The Transference Engine by Julia Verne St. John Page A

resist harmless if incomprehensible jokes from the child one has raised?
    â€œIt is the root of all evil!” she chortled.
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œThe square root! 25.807^2 equals 666.”
    â€œThe root of all evil.” I kept my face bland, not truly understanding why she nearly doubled over with laughter. Her mirth warmed my heart. That was enough.
    She’d long outgrown fear of me. Her lingering respect for our former closeness made her gulp air.
    Useless. She burst out with more peals of laughter. Her hand brushed another control and the machine leg, just as skeletal, jerked and kicked from the knee.
    I restrained my instinct to jump farther away from that bobbing leg.
    Ada turned her back and drew in several long breaths. Jaw still working to contain her mirth, she faced me once more. “So what do you think? Does the blinking eye make it appear more friendly?”
    â€œToo much so.” I shuddered with atavistic revulsion. “I do not like the idea of machines indistinguishable from humans.” My gaze kept returning to the skull-like head in fascinated horror.
    â€œOh, dear. Mr. Babbage and I had hoped that making it more like a pet and less of a machine would allow people to identify with them and accept them into their households and factories.” Ada frowned at her creation. One hand hovered too close to the spring controlling the arm.
    I looked elsewhere, not willing to become a victim of her pranks again. Various gears and wires, sheets of metal, and other arcane paraphernalia littered another long table to Ada’s left.
    A brighter patch of wallpaper in the center indicated the place her father’s portrait used to hang. She’d removed it, thank heavens. One less place for him to invade.
    To her right, a smaller table contained stacks of gold sheets, uniform rectangles, three inches by four, and less than one sixteenth of an inch thick—the all-important codex cards that determined mechanical actions. A punch press with thirty-two calibration dials sat in pride of place at the center of the table. It was a more complicated variation on the key cutter of my book catalog search engine. There were large sheets of paper, covered in mathematical equations that Ada, and no one else, could translate into the codes she punched into those gold cards.
    â€œWhat are these?” I asked, holding up the top sheet of paper.
    â€œOh, factorials,” she said on a delighted exhale.
    â€œOh, ducklings,” I replied in the same tone.
    She looked at me quizzically.
    â€œYou said that with the same delight as someone who has just come across a parade of ducklings in Regent’s Park.”
    â€œWell, they are certainly cute.” She studied the page with a cocked head and carefully returned the sheet of paper to its proper place. Then she took up the pen from the stand and made a hasty note on one of the clumps of arcane symbols.
    The gold cards were still blank and the mathematics unfinished. Ada had not yet completed the internal working of the automaton on the table. The mechanical man remained inert, incapable of independent movements. Technically.
    No. I would not think about the possibility that some poor soul, having lost its body, and not yet moved on to whatever fate God determined, might take up lodgings in the machine.
    No. No. No.
    Although, wasn’t that one of the purposes of necromancy? To achieve with magic what Lord Byron had tried with machines and bodies, moving a soul from one to another. And Lord Archbishop Howley of Canterbury would not need to outlaw necromancy if someone, multiple someones, weren’t already practicing it.
    â€œEnough of your games, Lady Ada. I need information. Like how someone would contrive a cannon that shoots deadly light and mounts the weapon inside the basket of a hot air balloon?” I looked her straight in the eye, avoiding the creepy imitation person on the table.
    Her gaze kept drifting downward to the