A few miles into the countryside west of London, a gleaming automatic carriage streaked across a narrow horse road. The contraption spews out dark steam and smoke and kicks up a flurry of dust behind it as it rumbles along at some thirty miles an hour. From a distance it looks at first to be a boat, and indeed it was fashioned from one - the chromed hull of a small sailboat lying atop two long wide strips of brazilian rubber, looped tight around four massive gears that churn with the noise of a busy woodmill. A glass cockpit has been fashioned in the top, only partially hiding the driver, hatless and wearing darkened goggles, his hair and scarf flying in the wind.
In the seat behind him, a woman with one arm sat rigidly, bouncing up and down with every bump. Despite her steel-eyed gaze, she was enjoying herself. She preferred the company of Charles to any other man. His friendship had perhaps been a costly one, in terms of societal status, but intrigue and gossip had rarely interested her anyway.
She looked out at the countryside flashing between trees. They moved so very fast. She remembered, dimly, an article she may have read, or perhaps heard excerpted, of doctors warning against the possible ill effects associated with high-velocity travel. She knew already that Charles would dismiss it as rubbish, and indeed it likely was. The man regarded bodies as little more than intricate machines carrying around dim consciousnesses, and had time and again produced semi-successful experiments reinforcing these conclusions.
Idly, she regarded her missing half-arm, stopping just at the circlet. It was one of the better of his demonstrations so far - much of his work could only be replicated near to his machines, which meant that to witness his work, someone would have to pay him a visit. Although Charles did what he could to be a gracious host, there was little the man could do to disguise his deep loathing and boredom with most other people, Annabelle being one of the few possible exceptions.
She had, one summer ago, brought a cousin of hers to visit his laboratory, as she’d often found herself mentioning her assistance in Charles’ nebulae work, a means of ‘relaxing a person’s body via disintegration’ (it actually was not nearly as bad as it sounded). He had answered the door, literally with blood on his hands, explaining without embarrassment that he had been attempting to graft the head of a dog onto a cat.
“Why?” came horrified inquiry from the cousin’s husband, a Captain Rothschild, formerly of the Imperial Navy Explorer’s Club.
Charles narrowed his gaze and with obvious disdain, merely said “For research.”
The tour of his laboratory, for which she’d planned would take most of the evening, had to be cut short after only five minutes, unsurprisingly ending in a shouting match over the role of scripture in morality.
And that had been the last she’d seen of him, at least, the last time she’d seen him herself. The rumors, the gossip about her friend Charles, well it was as constant as it was vile. Not only was there scandal after scandal about the transgressive nature of his research, but the man himself was said to drink cat’s blood, run experiments on orphaned children, and among some circles, had naturally had sold his soul to the devil.
There was some truth, perhaps an impression or outline of the truth, behind this reputation. Charles had first come to public attention during an experiment, unauthorized and mysteriously funded of course, involving crop fertilization. The result had been a monstrous pumpkin vine with tendrils some twenty feet in diameter and growing as fast as two hundred feet a day. The pumpkins themselves had dwarfed the buildings nearby as the vines laid claim to almost a thousand acres. There had been a great deal of outrage, naturally, but Charles denied responsibility, claiming that he had only developed the fertilizer for someone anonymous other, and that he had not actually deployed it anywhere, and furthermore he completely lacked the resources to actually follow through on the paper he’d written some five to six years prior. An investigation found Charles to be legally innocent though, also, “a danger to society and a general menace to his country,” and the actual culprit, the pumpkin patch planter, having no understanding of what was actually going to happen when he tried Dr. Yaewer’s recipe, was sentenced to hard labor for his entire life.
But that had been some ten years ago. Charles had since turned his attention from horticulture to siege weaponry, drawing disdain and public censure, though again no legal ramifications, when he developed what he called a “mountain cannon” capable of magnetically disturbing the Earth’s crust with dramatic and entirely unpredictable results. The result was not so much a catastrophe as a general failure, as the device created a massive fissure in the Earth right beneath itself, and summarily fell some thousand miles to its assumed destruction.
And now, this new Hobson business. It had already been, she considered, his greatest success and his best opportunity to be recognized as the genius he was. But her efforts to impress this upon him, to mollify the agitation and contempt within him, were so far only treated with a condescending agreement.
The Hobson field, as she understood it, acted through invisible forces similar in some way to magnetism. Somehow, these fields could be used to slice through solid objects, leaving them with the properties of being intact and yet the appearance and effect of being separated. Hence, when her left arm had abruptly vaporized before her eyes, it was not with alarm that she reacted, but only a tired amusement.
That’s not to say there hadn’t been a few mishaps. The Hobson machine had, on several occasions, created “anomalies” where things had changed shape, all by themselves. This occurrence, which Charles insisted was rare to nonexistent, had earlier caused Anna to physically merge, from the waist down, with Charles’ young research assistant, a Ms. Elizabeth Tyrshine. Anna had been engaged to attend a function later that evening, and so, once the Hobson was restarted, Ms. Lee was unceremoniously sawn free, and Anna was forced to leave in possession of the other young lady’s lower half.
Which, Anna reflected, Nobody ever seemed to notice anyway.
But why would they? At twenty-five her “years-of-bloom” as the novels liked to say were well behind her. And while she looked much the same as she had at twenty years, her posture, expression, and tone had grown shrewd, cunning even. The laughing young men who’d surrounded her at parties, smiling drunkenly and spouting poorly rehearsed poetry, they now fawned upon the younger, brighter, the more curious and easy-humored.
The carriage flew over a bump, jolting her out of her thoughts. There was a moment she was certain that the entire vehicle must have been airborne, but then just as quickly they crashed hard against the earth, the heavy engine letting off a loud hiss of steam.
“Confound it!” shouted Charles, thrashing the controls somehow, before the machine sputtered once, then resumed it’s dreadful clanging and once again picked up speed. Anna braced herself as best she could lacking an arm. It couldn’t be that much further to Chelkine Dale.
Could it?