The air was cold, crisp, clean.
Even at his elevation, the wind still bore traces of peat.
He surveyed his ancestral homeland, now abandoned.
Not a foreign soul for miles.
Eline shivered, wrapping her shawl around herself more tightly.
All the souls belonged to him.
Eline did not appreciate the cold. Shivering. Reacting. Like an animal. Like clockwork. He knew her as he knew all humans, as thoroughly and completely as he knew the workings of any machine. She bore the cold to be beside him. She was beside him in the cold to curry favor. She curried favor in order to advance her standing and the standing of her offspring. Knowing this, the gesture was hollow. Lucretia she was not.
He needed not gestures, merely compliance. She had never failed to be compliant, nor would she. Clockwork.
“Darling,” he said, adding an echo of warmth to his tone, “you are clearly freezing. Go back inside. I shall join you shortly.”
Few appreciated the cold. It was clean. It preserved. As it gnawed at skin, it sharpened thoughts. Few stimulants could produce such clarity. Unlike the easy, ultimately corrupting benefits of drugs, its gifts were reserved for those who could not only exist but dispassionately observe their existence.
At current, there was no slack, no movement on the great chains serpentining their way like leviathans up from the rocky surf. His island perched atop a honeycomb of helium sat placidly in the sky.
Some think of the circle as the perfect shape. It was, and it was not. An individual circle was the closest thing that existed to perfection. However, that perfection is ruined by the presence of another circle. It fits poorly with others of its kind. A circle is only perfect so long as it is solitary. It is the hexagon thus chosen by nature when nature needs bees build.
They all fit neatly, nicely, nestled in hierarchies each order neatly stacked into larger hierarchies. Nobles, merchants, peasants, servants, wives, children, grandchildren, and their further progeny. Stacked. Repeatable. Expendable. It was all but an industrious, orderly beehive.
He felt the cold distribute itself throughout his body.
Their flesh would rot while his would not.
He left the howling winds for the ticking of gears. Mechanical minds were improved by their lack of pretense. No matter how complex the mechanism, no matter how intricate the output, no one would imagine it to be anything but a machine. The computers of old were inelegant, ungracious in this respect, the people full of pretense.
Complex machinery was still not but machinery. The prerequisite of choice is the understanding of the machinery itself. Anything less was just some form or another of stimulus and reaction, a series of gears grinding against gears.
He did not react but act.
He was a circle.
Homo Economicish 