19

A low hum resonated throughout the place, coming from the very walls and floors of the underground structure. Slowly, the pipes were filled with high-pressure steam or air. It flowed without a hitch, and not one hissing sound could be heard as all the mechanisms were still working perfectly. Even where the pipes were broken and damaged, either by natural events or by battle, no ominous sounds of boiling gas leaks could be heard.

The damaged sections were simply disconnected from the main pipe system, thanks to cleverly built safety systems that were without a doubt the result of many years of incremental upgrades.

A low, suffuse light started to permeate the previously dark corridors. It came from small cubes of metal that were visible through small slits in the walls, their image distorted and warped after being reflected by a long series of angled mirrors.

"Fascinating. I was wondering how he managed to get some light down here."

Charles approached one of the slits and looked inside. The color of the light was still deep red, and it was barely visible against the bright cyan light of his floating wisps. He looked at them, and dispelled the mana connection that was keeping them active. The floating orbs dimmed and lost cohesion, until they ultimately disappeared. Eereen followed suit, and dissipated her own light orb soon after.

The room was immersed in a red glow now, that seemed to come from everywhere thanks to the clever system of mirrors and hidden holes in the walls. Its tonality was gradually going from the deep and faint red it was at the beginning, to a warmer and brighter color. The cubes of metal were heating up, and thus were producing more and more light by following the black-body radiation law.

"Woah. It's amazing, how can light be here without any torches?" The elf said, after her eyes adjusted to the new light levels.

The room was still a good deal darker than it was before, but it was only a matter of time until they could see comfortably again. Charles looked inside one of the light holes again before he answered.

"The pipes must be using the compressed gas to warm up special metal cubes until they glow, much like embers in a fire. That light is then spread through the whole place using mirrors. Did you know that the emission of light follows a fourth-power law?"

"Really? That must be a lot!" She said, and soon after began to look for all the places where the light was coming from.

Charles took a moment to process what she said.

"Wait, so you know what a fourth-power law means?"

"Nope. But seems like a lot by the way you said it."

"Oh. It's just that after a certain threshold, if you keep raising the temperature of the metal the amount of light grows like crazy. It's not fundamental to know, just… I don't know, cool maybe? I'm ranting, I'll stop."

"No! Don't stop."

"But it must be boring to hear about all this stuff. And we have better things to do."

"It's the first time I've seen you so interested in something. It's… nice."

"Thanks, I guess. Now," he turned towards the wall with the levers. "That switch was already set to 'on', so it should be safe to assume that it was the one controlling the outer defenses. This leaves out this last one here."

He approached the last switch, which was the only one that was still turned off. Now that the light in the room had reached comfortable levels, he could read the pressure displayed inside the valves that were mounted on top of the switches. The numbers were gibberish and there was no guarantee that the scale would be even closely similar to what he was used to, however.

One of the gauges was spinning wildly, as if the whole system had been damaged beyond what the emergency systems could handle. The gauge on top of the central red lever was rising steadily instead, while the third one was still measuring what by now, he knew was zero pressure.

"The spinning one should be the one that monitors the outer defenses. It was already active before, and the gauge reads nonsense, so it's safe to assume that it does that because of the damage I inflicted onto the turrets. Now, if the central one was the main power, then the last here should be powering something else. The possibilities are two: either more turrets, perhaps the inner ones, or the strange door we couldn't open before."

He looked at the elf, who was in turn looking at him. Her expression was calm and collected, and she was clearly waiting for him to come to a decision.

Charles was about to open his mouth to speak when he saw, in the increasing light of the room, a large diagram drawn in the wall behind Eereen. His eyes followed the lines going from the third switch, and he smirked.

"Door. Perfect." He said, and pulled the lever.

As they went back, tracing back their steps all the way to the first floor, Charles stopped for a moment at the elevator. He pushed the button to call it to his floor, but the platform did not move. There was a loud noise of metal bending and warping, and after a few moments the whole thing started slowly moving. The sound didn't stop, and instead only increased as the stress on the metal grew. The platform stopped again before the girders gave way and the whole elevator mechanism was jerked downwards a few inches before getting stuck again.

Bones, human bones, and broken pieces of machinery clattered on the hard and cold floor.

"Let's keep going." He said, and turned his back and went to the hatch.

The mechanisms on the locked door were finally moving. In fact, they moved with perfect fluid motions as long as they were being manipulated, and they stopped immediately as the external forces ceased. They didn't make a sound through the whole process.

All Charles had to do now was to crack the code to open the door. He stretched out a gloved hand, and touched the mechanism.

"Draw power from the railgun, and scan the mechanism." He ordered the LAI.

As the charge of his weapon diminished, a series of sensors and motors activated inside his suit. The gloved hand emitted a powerful yet subtle vibration, and a sound wave with a frequency of one terahertz spread through the metal and came back, rich of information. Enough to know what to do in order to open the door.

The door opened, slowly, heavily. Like everything else in the Factory, it moved smoothly and soundlessly. A small rush of air came from inside the room, and the smell of stale that was inside dispersed throughout the rest of the underground spaces. This was the only room where the air was stale, Charles noticed, but he didn't give it too much importance.

In the middle of the room there was a gargantuan cube made of girders and plates, which covered the majority of the inside mechanisms. There were openings on one side, and a large rectangular mechanism right next to them. It was not this huge cube, easily 4 meters tall and wide, that made Charles' jaw drop.

It was the walls. Or actually what was on the walls, hung in the same way as the tools in the other room. There were small metal cylinders, and inside them were metallic tapes that were thin and covered in bumps and indentations like pins in a music box. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, covering the entire four walls all the way up to the ceiling. The only places where there were no hanging metal tapes, because Charles was pretty sure that those were data tapes, were the places where the pipes came in and out of the wall.

One such pipe he recognized. It was like the one he saw attached to the calculators outside, and went all the way into the large cube in the middle of the room.

"A data BUS. Of course." He said, looking at it. "And those tapes, how much data do they hold? LAI, give me an estimation please."

Their data density is not incredibly high; I estimate the larger tapes to contain only up to 1 megabyte of data. Scanning them with only optical means, however, will take some time.

"Thanks." He whispered.

"What are all those things?" Eereen, who just got into the room, asked while pointing at the walls.

"Data. Recording, most probably. Text as encoded in metal."

Her ears perked up. "Can you read them?"

"Nope." He said. "But I think that the slit you see on the cube over there," he pointed at the central cube, where the two slits were on the sides of a central indentation filled with gears. "That slit should allow us to read the tapes. Here, see if it fits, but don't put it inside."

Eereen took the tape gingerly, and felt its weight with her hands. It was very light for something made out of metal, and it was polished and shiny, reflecting the bright orange light of the room. The leftmost slit was the one with the least amount of scratches, while the right one was full of small blemishes on the otherwise spotless metal plating of the cube.

One end of the tape fit perfectly inside the slit, and the elf pulled it out just before the mechanisms that were hidden behind the plates could activate and eat it.

"Just as I thought. Data tapes, and those two slits are for reading and writing. The mechanism in the middle must be a sort of screen, or terminal, then. And the cube, of course, is a huge mechanical computer."

The LAI made a few numbers appear in Charles' field of vision. The computer was clearly capable of translating at least text into machine language and of printing it into the metal tapes.

"Fascinating. Definitely fascinating. I want to read those tapes, now. I want to read all of them." Charles said.

There were symbols impressed on the cylindrical envelope of the tapes, words or numbers that were made to be read with the naked eye. After a long search, the LAI managed to extrapolate how the symbols translated into letters and numbers and highlighted the last tape, chronologically, for Charles to examine.

Before doing anything, however, he had to store all the other tapes safely in his ring. He prepared himself and instructed the LAI to lock onto them and to archive them by date, and then pulled. They all went into the ring without problem, the mana consumption being abysmal due to their unnaturally low density.

The only tape left outside was the last one ever made, smaller than most of the rest, thin and lightweight. It was incredibly sturdy despite the thinness of the metal. It went into the slit without issue, and the whole cube started moving.

Unlike the other mechanisms in the room, or in the whole Factory, this one was making sounds. The small gears that made up the entire calculator were no longer in perfect condition, and it seemed that time had taken its toll.

"What's happening?" The elf asked.

"Shush. Look there!" He replied, and pointed at the terminal.

The terminal was the closest thing to a screen that could be made without any way to manipulate light. It was a mechanical matrix made of hundreds of square metal rods next to each other. Together they created a flat surface, but then hidden mechanisms made some of them sink below the others like a relief. The upper part of the rods was bright against the rusty color of their lower section, making reading the symbols a trivial matter even in the strange light of the place.

After a few minutes the initial process was complete, and the whole matrix began to display what looked like black letters on a silver background. The LAI was working in full power to translate what was written, but after a while a few words began to appear in the air as blue holograms. The whole writing was made of English words, just in a different font. In a few minutes, a block of blue floating text was visible as a hologram just above the still shifting mechanical screen.

Charles looked at it and read, sure that only he would be able to see it. Eereen, in fact, was completely ignoring him as he stared at what she must have presumed to be empty air, and only looked at the screen without even looking around. To her, it must have seemed like gibberish, but to Charles' eyes there were words superimposed onto the metallic glyphs.

Year 49, Day 30.

It has been a long time since the last time I put down a single note on paper that was not a metallurgic formula, a spell, or a sequence of instructions. I think it is about time I put my story down in a record, like I do with my discoveries.

Well, rather than "on paper", now I should say... in metal!

I used to have a diary when I was young... but I lost it. Burned by a fireball (story too long to tell). Young... looking in a mirror I don't think I look a day past 50. Perhaps it is my vanity talking. Though I suspect mana may have more effects other than magic. Note to self: investigate this possibility whenever I have time.

Anyway. If I have learned something in 99 years of life,

Charles stopped for a moment. "99 years?" He asked out loud, but then immediately realized that only he could read the diary.

Anyway. If I have learned something in 99 years of life, is that Method in lab work is capital to make progress and obtain consistent results. It always has been. I do not understand those mages that rely solely on trial and error until they have created some sort of effect. Their discoveries look more like the result of pure luck than applied reasoning. Barbaric.

But I digress. The memory of this device is still too limited for my taste, only about 512 thousand states; I should not waste it in philosophical digressions... I am already wordy enough in my prose and have given up hope of ever becoming more concise. Backing up is a long and tedious process and I hate doing it too often. On the other hand, I have the feeling that one day my life will depend on it.

I should really find an alternative to the use of metal tapes to send information in and out... perhaps some sort of magic effect applied to a mechanism, like I used to do with the toys made back in my old lab... ah... 49 long years have passed since then. Am I getting nostalgic now? The only good way to go is forward.

"So, if 'states' is the word he uses for 'bits' and the word dimension of the main computer is 8 bits... Not bad. Not bad at all! Hell, this man single handedly discovered computer science!"

Once again Charles was reminded of another presence in the room. He took the time to look for the elf, and noticed that she was still standing behind him. She looked like she was studying the exterior of the large computer, so Charles continued with the diary.

It was a bit of a dare when I hid the three of my machines in the false bottom of my caravan, dismantled. They barely fit and I had to add a copious amount of hay to avoid the tingling of metal to be heard by the villagers. After having "demonstrated" to those peasants that I had destroyed all my "evil contraptions" I was finally let go. I had got tired of all those knights and all the quests they pretended to have received from the System. "Destroy the evil Metalmancer" they said.

The Metalmancer; the title and class I was given. I liked it since from the start, it really reflected my spirit and my pursuit. In the end, the system itself must have accepted who I really was, as it changed my class from blacksmith to the Metalmancer.

And I wore it proudly, for everyone was "a" something. A farmer, a Knight, a sorcerer...

I am THE Metalmancer.

And so here I am now.

It took long to find the perfect spot. It was thanks to the kind hearted man that I found it, not far from the portal that leads to the dimensional plane of the elves (I don't particularly like forests except when I need fuel for the forge, but I liked the volcano. Note to self: investigate the volcanic terrain in the elven plane).

The geysers of this volcanic zone were precisely what I needed to power my tools: so consistent in time, precise as a clock, and so easy to access.

In the beginning, when I built the first boiler, I could only work at certain hours of the day, when the geyser was active. Tried to accumulate that power with a flywheel but with no success. This went on for a few years as I built my workshop in a shallow cave which was rich in metal and I started to dig. Outside, my forge was powered by the breath of the earth itself.

I established a trade with the elves, who would sell me food and fuel for gems and goods made of metal.

Then I found a way to put a lot of air in a metal container, the same way a man blows inside a jug to inflate it. I realized that, by releasing it, it could then be used to power my machines. With this solution I could even free them from the constraints of a pipe system and have them roam around on wheels. I built wonderful automata with this system!

This helped me expand the workshop and build the first level of what would become my factory.

The trade with the elves was going well and they seemed to like me. Years passed and I built a second floor with a testing area for new discoveries I was making.

As I did that, everything was running the way I wanted and it was time to try some experiment.

Back when I was still in the village, I realized that I could have made systems of gears which could be configured to make them do many operations using the same mechanisms. Basically, since a machine has two states of being, it is either running or not, on or off, then I thought I could make machines that did multiple operations and not just the ones I designed them to do. A general-purpose machine that performed designed instructions using a sort of... language. The mathematical language of ons and offs. 1s and 0s. I just had to figure out how to make it.

The first attempts were disappointing. I could only still make the mechanisms do a series of complicated operations but only those. They became too complicated. I was about to give up.

Then I discovered how to make circuits that made choices. They reasoned a bit like a human being when they try and choose a path, albeit in a simplified way, and used a combination of two symbols. It all boiled down to mathematical operations and fortunately I had received a good education in that.

Indeed, Charles was right in his assumption that the Metalmancer was not an otherworlder. He didn't know whether to be happy or not.

I don't know how my adoptive father, the blacksmith, was able to pay for that tutorship, nor do I know why he insisted on making me study. My teacher was a very very old man, still he didn't look so old (maybe I took after him? Mathematics probably makes people younger? Nonsense).

He was a great thinker, so different from the people in the village. He stayed at our house and would tutor me on common knowledge and a lot of strange things that I did not comprehend fully, but mathematics I loved it. There was a beauty in numbers, the way they combined and seemed to describe the very nature of the world.

But I digress again. He was also a bit strange. Always scared of his own shadow, looking behind corners. Always murmuring about the System and so obsessed with one, single thing: he wanted to understand the nature of time and space, he said.

Well I suppose that my being fixated about metal and gears has a reason too after all!

One day he disappeared. We didn't see him again. He kind of vanished into thin air. Wonder where he went... the only thing he left was this ring. A common, small, gold ring with no incisions, no gems, nothing, but somehow capable of storing a few small items inside of it. It could make them disappear and reappear. According to a note he had left it for me: "I made it specifically for you and for you only, so that you would never have to get back to the shop to get your tools again when you forgot them", said his note.

I got really mad when my stepfather gave it to that noble, to repay a debt, he explained. It was really plain looking and did not look that precious but it was the only memory left of my teacher! My stepfather promised me he would leave me the forge to compensate me.

Charles looked at his finger, where the storage ring was. It glimmered in the red light, almost as if conscious that it was being observed. Eereen too looked at him, and then at his finger, albeit for such a small amount of time that it almost went unseen.

Not long after that, my stepfather died. Probably he knew that he was dying, that is why he sold that ring. Not to leave me with debts.

I regret all the bitterness he got from me before his departure. I wish I knew...

I just heard a noise. Adventurers again? No, It's the Elves, here to collect their batch of silver. Never too late, never too early, as regular as a clock. An admirable quality. Will resume writing tomorrow, (note to self: make time for this on my schedule).