OREGON, PRESENT
The clockwork automaton is the size of a small child, a hard weight against my fingers. Her glinting metal bones poke through faded lace. A cherubic porcelain face peeks out of the yellowed fabric; cheeks etched with a patina of fine cracks; lips pursed and faded red; eyes bright, black, and smooth. At a glance, the machine looks like a child. But what I’m cradling in my arms is far more strange.
For a start, this child is more than three hundred years old.
The Old Believer who allowed me into this stuffy church alcove is standing in the doorway, staring at me from the depths of his black beard, the stray hairs of it climbing his cheeks. It’s hard to figure out his age under all that hair, but it’s easy to see the discomfort in his lucid blue eyes. Tall and bent under the cloth of his black robe, the priest looks like the grim reaper, watching my every move.
In contrast to the women of the church, who wear prairie dresses, their beautiful hair twisted into thick braids hidden under silk hats—I’m wearing a pair of safety goggles hanging around my neck, blue latex gloves on my hands, and dusty black jeans. My dirty hair is up in a haphazard ponytail.
It’s my third and final week on the road, and I’m way beyond caring.
I lay the porcelain girl on a black pad spread over a gothic oaken desk. My usual work space at the university doesn’t have hand-carved cuckoos and clusters of ivy teased out of solid wood, but I’m used to making do with whatever I find in the field.
“Is he going to stare at us like that the whole day?” I ask Oleg, my translator.
“Probably,” he replies, not looking at me.
Oleg is sitting on a stool, leaning his elbows on his knees. The stocky man smells like cigarettes and aftershave. He’s consistently rude and impatient—and I’m pretty sure he’s been cursing at me in Ukrainian—but the sponsor that funds my travel decided that Oleg speaks the right languages.
Several years ago, the Kunlun Foundation reached out to me on behalf of a wealthy Chinese benefactor, a woman apparently obsessed with mechanical antiquities. Primitive automatons like this doll are a niche area of research, with sources of funding few and far between. Looking at the big picture, I suppose a grouchy translator is a small price to pay in return for the travel and tools I need.
I pull the chain on an ornate brass lamp. This alcove is almost claustrophobic, crammed with bookshelves and streaked with dim shafts of light that slant through a high row of arched, leaded windows. A silent waterfall of dust trickles through the light and settles onto the thick, ocher-colored carpet. Outside, the sky is bright and cloudy, spitting occasional raindrops against the glass.
From my tool roll, I slide out a plastic probe and use it to pry open the lace dress. Inside, I find sparkling networks of rack-and-pinion gears. This artifact isn’t anything close to a real girl, but she’s a lot more complex than a porcelain doll.
She is a classic court automaton, built during the Renaissance—one of many, though most are lost. Once upon a time, artifacts like this were gifted to the world’s wealthiest, most powerful human beings. Their owners kept these primitive robots locked in wonder rooms and art collections while they argued over whether the devices were animated by demons, angels, or natural magic.
Hundreds of years later, the last of these artifacts are scarce to the point of extinction, nearly always hidden in private collections, and otherwise almost impossible to find and study. On the final stop of a road trip through the Old Believer communities of the Pacific Northwest, this is the first artifact Oleg and I have been able to access. And it’s the only one I’ve seen in years that hasn’t been vandalized.
“Please tell him I appreciate this opportunity,” I say.
Oleg nods, turns, and I hear the quiet whisper of Slavic language. The Old Believer laughs once, a sharp grunt, and says something.
“What did he say?” I ask.
“He says he is doing you no favor. The church only wishes you will document the porcelain girl of Saint Petersburg before the…wolves take her.”
I glance at the Old Believer. His outfit is identical to what his ancestors were wearing when their religion was outlawed during the Great Schism of the seventeenth century. To escape persecution, these people spread to the far corners of the earth. That was more than three hundred years ago, yet he still speaks an old dialect of Russian.
“Wolves?” I ask Oleg, raising my eyebrows.
The translator nods, confirming the word.
My mouth goes dry at the thought that the same vandals I have seen other places could be operating here. Lately, it seems that whatever time hasn’t destroyed, someone else has.
I thought this place would be different.
The Old Believers are an obstinate people. Century after century, they’ve carried their sacred books and artifacts everywhere they’ve settled—from China to Oregon. In the old days, their scholars perpetually made copies of their libraries by hand, racing to rewrite each book as time turned the pages to dust. Everything in this room is sacred, meant to be cared for and protected at any cost.
Wolves.
A small oval face beams up at me from the foam pad, a century’s-old dimple in her cheek. Prodding with the tool, I find an inscription plate under the creases of her dress.
The text is in Old Russian but I can make out the dates and names. My guess is she was a gift to Pope Clement II from Peter the Great. The tsar of Russia considered himself divinely anointed to lead his people—with a direct line to the Almighty. He didn’t have much use for a pope. This automaton would have been a horrendously expensive gift. She could have been a peace offering, or a bribe.
Or a message.
I turn the artifact over in the lamplight, admiring the lacework of her dress as I remove the clothing from her back.
“She’s really incredible,” I murmur.
Oleg stands up and stretches. He steps closer to me, his feet silent on the thick carpet, and glances at the automaton with disinterest. The translator snorts, and speaks again with a heavy Ukrainian accent.
“A doll?” he asks.
I reach into my tool bag and remove my camera. I turn its heavy glass eye on the little girl, her body slight and delicate in the bunched folds of the dress.
The room strobes as I take a photo.
Snap.
“An automaton,” I say. “Sort of like a robot. But made before electricity. Before cars and planes and phones. Probably by a mechanician who answered to the tsar himself. For a little while, this ‘doll’ was very likely the most complex machine on the face of the planet.”
“A toy.”
“An emperor’s inspiration,” I say. “A link in a chain of technology that stretches into prehistory. How far, no one knows.”
“An old toy,” says Oleg.
I narrow my eyes at the man, pushing him away with my frown. Oleg chuckles and ambles off a few feet, pretending to inspect the rows of leather-bound books lining the shelves. The more sophisticated and well crafted the machines of antiquity are, the easier it is for modern people to dismiss them as toys.
But our ancestors had their triumphs, too.
I peel the rest of the clothing away from the automaton. Under the crumbling fabric, her golden limbs are honed, gleaming dully in the lamplight. She sprawls in my hands, a brass skeleton with a baby’s face.
I notice Oleg peeking again, despite himself.
“She was incredible. And she wasn’t the first of her kind,” I tell him. “Socrates warned that the ‘movable statues’ created by the master artificer Daedalus needed to be chained down, in case they ran away. Hero of Alexandria built an artificial man whose head famously couldn’t be severed with a blade. And more than a thousand years ago the Chinese artificer Yan Shi supposedly built an automaton that could walk.”
“Legends,” says Oleg.
I lift the naked automaton, feeling her hunched body, the slender ribs radiating like bicycle spokes. A complicated brass mechanism is mounted inside her narrow chest. With the limp weight of her body in both my hands, I lower my eyelids for a moment and try to imagine the lost centuries she has somehow survived.
“But she’s real,” I say to myself, ignoring Oleg.
This awe for the past is what brought me here.
Years ago, with a small brass key clutched in my sweating fingers, I unlocked a beat-up ammunition box. I slid the oil-soaked cloth off an incredible artifact—a spoil of war and a timeless secret between my grandfather and me. The relic belonged to another world, and I could sense an epic history locked in its fractal patterns.
I threaded a chain through the tips of the crescent relic and hung it around my neck. The artifact was with me, a familiar weight, as I studied linguistics; history; engineering; and finally medieval automatons. I solved a hundred little mysteries, with the biggest one hanging over my heart. And the more I learned, the further I sank, my grandfather’s relic always pulling me deeper into the shrouded past.