Aetheric Elements: The Rise of a Steampunk Reality
Page 47
The architecture stared down. No, it glared at me during those dark years. It was a constant rain. When it wasn’t the rain it was a dark, oppressive gloom and haze from smoke and fire. Everything was gray and life seeped from it. Stone and aged wood loomed over everything and men were lost in the labyrinth of muddy alleys and cobblestone streets.
I recall how the people in the lanes always had their shoulders bent, walking the boulevards in a hurry, while at the same time shuffling in a monotonous and broken manner. It is an odd gait once you recognize it. Even the rich and powerful showed this. Though ramrod straight they still moved with a certain pace that showed their heavy burden rather than a free person. Even aristocrats were constrained by the societal prison of their own design and construct. The clothes were stark and colors were not welcome. The few that insisted on wearing bright and garish clothing were foreigners and outcasts.
I became the monster I am during this time. I was the class in between the two other classes. I traveled, but not in luxury. I worked, but did not toil. I had a chance of earning a fortune and could choose to live on the fringes of either society, but was not accepted as part of either. I was a man of numbers and figures, money and innovation, and I led the industrial revolution and helped bring the world into the modern age. My plans started as shipwrights, and then moved into steel and rails. Trains and steamships were to be the legacy of my children if I had time for the urge for such things. I never made time for that though. It would have meant dividing my attentions and falling to the predators that lurked. These beasts in the form of men were waiting for me to look away long enough for them to steal what I had built. I would guess this is why I fell so naturally into the dark world that embraced me one night, and made me into a cold, unfeeling creature.
You went through your infancy, childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood… but it doesn’t end there. Everything has these phases, even countries, concepts, and eras in time. But we have phases in our adult lives also. People do not see these as clearly. Rarely does anything creative survive to full maturity before it is over taken by something younger and more aggressive, because with maturity comes either fear or complacency. I have beaten that certainty though. I have entered phases beyond adult, into an eternal state. I have renewal without losing what I was before. I have creativity through longevity, rather than being remade every decade of my life, like others.
As I grew in my new role and abilities, I no longer merely fed on the sweat of others, but on their very blood and more importantly, their souls. I became the ultimate predator. People trusted me from naiveté or greed. Either way it allowed me to feed from their weakness and grow in my own strength. I had the time and resources to plan further into the future than any person or government would dream. I robbed whole regions of their sons so they may do my work. I bought barren fields and found oil. I tore the very earth asunder for its precious offerings. I planned and succeeded in giving people dreams, dreams that I would steal away at the last moment, taking them for my own uses. I crushed hundreds of others that would threaten my plans, and trampled thousands underfoot without even noticing they were more than the dirt upon which I walked.
I took on protégés and students, even brought them into my personal fold and gave them every gift and advantage I could. One by one, or sometimes in pairs or groups, they would turn away from what I offered for a fleeting personal interaction. It did not surprise me so much as disappoint me. It did allow me to take back what was mine, which was everything they had worked for and created. I left them crumpled in the gutter, drained and alone.
If you recognize how people become bitter and jaded as time goes on, how our elderly are bent and twisted not from age but from experience, then you can imagine how one that does not age can change over a century and a half. I am now ready to change again. In my years I had the wisdom to save, plan, and set very specific designs into motion. I control the news and who receives what information. I control the transportation and who can go where. I even control the little scavenging insects of mankind that are still bent from toil. I control all these by money, power, and distraction. I keep the masses from forming a mob and gathering pitchforks and torches by making them feel safe at home, and threatened outside their own door. I have even taken the meaning out of their daily tasks. Most work had no redeeming or fulfilling qualities.
I now want to bring back the age of looming and glaring architecture, but with my modern twist. Look at the glass and see the smudges. The grey towers reaching for the dirty skies, incomprehensible art that children cannot even see shapes within, and adults ignore as they rush in their broken shuffle to their daily drudge. The large cities begin to cloud over with poisons on the ground and in the air, just as they did a hundreds of years ago. I no longer need the church to control these people; I now have mass media, and consumerism as their God.
It is not big business you should fear, it is my private business. For I shall consume all in my hunger and thirst for power. No hope means no resistance. I rule from the shadows, and I cannot be challenged when I cannot be seen.
The Unchronicled Peril: A Trio of Travelers Tale