Frankensteam
A Steampunk Frankenstein like Astro tale.
My good friend and colleague Dr. Edsel Moss, his teenage daughter Urania, and I were visiting the old country in an effort to find traces of my friend's family ancestry. The inheritance of my friend's father's estate had finally been settled, and he had decided to inspect the old homestead that had been in the family for many generations. It had been many years since he'd last been there, having been away at boarding schools during his childhood the place didn't hold many strong memories for him.
It being only a few months into the turn of the new century, it seemed strange to find ourselves in a part of the world that seemed to have been forgotten by time. After a long trip by steamship, railroad and horse drawn carriages we finally found ourselves on the Moss family estate.
The house stood on the top of a modest sized hill, surrounded by acres of rocky soil and an old growth forest of crab apple trees. A winding private road led uphill to the estate after forking off from the main road, which lead back into town in one direction, and towards the boarder of the country in the other. It seemed that a old homestead was perpetually covered by dark clouds threatening rain most of the time preventing the sun from casting away the gloom which hung over the old mansion.
Dr. Moss extracted a large key ring from his pocket and carefully tried one key after another in the lock before finally managing to open the gate. It took the two of us to push the rusted wrought iron panels open, the old hinges creaking from lack of lubrication and layers of rust. Urania cast her eyes upward at the upper stories of the old building, and the tower like spire that rose high in the middle of the property.
We carried our bags up the winding walkway that lead up to the main door of the old mansion. Once again, Edsel tried a half dozen keys before finding the one that gained us access to the front door, which also creaked on rusty hinges as it was opened. I had the forethought to have brought several lanterns with me to light our way. I pumped the lantern's fuel tank up to pressure before lighting the mantel wick, the hiss of its pressurized gasoline fuel supply and its brilliant white flame cast away the gloom of the dusty interior of the front chamber of the house.
"Look dad, this house seems to have Edison lights." Urania said. Sure enough, there were carbon filament bulbs in sockets hanging by wires from the ceiling. I traced the electrical plumbing back to the source with my eyes, and located a switch on the far wall. I tried it, but it appeared that the power was gone.
"I suspect that this house is wired with storage batteries," I explained, "It would appear that they are all discharged at the moment. Perhaps we can mend it later." Urania was disappointed, but nodded.
"I'm not surprised at the lighting." Dr. Moss said. "My late father was an inventor, an artist, and a dreamer with money to burn. He was well acquainted with the inventions of Edison and Bell. I think he had copies of the blueprints published by Charles Babbage for his proposed machinery, and he knew Tesla and Maxim quite well. I've heard stories about him that would make him out to be another Dr. Frankenstein, though I can assure you that he did not rob graves and stitch dead bodies together. From what I've pieced together from the tall tales told about him he was a kind of Da Vinci, creating machines that the renaissance era painter and inventor would have been proud of. For sure he did scare the crap out of the ignorant locals in the town below us."
"Yes I've read almost all of your father's monographs," I told Edsel. "Many of the ideas that he had published were not well accepted by the scientific community, yet I think that in the end he will be proven correct. In particularly, his ideas on atomic theory seemed a bit unique. Your father reminds me of a certain Swiss patent clerk I once had lunch with in Zurich."
It took us several trips between the road and the house to unload the wagon that had brought us from the railroad station to the countryside Moss Manor. We had to bring enough food and sundries to stock the cupboards of the old homestead which had been vacant for several years. The bedrooms were on the second floor of the large house, Urania found a beautiful corner room that seemed cheerful enough. I took the formal guest room just across the hallway from the master bedroom where Edsel unloaded his suitcases. After finding three clean cups the doctor and myself had ourselves a nightcap of warm cherry, and Urania a glass of cold milk from what we had packed in the ice chest that was filled in town.
Early the next morning we proceeded to thoroughly explore the house. The clouds had parted just enough to allow some sunlight to enter though the many windows the house provided for that very purpose. I still had my trusty gasoline powered mantel lantern to light our way in the basement, and the darker corners of the old building. The first order of the day however was breakfast. I started a fire going in the stove, and Urania proceeded to cook up up a breakfast of eggs and bacon. I put a pot of coffee up on the stove, the warm beverage drove the chill out of our bones. It was decided to start our exploration in the cellar, hopefully I would be able to get the central heat furnace going to prevent another chilly night.
It appeared that there was a good stock of coal in the bin downstairs, and the furnace looked to be in good shape. Edsel and I cleaned it out and got the dampers unblocked. I crawled inside and was able to stare up the chimney. "Looks to be in good shape." I announced, "should be safe to handle a roaring fire." The doctor and I each grabbed a shovel and filled the firebox with fuel. I splashed a bit of gasoline onto the coal and added a lit match. We watched the gauges on the furnace rise into the green arc as the pressure in the boilers entered the operational areas. "We have heat." Edsel smiled.
The two of us washed the coal dust off of ourselves and we proceeded to examine the rest of the cellar. It didn't take long to discover the power room where the storage batteries for the electrical system were located. The batteries were charged by several windmills behind the house. I was sure that they needed some maintenance before they would again function, but I had little doubt that the spare parts and tools required for that task were somewhere on the property.
The last compartment in the basement was locked, and again Dr. Moss searched his key ring for the key to unlatch it. It took all three of us to pull this last door open, so rusty were the hinges. It was pitch black in the large room, it's size obvious by the sound of the hollow echo. My lantern cast its light about the room and we saw what was inside. Urania screamed at the sight revealed by the high pressure gas flame. "Body parts!" she cried out, clutching her father. I walked into the room carrying my lantern to get a better look. There were quite a few dismembered arms, legs, hands, feet, and heads scattered about the room. None of the body parts were even slightly bloody however, so I carefully picked up an arm to examine and started to laugh.
"How can you find humor in something so macabre?" Urania yelled to me in horror.
"I'm sorry." I said returning to the doorway holding the limb. "But you can see that this is actually part of an automaton, not a person." I handed the arm to the girl who gathered her courage to touch it. "You're right." she said, "It's metal, not flesh!"
"There are quite a bit of these body parts scattered about the room." I said. "Edsel, It looks like your father was a bit of a Frankenstein after all, but his creations were mechanical, not flesh and blood."
"Well, that explains the stories told by the townsfolk," Dr. Moss laughed. I can't wait to discover what we will find upstairs in his workshop."
"My father's workshop was up on the top floor of the house," Edsel remarked. "It's one of the few strong memories I have of this place, perhaps because I was strongly scolded for sneaking up there on several occasions in my youth." We climbed a wide column of stairs to reach the third floor, and entered a large room that was walled by huge windows facing every direction. The tall ceiling was a lattice work of metal beams and columns that supported a patchwork of belts and pulleys that once supplied mechanical power to all sorts of machine tools though out the workshop. Levers and pull chains operated clutches to engage and disconnect pick offs from the main power shaft that ran down the center of the room where it was once driven by a very large belt that went clear down to the basement where a large steam engine once stood.
Though a window facing the rear of the property I could see the rusty ruins of a tall tower. Still standing, but now listing by a few degrees to the south, the structure's purpose seemed to be that of a wireless aerial. "Mr. Marconi is now in the news having recently demonstrated his new wireless invention," Edsel told me. "However, Mr. Tesla had demonstrated forms of wireless communication nearly a score of years earlier to less enthusiastic investors who didn't understand the technology. My father duplicated Nikola's experiments here years before Marconi even thought of it. That tower was part of my father's apparatus."
"What is this father?" Urania asked. The teenager was standing in front of a machine filled with gears, sprockets and toothed cylinders. It resembled a complex clockwork whose parts had been reduced greatly in size to allow more of the apparatus to fit in the same space. Despite the amazingly small size of its parts, the machine filled a good chunk of a corner wall of the room.
"That machine may be the Babbage apparatus that your grandfather once told me about." Dr. Moss said. "I'm not too sure of its function, but my father once told me that he believed it was possible to build a machine with enough complexity that it would be able to think and solve problems that would stump the smartest of geniuses."
We explored the workshop for nearly two hours. Most of the equipment in the large room were tools, experimental machines, and crude prototypes of ideas that never saw the full light of day. I was looking over the contents of a large bookcase on a particularly dusty side of the room, marveling at the titles of many of the volumes that it contained. "Your father has quite the engineering library here." I remarked. "I'd love to own some of these rare books."
"Help yourself to whatever you like," My good friend told me. "My specialty is medicine, not mechanics as you well know. Some of those books might have sentimental value to me, but I'd rather see them in the hands of someone who actually understands their contents."
I took that remark as a compliment as I removed one particularly large volume from the shelf to examine it. I jumped backwards in surprise as I removed the book from its shelf, for it seemed that I had released a hidden trigger that caused the bookcase to slide forward and to the side on rails hidden in the floor. Once out of the way, a secret passage to another room appeared behind the heavy oak cabinet. "Edsel, come take a look at this!" I cried out.
The three of us walked slowly through the hallway that had been hidden from our view behind the library. Here we found a much smaller room, illuminated by gas discharge electric lamps. "Those are not Edison lamps," I remarked, "They look more like the work of Mr. Tesla."
"Indeed, take a look over there." Edsel said pointing. In the corner of the room stood a piece of apparatus that I had heard of, but only saw operational once. Humming with the sound of high frequency electricity was a Tesla transformer, its high voltage output wired to the long glowing glass tubes that provided the light in this windowless part of the building.
"It seems that the equipment in here was triggered to operate when that hidden doorway was opened." I said.
"Look over here!" Urania said in a scared voice.
In a glass case a few feet from the teen were several child's size human heads. On closer inspection it was obvious that they were actually automaton parts. A lower shelf in the display box contained hands and feet that could have also been part of the same collection.
In the center of the room was what appeared to be a medical operating table. Made of rough-hewn lumber, the table had thick leather straps for the obvious purpose of holding a subject in place while a surgeon operated on him. Directly above the table hung a large Tesla discharge lamp for illuminating the work space. Higher up the ceiling above sported a glass skylight that could be opened to allow access to the sky. A windlass holding a large spool of thin metal cable was mounted next to the access hatch in the roof.
"For flying a kite to gain access to lighting, as the fictional Dr. Frankenstein might have?" I asked.
"It would almost seem so, but why?" Dr. Moss asked. "What was my father trying to do here?"
"Maybe the answer is in here?" Urania said in a low whisper.
Sitting on a wheeled table on the far side of the room was a metal box shaped like a coffin. It was about the right size to contain the remains of a small child, perhaps one of 9 or 10 years of age. The box appeared to be hermetically sealed, with numerous latches. Edsel Moss and I inspected the latches to see how to open them. Though not locked, it was tricky to release the dozen or so clamps holding the lid of the container closed. Finally we attempted to open it. Because of the air tight seal, the box lid resisted our first attempts to pry it open and we resorted to using several crow bar type tools to break the vacuum holding the lid down. Urania held her hands clamped tightly over her eyes in fear and dread as we cracked the final seal and gained access.
The inside of the box was lined with well padded violet velvet cushions, resembling the insides of an expensive casket. Lying in the box was what appeared to be the body of a young boy. The small child was dressed only in a pair of tight fitting black briefs lined with a wide green band. He also had a pair of red leather boots on his feet. Except for two pointy cowlicks sticking out at angles from the back of his head, the boy's hair was nicely combed and held in place by a greasy substance that the mortician had seen fit to apply to maintain his grooming for the after life.
Urania peeked between her fingers to glance at the contents of the box. Instead of being frightened by its contents, her curiosity peaked and she walked closer. The teen reached inside the casket to feel the body that lay within, and before we could stop her she had removed it and held it close to her.
"It's a doll!" she exclaimed.
Sure enough, the doctor and myself had been fooled by the well constructed automaton that the elder Moss had left behind in the sealed box. I motioned to Urania, and she handed me the boy like machine. It was about 4 feet in height and weighed perhaps 60 lbs. Its skin felt remarkably human like, but with little give as one would expect if muscle and bone were present underneath. It was clearly made of metal, but not any kind of metal that I was familiar with.
"Give him back to me." Urania asked. She took the boy in her arms and held him close against her breast, his head leaning against her shoulder. "I'm taking him back to my room." she announced and proceeded to leave the secret room and head back downstairs.
"Urania has always loved dolls." Edsel told me. "Though this does seem a bit spooky to me."
"Let her enjoy her new toy for awhile." I suggested. "We'll examine the automaton more closely later."
During our dinner Urania's new friend sat next to her at the table, she had put him in a chair and even put a setting of china in front of him. The boy had the most beautiful life like brown eyes I'd ever seen on a doll, and a haunting smile. She'd dressed him in some old clothing she had found in a closet in one of the closed off bedrooms. One could almost imagine him as being alive instead of just a creation of my friends inventor father.
After a meal of roast mutton and ox tail soup I summoned up the courage to confront the girl. "Urania, your father and I would like to examine the automaton more closely."
"Sure, I guess so." she said, "Just do not take him apart!"
"I promise we won't do that." I said.
I carried the doll up the stairs to the workshop and laid it down on top of the operating table. Edsel found the switch that controlled the Tesla discharge lamp over the work table so we could get a better look at him. I removed the boy's shirt and felt along his chest. "Give me a sharp pin please, Edsel," I said.
My friend handed me the tool and I probed the surface of the automaton's skin until I found the hidden latch that opened up a panel in his chest. "Come look at this!" I called.
His insides were a work of art. He contained bellows, clockwork, springs and motors, all in miniature. What looked like some kind of Leyden jar in the middle of his mechanics seemed to be a source of power. "I think this thing was actually intended to be self animating." I suggested. "It probably was intended to perform parlor tricks or something."
"That would not surprise me, but how was it supposed to be charged?" Edsel asked.
"More to the point, would be did it ever really work?" I asked. "And why did your father seal him up like that?"
"Perhaps to await a new day." Edsel suggested, "My father was clearly decades ahead of his time, and so apparently were his inventions."
I looked across the room at the Tesla coil, but dismissed the idea. That machine was sized correctly to operate the lighting in the room, and nothing more. For some reason I suspected this boy like machine would require much more energy to bring to life. Though the skylight above me I could see the approach of a storm as lighting flashed in the distance. The rain hadn't yet started, and judging by the time between the lighting and thunder it was still many miles away. I then noticed a large box kite sitting in the corner of the room. "Edsel, do you think?"
My friend saw what had caught my eye and took the entire scene in. "Yes, I do think you are correct. A bit dangerous, but then again Mr. Franklyn survived the experiment once."
We worked at cranking open the skylight and hauling the kite up to the ceiling. I attached the metal cable to the kite and pushed it through the open hatch in the roof. The wind had freshened and the kite was quickly pulled upwards into the clouds. We strapped the automaton down to the operating table using the heavy leather belts and I connected the rubber insulated cable from the windlass up to the Leyden jar inside of the boy. The two of us now donned some heavy rubber gloves and aprons that we had found hanging. The accouterments were obviously part of a set of garments kept by Edsel's father for the purpose of working with high voltages.
Edsel release the ratchet on the windlass and the kite was pulled higher up by the wind. By now lighting was flashing cloud to cloud above us and the crashes of thunder were shaking the building. Urania stood at the doorway to the rear part of the workshop, her father kept waving for her to stand back.
The lighting flashes grew more and more intense, and I began to question the wisdom of what we were doing. Then it happened! The kite had drifted into the center of the charged region of the towering cumulonimbus and was struck by the full force of a major discharge. Millions of volts of electrical energy flashed down the steel cable and entered the body of the automaton strapped to the operating table. We were momentarily blinded by the flash of light and hurled backwards by the force of the discharge. I picked myself up from the floor where I had been deposited and looked up at the glowing body of the elder Moss's creation that we had just electrocuted.
The boy opened his eyes and tried to move. His head, chest, arms and legs were each held tightly to the wooden table by strong leather straps, held down with steel bolts. One by one he flexed his mechanical muscles and tore each of the restraints clear from his body. He looked at us more with curiosity and wonder, than with any sign of aggression or anger. Dr. Moss and I didn't know if we should run for our lives or assist our patient, we were both frozen stiff from the adrenalin reaction our bodies were subjecting us to.
The automaton braced himself against the table with his arms and slowly swung his legs over the side of the table as he sat up. He tried to lower himself to the floor, but his legs were as yet unsure and he fell face first to the floor. Urania ran into the room as her maternal instincts took hold. She helped the boy to his feet and held him against her to carry him out of the room.
I stopped her and looked into the boy's face. "Hello" he said in a weak voice. "My name is Atom, who are you, and where is my father?"
Dr. Moss ran his hands though the boys hair. "Hello Atom, my name is Edsel Moss."
"Dr. Moss?" Atom said, "You look like my dad."
"Yes, he was my father too." Edsel said. "I guess than makes us brothers?"
I was dumbfounded. Clearly this was no parlor trick machine. It appeared that the elder Dr. Moss had created a super miniature Babbage thinking apparatus, and put it into the body of an advanced automaton to create a living machine in the form of a small boy.
"Well then Atom I guess you're my uncle." Urania said as she carried the newly awakened being downstairs to her room.
I don't know yet if this will be the only chapter, or if I'll continue this story. I wrote this quickly as the idea of a Victorian Steampunk - Frankenstein like Astro origin story emerged into my mind based on someone's Deviantart posting.