[story] the right-hand rule
author: chris (aefallen)
email: edgeofdawn [at] gmail.com
artist: susie oh (susieoh)
email: susie000 [at] gmail.com
At the turn of the century, a man from Lancashire invented what he called the right-hand rule, a principle for determining the result of a meeting of two forces so simple that you could remember it with nothing but your right hand.
At one of the Lancashire physicist's lectures was a young man who would later start one of the greatest industrial empires in the land. And this young man saw in the right-hand rule possibilities which even its own creator had not envisioned.
But this story is not about him.
It is about the world he left behind.
He grows up among wires and grease and steel, the steady tick of clockwork as familiar to him as the beat of his own heart. His fingers learn the right way to grasp a crescent wrench before they learn how to hold a pencil, and he learns how to tighten a bolt before he learns to write his own name. Unsurprising, that, seeing as how his name is the inordinately long and multi-jointed Landon Lloyd Spanner Ordinary. He falls asleep to the hum of the machinery, the constant rhythm against which his days are measured.
When he is five, he builds his first set of interlocking gears, all by himself. The teeth of the largest gear are longer than the span of his hand, and the entire set-up takes him all of the morning and close to all of the afternoon, eternity to the mind of a five-year-old boy up to his elbows in grease and dirt on the floor of Spanner Industries, the biggest workshop of the day, in all the land.
That's also when he learns that it's worth it for something that works.
When he is nine, he realises that while there is very little he can't figure out if he is allowed to take it apart and study it, he learns much faster if he is taught, and that the right answers come faster to those who ask the right questions.
When he is seventeen, he solves the mechanical problem that's been puzzling the minds of Spanner Industries' best and brightest, and single-handledly restores what was thought to be its greatest commercial failure. He has the world at his feet, and he knows it.
Today, he is twenty-seven, and he has nothing left to lose.
Landon rises with the sun as it climbs over the rooftops of London, reaching through the slanting chimneys and falling across the wasteland of the world aboveground, a city as empty of spirit as it is of life. The dusty ghosts of memory settle amongst the ruined buildings and shadowed back alleys. Silence echoes through the deserted thoroughfares, for there is very little that now awakes in the city of London.
Strange to think that less than a year had passed since the beginning of that strange and terrible era in which the very creations that Man had built for the ease of his existence turned against him. Less than a year since the day the first rogue invention had risen from the ranks and begun the steady war of attrition against its creators. The onslaught had begun slowly, at first: reports of malfunctioning machinery had been sporadic, in factories few enough to name. Then as the weeks passed, the incidents increased. What had once seemed to be chance occurrences were now disturbingly commonplace. Workmen were unable to contain the disruptions, or the damage.
Within months, the world Man had created was at war with him. Machinery of every make and manufacture rebelled with a mind of its own. Processing plants turned into deathtraps, and the massive factory cities into killing grounds. Even the most innocuous inventions turned treacherous. Those who could escape fled into the countryside, as far as they could go. Resistance was the last thing on anyone's minds, as mankind found itself crippled by the loss of railroads, communications, transport, and just about everything it had ever invented.
If anyone needed to see the application of the right-hand rule written in chaos and the wreckage of a once-beautiful country, this was it. Absolute carnage resulting from unstoppable destruction meeting a world caught unawares.
Landon looks down on the quiet world beneath him. At times like this, he feels like the only person left alive on earth. He knows it isn't true, though, and it's the reason he's still here.
Recently, he'd located a colony, living in the disused tunnels underneath Piccadilly Circus. The epicenter of London, he remembers his father telling him, on a trip into the town centre. He couldn't tell how big the colony was, but he'd watched the regular patrols, four during the daytime, and three at night; as well as the less-frequent food runs. He'd watched one end in carnage no less than a week ago, as the unwary team ran into not one, but three sleeping giants in the wreckage of Thane Court. Intervention would have meant annihilation, and so he'd refrained, watching instead for a chance to assist, if he could. The team realised it was up against more than it could handle and retreated as fast as it could, losing two of its six members to the machines.
If he was honest with himself, there was more than one reason why he was wary of introducing himself directly to the community. Above and beyond the fact that those like him, who had done so much to advance the reach of the machines, simply weren't welcome in the new world - there was one other possibility that bothered him.
He'd grown up as the son of the man who'd started up Spanner Industries, and he'd happened to be at an industrial conference at Bournemouth when the real trouble started in London. The widespread disruptions cut off all communication and transport into and out of London, and by the time he'd figured out what was going on, the only way into the heart of London he called home took him two weeks traveling by inland canals, three days by horse-and-cart that happened to be going in the right direction, and three weeks on foot. The journey was made all the more harrowing by the wake of destruction the machines had left in their wake, and by the fact that the closer he got to London, the closer he got to the heart of the entire problem. He'd spend hours at a time hiding out from the nearest hostile activity, wasting days on watching and waiting.
By the time he reached Spanner Industries, it was a smoking wreck, and confirmation of the rumours he'd heard that it was one of the first places to go in a major way. There had been talk that the entire factory had gone up in a spectacular explosion that destroyed nearly all the machines within it. Good thing, he'd been told, by people who had no idea who he was.
That, and the heartbreaking discovery of his father's death, was not the true problem.
The true problem was that he'd also heard that the person he should be thanking for engineering the elimination of both the head of Spanner Industries and most of the factory was none other than his father's second-in-command, Lloyd St. Clair.
Lloyd St. Clair had been the result of his father's unorthodox (and rather literal) interpretation of the right-hand rule. Having seen far too many rising enterprises run out of steam once their main man was out of the picture, his father had been of the opinion that an industrial behemoth the size of Spanner Industries needed more than a single driving force to keep it going. It would also need a steward to keep it on course, to ensure that all was right within the company, someone unafraid to point out what he felt was wrong.
Lloyd St. Clair was half-Welsh, half-Irish, and more than half trouble. It was soon apparent that he'd been an inspired choice, if not an orthodox one.
The rumors alone wouldn't have troubled him if he hadn't known that Lloyd St. Clair wasn't someone who'd wait until something was broken to get it fixed.
As the sun rises in the world above, another world is coming to consciousness deep underground.
Under the streets and pipes, underneath the wreckage of the world that was, Lloyd St. Clair is trying to decide what to do with the newest additions to the colony at Regent Street.
The dawn scouts had found these two on the patrol at first light, huddled under one of the archways ringing Piccadilly Circus. They were very young, half-starved, and entirely incomprehensible. Neither of them spoke English, and after a verbal altercation in which neither party actually understood what was being yelled, their finders discovered that both the young strangers did not appear to be speaking the same language. Not knowing what to do with either of them, the scouts had hauled them up (with a great deal of struggling and vicious incomprehensible curses from the older one) and taken them to the one person in the colony who dealt with incomprehensible things.
St. Clair takes a look at the both of them and realises that it has been far too long since anyone has found surviving children. He does a quick calculation and is startled to recall that the Machination had begun nearly a year ago. He can't imagine how the children must have survived if they hadn't had help of some sort.
They're tiny, to his eyes. They're both dark-haired and dark-eyed, though that's where the resemblance ends. One doesn't look to be more than five or so; and the other looks as if he can't be more than ten. Starvation will do that, though. And spending a year running from the rogue machines, with food as hard to come by as it is: it's a small wonder the children are even alive.
As different as they are, they remind him of another child, one who wasn't his own, but dogged his steps as determinedly as if it had been, and one whose fate he still does not know, today. He wonders where that child is now. Even though enough time has passed to make that child a child no longer, children always remain children to those who have had to care for them.
St. Clair shakes his head and makes another swift calculation. With food stores the way they are now, the presence of two additional appetites, however small, will likely reduce the length of time the stores will last by some fourteen days. This means he'll need to send another patrol out on a scavenger hunt sometime soon, in the next week at the very most.
It's not something he's looking forward to. The last food-scouting party made it as far as to Marchamp Street, and then they ran into a nest of trouble. Several seventh-generation machines appeared to have been lying in wait, and they'd lost Chassis and Bell.
He looks at the children again, and knows that whatever the food situation, he wouldn't have had the heart to leave them out there, aboveground.
And then he wonders, belatedly, where he will find clothes small enough for the both of them.
Where, he wonders, Will I find clothes that fit?
And as he articulates the thought, from somewhere inside him that he thought had been buried underneath all the dust and rubble, under the rust and ruin, a bubble of laughter bursts forth, as he thinks that wherever he is right now, the man responsible for putting him in this position surely must be having the laugh of his life.
Lloyd St. Clair didn't set out in life intending to be anybody's foreman or second-in-command, least of all to the man running the biggest industrial empire this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Truth be told, he didn't set out in life intending to be much of anything. Being half-Irish, half-Welsh, and all trouble, he'd started out on what he hadn't intended to be a long and fascinating career working for a small-time outfit that manufactured cigarettes. It's also how he takes up smoking when he's sixteen, because it's a way to pass the time and doesn't cost him a penny, because the cigarettes that don't make the cut don't get sold and are handed over to the workers. It becomes a habit he doesn't think to break until he realises he can't, by which time he's of the opinion that the world around him is going to hell in a handbasket and there's no reason to bother.
That's right around the time that the first machine that changes his life enters his world, and it does this by replacing him. It's a steel-and-steam-driven tin-can of a thing that hisses and needs a hell of a lot of coal to keep it going, but it makes easily three times the current daily output and it only needs five men to keep it running.
That means he's among the eighteen workers that his erstwhile employer un-employs.
He'd have raised hell if it wasn't happening everywhere else. Machines are putting what seems to be everyone out of work. No one seems to know what to do about it, so Lloyd St. Clair decides to figure it out.
Not being particularly unintelligent (merely disinclined to put much effort into thinking if it wasn't called for), he lights on the idea of going straight to the source. He asks around and does his share of finding-out, and discovers that more than half the machines responsible are the work of a company named Spanner Industries. It's a small step from that to realising that he'd better get himself to Spanner Industries if he wants to do anything about it, so he gets talking to the ones he figures will be most receptive: the very people who've been rendered obsolete by these machines.
He finds more support than he'd hoped for, and for the first time in his life, Lloyd St. Clair discovers a purpose. He's assembled roughly about a hundred people, all told, from the closest towns alone, and he figures he can do even better if he searches farther afield. It's right about then that he hears of the furore in London, and picks up a newspaper for the first time in his life. He was never a particularly motivated student, but he reads just fine, and learns that several thousand people were left unemployed by Spanner machines in London and its outlying districts alone. It's a short step from there to deciding that he needs to make it to London as soon as he can.
On the way there, he learns that the head of Spanner Industries is an impossibly young twenty-six-year old by the equally impossible name of Spanner Ordinary, and that Spanner Industries trades chiefly from London itself. It's a brilliant way to accomplish all his goals, and on the month-long journey to London, he thinks that Sebastian Spanner Ordinary is going to get the shock of his life when they meet.
As it turns out, Lloyd St. Clair ends up being the one caught by surprise.
A lanky, nondescript young man with pale cornsilk hair and eyes as gray as the English rain collides into him as he's coming into the outskirts of London, apologises fervently, and somehow works the chance encounter into tea with a family he just happens to know up the street.
He insists that St. Clair call him Sebastian, and that St. Clair come along, because he's new to the town, and St. Clair certainly has come a long way, and surely he won't mind coming by for tea - it's no trouble at all, they'd be delighted to have him there.
St. Clair has never really had family he's cared to call his own, so his is not so much surprise as barely-concealed shock that a complete stranger would be so ready to make him feel at home.
By the time St. Clair realises that Spanner Ordinary's first name is Sebastian, and that he's been inveigled into the home of the very man he's come all the way to London to thwart, he's so taken aback by the man's audacity that he almost admires him already.
By then, it's long after nightfall, after tea has magically segued into dinner, which seemed to flow equally naturally into an introduction to Sebastian's wife and very young son, as well as an offer to come take a look at Spanner Industries, because, as Sebastian Spanner said with all sincerity, We need men like you there.
St. Clair doesn't realise it yet, but it's the first, and certainly not the last time, that he'll fall for the Spanner Maneuver.
He turns up at the gates of Spanner Industries the next day. Sebastian Spanner is waiting at the door to the factory, and he smiles as if he's been waiting all his life for this. "I was hoping you'd come by," he says, and tells St. Clair that there'll be a place for everyone who cares to come here.
Days later, St. Clair will wonder if it wasn't all perfectly orchestrated, all of it, and years later, he will come to realise that indeed, it was.
He comes out of his thoughts to realise that, in his moment of inattention, the recent additions to the colony have somehow managed to misplace themselves.
Home, for Landon, is an abandoned hotel overlooking Leicester Square, close enough to the colony he's keeping an eye on, and far enough that he isn't immediately noticeable. The patrols pass this way twice during the day, but they're fairly regular, and it's easy to avoid their scrutiny.
It's been six weeks since he's found them, and he still doesn't have the answers he wants. He is starting to realise that direct engagement may be the only solution, but it's not one he wants to take up just yet.
And then the choice is taken out of his hands.
He looks down on the Square below, silent in the sunlight. The seasons are caught between summer and spring, the earth still sending out shoots and unfurling leaves, even if no man marks the passage of the days any more.
And then he notices two tiny figures crossing the sunlit Square. A closer examination reveals them to be children, the first he's seen in nearly a year. They're watchful despite their youth, keeping an eye out for the shadows and archways in which danger loves to lurk. They shouldn't be out here alone, he thinks, and no sooner has he finished that thought than the darkness in the alley between the old cinemas explodes outwards towards the children. The size of the disruption indicates that this is going to be a problem of some magnitude, and he is on his feet and racing towards the ground before the dust clears.
Children (one child in particular, really) have taught Lloyd St. Clair an important lesson in life, and that is there are even greater complications in life than the inner workings of machines. Put a machine down in a corner, and come back an hour, a day, a week or a month later - barring anyone who doesn't know what's good for them and takes things away from where they're supposed to be - you'll find it still there, right where you left it, exactly where you want it.
Put a child down in a corner, and it'll misplace itself the second you look away. Take a step away and you'll find it halfway across the room and out of the door.
And children have an unerring instinct for being drawn to trouble like a magnet.
St. Clair simply can't comprehend it. Children have minds, after all, and as living things, should have some sense of self-preservation, shouldn't they?
He should know better by now, he thinks, as he marshals those around him for the hunt. The children can't have gone far, he thinks, as he directs one patrol towards Westminster, another towards Leicester Square, and a third towards Trafalgar.
Their disappearance now is all the more worrying for the fact that yesterday, the scouts reported a massive and inexplicable surge in the number of machines headed this way. St. Clair suspects that they may have been alerted to the colony's existence, and he knows all too well that the machines have learnt to conceal themselves in the rubble of London and wait their turn to attack.
He also knows that children as young as the ones who have slipped out of sight aren't usually wise enough to know that.
As he ascends the sloping tunnels towards the surface - he's closer to fifty now than he's ever been, and his body knows it - he can't help but recall the child who made him feel responsible for all lost children thereafter.
Some twenty-seven years ago, close to dawn on a warm summer night, Sebastian Spanner walked into his workshop and unceremoniously deposited a tiny bundle of the smallest living thing Lloyd St. Clair has ever set eyes on in his arms. While the young industrialist was always full of surprises, this was one St. Clair hadn't been ready for.
This one barely weighs more than a tool kit, and it's scarlet and breathing and very very small.
It is also, impossibly, fast asleep.
St. Clair had been working on the latest model in the assembly line, short on sleep and more than a little slow on the uptake. So it was that he took quite a while to register what Sebastian Spanner means when he says, "We're going to name him Landon. Landon Lloyd Spanner Ordinary, really - we hope you don't mind."
As if realising it's been named, the tiny bundle decides to wake up. Oh God no is St. Clair's instinctive reaction, but the baby's eyes blink open long enough for St. Clair to realise that he's got his father's eyes, and he shifts inside what feels like an entire mill's worth of swaddling, and goes right back to sleep in St. Clair's arms.
As he leads his team across the streets into the Square, he wonders if his fear for the missing children is but a pale shadow of his fear for the one child whose fate he does not know.
And he wonders if his drive to make sure that these children are safe is all he can do to make up for the fact that there is nothing he can do to bring back that child that once slept so trustingly within his arms.
Landon recognises this machine.
After all, he'd spent most of his eighteenth year putting it together.
It had been one of the first machines designed to be capable of clearing and excavating wide swathes of land. Landon had spent months in the countryside testing the prototype, coming close to complete surrender several times when his efforts produced machines that alternately created caverns in the earth and delicately scraped the turf off the soil. It was a sensitivity issue, Lloyd St. Clair had told him, unsympathetic as always, as he watched his efforts. The calibration wasn't right just yet. In a moment of sheer frustration, Landon had named the machine Sisyphus.
He had been nineteen when he'd eventually gotten it to work.
And now, he smiles as he realises that all that knowledge is going to come in especially useful when taking it apart.
The children see him as he races towards them, approaching from behind the machine and out of its line of sight. Its bulk drowns them in shadow, and he catches a glimpse of their startled faces before he vaults atop the machine's broad back.
Sisyphus was a Herculean hulk of a contraption, built for endless acres of farmland and designed for slow, steady industry. That meant that it hadn't been built for speed or agility, and for this Landon was endlessly thankful.
It is a matter of moments to locate the catch above the panel that's the key to Sisyphus's inner workings. But as he twists the catch open and the panel slides free, Sisyphus begins to rumble in a way Landon's never heard before, and before he knows it, flame jets from every imaginable vent on Sisyphus's frame. Landon is caught unawares, and though the sleeves of the shirt he's wearing come down to his wrists, the kiss of fire scorches him from wrist to elbow and up the length of his arm. It is all he can do to think through the shock and the pain to hit the kill switch before he loses his grip on Sisyphus.
Lloyd St. Clair arrives at the Square just in time to see Landon fall from the back of the vast machine.
In one glance he sizes up the scene - the children are safe, having taken advantage of the distraction by running to the nearest building, taking shelter behind a ruined door. He recognises the rogue machine in the Square as one of Spanner Industries' agricultural inventions, and he doesn't recognise the man falling from it in a most spectacular fashion as anybody in the colony.
Whoever he is, he's probably just saved the children.
And is still on fire.
St. Clair strides over quickly, aware that the machine has somehow stopped - the stranger knows something about the way machines work, it seems. It also seems as if the fall hasn't killed him - he gets up, wearily, even as St. Clair nears, and begins beating out the tiny flames that are reducing his clothes to ash.
And then the stranger looks up and abruptly is a stranger no longer.
Time stops like a clock without a maker to wind it up as the gears in St. Clair's mind grind to a complete halt. Recognition awakens in Landon's eyes, and it seems for that one moment as if the turning of the world itself hinges on what happens next.
What does in fact happen next is that St. Clair's team catches up to them at last. Landon's burning clothing is finally put out, the children are retrieved, and Landon finds himself the recipient of a most unlikely invitation to tea, underneath the city of London.
Landon Lloyd Spanner Ordinary learns, very quickly, that the survivors of mankind's decimation are a ragtag bunch, and that their faith in Lloyd St. Clair comes from the fact that role of protector and guardian comes easily to him after spending nearly thirty years doing the same for the Spanner estate. He learns that there are some one hundred and eighty-seven of them living belowground.
"What now?" Lloyd St. Clair asks, and the words echo the questions that lie unspoken between them.
"You tell me," Landan says, easily, and the next words come as naturally to him as if he's been waiting all his life to say them. "You're the boss now."
Boss was not a word that came easily to Lloyd St. Clair. It radiated both subordination and obedience, neither of which he was very good at.
Insubordination and disobedience were entirely different matters, but that got you absolutely nowhere when you had two hundred workers to manage. It would be hard enough keeping them under control as it was. But convincing them that he was worth obeying if he wasn't going to give Sebastian Spanner the respect he was going to demand of them? Impossible.
It was just that no other term of respect fit better. Master was worse. Sir, he could just about manage, but airs and graces like that belonged in castles and fancy townhouses, not on factory floors.
Speaking the word is difficult. Lloyd St. Clair recognises no one as his master, let alone his boss, but he knows all too well that order has to emanate from the top. He half-snarls the word for weeks before he becomes accustomed to it, but snaps at Sebastian whenever he dares to suggest that just 'Sebastian' would be fine.
"No, it will not be fine," St. Clair storms, caught between the rock of impropriety and the very hard place of insubordination, "If the rest are anything like me, they'll never let you live it down. If you want to be obeyed, you're going to have to get used to it. I'm going to have to get used to it, curse it all. Boss. Goddamnit."
Sebastian Spanner smiles and says that he always knew that Lloyd St. Clair was never going to be yes-man material.
Oddly enough, the term of respect that came with so much difficulty with Sebastian Spanner came as easy as breathing with the youngest one. St. Clair called him the little boss until he was forced to admit that not only was it a mouthful, but it was also completely wrong, because the little boss had his other boss completely under his command.
"And," St. Clair had told the tousle-headed toddler who'd taken an extremely unfortunate and entirely misguided liking to him, "You are too small for a name as long as Little Boss."
Even today, Lloyd St. Clair can remember the littlest Spanner looking up at him with those impossibly wide eyes and laughing as if he understands what St. Clair is saying.
So it is that he snaps, "Don't call me that," to the boy who is a boy no longer. "I'm nobody's boss, and certainly not yours. Your father--"
The mention of Sebastian Spanner has them both fall silent.
St. Clair cannot fail to notice how much he's come to resemble his father. He has his father's pale hair and storm-gray eyes, but what he does next is nothing like what his father would have done.
"If it's come to that," Landan says, lifting his head, his tone as uncompromising as St. Clair has ever been, "The rumours, I assure you, have not escaped me. I've heard every variation of the fall of Spanner Industries, but what I notice is that all of them seem to agree about the one I should thank for the end of the whole mess.
"I don't know what happened there, Lloyd. And I'm counting on you to tell me and spare me no details. But before you do that, this is what I think.
"My father trusted you," the last living Spanner says, grey eyes intense as they meet St. Clair's. "And he was not wrong." He looks away, but only for a moment.
"I trusted - I trust - you. And I am not wrong."
Lloyd St. Clair looks at him and sees, at last, that the boy who grew up at his side is a boy no longer.
Landon's voice grows softer. "You may have known me all my life, St. Clair, but don't forget that I've spent all my life with you. And I know that if it had been in your power, my father would be alive today."
St. Clair laughs, shakily, before he can control himself. "Your father might not have agreed with that."
"My father didn't raise me alone," Landon says, and it's funny how those words make what St. Clair's seen all along but found no words for so suddenly clear to him.
It's right before his eyes - how could he have failed to see it, the right-hand rule come to life? Two forces and their final resolution, and here it is, standing before him. The boy looks so much like his father, but that's his own directness he's seeing, his characteristic knack for saying exactly what he thinks with no regard for strategy or subterfuge.
"But," continues Landon, "Alone was not how he liked to do things."
St. Clair can barely speak.
"And, you know," Landon continues, "He always thought of you as his right-hand--"
"Great lot of good I did him, then," snaps St. Clair, because this, he knows how to respond to. "Anybody who'd worked with your father knew he was hopelessly left-handed."
Landon grins, unexpectedly. "So he was," he agrees.
"So," says St. Clair, because he doesn't like the turn the conversation's taking, "You have a city full of machines gone wrong, survivors who don't know a ratchet from a rat, and if you don't have it by now, you should also have an idea that these two things do not add up to a swift and painless resolution of the problem we're all sitting underneath."
"Father would say," Landon says, reflectively, " 'What a Spanner can build, a Spanner can destroy.' "
He glances at St. Clair and smiles, wryly. "I guess that'll be my life's work. To unmake what I made. To undo all we did. And more."
"It's going to be a lot of work," says St. Clair, shortly. "And there's something else your father should have thought of. What a Spanner can destroy..."
He leaves the sentence hanging, so Landon can finish it.
"A Spanner can rebuild," Landon says, slowly, as he thinks about the monumental task ahead of them.
"That's right," St. Clair says.
Landon feels all of seven years old again, standing before this man as he insists, Yes, you can do this - this ratchet to this bolt, this gear to that piston, this is how to make this work, this is how you put it all together.
the end
email: edgeofdawn [at] gmail.com
artist: susie oh (susieoh)
email: susie000 [at] gmail.com
At the turn of the century, a man from Lancashire invented what he called the right-hand rule, a principle for determining the result of a meeting of two forces so simple that you could remember it with nothing but your right hand.
At one of the Lancashire physicist's lectures was a young man who would later start one of the greatest industrial empires in the land. And this young man saw in the right-hand rule possibilities which even its own creator had not envisioned.
But this story is not about him.
It is about the world he left behind.
He grows up among wires and grease and steel, the steady tick of clockwork as familiar to him as the beat of his own heart. His fingers learn the right way to grasp a crescent wrench before they learn how to hold a pencil, and he learns how to tighten a bolt before he learns to write his own name. Unsurprising, that, seeing as how his name is the inordinately long and multi-jointed Landon Lloyd Spanner Ordinary. He falls asleep to the hum of the machinery, the constant rhythm against which his days are measured.
When he is five, he builds his first set of interlocking gears, all by himself. The teeth of the largest gear are longer than the span of his hand, and the entire set-up takes him all of the morning and close to all of the afternoon, eternity to the mind of a five-year-old boy up to his elbows in grease and dirt on the floor of Spanner Industries, the biggest workshop of the day, in all the land.
That's also when he learns that it's worth it for something that works.
When he is nine, he realises that while there is very little he can't figure out if he is allowed to take it apart and study it, he learns much faster if he is taught, and that the right answers come faster to those who ask the right questions.
When he is seventeen, he solves the mechanical problem that's been puzzling the minds of Spanner Industries' best and brightest, and single-handledly restores what was thought to be its greatest commercial failure. He has the world at his feet, and he knows it.
Today, he is twenty-seven, and he has nothing left to lose.
Landon rises with the sun as it climbs over the rooftops of London, reaching through the slanting chimneys and falling across the wasteland of the world aboveground, a city as empty of spirit as it is of life. The dusty ghosts of memory settle amongst the ruined buildings and shadowed back alleys. Silence echoes through the deserted thoroughfares, for there is very little that now awakes in the city of London.
Strange to think that less than a year had passed since the beginning of that strange and terrible era in which the very creations that Man had built for the ease of his existence turned against him. Less than a year since the day the first rogue invention had risen from the ranks and begun the steady war of attrition against its creators. The onslaught had begun slowly, at first: reports of malfunctioning machinery had been sporadic, in factories few enough to name. Then as the weeks passed, the incidents increased. What had once seemed to be chance occurrences were now disturbingly commonplace. Workmen were unable to contain the disruptions, or the damage.
Within months, the world Man had created was at war with him. Machinery of every make and manufacture rebelled with a mind of its own. Processing plants turned into deathtraps, and the massive factory cities into killing grounds. Even the most innocuous inventions turned treacherous. Those who could escape fled into the countryside, as far as they could go. Resistance was the last thing on anyone's minds, as mankind found itself crippled by the loss of railroads, communications, transport, and just about everything it had ever invented.
If anyone needed to see the application of the right-hand rule written in chaos and the wreckage of a once-beautiful country, this was it. Absolute carnage resulting from unstoppable destruction meeting a world caught unawares.
Landon looks down on the quiet world beneath him. At times like this, he feels like the only person left alive on earth. He knows it isn't true, though, and it's the reason he's still here.
Recently, he'd located a colony, living in the disused tunnels underneath Piccadilly Circus. The epicenter of London, he remembers his father telling him, on a trip into the town centre. He couldn't tell how big the colony was, but he'd watched the regular patrols, four during the daytime, and three at night; as well as the less-frequent food runs. He'd watched one end in carnage no less than a week ago, as the unwary team ran into not one, but three sleeping giants in the wreckage of Thane Court. Intervention would have meant annihilation, and so he'd refrained, watching instead for a chance to assist, if he could. The team realised it was up against more than it could handle and retreated as fast as it could, losing two of its six members to the machines.
If he was honest with himself, there was more than one reason why he was wary of introducing himself directly to the community. Above and beyond the fact that those like him, who had done so much to advance the reach of the machines, simply weren't welcome in the new world - there was one other possibility that bothered him.
He'd grown up as the son of the man who'd started up Spanner Industries, and he'd happened to be at an industrial conference at Bournemouth when the real trouble started in London. The widespread disruptions cut off all communication and transport into and out of London, and by the time he'd figured out what was going on, the only way into the heart of London he called home took him two weeks traveling by inland canals, three days by horse-and-cart that happened to be going in the right direction, and three weeks on foot. The journey was made all the more harrowing by the wake of destruction the machines had left in their wake, and by the fact that the closer he got to London, the closer he got to the heart of the entire problem. He'd spend hours at a time hiding out from the nearest hostile activity, wasting days on watching and waiting.
By the time he reached Spanner Industries, it was a smoking wreck, and confirmation of the rumours he'd heard that it was one of the first places to go in a major way. There had been talk that the entire factory had gone up in a spectacular explosion that destroyed nearly all the machines within it. Good thing, he'd been told, by people who had no idea who he was.
That, and the heartbreaking discovery of his father's death, was not the true problem.
The true problem was that he'd also heard that the person he should be thanking for engineering the elimination of both the head of Spanner Industries and most of the factory was none other than his father's second-in-command, Lloyd St. Clair.
Lloyd St. Clair had been the result of his father's unorthodox (and rather literal) interpretation of the right-hand rule. Having seen far too many rising enterprises run out of steam once their main man was out of the picture, his father had been of the opinion that an industrial behemoth the size of Spanner Industries needed more than a single driving force to keep it going. It would also need a steward to keep it on course, to ensure that all was right within the company, someone unafraid to point out what he felt was wrong.
Lloyd St. Clair was half-Welsh, half-Irish, and more than half trouble. It was soon apparent that he'd been an inspired choice, if not an orthodox one.
The rumors alone wouldn't have troubled him if he hadn't known that Lloyd St. Clair wasn't someone who'd wait until something was broken to get it fixed.
As the sun rises in the world above, another world is coming to consciousness deep underground.
Under the streets and pipes, underneath the wreckage of the world that was, Lloyd St. Clair is trying to decide what to do with the newest additions to the colony at Regent Street.
The dawn scouts had found these two on the patrol at first light, huddled under one of the archways ringing Piccadilly Circus. They were very young, half-starved, and entirely incomprehensible. Neither of them spoke English, and after a verbal altercation in which neither party actually understood what was being yelled, their finders discovered that both the young strangers did not appear to be speaking the same language. Not knowing what to do with either of them, the scouts had hauled them up (with a great deal of struggling and vicious incomprehensible curses from the older one) and taken them to the one person in the colony who dealt with incomprehensible things.
St. Clair takes a look at the both of them and realises that it has been far too long since anyone has found surviving children. He does a quick calculation and is startled to recall that the Machination had begun nearly a year ago. He can't imagine how the children must have survived if they hadn't had help of some sort.
They're tiny, to his eyes. They're both dark-haired and dark-eyed, though that's where the resemblance ends. One doesn't look to be more than five or so; and the other looks as if he can't be more than ten. Starvation will do that, though. And spending a year running from the rogue machines, with food as hard to come by as it is: it's a small wonder the children are even alive.
As different as they are, they remind him of another child, one who wasn't his own, but dogged his steps as determinedly as if it had been, and one whose fate he still does not know, today. He wonders where that child is now. Even though enough time has passed to make that child a child no longer, children always remain children to those who have had to care for them.
St. Clair shakes his head and makes another swift calculation. With food stores the way they are now, the presence of two additional appetites, however small, will likely reduce the length of time the stores will last by some fourteen days. This means he'll need to send another patrol out on a scavenger hunt sometime soon, in the next week at the very most.
It's not something he's looking forward to. The last food-scouting party made it as far as to Marchamp Street, and then they ran into a nest of trouble. Several seventh-generation machines appeared to have been lying in wait, and they'd lost Chassis and Bell.
He looks at the children again, and knows that whatever the food situation, he wouldn't have had the heart to leave them out there, aboveground.
And then he wonders, belatedly, where he will find clothes small enough for the both of them.
Where, he wonders, Will I find clothes that fit?
And as he articulates the thought, from somewhere inside him that he thought had been buried underneath all the dust and rubble, under the rust and ruin, a bubble of laughter bursts forth, as he thinks that wherever he is right now, the man responsible for putting him in this position surely must be having the laugh of his life.
Lloyd St. Clair didn't set out in life intending to be anybody's foreman or second-in-command, least of all to the man running the biggest industrial empire this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Truth be told, he didn't set out in life intending to be much of anything. Being half-Irish, half-Welsh, and all trouble, he'd started out on what he hadn't intended to be a long and fascinating career working for a small-time outfit that manufactured cigarettes. It's also how he takes up smoking when he's sixteen, because it's a way to pass the time and doesn't cost him a penny, because the cigarettes that don't make the cut don't get sold and are handed over to the workers. It becomes a habit he doesn't think to break until he realises he can't, by which time he's of the opinion that the world around him is going to hell in a handbasket and there's no reason to bother.
That's right around the time that the first machine that changes his life enters his world, and it does this by replacing him. It's a steel-and-steam-driven tin-can of a thing that hisses and needs a hell of a lot of coal to keep it going, but it makes easily three times the current daily output and it only needs five men to keep it running.
That means he's among the eighteen workers that his erstwhile employer un-employs.
He'd have raised hell if it wasn't happening everywhere else. Machines are putting what seems to be everyone out of work. No one seems to know what to do about it, so Lloyd St. Clair decides to figure it out.
Not being particularly unintelligent (merely disinclined to put much effort into thinking if it wasn't called for), he lights on the idea of going straight to the source. He asks around and does his share of finding-out, and discovers that more than half the machines responsible are the work of a company named Spanner Industries. It's a small step from that to realising that he'd better get himself to Spanner Industries if he wants to do anything about it, so he gets talking to the ones he figures will be most receptive: the very people who've been rendered obsolete by these machines.
He finds more support than he'd hoped for, and for the first time in his life, Lloyd St. Clair discovers a purpose. He's assembled roughly about a hundred people, all told, from the closest towns alone, and he figures he can do even better if he searches farther afield. It's right about then that he hears of the furore in London, and picks up a newspaper for the first time in his life. He was never a particularly motivated student, but he reads just fine, and learns that several thousand people were left unemployed by Spanner machines in London and its outlying districts alone. It's a short step from there to deciding that he needs to make it to London as soon as he can.
On the way there, he learns that the head of Spanner Industries is an impossibly young twenty-six-year old by the equally impossible name of Spanner Ordinary, and that Spanner Industries trades chiefly from London itself. It's a brilliant way to accomplish all his goals, and on the month-long journey to London, he thinks that Sebastian Spanner Ordinary is going to get the shock of his life when they meet.
As it turns out, Lloyd St. Clair ends up being the one caught by surprise.
A lanky, nondescript young man with pale cornsilk hair and eyes as gray as the English rain collides into him as he's coming into the outskirts of London, apologises fervently, and somehow works the chance encounter into tea with a family he just happens to know up the street.
He insists that St. Clair call him Sebastian, and that St. Clair come along, because he's new to the town, and St. Clair certainly has come a long way, and surely he won't mind coming by for tea - it's no trouble at all, they'd be delighted to have him there.
St. Clair has never really had family he's cared to call his own, so his is not so much surprise as barely-concealed shock that a complete stranger would be so ready to make him feel at home.
By the time St. Clair realises that Spanner Ordinary's first name is Sebastian, and that he's been inveigled into the home of the very man he's come all the way to London to thwart, he's so taken aback by the man's audacity that he almost admires him already.
By then, it's long after nightfall, after tea has magically segued into dinner, which seemed to flow equally naturally into an introduction to Sebastian's wife and very young son, as well as an offer to come take a look at Spanner Industries, because, as Sebastian Spanner said with all sincerity, We need men like you there.
St. Clair doesn't realise it yet, but it's the first, and certainly not the last time, that he'll fall for the Spanner Maneuver.
He turns up at the gates of Spanner Industries the next day. Sebastian Spanner is waiting at the door to the factory, and he smiles as if he's been waiting all his life for this. "I was hoping you'd come by," he says, and tells St. Clair that there'll be a place for everyone who cares to come here.
Days later, St. Clair will wonder if it wasn't all perfectly orchestrated, all of it, and years later, he will come to realise that indeed, it was.
He comes out of his thoughts to realise that, in his moment of inattention, the recent additions to the colony have somehow managed to misplace themselves.
Home, for Landon, is an abandoned hotel overlooking Leicester Square, close enough to the colony he's keeping an eye on, and far enough that he isn't immediately noticeable. The patrols pass this way twice during the day, but they're fairly regular, and it's easy to avoid their scrutiny.
It's been six weeks since he's found them, and he still doesn't have the answers he wants. He is starting to realise that direct engagement may be the only solution, but it's not one he wants to take up just yet.
And then the choice is taken out of his hands.
He looks down on the Square below, silent in the sunlight. The seasons are caught between summer and spring, the earth still sending out shoots and unfurling leaves, even if no man marks the passage of the days any more.
And then he notices two tiny figures crossing the sunlit Square. A closer examination reveals them to be children, the first he's seen in nearly a year. They're watchful despite their youth, keeping an eye out for the shadows and archways in which danger loves to lurk. They shouldn't be out here alone, he thinks, and no sooner has he finished that thought than the darkness in the alley between the old cinemas explodes outwards towards the children. The size of the disruption indicates that this is going to be a problem of some magnitude, and he is on his feet and racing towards the ground before the dust clears.
Children (one child in particular, really) have taught Lloyd St. Clair an important lesson in life, and that is there are even greater complications in life than the inner workings of machines. Put a machine down in a corner, and come back an hour, a day, a week or a month later - barring anyone who doesn't know what's good for them and takes things away from where they're supposed to be - you'll find it still there, right where you left it, exactly where you want it.
Put a child down in a corner, and it'll misplace itself the second you look away. Take a step away and you'll find it halfway across the room and out of the door.
And children have an unerring instinct for being drawn to trouble like a magnet.
St. Clair simply can't comprehend it. Children have minds, after all, and as living things, should have some sense of self-preservation, shouldn't they?
He should know better by now, he thinks, as he marshals those around him for the hunt. The children can't have gone far, he thinks, as he directs one patrol towards Westminster, another towards Leicester Square, and a third towards Trafalgar.
Their disappearance now is all the more worrying for the fact that yesterday, the scouts reported a massive and inexplicable surge in the number of machines headed this way. St. Clair suspects that they may have been alerted to the colony's existence, and he knows all too well that the machines have learnt to conceal themselves in the rubble of London and wait their turn to attack.
He also knows that children as young as the ones who have slipped out of sight aren't usually wise enough to know that.
As he ascends the sloping tunnels towards the surface - he's closer to fifty now than he's ever been, and his body knows it - he can't help but recall the child who made him feel responsible for all lost children thereafter.
Some twenty-seven years ago, close to dawn on a warm summer night, Sebastian Spanner walked into his workshop and unceremoniously deposited a tiny bundle of the smallest living thing Lloyd St. Clair has ever set eyes on in his arms. While the young industrialist was always full of surprises, this was one St. Clair hadn't been ready for.
This one barely weighs more than a tool kit, and it's scarlet and breathing and very very small.
It is also, impossibly, fast asleep.
St. Clair had been working on the latest model in the assembly line, short on sleep and more than a little slow on the uptake. So it was that he took quite a while to register what Sebastian Spanner means when he says, "We're going to name him Landon. Landon Lloyd Spanner Ordinary, really - we hope you don't mind."
As if realising it's been named, the tiny bundle decides to wake up. Oh God no is St. Clair's instinctive reaction, but the baby's eyes blink open long enough for St. Clair to realise that he's got his father's eyes, and he shifts inside what feels like an entire mill's worth of swaddling, and goes right back to sleep in St. Clair's arms.
As he leads his team across the streets into the Square, he wonders if his fear for the missing children is but a pale shadow of his fear for the one child whose fate he does not know.
And he wonders if his drive to make sure that these children are safe is all he can do to make up for the fact that there is nothing he can do to bring back that child that once slept so trustingly within his arms.
Landon recognises this machine.
After all, he'd spent most of his eighteenth year putting it together.
It had been one of the first machines designed to be capable of clearing and excavating wide swathes of land. Landon had spent months in the countryside testing the prototype, coming close to complete surrender several times when his efforts produced machines that alternately created caverns in the earth and delicately scraped the turf off the soil. It was a sensitivity issue, Lloyd St. Clair had told him, unsympathetic as always, as he watched his efforts. The calibration wasn't right just yet. In a moment of sheer frustration, Landon had named the machine Sisyphus.
He had been nineteen when he'd eventually gotten it to work.
And now, he smiles as he realises that all that knowledge is going to come in especially useful when taking it apart.
The children see him as he races towards them, approaching from behind the machine and out of its line of sight. Its bulk drowns them in shadow, and he catches a glimpse of their startled faces before he vaults atop the machine's broad back.
Sisyphus was a Herculean hulk of a contraption, built for endless acres of farmland and designed for slow, steady industry. That meant that it hadn't been built for speed or agility, and for this Landon was endlessly thankful.
It is a matter of moments to locate the catch above the panel that's the key to Sisyphus's inner workings. But as he twists the catch open and the panel slides free, Sisyphus begins to rumble in a way Landon's never heard before, and before he knows it, flame jets from every imaginable vent on Sisyphus's frame. Landon is caught unawares, and though the sleeves of the shirt he's wearing come down to his wrists, the kiss of fire scorches him from wrist to elbow and up the length of his arm. It is all he can do to think through the shock and the pain to hit the kill switch before he loses his grip on Sisyphus.
Lloyd St. Clair arrives at the Square just in time to see Landon fall from the back of the vast machine.
In one glance he sizes up the scene - the children are safe, having taken advantage of the distraction by running to the nearest building, taking shelter behind a ruined door. He recognises the rogue machine in the Square as one of Spanner Industries' agricultural inventions, and he doesn't recognise the man falling from it in a most spectacular fashion as anybody in the colony.
Whoever he is, he's probably just saved the children.
And is still on fire.
St. Clair strides over quickly, aware that the machine has somehow stopped - the stranger knows something about the way machines work, it seems. It also seems as if the fall hasn't killed him - he gets up, wearily, even as St. Clair nears, and begins beating out the tiny flames that are reducing his clothes to ash.
And then the stranger looks up and abruptly is a stranger no longer.
Time stops like a clock without a maker to wind it up as the gears in St. Clair's mind grind to a complete halt. Recognition awakens in Landon's eyes, and it seems for that one moment as if the turning of the world itself hinges on what happens next.
What does in fact happen next is that St. Clair's team catches up to them at last. Landon's burning clothing is finally put out, the children are retrieved, and Landon finds himself the recipient of a most unlikely invitation to tea, underneath the city of London.
Landon Lloyd Spanner Ordinary learns, very quickly, that the survivors of mankind's decimation are a ragtag bunch, and that their faith in Lloyd St. Clair comes from the fact that role of protector and guardian comes easily to him after spending nearly thirty years doing the same for the Spanner estate. He learns that there are some one hundred and eighty-seven of them living belowground.
"What now?" Lloyd St. Clair asks, and the words echo the questions that lie unspoken between them.
"You tell me," Landan says, easily, and the next words come as naturally to him as if he's been waiting all his life to say them. "You're the boss now."
Boss was not a word that came easily to Lloyd St. Clair. It radiated both subordination and obedience, neither of which he was very good at.
Insubordination and disobedience were entirely different matters, but that got you absolutely nowhere when you had two hundred workers to manage. It would be hard enough keeping them under control as it was. But convincing them that he was worth obeying if he wasn't going to give Sebastian Spanner the respect he was going to demand of them? Impossible.
It was just that no other term of respect fit better. Master was worse. Sir, he could just about manage, but airs and graces like that belonged in castles and fancy townhouses, not on factory floors.
Speaking the word is difficult. Lloyd St. Clair recognises no one as his master, let alone his boss, but he knows all too well that order has to emanate from the top. He half-snarls the word for weeks before he becomes accustomed to it, but snaps at Sebastian whenever he dares to suggest that just 'Sebastian' would be fine.
"No, it will not be fine," St. Clair storms, caught between the rock of impropriety and the very hard place of insubordination, "If the rest are anything like me, they'll never let you live it down. If you want to be obeyed, you're going to have to get used to it. I'm going to have to get used to it, curse it all. Boss. Goddamnit."
Sebastian Spanner smiles and says that he always knew that Lloyd St. Clair was never going to be yes-man material.
Oddly enough, the term of respect that came with so much difficulty with Sebastian Spanner came as easy as breathing with the youngest one. St. Clair called him the little boss until he was forced to admit that not only was it a mouthful, but it was also completely wrong, because the little boss had his other boss completely under his command.
"And," St. Clair had told the tousle-headed toddler who'd taken an extremely unfortunate and entirely misguided liking to him, "You are too small for a name as long as Little Boss."
Even today, Lloyd St. Clair can remember the littlest Spanner looking up at him with those impossibly wide eyes and laughing as if he understands what St. Clair is saying.
So it is that he snaps, "Don't call me that," to the boy who is a boy no longer. "I'm nobody's boss, and certainly not yours. Your father--"
The mention of Sebastian Spanner has them both fall silent.
St. Clair cannot fail to notice how much he's come to resemble his father. He has his father's pale hair and storm-gray eyes, but what he does next is nothing like what his father would have done.
"If it's come to that," Landan says, lifting his head, his tone as uncompromising as St. Clair has ever been, "The rumours, I assure you, have not escaped me. I've heard every variation of the fall of Spanner Industries, but what I notice is that all of them seem to agree about the one I should thank for the end of the whole mess.
"I don't know what happened there, Lloyd. And I'm counting on you to tell me and spare me no details. But before you do that, this is what I think.
"My father trusted you," the last living Spanner says, grey eyes intense as they meet St. Clair's. "And he was not wrong." He looks away, but only for a moment.
"I trusted - I trust - you. And I am not wrong."
Lloyd St. Clair looks at him and sees, at last, that the boy who grew up at his side is a boy no longer.
Landon's voice grows softer. "You may have known me all my life, St. Clair, but don't forget that I've spent all my life with you. And I know that if it had been in your power, my father would be alive today."
St. Clair laughs, shakily, before he can control himself. "Your father might not have agreed with that."
"My father didn't raise me alone," Landon says, and it's funny how those words make what St. Clair's seen all along but found no words for so suddenly clear to him.
It's right before his eyes - how could he have failed to see it, the right-hand rule come to life? Two forces and their final resolution, and here it is, standing before him. The boy looks so much like his father, but that's his own directness he's seeing, his characteristic knack for saying exactly what he thinks with no regard for strategy or subterfuge.
"But," continues Landon, "Alone was not how he liked to do things."
St. Clair can barely speak.
"And, you know," Landon continues, "He always thought of you as his right-hand--"
"Great lot of good I did him, then," snaps St. Clair, because this, he knows how to respond to. "Anybody who'd worked with your father knew he was hopelessly left-handed."
Landon grins, unexpectedly. "So he was," he agrees.
"So," says St. Clair, because he doesn't like the turn the conversation's taking, "You have a city full of machines gone wrong, survivors who don't know a ratchet from a rat, and if you don't have it by now, you should also have an idea that these two things do not add up to a swift and painless resolution of the problem we're all sitting underneath."
"Father would say," Landon says, reflectively, " 'What a Spanner can build, a Spanner can destroy.' "
He glances at St. Clair and smiles, wryly. "I guess that'll be my life's work. To unmake what I made. To undo all we did. And more."
"It's going to be a lot of work," says St. Clair, shortly. "And there's something else your father should have thought of. What a Spanner can destroy..."
He leaves the sentence hanging, so Landon can finish it.
"A Spanner can rebuild," Landon says, slowly, as he thinks about the monumental task ahead of them.
"That's right," St. Clair says.
Landon feels all of seven years old again, standing before this man as he insists, Yes, you can do this - this ratchet to this bolt, this gear to that piston, this is how to make this work, this is how you put it all together.
the end