The Gears Never Rust
Glenn Uncertain had done many great things in his life as an adventuring archeologist. He braved The Tombs of Technokahmen. Faced down an army of tanks made from ancient American Indian bones that fired their malevolent spirits from the tank‘s turret. He even read the illustrated edition of the book written by Grand Visor of Horrible Deaths. None of that phased him. However, there was only one thing in the world that terrified him: The Cog Sphere.Resting at the top of a tower of brass steam pipes and valves The Cog Sphere’s clockwork gears turned endlessly for an unknown and meaningless purpose in the center of Sprocketburg.
Glenn Uncertain was the man who first discovered it hidden deep beneath the earth. Glenn described it, soon after it’s unearthing, to his dear friend Alexander Uncertain1
in a letter as, “A birds nest of polished metal that ticked, tocked, writhed, and twisted itself in the dirt with a terrifying vivacity. It’s shape an incomprehensible form that is beyond the conception of the minds of men”.
The Cog Sphere quickly developed a unique fascination by most of those who laid eyes on it and quickly became the jewel of the city. The people decided that it was rare discovery that needed to be displayed proudly. But Glenn soon realized that those who looked upon it’s hypnotic motion for too long soon started to get strange new ideas.
It’s dark influence began to spread throughout the city and “The Madness” set upon the town and things began to change. The most drastic change being that before The Sphere’s arrival the town used to be called Edistown in celebration the man who invented electricity, but after it arrived the people changed Edistown to Sprocketburg. A name that celebrate the old ways of steam and oversized bolts.
Glenn himself was only able to protect himself from The Cog Sphere’s influence by observing the device through a pair of his multicolored science goggles. A pair, as he explained to Alexander, of being “Ingeniously infused with a little magic to reshape the world into something much more logical and less silly ridiculousness. If you were to observe, say, a Zeppelin2 (or any other such inflatable dirigible), you would see in it’s place, an Areoplane of a very sensible design.”
When Alexander asked what Glenn saw when observing The Sphere he responded with “It appears as nothing. A black void of empty space. Existing only to take up space in an already crowded world.”
The people of Sprocketburg did not share Glenn’s fear and in fact chastised him for defaming the glorious technological revolution at hand. He had to stop working as an archeologist and was not allowed to leave the city.
During his imprisonment Glenn Uncertain began to document the changes in the people day by day3. On January 23 He describes the strange ornamentation that began to appear on the few priests that remained in town.
They had adorned queer additions of copper and brass gears attached to their newly adopted top hats. The gem encrusted cogs spinning pointlessly and fueled by small and unnaturally efficient steam engines they now all carried on their backs.
When Glenn asked about them he writes the priests responded thusly, “The Sphere gave us inspiration. Showed us how to tap into the diving power that can only be accessed by slightly tarnished tappets and screws.”
Over the next few days he saw more people were joining the priests in their new practice. Soon nearly every man, woman, and child had the mark of the Sphere’s influence. With in three months of the discovery of The Sphere, everyone began wearing jewelers glasses and extraneous vests, scarves, puffy shirts, and brass pocket watch chains. Each person trying desperately to out due the other in order to show their devotion to The Sphere.
Glenn writes solemnly in his journal. “The streets are empty again today. I look out my window and see no one. But I know that in each house there is a family hunched over a workbench desperately trying to find a new way to incorporate a cathode ray tube into their lapels. I fear that if I were able to see past the grease smeared lenses of their goggles I would see the hallow emptiness one would find in the glassy eyes of a clockwork toy.”
Glenn was not wrong. The townsfolk’s need to out done one another grew geometrically and architecturally4 over the course of five months. It was then the houses began to undergo their metamorphose. They became inexplicable messes of pipes, gears, and pneumatic tubes. Literally indiscernible from one another. Glenn described them as “The tendrils of The Sphere wrapping around the city, choking the last bit of life an culture out of its dying body”.
Glenn lamented that nobody in the city went on adventures any more. There was no more digging, no more romance, no more great battles of good and evil. There was only the Cog Sphere. It became life and life became purposeless. The human body became merely a means to decorate itself in the pointless machinery of The Sphere, which only served to decorate the human body, which was only a means to decorate itself in the pointless machinery of The Sphere, and so on. In under a year the town of Sprocketburg had become city wide embodiment of The Sphere.
One day Glenn put on his goggles all he saw around him was blackness. A void of usefulness and logic. Glenn described it was like closing your eyes and imagining the dumbest thing you possibly could. We think that it was this that finally drove him insane.
The last journal entry we have from him is as follows: “I can no longer abide by this. These people were once my friends but they aren’t anymore. They are gilded shades of their former selves and tonight I will free them. Perhaps in death they will find freedom from The Sphere5."
We know little about what happened next. We do know he left a trail of bodies behind him as he marched towards the tower of The Sphere. We do know that they found his body tattered and scared with severe burns from an explosion. We also know that the Sphere was no where to be found nor was any shrapnel that would have been produced by any explosion. All we have is a slightly singed note in Glenn Uncertain’s handwriting saying:
“--- long now. The burns will kill me soon. Have to tell. It opened for me. Showed me its core. Showed me the complex infrastructure of levers and chain belts that exist between. The terrifying complexity of the clockwork creatures probing the fabric of reality slowly trying to get through. Can‘t stop them. For them, there is no time.
The gears never rust.”
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1. The two weren’t exactly related. At the time immaculate conceptions ran at about the same rate as the spread as agnosticism thus leading to a rather large family of fatherless children from a diety that may or may not exist.
2. A sort of mobile couch used by the fatuous and wealthy to observe, from above, sporting events.
3. See illustration.
4. The previous architecture was one of minimalism with a touch of arcadian-non-linear-refomism.
5. The original documents are a little difficult to read sometimes but most scholars believe that at the end of this foreboding sentence Glenn Uncertain had drawn a cartoon frowny face.
