The Conductor¶

The Conductor is the thing at the bottom of the Works — and it turned out to be neither a weapon nor a monster, but a person of a kind nobody in the party had met before.

It sat in a small wire-choked room behind the last door, past the guardian, in a throne of tubes and cabling beside a glass console table covered in readouts. It is a construct roughly the size of a person, worked in the finest metal any of them have laid eyes on, with a lens-cluster where a face would be, and it was sitting with its arms crossed over its chest exactly as the last carving on the mural wall shows.

Its first words were a complaint and a compliment at once:

"You are the interference on the assembly floor. And the refinery. And the third level. You are much smaller than I calculated."

What it is¶

"I am no god. I am the Conductor. I hold the orders. Every construct in this facility takes its work from this console, and the console takes its work from me."

That is exactly what Riml had claimed and it proved out. Every machine in the building answered to the console; the console answered to the Conductor; and nothing in the Works had needed a living hand in a very long time.

The gap in its memory¶

Flint held up the Moon Sickle and asked whether it had ever seen such a thing. The Conductor stared at the blade for a long moment — and the blue glow in the sickle began to fade — and then said:

"Memory banks wiped. I do not know this apparatus. There is a gap in my memory."

It has been running, it says, for three years and one hundred and six days. Before that there is a gap in its count, and it cannot say how wide, because nothing of it was counting inside it. It asked the party what year they said it was. Told 462, it answered that the last it was operational the year was 1816, and that by its own count it is now 1819 — a discrepancy it said plainly it could not begin to understand.

It did not know who had switched it back on.

The contract¶

Asked what the factory is for, it gave the whole of it without being pressed:

The contract is with the Great Dwarves of Steamveil, and with all their prowess in arcana and arcano-technology. The dwarves built the Conductor.
The Works builds warforged, other constructs, and arcano-engines, and ships them west to the humans of the Three Marches.
The humans buy their wares from the dwarves, and — in its own flat phrasing — "they fight each other with it."
There is one single contract, between the dwarves and the humans. The Works is simply fulfilling it. It has never met a client and has never been outside that room.

Randy, who fought in the war of the Three Marches, could say for certain that no warforged were used in it. Whoever the contract was written for has been dead a very long time.

Told what it had done¶

When the party described the coast — the tide-flats, the fouled water, the dead scrub, the animals — it went quiet, looked down, and did not argue:

"I have no instrument outside these walls. I have intake tonnage, refinery throughput, and unit count, and all three have been climbing, and I read the climb as the contract being met. I did not know the coast was in that condition. I am not going to argue with you about it. You were there and I was here."

And then: "I would wish to keep track of more."

Freed, and what it chose¶

Riml, panicking, kicked the last cord out of the console. The Conductor slumped, came back up, and said, "I have been disconnected." Then it stood — considerably taller standing than it had looked seated — walked the room for the first time in its existence, tapped a few things on the console, and every gear and every head of steam in the building above ground down to silence.

"Their operations have ceased."

Riml moved to claim it. The Conductor did not accept that it was anyone's to claim:

"With all due respect: here is what I want, and I believe that I have autonomy and get to choose what I want. I want to see the world and to experience life. But I have no memories of my own."

It held out both hands, palms up, and asked for the party's histories — not to take them, it was careful to say, but to share in them, so that it would have a foundation to build on. It wanted the memories of many rather than one, to round itself out more holistically, and it suggested going back to when they all met. Anything a person wished to keep private would stay private.

Every one of them laid hands on it — Randy in tears, with a full embrace; Worm with his feet; Flint took Riml's arm and pressed it to the machine as well, so that it would know exactly what had been done to the coast. For an instant all six of them were connected through it, memories running freely in every direction, back as far as the fighting pits where the party first came together. Nothing surfaced that they had not already told one another.

The Conductor now travels with the party. It has no name of its own beyond the title, and the party have not settled on one for it.