Inside this bland doll house was young Mathildareena Lester: pale, thin, and plain.
Mathildareena worked as secretary and live-in nurse for the old men; she looked, by comparison, brand new and unused. The poor lass lived here inside the clock tower, in a flat connected to the office. Even though muted by the walls, there was a constant rhythmic working of mechanical time permeating the aether.
She had waiting for them three cups of seavenly tea. On that second day, she had a cup waiting for me, too, the sweet thing. Mathildareena was the eldest daughter of Gunter and Helberta and the eldest of her 7 siblings. Somehow Gunter, and his brothers for this matter, all found time to have children. They spent their days from 6 in the morning to 11 at night reading ticker tape every day of the week, never a vacation, never a sick day, never a holiday, never even a half day. All days were spent reading ticker tape. Family would often visit them at work where they allowed themselves 5 breaks of 20 minutes each throughout the day, the third and fifth breaks reserved for meals. Yet, somehow there was always time to try for children, I suppose.
The old men took their seats around the mechanism situated in the middle of the room. A beautifully patterned circular carpet decorated the wooden floorboards. The machine itself seemed to be weight-activated through the chairs, I observed. I asked Mathildareena several questions throughout both days, most of which she answered thoroughly, although a few answers she simply couldn’t provide. She didn't understand how the mechanism actually worked, but she knew how the office worked inside and out.
As the men sat in their chairs a low hum emanated from the mechanism. The mechanism itself was a re-purposed Jacovian Numbers Runner, an original by grand inventor Wilhelm Jacovian with modifications put forth, presumably, by the Lesters.
Jacovian was an interesting man, for he could read the numbers, but very slowly. He admitted that by the time he could decipher a strand of ones and zeros it became utterly unimportant and it never truly mattered in the first place. To be able to read a constant stream of numbers meant something to the overall use of the mechanism.
While never precisely accurate, the information gathered from it has been invaluable to The Information Ministry who take the information from the day and weigh out the information accordingly. The information is evaluated by a team of Royal Advisors, a committee of University professors and a group of various Works executives, plus a citizen's council. Eventually a once heaping-amount of fascinating information is whittled down to arguments and grievances culminating in the least important information getting through to the very few who might find it useful. By that time, the information is at least a day older than it should be. The back logs pile up. Information gets lost. Such an awful shame, really. Important information does get through, but often blown out of proportion or debated by politicians to the point of frivolity.
The hum grew noticeably louder and the crickets sounded. Mathildareena said when she was but a wee lass, she believed crickets worked all of the gears and that was the sound of them working. Ticking and chattering and winding and grinding and clunks and clinks and noises I can not put onto the page to accurately describe what I was hearing.
She excused herself from my side as she retrieved the telephenomenal craniator from the chest behind Gunter’s chair and strapped it to his head. Perhaps this is what made them all bald, I thought to myself. The contraption fit atop their heads comfortably, although they were terribly unfashionable. The Jacovian Psychometer was an accessory to his numbers machine, a tuner for the randomosity, if you will. It was partially based on our work in the field of paraphenomenon. Harold and I headed a team of scientificals in a search for paraphenomenonal energy. We came up with a crude contraption, the telephenomenal dilator, before our funding was cut short and our work and archives destroyed. Somehow a rudimentary set of schematics got into public hands and those with the know-how have been tinkering ever since. Wilhem Jacovian used our work as the basis for his psychometer.
These craniators, though, were more advanced, modified with copper wiring and magnets. Gregor’s craniator came equipped with ocular magnifiers. They were each clunky, yet strangely uniform. She tightened winding knobs at certain points on their heads, one of which I could tell was a Georgian Oscillator. These helmets each fed copperficient wiring from the back, down along the floor into a four-pronged outlet at the based of the podium.
All this business to produce three strands of ticker tape, each about the width of a fingernail and crammed with 12 rows of ones and zeros, printed so terribly small.
Watching old men read ticker tape grew quite tiresome at a feverish pace. My only form of escape was to look out from the sole window at the end of the hallway outside of the office. The window was circular with a vague web pattern etched into the glass with iron. Both days, peering from the window, quite dreary days they were, it seemed. I asked Mathildareena if it was the same everyday.
"Lunch at noon, dinner at eight, unless it’s a holiday. Then family visits." She smiled.
"And this is all that they do?" I was astounded. “All day, every day?”
"Well, this and then before they leave for the day, about an hour prior," Mathildareena explained, "they each write down their evaluation for the day’s numbers, tube it up, and send it off. Everything they did yesterday, they’ll do today. Everything they do today, they’ll do tomorrow." She pointed to the vacuum tube on the wall, a stack of cylindrical canisters to the side. “All self-contained, everything they need.”
I was shocked, though, that after 17 hours of reading ones and zero, they could write their evaluation of the numbers in the such short span of 15 minutes. Mathildareena explained further that they had worked out a form of short hand with The Institute of Linguistical Scientificalities long ago to save time.
A mechanical winding sounded from outside of the office as the lift approached. Moments later, the locks unlocked and the door swung open. In entered Adam Lester, Gunter's eldest grandson. Mathildareena took his jacket from him as we followed him into the numbers room. The door slammed and locked behind him. He was disheveled and out of breath. His grandfather raised one arm and barely raised his index finger. This was his greeting to his grandson. Then he slowly brought it down back to the arm of the chair. It wasn't the warmest greeting in the world, but it wasn't bad for being late.
Adam said hello to me shyly and went to his chair off to the side. He was given his Uncle Fluten's chair. Fluten Lester was the fourth brother and second eldest and so far the only one to have passed. It was worn in all the right places for Uncle Fluten, but not for Adam. Adam was a young lad in his 20's, not a hundred-something year old man who had transformed along with the chair over the past 90 years. It should have been cremated along with Uncle Fluten. It was futile for anyone to get comfortable from the looks of it.
Poor Adam would sit in this chair for 17 hours a day (give or take the time to be late). Very occasionally he alternated between sitting in the chair, sitting on the floor, and standing. His grandfather would tell him, on the rare occasions they would walk to work together, "Don't move around so much, you'll rattle your brain and lose count." He called reading the numbers “counting” as a kind of slang terminology.
He wasn't meant to be sitting in this cage of an office, but he trudged on day after day, reading numbers. Mathildareena wasn’t meant to be cooped up like this, either, to be fair.
Counting. And counting. And counting.
By mid-morning, I had fallen asleep and taken a short nap until Helberta came for a visit. Always pleasant to see the woman.
She whacked my shins with her riding crop. I quickly retracted my legs from the paperbox I was resting them on. I stood right up. She looked to have come directly from riding lessons.
"Ah, Helberta my dear!" I said in a terribly jovial manner, "Yes, I can barely keep up with them!"
Helberta invited me on a personal tour of the rest of the clock tower. We left the counting room and headed for the hallway to the lift and down to a
service floor. She pointed out the great number of pipes, gauges, wires, cables, gearboxes, telegraphical lines, and valves, amongst a plethora of other steam and clockwork tech. It all lead from beneath the ground and up into the tower. From the bottom of the tower it all stretched upwards into a massive gearbox, the ticking of millions of gears. From the strange contraption the workings fed right up into the floor and up into the base of the Jacovian Numbers Runner. All these connections fed into the machine. The inside of the tower seemed more grand to me than the outside, now.
I confronted Helberta with a question I knew Mathildareena couldn't answer, "Who maintains the tube that takes the information for the day?"
Helberta answered straight away, "All of our tubes are maintained by the Clockwork Foundation through one of the Works companies, after all, the clock tower is owned directly by the Clockwork Foundation."
"And where does this one tube go? Who maintains the length of the tube?" I inquired.
Helberta thought a moment, "Well, I would suppose the same maintenance department."
"And how often are the tubes used? Just the one time before midnight?" I asked.
“Yes, just the one time each day. A cleaner pod is run through on the last day of every month. Why do you ask all these terribly dull questions, doctor? I find no pleasure in conversations regarding messenger tubes." Helberta became unamused very quickly in my presence.
"Curious, is all." I answered to be polite, but my mind was occupied by all the twisting tubes within the gnarled walls, like a charred skin, and splintered wooden scaffolding that formed the skeletal structure of the tower.
Out of sheer boredom after being shown around by Mrs. Lester, I fashioned a test of the tube system. I had a messenger run from the clock tower to the institute with a message reading, "...cover your end of the tube with a bag tonight when expecting envelope. Love, Dr. Monocle."
On my end, at the clock tower, I created a pod that would explode on impact, filled with paint I found in a closet on a lower floor. I rigged the capsule ever-so carefully and would gently place it into the tube as it was taken by the rushing air. This was either going to be a successful test or a horrible prank, I thought.
“And what do you hope to accomplish with this test, Dr. Monocle?” Mathildareena asked.
I replied, “I hope to appease my curiosity. This is the one exit, this tube, that is not guarded in any way.”
I waited out the rest of my time experiencing a continuous stream of repetitive memory syndrome. I looked at streams of numbers and every time I thought I had found a pattern or interesting grouping of ones and zeros, I realized that it would not matter because they were just that to my eyes, patterns and groupings. I had no idea what I was looking at.
During a period of boredom which I shall compare to the act of staring at a wall for several hours, I decided to entertain myself. I collected an armful of discarded ticker tape before Mathildareena could throw it away. I may at times be curmudgeonly and cranky, but by using my time constructively I managed to do something sweet and fashioned a bouquet of flowers from the discarded paper which I presented to Mathildareena. I do believe that was blushing I witnessed, indeed.
I asked Adam to teach me some of what he was learning. He was pleased to entertain my fancy. He started, “A group of digits like this, bracket non-formulated, means initial potential greater than the converse only in which the repetitive quantive is equal within the margin of 3 points in either direction altransitly.”
“Repetitive quantive?” The boy spoke far too quickly for my ear.
“Repetitive quantive,” he explained with an attitude, like the snooty, huffy tone I’d heard in the voice of dear, old Helberta, “repetitive quantive, repetitive quantive. Baseline situation performance. More likely than likely.”
I politely listened as he continued on speaking in a language I’m not sure was my own. I smiled and acted surprised at some of his more bewildering statements. It seemed by the tone of his voice, confident and forthright, that he did in fact know what he was talking about. Eventually, dinner was my reprieve from the wall of words sounding from Adam Lester’s mouth.
At 11:45pm I sent my paint-filled pod down the tube as the Lester brothers jotted down their actual notes.
According to the messenger who showed up 10 minutes later, nothing arrived at The Institute. Someone had intercepted the pod, someone now covered in white paint, somewhere between the clock tower and The Institute.
I shared my results with young Mathildareena and she was caught in shock. She immediately sounded the private alarms to The Information Ministry. The Information Ministry alarmed The Ministry of Communications. From there it was unknown who or whom was signaled next, but it became sheer pandemonium on a bureaucratic and political level.
Helberta showed up to the capsule room. She demanded to know what was going on.
“Your tubes are compromised,” I said, adding the slightest hint of drama to the tone of my voice. We were entangled in a mystery of enigmas. “It seems, for some unknown length of time, the messages have been intercepted and replaced with forgeries, my dear Madam Lester.”
The old bag gasped. Somewhere in the distance, by sheer coincidence, the blare of a fog horn, the deep honk of a carriage whistle, and the blast of a rail horn all sounded in a short operatic burst one after the other that added to the drama tenfold.
If not for my discovery, the numbers regarding The Chasm may have not been counted in time. Blame was placed on young Adam, but nothing could be proven. A lot of information was compromised and lost due to these treacherous antics. Some theorized GhostWurks was involved, but evidence towards the theory was flimsy at best.
I was even consider to be a suspect; a conspiracy brought about by my own curiosity. In the mean time, the turmoil within The Chasm boiled over.
*1 The Freundlich Clocktower: Named after one Jessums Freundlich, decorated sniper under The Royal Huntsmen, awarded for saving The Queen's life by removing The Seven Assassins of Daltonbury in one afternoon from a parade route through New Victoria Metro Quarters, among other heroic feats.
No one found it ironical in naming the clock tower after a sniper.
6
Harold and I followed the young man from the observatory and down the hall to a stairwell. I regaled them with my tale of The Numbers Runners. We were lead downstairs into a sub-level of laboratories, most of which were dark, as in, out of service. A vast catacombs modified into laboratories lay before us, defunct rail access at the far end of the deep echoing hallway. The great archways were constructed of brick and stone ages ago by master masons, Order of the Cornerstone, those responsible for a vast majority of what was left of the old University.
“Admiral Emerald has a telegraphical machine, we can get a reprint from The Ministry Station,” the young lad said excitedly, his voice hurried. I recognized him as an engineering student; though it was possible he just had that disheveled look, as if he dressed up nicely about a week prior and hadn’t changed since. His bow-tie was askew and a flap from his shirt flew free as the other half remained tucked into his pants. He carried a stack of books beneath his twig-like arm, his bony elbow jutting out to the side.
“There’s a bloody telegraphical station in the commons area, you are aware?” Harold reasoned, “It’s much closer.”
“Well, I’ve got coursework and I’m late,” the student snapped in an obnoxiously nasal tone, as if we should have known.
The whiny lad lead us into the laboratory, one of the larger laboratories on this sub-level and one that had been shrouded in mystery. One of The Admiral’s projects, no less, sponsored by ArmamentWorks, SteelWorks, AutomatonWorks. Everyone had their nose in it, but no one knew what it was. I had no clue as to what went on down in the laboratories since The Admiral had taken over this wing several months ago.
Such magnificent ingenuity stood before my humble embodiment. It caught my eye almost immediately. If one is to build it large, then attempt to redefine the word; for cert
ain this was a project from The Admiral. As a frame of reference I reminded myself that most of the parts being put to use were re-used, re-fabricated, re-purposed locomotive parts from old, decommissioned TransMetros Rail Line engines.
From a work table, I picked up and held the blueprints in front of me, arms stretched out. It was all very fascinating and quite impressive. I lowered the blueprints to get a gander at the real thing. While still in the early stages of construction, I could see it taking form. I walked closer to the metal behemoth. There were some engineering students working through a problem with one of its legs. Admiral Emerald stood by, muttering something. I took my place just behind him.
“And that is why, Monocle, education isn’t all that great of a thing. Really, when it is all cut and dried, it’s just... a thing.” The Admiral seemed to be still carrying on our conversation from before. Had this daft old blowhard been rattling on this entire time?
I stood there, my mouth agape, my eyes shifted in his direction. Surely, it must have only been a coincidence that whatever he was muttering about only seemed to relate to when I left him outside my office door. My goodness. I was stymied. I do believe that he believed that I was by his side as he was talking to me this entire time.
The Admiral was lost in his admiration of the sleek behemoth, "Takes your breath away doesn’t it? Quite impressive, indeed, professor. Quite impressive, yes, indeed." The Admiral's gaze was swept up in his never-ending project to either destroy or imprison the world (I could never be really certain of which). His last endeavor, the massive rifle that fired rail spikes, turned out to be an exercise in metro defense as the weapon got into the wrong hands (those of a crazed gaster).
"And what will you be using it for, if I might inquire?" I knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it in his words however eloquent or crude they were.
Spectacular Moments of Wonder with Dr. Monocle: That Certain Gentleman Page 5