BunnehBlog

The Gyre
“When did it all begin? That’s nearly impossible to say, really. Perhaps it was in 1784, when James Watt patented his steam engine. Looking back now, it seems like the world changed virtually overnight. More and more inventors, more and more fantastic devices, each one more amazing than the last. Where once there were a handful of brilliant scientists, toiling away thanklessly in the darkness, now there were scores of them, hundreds, even thousands. Things once thought simply impossible were now the stuff of everyday life, and it didn’t end there. No. That’s just where it began.”

“In the year of our Lord 1837, Buckingham Palace commissioned a new clock to be built in honor of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne. The Clockmakers Guild of London took this challenge as a point of pride for our skill and reputation, and we spared no expense. Each part, no matter how small, was hand-crafted by the finest machinists in England. Rare woods, ivory, and gemstones were imported from all across the Empire, from Africa to India. It took our greatest craftsmen working day and night over a year to complete this masterpiece. We called it simply “The Gyre.”

“On the night of the celebration, the heads of our Guild proudly stood before our creation. With a majestic flourish, Master Clockmaker Hermann von Schreiber turned the key to wind the Gyre…

“…And nothing happened. The magnificent clock did not start. Neither a tick nor a tock was heard from its inner workings; its bejeweled hands did not move.

“The young Queen was gracious, forgiving our Guild this unintentional slight, but we were of course mortified beyond belief. The pride of our entire organization rested on repairing our faulty creation, and we worked for months attempting to figure out what had gone wrong. We disassembled the entire mechanism, down to the tiniest screw, searching for a flaw. We rebuilt it from the ground up, carefully, slowly, taking every possible care.

“And still, the clock would not run. As if it were defying the very laws that govern the universe, the clock would not run!”

“It shames me to this day to admit it, but we were defeated. We had little choice but to completely scrap our grand project. With heavy hearts we prepared to disassemble the great clock. But then something happened… The clock began to tick. Slowly, ponderously, as if time itself was struggling through a sea of treacle, the second hand began to turn.

“I shall remember that moment until my dying day. Dark shadows flickered across the walls. An icy chill filled the air as we watched, fascinated. The clock ran, the hands turning almost imperceptibly, for several hours. And then it stopped. On the clock, five hours had passed. We were baffled. No one had touched it -- indeed, the clock hadn’t even been wound! It ran by itself, for no reason. And it would not run again, even when we attempted to restart it.

“Weeks later, word came in from abroad. There had been a terrible battle in the North-West Frontier Province of India; over 12,000 brave and loyal British soldiers were slaughtered by rampaging Pashtun tribesmen. When reports of this reached our ears, we were struck with the odd happenstance – the massacre had happened at exactly the same time as our clock had been running!

“Of course, we chalked it up to simple coincidence at the time,” the professor leaned back in his chair and shook his head sadly. “But then it happened again. Shadows filled the room, an icy breeze ruffled our clothes and hair, and the clock began to run. I cannot say why, but we knew at that point – somehow we knew – that something terrible was happening in the world just at that moment.

“The passenger steamer SS Newcastle went down at sea. Nearly three hundred men, women, and children perished in the North Atlantic while our clock ticked slowly on. And that was when we realized that the world had changed; that we had created not a mere timepiece, but a window to another world. We, fools that we were, didn’t know what to do, so we did nothing. It was a time of waiting.”