After securing both the Queen's confidence and the Cabinet's cautious approval, Arthur Lionheart's proposal for a "personal expedition" faced no further resistance. The Empire's machinery stirred at once—ministers sending dispatches, dockyards roaring to life, and naval yards preparing for distant horizons—while the Prince Consort oversaw preparations with unusual intensity.
Before Arthur departed for Plymouth, however, one final matter demanded his personal attention.
For the first time in weeks, he returned to the Royal Academy of Sciences—the shared domain of Faraday and Ada Lovelace.
The moment Arthur stepped into the laboratory, he halted, momentarily arrested by the sight before him.
Ada Lovelace—brilliant, pale from sleepless nights and incandescent with purpose—sat before a newly refined Analytical Machine. But this one was unlike its predecessors: smaller, compact, almost elegant. And most astonishingly—its power source was no longer a laborious hand-crank, but a small experimental electric generator.
Innumerable gears and levers surged into motion with a mechanical vitality neither Victorian nor wholly modern—quick, precise, and alive with the crisp click-clack of a masterwork timepiece.
"Your Highness!" Ada rose at once, excitement overriding fatigue. "Look—look what we've achieved! Electricity driving computation. Its processing speed is at least tenfold what it was."
"A remarkable accomplishment, Ada," Arthur Lionheart replied, sincere admiration warming his voice.
Then his expression shifted, gently but unmistakably.
"I've come to say goodbye," he said plainly. "You will have heard—I am to accompany the fleet eastward."
"Yes, Your Highness…" A shadow of worry crossed her features. "May fortune favour you."
Arthur offered a small, reassuring smile.
"And while I'm away, the Academy cannot lie dormant. Our work must continue."
He placed a heavy, leather-bound notebook—locked with a brass password clasp—into her hands.
"What is this?" Ada asked, curiosity already taking hold.
"Some of my more… unconventional speculations," Arthur said. "If the machine can already follow basic logical instructions—'if', 'then'—might its logic not be expanded further?"
He opened the first page, revealing diagrams of peculiar, unfamiliar symbols.
"For instance," he said, pointing to one, "I call this an AND gate. It outputs a '1' only when both inputs are '1'. Otherwise, it produces '0'."
"And here—an OR gate. One positive input is enough for a positive output."
"And this is the simplest of all: a NOT gate, which inverts whatever it receives."
Logic gates.
Fundamental elements of digital computation—ideas that history would only formalise a century later—now sketched across Ada Lovelace's notebook in symbolic form before their time.
She stared at the diagrams, and in an instant her formidable mind caught fire.
She saw them—thousands of such gates, not as cumbersome assemblies of brass and gears, but as abstract logical units, capable of being combined and recombined into ever more intricate patterns: adders, subtractors, analytical engines far beyond anything the nineteenth century had imagined.
This was not merely machinery.
This was pure logic made mechanical.
"Good heavens…" Ada whispered, fingers trembling over the notebook as though touching a relic of some future civilisation. "Arthur… how many worlds are hidden inside your mind?"
"More than I've had time to name," he replied with a faint, enigmatic smile. "And when I return from the East, I hope not to see this heavy old creature clattering away with gears."
He met her gaze with a calm intensity.
"What I hope to see is a machine that can truly think."
"An intelligent, electrical mind—capable of calculating trajectories, deciphering ciphers, and perhaps… even predicting the markets."
"Ada—can you do it?"
Ada Lovelace—who posterity would honour as the Mother of Computers—looked at the man preparing to embark for distant seas, at the expectation shimmering behind his composed demeanour.
She straightened, resolve burning bright.
"I shall do it, Your Highness," she said solemnly.
"When you return, you will find an era built not of steam alone, but of zeroes and ones."
Arthur Lionheart knew that with Ada's genius—and with the theoretical "scripts" he'd entrusted to her—the seed of an information age would take root, even as he crossed half the world.
And when he returned, carrying victory home across the waves, he would not be greeted by military triumph alone—
but by a new world, trembling on the edge of technological dawn.