London smelled of coal and desperation.
Inside the Bank of England, the air was thick with smoke. Not from a fire, but from friction.
The Babbage Engine dominated the basement.
It was a cathedral of brass and steel. Thirty feet long, ten feet high. Thousands of gears, axles, and levers.
It was the heartbeat of the British Empire.
And it was beating too fast.
Click-clack-whirr. CLUNK.
I sat in the center of the room. James Rothschild.
I was blindfolded. A black silk tie covered my eyes. The EMP flash from Egypt had burned my retinas. They were healing, slowly, but the light still caused agonizing migraines.
I didn't need eyes to run the world.
I read the economy by touch. By sound.
I ran my fingers over a stack of fresh punch cards.
Hole, space, hole. Sector 4. Textile shipment. Approved.
I fed the card into the slot.
The Engine digested it. The gears spun. A bell dinged.
Perfect.
A clerk ran down the iron stairs. His boots clanged loudly.
"Lord Rothschild!"
I didn't turn my head.
"Stop shouting, Higgins. You're disrupting the acoustic harmonic of the main drive shaft."
"Sir, there's an anomaly."
I stopped feeding cards.
"Define anomaly."
Higgins stopped at my desk. He was panting.
"A serial mismatch, sir. From the Dover branch."
He handed me a card.
I took it. I ran my thumb over the perforations.
"A transaction record," I said. "Five-pound note. Serial A894-322..."
My thumb stopped.
I traced the last hole.
It was in the wrong place.
"Y," I whispered.
"Yes, sir," Higgins said nervously. "The teller in Dover accepted it from a sailor off the HMS Dauntless. But the sequence for that batch ended in X."
I gripped the card. The stiff paper cut into my thumb.
"Y is a command code," I said. "It means 'Liquidate.' But that code wasn't issued."
"Perhaps a printing error?" Higgins suggested.
"The Bank of England does not make printing errors," I snapped.
Before he could answer, another clerk appeared at the top of the stairs.
"Sir! A report from Folkestone! Duplicate serials!"
I stood up.
My chair scraped against the stone floor.
"How many?" I demanded.
"Three, sir," the second clerk yelled down. "Used to buy horses. All ending in Y."
Then a third clerk.
"Deal, sir! A dozen notes! Y-sequence!"
I ripped the blindfold off.
The pain was immediate. The gas lamps in the basement stabbed my eyes like needles. The room blurred.
But I forced my eyes open. I stared at the massive Babbage Engine.
It was churning faster now.
Click-clack-clack-clack.
The sound was changing. It wasn't the steady rhythm of commerce.
It was a stutter.
CLUNK. GRIND.
The machine was trying to reconcile the data.
It read the original "A894-322-X" (Hold) that was in the vault.
Then it read the incoming "A894-322-Y" (Liquidate) that was flooding the coast.
It was a paradox.
You cannot hold and liquidate the same asset simultaneously.
"He didn't invade with an army," I whispered.
The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow.
Louis. The Glitch. The Accountant.
He had found the code.
He hadn't brought cannons across the Channel. He had brought a virus.
He had introduced hyperinflation to my closed system. He was corrupting the ledger.
"Stop the machine!" I yelled.
GRIND. SCREECH.
Smoke began to pour from the tertiary gear bank. The smell of burning oil filled the air.
The Engine was trying to calculate infinity. It was destroying itself.
"Sir!" Higgins screamed over the noise. "The main shaft is bowing!"
I ran to the machine.
I didn't look for a switch. There was no switch.
I grabbed a heavy iron wrench from a tool bench.
I swung it.
CRASH.
I smashed the wrench into the delicate brass linkage of the input feed.
Gears shattered. Springs flew into the air, pinging off the stone walls.
The machine shuddered violently. A massive cloud of steam erupted from the boiler valve.
Then... silence.
The Babbage Engine stopped.
The gears locked.
I stood there, panting, the heavy wrench in my hand.
My eyes watered from the pain of the light and the smoke.
"Sir," Higgins whispered. He looked terrified. "You... you broke it."
"I saved it," I said grimly.
I dropped the wrench. It clanged on the floor.
"The network is compromised. Every note ending in 'Y' is a bad packet."
I turned to the clerks. They were staring down at me from the stairs, pale and silent.
"Send runners to every branch in London," I ordered. "Close the doors. Stop all transactions."
"But sir," a clerk stammered. "The people... the withdrawal from the Blue Drop... they are starving. If we stop the money flow, they will riot. They will burn the city."
"Let them burn it," I said.
My voice was dead. Flat.
I had lost the economic war. In five minutes, Alex Miller had crashed the pound sterling. He had turned my greatest weapon—the Network—against me.
If I couldn't control the board, I would flip the table.
I walked to a steel safe in the wall behind my desk.
I spun the dial. 32-14-6.
I opened the heavy door.
Inside weren't gold bars.
There were racks of glass vials. Dozens of them.
Filled with pure, electric blue liquid.
"Blue Drop" concentrate.
I pulled out a wooden case containing six vials.
"Higgins," I said.
The clerk scurried down the stairs.
"Yes, Lord Rothschild?"
"Go to the barracks at the Tower of London," I said. "Find Captain Shrapnel's brother."
Higgins blanched. "Major Thomas? Sir, he's... he's locked in the asylum wing. The experiments..."
"He's an asset," I corrected. "And it's time to liquidate."
I handed Higgins the case of vials.
"Give him this. Tell him the French King is in Dover."
Higgins took the box with trembling hands.
"And tell him," I added, looking at the broken gears of my beautiful machine, "that I want the Accountant's head. I want the boy's head. And I want the Emperor's head."
I turned back to the safe. I reached past the vials.
I pulled out a pair of dueling pistols.
They were heavy. Silver-chased.
I checked the loads.
"The audit is over," I whispered to the empty room.
I looked at the map of England on the wall.
Dover was marked with a red pin.
The HMS Dauntless had docked an hour ago.
I knew he was there. I could feel the anomaly in the timeline. The physical weight of his presence on English soil.
"He wants a hostile takeover?" I said.
I snapped the pistols shut.
"I'll give him a hostile takeover."
I walked toward the stairs.
The Babbage Engine hissed behind me. A dying breath of steam.
The age of information was dead.
The age of monsters had begun.