A Fabulous junkyard

Contents of Exhibit C (Burnt journal):
Feb 15, 2037

I DO NOT NOW IF THESE WORDS WILL SURVIVE—ANY MORE THAN I can be assured of my own survival—but since I find myself with the time and the need to record these final thoughts and confessions, I shall take pen to page and do just so. My name is Philip Pirrip—though that is not the name I was born with it is, nevertheless, my name—and this is the story of my birth, education, and the induction into the Fraternal Order of the Cog that was both my undoing and my salvation.

I was born into the wrong place and—most tragically of all—the wrong time. Somehow, even in my infancy I knew that there was something wrong with this pale, antiseptic world I occupied. According to my mother, my persistent colic could only be calmed by the sound of whirring clockwork held close to my ears. When I became old enough to walk, I set about disassembling whatever devices I could reach to see inside them and investigate their workings. More often than not my efforts were met with disappointment, as the circuitry of even our toaster was microscopic. I loved the smell of my uncle’s illegal tobacco cigarettes and would follow him around while he smoked—until my mother finally shamed him into quitting in favor of foul marijuana. Who is to know what made me so? Perhaps there is something to reincarnation and I was born with a sentimental soul: one that longs for its past.

It was the books that finally told me who I was. Not long after I’d turned eight, I was bedridden with the enigmatically named chicken pox. My grandfather gave me a few H.G. Wells and Jules Verne paperbacks to pass the time while my Gamestation was being fixed. I remember the crinkle and crunch of cheap yellow paper, the smell of times long gone. It was a revelation for someone who’d until then only read words from a screen. The faded cover boasted a thousand thrills and chills beyond my wildest dreams, and the stories within did not disappoint. Even before I started to read, I knew that I had been given an answer. Though the science described in these stories held little resemblance to the real thing, I was fascinated by the possibilities they offered. It was not merely the applications of technology that awed me—for miraculous devices can be found everywhere in this age— but the romance of discovery and the pleasure of seeing beautifully crafted devices in motion. Gears and cogs and pneumatics and steam made me weak in the knees. Science that was not beautiful did not interest me. I wrapped myself in the novels of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Conan Doyle, and Poe; in artists and musicians from the Victorian era. I asked my mother for a Prince Albert frock and took to wearing it regularly. In short, I awoke to nerdhood at an early age.

I graduated high school early and wasted no time in packing for college. I attended MIT with the intention of majoring in AI psychoanalysis like the rest of my class. I drowsed through my first semester of classes much as I had sleepwalked through most of my life: making friends I did not care much for and studying things that only tangentially interested me. Professor Pappas, with his overly enthusiastic lectures on bland, invisible microchips, failed to excite me the way the Verne had. I began to wonder if I should have studied the arts instead.

It was not until I had consigned myself to a second semester of soullessness that I encountered the Order. I was sitting at a table in the quad, drinking my Darjeeling and staving off boredom with a tattered copy of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, when a shadow suddenly appeared to block my reading light. Irked at this intrusion of my private space and time, I looked up and the sharp words I had readied dulled on my tongue. The woman who stood over me wore a billowing dress nearly as red as her flaming hair and at least a century out of fashion, with a poesy-weighted tea-hat on her head and a collapsed parasol in her hands. She leaned over—seemingly oblivious to her uncomfortable proximity—and squinted her green eyes at the title of my book.

“I didn’t think anyone read actual books anymore.” She spoke with an elocuted British accent, the sound of which sent a thrill down my spine. It was a businesslike way of speaking, cold and measured—and yet there was a sort of music to it that delighted me. She introduced herself, gloved hand extended, as Estella Haversham, Senior Deacon for the MIT chapter of the Fraternal Order of the Cog. I was nearly too tongue-tied to introduce myself. She was part of a Culture, I realized. There were many such groups on campus, like the Minutemen who patrolled the walks in revolutionary war garb, or the animorphs who surgically altered their facial features to resemble those of Japanese cartoon characters. Cultures were frequent targets of ridicule amongst more acceptable members of campus society. I had never heard of the Fraternal Order of the Cog before, however.

“We are a chapter of steampunks,” she explained. “Anarchists, socialists, and other political revolutionaries with a love of true science—the soot-blackened and steam heated kind. We bow to no one but common decency and the laws of the universe, and even these serve us as much as we serve them. We are holding an open demonstration of science outside of Tesla Hall tonight. Attend if you are interested.” And would you believe, unknown reader, that I was?

I saw her again at the demonstration, this time clad in goggles and red leather to protect her from the billowing flames that issued from the thousandheads of monstrous organ she and her fellow Cogites had built. It was a massive instrument, the size of a van, squirming with brass tubes, each of its iron keys shaped like a different animal, capable of mimicking any music instrument. They played the best of Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, and boogie to a small but enraptured audience. As I danced for the first time in my life, I realized that these people were like me: souls pining for a world denied, singers of a song only they could hear. I made up my mind at that moment to join them. No matter the mockery of my peers. If their dead, grey world was reality, then I wanted no part of it. These were my people. This was my reality

COUNTER-TERRORISM DIVISION UNIT #42A
TRANSCRIPT 2/15/37
15:23-15:25

“HOW MANY of them are in there, Clyde?”

“Twenty hostages: scientists and technicians, and a pair of feds who slipped up. Eight to ten terrorists in the cell, all heavily armed.”

“Armed with what?”

“Mostly pistols and rifles. I think one of them has a sword cane. Nothing post 20th century.”

“Jee-zus. What are they, Harry Potter nuts?”

“Not sure. Got some social anthropologists looking into it. Theory right now is that they’re steampunks. Basically, people who wish they were still living in fancy-pants Victorian times.”

“Kee-riste. Modern primitives, you mean.”

“Yep. Which means we can’t hack ‘em. Hell, we don’t even know if their tech is stable. That bomb they got planted under the building could go off at a sneeze.”

“Give it to me straight, Clyde. No rocks, no mixers. How bad is this going to be? Waco? Sears Tower ’22?”

“I’d say it’s a whole new class of bad, Carl.”

Mr. Know-it-All’s Virtual Guides Vol. 8: Recognizing Culture
Terrorists, Scholartastic Educational Enterprises, 2029.

“WHAT’S WRONG, Timmy? You don’t seem to be enjoying your banana nut sundae. What’s on your mind?”

“Mr. Know-it-All, what’s a Culture Terrorist?”

“Why, Timmy, where’d you learn such big words?”

“The newsfeed, sir. And my mama said the other day that she’s scared the Culture Terrorists are going to destroy America. Could that really happen, Mr. Know-it-All?”

“It just might, Timmy, it just might. A Culture Terrorist (or CT) is a kind of person who just isn’t right in the head, the kind of person who’s so twisted that he or she can’t see how wonderful the world is right now. He or she hates our modern life and products, like your Gamestation IX.”

Timmy gasps.

“The CT wants to go back to a time when people were crude and cruel like him. In the old days, terrorists were religious fanatics or communists, but now… Well, now they have all kinds of wacky beliefs!”

“Like what?”

“Like the Furries who took over three floors of the Sears Tower back in 2022.”

Images of men and women in colorful cartoon animal suits using tasers and AK-47’s to herd terrified hostages into an elevator. One fox, with googly blue eyes, has a bomb strapped to his back.

“Or the cross-country bank robbing LARPers in ‘27.”

A snarling elf holds a teller at crossbow point. In the background a twelve-year-old boy in star-covered robes and a fake beard waves his hands and yells nonsense words.

“Wow, Mr. Know-it-All, those terrorists sure are funny!”

“They sure are, Timmy, they sure are. Funny but dangerous. So it’s important that you keep an eye out for people you think might be CTs. If you know someone who collects comic books, dresses up in chain mail, or likes to pretend that he or she lives in any time other than the present, report them to your local CTD unit straight away. Because the next Culture Terrorist might be in your very home. Or yours! Or yours!”

Accusing finger. Menacing music. Fade to black. Cue national anthem and credits.

JOINING THE ORDER was a more complicated matter than simply renting an overcoat and showing up to weekly meetings. I was to foreswear use of all twenty-first century technology. Writing my school papers with an old pen and inkwell was d—n near impossible, but a revelation. Without an AI to organize and compose my thoughts for me, I was forced to think carefully about my ideas and the language that contained them before committing them to paper. My first few efforts were dreadful, but as time passed I learned to write—and think—with a degree of clarity that I had never been capable of before.

Further rites of passage took the form of assisting in the building of the group’s inventions. I was dubbed an apprentice, and through hard work and initiative I was expected to work my way up to a Journeyman. The Order of the Cog was an anarchist group, however, so though I was considered a junior in my understanding of science, I had no less a voice at our meetings than our own chairperson.

The chairperson of our Order was its founder, Mr. Abel Magwitch: a quiet, kindly old man who, with his long white beard and sad blue eyes, resembled no one so much as Sir Charles Darwin. When he spoke it was with a raspy whisper, the voice of a man who had spent his younger years yelling over the clank of heavy machinery. Mr. Magwitch was a master of mechanical engineering—in his past life he had held an advanced degree in robotics—but he was interested in every aspect of the world and knew something about nearly everything. He was shy and never joined in our raucous revels, but he would often take us aside to offer advise or encouragement of such quality that it was impossible not to admire him as we all did.

Second in experience was Mr. Jaggers, who—with his iron teeth and perpetually soot-blackened features—frankly frightened me. His face was always clenched in a scowl and he spoke to us apprentices as though we were children. But he taught me to smoke a pipe and judge good tobacco, and his understanding of political philosophy was second to none, and in this manner he quickly earned my respect.

Life in the Order was non-stop excitement. I had little time for classes and soon stopped attending altogether. Stella taught me to fire old-fashioned firearms and gave me one of her homemade air-pistols; which were, of course, inspired by those featured in the Sherlock Holmes stories. We raised money by performing in concerts with our steam-powered instruments. We demonstrated the wonders of science to passersby on city streets. We flew over towns in a hot air balloon and dropped pamphlets that decried the government onto the sleeping houses below. I can’t count the hours I spent in the darkness with my fellow Cogites, sipping absinthe and watching old science fiction films projected silently onto the wall with Drummie’s homemade cinematograph. The futures that those movies promised didn’t seem so distant anymore. Watching them, I felt as though I were peering into the true world that this veil of solids only hid. We knew the truth.

When we weren’t doing all these things, we worked on the Order’s master project: the construction of a steam-powered automaton of Mr. Magwitch’s design, inspired by the works of Mr. Lewis Carroll. It was dubbed ‘the Jabberwock.’

The night of the Jabberwock’s celebratory animation, Mr. Magwitch and Mr. Jaggers had an altercation. The exact nature of their furious debate is unknown, as it was held behind closed doors. But we could hear the timbre of their raised voices and made out the occasional non-sequitor through the muffling wall. At the conclusion of their debate, Mr. Magwitch stormed out of the room and the building, his shoes and cane pounding out every step to the doorway.

Our fears could wait for tomorrow. There was science to witness tonight. Shivering in anticipation, we watched as Mr. Jaggers threw the switch and brought the Jabberwock to screaming life.

COUNTER-TERRORISM DIVISION UNIT #42A
TRANSCRIPT 2/15/37
18:41-18:43

“DAMN! THE OPTICS went out. What the hell got our hunter-seekers?”

“Looked like a giant steam-powered robot to me, Carl. With scythe-sized claws.”

“But where did it come from?”

“Keep in mind that we’re dealing with Abel Magwitch here. MIT whiz kid back in the 1990’s. Passed on hot fields like String Theory and New Quantum to study antiquated Newtonian physics with a focus on steam-based technologies. Guy puts the ‘gee’ in ‘genius.’”

“First they somehow neutralize the dustcams, now they take out the Hunter-Seekers. What’s left?”

“I dunno. Give into their demands? Shut down nanotech research like they ask?”

“Or we could send in everyone. Forget the hostages.”

“Some of the most brilliant scientific minds of today are in there, Carl.”

“There isn’t a single one of them that we won’t be able to replace with an AI next year. I’m sick of these freaks popping up every other week, Clyde. Let’s just take ‘em out. Make the rest of ‘em think twice. Let’s send in everyone.”

“What do you mean by everyone?”

“Come on. You’ve seen ‘The Professional.’ What do you think I mean?”

MR. MAGWITCH no longer attended Order meetings after that night, but a week later, he asked us all to come for a special lecture at his house. There would be wine and cheese—and food for the mind as well. Naturally, we were all very interested to attend. Everyone was already there when I arrived—with the notable exception of Mr. Jaggers. Mr. Magwitch was a meticulous host and a wide selection of cheeses and wines was spread out for us to sample on his dining table. He took time to speak with each of us, making sure that we were comfortable and well fed. He showed us some of his latest creations: tiny mechanical doves whose clockwork mechanisms doubled as music boxes, exalting the room with beautiful hymns as they flit about.

When he was certain of our elegant sufficiency, he took off his shoes, stood up on a chair and, with a slight cough, begged our attention. Our minds a pleasant buzz from the wine, we gave it gladly. None of us expected him to start his speech the way that he did:

“Pornography,” he said. I confess that I may have spat up some of my Shiraz.

Pornography was the credo for the world we lived in now, he explained. Modern humanity’s surroundings were a vast buffet of instant gratification for the basest of senses with no real truth or beauty to nourish its greatest parts. We lived in an empty utopia where nearly anything could be obtained with ridiculous ease but nothing could satisfy. Science had brought us one miracle after another, but these miracles had not transformed the world into heaven. Rather, they merely made heaven mundane. Kitchens were laboratories where food could be synthesized and all care or art was excised from cooking. Sexual intercourse mostly occurred in the wireless worlds, in digital love motels where lovers never touched. An endless variety of entertainment was available online for free. Nearly everything was massproduced by automatons. Fewer people left their homes with every passing improvement to virtual reality. Life itself had become a masturbatory fantasy.

“This world has given us everything,” he announced, “and it has destroyed us.”

He called for change. Not a return to the past. Science was progress, life was change, to deny these things was to deny reality and embrace madness. Rather, Mr. Magwitch dreamt of another future (a dream that he suspected had brought all of us together), one where humanity was selfreliant and separate from and master of the tools that enhanced him. A future where every man and woman was a scientist, artist, or explorer. And since it seemed that our fellows were too comfortable to change, it was our responsibility to drag them into that future, kicking and screaming if need be.

Of course, this would require our participation in illegal activities that would be judged antisocial and insane by society as all truly meaningfulactivities were—and he understood if we did not wish to participate. He himself would never have suggested this if he did not feel that revolution was necessary. I think he was genuinely surprised by the applause that greeted the conclusion of his speech. I clapped until my hands were red as strawberries. He had described the world as I saw it, had captured the feelings I’d had since I first became aware.

We started picketing the nanotech research lab and sabotaging the local wireless grid. We set up a steam-powered grinder/percolator outside JavaBucks and offered free coffee. We wrote our congressmen and we begged them to reconsider Proposition 444.

And then we moved on to bigger things.

Accessing GonzoFeed™: Your Source of Music, Movies, Pornography, Spirituality, and News Customized to Your Personal Tastes! Reality As You See It!

“THE STANDOFF HAS gone for eighteen hours,” the SimReporter announces [to some eyes it’s a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe, to others Edward R. Murrow, and for the vast majority, a giant talking penis]. “The last of the hostages was released nearly an hour ago but the terrorists have not evacuated the building. It looks like the CT team has decided to make the first move. They’re sending in a battering-bot to knock down the door… Oh my God!” [This blasphemy is censored for those who have enabled the ‘censorship’ option.]

Hissing and smoking like the devil himself, an iron monster bursts through the barricaded front doors of the laboratory and knocks the heavy battering-bot aside with a disdainful swipe of its massive claws. [Heavy metal music begins to play as] The monster tromps down the steps in tune with the giant key spinning in its back. Trained soldiers back away in terror. They are used to enemies that are functional, who lack imagination and passion. They have never seen something so beautiful and horrible as this Moreauian monstrosity. Twin blue flames burn in the hollows of the monster’s eyes. Its curved claws stretch all the way to the ground, scraping grooves in the stone. It is a marvel of engineering and craftsmanship. It looks almost alive.

A moment later the spell breaks. Their training recalled, the soldiers open fire and their high-powered bullets shred the Jabberwock like paper [on sale at FleurMart now! High-powered acid bullets! Real men only buy bullets from Marksman!] What’s left of the iron behemoth crashes down the stairs, bursting and steaming. The Jabbwerwock has been slain with no need for a vorpal sword. There follows a silence broken only by the hiss of the robot’s cracked boiler and the sobs of an officer whose sanity trembles.

With the doors broken down, a crack Counterterrorist team of soldiers cautiously enters the house. A moment later, the building erupts into a smoking column of dust and brick and flame and noise. Officers and robots standing nearby are tossed aside like toys before the sweeping arm of a giant malevolent child. [Rewind/fast forward- the image is shown again and again. A different angle, now in reverse. Guitars wail.] A pit filled with rubble is all that remains of the historic building and the living anachronisms that occupied it not a few moments earlier. Officers stand back with guns at the ready, their ears still ringing from the roar of the blast. A minute passes. Five minutes. Still no one emerges, and at last they give the signal for the medical technicians to approach. There won’t be much work for them tonight. An officer lights up a celebratory joint [buy Rasta Joints, mon! De’re da best on de market!] It looks as though the situation has been resolved.

[Next up! Stay tuned for an analysis on the Naked News! News got you down? We’ll help get you up!]

COUNTER-TERRORISM DIVISION UNIT #42A
TRANSCRIPT 2/15/37
20:07-20:10

“BOOM! DID YOU see that Clyde? We got ‘em! We got ‘em good!”

“We sure did, Carl. Looks like our job’s done here.”

“I’ll say. Nothing left of the manor or the terrorists. Nothing left to do but go home and fill out the paperwork. Might even be back in time to catch the game. Wanna join me, Clyde, you old dog?”

“I’m an old man, Carl. I’ll probably just drink some milk, read my book here, and go right to sleep.”

“I see… All right then. Good night, Clyde.”

“Good night, Carl.”

AND NOW I find myself crouched in the darkness, cowering under a desk like an animal cornered in its hole. Police lights flash through the window, turning the room blood red for an instant every other instant. Half of us are down, injured or dead by CTD attacks—Mr. Magwitch, our wise, kindly leader suffered a fatal heart attack during the first exchange of gunfire. The air is muggy and thick with the heated vapor we have been using to neutralize their nanotechnology. It is difficult to breathe, almost impossible to see these words as I write them. I can hear sobbing somewhere—either one of the hostages or our own number. It has not even been a whole day and already we are exhausted and frightened and ready to surrender.

Despite the desperate situation I now find myself in, despite the terrible mistakes that we have made, some mad part of me still has hope. Not for our survival or freedom, but for our cause. It is a mystery, this unfounded naivety that infects me. What cause could I have—in the face of humanity’s apathy, in the lure of its unthinking laziness—for hope?

A memory. The memory of a sick, happy little boy, curled up in bed with a book and a smile. He travels across a vast and impossible universe of robots and dinosaurs, wise heroes and monstrous villains. It is a world unlike his own, and he knows that once he has been there he can never leave.

For as long as there are Doc Savage pulps and Jules Verne stories and little boys and girls to read them, our struggle will never die. The revolution will continue silently in the imaginations of men and women who go to work and live their simple lives. Though they may look like bankers, constables, and tax-men to others, in their hearts they are warriors and wizards, kings and queens in a world that can never be sullied. Someday that world will pour out into this one, through these men and women, and what we have started here—what others started millennia before us—will be complete.

We have decided to release the hostages. They may call us terrorists, but we are not. We are revolutionaries, and we will fight with honor to the bloody end. Father, mother, whatever they may tell you, know that your son died a man. I have no regrets, save that I did not spend more time dreaming. Good-bye.

THE LIGHTS GO out—all but one anyway. The old army-man reaches under his desk and pulls out a tattered and dog eared book. A slight smile crosses his weathered face. He opens it to the first page and the smell of molding pages ushers up a memory from childhood. Soft cartoon sheets wrapped tightly around him, his mother’s voice transmuting the blocky printed words into music. “Chapter 1,” he reads quietly to himself, “Down the RabbitHole…”