“We did do it, though, did we not? We carved a settlement beneath the sea and powered it all from the adjacent steam vents . . .”
“Oui, mon ami, we did indeed. In one year we constructed what no man had ever dared and for six months we lived in it, aided by your ‘marvellous’ creations. We had big dreams, Mordecai.”
“Yet, have I wasted the talents of a brilliant surgeon? Kept him from the greatness he deserves?” More coughing, though not as heavily as before.
“Save both your strength and your kind words of praise. I am a simple country chirurgien who has allowed this failed venture to keep me down in a morass of self-pity. I have been living as one lost in les catacombes beneath Paris where we first tested your theories; but seeing you here, not willing to fold your hand and lay your cards down has renewed my vigour for life.”
“Excellent, excellent.”
“May I ask how you found me? Out of shame, I have not been living under my own name for some months now.”
From deep within, Hawkwood seemed to find joy at his inventiveness and allowed it to bubble up into a smile worthy of the dreamer who had sold me on his great scheme in the first place. “Grigori. Between his mystical visions he found time and means to launch a small salvage operation.”
“Grigori?” I was doubtful.
“Our young Russian returned to our Moroccan warehouse in Agadir and cobbled together enough equipment to make his way back down. That impetuous boy learned more from both of us than we could have imagined.” He coughed, shuddered and his eye drifted in the orbit for a moment, appearing untethered. He regained control and once more focussed on my face, though with some difficulty.
“He found me here, just after the surgery. I was in much better condition than what you are witnessing now and so, once we were both satisfied that neither was here to kill the other, we chatted at some length. He had believed he was the only survivor of the Haven, since he was topside checking the buoys when the vent ruptured.
We talked some more and eventually I sent him with poor Gamma’s skull to find you, knowing that you would better believe his story of my survival with the head as proof. I sent him merely to extend an invitation to return, unfortunately my condition worsened after he departed and with no way to get a message to him to change the degree of urgency, I was left with no choice but to send Alpha out into the world to fetch you.”
“But how?”
“He followed the homing signal still active in Gamma’s cerebrum. I should have known that Grigori would react the way he did when Alpha caught up to him—he never really trusted the mechanicals. Of course, when Grigori shot at him, Alpha reacted as he was trained and it all tumbled downhill from there, starting with gunfire in the streets of Paris and ending in your subsequent drugged abduction.”
“I would have come willingly. I never had a chance to get your message from Grigori, nor to ponder the contents of the sac for long.”
“I know, I know. My sincerest apologies, ol’ chap. The single-mindedness of task completion in the automatons is one of the issues I wish to address on the cognitive level.”
I looked again at the infected shoulder and his grey pallor, listened to his belaboured breathing, and doubted he had time enough to address anything, though I kept that thought very much to myself as well.
“Before he departed to find you, Grigori squared up and told me that, thinking us all dead, he had returned for the gold. Once I knew that I gave him a handful of doblones as partial advance payment for the delivery of the message. Since he did not return with you and Alpha I must assume he is still running and will eventually make his way back home to Russia where he will marry Praskovia and try to forget the sea and the gold owed to him.”
“Gold?” I knew of no gold here.
“The doblones we recovered that very morning. I was on my way to show you the amazing samples when all bloody hell broke loose. Although the cliff collapsed on this wing, the domed structure which allows Haven to resist the pressure of the sea saved her from the rock above.”
I was shocked. “Mordecai, when the silt settled and my sealed-off laboratory was all that remained, I despaired. Like Grigori, I thought myself the only survivor. I waited three days but when my air-revitalizer failed I had no choice but to gather my journal and a bottle of port and trigger the emergency surfacer. My heart broke, sir, when I rose up from and above the ruin of our dreams and—less importantly—our fortunes. Gold, you say?”
“Doblones. Eighteenth Century Spanish coins. We managed to save one chest before the cave-in buried the lion’s share. Your half is in that small box behind you, against the wall.”
I turned and spotted the boîte immediately. Making a poor attempt to appear less eager than I felt, I opened it and my heart nearly stopped. It was no Blackbeard’s treasure, but it was gold and it was easily twice what I had invested in Hawkwood’s Haven. I looked back over my shoulder to my dying partner. “You are certain of this?”
“It is the least I owe you for your faith in this madman’s dream. I have but one last favour to ask of you, as a doctor. The doblones are yours whether you accept or refuse so feel no obligation from that quarter.”
“A medicant to aid your final release? Something to ease your pain as you move on?” He would not live long in his bastardized mélange of a shell, which was probably best. I saw less of mon ami in that face than I did a mechanical contrivance.
He laughed. “Not at all, my friend. My automatons are most capable in that field, should it become necessary. In fact, they are so capable that they have one final surgery to perform.”
“Surgery? You have an infection. Poisoned blood. No surgeries will repair that.”
“None but one, my sceptical Frenchman. Or it may not. But should it succeed . . . should it be done with any degree of success, I would have you by my side through it all to oversee the work and to revel in the greatness of my new reality.”
And so, not two hours later, Mordecai, Lord Hawkwood, had his mad, dying brain transplanted from his failing hybrid of flesh and machine into a fully mechanical host designed in part by myself a year previous, although at the drawing board I had believed it was to be a somewhat more conventional life-support system. The procedure took a bit more than eight hours and throughout it all I could only stare dumbstruck as Mordecai’s remaining three mechanicals worked with a surgical speed and precision far beyond that of any human surgeons I had ever worked with or even heard mention of.
I will admit that more than once during the long night I nearly ripped the human brain from the metal pan and dashed it to the floor to keep this horror from continuing, but I was rooted in place, simultaneously fascinated and repulsed. I was both a God-fearing man and a scientist, an innovator. Their achievement was sheer brilliance, but also an abomination. Oui, they transplanted his brain, his own thinking, reasoning machine, but what of his soul? What of his essence?
My hands quivered and shook even after I stuffed them down into my pockets but when I saw that Epsilon—the mechanical taking the lead—was referring to my own notes on Medical Field Improvisation, Amputation, and Surgical Procedure, I wept silently at the inhumanity of it all. I had not even known they could read!
What had we created down here in Poseidon’s domain?! At least young Mary Shelley’s fictional monster was cobbled together from human parts. This machine—this clockwork caricature—being given life before my eyes was both so much more and so much less than a man.
But, alas, at heart I was a cowardly doctor. Other than increasing the dosage of the bromide cocktail being used as a sedative and anti-convulsant, I kept out of their way and let them work.
Twenty hours after Mordecai’s yellowed, bloodshot human eye closed for the last time, two new, brass-and-glass optical receptors spun open and the “reinvented” man performed a miracle—he spoke. He spoke in a voice resonating of light machine oil and a miniature metal orchestra, yet he spoke, and I nearly fell off the cot where I had been grasping at fitful sleep. His w
ords at first were soft and quite raspy, yet as he learned the ways of his new apparatus there grew strength and purpose.
“This . . . is . . . a . . . most interesting experience. I can detect my mechanical brethren in way quite similar to how I am hearing my own voice. We are . . . as a small, four-unit hive, yet I retain my individuality. . . . Ah, I see now that they are distinct individuals, though not yet as well-defined as I am.” A hive? Mon dieu!
He paused, most probably listening to a voice broadcast between himself and his new kin. His piston and cable fingers twitched and he cocked his clockwork head like a dog attempting to hear better.
“The surfacer is ready and the hydro-boat awaits topside.” It was Mordecai’s voice, but at the same time it wasn’t and it jarred my nerves quite harshly. I realized at that moment that as dearly as I wanted to stay and participate in this incredible breakthrough in medical and engineering science, I found I no longer had either taste or tolerance for life on the ocean floor. The offer to return me topside was perfection.
“How will you fare, mon ami?”
“I will fare well and not want for activity, ol’ chap. We have a great deal of work to complete here before it is a sustainable environ once again.” He gestured sloppily with his new arms and I believe that a hinge lifted on his speaking aperture, affecting a smile. “At least now I will have the opportunity. Some day, when your mind is still sharp but your body begins to fail, I hope then you will consider joining me on this adventure, my friend. As marvellous as this new body of mine is, over time it will appear crude and primitive as we modify and improve the designs.”
I shivered at the thought of trading a flesh body for mechanical self and prayed that I managed to return to the world of humanity before these creations learned to read minds and could see the dark intent forming in my heart. I am no zealot, but I do so believe that beyond this world there is a paradise waiting and I will face my earthly end here with Gallic pride and stubborn faith. At least that is my hope. I see now in Hawkwood’s actions and words that it is très possible that he will not stop until all mankind joins his new hive, his dark collective.
And so, I returned to the surface world, the world of sunlight and rain and humanity, taking with me both the Spanish gold I was given and a fresh insight into what dreams may come to. Here, outside Paris, I am well satisfied to invest in dry land and in the new industrial automation growing in London and America. I rebuild what I gambled away on Hawkwood’s Haven and mayhap someday will confess to our local Monsignor why I spent a month in that warehouse in Agadir erasing all signs of my involvement in a bizarre project somewhere off the coast.
Perhaps, too, the Monsignor will understand why I converted a goodly portion of those Spanish coins to simple francs and then quietly used the francs for a shipment of explosives in waterproof crates sent down from Stockholm.
I like to believe that some day the world will be ready for a genius the likes of Lord Mordecai Hawkwood, inventor, noble, and steam-driven mechanical dreamer. Mais il ne sera pas aujourd’hui. But it will not be today.
razor voices
KELLY ROSE PFLUG-BACK
“You got skinny,” I remember John saying. “They didn’t feed you enough?”
His blue eyes had been clearer than I’d remembered, his sharp face patched with eczema.
A haze was hanging over the city and the trees behind it. The sun was high up in the sky, and we cast no shadows. I remember watching his eyes wander over my body in a way that men’s eyes rarely do. At first I didn’t recognize it, because it had nothing to do with hate, or sex, or both.
“I figured you would be hungry.” He said, and he looked down at a container he was holding. It made me cry for some absurd reason, the fact that he’d brought me food.
“I missed you,” I answered, because it was easier than telling him what happened; how they gave me food sometimes with piss and broken glass in it, how I just got used to being hungry all the time and after a while stopped noticing, just like when we lived in the squat on Wharf Street and there was never any food.
I wonder now if he’d been able to see how I’d changed, that day– before the words actually came loose from my mouth, before I showed him. I wasn’t the saucer-eyed, speechless thing that used to run from him into the shadows whenever he stayed up all night pacing through downtown, looking for a girl that didn’t exist anymore. And I wasn’t that girl anymore either. I wasn’t the same person I’d been when Danielle was still around and everything was normal. In fact, I wasn’t sure if I was still a person at all, in any practical sense of the word.
Sometimes when I think back, I try to pinpoint the exact time when Danielle started slipping. I don’t know why I do it, other than as a way to think of more avenues to blame myself. When I really pick away at that last year, it usually comes down to one thing.
Before the drugs, before she started working, there was something else that was eating away at Danielle. I still remember the day she first told me about it, although towards the end it was all she ever talked about. She and I had been walking to our secret river, the one you have hike down hours of logging roads to get to. The wind had been full of pollen and asphalt fumes, milkweed pods bursting with their silky wool. Time had seemed to be passing too quickly. Just weeks before, the spring had been young and new—the riverbank lined with budding crocuses and tender shoots of grass. Not the brambled, overgrown place it was now, thick with insects and wilted from the heat.
“Summer never smells like this, where I used to live,” she’d told me, stopping, looking at me with her red-rimmed eyes.
Her hair was soft tatters of faded, sea-foam green, falling across my face when she bent to kiss my cheek, like she was trying to console me over some bad thing that hadn’t happened yet. Soon she would start dying it a fake yellow-blonde, but I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t know that any of the things that happened would.
The logging road we were on is visible from the ferry when you’re coming to the island; they all are, dusty veins worming through the green quilt of spruce trees that otherwise covers the mountains. You can see the clear cuts too, and they look like the bald patches on a mangy dog. I’d seen them from the ferry the day John came to take me back to the city, and my heart had lurched and hammered against my hollow ribs.
“What’s wrong?” I’d asked her, and she said that she was crying for all the girls who’d disappeared. I knew what she was talking about; I’d known before the papers ever admitted it, just like we’d all known.
Sometimes they would find them tied up clumsily in shredded tarps and yellow rope, stuffed into the mouths of culvert pipes that leak toxic sludge from the logging sites into the rivers, which carry it eventually to the sea. Sometimes they would find them all cut up, a foot in some residential trash can, its protruding bone mangled by the teeth of a chainsaw. An arm or a leg might wash up on the shore in Esquimalt, or be dragged up in a fisherman’s net. But most of them, they never found. Not even in pieces. Most of the girls, nobody ever looked for. It might have been that the rest of the world didn’t even notice that they were gone.
The mission downtown where Paula works has photos of them all on a big memorial wall; not just the girls, but everybody. The old man who died of exposure three years ago on the steps of the government-run shelter because they said that all the beds were full and they couldn’t let him in. Reggie Elchuk, who the cops shot dead in the park last January because he’s not all there and for some reason they thought that made him dangerous enough to shoot.
People think that killers are exceptional individuals, but that’s not necessarily true. The shelter workers who locked the door, and the cop who pulled the trigger on Reggie, they’re what most people would think of as normal. The people who killed the girls, or hurt them so badly that they wanted to kill themselves, they were normal people too. When something is commonplace enough it becomes ordinary by default, even when that something is killing. The world is full of everyday, ordinary murdere
rs. They’re everywhere you look.
That day on the logging roads Danielle told me that the crows who perch, screaming all along the telephone wires downtown are the ghosts of the girls nobody looked for. She said they build their nests way up high, where nobody would think to look. I turned my face to her, and when I looked in her sootblack eyes I realized that the trees around us were filled with the squalling of birds, as though I’d been deaf to the noise before she said it. Their razor voices filled the woods, so loud in my ears that they could almost drown out the hum of faraway chainsaws, the snap and creak of felled timber. The scraping of their voices swirled in her eyes, so dark they looked like they were all pupil. She looked more animal than girl, I thought, her sharp features tensed like she was in pain. When Danielle said things like that, it always seemed like there was no reason they shouldn’t be true. The world she saw was more beautiful than reality, and it was full of possibility. My world had no possibilities in it, back then. In my world those girls were just dead, lying in unmarked graves or cheap pine caskets. They were invisible, just like their killers had wanted.
We’d been standing by one of the clear cuts when she said it, and I could see almost forever across the ripped-up wasteland of what used to be the forest. The crows were circling above us, mirrored by their shadows. Black, bird-shaped patches that glided over the uprooted stumps and the hacked off limbs, the parched earth that stretched out to the horizon. I had never seen crows circle before; I thought that only vultures did that. Now sometimes I wonder whether I imagined it.
I wanted to keep looking, but Danielle hooked her arm through mine and kept walking down the dirt road, like there was nothing to see. I remembered cutting peppers on a wooden chopping board once, years before in the kitchenette at Danielle’s mom’s apartment, and accidentally cutting into the pad of my thumb so deep that the knife grazed my bone. It didn’t bleed as much as I’d though it would, and when I rinsed the blood off under cold water in the sink I could see a cross-section of all the different layers of skin and muscle. The layers went in concentric circles, all the way to the bone. They looked like growth rings, I thought, the ones you see on a sawed down stump that will tell you how old the tree was, if you count them.
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