3105-06-09

The sour forced air in the barracks rattles the walls like an angered beast, masking the quiet looming of the propellers. The constant sound is an ocean, thick enough to drown a man, deep enough to seep through your senses. The boys and girls in the barracks cry out when the walls come down to show them the arcing flashes of blood-red lightning that crash through the clouds as we pass through a storm, shrieking for salvation—though they know we are all safe here. The absent walls are windows, paneless portals to the dwindling forest of metal trees.

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I found him in that forest, the little clockwork bird who cannot sing, only hiss with the whisper of twirling gears and springs in perpetual motion. Perhaps the propellers might run as he does, kept mobile by pendulums that catch and recycle their own weight. Yet even he cannot run unmaintained, even the ever-spinning cogs must be oiled.

Someone must travel in the subterranean, maybe once a year, a decade, a month or even a millennium. I often stop to wonder, though in truth I dare not…