Dear Readers,
Every Tuesday I write a post titled "A Day in the Life," where I write a short narrative, based on primary sources, that gives you a taste of what it might feel like to live in one of the time streams we study.
Today, I tell the story of a curious and inquisitive man living in a time stream where the prevailing culture is quite the opposite. While his work is noticed, no good comes of that. This story is a preview of some primary sources that will post later in the week. Below, see how trouble comes from an aging renaissance man. A man after my own heart.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
Glass, charred from the inside. Felixis turned the bulb in his hand and still could not believe it.
Moments before this little glass bulb served as a small component in his new Listener Engine, and then he heard a pop and the whole machine stopped working.
He frowned and muttered, “You were only supposed to light up. You’re not important to the machine, just to show me when she would work. Why is she broken without you?”
Felixis patted the little glass bulb like a pet, and furnished it with a tender smile, “We’ll get you fixed, don’t worry. Everything will be okay.”
He placed the bulb, with a gentle touch, onto the felt mat on his workbench. He almost giggled each time he thought of that bench. No one Felixis knew owned anything like it, and he knew no Box Store where he could find one, either. He made the bench, himself. Felixis’s friends acted impressed, but he knew it scared them. It scared him a little, too. The magistrates and Factors always told him how dangerous it could be to make things, both for his body and for his soul.
“Better to let the old machines take care of making things and finding answers, Felixis,” Magistrate Jamus told him the last time he got caught as he scavenged from the junk pile. If not for Jamus’s remembrance and love for Felixis’s late sister, that run-in might have ended in jail, or worse.
Felixis frowned again when he thought about that. “Yet I can’t help myself,” he shook his head and lamented himself. Then, Felixis reached for the red-lensed glasses that hung on the wooden rack above his bench and removed his normal spectacles.
He smiled and reached for his Notebook. Felixis kept all of his notes under a lock and key of sorts. Before the Factors took away his father’s secret library, Felixis owned a book that told him about a great Ancient named Leon, who inspired Felixis to his present “career” as an inventor. Like Leon, Felixis wrote his notebooks so that only he could read them. Thus, his glasses. His most prized possession, they filtered the light from his notebook’s screen and showed him the secret writing there. To anyone else, it looked blank.
“Hello, Felixis,” his Notebook greeted him in its tinny voice.
“Hello, Notebook! How are you today?” He grinned. Notebook might have come from the Factory, but he was still friendly.
“Pleased as punch, Felixis. And you?”
Felixis sometimes wondered if anything could dishearten his Notebook. Probably not, especially since he reprogrammed it to never find anything amiss about his work. “Actually, I’m not doing so great, Notebook. Something broke.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that, Felix! But we’ll make it better, together!” Notebook still filled the room with sunshine, even with its voice problems.
Felixis smiled, though an observer might have thought it a little weak, “All right. Let’s try. Show me the Listener Engine.”
“Is something wrong with it, Felixis?”
He frowned, “Yes. I blew out its light, and somehow that has broken it. I must learn why.”
Notebook tried to be supportive, “Well, you know I can’t tell you how to fix it. But I still hope you can!”
With that, the design for his Listener Engine showed up on the screen. The Engine would be his greatest work. From years of study, he learned how the beings that came from the Factory worked. He destroyed them in different ways and slowly figured out and named each component.
His greatest discovery, however, he found by accident. One day he found a set of paired Speakers. A person could use them to talk to another person from very far away. When he tried to use them during a thunderstorm, they got very crackly. At that point he realized that Factored machines must communicate through the air somehow, and the thunderstorm’s wet air somehow disrupted it.
Felixis then set himself to find a way to listen to these “conversations” between the machines. His Listener Engine was born. First on the screen, and now, piece by piece, in the laboratory. It would allow him to hear everything, and learn the secrets that the Factors kept from him. He would have knowledge.
It did not take a Listener Engine to hear the boots crunch on his gravel drive. Boots meant only one thing to Felixis: Prefects. Only prefects and hunters were allowed boots by the Factors, and hunters would not have business at a private home.
He yelled, “Notebook! Order the workbench to hide!”
Notebook, helpful as ever, said, “Felixis, don’t be silly! You made the workbench. I can’t talk to it.”
“Damn!” he remembered that just as Notebook told him, “All right then, hide the plans. I’ll see to the Listener Engine.”
He rushed to disconnect its many exposed wires and moved the copper parts around the room. Perhaps if it just looked like junk, the prefects would take him for a crazy old man and leave.
He heard a loud bang at the door. He tuned out the knock, he would answer soon.
Another bang came, a little too soon. This made Felixis jump. Maybe they’re not knocking.
With the third bang, only half of the Listener Engine lay disassembled around the room, and Felixis rushed to finish.
Then he heard the fourth, and the door fell. Footsteps in the anteroom. He dropped the fifth to last piece of the Listener with a sickening crunch. Felixis would worry about it later.
From outside his workshop, he heard Jamus’s measured voice, “Let me talk to him. He’ll listen to me.”
Felixis breathed a sigh of relief. Then, Jamus stepped into the doorway, in his red Magistrate’s robes.
“Felixis, what is this?”
“It’s nothing, Jamus. Just junk,” Felixis put down the piece in his hands, “How are you? Why are you in my house?”
Jamus shook his head and frowned, “The Inquisitors are in town, Felixis. Looking for you. They don’t take excuses. I tried.” The Magistrate’s eyes pleaded with Felixis.
Felixis looked around his workshop, and sighed, “All right, Jamus. I’ll come along. But I didn’t do anything.”
Jamus frowned and muttered, “I’m not the one you need to convince.” He led Felixis out towards the Prefects.
Felixis saw a stranger among them, though, in dark gray robes with a dark gray hood. He tried to see the stranger’s face. When he caught the green, bright eyes that pulsed within the dark hood, Felixis knew his Inquisitor, and his heart fell.
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