Punchcard

In 1843, Charles Babbage finished his Analytical Engine. Fifty years later it runs the country.

Beneath Somerset House the Great Engine records every soul in Britain on a punched card. Wages, rent, bread and railway tickets all go through a copper tally stamped with your number. Ivy Tallis has spent four years checking those cards, and she has never doubted the system.

Then, during a routine reconciliation, she finds a gap in the Lambeth deck where her own number should be.

Within days her tally is refused, her landlady turns her out and her name goes up on every district board in the kingdom. A courteous man in a grey coat from an office with no name on its door wants a word with her. In this Britain, people without cards don't simply fall on hard times. They disappear.

Driven into the hidden city of the Blanks beneath London, Ivy follows the trail to a forgotten lady analyst trained by Ada Lovelace herself, and to the truth about her father's death. Every ten years, before the Census, the Register quietly makes room. This year it means to remove three hundred thousand people.

Census night is only weeks away. To stop the cull, Ivy must break into the heart of the greatest machine ever built and make it tell the truth.

Punchcard is a Victorian alternate-history thriller about surveillance, worth and the people a system decides not to count.

Part of The Otherwise Histories - Standalone alternate history thrillers, mysteries and romances set in the Britains that never were, from Roman Londinium to a 1974 Moon base.