I lied. He’s not in Cydia just yet, but will probably be there by the middle of tomorrow’s writing. Christ, this is turning out to be longer than I anticipated! I’ll have to work overtime to finish it during November – Ford’s monologue isn’t even complete in today’s writing.

Word Count: 60,105

Graham picked himself up, albeit slowly, and made his way, gun in hand, over to Jessica. “Stop crying, there was nothing you could have done. Saving me was something completely different than saving Joseph. I was accessible.” Graham looked up at the Wheat robot, which was now almost completely prepared. Soon enough the robotic arms backed away, leaving a shimmering brass structure, large enough to fill the entire orifice, where Joseph Wheat once stood. Graham turned away, not wanting to see such a horrid sight – but it would soon be forced upon him. More robot arms picked up the metallic remnants of Wheat and began lowering them to the ground, and during this slow process neither of the two humans left in the room could move.

Finally, the Wheat robot clunked down, making slight indents onto the metal floor. It stood still, and all at once activated – a Carnot Engine where Wheat’s heart used to be was now pumping steam throughout the robot’s system.

It hardly looked human; there was no flesh, only pipes and gears, but there was one major difference between the Wheat robot and the clockwork robot 0x18015DANIL that had saved Graham: The Wheat robot still had several vital organs. Somehow, president Ford and his malicious engineers had found a way to create a half-android; Wheat’s brain was still intact, but it was integrated into the robot being.

It moved.

It flexed its arms. Tested its legs to ensure everything was functioning properly. The generic, preprogrammed tests confirmed correct functionality.

It spoke through steam pipes and a slit mouth. With every word, more steam bellowed forth from the ungodly orifice. “Hello. I am your friend.”

Graham thought he might faint as did Ames, but both restrained themselves from running away from the Wheatbot. Instead, Graham worked up the courage to speak to the robot. Graham moved closer and touched the warm brass that made up Wheat’s new body.

“I’d like to be your friend, too,” he said.

Suddenly an abundance of gears turned, pulling leftover muscles and tendons that had been taken from Wheat’s body, and the metallic face of the Wheatbot contorted to show happiness. “I’m not gone,” said the Wheatbot. “But it hurts. Find Ford. Make him pay.” The entire structure shook as the steam jettisoned from the Wheatbot’s mouth, and it was clear to Graham and Ames that Wheat was still inside the robot, alive and well, his memories intact. And yet the robot controlled him; Wheat’s mind had little to do with the actions the robot actually took. Those actions were predetermined by advanced programming within the robotic architecture – clearly primitive versions of this architecture were present in 0x18015DANIL, but the Wheatbot contained bits of the advanced technology from the taser-like devices and the robotic arms in the room.

As a result, the Wheatbot looked strikingly less complex and more modern than 0x18015DANIL. And it was just such a robot that was now walking over to take a look at his newest companion. Unlike DANIL, Wheat’s structure was fundamentally more limber and quick, although both robots were about the same size. It was only when both robots were together that Graham noticed the label on Wheat’s structure – 15x829172JOSEPH. Graham turned to the DANIL robot, looking up into its artificial face solemnly.

“They did this to you, too, didn’t they?”

DANIL nodded, his metal joints creaking; the gears inside his body were becoming weaker, unstable with the passage of time. A corpus clock on the wall was currently the only audible noise in the room besides Graham’s voice, and Ames’s bewildered weeping. Ames was focused on Graham, too afraid to speak to the Wheatbot or to the DANIL robot. Even though she had spent an afternoon with the DANIL robot, she never considered that it had been made from a live human being – she was in such disbelief that she very nearly ran away in attempt to deny the entire event, but knew this would solve nothing.
“Can you speak? Can you tell me what your name was? Can you tell me anything about your former self?”

The DANIL robot shook its head no, and then began to bend down. It took one of its hands to the metal floor and began engraving letters, for it seemed writing was the most it could do beyond move its body and fire bullets. In the floor it wrote: “DANIL OTHRET”.

Graham had heard that name before. He knew it from somewhere – it seemed familiar, for he knew that he only knew one Othret in the world, but it was not from the world of Talos. This fueled Graham’s next question: “Are you from Talos?”

Danil Othret shook his head in denial, and Graham remembered where he’d heard the name Othret before – his old boss, Lars Othret; As he recalled, Lars Othret’s only son, in his early twenties, had gone missing several years ago, causing Lars an incredible amount of distress. It was Graham who had consoled the man at regular intervals, which is why Graham was so surprised that Lars would fire him – but this was no time to rekindle old agonies. Graham had found Lars Othret’s lost son!

“Danil… Danil Othret… I knew your father. I worked for him. When you went missing several summers ago, this was where you went? I don’t even want to know the how, or the why, but I know that others from Earth might be here as well. I’m trying to get home, back to Earth. Did anyone come here with you and still has their body intact?”

Danil began engraving another series of letters into the metal floor: “STEVE – CHILD – CAMPER – BOILED”. Danil could recall the events vaguely in his torn-up mind – the child being brought to the refueling, his confusion, his maddening and futile attempt to stop the knights who had melted the child down and hailed him as “the devil incarnate”. But without tear ducts, without half of his emotions, Danil could feel nothing for the child. Everything was a string of words to him without meaning. Graham knew Danil’s father? This meant nothing to a robot; it meant nothing to Danil’s model.

Wheat tried to capture their attention again by speaking. “Go find Ford,” he said. Danil looked at Ames and Graham and nodded in agreement with Wheat. “Now!” Wheat said, Graham took Ames by the arm and dragged her away from Wheat, whom she’d just began to touch and confirm the existence of, still in disbelief. The gigantic robots, which from all the way across the room lacked any semblance of humanity, shrunk into the distance as Graham and Ames made their way for the exit. And just like that they were gone, lost behind the doors of the robot creation chamber.

“We can’t just leave them in there!” Ames shouted to Graham, angry with him for dragging her out of the room so suddenly. The two were now standing in a red hallway lit similarly to the boiler room; this was clearly a back hallway inaccessible through normal means. The floor was a metal grill, and beneath the metal mesh was dirty concrete. The walls, too, were concrete.

“We don’t have a choice. Ford is up there somewhere, probably hiding away until we leave, and if we don’t do something about him he could do this to more people. I want to get out of Talos and go back to my own world as much as the next guy, but this man has already destroyed two people too many, and one of them from my own world! Not only does this prove I’m not insane, but it proves that there is something seriously wrong with Lanford and its government. And if Ford thinks we’re just going to leave and let him get away with what he’s done scot-free, he should have another thing coming to him, don’t you think?”

“I agree with you, but it’s not fair to either of them. They’re still human… Joseph is still inside that thing. I can’t just leave him alone, James! It’s partially my fault that he’s like that now.”

“It’s none of your fault. Frankly, I can’t believe you came to rescue either of us.”

“Someone sent up a signal flare from inside the White District and I got word of it. It’s big news right now, and nearly the entire Railroad gathered together to infiltrate the district. Yes, just to rescue Station A! Every station is as important as every other station, and so we all worked to break in. At one point I met with that robot, who, when he realized what I was doing, followed me and began helping me dispatch the knights. But listen, if we’re going to leave the two of them in that room, we have to get everyone else first and then go for Ford, not the other way around.”

Graham looked at the floor and swayed. “Ames…”

“What?” she said, noticing the despair in his face.

“The rest of Station A… is…”

“That can’t be. That’s impossible! They sent the flare! Somebody had to send the flare!”

“It was probably Alex, when the rest of us were still in shock that we were in the Whiter District. We were attempting to break out, but got caught. That’s probably when the signal flare was sent. Wheat and I were detained, but everyone else, they weren’t as fortunate,” Graham told her in a heavy voice. He then continued, not wanting to aggravate Ames’s emotions further, “You could argue that Joseph and I have it worse. Everyone else got to move on, got to stop experiencing this torture, but Joseph and I lived! They forced us to watch as they tossed all of our friends into a gigantic cauldron to be cooked to death!”

Graham realized he was making Ames hysterical. “Stop it!” she said at once, and began running down the hall.

“Where are you going?”

“To find President Ford! Hurry, now!”

The two began sprinting down the hall, knowing that there would eventually be an elevator to take them back up to one of the main floors, or eventually the spiral of prison cells. They did not intend to avoid knights, but rather rush through them, killing all in their path in an attempt to make their way to the boiler room. Ames had never seen this room, and Graham did not want it to come as a shock to her the truth about the power plant, and so he never told her why the Station A residents had been melted down, nor did he mention the ritual of the refueling to her at any point.

Through the convoluted network of elevators they made their way to the spiral of prison cells. Several knights did get in their way, but with the combination of bullets, ingenuity and the stolen taser device, they were no matches for the duo – at least, not one at a time; they never ganged up in groups to the relief of Graham and Ames. After much turmoil they reached the boiler room. The elevators along the way were all completely empty, as if every elevator boy had simply evaporated. This scared Graham, who had begun to tolerate and even appreciate the elevator boy who he had seen and not seen throughout his journey in Talos.

However, the boiler room was empty – not a human being in sight. Not bothering to introduce Ames to the bubbling cauldron of lava at the other end of the room, he began searching every corner and crevice for President Ford, who he was sure would be somewhere around here. Then he remembered: the elevator wall went to the hidden observation chamber, not to the boiler room, and he began looking for signs of the observation chamber in the room. It was, however, impossible to see from within the boiler chamber, which was much too dark and much too red to spot anything near the ceiling, which was where the observation chamber was located.

Their only option was to find the path up to the chamber, which Graham supposed was hidden somewhere in the room. Together he and Ames shut all the doors to the boiler room and began searching for hidden passages that would lead up to the observation chamber, and after several critical minutes of searching a pathway behind the cauldron was revealed by switching a lever on one of the large steam processors. These steam processors, located adjacent to the boiling lava cauldron, trapped and cleaned the steam; they were massive box structures reminiscent of the oldest computers on Earth that filled entire rooms. The refrigerator-sized steam processors had dials, meters and levels all over them, and Graham and Ames switched every one of them until at last a door revealed itself in the brick wall, just like the passageway Alex had once revealed to Graham.

Through the passageway they crawled, which eventually became wider and wider and better lit. Several Lamp Spheres adorned the walls of this new passageway leading up to the door that Graham easily recognized due to its pristine cleanliness and white color as the entrance to the observation chamber. President Ford clearly did not think that anybody would find his hidden passage to the observation chamber, and pompously had left the door unlocked.

Ford was within, working at a complex control panel that had popped out of the wall on the far end of the small room. Above the control panel was a corpus clock, slowly clicking, slowly consuming time., emphasizing with each passing second how little time Graham and Ames had to stop this deadly man from continuing his tradition of death. Hearing their entrance, Ford turned around.

“Come to get me, eh?” he said, turning away from his control panel for just a moment, sounding incredibly nervous. “Well, I suppose I can’t fight you.”

“No, you can’t,” Graham said. “People from Talos are weak, like you said. So either cease all operations, or my friend and I can dispose of you right here.”

“I can’t do either of those, I’m afraid! This is something much grander than you or me, Mr. Graham. It involves the entire world – nay, both our worlds! Allow me to explain.” Ames was already pointing her gun at the man, but Graham became vulnerable at the mention of Earth, and told Ames to back off for a moment while he asked Ford how his operations involved his world. With an expression of grief, President Ford said, “Lanford has always been this way; the country, not the city. Steam and coal have always been our only methods of generating power, and you must know these are terribly limited resources, and their technology can only go so far before you must find a new technology.

“I do not want that new technology,” he continued, as Ames clutched her steam gun at her side, preparing to shoot and kill President Ford at any given moment. “All of the world leaders, in every country on every continent, have collectively agreed that it is best if we continue our progress with steam. We know there are alternatives, as did our predecessors, yet the world of Talos remains adamant about its heritage. Our society was founded on steam; the day that those great men came to Lanford and began a new society of their very own, from the ground up, was a defining moment in our history. What they do not tell you in the history books, however, is how steam technology came about and developed.

“To everyone, steam has always been. There have been recent advancements, yes, but our overall goal in commanding this world has been to ensure that technology remains relatively the same century after century. No generation shall be more fortunate than the last. This was the system we prided ourselves on; we kept it safe from the residents of the countries around the world. The agenda was ours and nobody else needed to know what we were doing by hiding the evils of alternative fuels.”

By now Graham and Ames were intently listening to the man’s speech, Ames especially so, for she was a resident of Talos and was utterly astounded by how much had been kept from her. Even in the Underground Railroad there were so many things she never knew about her own planet, about the government they were supposedly fighting, about why things were as they were. She wanted to know more, but kept a steady hold on her steam gun the entire time.

“Yet, somewhere along the line,” Ford continued, “our logic was flawed, and the seeds of civil unrest had already been deep inlaid into our people. They had begun to catch on to our plot; we denied inventors the right to patent their work, and we confiscated all new materials developed by eager scientists. This level of control now makes citizens uneasy, but we continue our agenda and keep the people using steam and steam alone – that is this world. But only for now.

“The founding minds of these lands had a plan for its development, and that was that it should remain as it was founded. If we, therefore, cannot change the way it works now, we must refound the land. And it is your world, Mr. Graham, which is enabling us to do so. Through means beyond our comprehension, your world has always loomed in the midst of Talos, and since our founding fathers came to Lanford we have borrowed from technology received from your world to advance our own steam-driven versions. It was from technologies like these that we invented the Lamp Sphere, in top-secret, and released it to the world under the name of a fictional scientist. This was, of course before I was even before – my grandfather, bless his soul, was the man who pioneered this effort. Ah, but please here the rest of my tale, for I am not nearly done!

“With more of your technology, Mr. Graham, we began researching inter-dimensional travel, and within the last decade have made several breakthroughs significant enough to convince us humble world leaders that Talos could indeed be saved from its civil unrest and instability. By opening a rift into this strange, outer dimension, we could seek to control the space and build a new Talos there, as we saw it fit; a Talos that would not be strewn with the seeds of instability and unrest, but the triumphant song of a utopian paradise.

“With technology from your world, Mr. Graham, this is becoming possible, and not a moment too soon. We cannot maintain the current lifestyle in Lanford forever, or anywhere in the world for that matter. It is all falling apart at the seams.”

Graham interrupted. “You—are you telling me this is what these prisons are for?”

“We’re out of coal and raw materials for steam, I’m afraid. And once we build the new world, it won’t matter anyway – we will make new people, people accustomed to technology of our choosing, and together we will live in peace in New Talos.” Ford stood, incredibly proud of his vision, not noticing any of the multiple flaws in his plan, and by proxy the plans of all the world leaders of Talos who had collectively come to the agreement to use borrowed technology to destroy their own world and rebuild it from the ground up.

Ames was disgusted. “You’re sick,” she said. “I won’t let you get away with this. You can’t destroy Talos! It’s the home of billions of people – you would simply throw those lives away to create your own twisted vision of a perfect society?” She raised her gun just slightly higher, waiting for Ford’s response, waiting for the end of his story so that she could shoot him and be done with it. She listened to the man only for Graham’s sake, only because Graham had begged her to wait until Ford was finished. She had too much respect, she thought, for a man she knew too little about.

Then again, perhaps that was how Graham felt about Ford during those tense moments.