A Steampunk Animal Fable
Photo by Josh Redd on Unsplash
Dodmen Moldywarp, Chief Technician to Sir Ashton Lever’s celebrated Holophusikon, twisted his magnifying loupe up away from his face and rubbed at his tiny eyes with the backs of his forepaws. It had been a long shift already, and he no longer enjoyed the vigor he’d had as a pup. His sensitive nose picked up the mingled odors of vinegar and beeswax coming from far below; his nephew Desman’s cleaning crew had been polishing the mahogany fixtures and brass fittings of the massive search engine the whole day. All seemed to be going well.
Dodmen’s vision had grown worse in recent months, but he could still see that the sunset out the vaulted windows was spectacular. He gazed out at the estate’s grounds for a moment, then brought his attention back to the high-ceilinged room that had been his workplace for many years. Some of his maintenance moles were lighting the gas lamps around the perimeter of the upper level, while others dusted the ornate fretwork that decorated the walls.
The old mole resigned himself to the fact that he still had a long evening ahead of him; his employer was having a dinner party later and would doubtless want to show off his famous invention to his guests. Dodmen would be needed far into the night. Sir Ashton may have created the search engine, but he could no more operate it himself than he could ride one of his prize-winning racehorses. Nor would he want to; such activity was beneath him, gentry that he was. Jockeys were for running The Downs; moles were for running the Holophusikon.
Dodmen pressed open the flange on the voicepipe next to the engine’s ivory-inlaid keyboard and cleared his throat. Before he could speak, he heard a faint click at the other end. Dodmen smiled; his nephew often seemed to know exactly when his uncle would be calling downstairs.
“Yessir?” asked Desman.
“I’m feeling my age jest now, Dez; I’m going fer a spot of tea to give me a bit o’ strength before I meet with the ferret. Call me in the break room when he arrives, and I’ll meet him here up top.”
“Er…beggin’ yer pardon…” The younger mole hesitated. “Foalmart’s here already, sir. I’ve sent him up to yer station jest now.”
Dodmen sighed; indeed, he now heard the ferret’s claws clicking on the treads as he bounded up the iron spiral staircase. “No worries; thank’ee, Dez,” Dodmen said, and released the voicepipe.
Foalmart was a relative newcomer to the Holophusikon. Moles were meticulous, but weren’t the fastest creatures, even Dodmen conceded that. But he worried about Sir Ashton’s newfound obsession with speed, and that the ferret’s habitual haste and disregard for protocol could damage the search engine’s sterling reputation for thoroughness and accuracy — not to mention the machine itself.
“Well, Old Moldywarp,” sneered Foalmart from behind him. “You wanted to see me? What’s the occasion? Are you ready to admit you need my help to run this behemoth?”
Dodmen turned, trying not to bristle. Foalmart lounged on his hind legs against the filigreed landing pole and stared down at him. Dodmen smoothed his chest fur and drew himself up to his full height, trying to ignore the fact that he was still several inches shorter than the odious ferret. Dodmen cleared his throat again and spoke carefully.
“Sir Ashton believes ye’re ready to manage a shift on the Holophusikon on yer own. I’ll be as frank with ye as I was with him, Foaly; I beg to differ. Of course Sir Ashton’s word is law, but he has come to trust my opinion over the long years I’ve been in his employ. He has agreed to my request to have ye run some simulacra on the search engine to prove your abilities. He’ll make his final decision when he reviews your results. I’ve prepared a test for ye based on the requests of some of Sir Ashton’s previous clients.”
“What, exactly, are your criteria for judgment of my abilities, if I may ask? Speed of query input and return of search results, I should hope,” said Foalmart, his black eyes dancing in the gaslight.
Dodmen frowned. “Proper context and freedom from error,” he corrected. “The Holophusikon’s speed and size is already unmatched among search engines; don’t sacrifice accuracy…”
“…for the sake of a few extra seconds,” the ferret finished with him. “Ye gods, mole. I know all of your speechifying by heart. You’ve drilled the catechism of your precious ‘Holy Foreskin’ into my skull. I know this infernal machine inside and out, the same as you; you’ll find that I am equal to any examination you could concoct.”
Dodmen flinched at the ferret’s vulgarity, but forced himself to remain calm. “Right, then. We could begin presently, or wait until morning, as ye prefer.”
Foalmart gazed in apparent disinterest at the claws on his left forepaw, but the very tip of his long, white tail twitched back and forth. “The sooner, the better; let’s get it over with,” he said after a moment.
Dodmen drew three cards with intricate edge notching out of the pocket of his leather apron. He handed the first to Foalmart, then backed away from the keyboard and bowed. “She’s all yers,” he murmured, and settled back on his haunches to observe.
“‘Joseph Priestley, dephlogisticated air,’” Foalmart read aloud. He spoke into the wide-range speaking trumpet just under the dedicated voicepipe. “All hands clear; beginning query,” he announced, and began typing Code.
Dodmen closed his eyes and listened; he’d been running the Holophusikon so long that his ear was as fluent in Code as in English. The ferret was a faster typist than he had ever been, but Dodmen counted three separate mistakes in Foalmart’s transcription. Would they be enough to throw off the result?
Deep within the bowels of the machine, sorting rods clanked as they thrust into and withdrew from vast banks of punched data cards. Steam hissed in the outlet pipes above; Dodmen knew it would be billowing out the exhaust chimneys above the skylights soon.
A faint clanking caught his attention; he opened his eyes and looked at Foalmart. The ferret seemed oblivious to the fact that something was wrong. Dodmen shuffled forward, elbowed the ferret out of the way, and threw the pause bar across the keyboard. The engine’s gears wound down slowly. Dodmen pressed the voicepipe open.
“Dez, go in and check the right cam in the forward piston series,” he barked. “Sounds like ‘er timing’s a bit off.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Foalmart snapped. “You’re trying to distract me.”
Dodmen looked at the ferret coldly. “I’m trying to help ye. If you throw a rod during a query, there’ll be the very devil to pay with Sir Ashton. The least he’ll do is demote ye from Shift Manager right quick, I can promise ye that.”
Foalmart stared back with open hatred in his eyes. Dodmen clamped down on the instinctive growl that was rising in his throat. The voicepipe whistled; Dodmen broke his gaze away from the ferret and opened it.
“You were right, sir; the cam was loose,” said Dez. “Hoddy tightened the end pinion; she’s ready to go again.”
The old mole backed away from the keyboard once more; Foalmart raised the pause bar and coded in the ‘resume’ command. A minute later, punched tape clicked forth from the output drive. Dodmen waited until it had finished spiraling out, then tore off the strip, twisted his loupe down in front of his eyes, and read it aloud.
“Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, very good,” he admitted. “‘Priestley’s treatise on the discovery of oxygen, first published in 1774. Copies available at the Francis Trigge Chained Library in Lincolnshire, as well as at various collections at Oxford and Cambridge.’” Dodmen sighed. “Well done, Foalmart, despite yer errors. This is exactly the sort of result Sir Ashton’s clients expect.”
“Don’t patronize me, Moldy,” snarled the ferret. “Let’s get on with it.”
Dodmen rolled up the output tape and put it in his pocket. He glanced at the next card before handing it to Foalmart with a faint smile. “May Fortune continue to smile upon ye,” he said.
“Heraklitus, panta rhei,” muttered Foalmart, then announced the all-clear through the trumpet. His paws danced quickly over the keyboard, but Dodmen’s smile deepened as he listened. Once the ferret finished his input, the Holophusikon’s innards churned on far longer than it had the first time; the mole could sense his rival’s tension mounting by the second. When the output tape appeared, the ferret tore it off quickly. He looked it over, his brow furrowed and his mouth working silently with the effort of reading raw Code. After a minute, he crumpled the tape and cast it to the parquet floor of the platform.
“Allow me to conjecture, dear Foalmart,” said Dodmen, unable to keep glee entirely out of his voice. “Instead of a listing of the Ionian philosopher’s writings on Flux Theory, ye retrieved all of the known accounts of the mythical Twelve Labors of Herakles.”
“You set me up,” Foalmart spat into the mole’s face. “Herakles, Heraklitus…you chose that card specifically to trick me.”
Dodmen’s sense of fairness would not allow him to deny that there was truth in the ferret’s accusation.
“To test ye,” he amended gently. “I’ve nothing against retiring and leaving all this behind; I know my time is short. But when I hand over the watch and care of the Holophusikon, it’ll be to the creature that treats her with respect. Ye fast, busy ferret, ye look at me and ye see a backward old mole. But I’ve been with Sir Ashton since he built this engine; I’ve input or edited nearly every data card she holds. And nothing I’ve learnt in all these years has been more important than the principle of precision. What good is the biggest knowledge bank in England if ye can’t retrieve the right information when ye need it?”
“Enough rhetoric, Dodmen,” said Foalmart. “Was this an all-or-nothing examination?”
“Naw, Foaly; calm yerself. I’m a creature of reason. Let’s make it two outta three.” Dodmen handed the last card to the ferret, who examined it before turning to the trumpet. “All hands clear, beginning query,” he enunciated carefully; Dodmen’s ears picked up a faint echo of the ferret’s words from the floor below.
“Pope…quote…essay…criticism,” muttered Foalmart, coding in the keywords more slowly this time. “A letter-perfect transcription,” Dodmen acknowledged. The ferret shrugged his shoulders without turning.
The Holophusikon cranked into gear slowly, chugging and huffing. Dodmen knew that this particular data set, with its more generic parameters, would take the search engine longer to chew over than the previous two simulacra had. This apparently hadn’t occurred to Foalmart, who began pacing the platform.
The output tape clicked twice, then stopped. Without warning, a metallic boom sounded from deep within the machine and smoke billowed out of various pipes. Dodmen jumped up and put all his weight on the alarm whistle’s rope, but he could already hear the maintenance crew scurrying to safety. The old mole groaned, knowing that Sir Ashton would bluster his way from the main house into the Holophusikon’s annex very soon. A claw on his shoulder tore him away from his hold on the rope.
“A thrown rod? You engineered this,” hissed Foalmart. “Is this part of your test as well?” The ferret turned and fairly flew down the circular stairs.
“Where are you going?” called Dodmen, lumbering down after him.
“You can’t undermine me,” the ferret yelled. “I’ll reset that rod myself, you’ll see.”
“No, wait, Foaly! The pause bar!” But the ferret was out of earshot. Already out of breath, the old mole pivoted and ran back up the stairs as quickly as he could. His paws skittered and slid on the slick iron treads. “Foaly!” he cried again, but knew his hoarse voice would never be heard.
Back on his platform, Dodmen ran to the keyboard and reached for the brass pause bar. A jolt and a high shriek cut off mid-pitch by a second boom let him know he was a second too late. Dodmen sank down over the keyboard, letting his snout rest on the smooth, cool ivory.
“Ahh, Foaly,” he murmured, feeling sick to his stomach. “What good is all yer hastiness now? Poor busy thing.” Dodmen exhaled, straightened, and opened the voicepipe. “Dez, get the cleaning crew and a big rubber sheet. Foalmart’s just been cogged.”
“Yessir, we know, sir. Ferret or no, it’s an awful shame,” came his trusty nephew’s reply.
“I’ll be right down to meet Sir Ashton. If we work quickly, we can have things back in order before the dinner party. We’ll deal with the ferret’s remains tomorrow,” said Dodmen, and clicked the voicepipe closed. He noticed the aborted output tape sticking out of the drive like a paper tongue; opening the hand crank panel, he wound it out manually and tore it off.
“Well now, Foaly. Pope’s words’ll make ye a right fittin’ epitaph.” He took a pencil out of his pocket and transcribed the words directly under the punched Code on the tape:
“A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”