Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl by David Barnett Page A
Authors: David Barnett
Tags: Fantasy
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isolating them from external forces, and monitored the progress every ten minutes. Within half an hour the mouse had died. The red light continued to glow, and did so for a further seven hours, gradually dimming in the final sixty minutes. Curious.
March 14, 1888— My dear Albert’s ninth birthday today. How I miss him and my darling Pauline. But the work the British Government has me doing here, while producing little of merit so far, is well paid, and they are both looked after in Munich, though I worry the constant infernal spats between the French and the Spanish will spill over into violence again, and Germany will be dragged into the hostilities.
The past three weeks have seen much progress with the Atlantic Artifact. I bade Baxter bring me more presents, and he obliged with a succession of dead and dying mice. The artifact seems to respond to living things as they are near death, and for a period of no more than seven hours after death has occurred. It is frightfully perplexing. Could I be on the brink of a major discovery? Is the artifact nothing less than an indicator or meter of the presence of the very soul?
March 21, 1888— A major breakthrough, and one of those accidental (or is it?) moments of which great discoveries are made. I was looking through a book of underwater creatures and marveling at a very distinct picture of Chrysaora fuscescens, the Pacific Sea Nettle jellyfish. I was idly pondering how its gelatinous dome and trailing fronds looked remarkably like a brain with the spinal cord attached when it struck me like a thunderbolt. The Atlantic Artifact was the rough shape, size and weight of a human brain.
I have a small colony of frogs that I have been dissecting with the purpose of investigating the electrical impulses that power bodily functions. A small current applied to the nerve endings of a dead frog will cause the legs to twitch, and on an impulse of my own I rigged up a copper connector to one of the nerves of a recently deceased frog and inserted it into one of the many holes on the underside of the artifact, which glowed excitedly as I brought the animal to it.
The results were instantaneous. The frog’s right leg moved immediately, proving the artifact is possessed of some internal electricity-generating component. Marvelous, given the age of the artifact.
But there is more.
With the ordinary electrical impulse, the frog’s leg merely jerked and twitched. When plugged into the artifact— which I have already begun to think of as a “brain”—the leg performed a fluid, natural movement, exactly in the same way the living frogs in my colony moved when swimming. The artifact was not merely running a current and exciting the animal’s nerve endings, it was “remembering” how the frog would have moved in life, and replicating it.
I left the frog attached to the artifact overnight, and the next morning the artifact still glowed, much past the seven hour limit when it is merely adjacent to a newly dead beast.
I must investigate further.
March 23, 1888— I have exhausted my colony of frogs. I tried different nerves and muscles attached to different housings in the base of the artifact. With one group, the forelegs moved. With another, the rear legs. I achieved a beating heart, an opening mouth and, with my final frog, I had the notion of placing its brain inside the artifact, which glowed brightly as though it somehow “approved” of this development. Within moments I gazed into the shining, unblinking, yet evidently seeing eyes of a frog dead for six hours.
I saw my own reflection in its black eyes. It was like seeing eternity.
Or perhaps God.
March 24, 1888— I had Crowe capture a magpie in the garden and after some rough surgery I have managed to connect its spinal cord to a large copper attachment, which fits snugly into the largest hole on the base and up into the hollow space within the artifact, where I reattached the cord to the unfortunate bird’s brain.
March 14, 1888— My dear Albert’s ninth birthday today. How I miss him and my darling Pauline. But the work the British Government has me doing here, while producing little of merit so far, is well paid, and they are both looked after in Munich, though I worry the constant infernal spats between the French and the Spanish will spill over into violence again, and Germany will be dragged into the hostilities.
The past three weeks have seen much progress with the Atlantic Artifact. I bade Baxter bring me more presents, and he obliged with a succession of dead and dying mice. The artifact seems to respond to living things as they are near death, and for a period of no more than seven hours after death has occurred. It is frightfully perplexing. Could I be on the brink of a major discovery? Is the artifact nothing less than an indicator or meter of the presence of the very soul?
March 21, 1888— A major breakthrough, and one of those accidental (or is it?) moments of which great discoveries are made. I was looking through a book of underwater creatures and marveling at a very distinct picture of Chrysaora fuscescens, the Pacific Sea Nettle jellyfish. I was idly pondering how its gelatinous dome and trailing fronds looked remarkably like a brain with the spinal cord attached when it struck me like a thunderbolt. The Atlantic Artifact was the rough shape, size and weight of a human brain.
I have a small colony of frogs that I have been dissecting with the purpose of investigating the electrical impulses that power bodily functions. A small current applied to the nerve endings of a dead frog will cause the legs to twitch, and on an impulse of my own I rigged up a copper connector to one of the nerves of a recently deceased frog and inserted it into one of the many holes on the underside of the artifact, which glowed excitedly as I brought the animal to it.
The results were instantaneous. The frog’s right leg moved immediately, proving the artifact is possessed of some internal electricity-generating component. Marvelous, given the age of the artifact.
But there is more.
With the ordinary electrical impulse, the frog’s leg merely jerked and twitched. When plugged into the artifact— which I have already begun to think of as a “brain”—the leg performed a fluid, natural movement, exactly in the same way the living frogs in my colony moved when swimming. The artifact was not merely running a current and exciting the animal’s nerve endings, it was “remembering” how the frog would have moved in life, and replicating it.
I left the frog attached to the artifact overnight, and the next morning the artifact still glowed, much past the seven hour limit when it is merely adjacent to a newly dead beast.
I must investigate further.
March 23, 1888— I have exhausted my colony of frogs. I tried different nerves and muscles attached to different housings in the base of the artifact. With one group, the forelegs moved. With another, the rear legs. I achieved a beating heart, an opening mouth and, with my final frog, I had the notion of placing its brain inside the artifact, which glowed brightly as though it somehow “approved” of this development. Within moments I gazed into the shining, unblinking, yet evidently seeing eyes of a frog dead for six hours.
I saw my own reflection in its black eyes. It was like seeing eternity.
Or perhaps God.
March 24, 1888— I had Crowe capture a magpie in the garden and after some rough surgery I have managed to connect its spinal cord to a large copper attachment, which fits snugly into the largest hole on the base and up into the hollow space within the artifact, where I reattached the cord to the unfortunate bird’s brain.
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