MOSCOW, 1709
The doll’s face is the first thing I see. She is my first memory, and the last sight I could ever forget.
I do not remember opening my eyes.
The candlelit path of her cheek eclipses a great darkness. As she moves, the outline of her face becomes a wavering blade of light. Her skin is made of hard porcelain. Leaning over a wood desktop, clad in a dress, she scratches marks with a quill pen held in frozen ceramic fingers. Her black eyes aim at the paper without seeing.
The doll’s hand swoops back and forth as she mindlessly writes her message. A flutter of gears under the fine fabric at her neck beats a false, mechanical pulse, and yet this is the heartbeat of my world, a rhythm, steady and quiet and hard under the warm-wax smell of candles and the canopy of a low wooden ceiling.
Then comes the old man.
An amorphous shape—shifting between shadows that flick like snake tongues up timber walls. Thin and bent, the man drapes long fingers over my face. I turn my head slightly to inspect him, blinking to focus. His features sharpen into detail: wrinkled bags under glittering eyes. His lips are pressed together and white within a graying beard. Every half second, his limbs quake slightly as his heart throbs in a narrow chest.
I will come to know this man as Favorini. My father. Or the closest thing to it.
Now the old man is holding his breath, watching me with wide eyes.
“Privet,” I say, and he collapses into a faint.
Without thought, I catch him by the shoulder. Eyelids fluttering, his head dips like a sail dropping to half-mast. For the first time I see what must be my own hand. An economy of brass struts wrapped in supple leather. And now I truly begin to understand that I am also a thing in this world. Not like the doll who is writing a few feet away with all the mindfulness of water choosing a path downhill. Something more. But also not the same as this fainting man, made of soft flesh.
Somehow, I am. And, I tell you, I find it a strange thing, to be.
The idea of it settles into my mind. A world outside me, perceived through vision, hearing, smell, and other senses more innate. And somewhere inside, I am placing the sights and sounds into a smaller, simpler idea of a true world that is too complex. From within this little world in my head, I am making decisions.
So I catch my father by his shoulder.
The old man slumps, held upright by my fingers. His chin falls to his chest and his face is lost in strands of brown-gray hair. I have saved him from falling into a sharp jumble of tools that lie scattered around my legs. This room is a…workshop, without windows, lit by a tilting confusion of candles sprouting from every surface. Splintery beams stripe the ceiling, and the low room stretches beyond the light into warm darkness. A patchwork of desks and tables is arrayed in groups. Some are empty, but most are piled high with scraps of metal, twists of rope, wooden bowls filled with unknown substances, fouled spoons, and all manner of glass vials and tubes.
Somehow, the knowledge of this is already in me.
Half-formed body parts are also sprawled among the clutter. Chunky torsos filled with fine gears, supported by whalebone ribs and riddled with veins of India rubber. This place is more than a workshop…it is a womb.
Sitting up at the waist, I lay the old man over an empty desk.
My body has been arranged on a long wooden table. Nearby, the doll thing nods sightlessly, her pen scratching as she covers a stiff page with scrawls of ink.
She and I are kin, I know it.
My shape is that of a man, crafted in perfect proportions. Long golden legs, light winking from hundreds of rivets. My skin is made of bands of a beaten gray-gold metal, fastened to a solid frame. Through narrow gaps in the tops of my thighs, I see rows of braided metal cables, pulled to tension, wrapped around circular cogs.
When I move, I hear a clockwork grind coming from inside.
“Hello?” murmurs the old man. “My son?”
The consonants of his language echo in my mind, resolving into words. I can almost remember hearing his voice before. Lessons whispered in my sleep.
Gnarled fingers wrap around my wrist. Faintly, I can feel the heat inside the man’s hands. I sense he is full of warm blood, carrying energy through his body. His skin is not like mine, nor his heart. There is no blood within me, for my father and I are not alike. He is a human being, and I am…something else.
“You are here,” he says, his grip tightening on my wrist. “What do you remember? How far back?”
I cast my mind into the past and find only the void. Shaking my head, I pull my arm away from the old man. For an instant, he seems disappointed.
“Who…who are you?” I ask.
My voice comes from somewhere deep inside my chest. I can feel a device in there, a bellows that contracts and sends wind up my throat and between my teeth. There seems to be a multitude of voices beneath my voice.
“Giacomo Giuseppe Favorini,” says the old man. “But call me Favo. I am the last mechanician to Tsar Pyotr Alexeyevich. Practitioner of the ancient art of avtomata and keeper of the anima. Successor to the great alchemists who came and went before history. And, if you will believe the tsar’s wife, Catherine Alexseyevna…I am a devil.”
“Last mechanician?”
“I will explain. Ten years ago, the tsar visited Europe in secret. The Netherlands, England, Germany, Austria. He returned with shipbuilders, artists, and mechanicians. To one group of us, he gave a special artifact—the anima. With it we were to build…you. But the tsar’s wife never saw the promise. It has been so long. Catherine has managed to send the other mechanicians east to exile. I am the last.”
The old man trails off, sadness in his voice.
“But you are here now!” he exclaims, snatching a small hammer from the table. “Come, look at you! Talking! Can you see me? Tell me what you see!”
“A room. A man. Machines.”
Some knowledge of this world is already inside me, packed into words that reveal themselves when I try to think of them. But I can already sense that there is much, much more to be learned.
“Concise,” Favorini says, tapping my chest lightly and listening. “The old texts were true. The anima is working…”
These words confuse me. Extending my gauntlet-like hands, I clench my fists and grind the hard metal of my own fingers together. Squeezing, I push to the tolerance of my strength, until the gears in my hands are straining. I swing my legs off the workbench and my wooden heels scratch the floor.
I stand, the top of my head nearly brushing the ceiling.
Favo scurries away into the darkness. In a moment he returns, his thin arms wrapped around a tall golden panel. The polished bronze groans as he drags it over the wooden floor, its surface glowing in the candlelight. He props himself against it—holding the long rectangle before me—then stops and stares.
“Look upon yourself,” he whispers.
At my full height, I see my movements reflected in the gleaming panel. I am tall and thin. Very tall. My face is smooth, chin dimpled, eyes sharp and predatory over a straight nose. Ringed in brown curls of hair, my face is only crudely human. My lower lip is pulled to the side, slightly disfigured. I am not wearing clothes. Instead, my chest and arms are layered in beaten metal banding with occasional tight swathes of leather tidily placed underneath. A winking light haunts the depths of my brown eyes, and I now understand why Favo has awe in his voice.
“My son?” he asks.
“Yes,” I reply.
“What is the first thing?” he asks.
“The first thing?”
Flexing my fists again, I feel an unyielding strength in my metal bones. I am so much bigger than this small old man.
“Yes,” he whispers. “In your mind. Reach inside and tell me the first thing. The first word you ever knew. What is your Word, my son?”
I find a hard honesty to the limits of my body—to the solid press of my flesh and the clenching strength of my grip. Pushing into my mind, I search for the answer to Favo’s question and find another principle, incontrovertible, even stronger than that of my flesh. It is the reason for my being—a singular purpose hewn into the stone of my mind.
There is a word that is the shape of my life.
I set my eyes upon the old man, and the leather of my lips scratches as I say the Word out loud for the first time.
“Pravda,” I say. “I am the unity of truth and justice.”