The Steampunk Megapack

by Jay Lake

  * * * *

  Maggie worked across the line from him. She wore the same leather overall and cotton handkerchief as everyone else but wore them somehow different. Busier. Livelier. She never stopped talking, even when the din of the Line droned out everything and when everyone around her had tired of conversation and retreated into screwing bolts and lenses. Her talk swung from the trivially topical to the deeply personal to the charmingly inane, it didn’t matter. You got the feeling she was a dam holding back an ocean of conversation, trying to understand and explain anything around her. Donner waded in the river of talk, she was so much wittier then the Company Lectern, sitting on his high stool and megaphone speechifying news of the latest broken strike or stock price with hammy Bowery theatrics. She had such smooth skin, regularly bathed in the sauna of the steam exhaust and cloudy air of the Pit. It took Donner a year before he was able to talk to her in the tavern after work, a simple, overlooked kind of place where a single woman could talk to a man without risking a black mark. He asked if she was worried about talking so freely, people get Fired for less. She laughed. Black marks? She had four She even recited a Commune speech without the Line boss batting an eye.

  “No one cares about line workers!” she said and then she laughed.

  “Buy a Ignavus Maniac a beer?” she asked.

  He did.

  Most workers never talked about black marks, at least not in the tone that Maggie did. Usually if Company Card marks where being talked about it was in the sobbing slurring tone of the recently Fired with his friends trying to keep him upright and out of fights. A Company Card, or “Holey”, is a stiff piece of rectangular paper about the size of your hand. One end features a machine-drawing of its owner along with their name and last known address. The other side held rows and rows of small holes, machine language for units of information: date of birth, race, religion, height, eye color, known diseases, marriage status, police record, country of origin, and the one that everyone was concerned about, work history. Machine language may be an inscrutable grid of holes and spaces, but common knowledge held that too many holes in the 16th line got you black balled from all but the smallest and meanest Companies. You could try to run to Free Vermont, but the machines are quick and talk to each other. Lay low, store some money and hop a train and you’d be stopped before you got to Beacon. The machines never forgot. Make too many mistakes and you’d have to become an Independent, sitting outside the factory gates in case they needed to replace someone and there’s no time for a background check. Independents lived up in the Bridge, inside the wooden huts built on and around the iron supports, barely more than tree houses or covered arcades. You didn’t notice them much, unlit up in the gloom, if you saw them at all. They hid in alleyways and up ladders, a separate city of rope bridges and tunnels. When the gloom was clear or when the Metros where extremely bored, they would sweep through the Bridge on the pretense of rutting out Commune sympathizers and arrest anyone without a Company Card. They’d send them straight to Ellis Island to be rounded up and shipped to the West or back to whatever blasted-out hamlet they came from.

  Donner had two marks. In the early months of Employment he clocked in late. A year or so later, his apartment was visited by the Company’s Hygiene Division and found little evidence of religious or spiritual devotion. But because of his selfless support of a windowed mother, they let him off with a black mark and an order to attend a course on the Usefulness of holy virtue in promoting upright behavior and preventing disease, dipsomania, and death. He was also required to read and memorize a pamphlet on Mania Ignavus, a disease common to laborers which causes them to irrationally sabotage their career and shun labor. He was told if he experienced any of the symptoms of Mania Ignavus (slothfulness, sleepiness, a desire to stay home, ill-will toward the Line boss) that he should go immediately to the Company Physic for a ration of Workers Powder at a reduced rate.

  He got his third and final black mark two years later.

  * * * *

  There was a sudden jolt on the Line. They’d been constructing new goggles and something went wrong. Sometimes the City would go mad for fads, infecting everyone from Lady Astor on down. There was a medieval mania a few seasons ago that had them adding tiny crosses and sheep to the edges and dying the leather strap red and purple. Now the trend was for more ornate frippery but it wasn’t like the before. The Line’s volume had gone down dramatically, the new pneumatic machines made many drillers and welders redundant. The line had shrunk to 10 people. They worked on a few units a day, like Craftsmen, and the goggles coming off the line where nothing Donner had ever seen. Heavy beautiful frames, with black mirrored lenses and tiny cogs and wheels encrusted around. They linked together and made a delicate ticking motion when turned. The clasps were pearl and the edges of the frames outlined in ivory and fastidiously polished silver. These were not for wielders and the company had started to check worker’s bags for lost pearl shavings or silver fragments. Maggie held a hilarious debate where she said the goggles were not mere fashion, but merely equipment for some highly esoteric and brightly-lit Industry we simple laborers couldn’t begin to understand. What went wrong was a sudden stop,and before anyone could react, there was a huge pileup of priceless brass goggles and delicate little wheels spinning out into the air. Someone eventually pulled the all stop. In the end everyone got a black mark for being slack and Donnie was Fired. He got back his Company Card. The 16th line down was a lousy with fresh holes. The full blow didn’t hit him until he was well out of the Factory, walking along the duckboards back to his apartment. He didn’t have to be anywhere. He had nothing to do, and nothing was being asked of him. It was terrible. It took all his effort to ignore temptation to jump off the 535th St. Bridge.

  * * * *

  He should be more worried. The Pit is full of factories, prime targets for sabotage or Monarchist bombardment, but he’s not. The work takes all his focus, an excessive surplus of attention that starves things like worry and self-preservation. It wasn’t the thudding hypnosis of the Line, more of a willed trance. Muscle memory for the mind. He lost two weeks once bending the wire-mesh into the Company Card watermark. Two weeks hunched over increasingly tiny pliers trying to transfer the faint watermark on the original card to the metal mesh. He barely ate sleep under the desk. He’d never been happier.

  * * * *

  It was his mother who gave him the idea. Shortly after he got the job at the Goggle factory his mother had become enraptured by the preacher Gothel Roze. He was the heir to some kind of oil-rich Pennsylvania Company but suffered a disastrous radio-illumative treatment for syphilis leaving him both chaste and devoted to religious uplift. He preached on street corners, in meeting halls, taverns and parks. Every time he pushed same message, Christian charity toward all men, the pooling of suffering and reward, the equality of all men before God. It could pass for a Commune rant if it wasn’t for the vow of poverty, distinctive cotton robes, and the conviction that the Machines were God’s own tools and by using them correctly and owning them jointly, they could create a second Eden free from want or struggle. A winking that “collectively owned” extended to husbands and wives brought in even more devout.

  While he was working Donner didn’t pay his mother’s new found faith much mind. She’d develop manias just like everyone else and spend a month or so declaring herself a Nativist or swearing to wear only red before the storm cleared and it was time for new fad. But this was different. She took down the tin crown and ruby pins and donated them to Roze’s church, now calling itself “The Treasured People”, to the annoyance of local Rabbis. She’d taken the mendicant rites and begged outside the church, for the church, to prove her devotion. After Donner was Fired, she leaned on him even harder to at least visit the church and hear a few sermons. He used to work in the factory, he could man the Bread Machine!

  Donner resisted. The Metros saw the Treasured People as Commune sympathizers in ragged robes, no mater how much they praised the holiness of Machines. You t
ook a risk just talking to them on the street. Roze worried Donner, he didn’t like the look people got when talking about him, the way they lit up and started in on the same litany of praise. No one should be able to do that, not even a Monarch. Donner started to the avoid the Church on his trips to and from the tavern. He didn’t want to see his mom on the same corner she once sang on covering her face and holding out a bowl. One foggy day she just left. She left Donner a note saying she was joining the devout at their settlement upstate and if he ever changed his mind he was free to join with her but there could be no visiting. She left a few weeks worth of savings and strongly suggested he use it to follow her. Donner was furious, she left without talking to him and took with her the pension that had only just supported them. Didn’t she care about him? Did she want him to come an Independent? Was this some kind of twisted forced poverty vow Roze had planted in her? They where already hungry as it was! How much more holy could they get?

  * * * *

  She’d left her Company Card behind, a slap to the face. It was worthless without the cardholder to present it at the Fund. Donnie did what any sensible young man would do, he went out to get very very drunk.

  And that’s when he saw Maggie. Sitting with her back to the crowd in the tavern at 6pm, hours before quitting time. She jumped a bit when he approached her and then smiled and put her head against his arm. She had clearly beaten Donner in getting impressively drunk. She looked up at him.

  “I got fired.” She put took a swig from a bottle on the table. “Anderson was nice enough to give me this for my troubles.” She rolled the bottle around its rim. Donner sat down.

  “What for?”

  “No idea. Got taken off the Line and given my holey back. It looked like a fucking firing range.”

  She shrugged. “It’s not all bad.” She held up a burlap sack. “I got this.” She opened the sack and took out the biggest, most amazing pair of goggles Donner had ever seen. He leaned in to keep her from flashing it too boldly in a bar full of Unemployed.

  “How?”

  Maggie took another swig from the gin bottle. The impossible goggles sat her lap. It must have been a limited run, a rare one-off, they looked too delicate for anything but being looked at. Her fingers tapped the miniature cogs and wheels. “They followed me while I got my things and I guess they must have thought I was a meek little thing cause they didn’t take it very seriously. They left me in the locker room while they gabbed and as I was getting my bag I noticed this rainbow glare on the wall. I followed it to a bag in an open Craftsmen locker and there this was, just sitting pretty with the light hitting it so. The shower was on, so I assumed whoever was in there just dumped it off for a tic and forgot to close the door. So I just thought I’d take it.”

  Donner blinked. Maggie took another gulp.

  “Honestly speaking I don’t think I was thinking anything at the moment. I took it and was out of the Factory before I realized what I did.”

  “Didn’t they check your bags?”

  “They did. I hiked up my skirt and strapped it onto my thigh. They didn’t look there.”

  Donner looked at her for a second and although he’d hate to admit it, he wondered what they smelled like.

  “You could sell it.”

  “To who? Where?” Maggie sucked in her cheeks a bit, clear sign she was thinking. “I could pick out some of the stones.” She touched the pearl clasps.

  “No, I think I’ll keep it. It’s my trophy. I think I deserve it.”

  “Well!” said Donner, trying to force the right amount of levity into her voice. “You’ll be the most fashionable Independent in the Pit!”

  There was a short pause. Donnie went bright red. Then Maggie burst out a honking wet laugh from bottom of her chest. She held up the goggles and shook with laughter.

  “Well they must be fashionable!” She pressed her face into the goggles, the black mirror disc covering her eyes like coins. “Cause I can’t see a damned thing with these things.”

  Donner looked at her, face half-obscured by the goggles. He thought about his mother’s Company Card back at home, an almost uniform blank without much in the way of diseases, arrests or black marks.

  Donner had an idea.

  * * * *

  He turns another dial on the goggles. The paper becomes a jagged dessert. The tip of his blade lowers into view and he turns the paper so he’s always pulling the blade, keeping the cuts smooth and uniform, just as a machine would. The room still carried the smell of paper-making, it seeped into the wood and blankets. They’d started to keep separate clothes for working after trying everything else to keep the smell down. More then once they worked in the nude.

  * * * *

  Decoding the Machine Language wasn’t hard, just tedious. Maggie had it more or less figured out inside a month. His Mom’s holey was a near perfect blank and they shared the same round face and slender neck. No one looks like their phototype anyway. The real test came when Maggie went down to the Fund in full goggle-and-bustle to collect her pension, one further uptown to avoid running into anyone who might wonder why Donner’s mom had lost an inch in height and gained 15 pounds. The card went into the wood and brass slot- chunk! and came out- pop! followed by a few coins passed through the security screen by a revolving disc. The Fund clerk didn’t even look up.

  It worked. The thing they said could never happen did. They tricked the Machines. Maggie was, as far as they thought, someone else. She escaped. They had an ecstatic evening, again careful to stick to wards where they wouldn’t run into anyone they knew while spending hard silver on champagne and roast beef. They started to talk about the future. Using someone card is easy, how could you create a whole new one? A fake card that represented someone real, someone trustworthy, but someone who wasn’t using their holey?

  They said it at almost the same time, the other members of Roze’s church. They were effectively missing. Invisible. All you’d need to do is find someone with a reasonable record and then fill in the details backward.

  The details were there if you went looking for them, trawling the ocean of paper the Companies produced just by existing. Find a missing person, go to parish records and librabies and archived newspapers, spend a few nights in the paper piles around funeral homes and doctor’s offices. Censuses were less and less frequent, minor discrepancies tolerated and the system was groaning to index everyone. Tavern gossip said full background checks where almost unheard of now. The right identity could last for months, years.

  Maggie did the data mining mostly. When Donner showed her the translation grid she shouted ‘That’s Jacky code!” Her aunt had a Jacky Loom back before the Cottage Laws got rid of private machines. She learned some simple patterns and the concept was the same, so the bulk of the translation work fell on her. She turned appearances and ages into the lines of holes and spaces on the cards. Once, deep in cups, she said she was worried the language was translating her. She was starting to dream in machine, bursts of patterns and grids, wild impossible rolls of holes and spaces that could represent anything in the world or anything that could be the world. Somewhere there was a pattern that perfectly described her and him and them together. Donner thought it was the most romantic thing he’d ever heard.

  Progress was slow. The goggles went first the mirror black lenses removed and replaced with magnifying lenses scavenged from glass maker heaps and discarded eye ware concerns. They built a press, modified from something used to press squid into snack food sold to them by a sickly looking Independent in the tidal caves near New River. They tested the paper weight and composition of the card. It wasn’t wood pulp, but not wholly cotton. They settled on a kind of linen-cotton blend and thankfully rags were cheap and common ever since the South American plantations opened up and everything was made with cheap wood-pulp. They where in business.

  It got around that they could fix cards. It was never said directly, but people began to approach Donner about changing an “obvious mistake” on a holey. Women who wer
e definitely married and not divorced. Laborers who certainly did not get fired twice in a month and group of Ex-Communes who had “misplaced” their Cards a year ago. It was going so well Donner thought he might not even need to create new cards for themselves, but then Pennsylvania caught fire.

  * * * *

  No one knows how it happened, but the usual suspects were blamed: Anarchists, Catholics, Irish Insurgents, The Commune, even The Treasured People as a kind of revenge against Roze’s pre-enlightenment origin. All anyone did know is that a series of explosions blew open the coal belt, leading to mine fires that quickly spread into the rich seams under the earth, a fire that could burn forever. Before long there was a river of refugees pouring into the city and the Metro was struggling to hold them at Old Newark. The Crown was called in. They threatened to bomb Liberty Bridge if the refugees broke the line and tries to cross it.

  And then they did. Rumors that they waited until the most amount of people where on the bridge before shelling it were popular but unconfirmed. This was bad. This was usually when they stop calling them. “the mob” and start calling them “the people.” This is when borders get closed. This is the Village Blockade but with the Crown’s Regina-class warships overhead. They had to become new people. They had to get out tonight. Despite his protest, Maggie went by herself to grab the money they had slipped discretely into a 24-hour safe deposit box every few weeks. Donner had to go home and finish the cards. She said she’d be back as soon as possible.