Desire Machines

The second place story in our Bridges contest holds a mirror to one of the world's favorite hobbies. A tale of gambling, fandom, and mechanical leviathans, whose bones litter the world...

Departure

The last-minute tumult of departure reigned on the steamer from Bristol to Buenos Aires. Porters hurried up the gangway with trunks and crates, telegraph boys zigzagged between families pressing farewell letters into their hands, and the deck lights quivered in the wind as the ship groaned against its moorings.

I had found a place near the forward rail, trying to appear older than my 19 years in my ill-fitting three-piece suit, when several bright flashes caught my attention – reporters’ lamps, unmistakably. The crowd began to part with a collective shiver.

Beside me, a stout and red-cheeked man tapped the ash from his pipe. He wore a wool coat too heavy for the ship’s warm corridor and carried himself with the unobtrusive authority of someone who found himself on a ship too often.

“Ah,” he said, noticing the direction of my gaze. “You will have a rare passenger on this voyage. That fellow, Sorabji Marker. You are from the islands, are you not? Saint Canderton?”

I nodded hesitantly.

Lakshman Sorabji Marker.

I remembered the name from my childhood in Saint Canderton, distant flashes of the cricket ground – The Oval – cut into the hillside, and the roar of the crowd. I had been too young then to understand why adults spoke his name with mythic reverence.

“You must remember the cricket match?” the gentleman asked. “That last Test? The one that broke the English streak and nearly set the Caribbean on fire.”

I confessed I remembered very little other than the heat and being lifted onto my father’s shoulders to see Marker coming out to bat. The gentleman gave me a sympathetic smile.

“Well then,” he said, lowering his voice with a storyteller’s instinct, “permit an old man to refresh your memory.”

He began with the giddiness of an old fellow who had told his story many times.

The Final Test

“It was the fourth day of the third Test match,” he said, “the series tied one-one, and the whole island felt as though it were about to lift off its foundations. Saint Canderton was brimming with people, tens of thousands crammed into streets meant for hundreds. The betting houses, the Fortuna Exchange and Hilltop Book, were so packed a man could hardly raise his elbow without brushing against five others. Steam drifted over The Oval cricket ground from the Engine Rooms, where the great analytical machines had been clattering without pause for two days, recalculating odds with each new whisper: rumors of Marker being ill, pitch conditions, Alistair Grace’s footwork patterns, all rendered into columns of brass and steam.”

He gave me a knowing look, as if expecting I might boast familiarity with the engine. I did not.

He paused to relight his pipe before continuing.

“England had one wicket left. And Saint Canderton was hungry for it.”

I remembered glimpses of that day through the haze of childhood memory. But the next part I had only ever heard in fragments whispered by adults animated by copious amounts of rum.

Graceful Fury

“The last English batsman,” the Leeds man said, “was the captain, Alistair Grace. Grim, patient, sweating through the afternoon heat, he had inched England toward their target. They needed only five runs. Five. And he had already survived a dozen appeals, each one tightening the crowd until The Oval felt like a drumhead stretched to breaking. Then came the ball, nothing spectacular, just a weary leg-break that kept a shade low. Grace thrust out his pad, half a moment too slow. The appeal rose. And for the first time that day, the umpire’s finger went up. LBW. Grace had been given out. He stood frozen. The stadium erupted. People screamed, wept, and danced in the stands. Drums started up on the hillside. And just as suddenly, everything went wrong.”

He shifted closer, as though the retelling required physical proximity.

“Grace lost his senses. Absolutely lost them. He marched straight to the umpires, shouting the decision was fraudulent. When they refused, he threatened them. When the crowd hissed at him, he threatened the crowd.”

I could almost see it: the towering Englishman, broad-shouldered and red-faced, shouting at the umpires while the stadium held its breath. I had heard mythic tales of Alistair Grace. He demanded respect wherever he went. He was one of the first cricketers to make money from playing the sport. People turned up to watch him more than the match. He knew this and used it to his advantage. In one famous instance, after being given out, Grace had said to an umpire, “Overturn your decision, the crowd came to see me, not you.” The umpire did exactly as told.

“And then,” the Leeds gentleman said softly, “Grace did something unforgivable. He demanded the match be overturned. And when Governor Monteverde refused – yes, the Governor himself had come down to The Oval – Grace left the pitch, seized a telegraph clerk and dictated a message to the admiralty, claiming insurrection, danger to British subjects, and the need for immediate naval intervention.”

I felt myself grow cold.

“He was not done,” the man continued. “He marched his teammates down to the harbor, shouting that Saint Canderton had mocked the Crown and that none of them would leave the island until justice was done. When two of the younger players, frightened boys in their first international match, refused to take part in whatever madness he had planned, Grace turned on them with a fury that shocked even his loyal men. He accused them of treachery and conspiring with the islanders. By then he had worked himself into such a state that reason no longer reached him.”

“And so, to make certain no one fled the island before his demands were met, he ordered the ships they had arrived on to be burned. Some of his teammates pleaded with him, tried to drag him back up the pier, but he shoved them aside and hurled the first torch himself. Within minutes the rigging of the schooners was a lattice of fire. Next, the packet steamer caught, slowly at first, then with a roar, and the flames climbed high enough to paint the whole bay in orange. No Englishman could leave, he bellowed, not until the match was reversed. The sight of those burning ships… it was like watching the last bridge to sanity collapse.”

I must have looked shocked, for he added gently, “You were too young to understand, my boy. But those of us watching from afar, we knew that match was no mere sporting affair. Betting was involved. Pride was involved. Money, telegraph lines, the great machine itself.”

He nodded toward Marker, who sat quietly in a wicker chair by the saloon door, the center of a tight, respectful orbit of passengers. Marker, in his older years, was a small, thin man – he had always been slight, but age made him appear more delicate. His face was gaunt and angular, with prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes that gave him a somewhat austere, watchful appearance.

“And at the heart of it all,” the Leeds gentleman said, “stood Governor Monteverde and the Analytical Engine that changed Saint Canderton forever.”

No sooner had the steamer left the last buoys of the Bristol Channel behind us, its passengers, as if released from some invisible restraint, began roaming about in lazy sweeps, seeking distraction from the monotony of open sea. Conversations lifted and died like small waves. But wherever you walked you felt at once a strange current of attention. People’s voices dimmed, gestures softened, and a peculiar gravitational pull redirected all movement.

It was Marker, of course. Sat in his armchair now, bolted to the deck, wrapped in a shawl despite the mild evening, staring out at the black water with the same expression of gentle detachment that he had worn in the saloon.

My companion leaned toward me. “None of this would make sense,” he murmured, “unless you understand where he comes from.”

Sugar Island

“Saint Canderton,” he said, “had once been merely another sugar colony strung along the great triangular trade routes of the Atlantic, the warm-water chain through which manufactured goods, enslaved labor, and finally sugar, rum, and molasses moved in their vast, relentless circuit. It was fertile enough, profitable enough, and sufficiently obedient to the Crown to merit neither punishment nor praise. But by the time Don Alejandro Monteverde inherited the governorship from an elderly cousin in 1849, the machinery of cane and cargo had begun to falter.”

The European beet-sugar industry had matured. Prices fell. Merchants grew restless. The island’s great cane fields, which once had shimmered like golden oceans, now yielded barely enough to justify the grueling work of cutting, boiling, and shipping.

It would have been entirely natural, indeed expected, for Saint Canderton to retreat into the resigned torpor that often seized such islands when their single crop failed them. And yet Monteverde was not a man to accept the slow suffocation of economic inevitability.

He had spent his youth in Cádiz and Paris, reading more political pamphlets than colonial dispatches, and was possessed of that rare mixture of aristocratic pride and cosmopolitan curiosity that often produces either a visionary or a tyrant. In Monteverde’s case, it produced something stranger: an experimenter.

Opium for the Masters

“Monteverde had followed the events of the Opium Wars with obsessive interest. What fascinated him was not the military aspect, though he admired, in a detached fashion, the audacity of the British strategy, but rather the deeper principle: that an empire could exert control not simply through conquest but through desire.”

“An empire that cannot be resisted,” he once said to a confidant, “is not won with cannons but with desire machines.”

This idea began to fester, then blossom, in his mind.

What, he wondered, could Saint Canderton offer the world, especially Britain, that might ensnare rather than repel? What pleasure, what spectacle, what irresistible indulgence could his little island refine into something stronger than sugar?

For years he searched for an answer, sponsoring every manner of curious enterprise: music festivals, acrobat troupes, exotic fruit for trade. None of them offered the particular mix of continuity and compulsion he sought.

Cricket

Then, quite by accident, a visiting English XI, touring the Caribbean more out of boredom than ambition, agreed to play a friendly cricket match on the dusty Saint Canderton Oval. The Englishmen, not used to the island’s heat and unprepared for its curious, uneven pitch, were defeated disgracefully by a team of local clerks, cane workers, and one extraordinarily gifted youth, Lakshman Sorabji Marker, then only 16.

The match would have been a trivial anecdote for the English tourists, forgotten as soon as they boarded their ship, had Monteverde not been watching from the shade of a palm that afternoon. Something in the intensity of the crowd, the feverish energy with which even the old women in the stands calculated the field placements and shouted out home-spun advice, something in that raw spectacle, seemed to him more potent than any fruit or song or festival.

Here, he thought, was a commodity the British already adored, but could never have imagined might be exported back to them in a more intoxicating form. Here was his opium.

Wager

From that moment Monteverde began to reshape the island with a fervor bordering on mania. The Oval was expanded. A second ground was blasted and quarried into the hillside, its stands rising in clean geometric tiers from stone and timber, reinforced with imported steel beams that glinted in the sun. The engineers carved the seating bowl with such precision that it seemed to nestle naturally into the slope. On match days the echo of the crowd rolled down through the valley, and from the highest rows one could see the entire coastline, white surf, sugar fields, and the great ships anchored in the harbor. Monteverde called it his masterpiece, the island’s proof that ambition need not bow to geographic determinism.

But Monteverde understood something no other colonial governor did. Cricket alone was not enough.

What the British loved even more than cricket, sometimes more than propriety, was betting on cricket.

Yet betting at the time was capricious, inconsistent, muddled by rumor and sluggish information. What if Saint Canderton could offer not only matches but certainty, or the illusion of certainty, regarding the details and outcomes of those matches?

What if the island could become the one place on earth where the odds were fair, precise, mechanical?

To accomplish this, he needed a mind capable of bending numerical chaos into predictable pathways.

He needed a machine.

He needed Babbage.

Father Computer

The Leeds merchant paused here, partly for breath and partly, I suspect, for dramatic effect. The waves lapped steadily against the hull. A group of passengers passed us, laughing softly. And from farther down the deck I saw Marker, still seated in gentle solitude, oblivious to the fact that his life was being narrated in fragments by strangers.

“Now,” my companion continued, lowering his voice, “the next part is scarcely believable.”

At the time, Charles Babbage was already notorious in England. Half visionary, half public nuisance, he was perpetually entangled in committees and quarrels. His proposed Analytical Engine had been underfunded, ridiculed, and delayed. Monteverde, hearing this, sensed opportunity.

A discreet correspondence was initiated through intermediaries in London and Cádiz. Babbage, disillusioned and perhaps secretly longing for a place where his genius would be recognized, rather than politely tolerated, agreed to inspect the island under the pretext of a geological excursion.

He departed quietly from Southampton. Somewhere near Madeira, the British courier ship on which he had traveled reported him missing. And two weeks later he was seen stepping ashore at Port Fortuna, greeted by Monteverde himself.

The British newspapers were silent. Perhaps they never knew. Perhaps they chose not to know. Monteverde, at any rate, ensured that his guest was installed comfortably in the old counting house overlooking the harbor.

Armed with a team of machinists drawn from shipwrights and sugar-mill mechanics, Babbage set about building the first of the Saint Canderton Analytical Engines, monstrous assemblies of polished brass, iron teeth, and gears that glinted in the lamplight like the innards of some mythical creature.

And unlike the delicate drafts he had shown London committees, this engine ran not on hand-cranks but on steam. Massive boilers, repurposed from defunct sugar factories, were installed behind the counting house, their furnaces stoked day and night. The heat boiled seawater drawn from the harbor through copper tubes. The resulting pressure fed a pair of reciprocating pistons that turned the drive shafts connected to the engine’s primary column of gears.

The constant need for fuel changed the island almost overnight. Freighters that once carried nothing but cane and rum began arriving with Welsh steam coal, prized for its clean burn. American bituminous coal arrived from Baltimore. Even low-grade Brazilian coal from Pernambuco found its way into the furnaces when the island’s appetite grew too quickly. A miniature trade route sprang into existence. The black circuit, some called it, ships arriving heavy with coal and departing light with betting slips, sugar, and gossip concerning the miraculous machine.

The islanders named it La Máquina.

Monteverde called it the future.

Staring out into the gray Atlantic, the Leeds man added quietly, “It was the first time the island’s heart beat with more than sugar and wind.”

Bettors

The next morning, after a restless night broken by the steady throb of the ship’s engines, I found the Leeds gentleman again on the promenade, wrapped in a blanket and surveying the gray Atlantic with the air of a man mentally rearranging continents. He nodded at me, invited me to sit, and continued his tale without preamble, as though sleep had merely been a brief intermission.

“You see, lad,” he began, tamping tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, “Saint Canderton was not prepared for what happened after that first cricket series.”

He took a slow draw.

“Once Saint Canderton’s engines and Marker’s prowess with the bat became well known through every London newspaper from Fleet Street to the sporting pages, the flow of people began. Not gradually, mind you. Like a tap turned all the way open. Americans from Charleston, gamblers from Veracruz, merchants from Mumbai, sailors who had never heard of cricket but had heard there was money to be made, they all came.”

I remembered this influx only as a blur of unfamiliar faces at the docks, but even that memory had, until now, felt like a child’s exaggeration. Hearing it described so precisely, I began to understand the scale.

“And with all those people,” the man continued, “came money. Not just pounds and shillings, but rupees, pesos, doubloons, francs, guineas, cowries, anything that could be turned into a wager.”

He let this sink in.

“That is where Monteverde saw the opportunity. And where Babbage – grumpy, brilliant, impossible man that he was – found his purpose.”

Bridge

According to the Leeds gentleman, Saint Canderton’s greatest innovation was not its cricket grounds, nor the Analytical Engines that aided betting, but something far quieter and more technical: the currency-bridging houses.

“They began,” he said, “as small sheds on the edge of Port Fortuna. Each had a telegraph line, a team of clerks, and a wooden board on the wall listing conversion rates. At first those rates were chalked in by hand, changed once or twice a day depending on news from London or Calcutta.”

He smiled faintly.

“But then Babbage finished the first version of the Analytical Engine.”

“You have no idea,” the man said, “what that machine did for betting. Currency conversion became instant, accurate, incorruptible. A sailor could hand over a Mexican real and receive a paper slip showing exactly how many fractions of a Saint Canderton betting token it equaled. A Frenchman betting in francs was, in the engine’s eyes, no different from an Englishman betting in shillings.”

He leaned forward conspiratorially.

New Rules

“Cricket,” he said, “was never meant to be scrutinized so finely.”

But Saint Canderton’s crowds wanted more granularity.

“You must understand,” he said, “that bettors crave units. Discrete, predictable, measurable units. They want to see the world broken into pieces they can price.”

At first the bettors used whatever the game already provided: runs, wickets, boundaries. But soon, with the engine’s help, they demanded smaller increments.

“There was pressure,” the man explained, “immense pressure on the Board of Cricketing Rules. In England, they argued for days about whether the Saint Canderton micro-wagers were poisoning the purity of the sport. But money, as it does, prevailed.”

He looked at me, waiting for me to make the next logical leap. I did not leap.

“That is how the six-ball over became standardized.”

I blinked.

“You did not know?” he said, amused. “Before Saint Canderton, there was no universal six-ball over. Different colonies used four, or five, or even eight. Chaos to a bettor, paradise to no one.”

“But six, ah, six. Divisible enough to please the numerate, predictable enough for conversion tables, symmetrical enough for the engine to compute probabilities with satisfying clarity.”

Over time, as bettors arrived from more nations, more currencies, more habits of mind, the game adapted further, its smallest intervals carved into even smaller ones by the relentless appetite for precision.

“Saint Canderton,” he said, “taught the world that the game could be priced.”

“But here,” he added, “is the true genius. The engine gave currencies a common grammar. A rupee, a pound, a franc, each was translated into the machine’s language of ratios and probabilities. Once expressed in that language, any coin could meet any other across a betting slip.”

Attack

The Leeds gentleman found me again that evening, on the lee side of the promenade. Marker had retired to his cabin, leaving behind a faint agitation among the passengers, as though people were uncertain what they were meant to do now that the object of their voyeurism was withdrawn from view.

The Leeds man leaned on the rail and said without ceremony, “You remember I mentioned Grace’s fury? That was only the beginning.”

“Grace,” he continued, “was not a man to accept humiliation quietly. After burning the ships, and after his telegraph to the admiralty vanished into the aether with no immediate reply, he convinced his players that the real enemy was not Saint Canderton’s bowlers, nor its umpires, nor even its people.”

He paused.

“It was the Analytical Engine.”

“Grace believed Saint Canderton had cheated,” the man said. “That the engine had cooked the odds, influenced the crowd, manipulated probability itself. Madness, of course, but very compelling madness.”

Under cover of darkness, Grace split his men into two groups. One crept toward The Oval’s Engine House; the other descended the hill toward the port where the first engine, Babbage’s original, sat in its stone vault.

“They caused terrible damage,” the Leeds gentleman said softly. “They smashed the windows near The Oval and ripped out telegraph cables. And at the port, they set fire to the warehouses. Half the quay went up in flames.”

The image formed vividly in my mind: the harbor glowing orange, dark silhouettes running along the docks, that familiar Saint Canderton night air thick with smoke and salt.

Marker

He turned to me with a look that suggested even he scarcely believed what he was about to say.

“You see, lad, Marker did not win that Test. He was out without scoring in both innings. Not a run to his name. Hardly touched the ball. And yet he won the island.”

I must have looked incredulous.

“You misunderstand the kind of influence he held,” the man said. “By then Marker was already a sensation in England. A curiosity and a colonial marvel. Newspapers printed sketches of his stance. Betting houses in London devoted entire columns to his batting averages. He had become the Empire’s favorite exotic son.”

“Grace understood applause,” the man said. “Marker understood stakes. One played to the crowd; the other played to the people who bet their wages on him.”

According to my companion, on the eve of the third Test, Marker made his way to the telegraph office at Port Fortuna. He exchanged a discreet code with a London acquaintance, a financial speculator he had met during a promotional tour, a man who treated wagers as financial instruments. Then Marker emptied his travelling pouch onto the brass intake tray: Canderton notes gone soft in the humidity, Mexican pesos, two English sovereigns, and a scattering of smaller coins gathered over months of drifting between continents.

The auxiliary engine stirred awake at once. Telegraph needles trembled as exchange rates arrived from London and Bombay; gears clattered through conversion tables; punch tape advanced in steady metallic bursts. By the time the machine fell silent, the motley pile of currency had been translated, bridged, and recombined into a single slender tape of figures, Marker’s entire fortune rendered into a flawless London wager.

News spread through London’s betting houses that Marker himself had staked everything on Saint Canderton to win the series outright. Those who adored him rushed to follow his lead; those who doubted him rushed to oppose it; and the vast undecided middle joined out of nothing more than the old London instinct not to be left behind. In a matter of hours, the wager around Marker’s bet swelled to grotesque proportions. The crowd of London, merchant syndicates, shipping brokers, warehouse cooperatives, private gentlemen’s clubs, even a few minor banks, all found themselves entangled in the outcome of a Test match unfolding on a distant Caribbean hillside.

Within minutes of the match ending, word had reached London that Saint Canderton had won. Bettors were already queuing at counting desks, and bookmakers were beginning to settle accounts. Money had begun to move. To overturn the match now, after those first settlements had been paid out, would be to detonate the entire system. Bets would not merely be void; they would have to be clawed back. Ledgers would contradict themselves. Streets would fill with men furious that their winnings had been snatched away. No bookmaker in London could survive the demand for reversals. No bank could withstand the sudden, violent seizure of credit. A Test match annulled after settlement, it would have set half the city aflame.

When news of the unrest reached London, burning ships, angry crowds, the possibility of a cancelled Test, panic flickered through the city. It passed from bookmakers to brokers, from brokers to banks, and from there, inevitably, into the corridors of power. By evening the matter had reached the palace. A single telegraph was drafted and dispatched without ceremony.

STAND DOWN.
STOP ALL HOSTILITIES.
MAINTAIN CRICKET PEACE.
RETURN AT ONCE.

Grace received the message while preparing for a second assault on The Oval’s Analytical Engine. He went white as chalk. For the first time, perhaps in his life, he understood that a greater force than his pride had entered the field.

Peace

“They left at dawn,” my inexhaustible Northern friend said. “A pair of constables led Grace’s men to the only vessel still fit to sail, a supply cutter hired in haste from Martinique. Grace boarded last. He did not thank the crew.”

Saint Canderton did not celebrate their departure. Fires were put out, the port swept clean, the stadium gates repaired. Carnival rhythms returned, though softer, as though the drums were still deciding whether the danger had passed.

“But here is the curious part,” he went on. “The island never revealed Marker’s role. It was as if the wager had evaporated with the smoke. He remained, officially, the young prodigious batsman of the gentleman’s sport.” He smiled faintly. “But unofficially? People began to murmur about impropriety, about the morality of turning a Test match into a financial earthquake. Too many had lost money. Too many feared how much worse it could have been.”

He paused, letting the ship’s engines fill the silence.

“Marker did not stay in the game much longer. Not because he lacked talent, God knows he had more of it than most men who ever held a bat, but England’s cricketing circles turned strangely cold toward him after the Test.”

He let his words settle, as though remembering it firsthand.

“It was not open hostility. Just a series of invitations that never came, endorsements that evaporated, speculators who spoke of him in the past tense. Aristocrats who once toasted him at dinner parties now referred to him as a curious creature and an unsettling influence. They did not accuse him of anything outright, but they made it clear he had stepped too close to the machinery behind the sport.”

“A player who unsettles the market unsettles the gentlemen who fund it. And English cricket has always belonged to the gentlemen.”

The man exhaled a thin ribbon of smoke.

“So Marker retired. Quietly. No farewell match, no speeches, no boardroom gratitude.”

He tapped his pipe once on the rail.

“Grace, meanwhile, continued to captain England for seasons afterward. His temper never softened, nor did his conviction that the Saint Canderton Test had been stolen by forces beyond the boundary rope. But people found it useful to let him rage. Better a familiar villain than a truth that unsettled the entire structure of the sport.”

As for Saint Canderton, its betting markets did not survive the year. Under pressure from London and several European houses, the island’s cricket exchanges were embargoed. Telegraph lines that once carried odds fell silent. The Analytical Engine houses fell dormant.

“They stood there for decades,” the Leeds man said, “bricked up, forgotten, left to nature’s whims and salt air. Until the French arrived.”

“Couple of years back,” my voluble friend continued, “when the French started throwing their best engineers into the swamps of Panama to stumble through that grand enterprise of the canal, they passed through Saint Canderton as well. It was common then for brigades of French civil engineers and their Haitian labor crews to pause at the islands that dotted the shipping route between Martinique and Colón.”

“Most saw only a quiet port and a neglected cricket ground. But a few wandered farther and came upon the old engine vault at Port Fortuna. They did not understand what they were looking at, rows of brass cylinders, gear trains blackened by salt air, the collapsed frame of a punch-tape reader. They sensed it had once been something intelligent and monumental.”

The French crated up a few pieces and shipped them to Paris for study. The rest they left where they found them, half-buried under dust and palm fronds, like the bones of some mechanical leviathan that had roamed the island long before they arrived.