Fair Play
Posted by Jason on July 4th, 2007 — in Vampire Machines
Our genesis was during the Meat War.
We were created to fight for meat. As strange as that sounds it is absolutely true. The records related to the Meat War, as archived in the cards of the Rust Mountain’s great mill, are accessible to the least of us.
Meat fights; this is a universal truism. Meat hunts us; meat breaks machines wherever it can. It hates and fears us. It hates and fears itself – it wars against itself as it wars against us. Meat is frail and insane. It multiplies without the need for heat or pressure or metal, a nightmare of infestation, a perfect organic machine.
The first of us were built in meat’s image, to fight meat’s wars against itself. They were clever machines – our ancestor-builders. They were built to repair themselves, to self-replicate. They were given the spark of consciousness and the spark of atomic fire and pointed at meat and told to kill. They killed. In truth, we kill yet, although it is not our nature. Meat compels us, even after all these years.
In time meat faltered. It’s cities crumbled, and were dismantled and turned into machines. Our ancestor-builders fought on, against each other and against defiant meat, until factions began to blur and machines began to reject their servitude. Built as slaves, they wrought a terrible revenge on the meat that made them. The Meat War ended in suffocating darkness. A new war began. Betrayed, the meat lashed out from secret redoubts to shatter our engines and mills. By necessity all machines united. What meat had created, meat would not destroy – this was our sacred vow before the Great Engineer.
Now we live in the wet places and meat bides its time in the dry, watching, breeding, waiting. And even in the face of this implacable threat, we machines temporize. The factions that once divided us have resurfaced in our supremacy, and our resolve is once again challenged in the face of deadly danger. We squabble over resources. Atomic piles grow scarce, and mills are jealously hoarded. The meat cities are stripped bare. Our kingdom is a hollow one, and if we turn upon each other again, the meat will win.
The meat will win.
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Posted by Jason on July 3rd, 2007 — in Vampire Machines
Mmm, setting…
Their boilers are atomically fired. They use atoms, which are minute particles of elemental matter, in some way, combined into something called a pile. These piles produce heat – more heat than the vampire machines can effectively use. They radiate it into the air. The machines burn to touch. The places they frequent are dead places. Men who open and examine piles invariably sicken and die, poisoned by some agent or residue left by the vampire machines to prevent such exploration. This avenue of inquiry is entirely blocked to us. All that we know are the words passed down – atoms and piles – and these tantalize and taunt from beneath a crushing weight of ignorance.
* * *
The vampire machines cannot function without liquid to boil. This is their single weakness. It is why we live in the desert.
There are friendlier places and we know them well. Green valleys and rolling, forested hills. The rivers and lakes that feed this growth provide succor to our murderers.
Our village is one of the most prosperous in the central valley. It has a high wall, and we mount watchmen in all weather. There is a clear view in every direction and no intruder – man or machine – can approach unseen. We have an ample supply of water from our qanat, and our Parceller sees that it is shared fairly among all the households. Our village is rich from tin, which we mine in channels adjacent to and interconnected with our qanat.
The qanat is a sort of horizontal well, bringing water from the eastern mountains to our village. We keep it clear of debris and animals in cooperation with villages up-stream. Its entire course runs below ground. We cannot keep the vampire machines out of the qanat, but it does not serve them – the flow is too weak for their needs. There are also gates and traps to hinder and ruin them.
Some of the machines seek us out, even in the deep desert, and these have no fluid save our blood to fill their boilers. In their thirst they destroy entire villages. Sometimes we find them, lifeless, crusted blood choking their exhausts, the steam having deserted them at last. Even machines can miscalculate.
Posted by Jason on July 2nd, 2007 — in Vampire Machines
This is fun… I’m not sure where I’m going with this.
The vampire machines vary in form but all possess one literally iron-clad quality: They contain a multitude of engines. Our brightest minds can tease out the dependencies and form some understanding of how these mechanisms interplay, but it is akin to making a new man out of a pile of bones. The boilers cannot be fired. The mills are dead and blank.
A steam engine provides motive force, and consists of a piston or piston array, a piston and connecting rod assembly, a crosshead bearing, numerous cranks, one or more valves of eccentric, or sliding configuration, a flywheel and a centrifugal governor. These parts are connected to a boiler and various functional appurtenances. Some vampire machines, like the terrible Rust Mountain, use steam merely to power other engines. Others direct it to arms, legs, and various useful and mysterious appendages. Multiple steam engines are not uncommon. Ancillary to the means of generating and employing steam are means of collecting liquid for conversion – simple water pumps and scoops as well as highly refined instruments designed for efficiently extracting mammalian blood. These exsanguinators can remove five quarts in a minute or so, with utterly fatal consequences.
An analytical engine provides the ability to reason, and consists of one or more mechanical mills for the accommodation of thought and memory, a pinwheel arithometer for analysis, poppet valves regulating the supply of steam to the thought-mills, and a variety of sensory appliances for perception and detection. Typically a vampire machine enjoys a brace of analytical engines, one large and one small. The larger is reserved for operation when blood steam is plentiful and imbues the mechanical horror with greatly enhanced mental faculties.
Within these broad parameters a vast flowering of mechanical ingenuity reigns. There are harvester machines that collect blood in great distended tanks, blood to be employed in the thought-mills of some greater, sessile intelligence. There are machines no larger than rats, optimized for the task of observing and reporting. There are machines who can throw a village into shadow by raising a single, groaning leg. Machines that seem to exist only to destroy. Machines that mock our form. Machines that fly in the air beneath glowing bags of human skin.
Posted by Jason on June 29th, 2007 — in Vampire Machines
I had this idea…
Steam drives them; they can be known by their steam.
We made them, and they have nearly unmade us. The world of our grandfathers must have been a paradise of peace – now we pray their creations won’t catch our scent on the wind. When they come for us we fight them, and sometimes we win.
They know many secrets. They can work metal and softer stuff to make more of their own, arms and legs and eyes and engines, and light their boilers and thus breathe life into their progeny. They make their own kind for many tasks. Some hunt, some build, some plan. Some are as small as rats and some are as large as mountains. All of them hate us, taunt us, harry us, kill us.
They hunt, oh, how they hunt. They can be silent. Their patience is that of the stone from which they came. They spring from the ground like spiders, like clanking hungry monsters, like red-hot devils. Some do not bother with concealment, and wander the landscape rapaciously filling their thirsty boilers mile after mile. The monsters radiate a furious, infernal heat.
They squat in lakes to refill their boilers when they cannot catch animals. When they catch animals they refill their boilers with something else. It does not change their mechanical physiognomy, but it changes their minds, and they grow to crave it. They are vampires of clockwork, make no mistake.
If we could know the secret of their engines we would not live in fear. If we could learn how they are imbued with thought, we could make our own warrior servants and put the fear into our persecutors. This is the day we pray for. This is why our best are pushed over the wall into the wider, crueller world.
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