(09-12-2013, 09:13 PM)chineseroom Wrote: Hey, great to see you all having so much fun with the story. You're pulling some interesting threads together here. There's still a fair number of clues hidden away you haven't factored in yet.
I'm going to be about and around tomorrow, will try and chew the fat a little with you little swine.
Awesome. I'm glad that there are still clues in there that some haven't considered. I'm playing through a second time and really getting immersed and in depth into the story and trying to piece together the puzzle!
August 4th 1898
More experiments with Compound X. Took the dog and injected it with strychnine. After the expected convulsions and spasming, it died just after midnight. I immersed the body in a large tank of Compound X and introduced an alternating current via induction coil for a period of three and a half minutes. Partial return was induced. However, damage incurred prior to death was retained upon revival, meaning the dog continued in the acute state of strychnine poisoning until I put a bullet in its skull. But drowning? Perhaps, yes. It is after all known to be the kindest of suicides. If one were to drown, replacing the fluid in the lungs with Compound X should theoretically be perfectly possible as a revival method.
November 7th 1898
The bank is refusing credit, the ignorant swine. I sit alone at night and weep, once the children and servants are safely asleep, when they cannot hear me. My darling, how I need you now. They say I have squandered my fortune, that my investment in these latest machines has ruined the family name. What? That I was to remain a local butcher?What are these two arms compared to the multitude that can be applied, without pay, without tire, by adapting the mechanisms we find in the looms and the mills. But, if the bank has its way, it will all come to nothing. If they come for the house I swear I will kill them. I will kill them all. I will take my rifle... my rifle...
November 29th 1898
Of the few books to survive after those degenerate peasants fired my Great Uncle's castle were his travel diaries. He talks of archaeological digs in Siam, Arabia, which yielded treasures of quite extraordinary worth. And, most interestingly, he hints at those yet to be found, in the Americas where civilisations were consumed by the jungles. Of course, it all makes sense - those conquistadors were only driven so far by their faith - El Dorado did the rest. And yet, there is more. "Find the Temple of the Stone Moon", he writes, "and the world will never more be hungry, and neither shall you."My mind is made up. Damn the creditors. I shall leave my work unfinished and I shall take to the Americas, and I will return with my soul richer and my pockets bulging.
February 17th 1899
And I said, look, my darlings, can you see it? And they said Yes, Daddy, Yes, we see it. A tall, weathered cap of a steep sided pyramid, so like those of Eygpt. Stone falling away from the summit, vines crawling about intertwining the stucco serpents that thrive about the steps. A palpable sense of stillness, a weight of forgotten. And this, here, this is where the king sat. And this is where the priests lived. This house, this is the house of the dead. And here, where the sun strikes, this is where they threw the hearts that were not consumed.No, my darlings, they most certainly were not savages. You see, they believed that the sky could fall on their heads and they truly, truly believed that offering blood was the only way of stopping this from happening. Perhaps, my darling. Perhaps they were mistaken altogether. Or perhaps their tragedy was they could simply not spill blood enough to prevent the sky from falling in upon them.
February 14th 1899
Yes, he said, I know these ruins.He was a shabby fellow, all rotten with some malodorous disease. I caught him looking at me strangely, as if what he really wanted to know was how I knew of them. Biting back the temptation to box his ears for the impudence, I simply smiled and told him that my family's library contained intriguing travel books. The illiterate oaf did not understand that of course. He agreed to lead us anyway.I have told the children, truly, this will be an extraordinary adventure. If those old stones hold the financial benefits I predict, it will be merely the first of many.
March 8th 1899
I have stood before myself, reflected in the cracking mirror of my own life. What forms are these that swim in my dreams? What shadows cast by the lonely temples? As I lay dying on the stone steps, all I saw was a great serpent wound around the pistons and pumps, wounded by the crush of the wheels.This heart, this vast beating. Stilled now, time and jungle about me. I dreamt of underground, subterranean, an enterprise. To unlock the passion, the coming century. Must we be crushed underfoot by metal feet not mine? Surely this machine can be better, it can serve us as we serve it; it can save us all. I will build to the core of the earth, invert Babel as I am a Midas chained.
March 15th 1899
Curled into my bunk, all sick and sweat ridden. They clean my room about me, but I can only hear the voice from within that gentlest of stones. It sings to me and I dream of a great machine.We will build a new world from the ruins of the old. We will plant flowers in the rotten ribcage and let them grow to hold the sky from falling. I remember how it whispered to me, as we rolled sick and heaving. And I remember when we pulled into Southampton and we both wept, for it was every bit as much a desecration as had been sung to me.And then we came to London and I set it upon the mantelpiece, and went into the house and gathered the servants and set on re-crafting them, and then I went into the garden and buried those tiny shattered skulls under the weeping bulges of the rhododendrons.
April 30th 1899
The crate arrived this morning, and I had it delivered directly to the workshop. The body is remarkably preserved, although there is a subtle yet nauseating stench of damp and rot. It is humanoid in shape, but has suffered severe skeletal deformity. Remnants of leather straps encase the torso, which is deformed, with evidence of substantial muscle mass and displacement. It is difficult to ascertain whether this unfortunate is the recipient of some barbarous surgery, or was born deformed and an attempt to force his gnarled body into some semblance of humanity was made. What he is I cannot tell, but I smell the Orb upon him, and suspect my great uncle's presence in his curious condition.So it can be done. We can reshape the body into a tool, accelerate the processes of Mr Darwin's evolution. But here my great uncle and I part company. He chose men as the subjects of his experiments, but men are difficult to control and rotten with sentimentality. No, we require a new creature for our chattels: loyal, clever, strong, easily sated.
May 1st 1899
But then, what if they could stand upright and walk as men? What if the brute were harnessed thus? Would they sing, would they find their own God?I have seen these things and I will tell you now, no. No they will not. But they will happily accept fealty to a God thrust upon them, and worship it thus given. In this, I realised, they are no different to the masses. They are much the same as us.Once this irrevocable threshold is passed, I understand that we too are shackled and must be set free. To free the man, we cut the man. In order to cross that great evolutionary line, it must first be painted upon the ground.
June 3rd 1899
I realise now that my fear of dirt stems from the disease I contracted climbing those lost jungle temples. It is as if those clean places, so free of humanity's filth, imprinted upon my soul and left it fragile to what I find here.Fear is what keeps us all in our places, and the fear of the flesh, the ruin of the flesh is the greatest of them all. I am sickened, I am ruined, but I will build such machines to contain this plague and heal us all.A new century is upon us.
June 24th 1899
In my dreams, I see a man, dressed in jaguar skins and feathered like a blooded saint. What came from the heart lubricated us, it crushed evil under its tread and liberated us all. The foetid heat of the jungle, mirrored somewhere behind my forehead. My temple pounds, the blood boils in my skull. It feels as if there is something alive there; a rat, a damn rat gnawing through my brains, eating its way out into the world. Even the laudanum will not quell its endless hunger. I hear my children playing in the attic but it fills me with terror, not love. What desperate thoughts are these?
July 15th 1899
In order to facilitate assimilation of tissue groups, a compound is required, or the cells will not bond. Disposal of non-bonded subjects must be immediate and using incineration or we risk continuous animation without form. This is... unpleasant.A simple compound of one part Brennenburg Infusion Vitae to one part Orgone Monad Disperal fluid is sufficient. This can then be administered intravenously to subjects following re-assembly to maintain bonding. The compound is unstable and highly light reactive - once in the body, the Schumann Lamp can be used to activate the compound, but outside the body is highly corrosive. It can even destroy small quantities of metal.
August 1st 1899
Where de Laval spins milk into cream, we will spin life into dead flesh. The mixing process takes approximately two minutes, during which time the process emits harmful Curie Radiation. For this reason, centrifuge controls have been placed into a shielded antechamber where it is advised the operator remains until the spin has ceased. At this point Compound X can be extracted and sent, via the pneumatic delivery system to the Laboratory ready for use on subjects.
August 1st 1899
Several of the older forms have breached their containment area and escaped into the sewers. They remind me of my limitations - this is no Chelm and I am no Eliyahu, at least, not quite yet. It is the heat generated from keeping the doorway between open that is to blame. We cannot simply pack them about with coolant as we do at the centre where the doorway is. The later versions are kept safe by the freezing temperature of those towers. Up here, where the air is hot and fetid, they become overheated, and their duality tears them asunder, as the other place flies from their cells and their vitae splinters. They live sporadically, torn from one world to the other and back again in violent, unpredictable bursts. For a few seconds they are creatures of this world, then they are torn away and cease to have physical form. This vicious ripping back and forth between worlds has driven them quite insane. I have ordered the affected areas sealed, and will not allow my loyal workers to enter. These are damned places now, the abode of failed experiments, ghosts of fear and spite.
August 19th 1899
Von Reichenbach writes of the Odic Force, whilst that ignorant charlatan Blavatsky pontificated upon the soul. They are both cretins. To think one could strive for such great heights without wading first through puke and innard, without standing upon an architecture of bones! Montezuma was the wiser. But here, in our temples of steel, I have witnessed the severed head of a man, recently trampled to death by a runaway carriage, immersed in a solution of the Brennenburg compound open his eyes, and cry "Oh where are my legs Sir? Where is my body?" We are breaking through the barriers of death itself. Oh my dead darling Lily, it is too late for you, but I promise you this: I will save our children from death and, if need be, I will wrench them back from the blackness with this wonderful concoction!
August 20th 1899
Took delivery of another batch of imbeciles today. They are the sorriest specimens of humanity I have ever seen. No-one asks where they go to. The authorities of Bedlam are simply happy to reduce the over-crowding in their teeming, stinking halls. We measure their skulls, check their teeth. We give them Laudanum to pacify them.They wait in line, livestock, dull brown eyes and filthy skin. Many soil themselves as they wait. Into the manipulator they file in silence. I hear the hissing of gas. I hear the dull groaning as teeth are removed, as bones are reset. I hear the pigs screaming. We have removed all the mirrors. After the process, it is their reflections that trouble them the most. Afterwards, when they sleep, I walk amongst them. My children, I whisper to their dreams, you are my children now. I have children once again, and your forms imperfect will be the engines to make my own blood flow again.
August 22nd 1899
In America, they talk of building their cities to the skies. To me this seems folly. But perhaps it is simply a case of a nation founded without a history of its own. We walk upon our histories; they are compacted into the very loam beneath our feet. The engineers we employed talked of this. They talked of how, when building the underground trains they would often come across older tunnels criss-crossing the capital.What palaces lie buried beneath us? We are digging, digging, excavating and re-appropriating what we find. At the centre of the planet, my architect tells me, there is a great iron ball. It is the egg of the world.
August 31st 1899
Children really are the most wonderful, useful creatures! The unfortunates from the orphanage have proved indispensible in cleaning the larger steam pipes. It appears that matter from the slaughtering process may indeed vapourise at source, but drifts like dust through the air and lodges in the pipes, causing them to foul. Periodically, we shut the pressure down and send one of our pixies into the pipes to scrub the reconstituted fat away. Armed with just a shortened broom, our little explorers venture into the dark.Of course, we can only keep pressure down for a short period, so they must be fast, or they risk being trapped and boiled by the superheated vapours when they rush back into the system. Then we will be sending their comrades in afterwards to scrape free the cooling mess. The survivors tell me you can reach all manner of places within the complex through the pipes. I smile, tell them I am so proud. And then feed them to the pigs.
September 11th 1899
Our power source provides surplus energy for our needs, and the architect has assured me that the excess is being stored safely deep within the factory. I have been as far as the entrance to the storage chambers, but it is clearly hazardous to proceed further. Our workers enter and work there, but they do not last long. We dispose of the bodies beneath the chapel, in an old medieval plague pit, which seems appropriate. They are covered with burns and strange growths upon the skin that blister and split when they are moved. The smell is quite overwhelming.All we require for the new power source is a steady supply of clean water, which we are diverting from the sewers. Our entire enterprise is thus built upon human waste.The power source generates substantial heat, which rises through the chimney complex and warms the tunnels for the workers. Provided there is not too much blood in their excrement, it functions as a perfect closed system.
September 28th 1899
"Imagine", they say "a machine one day that might think like a man!" As if this is to be desired. One might almost boast of creating a man who breeds like a pig. Men and women upon all fours, rutting carelessly, ejaculating their filthy little missives into the streets. Alleys and gutters running freely with the careless spill of their conjoinings. The air thick with the whimperings of lust. Bodies streaked with their own emissions. We have created a world where man is so utterly debased he will spray his seed over passers-by. And yet, this is the condition Babbage aspired to.No, this is not the machine we seek. Such an entity should be nothing less than a deity, and we would fall upon our knees and worship it. We shall not carve gods to bicker and fornicate, they will exist to clean the world and set us free. I reject Babbage as I reject these men of government. Let the pigs copulate in the gutters whilst they can, we shall scoop them up and ease their ascension soon enough.
Father Jeremiah's Journal, October 1st 1899
They flock to us now, where once I had to walk amongst them, to bring salvation into their lives. Now, drawn by warmth in winter, by the food that Mandus distributes, my church is full and my charges are saved. He walks amongst them and they almost worship him. He will not allow them to work in his factories, claiming that his workforce are specially trained for the new machinery he uses, and that it would be irresponsible, nay unethical, to risk such precious lives as he sees here.A changed man since Mexico. It is to be praised that in the face of such appalling tragedy, and from the confines of his sickbed, as he is often chained to, he conducts one of the greatest and most benevolent charities in all of London. Not content with the rise to become the dominant food produce business in the land, he distributes his goodwill, his fares, to the poor and they congregate about his kingdom in gratitude.
Edwin and Enoch's diary, October 3rd 1899
Daddy says we're not allowed to play with the animals anymore. We were playing hide and seek with Cook and he came and shouted at us, just as we were going to hide behind Mr Grumpy Teddy. Cook says it's because of the guns in there, but he always lets us help polish them, so it can't be that. Anyway, that room is haunted. If you sneak around there at night, you can hear the ghosts in the walls behind the cases. They are often angry, or that's how it sounds. We think that's why you can hear them rattling their chains and slamming doors and things like that. We don't like it in there anyway.
Edwin and Enoch's diary, October 11th 1899
Daddy says there won't be a Christmas this year, he is much too busy. Nanny says we must not disturb him, he is ever so busy. He is gone for work before she wakes us and often we are asleep before he returns. We found a bird in the garden with a broken wing. We gave it to Nanny, who said it was a filthy thing and hit it with a rolling pin. Later, we crept downstairs to bury the body when everone was asleep. There was a pig in the garden, we heard it snuffling about. Then Daddy came and said we had to come inside straight away. He was furious, but we think he'd been crying again.
October 11th 1899
We integrate the very latest knowledge of chemistry, using low levels of a laudanum derivative in feed to subdue the product even before the initiation of the process. This means that when we drag them from holding pens onto the line, they are less likely to panic and damage machine components, other products or themselves. This section of the belt is sheathed in rubber and kept well lit to maintain good spirits, and we have actually found that the intelligent placement of gramophones and simple acoustic amplification tubes around the line means we can use music to further soothe the product. We find Debussy particularly effective in this regard.
October 17th 1899
Each compartment is ergonomically designed, with a feed-trough at one end, so the product naturally settles into a position ready for the stunning arms to connect to the skull. We use the natural static charge built up by the friction of the carts against the belt to build an electrical charge, which is contained within glass vacuum canisters at the sides of the stunning arm mechanisms and delivered along the stun arms via copper cabling. We have observed that the artificial lightning contained within these canisters seems to calm the product further.Post-stunning, the line tilts sharply to the vertical, the physics of which tips the stunned product upwards to fall directly onto the hook of the bleeding line. This hook passes normally through the haunch or thigh of the product, and from this point, we dispense with the belt and instead instigate a channelled floor, which creates a funnel allowing blood and by-product excretions to collect and run to the fluid collection tanks.
October 18th 1899
A series of collecting vents have been installed along the ceiling at this stage of the line. In the process of stunning and bleeding, the product often expels stinking vapours from its digestive system, which can be collected, condensed, and used in the methane boiler to drive the engine as a whole. In this way, the more product is processed, the more power becomes available to the machine, and productivity is actually increased. A simple stroke of genius, but one that encapsulates the benefits of self-regulatory automation.
October 21st 1899
The product moves now into the bleeding. A system of spring-loaded blades are arranged here. Tension is built via a series of springs that run along the bleeding line, using the momentum of the product itself to build up the energy for the action ahead. The blades are released at a point of optimum tension as the product passes them. The combination of the speed of release and the sudden stop against the rubber buffers at the side of the line sets the blades spinning rapidly enough to cut the throat of the product. It is a clean, sympathetic and efficient process. The product then continues along the line, and the natural bleeding process is allowed time to occur, the blood collecting in the angled basin at the foot of the line. Secondary springblades are positioned at two further points along the line. Should the mid-level rubber buffers continue to be manipulated, in the form of a semi-bled product thrashing or twitching, these movements automatically form the basis of the spring energy required to send the next bleeding blade into activity.
October 22nd 1899
Naturally, once bled, the product must be scalded, dehaired and scraped ready for gambrolling and evisceration. For this, we pass them through the steam reservoir, which is kept at a constant temperature by passing excess high-pressure venting from the engines, via the boiler and series of large copper pipes, into a stone chamber just below the workhouse. At the centre of the machine, there is a component that must be kept at a consistently low temperature, which controls operations of the processing of product throughout the system. Alongside this, refrigeration is of the utmost importance in retaining product quality, and this also requires heat to be removed from certain areas of the machine. Two problems are therefore combined into a single solution: the removal of heat from some areas and the requirements for increased heat in others.Conducting panels draw heat using the principles of convection regulated by the boiler and sending freezing air along one set of pipes in one direction, and super-heated vapours in another.
October 23rd 1899
Newly scalded, the product passes into a section of the line framed with steel brushes. The natural process of abrasion removes any hairs and tougher sections of skin, and at the same time, the forelegs are removed with a further blade powered by a compressed steam duct from the scalding room.The flow and change of air around the entire system creates differential pressure. A complex arrangement of pipes converges this into a single vacuum chamber, to which is attached a funnel. As the product passes the funnel mouth, the entire viscera are removed, via the anus, in one clean and efficient process by the meeting of the two areas of pressure. This process causes the vacuum chamber to seal once more, building a new charge of pressure for the following product. The viscera flow into the tripery vats to meet head, feet, hairs and any skin lost in the scalding process.
October 24th 1899
We have set aside an entire wing of the mansion for their parties, we invite them from near and far, and we guzzle them in with fine wine and the finest cuts in all of London. My god Mandus, but these chops are rather divine, who is your butcher?Feed them up, for the wine and the grains will also lend a character to the product, keep the flesh relaxed. Opium in the champagne and gravy. A hog roast every night for the Duke and the Duchess! An actress battered and sliced! An artisan in every mouthful! An importer of fine teas stewed in his own leaves! They bicker and breed under the table, by the fireplace, on the carpet stained with wine and fat, whilst long dead nobles of deformed grace and cold stare watch them from gilded frames along the crooked walls.We will hose it down later, as we shovel them into our machine.
October 25th 1899
No-one misses the poor. Round up some orphans and the world will thank you for it. Disappear a whore and a gentleman applauds you. Cull a beggar and a lady walks safely again.I hate them. I hate them more than any of the others. This privilege, this pretension. These so called leaders, these pillars of society, these rich and fanciful. They wear their filth on the inside, but they are no less dirty.I have plans for them all. We will feed them and then we will feed from them.
October 25th 1899
A different strategy for the poor, who mistrust the offered hand, the plate of steaming offal. For them, we are become the disappearance in the night.More efficient and less visible to picking off stragglers and strays is the removal of entire communities in one swoop. Let the ground open under them and fall to the maw. Last month, by activating the doors at shortly after midnight on a balmy Saturday, fifty-seven individual products were obtained in a single catch.I have instructed the workhouse to begin plans for a street festival before the end of summer, to pack out the narrow lanes with a teeming throng, with hundreds of pairs of feet. We have begun to assemble a network of false streets and have extended the holding pens in preparation. A second pigline will be added to enable the system to cope with the increase in traffic.
October 25th 1899
No machine blades for fatty bishop and gluttony heiress. Prime cuts all for the sorting bins, and the very best, as always, back in the dumbwaiter to the kitchens above, to be stewed and plumped and gravied and breadcrumbed and returned to the table for the next night's feast. And not every night, you see, although we have begun to increase the frequency of the final act. Unlike the poor, the rich will be missed, given time. But we will continue to spoil and ready them, and our fine foods are now exported to mansions and lodges across London. And it has been noted in The Times of late, how rather overweight the great and the good are becoming, with their diets of fine wine and rich meat. Indeed, in Punch just last week, a cartoon showed Viscount Selwyn as a stuffed pig, laid upon a platter for his peers to dine upon. A vicious and cowardly slander, no doubt.But he tasted delicious.
October 27th 1899
Then upstairs, to bed! To bed! To toss and turn on bloated stomachs, to copulate and puke upon chaise-longue, four-poster or dressing table. Collapse at last into the engulfing mattress, drunk and drugged and fat and stupid and senseless. And spring the trap, manpiggies, spring the trap. At a pull of a lever, a set of hydraulic pistons and gears are fired, resulting in three walls of steel bars dropping from the ceiling via the canopy to cage the product into the bed, preventing escape. The entire bed is then tilted backwards into the wall by a powerful spring mechanism, also fed by the hydraulics. The pressure for this system is created as a by-product of the vacuum evisceration system employed for mass production elsewhere on the pig line - in this way, we have created our very own bottled revolution, for the movement of the masses is a causal factor in the extermination of the rich!
October 27th 1899
And waste not, want not, for here the assorted slop and innards are sifted and sorted and enter the world through more channels and means than one could possibly conceive. The product passes by this section of the engine and is driven through the blade, splitting it into two sections ready for the butcher's block. And in the interim, it is kept in our freezer bays under the house, and the heat produced naturally by the refrigeration process feeds into the pipes and crannies of these rooms and is the very reason, my dear friend, that we can sit here in shirts and waistcoats but no jackets, on a freezing winter's night, without a fire in the grate, and discuss our great enterprise. The warmth in our bellies and toes may be attributed directly to those bellies and toes even now passing through steam, fire and blade beneath our feet.
November 23rd 1899
Twin candles, bent to the will of the central saint, casting their light to the corners of the chapel. Father Jeremiah I thought could be trusted with the secret, but he is like all of the others. So the old priest has gone to the holding pens with his flock, he says he will enter into our world with them. A shepherd indeed.
December 1st 1899
There is a spoon of medicine, I says, and it's a silver spoon what you did get born holding, ever so painful for mummy dear but grasped so hard it was in a little screaming red fist. Later you used your spoon to dig a hole in the garden to get all the way to Mexico, and then you did eat worms with your spoon on the way to stay fat.This spoon was the same you gave your twins, then you used it to dig a hole to their clockwork souls and you ate up their hearts like soup on the way to keep you fat.Fat little mole, where will you dig next, I asks, you and your little silver spoon made from the silver spine of your children, and wrapped in the hair of your dearly departed?Dear Sweet Jesus, my darling Lilibeth, what am I become?
December 2nd 1899
Walking away from those temples, that small pile of stones under the rhododendrons. The skulls of innocence under the loose clod. Headless ribcages in the cool stone behind the altars, three thousand miles apart. I trace back my life to this instance, rain channels eroded in ancient stone. The toxins are already in this damp, this falling water.I hack and retch and vomit into the sink and grasp the bowl with both hands and stare. There in the plughole, as clear as day, a toy spine, clockwork and intricate, like a child's spine, but clockwork. How could that be? How could a child's spine be made like clockwork? I washed it carefully and placed it on the mantelpiece, by the egg I laid myself, under the garden where the childrens' skulls are buried. I call it my Mexico.
December 15th 1899
What ungodly temple is this? Beneath the vast boiler, that barnacle bruise, that cacophony, that barely-contained, that swollen heart of hate, what is this stillness, this silence, this palpable air of death I have found.What clean blue water without a ripple or a blemish, whose light engulfs me so? What rods fall into this water, this metal so unlike brass or steel, a milky sheen to the surface, a white clean like cotton wrapped upon a pole. Why this humming, this dizzying sense of vibration, electricity, power? How can this deep water be so clear, these rods descend into the earth so?And all around, above, where I stand, the machine as it ever is, dark metal, joints, stairs and gratings. Yet here we suckle at the very stillborn tit of god himself.
December 20th 1899
I am to have a visitor, the distinguished Professor A. He is come to ascertain my mental wellbeing after my prolonged absence from the club. But I am not stupid. He is here to spy for them. When they stalked The Ripper, he was often called to pontificate upon lacerations and missing organs. And now he comes to me, to doff and wheedle and 'my dear sir' and 'but you must still grieve' and 'perhaps just a quick look at your engines, the triumph of the age'. He knows nothing of loss, nothing of sacrifice.But to refuse? That would simply poke the hornet's nest, invite a swarm of interlopers and thieves. I must entertain this buffoon and submit to his intrusion. Perhaps I should show him the tripery. See whether his stomach, so trained by rummaging in the innards of clumsily vivisected whores, is strong enough to stare into the real engines of his golden age. I may even introduce him to Jack, or his sons at least. We have stronger locks on the windows now, and we bring their toys to them.
23rd December 1899
I stand and look at myself in the mirror, penis in hand and my reflection grins at me and his mouth is full of the sulphur mustards. "Vain fool", he sneers, "Are you really so very different? Do you genuinely believe your works of evil are any greater than the rest of them? You are simply a weak man, a product of his age, the same as any other. This is Empire, cretin, this is the killing idiocy, the natural result of this social Darwinism. If you are evil, then this world is evil. You just let the blood run in the street rather than hiding it in the poorhouse. You hold the blade and slide it home yourself, you do not pay a man to do this for you where you cannot see it. If you are evil, at least yours is an honest evil and that alone makes you Ubermensch". And thus I wash my hands and take to bed.
25th December 1899: If You Should Find This
Then you already know all I would tell you. You already know what you have done, and what you must now do. Walking away from those temples, that small pile of stones beneath the rhododendrons. The skulls of innocence under the loose clod. Headless ribcages, cruelly torn asunder to expose their flowers, in the cool stone, behind the altars, three thousand miles away.I trace my life to this instant, rain channels eroded in ancient stone. The toxins are already in this damp, this falling water.And in that instant, cradling my children's heads in my palms, I knew then I had to unbuild what I myself had constructed, though even then it was little more than a sickening dream. This machine is ever mine, and it falls to me to redeem it, and myself.
27th December 1899
I am halved, I am bisected. I placed my feet in the stirrups of childbirth and I hung upside down and the great blade of history cut me in two like a butchered pig and my guts fell onto my children and smothered them in my love. Each half of me still living, but the guts kept falling onto my children. So we each went our separate ways and one half built a machine instead, to hold his hate in and to keep his heart beating. And the other fell into a sleep, to blunt the pain. And then he had terrible dreams and when he awoke, the other had made ovens and killed and skinned and cooked all of those he held dear. And thus, holding onto his guts, he strode forth to find himself and make himself whole again.
28th December 1899
Memories, they surface like bloated bodies rising to the scum of the Thames. I looked at them, covered in the blood of their dead mother, little piglets squalling in their swaddling and my heart at once was filled with a great love and a consuming hate I could never have imagined. At that point, did my soul split, creating him? Was this the egg of my soul, the moment the great clock began to tick? Is the only path to redemption to join us together again, to make myself whole, to close the great circle and take that madman into my heart once more - and forgive him, and myself as well.
29th December 1899
Can a man construct himself anew? Can a man, on realising who he is, on what he has become, tear himself apart down to the bricks and begin again? Are our souls just this, tiny cogwheels and clockwork, and intricate machines to serve a function that, upon reflection, we might set to a new task? Can a man, defined by his actions, defined by that which he now finds abhorrent, set to sabotaging this body his machine, until those children of his soul turn in new motion, and he may awake to a new sun, a new year, a new century with hope in his heart? As I reach my hands to the exposed wires I ask myself this - is redemption possible for such a creature as I? And if not, then surely better to die amongst my creations than to continue to live as a monster.
EDIT: Spoiler tags for excessively long walls of text...pretty please?
-Kreekakon
(09-11-2013, 11:33 PM)Petch1984 Wrote: My favourite part was seeing all the Pig-men in their cells. It was quite a sad scene (and funny when one slips over trying to run at you). After that the game was less intense for me... I was the real monster haha.
I thought that scene was brilliant, having us sympathize on some level with the monsters.
Hm at that part i finally got, that they arent monsters. Only humans transformed into such an evil form with chemicals or potions...
Do they still have control of their bodies after the subjects get killed?
Or are they completely new and cant remember anything?
I think they remember it after they transformed.
The question that will never be answered: SOMA WHY ARE YOU SO BEAUTIFUL? ;_;
(09-12-2013, 09:42 PM)Kein Wrote: Let's make a timeline, shall we?
...
I can't believe I missed so much of these (about half), maybe it's because I spent quite some time crouching?
very useful, no wonder I felt I was missing quite a lot when I finished the game.
Ok, I haven't really gone over the 21 pages of plot discussion thus far in this thread, so I don't know if this has been discussed yet - WHEN DID THE BLOODY KIDS DIE? Its driving me insane as I've figured out most of the plot on my own thus far.
Here's the issue: if Mandus killed the kids in Mexico around Feb 1899 then who the hell wrote the two diary pages from 3 and 11 October 1899?!! The kids are writing these diary pages as if they're alive and well and that their father and someone named "Cook" and their nanny are well aware of them! And I don't buy the whole "oh it must have been their ghosts". I considered that but it doesn't jive with the diary pages as none of them assigns any form of guilt or blame on their father, and I'm pretty sure the International Association of Etheral Spirits pretty much ruled that thats what ghosts are supposed to do.
If someone has some ideas on this, please let me know.
(09-12-2013, 08:29 PM)Kein Wrote: So in other words we are back to the beginning -- too much holes and contradictions, too much unexplained, too inconsistent. So far all the theories are like that.
Perhaps the game's story is nothing but a result of greatly unreliable narrator combined with the idea of self lying to self - of course, this is presuming the engineer is Mundus' other half, so to speak. A Machine for Pigs and sudden call forward to the Great War in the end by yourself? Clairvoyance anyone?
Finding himself in form of an object which tells him of the future that he will do something great to help the world? Check. Deeply touch after illness and death of one's wife? Check. Hints to the bit two-faced (especially sexual) morality of Victorian\Edwardian era England? Check; after all, few of the notes\loading screen poems would be right at home in 19th century erotica novel, or even arguably at Fanny Hill, and words and written text have their own interesting discrepancies for someone as well-educated as Mundus. The Great War apparently is implied to happen in-universe? Check. Machine for some pig-creatures for the sake of some purpose intending to avert The Great War, or at the very least death of his children alongside twisting his own hatred? Check. In the end puts an end for that, instead murders his own children (or otherwise contributes to the fact) and engages in conversations with himself via weird looking telephones - and otherwise after artificially induced amnesia? Check. Wanders around in conspicuously absently populated London? Check. The other part of self is not exactly agreeing with oneself? Check. Raising obvious question: which one is using or lying to another? Check. Plenty of flirting with the idea of how worthless and ephemeral life is? Check. All ending in something which can be perceived as self-fulfilling cycle? Check.
One of the dozens of guesses I could make up? Mundus simply was unable to come to terms with his own personal loss, and turned into bit of a lunatic.
Admittedly that pointless waste of text has no real foundation aside from speculating for the sake of speculating, so actual contribution the discussion is bit nonexistent. Maybe I should refrain from posting in middle of the night.
(09-12-2013, 10:58 PM)warlordnik Wrote: Ok, I haven't really gone over the 21 pages of plot discussion thus far in this thread, so I don't know if this has been discussed yet - WHEN DID THE BLOODY KIDS DIE? Its driving me insane as I've figured out most of the plot on my own thus far.
We haven't figured it out yet and this is one of the biggest contradictions so far in the game.
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[SPOILER] Plot Discussion Thread *Spoiler Alert*
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