This ongoing work in progress is entirely a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed within are entirely fictional and any resemblance to people, living or dead is coincidental.
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Copyright Ion Fyr 2022
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Late August, 1888, on a tiny, currently uninhabited island in the North Atlantic, 300 or so kilometers from shipping lanes.
Gods, I hope the Baroness collects me from this desolate place when I ring her…but not yet.
[Constable Pool records the story so far, scribbling with his various pencil stubs, telling of the sea-beasts in more detail, and then with a flourish of tension, introduces the discovery of the wreck of Tehuti’s Revenge and the discovery of the still-uninvestigated mechanical devices.]
In perusing the documents I have found–the tip of the proverbial iceberg, so to speak–It seems that the airship Tehuti’s Revenge had been an Albarian vessel, subsequently captured and repurposed for nefarious purposes, by pirates.
Pool, sets the pencil nub on the journal which lay open on what had been the captain’s own table, or desk. He stared at the warn forest green paint on it’s five centimeter length, the faceted tip, hewn by his pocket knife to a point.
What is this place? he thought. Pirates who captured a calculation machine as booty, who then marooned their obsessed captain on an island on the arctic circle?
The captain had scrawled at length about the process of learning the workings of the machine, the device, and it seems it wasn’t until the coincidental occurrence of both a savage storm, which damaged the Tehuti’s Revenge and which occurred shortly after the capture of the device, that the Revenge (the captain referred to the airship as Tehuti, Tehuti’s Revenge and the Revenge almost interchangeably) was scrapped and repurposed to house the crew and the machine.
It appears that there had been a second, more intact and functional airship, taken by the crew to continue their piratical activities, and the Captain made frequent mention of the “base betrayal”, heaping particular scorn on his former bridge crew.
Once the method of communicating with the machine had been established, the captain had spent years–by all accounts–learning the codes represented by the holes in the cards, and, more importantly, creating new cards, defining wholely new concepts, building on the machine’s core knowledge. Over the years the functional vocabulary had increased to thousands of words.
Pool wondered how accurate the mechanical thing’s understanding of the language actually was.
The evenings were still cold, the pre-dawn mornings even colder, but the lucky happenstance of both the “oven” in the cafeteria and the heat-stove in the captain’s quarters, which Pool had taken for himself–after stripping the foul-smelling blankets from the bed–made all the difference.
He let the device run, its gears and shafts churning through the night.
The morning came with a silver-grey sky, hinting at autumn, quickly followed by a winter which he had absolutely every intention of avoiding. Tea from some stale leaves found in a tin in the cafeteria helped to wash down dry and tasteless hard tack. He cleansed his palette with some over-pickled pickles and wished he had brought up more eggs. Despite the disgusting fishiness of sea-bird eggs, they would be fresh, just the same.
On his meandering morning tour through the tent-camp, Pool walked past the chamber in which the anthromorph, the humanoid, clockwork mechanism, had been charging.
It was not a alone.
Footprints in the dust indicated that it had been out, disturbingly, while Pool slept. He had difficulty imagining the metal beast skulking or sneaking in any way, shape or form, but there were the footprints.
Not only that…now it had a companion.
A second machine, bipedal and humanoid, of nearly exact composition as the first, stood wired to batteries next to the first.
Constable Pool was not a man unused to surprises. This surprised the hell out of him.
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Ion Fyr 