Charles Babbage and Lady Ava Lovelace

 It came to them not by coachman, nor by any familiar errand-boy, but by a fellow with the look of one who had lost his way between offices: a satchel at his side, a stiff hat in his hand, and an air of apology that is the true livery of the Post when it performs a marvel.

They were together—Mr. Babbage in his habitual state of half-battle with the universe (which is to say: delighted by it, and furious at its inefficiency), and Lady Lovelace with that composed brightness which makes other people feel they have been living by candle when gas has already been invented.

The man set down two stout cases of brown pasteboard, each marked in bold black letters with a word neither Latin nor Greek, nor any trade-name known to either of them.

AMAZON.

Mr. Babbage touched the lettering with the tip of a finger, as though it might be wet ink, or some new chemical varnish.

“A river,” he said at once.  “In South America.  A curious choice for a merchant.”

Lady Lovelace regarded the cases as she might a riddle—one that was polite enough to stand still and be stared at.

“Or a myth,” she replied.  “But why should a myth arrive by post?”

The fellow produced a paper, asked for a signature, and looked so profoundly relieved when Mr. Babbage scrawled his name that one might think he had been carrying dynamite.  Then, with a bow and a retreat that bordered on flight, the messenger departed, leaving the two of them alone with their inexplicable cargo.

They did not open them at once.  This is the English way: when presented with the unbelievable, one first pretends it is merely unusual.

Mr. Babbage walked around the boxes as though they were engines, checking for seams and fastenings.  Lady Lovelace knelt to examine the stringing and the paper seals.

“It is new,” she said.  “Not merely unused—new in the manner of things freshly conceived.  Look: the precision of the stamping.  No wobble.  No blurring.”

“Machine work,” said Mr. Babbage, with the eager contempt of a man who has spent his life demanding it and being denied.  “But better than any I have obtained from a workshop.”

“And two,” she added.  “One apiece.  That is… considerate.”

“Or strategical,” he said.  “It is a great deal easier to start a revolution when you provide two conspirators.”

They shared a look at that—half amusement, half recognition—because between them, conspiracy was merely another word for thinking in advance of everyone else.

At last, Mr. Babbage fetched a paper-knife.  Lady Lovelace did not stop him.  She only said, very softly, “Let us proceed as if it were both gift and experiment.”

The first case opened with a dry tearing of paper.  Inside was another box—clean, white, and fitted with a kind of lid that did not so much lift as yield, like a well-made puzzle.

Upon it, in austere lettering, was written:

iPhone.

Mr. Babbage pronounced it at once, the way he pronounced “Difference Engine”—as if naming it were the first act of ownership.

“Eye—phone,” he said, tasting the syllables.  “Phone.  Like telephone—but—” He stopped, because the word had no proper business being there.  “No.  That is nonsense.  There is no such thing.”

Lady Lovelace ran her fingers along the edge of the white box.  “Yet someone has thought to name it for a thing that does not exist.  That is how inventions arrive: wrapped in language that has not yet earned itself.”

They opened hers next.  Another iPhone.  Identical.  As if the sender had wished to remove the escape of believing in error.

At the bottom of each brown case lay a folded note, placed with absurd neatness.

Lady Lovelace opened hers first.

It was written in a hand that was careful rather than elegant—like someone copying out a message they did not trust themselves to spell incorrectly.  The language, though English, had certain turns that felt faintly modern—too direct, too stripped of ceremony—yet it was perfectly intelligible.

Here is your new iPhone, since there is no network where you live I have done a basic setup for you.  Feel free to use as you like.  From a distant admirer

Mr. Babbage snatched up his own note and read it, then read it again, as if a second reading might reveal the method of its delivery tucked between the lines.

“No network,” he repeated.  “No network where you live.  That is a strange way of addressing the matter of cables and wires.”

Lady Lovelace did not answer at once.  She turned the note over, searching for watermark, for imprint, for any familiar printer’s trick.  There was none.

“A ‘distant admirer’,” she said at last, and there was a small brightness in her eye, like a star seen through cloud.  “Charles, we are being flirted with by a century that has learned to be impertinent.”

“Or by a charlatan,” he said—yet his voice betrayed him: he did not sound like a man fending off deception, but like a man being offered a duel with reality.

They lifted the white lids.

Inside each lay a thin, dark tablet—not large like a slate, not small like a snuff-box, but something in between.  It looked, at first glance, like a piece of polished black stone set into a frame of metal and glass.

No gears.  No springs.  No visible mechanism at all.

Mr. Babbage’s first instinct was to accuse it of fraud: a thing that did nothing could not be a machine.  Yet the weight of it, the cold of its surface, the exactness of its manufacture—these were too honest for a conjurer’s bauble.

Lady Lovelace lifted hers and held it to the light.

“It is a mirror,” she said.

Mr. Babbage made an impatient sound.  “A mirror that has a button.”

He pressed the button.

For a moment there was nothing, and he almost laughed—until the blackness altered.  It was as if the stone had awakened.  A pale sign appeared, then a field of colour, and then—most unsettling of all—a word, repeated in many tongues, gliding past as though the object were greeting the world in turn.

Hello.
Bonjour.
Hallo.
Ciao.
… and others neither of them recognised.

Mr. Babbage stared as if someone had performed a card trick with the laws of optics.

“It is illuminated from within,” he said, leaning close.  “Yet there is no flame.  No wick.  No—”

Lady Lovelace touched her own device’s surface and gave a slight involuntary start, as though it had responded to her like a living thing.  The word changed.  An instruction appeared, blunt and simple.

Swipe up.

She looked at Mr. Babbage with the expression she wore when she had found a promising idea and was politely inviting him to catch up.

“It asks to be handled,” she said.  “Not opened.”

Mr. Babbage harrumphed.  “Everything asks that, if you are willing to ignore good manners.”

Yet he copied her movement: he drew a finger along the glass, and the device obeyed.  The greeting vanished.  Another panel appeared, offering a list of languages.

Lady Lovelace’s eyes narrowed—not with suspicion now, but with delight so keen it bordered on hunger.

“It is presenting alternatives,” she murmured.  “Like a menu in a machine-shop, except it listens.”

“It does not listen,” Mr. Babbage said at once, because the notion was intolerable.  “It responds to the pressure of your finger, nothing more.”

Lady Lovelace did not argue.  She only tried again, very gently, and watched the list glide, smooth as thought.  Then she chose the nearest thing to their speech.  So did he.

Next came region, then letters larger or smaller, then a set of questions put with the briskness of a clerk who has never had to apologise to a duke.

Mr. Babbage bristled at the impertinence of it.

“It treats us as if we were—” He stopped, searching for the insult.  “—as if we were ordinary.”

Lady Lovelace smiled faintly.  “Perhaps that is the point.  A device that must serve anyone cannot flatter.”

Then came a request that struck them both silent: the device asked to connect to something that was not there.

Choose a Wi-Fi Network.

Mr. Babbage leaned back as if the thing had proposed witchcraft.

“Wi-Fi,” he read aloud.  “Why—Fye.  What is fye?  Some abbreviation?”

Lady Lovelace read the line again, her finger hovering.  “Or a proper name.  It might mean nothing.  There are names in mathematics that began as jokes.”

But there were no networks listed.  Only the blankness of a city map with no streets.

They remembered the note: since there is no network where you live I have done a basic setup for you.

Mr. Babbage’s mouth tightened, because he hated any sentence that implied a difficulty had been foreseen without him.

“So,” he said, “it is designed for communication at a distance.”

“Which would make it,” Lady Lovelace replied, “a kind of messenger.  Only the messenger itself is the message.”

They proceeded.  There were other requests—face recognition, a passcode, the making of an account of some sort.  They did what they could and declined what they could not understand, the way one declines a second helping of an unfamiliar pudding: politely, but with relief.

At last—after enough small obediences to feel ridiculous—they reached a screen filled with tiny painted symbols, arranged as orderly as a cabinet of specimens.

Mr. Babbage stared.

Lady Lovelace stared.

Then, very slowly, Mr. Babbage began to laugh.

It was not the laughter of amusement.  It was the laughter of a man who has spent his life yelling into a storm and has suddenly heard the storm answer back in perfect grammar.

“These are—” he began.

“—operations,” Lady Lovelace finished.

One bore the image of a book.  Another of a clock.  Another of a quill.  Another of a globe.  There was a device for calculation.  There was a device for music.  There were images whose purpose they could only guess at by their emblem, like hieroglyphs of a future Egypt.

Lady Lovelace touched the one that resembled a clock.

The screen changed at once.  Not by turning of pages, not by sliding of shutters—by instantaneous transformation, as if the object were made of pure possibility.

A face appeared: a circular dial, hands moving with perfect steadiness.

“It keeps time,” she whispered.

Mr. Babbage snatched his and opened the same.  He held it near his ear, absurdly, as if it might tick.

“It does not even have the decency to make a sound,” he said—then stopped, because the hands were moving, and nothing in it should have moved.

Lady Lovelace went back, opened the book.  A calendar.  The days arranged in a grid like a ledger.  She flicked, and the months moved beneath her finger as easily as cards.

“Charles,” she said, and her voice had changed.  It had become very calm.  “This is a machine whose cogs are not brass.”

“A machine with no machinery is a contradiction,” he snapped, though his eyes would not leave the screen.

“A machine with hidden machinery is merely a higher art,” she replied.

Mr. Babbage opened the one marked with numbers.  A slate appeared, but it added and subtracted at a touch.  He entered a long multiplication, the kind he would give a clerk just to watch him suffer.

The answer appeared without hesitation.

He tried another.

And another.

His face—so used to scowling at the incompetence of human assistants—took on the look of a man watching a horse do algebra.

“This is—” he began, and could not finish, because any sentence he chose would be too small.

Lady Lovelace, meanwhile, had opened the quill.  A blank field like paper.  And above it, the letters—each one available at a touch, so that a person might write without ink, without blot, without even the physical labour of a pen.

“It is a writing engine,” she said quietly.  “A printing press that fits in the hand and prints only for its owner.”

Mr. Babbage looked up sharply.

“Do not romanticise it,” he said, because romanticising was his privilege, and he resented her taking it.

But Lady Lovelace was not romanticising.  She was measuring.

“Consider,” she said, “what it means that it offers us a cabinet of functions, each invoked by a symbol.  Consider that it changes its entire nature without a single screw turned.”

Mr. Babbage’s mind was racing now, and when his mind raced it took the form of lists.

“It performs calculation.  It displays figures.  It displays text.  It keeps time.  It may store information—perhaps in some arrangement of electrical states.”

Lady Lovelace watched him with the faintest smile.

“Charles,” she said, “you have just described the Analytical Engine, only shorn of every limitation which makes it possible to build.”

He looked at her, offended, because the truth had been spoken aloud.

“And yet,” he said slowly, “it exists.”

Lady Lovelace tapped the little glass again, and made the “book” of days leap forward in time.  She stopped at a year far beyond their own—far beyond any reasonable experiment.

“It permits navigation through time,” she said, then corrected herself at once: “Not time itself—representation of time.  Still.  It is… an abstract machine.”

Mr. Babbage’s hands tightened around his iPhone as if it might wriggle free.

“Who would send this?” he demanded.  “And why two?”

Lady Lovelace looked down at the note again: From a distant admirer.

“A person who wishes us to understand it,” she said.  “Not merely to possess it.”

“And does it,” Mr. Babbage said, “instruct?”

Lady Lovelace opened something labelled “Tips”—a sort of built-in manual, illustrated.  It demonstrated gestures with little drawings of hands.  It explained, in cheerful prose, what a “photo” was, and how one might “edit” it.

“Photo,” Mr. Babbage repeated.  “Photograph.  That I know.  But—” He seized her device, not rudely, but with that urgency which is rudeness disguised as necessity.  He hunted through the icons until he found one that showed a small lens.

When he touched it, the screen altered—and suddenly it was no longer a slate of symbols.  It was a window.

A window that showed the room in front of it, in perfect miniature, with colours so faithful that for an instant Mr. Babbage looked behind the device to see whether it had stolen the room and stored it.

He moved it left.  The view moved left.

He moved it right.  The view moved right.

He stared at his own hand in the little window, turning it like a specimen.

Lady Lovelace watched his face with the satisfaction of someone who has correctly predicted an experiment.

“It is,” she said softly, “a device that takes light as its input.”

Mr. Babbage’s mouth opened, closed, opened again.

“It draws,” he said hoarsely.  “It draws the world.”

Lady Lovelace took her own iPhone and aimed it at him.

“Hold still,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because I wish to see whether it can capture your expression when you are forced to admire something.”

Before he could protest, she touched a circle on the glass.

There was a tiny sound—like the faintest click of a mechanism too small to be honest—and then the device presented an image of Mr. Babbage: his hair in disarray, his eyes bright with outrage and wonder, his mouth mid-argument.

It was not a sketch.  It was not a daguerreotype with its solemn slow cruelty.  It was immediate, casual, almost rude in its accuracy.

Mr. Babbage stared at his captured self as though confronted by a rival.

“That,” he said, very slowly, “is impossible.”

Lady Lovelace’s eyes glittered.

“No,” she corrected him.  “That is merely unexplained.”

They fell silent then, not from lack of thought but from surplus.  The room, with its papers and diagrams and half-finished dreams, seemed suddenly quaint—as if they had been building a cathedral out of matchsticks and someone had casually delivered them a wrought-iron bridge.

At length Mr. Babbage spoke, and his voice had become more careful.

“If this device performs all this without network,” he said, “then with network it must—” He stopped, because imagining it felt like blasphemy.  “It must connect.  It must transmit.  It must—”

“Be a node,” Lady Lovelace finished, and then laughed at herself.  “Listen to me: I am already speaking its language.”

Mr. Babbage pointed at the “globe” icon.

“That,” he said, “is the boldest claim of all.  A globe in a pocket.”

Lady Lovelace did not touch it.  She read the note again, and her restraint was a kind of wisdom.

“No network where you live,” she reminded him.  “So the globe may be—empty.  Or a promise.”

Mr. Babbage, thwarted, opened it anyway.

A blankness.  A polite complaint.  It wished to connect.

He made an animal sound of disgust—half laugh, half growl.

“There!” he said triumphantly.  “A limitation.”

Lady Lovelace tilted her head.

“It is not a limitation,” she said.  “It is a dependency.  Which means the true machine is larger than the thing in your hand.”

Mr. Babbage blinked.  He understood that at once, and the understanding struck him like a physical blow.

“A system,” he whispered.  “An entire system.”

Lady Lovelace looked again at the flawless glass and the obedient symbols.

“What we have,” she said, “is a limb cut from a giant.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon doing what they always did when presented with a marvel: attempting to reduce it to principles.

They tested its arithmetic.  They tested its memory.  They attempted to exhaust its store of “pictures” and “music,” and discovered that it held more than seemed possible in so thin a volume.  They tried to locate its power source, and found only that it grew warm with use and slept when idle, like a creature conserving itself.

At one point Mr. Babbage held it up to the flame of a lamp, expecting, perhaps, to see gears inside the glass.

Lady Lovelace stopped him.

“Do not murder the future,” she said, gently enough that it felt like a joke, but with an edge that made him obey.

When evening came, and the servants brought in candles, the iPhones shone of their own accord—softly, unbothered by drafts, refusing to gutter.

Mr. Babbage sat back, exhausted in the manner of a man who has run a race against possibility and found it faster.

Lady Lovelace, however, looked newly awake.

“It is,” she said at last, “a proof.”

“A proof of what?” he demanded, because he could not stand proofs that were not his.

“A proof,” she said, “that a machine may act upon symbols with such subtlety that to the untrained eye it resembles thought.”

Mr. Babbage frowned.  “We are trained.”

“And yet,” she replied, “we are astonished.”

He looked down at the small luminous rectangle in his hands.  His reflection hovered faintly in the black portions of the glass, superimposed upon the icons like a ghost haunting a cabinet of tools.

“It is an engine,” he said, slowly, as though admitting the word cost him.  “But it is also a library, a camera obscura, a calculating boy who never tires, a writing desk, a lantern—”

“A theatre,” Lady Lovelace added, opening the music and letting it play a tune of perfect clarity from no visible instrument.  The sound filled the room like a polite intruder.

Mr. Babbage stared at the device as if it had just sung.

Lady Lovelace folded the note and put it carefully away, as though it were a title-deed.

“Charles,” she said, “we must be careful.”

“Careful?” he barked.  “With this?”

“With ourselves,” she corrected him.  “Because the temptation will be to treat it as an oracle.  But it is only a tool—albeit one forged by a civilisation that has solved difficulties we have not yet named.”

Mr. Babbage looked as if he wanted to argue, but his mind was already running ahead into a future full of gears that were not gears.

“What do we do with them?” he demanded.

Lady Lovelace held her iPhone in both hands, like a precious book.

“We do what we always do,” she said.  “We learn its grammar.  We infer its principles.  We attempt to describe it without using miracles as verbs.”

Mr. Babbage’s expression softened, just a fraction.

“And if,” he said, with sudden suspicion, “it is meant to change us?”

Lady Lovelace smiled—bright, dangerous, delighted.

“Then it has been delivered to the correct address.”

And the two of them bent again over the little glowing windows, like astronomers who had been handed a piece of fallen star and were trying, with paper and pencil, to work out which heavens it had come from.