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In the Palace of Science (Part 2 of 2)

By Chris Campbell

(…Continued from Part 1)

B-Side

 

Track Five–

 

The automaton was unfinished, but even in a transitory state, it was a thing of marvel. In form, it was like a man. With two legs meant for bipedal ambulation and two arms with three-fingered hands meant for grasping. Although roughly, from the thickness of its fingers. The design of the machine differed most strikingly from the ideal human in the shape of its head and body, for it had no neck. Rather, a barrel-shaped torso attached directly to a head that was meant to be enclosed within the thick, vaguely egg-shaped glass dome sitting next to the machine.

The front piece of the barrel-shaped body was also set aside on a nearby table, exposing its chassis and internal mechanism. Peering inside, it became clear that filling the hole within this hollow man was the singular aim of much of the work I’d been doing for years.

“I call him Talos.” The professor’s voice cut into the silence that enveloped the lab after I’d spent nearly a half hour silently examining the machine upon entering.

“I think it’s time you speak plainly to me about the nature of this work,” I responded, rather than allowing him to hook me on the bait of working out the genesis of the device’s name. I knew my classics as well as any man, but I was well tired of games.

“You must pardon me. Some habits are hard to break, but of course you are right. Nearly forty years ago, the son of a once-prosperous family with extensive shipping interests in the Aegean discovered an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Lemnos. Rather than alert proper authorities, he smuggled the entire collection of salvaged artifacts back to his family’s estate.” The professor reached into his pocket and pulled out a gold coin.

“I’ve long suspected that hidden from our sight in unrecorded histories and the ashes of Alexandria, there lay technologies possessed by ancient man only hinted at in the myths and legends left in their wake. The automatons of Hephaestus, the construction of Pandora, and the wonders of Atlantis. When the once-prosperous family’s fortunes turned, items like this began to appear in circulation,” he said, placing the gold coin in my hand. “I deduced a cache of heretofore unknown treasures from the ancient world had surfaced and bent my mind toward obtaining them.

“I traced the collection to Newport using a simple geometric analysis and frequency chart of the items as they surfaced. It was there I first adopted the guise of Mr. Ochi to aid in my investigation.” For an instant, I recognized the visage of the old reliable butler return in the professor’s expression, and it struck me then how dearly the absence of the man who never was had affected me.

“Once in Newport, I made it known that I was an agent acting on behalf of a gentleman looking to acquire artifacts and that price was no concern. I paid a dear rate for the cache of silver and gold I acquired, but the real treasure, the crust-encased pieces of this automaton, were tossed into the deal for next to nothing.”

“What you see before you is a re-creation and extrapolation of Talos’ intended form. Most of the original was beyond salvage, but enough components survived for a thorough analysis of the materials and to gain insight into the original design. I was able to identify and decipher the method by which his ancient builders set carved rods of quartz, tourmaline, topaz, and amber crystals within ingenious configurations to absorb, generate and store electrical charges. I also discovered, or I should say rediscovered, the curious alloy much of Talos is built from the fabled metal lost with Atlantis, aurichalcum—a metal most magnificent, with properties that not only conduct but amplify electric, magnetic, and gravitic energies.

“Aurichalcum, you see, is not only the heart of the automaton, but of much of my research these past years. The principles I’ve discovered from employing it for scientific inquiry are, in part, why my own investigations have sped so far ahead of those who would consider themselves my peers. Or should I say our peers, now that you have joined me atop this mountain of knowledge only we have summited.”

 

 

Track Six–

 

For years after the professor entrusted me with his greatest secret, the two of us rebuilt the automaton at a nearly feverish pace. As we did, the distance the professor previously kept between us entirely disappeared, our work together evolving into a true partnership.

On the rare occasions when I became frustrated with the pace of our endeavor, he was quick to assuage my discontent, noting how much faster the task was coming along with the two of us working together compared to his decades of toiling in solitude, how having someone to share each discovery with breathed new life into the project, how he’d feared before I joined him that he wouldn’t finish the work in his lifetime. How long he’d spent searching for an heir worthy of passing the task onto before he’d discovered me. But that now, working together, he believed we would not only finish, but finish soon.

It was the deepest night of winter when we placed the final pieces, a pair of circular

aurichalcum receivers that resembled Heinrich Hertz’s loop antennas. These receivers were set at ninety-degree angles to each other on either side of the automaton’s head. Installing them into their finely geared crystalline sockets took the entire night.

Talos had no discernable switch, toggle, or mechanism to wind up the clockwork gears within him. The professor surmised that once we finished its reconstruction, it might feed off an available field of energy like a machine with a properly attuned receiver would from one of Tesla’s high-frequency transmitters, and the automaton would either leap into life, if we were lucky, or begin to slowly fill its crystalline capacitors.

With a final tightening of an antenna within its socket, Talos was complete, and the professor and I stepped back from our work. Near-perfect silence enveloped the room, neither of us daring to breathe while we waited, and then it began. Both the antennae started to rotate, slowly at first and then faster, and the room began to thrum with strange energy.

Then for no discernible reason, the spinning antennas slowed until their rotation crept to a halt.

The pair of us again stood in silence after the brief spurt of activity ended, waiting and hoping. The professor stared at Talos with an intensity that suggested he intended to bring it back to life through the force of his will alone.

“Did we miss something?” I asked with my first exhaled breath. “We must be close. Perhaps we should check the filaments attached to the capacitor? Or the cooling apparatus might need adjustment. Maybe it turned itself off before it risked overheating and damaging its amber components.”

I reached for the large spanner we used to close Talos’ chest plate when the professor rested his hand on mine.

“You might be right, but perhaps we should wait. We figured out enough to rebuild this machine, my friend, but we still don’t fully understand it. Look at the timepiece.”

I paused to check the clock we’d affixed to the wall—an experimental design the professor and I based on Talos’ technology. According to our calculations, the method we’d arranged the clock’s crystal lattices in would keep nearly perfect time for years from a single winding of its aurichalcum spring.

“Eighteen after seven, what of it?”

“You and I have learned so much, have perhaps peered beyond the horizon to secrets within the physics that man was never meant to discover, yet we don’t even know which field of energy our Talos is meant to feed from. Don’t you find it curious that the moment the sun rises is the moment it’s shuddered into inactivity? If I’m right, we might only need wait a few hours. Nothing in the grand scheme of things for the culmination of our life’s work.”

“Then what? We’re just waiting?” I asked.

“What we should do is rest. But I’ll never ask of you what I can’t do myself, so we work. You may be right about the filament or the cooling system, after all. For now, consult your diagrams before we reopen it. If sunrise was a factor, I have a new theory to examine.”

That afternoon we reconvened at fifteen to five for dinner and to share what we discovered with each other.

Next to nearly untouched plates heaping with the season’s traditional repasts of glazed ham, scalloped potatoes, green beans, and turkey, the professor and I devoured the stacks of papers we presented to each other.

Him fingering over the diagrams where I explored the most likely culprits for any failures in our initial build. While I sat in amazement as I looked over his calculations for the available energy generated by the tidal shear driven by the Moon and the Earth each pulling in opposition and how the bulk of the Earth between the mechanism and the Moon would deprive it of the opposing gravitational forces it needed to ignite the system. If his calculations were correct, the implications for humanity were immense. I imagined a world powered by the abundant energy provided by the clockwork of gravity, with the Moon as Earth’s pendulum.

At half past five, we made our way down to the sub-basement. If the professor was right, we had but a handful of minutes to wait. If I was correct, it would be a long night of disassembly and testing.

When the appointed minute came again, we waited.

Talos’ antennas began to spin up, emitting a soft humming sound as their speed slowly increased. For a while, we watched them rotate, perhaps both fearing that, once again, the machine before us would disappoint and that this rotation might be all that would come of our long labors over it. But then energy coursed through the room, making every hair on my body stand on edge and my teeth chatter and my nose fill with the scent of ozone with a hint of burning frankincense. The professor was right.

Inside the large glass dome that served as its head, the tiny servos set within triple axel gimbals spun into life, and pale violet light emanated from within. This was not entirely unsuspected, and the off chance that the glass dome might serve as some type of cathode ray tube was why we’d evacuated it during our installation, yet seeing it light up through still unknown principles was exhilarating to behold. If this had been the end of it, the professor and I would have spent years examining the data from the test, enraptured by the groundbreaking success of bringing this curio of the ancient world to life.

Alas, that was not what was meant to be.

Talos’ first sign of deliberate motion was the opening and closing of its hands, metal hands strong enough to bend steel and crush stone, as if it was testing the truth of its completion. Then it sat up and pivoted around to try its legs upon the floor.

“My god, look, he stands.” The professor exclaimed when it rose to its feet, slowly and deliberately bending and testing its joints.

Then the automaton turned toward the doorway and started to walk. It took a moment for its intentions to dawn on me, but not the professor, who flung himself between the machine and the exit.

“Stop, you must, I command you.” He shouted, holding his hands up, palms facing out, in the vain hope that if his words meant nothing to the ancient machine, that the gesture might be familiar, a simple method of communication far older than our young English tongue.

Talos would not be slowed and brushed the professor away with a single flick of its stubby arm, sending the older man flying into the wall with a sickening crack. From there, it made its way to the shaft in the bedrock from which the laboratory was carved, ignoring the ladder, which would not have held its massive weight, and digging its arms and feet into the bedrock to fashion the foothold and handholds it required to ascend from the depths of our Palace of Science.

As Talos climbed, I rushed to the professor’s side to assess his injuries. From the look of it, he’d suffered a broken collarbone from the impact. However, as I attended to him, he pushed me away using his good arm.

“Never mind me, follow it, stop it if you can. We can’t lose it, not now, not with all we still have to learn.”

Perhaps I should be ashamed of this more than anything else yet to come, but I    didn’t hesitate to abandon my wounded mentor and follow the work. Yes, I’ve done much worse, but I can justify those actions even as I speak to you now with my hands still covered in the evidence of the crime that most certainly damned my soul as it saved the world.

I climbed and then ran, trying to catch up with Talos. At the end of the hidden stairway, I found the bookshelf that hid its opening splintered and broken, its books strewn across the library floor. As I surveyed the destruction, looking for a clue to the path the machine took, I heard the far wall of the library resound with a mighty  smash, and I followed the sound.

Racing through the hole it left, I caught up with the automaton quickly enough but could think of nothing to stop its relentless march. The broken professor, the splintered bookshelf, and the smashed library wall were enough examples of the power in its metal form that I dared not place myself in its path, although I endeavored to remain apace with its steady clockwork strides toward some unknown destination.

At first, the nature of the chase itself was enough to entirely consume my senses, but as the minutes ticked by, the midwinter night I’d plunged into demanded its toll for how poorly I’d prepared for its freezing depths.

I lost parts from two toes to the ill-fated mission, and still lost track of Talos hours into the painful chase when he trudged from the rime-encrusted shoreline into the coastal waters, slipping from my sight and into the depths of the Sound.

 

 

Track Seven–

 

Some of the wounds we suffered that night healed quickly. With proper footwear, I could walk with hardly a hitch in my step soon enough, and the professor’s broken bone set near enough to perfect that he was none the worse for the trouncing. Unfortunately, the dearest wounds dealt that night were not inflicted on our flesh.

The professor’s drive for discovery evaporated with the escape of the experimental man we’d built. For days he sat listlessly in the library, staring at the tarp I’d hung over the hole in the wall to keep the winter out. Perhaps he was deep in contemplation, going over the events of the night and our preparations for it, trying to pinpoint when taking a different path might have avoided the complete failure that resulted. Perhaps he was waiting for Talos to return. Either way, he refused to speak to me about what he was thinking, hardly acknowledging my presence at all except to wave me off and grumble that he was fine whenever I hovered over him too closely. All the while sipping on the laudanum prescribed to aid his rest and recovery as the collarbone mended.

As weeks turned to months, I found him more often abed, senseless with lips stained red from the malicious elixir, until he stopped leaving his bed altogether. While the injuries I suffered that damned evening were not as transitory as a broken collarbone, all told, I seemed to have gotten the better of it. At first, I occupied my time repairing the damage Talos did to escape from the Palace of Science. Rebuilding the hidden bookshelf with my own hands and overseeing the masons who came to repair the hole in the wall, passing off the damage due to a flaw in the original stonework.

Even after those repairs were finished, I managed to remain busy with a host of other activities, but none were what I’d devoted my life to, what had brought me to the professor’s home, the pursuit of science. In this regard, I was as useless as the man, now a recluse in truth, hiding in his bedroom and dreaming his days away.

It was odd indeed that the act of giving life to Talos drained all the vitality from the Palace of Science, as if the best parts of the professor and I were consumed to power the automaton’s animation.

The same inescapable truth may have haunted both of us. That when the machine we dared to rebuild got up off that table and walked away, and we were helpless before it, it proved that we were not standing atop some pinnacle of science. We were, in fact, fools playing with the tools of those immeasurably far above us. Now with the machine long gone, lost to the depths of the ocean, going about some unimaginable task, we’d no means to ever close the gap between the knowledge that we had and the knowledge we needed to understand what we’d unleashed upon the world in our hubris.

With the yellow husk of the man I’d grown to admire so much during my tenure at his estate withering above me, this and other troubles began to plague my mind. Soon I found myself spending long evenings within the walls of the professor’s vast wine vault. In those depths, I also heard the call of the laudanum and its promise of peaceful dreams. Thankfully, as far gone as I was, I never took what might have been the final step for both of us, the professor’s deterioration just fearful enough to warn me away from the danger of the soporific.

Months later, with the turning of the season came a turning of my physical and mental state, a sort of springtime of the mind. I resolved to rescue the professor from the prison of the poppy. As a child, I was helpless when my father disappeared after sending my mother a telegram from his patron’s congressional office the day after their electoral defeat–announcing that the tide had turned, and he was on his way home. There was nothing I could do to look for him in the broad swath of the country he might have disappeared into, no way to effect his return. The professor, however, was well within my reach, and I could not allow him to slip away from me further and disappear beyond the point of no return.

It was not an easy path. The poisoned-tongued demon I pulled out of the master suite was so far from the genial Mr. Ochi or my keen-eyed collaborator that, for the first few days, I feared I’d waited too long. That what greatness had been in the man was now gone and that my patron and friend was beyond saving. I’ll spare you a close retelling of this course of events, but let it be said, hard as it was, it was manifestly easier than allowing him to continue to waste away and ignore the role I was playing in his downfall.

A few long weeks later, I was taking a meal with the now cogent, although still quite diminished professor, when we heard a loud knocking on the grand front door. Ringing with the unmistakable sound of aurichalcum on aurichalcum. There at the door, we met it again–our Talos returned.

In one massive arm, it was holding a box about the size of a gramophone made of some dark material that glowed with a prismatic, almost greasy sheen in the reflected light that pooled in the doorway. In times like these, habits long honed to unconscious violation take the lead. When a visitor arrives at night, you invite them in. We moved aside to allow its entrance, and the automaton marched past us, heading for the library. Once there, it made its way to the recently repaired bookshelf that hid the passage to our secret laboratory, and once again, the polite thing seemed to be the only thing, so the professor unlocked the hidden latch, and I swung the shelf out of its way.

The three of us made our way down the stairs to the rooms below and were unsurprised when Talos headed toward the hole in the lower office that led to the super-secret sub-basement laboratory where he was reborn. I wondered how it would manage to climb back down with the box in its hands, but this turned out to be foolishness. It simply jumped, only to land seconds later with an impact that shook the foundation.

The professor and I climbed the ladder down the shaft to follow it. When we made our way into the small stone room illuminated only by the dim violet light cast from Talos’ head, we found that it had placed the mysterious box on the center table where the automaton had rested for the years we’d spent rebuilding it.

I nearly jumped out of my skin when the professor burst into laughter beside me.

“Wonderful, absolutely wonderful,” his voice rang out, the peals of his laughter echoing as they ran up the shaft away from us.

 

Track Eight–

 

The box, for a time, was a puzzle, although Talos’ intentions were clear enough.  The mystery proved to be the true elixir the professor needed to return to himself.  And if I am to be honest, I might as well admit—it was much the same for me.

We spent weeks studying the box, experimenting with various sensors to gain in-sight into the interior. Acoustic tests indicated that it was indeed hollow and not a solid block of the substance the exterior was made from.

Even the keenest diamond-tipped edge could not slice a piece of the black casing away, making chemical tests unwise. Although the box glistened with an oil-like sheen and felt greasy to the touch, it left behind no detectable residue for analysis. Electrical experiments indicated that it was the most perfect conductor of electricity we’d ever measured, leading the professor to theorize that it was some type of heavily modified form of the aurichalcum we’d become familiar with, but transmogrified by some unimaginable forces to reach its ultimate state. This was the first time I disagreed with the professor on one of his bolder predictions. I believed it was a curious form of the base material carbon where the bonds between its atoms produced something even more robust than the diamonds we tested against its surface.

It was a matter of some luck that we discovered the method of opening the box, something I refuse to share on the chance that my plea to leave everything buried and forgotten is ignored. Suppose you, my dear listener, are a greater fool than I expect; perhaps, by withholding this knowledge, I might succeed in my final mission even after every other measure I’ve taken has failed.

When we opened the box, it seemed to me that it breathed in, but I convinced myself it was only the atmospheric pressures from within and without equalizing, for, of course, a box could not breathe. Within the interior was a mechanism that confounded us upon its revelation. Various crystals connected by coils of aurichalcum, with settings made from the same black material as the box’s exterior. Superficially the systems inside appeared similar to those of Talos, but the strange geometries we found within the box’s mechanisms suggested it was far more advanced than the automaton, almost as if part of the mechanism operated outside our plane of existence.

The two of us spent days carefully examining it while I diligently drafted the internal schematics, attempting to divine the box’s purpose and what repairs it required—eventually, a week passed before our next breakthrough.

“It’s so simple.” The professor said, pointing his finger at a portion of the diagram I was working on. “Look here, Carruthers, do you see it.”

“What is it I’m supposed to see?” I asked.

“Think simple, son. I won’t take this discovery from you, look again and think.”

Although we worked as nearly equals for years, falling into the role of the mentee was easy enough, so I emptied my mind, focusing on the diagram, trying to see what could be so simple that it would, in turn, explain the greater complicated whole.

“It can’t be,” I said, scratching my head before I began drawing a diagram from memory next to the spot the professor indicated. The similarities between the system within the box and a crystal diode demodulator were inescapable.

“It’s like some type of radio receiver.”

“Not a radio. It won’t be radio waves it picks up with this design. But it seems that we are clearly in possession of a mechanism with the ability to pick up some type of exotic transmissions—that is, if we can fix it.”

“Transmissions from where?” I asked, but either the professor missed my question in his excitement or chose to ignore it as immaterial to the discovery he’d made.

Once the nature of the box was discerned, the repairs it would need if it was going to function became apparent. Although, upon closer examination, they proved not, in fact, to be simply repairs. We soon discovered that whoever began the construction of the box, unknowable eons before, had abandoned the task unfinished.

Its incomplete nature preyed on me, a small voice at the back of my mind that spoke of danger, trying to rise above the growing whispered promises of greatness that led me onward. Within weeks all the parts and pieces we required to finish the transmitter were laid out on a bench next to the table the box rested on, along with the tools we would need to do the work, from spanners and tongs to soft rubber hammers and welding tools. It was only then, when it became clear that nothing could prevent us from the appointed task, that I finally broke free of the momentum that carried us ever forward and confronted my patron with my dire concerns.

“We can’t do this. Look, man, think for a moment about how Talos battered and broke you when we turned it on, how little regard it held for your life. All we know about this box is that he brought it to us and its workings are beyond us. That and whoever started building it had sense enough not to finish. How dare we proceed when we know less of this than them?”

“You don’t know why it was left unfinished any more than I do. To say they decided not to finish is pure conjecture. Perhaps some calamity befell them, like Pompeii, Herculaneum, or the fabled Atlantis.”

“What we know is that if we turn this on, it may receive something, but not from whom. You’re the one who led me to the monsters that live in the math, who showed me what might lie beyond the bounds of our reality. You know how fragile our existence is, but not from where the strange geometries inside the box might allow a signal to reach us. If we open this door, there may be no way to close it and usher back out what we are letting in. You spent your life holding back discoveries too dangerous for humanity to meddle with.”

“I held back from the others, never myself, and not from you. Haven’t I shared all that I know with you? What does the Universe hold that we together can’t fathom? How can we turn back when the next horizon is upon us?” the professor asked. “I don’t blame you for your fear, boy. Greatness and fear go hand in hand, but this is my purpose, our purpose. This is why I brought you here, why I built my Palace of Science.” While he spoke, the professor’s hand holding the largest rod of amber we’d carved to fit within the transmitter began to shake, reminding me of the sickness that consumed him just a few short months ago during the worst of his withdrawal from the laudanum.

“How can I live with myself if I turn back now?” he finally asked in nearly a whisper, almost as if pleading with himself and not with me.

“We make this choice together. That’s how.”

With that, the professor dropped the crystal on the tray and reached out to grip my shoulder. He was about to say something when Talos, who’d stood silent sentry since his return, moved from the position it took near the entrance to stand directly in front of the stone room’s door, completely blocking our path. Even without words, the message was clear.

The first day was the easiest, as we were able to keep ourselves busy with matters of survival. With the tools we had on hand, we adjusted the vents and burners built into the stone room to collect and condense the water vapor produced by the methane’s combustion. Enough that we faced not a quick death from dehydration, but a slow one from starvation. Talos only watched and waited.

On the second day, we became restless as we explored methods of destruction that would allow us to affect our escape. I calculated that we could cause an explosion     powerful enough to damage Talos’ metal exterior but that setting it off would smash us into pudding at best and, perhaps, even set off a chain reaction in the methane             stored within the surrounding bedrock. The professor calculated how to achieve temperatures high enough to defeat the automaton’s internal cooling mechanisms, melt the amber rods within it, and render it inert. Much like the explosive solution, our fate would be likewise sealed in the effort. Talos only watched and waited.

On the third day, everything changed. After spending nearly fifty hours awake, pacing and pondering our eventual fate, I finally fell into an uneasy sleep at the professor’s insistence when something, perhaps some second sense, pulled me from my slumber. That is when I saw him through blurry eyes, standing beside the box, tools in hand, working on its interior.

When he noticed me stirring, he called out.

“I’ve almost finished, Carruthers, the world be damned. I’ll not let you die down here. Come what may, we’ll face it together.”

I had no means of deducing how long he’d been at work or how close he’d come to finishing, no method for extrapolating how Talos would react if I tried to restrain the       professor before the box was complete.

All I knew for certain was the professor could be finished in a snap and that, in his madness, he’d revealed to our jailer where his true weakness lay. So that now, Talos need only to coil me within his metal embrace and start to slowly squeeze to bend the professor to his aurichalcum will.

From the tray next to my dearest friend Thomas Washington Kelly, I took the largest spanner and brought it down squarely on the top of his crown, acting as swiftly as I could to preempt any attempt the automaton might take to stop me, and before any weakness of my all too human heart might break my resolve to act.

I record this now while my mentor’s blood pools at my feet, and Talos still watches and waits. Judge me if you must for what I have done, even if it was done to save you. I have adjusted the burners to blow. If my calculations are correct, the explosion will be enough to ignite the natural gas stored in the nearby bedrock, causing the tower far above me to collapse and fill the shaft that leads to this secret laboratory. Burying the professor, the automaton, the box, and me beneath the wreckage of the Palace of Science.

I will place this disk in one of the vents where the force of the explosion will lift it to rest nearer to the surface. Know that only damnation lies below it, and the fate of humanity now turns on you.

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Host Commentary

By Valerie Valdes

Once again, that was part two of In the Palace of Science by Chris Campbell.

Chris had this to say about his story:
“I will share the two men whose lives most inspired the piece.

The first is ​​Lewis Latimer, the often-overlooked designer of the improved carbon filaments for light bulbs. His work on the light bulb’s design produced a dramatic increase in luminosity along with a sizable extension of lifetime hours. These practical and functional improvements were absolutely necessary for their mass market adoption.

The second is Thomas Washington Talley, the first Black chemistry professor to teach at a major American university and the collector of two formative volumes of African American oral folktales. I used Talley’s work, specifically the forwards to his volume The Negro Traditions, in the development of the narrator’s voice as a scientist and scholar with a keen sense of race and class consciousness informing his oral performance.

Both Latimer and Talley are men with noteworthy accomplishments who nonetheless faded into insignificance because they lived within a dominant culture that made no room for their excellence to be celebrated. The mythologizing of Edison erased Latimer’s contributions, while Talley’s achievements as a folklorist disappeared into the shadow of Chandler Harris.”

While the erasure of marginalized people from history has occurred for as long as we’ve had history to erase, watching it happen right now in real time in the US has nonetheless been agonizing. Bad enough that the use of predictive text programs has led to the so-called hallucination of things that never happened, but which the people using those programs treat as facts. The actual historical record is being literally, systematically deleted by the government, as if doing so can somehow just as easily eliminate the removed people and events from our world. In this story, the narrator nobly sacrifices himself for the greater good, hoping that the loss of one man will save all of humanity. But as we consider how it all began, with the discovery of the recordings of his experiences, we find that history is not so easily buried or destroyed. There will always be those who fail to heed the warnings of the past and are thus doomed to repeat it; there will always be people eager to open Pandora’s box or Bluebeard’s locked door. But so too will there always be people who do their best to close the lid and try to cram the evils back inside, and those who refuse to let bodies continue to pile up in the secret chamber. Say their names.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

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And our closing quotation this week is from Lewis Latimer, who said: “We create our future, by well improving present opportunities: however few and small they be.”