A quick-fire response to Diana’s May photo prompt. Steam punk isn’t my thing, so this is a first for me, and it isn’t even a story…
Pixabay image by Brigitte Werner
The world whispered and sighed to the sound of wheels turning, valves hissing and the soft clicking of gears. Horse hooves beat time, and the pistons of steam engines rattled louder than anything but thunder. Cities had risen and spread in a regular, ordered fashion and society acquiesced to a hierarchy that never changed. The secret lay in the great clock that ticked at the heart of the earth.
Time had ticked since the methodical unfurling of the first fern and the faint throb of bioluminescent proto-fish in the ocean depths. It ticked soft and gentle for millennia and millennia, regular and unfailing. Bird throats chirruped steadily; clip-clopping and pattering animals stepped in time to the universal dance. The hidden iron-nickel wheels turned, stirring the earth’s molten core and sending waves through its magnetic field to draw up tides, swell oceans, bowl winds and storms across the distant outer crust where the ferns grew taller and the fish grew monstrous and famished.
Wheels and gears shifted and the ticking grew louder, more insistent. Time called for a new era to begin and sent the waves into flux, drawing and pulling new spirals of DNA and twisting them into a new creature that would order the anarchy of the crust. Man.
Man sprang from the tepid swamps and desert winds and walked to the higher ground, clearing it of invasive and threatening species multiplying with the regularity of turning wheels and cogs. Wheels and cogs, then pistons using the motion of fire and steam, man fashioned the world after his own image, to function unfailingly, undying, with no irregularity, no flights of fantasy, no wondering why or how. Man, made in the image of the creator, functioned. And the great clock at the centre of the world ticked in satisfaction and saw that is was good.
Time ticked.
Jane Dougherty Writes 
Man sprang from the tepid swamps and desert winds?
Ha, I love this one.
Made to run like clockwork, with the imagination of a clock as well…
You are good at any genre because your imagination is wild.
Wild is the word. And it never sleeps. Unfortunately.
What Bojana said. 🙂
Also, pistons is another good word (especially when combined with wheels and cogs). 🙂
I have absolutely no practical knowledge of anything remotely mechanical but I like the vocabulary 🙂
I’m the same way (as you might guess). 🙂
It would be odd if you weren’t 🙂
🙂
Wow. You just whipped this one off, huh? It’s fabulous, Jane. I love the imagery and metaphor. It has a frightening sense of grinding forward, of machinery that while creating order is also out of control. My goodness, you can write. I’ll share tomorrow. 🙂 Thank you!
Thank you! It isn’t really a story, just an extended metaphor. I’m glad you like it though 🙂
Yes, but so evocative. It’s really stunning.
I think the best thing about steam punk is all those cogs and wheels. Not sure where the model with the brand name showing on the waistband of his knickers fits in though 🙂
Ha ha ha. A couple stories (the comedians) picked up on the underwear. 🙂
The image is like a book cover for a particular type of ‘romance’ souped up to fit a steam punk novel and that waistband kills it for me 🙂
Lol. Thanks for the laugh. Ha ha ha.
🙂
Clockwork time is such a human invention. (K)
And we’re going to follow our notion of what should be right until the mechanism breaks down.
without any idea of how to live any other way…
Reblogged this on Myths of the Mirror and commented:
Jane’s amazing response to the prompt. I hope you enjoy the read. 🙂
Thank you, Diana!
You’re welcome. A wonderful piece of writing. 🙂
🙂
Excellent. A most inventive piece of writing.
Thank you!
Awesome! I truly love this and would like to read more. Steampunk may not be your thing but you sure nailed it here.
Thanks Lyn, I’m glad you think it worked though I don’t think I’d be able to sustain any more than this. Steampunk doesn’t seem logical to me—pseudo Victorian instead of pseudo-Medieval. Same difference.
I don’t know steampunk from just plain funky, but this story is punkishly metaphorically phantastic. And if I want to go deep into it (and I kind of have no choice), I wonder if deep inside, we all have little wheels clicking out our time, the movement made by the Great Clockmaker. ❤
That makes better sense to me than the steampunk world that has a normal-paced technological development until it reaches the age of steam and then it stops. Nobody discovers anything else, just different configurations of wheels and pistons. Your idea that humanity reaches its apogee with the invention of clockwork because we are made up of cogs and wheels would make perfect sense 🙂
This doesn’t sound like the kind of world I would want to live in…
Me neither. Nightmarish. Thanks for reblogging, Anita 🙂
Reblogged this on anita dawes and jaye marie.
I love the ever-ticking, pacing tone of this.
Thanks, Chelsea 🙂