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abalidoth · 2 years

Text

On the Lifecycle of the Quesalian Automatons

[read on AO3 -- the footnotes actually work there]

Much ink has been lain down about the neighbors to the west, the machine folk of Quesalia. Their customs, their language, their unique disregard of the matter of the sexes – all of these have been explained, well or poorly, by other educators. However, one point I often see misrepresented and confused in scholarly treatises on the anthropology of these people is their cycle of life. Tales abound of clockwork men ticking away the years into infinity, of great foundries hammering out bouncing baby cogs with the precision of an Istolian metronome. Perhaps it is fanciful to those across the mountains, lightning trapped in flesh, to envision a life with a sharp beginning and an uncertain expiry. It taps into something primal in the human mind.

But I wish to set these stories to rest -- not because fanciful stories are an evil unto themselves, but rather that the truth deserves its due, and because the truth is, daresay, more interesting than the fiction.

At the most basic level, the Quesalians live their lives by generation. A generation is exactly nine to the power of four days, or 6,561, which is just shy of eighteen years. Each generation is divided into nine sprokoi, or "teeth" [1], each of which is almost exactly two years long. The first sprokos of each generation is known as the Time of Building. These two years are the most important times in the life of an automaton, marking the transitions of their phases of existence.

Before I go any further, I must dispel a common misconception I see frequently on this side of the mountains. While a clock or a water mill can theoretically last forever, if sentient beings such as ourselves replace the parts with regularity, such a thing is not true of the Quesalians. The maximum lifespan of a Quesalian is exactly four generations plus one sprokos, or seventy-four years, quite comparable to that of a human.[2]

If mechanisms can be replaced, you may ask, why is there a specific lifespan? There are two main reasons. One is simply cultural. This is the way of Quesalian life, a point of pride and seen as the source of a peaceful and productive society. The second, and more insurmountable, is mechanical. The mechanisms of human cognition are still opaque -- scholars only recently determined an electrical component to human movement and thought, and even that is largely mysterious. However, while Quesalian memory is not fully understood even to automatons, the workings themselves are clear and visible -- a stack of golden plates, hidden away behind glass, spinning away in the torso.

The whorls inscribed on those plates record everything the automaton has seen or heard in its life, from the very moment the mainspring is wound to the day it runs out. Those plates are not of infinite capacity. Seventy-four years is about when overwriting begins to happen, when the last few dregs of empty space are parceled up into smaller and smaller pieces, which are more and more inefficient to retrieve. [3] Unlike humans, automatons do not lose memories from birth, and so their span of remembrance is limited.

So, with that established, we can answer the question: why exactly four generations plus one sprokos? Why not just four? This has to deal with the system of generations. It will be easiest to explain if I just provide a reference at first – this is a surfeit of information to read all at once, and I apologize, but I hope that it will become clear in time. The life of an automaton is as follows:

1st Building: Construction and awakening

1st full generation: Childhood (Cog)

2nd Building: First Bloom

2nd full generation: Life and work (Seconder)

3rd Building: Second Bloom

3rd full generation: Life and work (Thirder)

4th Building: First Rain

4th full generation: Life and Work (Elder)

5th building: Second Rain, and death.

Some of these terms will likely be familiar to you, either from other scholarly texts or from penny novels sold on the streets of Dorrester and Lux-au-Mer. Doubtless you've seen the lurid tales of Kassa the Thirder advertised on pulp paper or serialized in the Daily Signal. But if you'll be patient with your humble guide, I would like to explain them more fully, with the tale of my own birth.

If you'll allow me to (pardon the pun) dispense with the artifice, let me be entirely forthright with you -- I am, myself, a Quesalian. I am powered by a mainspring and not a heart; I hold my fountain pen in brass fingers stained copper with years of ink. Perhaps now you understand why it is so important to me that you, dearest reader, understand the ways of my people so well. It is my calling to communicate such things with you, to bridge the divide of gear and sinew for a harmonious future for all.

But lest I lapse further into poetry -- a common affliction of my people, I'm afraid to say -- back to the story of my birth.

I was constructed in the Building of Generation Fifty-Seven of the modern age. [4] The first light to fall on my radiometers was that of a humble Quesalian home -- the sanctified workshop space in the basement, specifically, surrounded by the tools of creation. I didn't know anything. I was a baby, although unlike a human infant, I remember every second of my confusion and awkward flailing.

My parents -- there were four, and you'll understand why in a moment -- did not give me a body at first. I was just a torso and a head, with a disconnected voicemaker. If I had had a full body, I would have hurt myself. So I was given an arm, and shown how to use it, and I was praised and cooed over when I was gentle and chided when I was rough. Another arm followed, then a voice, and then a quartet of legs. By that time, halfway through my Building, I was out of my phase of terror and into a span of curiosity, one that has only grown as I live into my middle years. This is when my parents began to teach me how to be a person.

My parents were Itai, a cog just out of creche and moving into its years as a Seconder; Sen, an energetic incoming Thirder who had spent its Second doing sculpture; Fura, heading into its Elder years with two generations spent teaching in a creche; and Kassa, our Second Rain, in its last two years of life, an automaton that had seen and done everything there was to see and do, who was missing an arm and refused to tell the story of how. [5]

This was a full House -- a First and Second Bloom, a First and Second Rain, and a baby, randomly assigned by drawing lots in a grand ceremony at the beginning of each Time of Building. Nearly every House is like this -- of course, numbers don't always work out evenly, and sometimes people die early and need to be replaced. Sometimes a House will be missing one of its members, or will be tasked with building two children instead of one. The algorithms that determine these things are complex and sacred. I am an anthropologist and not a priest, and thus not privy to such things.

The Time of Building is not just for making a new child. It is also a time for the First and Second Rain to pass on the knowledge of their lives to the First and Second Blooms. Most of it was Fura and Kassa telling stories -- somewhat for my benefit, so I could learn the cadences of speech, but mostly for Itai and Sen, to absorb their wisdom. Itai was planning to go into childcare like Fura was, and so it stuck closely to Fura's heels and asked stories specifically about education; Kassa had seen a little of everything, and had plenty of advice for Sen's art career. But both Rains had plenty of advice for both Blooms -- how to be a good friend, how to get along with neighbors, how to deal with grief and hardship. The ups and downs of life.

By the time the Building was over, I was a person, able to walk and talk on my own, albeit poorly. My House dissolved, as they all do -- although sometimes lifelong friendships will form during a Time of Building, there is no shame in amicably parting paths with a co-parent -- and Kassa committed its plates to the Hall of Memory and its body to be refurbished and made into new bodies, come the next Time of Building.

I spent sixteen years then in creche with the other Cogs of Generation Fifty-Seven, learning how to be a person. These were much more basic lessons than the wisdom imparted upon a Bloom. How to move one's body, how do do arithmetic, how to read and write and speak clearly and not cause trouble. These were the times of my first friendships, of first obsessions (in my case, with the strange fleshy people beyond the mountains -- as you can see, not an obsession that ever diminished) and first rivalries. I went into a specific track in the latter half of that generation, training to be a scholar.

Then I graduated, and the fifty-eighth Time of Building was upon us. I was a First Bloom, and I entered the first House of my own. It was a rough initial experience, to be honest -- we were chosen as one of the Houses to build two children, and neither of my Rains had much interest in scholarly ambition. My Second Bloom, Saza, was a brash and closed-minded sort, taken to mocking me for my interest in humanity.

Ah, well. These things happen. Not every House is harmonious; no algorithm can remove scoundrels and quarrelers from the pool altogether. That sort have to end up with someone, and in that first House of my own, they ended up with me.

My time as a Seconder was spent on this side of the mountains, learning the languages and customs of the humans. At first I spent my time in emigrant communities in Dorrester, but soon I was living on my own, mingling with my neighbors, fielding questions both genuine and rude from those around me as to my nature and the nature of my people. Those questions and their answers eventually evolved into the text you read now.

I headed back to my homeland for my second House, ready to be a second Bloom, and blessedly had a much better time of it. My Second Rain was a mathematician and my First Bloom had ambitions of writing; my First Rain was a painter, but a kind and generous soul. (That kind of empathy is essential for the work I do -- it can't be all scholarly rigor. There has to be love in it as well.)

And that brings me to now, back into the world of the humans, near the end of my years as a Thirder. In three years' time, I will make the pilgrimage home again, to the great city of First Winding, to be assigned to a House and make a new person, to be a Rain for the first time and pass on what I've learned to a pair of new Blooms.

In some ways, you all are my Blooms, in a grand and unruly House. You sit at my knee as I tell stories of Quesalia, stories that I hope have wisdom in them, and together all of us are building something new, something that we all put a piece of ourselves into. I hope this little treatise gives you new perspective on not just my people, but also your own. While you don't have the rigid clock cycles of an automaton, I hope that you can learn to stop every once in a while, to pass on what you know, to learn what you don't, to take stock of your own life and change course if it's needed.

– Cezai the 3rd of Lux-au-Mer

14th of Evenfall, 2736 (59/1542 Quesalian)

[1] So-called because of the nine teeth on the heart-gear attached to a Quesalian’s mainspring.

[2] Humans have the opportunity to live longer, but it is much less common for an automaton to die early, as they do not fall ill and it is easy to replace injured pieces.

[3] Their true extent is probably more on the order of ninety years -- there are a few accounts of Quesalians put in situations where they cannot join the rest of society, or a few aberrations who avoid their programmed end.

[4] Don't concern yourself overly with what zero date we use to anchor our calendar -- we don't remember either.

[5] I can't confirm that Kassa my Second Rain was the inspiration for the pulp hero of Kassa the Thirder. It's a relatively common name. But I wouldn't be surprised.

#robot stuff #fake ethnography #steampunk #yes I have been reading a lot of becky chambers recently why do you ask :P #tessa writes stuff

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