sweetheart. I’m Charles Watson, but most people call me Charley now,” he smiled. “By the way, Josephine sends her best. She’s hanging in there.” Watson raised his eyes meaningfully in the direction of Bodhi, still slumped unconscious. “Unlike him.”

  “Or him,” said Caroline, pointing
to Anson. “Where do we go now?”

  “We take Bodhi to Francesca’s. And we bring Anson with us.”

  “To where?”

  “To Omni.”

  Deregulated Zone

  January 2135

  The large man pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket as he walked over. Everything about him was out of place - his clothes, his stance, even his expression. He stood over the table and leaned forward, deep into the controlled faces of Yeshua and Minnow. Placing the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he extricated a large phosphorus coated match from a side pocket wrapped in a yellowed handkerchief. The tobacco of his cigarette flared orange in the dark café, crackling in the air as a plume of clove scented smoke swirled above them.

  “Is there some business we have together?” asked Yeshua.

  “Indeed,” the man replied as he pulled two grimy chairs over to their table. He sat in one chair while littering the other with a quick mound of ashes. Pulling a thick sheaf of antique English banknotes from his pocket bound in thick pink rubber bands, he set them by the discarded cigarette ash. “I have something to give you…for safekeeping.”

  “Us?” Minnow asked, choking back some water. “Me?” She pointed at herself. “Him? What is it?”

  “You are both acquainted with my daughter, Josephine.” Yeshua’s mouth drew in, its corners pressed together. His face grew pale under the pop of the fluorescent lights and he clutched his stomach. “At least, you fit the description of the characters in her current social circle.”

  Minnow nodded. “We know a Josephine. But it’s impossible she’s your daughter.”

  “No, it isn’t, dear girl. And you, most of all, should know that certain barriers have been already been crossed. The barriers of time have been violated unnaturally. I came with a man you call Charley, against my better judgment.”

  “That isn’t be possible,” said Yeshua. He reached for a napkin to wipe his mouth.

  “Just a moment.” The man walked back towards the table with the hookah pipe and the men yelling at each other in escalating sounds of Middle Eastern words.

  “I think we need to get the hell out of here,” said Yeshua as he grabbed Minnow’s elbow. An unframed and amateurish Picasso reproduction fell from the wall behind him, banging to the floor.

  “No. Let’s see what he has for us.”

  “People here are crazy, Minnow. This could be a set-up by Omni, from Noc-Ops.”

  “Sit down.” She pulled his sleeve harshly, and the edge in her voice was like a growl. She kicked the painting under the table.

  The strange man relit the hookah pipe coals with another of his long matches. A pressure lamp hissed on the top of the table, lighting the faces of the eager smokers.

  “Perhaps this is a shock,” said the man as he walked past the loud accents in the café. “I’m Frederick Rolls. Josephine’s father.”

  “What?” Yeshua jumped up. “Who are you, really? He died when she was a child, long ago.”

  “Centuries…” Minnow said as she rolled her eyes. “Literally.”

  “Indeed,” his swallowed as his brow furrowed. “So it seems. Nonetheless, I have papers for you,” he said hurriedly. “Important papers, important enough to be dragged here. Keep them away from Anson.” He stumbled backwards to the hookah table and breathed in deeply from its coiled pipe. He stood for several moments, unmoving and holding the smoke deep in his lungs. With a slow, smoky exhale, he sputtered a cough at the end. “How is she? What is she like?” His eyes receded into his skull, black and diminished.

  “Josephine? She’s fine. Happy. She’s here now, you know.” Yeshua’s eyes squinted as he searched Rolls’s face for a reaction.

  Rolls paled in the dim light and exuded another phlegmatic cough. “How things must have changed for her. I must take my leave.” He rushed out the door leaving on the floor an old leathered satchel of old notebooks. Black ink smudges were smeared haphazardly across the old warped papers. A modern sticky-note was attached. Keep safe. Blueprints enclosed.

  “What are these? Old notebooks?” asked Minnow. “Boy, that was weird. Do you believe him? Is he mental?”

  Yeshua picked up one of the notebooks. He blew the dust from the binding and read the cover: Professor Anson, Oxford University 1830. “I believe he is exactly who he says he is. These must belong to Anson’s father.”

  “Why would he come here?”

  “I don’t know, maybe to keep these away from Anson? I don’t understand how he knows Charley. Charley can’t back-travel.”

  “Evidently he can. And he has.”

  Yeshua slid back into a landscape of darkness. Rain streaked sheets of dirty glass windows hid the passersby from his view.

  The brittle paper in the notebooks cracked under their fingers. The pressure lamp hissed loudly and the candles flickered in the wall sconces. The server returned with fresh coffee. “Where’s the Picasso?” She looked about the room and picked it up from the floor. “You know old man Rolls? He’s been lurking here for days. Morning until night. The manager has to kick him out every evening and then he is here again every morning, as soon as we open. I can’t believe he left. Strange fellow.”

  “He must have finished what he came to do,” said Minnow as she picked up a spoon, crooked, dented and oxidized into a rusted color.

  “All he did was talk about the plans and finding who to give them to. Crazy old guy.”

  “Wow,” mused Minnow. “Is that a uniform?”

  The server shrugged. “Nope. Want a new spoon?” She was dressed like a ten-year-old boy from an old cartoon show: tight black shorts to her knees, almost Capri length, with a satiny yellow and red striped short sleeved jersey. The number 12 was emblazoned across her left pocket as well as her back. A purple miniature top hat rested on her head, at a strange side angle, with oversized reddish baby shoes with long black and white laces.

  “Yes, please.” The girl walked away, a bright splash of living color in the bland room of gray, brown, and smoke. Minnow blinked in her wake and used her pinky to stir the coffee.

  “Doesn’t that burn?” Yeshua grabbed for her wrist.

  “It’s not so bad. High threshold for pain, right?”

  “I can’t read these notebooks. It looks like a foreign language. The letters are swirled and connected,” said Yeshua as he thumbed through the pages.

  “It’s called cursive script, or something like that. It was the handwriting used until the early to early 2000’s when people stopped writing by hand. Everything became computerized into standard Times New Roman font or some other serif font.”

  “Wild. It looks like an art form now.” Yeshua eyes danced across each letter, admiring their form. “What are we going to do with these?”

  “I guess keep them here, where Anson can’t get them.”

  “Should we tell Josephine about her father?”

  “That he was here? Good question.”

  “Should we show her these notebooks?”

  “I don’t know, another good question.”

  “Seems like lately, everything ends with a good question.”

  Omni

  December 31st 2134

  Yeshua spent a few moments thumbing through an old and slightly pornographic Japanese magazine; the black and white chiaroscuro accentuated the boredom of the model’s faces. One girl held an antique shotgun between her legs, cold and heavy, pointing it outwards. The girl in the centerfold rested in a French styled window, with blurred eyes, knitting a scarf, partially wrapped around her neck. The bottoms of her feet were dirty as if she never wore shoes. Yeshua flipped to the back, to a young woman holding antique binoculars as she stood between aqua curtains in a third story window. She looked down to an unknown viewer stopped in the street to look back at her. The decorative iron railings of the balcony crossed her body like black ivy. Half of her chest was exposed, mostly ribs and muscle, just a hint of roundness. She held an old fashioned key in her mouth, sitting on top of her tongue with a purple ribbon.
Yeshua cleared his throat and tossed the magazine back in the drawer and continued digging through the papers.

  Yeshua rubbed his hair back from his face and grabbed an age-stiffened rubber band, long past its prime of elasticity, to tie his hair back. Pulling out old hockey magazines, he found what he was looking for, almost at the bottom of his drawer, the green folder. Smudged chunks of grape jam, over ten years old, still stuck like cement adhesive to the outside. The smell of age and staleness lingered in the papers.

  His bedroom door clicked shut and Yeshua jumped. A short man, dressed in white, stood in the doorway wearing a tribal mask, unmoving, as if he were a totem. Yeshua rushed at him, pushing him to the floor.

  “It hasn’t been so long, Yeshua, since we’ve spoken face-to-face,” the intruder sounded muffled through the mask.

  “Who are you?” asked Yeshua, trying to recognize the strange voice.

  “It’s time for us to meet again,” said the man. “I warned you.” Shiny white teeth sat behind the mouth hole of the bright mask and white paint surrounded the black eyes. Oversized red lips anchored the mask.

  “You look ridiculous,” Yeshua looked down at the masked man on the floor.

  The man pushed to get up. “Stay down,” said Yeshua, kicking the man’s hands out from under him.

  “How is Josephine adapting?” asked the man, removing his mask. “If I may be so bold to ask.”

  Yeshua reached down, grabbing Tran by the throat and lifting him to his toes. The mask slid down the back of his head. “I don’t have any fucking time for you, man,” said Yeshua. “Go back to who you work for and tell them. Then, stay away from me, and everyone who knows me. Got it?”

  “So sorry, my friend. Your confidence impresses me. I can see how you would have been selected for Omni’s Special Forces. However, what you request cannot happen,” said Tran, pushing Yeshua. Tran stepped back and brushed the wrinkles from his white suit.

  “Looks like you need a belt,” Yeshua said as Tran pulled up his sagging pants.