The other man, dressed in a crisp suit, looked skeptical. “Are you the man who came up with the idea of using a larger flywheel for the old engine?”
I nodded. I took pride in the way I could squeeze more power out of my machines than dreamed of by their designers.
“You did not steal the idea from an Englishman?” His tone was severe.
I blinked. A moment of confusion was followed by a rush of anger. “No,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. I ducked back under the machine to continue my work.
“He is clever,” my shift supervisor said, “for a Chinaman. He can be taught.”
“I suppose we might as well try,” said the other man. “It will certainly be cheaper than hiring a real engineer from England.”
? ? ?
Mr. Alexander Findlay Smith, owner of the Peak Tram and an avid engineer himself, had seen an opportunity. He foresaw that the path of technological progress would lead inevitably to the use of steam power to operate automata: mechanical arms and legs that would eventually replace the Chinese coolies and servants.
I was selected to serve Mr. Findlay Smith in his new venture.
I learned to repair clockwork, to design intricate systems of gears and devise ingenious uses for levers. I studied how to plate metal with chrome and how to shape brass into smooth curves. I invented ways to connect the world of hardened and ruggedized clockwork to the world of miniaturized and regulated piston and clean steam. Once the automata were finished, we connected them to the latest analytic engines shipped from Britain and fed them with tape punched with dense holes in Babbage-Lovelace code.
It had taken a decade of hard work. But now mechanical arms served drinks in the bars along Central and machine hands fashioned shoes and clothes in factories in the New Territories. In the mansions up on the Peak, I heard—though I’d never seen—that automatic sweepers and mops I designed roamed the halls discreetly, bumping into walls gently as they cleaned the floors like mechanical elves puffing out bits of white steam. The expats could finally live their lives in this tropical paradise free of reminders of the presence of the Chinese.
? ? ?
I was thirty-five when she showed up at my door again, like a memory from long ago.
I pulled her into my tiny flat, looked around to be sure no one was following her, and closed the door.
“How’s hunting?” I asked. It was a bad attempt at a joke, and she laughed weakly.
Photographs of her had been in all the papers. It was the biggest scandal in the colony: not so much because the Governor’s son was keeping a Chinese mistress—it was expected that he would—but because the mistress had managed to steal a large sum of money from him and then disappear. Everyone tittered while the police turned the city upside down, looking for her.
“I can hide you for tonight,” I said. Then I waited, the unspoken second half of my sentence hanging between us.
She sat down in the only chair in the room, the dim lightbulb casting dark shadows on her face. She looked gaunt and exhausted. “Ah, now you’re judging me.”
“I have a good job I want to keep,” I said. “Mr. Findlay Smith trusts me.”
She bent down and began to pull up her dress.
“Don’t,” I said, and turned my face away. I could not bear to watch her try to ply her trade with me.
“Look,” she said. There was no seduction in her voice. “Liang, look at me.”
I turned and gasped.
Her legs, what I could see of them, were made of shiny chrome. I bent down to look closer: the cylindrical joints at the knees were lathed with precision, the pneumatic actuators along the thighs moved in complete silence, the feet were exquisitely molded and shaped, the surfaces smooth and flowing. These were the most beautiful mechanical legs I had ever seen.
“He had me drugged,” she said. “When I woke up, my legs were gone and replaced by these. The pain was excruciating. He explained to me that he had a secret: he liked machines more than flesh, couldn’t get hard with a regular woman.”
I had heard of such men. In a city filled with chrome and brass and clanging and hissing, desires became confused.
I focused on the way light moved along the gleaming curves of her calves so that I didn’t have to look into her face.
“I had a choice: let him keep on changing me to suit him, or he could remove the legs and throw me out on the street. Who would believe a legless Chinese whore? I wanted to survive. So I swallowed the pain and let him continue.”
She stood up and removed the rest of her dress and her evening gloves. I took in her chrome torso, slatted around the waist to allow articulation and movement; her sinuous arms, constructed from curved plates sliding over each other like obscene armor; her hands, shaped from delicate metal mesh, with dark steel fingers tipped with jewels where the fingernails would be.
“He spared no expense. Every piece of me is built with the best craftsmanship and attached to my body by the best surgeons—there are many who want to experiment, despite the law, with how the body could be animated by electricity, nerves replaced by wires. They always spoke only to him, as if I was already only a machine.
“Then, one night, he hurt me and I struck back in desperation. He fell like he was made of straw. I realized, suddenly, how much strength I had in my metal arms. I had let him do all this to me, to replace me part by part, mourning my loss all the while without understanding what I had gained. A terrible thing had been done to me, but I could also be terrible.
“I choked him until he fainted, and then I took all the money I could find and left.
“So I come to you, Liang. Will you help me?”
I stepped up and embraced her. “We’ll find some way to reverse this. There must be doctors—”
“No,” she interrupted me. “That’s not what I want.”
? ? ?
It took us almost a whole year to complete the task.??Yan’s money helped, but some things money couldn’t buy, especially skill and knowledge.
My flat became a workshop. We spent every evening and all of Sundays working: shaping metal, polishing gears, reattaching wires.
Her face was the hardest. It was still flesh.
I pored over books of anatomy and took casts of her face with plaster of Paris. I broke my cheekbones and cut my face so that I could stagger into surgeons’ offices and learn from them how to repair these injuries. I bought expensive jeweled masks and took them apart, learning the delicate art of shaping metal to take on the shape of a face.
Finally, it was time.
Through the window, the moon threw a pale white parallelogram on the floor. Yan stood in the middle of it, moving her head about, trying out her new face.
Hundreds of miniature pneumatic actuators were hidden under the smooth chrome skin, each of which could be controlled independently, allowing her to adopt any expression. But her eyes were still the same, and they shone in the moonlight with excitement.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
She nodded.
I handed her a bowl filled with the purest anthracite coal, ground into a fine powder. It smelled of burned wood, of the heart of the earth. She poured it into her mouth and swallowed. I could hear the fire in the miniature boiler in her torso grow hotter as the pressure of the steam built up. I took a step back.
She lifted her head to the moon and howled: it was a howl made by steam passing through brass piping, and yet it reminded me of that wild howl long ago, when I first heard the call of a hulijing.
Then she crouched to the floor. Gears grinding, pistons pumping, curved metal plates sliding over each other—the noises grew louder as she began to transform.
She had drawn the first glimmers of her idea with ink on paper. Then she had refined it, through hundreds of iterations until she was satisfied. I could see traces of her mother in it, but also something harder, something new.