Perhaps he’d known all along where he would go. He hadn’t been there since the old man had died almost fifteen years before, but he sincerely hoped that the Baker’s labs were still functional and equipped. Waiting for the right person to come and use them again.
Safety. If anywhere in this hope-forsaken city was safe, it would be the place where the Baker had lived, thought, composed, created and died.
The place where, for Tom, love had been born.
It was crazy what time could do to memory, even that of an artificial. It was as if the years could twist streets, the passing of seconds alter perceptions, smells and memories, take the truth and turn it into distorted ideas of what was and had been.
Either that, or he’d consciously tried to forget.
He’d found the estate easily enough. Twenty acres of industrial and business units, half of them flooded by the swollen river and stinking effluent, was not difficult to locate, even in the city. But once there, distance and direction became skewed echoes of what he remembered. He took the third turning right, the second left and found the unit… but it made net casters, and there were several chopped Draggers hanging around outside, eyes red with menace and blood.
Tom backtracked and started again, trying to make out where he had gone wrong. Wading through a foot of shitty water was not the highlight of his day, but knowing that the Baker’s hidden lab was beyond made it almost possible to ignore the stink and the things bumping against his legs. The sun sank in the west. It bled through the polluted atmosphere and cast pink reflections and violet shadows across the buildings, making them almost beautiful. Tom laughed out loud when he found the unit, then frowned when he realised that it was the wrong one again.
Every passing minute his fear grew. The sense that he was being watched — created by his own internal terrors, surely, not by any external presence — grew and grew, twisting him around every few seconds to search for the watcher. He saw a tramp and a few gang members, individual buzzed artificials wandering around awaiting death, a pack of dogs looking for the dead.
Eventually, desperate and exhausted and fearful that the dark would steal his last hope of finding the place that night, Tom sank down against a wall and felt tears brewing. The rucksack weighed heavily on his shoulders and in his heart.
And then the Baker found
Something inside his head clicked on. He’d never felt it before, had never even been aware of this part of his consciousness, but its sudden appearance opened up whole new vistas of knowledge for him. There was a brief surge of power that made his vision dim and his balance waver, but then he knew so much more than before that he almost cried out in fear, shock and relief. He stood, shucked the rucksack higher on his shoulders and walked around two corners to the Baker’s old unit.
It was deserted. The windows were smashed, the door graffiti-strewn and smeared a shiny silver where someone had tried to crowbar it open, the walls crumbled and lined black with flood tide-marks. And Tom smiled, because he knew that no one would have ever been able to find the Baker’s place.
No one but him.
Here was safety and refuge. Here, in the twist of a handle and the muttering of a special word, was a place where his love had been born and where, ironically, he could save it. Tom unslung the rucksack and slipped two fingers under the flap, feeling the silk of Honey’s hair and the oily coolness of her deflated skin.
“I’ll save you now,” he said.
Tom reached out, twisted the door handle and muttered, “Pudding Lane.”
The ground parted and carried him six feet under.
The inner door opened and Tom walked through. The laboratory was just as he remembered. It looked more like the room of a dark-ages alchemist, with arcane machinery arrayed around the walls, sheafs of yellowed paper piled high and haphazard on the huge oaken desk at the far end, dusty skylights letting in a faded, filtered light from somewhere outside. The whole end wall was taken up with a huge pinboard and there were drawings, sketches, formulae, potions, text-book extracts and personal memo’s pinned there by the hundred, a collage of idea and potential that stunned Tom now as much as it had fifteen years before.
The place even smelled the same — spilled chemicals, old experiments, stale thought. It was as if the Baker were still here, ruminating in the comfortable back room instead of being dead. Tom shook his head. An artificial’s thoughts were supposed to be his own, but memory was powerful. Here was the Baker bashing a clay pot with a hammer, determined to get at whatever was inside before it was spoiled. He looked up and swore at Tom… and then he was relaxing in an easy-chair, recounting tales of his earlier years as Honorary Professor of Sentience at the university… and then here, pouring a sticky, clear gunge over the back of a dead frog and screaming in delight as its legs spasmed. Memories everywhere. It had been the most amazing time of Tom’s life.
“You’re as good as human,” the Baker had told him, “and better than most.”
Among the mess of apparatus were pieces of equipment that Tom recognised from many of the Baker’s experiments. He didn’t necessarily understand them — not back then, and still not now — but they provided him with a strange sense of peace. To know that the Baker had been busy in this world was a comforting thought. And to know for sure that his influence was still felt — through Tom, and probably elsewhere as well — went so far as to give hope.
There was a noise at the edge of the room, a rattle of cogs and the lazy squeal of something long-dormant coming to life. Tom stepped back and prepared to utter the exit phrase. He wouldn’t put it past the old scientist to have left some sort of guard in this place, a booby trap to bring the roof down should anyone enter after his death. After all, as he’d once told Tom, there were things in here best forgotten. But then Tom felt himself being spied upon, scanned, a horribly invasive sensation that raised his hackles and drew his balls up into his body. A sheen of light passed over him from head to foot and it seemed to reach inside as well, lighting his internal make-up and delving into his head. He felt a brief flush of abandonment as the scan ended — for a moment he’d sensed the Baker’s attention upon him — but then the discordant rattle and hum of machinery took on an orchestrated rhythm. Some lights flickered on, a coffin-shaped upright cabinet to his left began to shiver slightly as something inside turned over, and several of the Baker’s gophers darted out from beneath the workbench along the wall.
Tom smiled in sheer delight as the little robotic transports hurried about the floor. The scientist had made these things one day when the effort of walking back and forth across the laboratory, searching through cupboards and sifting files had become too tiresome. His casual genius was apparent in their perfection. He could speak his requirements and the next gopher in line would search the lab until it found exactly what the Baker was after. They were remarkable, but their uses were too simple, too convenient for the Baker to be over-excited by them. His efforts had always been directed more left of centre.
No instructions were spoken now, yet still these little wheeled creations busied themselves with some secretive business. And as Tom watched for a couple of minutes the pattern became obvious — everything they searched for and found was taken to the cabinet. They’d disappear beneath the desk beside the cabinet and come out again empty-clawed. There were clicks and clunks and soft sighs from in there. The sounds of construction, and creation.
But Tom felt safe. The Baker, though long dead, would never do anything to bring him harm. Tom had been the nearest thing he’d ever had to a child.
“Baker,” Tom said. “It worked. It worked just like you said it would!” He slipped the rucksack from his shoulder and placed it on a work bench, realising as he undid the clasps just how pathetic it all looked. The Baker had sent him into the world to find love, and here he was returning to the old man’s labs for the first time with a deflated whore over his shoulder and a mad pimp on his tail. “I know it looks a bit strange,” Tom said, carefully opening the drawstring and taking Honey out. She was so light, so
The cabinet rattled and hissed at the edge of the room, gophers flitting on their unknown missions. One of them jumped onto the bench next to Tom and grabbed a lightning-quick snip of his hair. Tom jerked back and watched it return to the shivering machine, his lock held high in its claws.
