Tag: fiction

Staring out of the train window, the boy sighed as the miles flew past, each taking him further from his family – his worried mother and the father he would never see alive again. He was to stay with a distant aunt he’d never met, out in the country, having been packed and rushed out of his home in the early hours of the morning. Answers to his tearful questions were not forthcoming, only his mother’s weeping face and his father’s strict glare.

By his side was his school satchel, containing an apple, some sandwiches and a thick, leather-bound notebook, into which his father had stuffed folded blueprints, sketches and diagrams quickly salvaged from the workshop. His father was keen to impress upon him how important it was he kept these documents safe and was not to mention them to his estranged Aunt. Indeed, it was clear that he was to make no mention of the Great Machine or his work with it to anyone outside of the immediate family. The boy just nodded mutely at this request, but he understood perfectly.

During the weeks before his impromptu departure, the Colonel’s visits to his father had become more frequent and more explosive. Anthony had been made to hide in his room upon any knock on the door, and could only hear the raised voices of the two arguing men muffled through his floorboards. Every visit was accompanied by a greater number of footsteps, and a greater clanking and rustling of military uniforms and rifles.

His father had taken to drinking heavily and had no time to discuss anything, least of all the Great Machine, which had lain dormant for months now. Anthony relished the return to a normal sleep pattern and a cessation of his intake of the bitter tincture his father prepared for him, he assumed to keep him awake through the long nights of toil.

Still, he missed the machine, and he missed the time spent with his father. He missed the blistering steam and the whirring and clanking of the mechanisms as their experiments got ever closer to achieving their goal – the transmission of music and art through time itself.

Their latest test transmissions had gone well – all the diagnostic report cards signified that the messages were being received, although at this point there was no way of knowing if the broadcast had reached the desired parties, or someone else entirely. At this point, it was irrelevant.

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The boy surveyed his work. Three years of his thirteen crafting, bending, filing, sawing and polishing and the results lay before him like a sleeping dragon. Almost every corner of his father’s library was filled with pipes, pistons, bellows and wires – grapevines and tendrils in a forgotten greenhouse. It was New Year’s Eve, 1916 – 1917 would see the first successful Transmission.

Acidic smoke belched from a side-vent as the boy turned handles and frantically pumped footpedals. Some type of grit poured from an opening and was directed out of a window with funnels. An array of greasy bulbs slowly came to life as a low rumble emanated from deep in the belly of the machine. The boy wiped his forehead on his jacket sleeve and retrieved a series of punch cards from a nearby table. Leafing through them, his face lit up as his gaze alighted on one particular cardboard sheet. This was it, he thought – the Initial Transmission.

He had no doubts whatsoever that the machine would do what it was designed to do. The boy considered himself a vessel, an instrument just as the recipients of the Transmissions were also vessels. The only difference was, of course, that the mucky-faced child stood in the shadow of the machine knew his role already.

It was nearly time. The boy didn’t research the recipients personally, rather they were supplied to him by the same agency that gave him the blueprints for the machine.

The understanding was that if the Initial Transmission was a success, he could choose the next set of recipients himself. Frequently the boy had mused that in the coming years he could perhaps refine the apparatus and reduce it’s size somewhat, even relegate it to an outbuilding so his father could reach his Encyclopedias again. Perhaps create living quarters within the vast apparatus if the heat and noise didn’t make that proposition too risky.

The boy traced his finger across the rough-hewn holes in the punchcard and read the hand-written title at the top. ‘Without‘ was all it said. Of course the boy couldn’t decypher the card itself, and even when the machine had devoured and processed it the likelihood of him being able to comprehend the resulting diagnostic data was slim at best – but he would know for sure that it had worked, and the last three years of his life, three years of night-long knuckle-scraping hard work, would not have been in vain.

Three of the five bulbs were now illuminated and the low rumble had become a dense roar. The machine was ready for input, the autistic child – forgotten and left to his own devices, had built a mechanism by which art could be transmitted across time. He inserted the punch card and lungs still, pulled the lever.