Just as his life had gained a reason, it was robbed away. Electricity was rare if not at a party.

Food was rare if not at a party. Silence was rare as the sound of the party went on day and night. No one could stop them, no one would stand up and stop the party.

Sigmund had gone with his parents from time to time to get food on a party. He left just as fast as he came to the party to be alone in his room, while his parents usually stayed for longer. Alone at home he continued albeit distracted as the bass from the party traversed large distances not dissimilar to how elephants communicate via infrasound over large distances, just that the party was communicating essentially a middle finger.

We know that elephants do not possess middle fingers and thus this is where the metaphor breaks.

Sigmund knew better than to reason with his parents and had made a secret private stack, mainly made up from things he had stolen from parties - he didn't see it as stealing, he was just taking back something his parents spent without his consent.

He would keep his stash save and finish his work, maybe surviving all of this, but he seriously doubted that when he listened to the joyous shouts from afar.

How could they just eat all that food, didn't they know that they would have to eat after all that food was eaten too?

He could picture himself lonely in his room, dancing skeletons starving at the party. He got up in his vision, went to the party and turned the music off when no one was dancing anymore. Finally everything was silent and he was alone. Maybe it was not so bad.

He would then finish his invention and sire the mechanical race that would populate the planet after all of them were gone. What was the bad thing about them eating all the food again? They should hurry up damnit!

Sigmund nodded to himself and smiled briefly. He then returned to his work, only to be irritated again - one could not simply turn of a thought process when it occured, so he let his mind flow.

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His beings would not need food, they would eat electricity and metal... well metal was probably enough and the rest they would figure out on their own. And they would build more of their kind and populate the entire world. And they wouldn't need houses to stay warm, they would just need very long cables so they can stay plugged in.

Maybe add another cable so that they can plug in one, then curl the other one up... that was actually useful for his design.

Until now he had only a semi-functional theory of their mind, and ideas how to put it into mechanical reality, but the general tools to survive would also be important, maybe even more important than the ability to write.

They would need fingers that fit into an inlet and that could remove themselves easily from that inlet - easy, just put a downscaled arm on it to push out.

Now how would the information travel from its thinking apparatus to the arm?

Probably a second wire that would transmit it. Necessarily the ingoing electricity of a plugged in cable would trigger the arm of the other plug to deplug, which then had to be stopped from constantly attempting to deplug - electricity had to be saved.

The clockwork system would need two clocks that would only align once per plugging in.

Sigmund began to design the dual-plug system, a very interesting system taht would only fail because of the inaccuracy of clocks and because tiny moving parts tended to just fail.

Not that it was impossible to make this a reality, but right now with manufacturing basically standing still, it was not practically doable. Sigmund tackled further problems like wire de-tangling mechanisms and the integration of the category survival into his mind framework, laudable and highly creative and motivated - but ultimately just a burning clockwork dream.