God's Machine

Somewhere below the bustling streets of Zephyrus is a cavernous chamber filled with grinding gears and turning cogs great and small. Flywheels, spiral bevels, racks and pinions, double helical, miter and worm gears. Internal gears and spur gears! Made of wood or metal. Some moving fast and others moving slow. There are pistons, too, and tesla coils which periodically discharge electricity. All throughout there are networks of walkways and gantries, stairs and ladders. Gas lamps and primitive light bulbs barely illuminate the many passages to and from. In places there are levers and fuses, buttons and switches. Bells, chimes, et cetera. Et cetera. The chamber is twenty stories at least and several miles in length and width. There are a number of smaller rooms filled with more contraptions presumably linked with everything else.

But what does it all do? What does it mean? What is God's Machine for?

No one knows. It was discovered more than thirty years ago and in that time barely anything about it is understood. Part of the problem is location and difficulty in reaching it. It is deep underground and reached through a maze of passages, some of which containing a variety of booby traps. The other problem is the size and complexity of God's Machine. Any examinations have to be extremely careful lest they break it or be crushed by one of the massive cogs. While the whole of it is ill understood, some features have been identified. One portion of the great machine has been noted to forge swords. Another has been seen to create large glass lenses. And yet another seems to be a large and uniquely precise calculator of some kind. One of the more recent discoveries in a side chamber is a massive and extremely complex orrery. Still, there is a lot more unknown than known and new discovers are infrequent.

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License