Dopecentury I --- The Crawler
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
Wheels as tall as houses, a long line of them, stretching back, over the horizon. They turn, or churn, with an elegant steady pace. A human pace. A walking pace.
One might note a particular spot, say toward the bottom of a wheel, and track that spot on its course. It would climb with unrelenting patience. First backward against gravity, then up the long hill to the apex, and then — as if fighting the steepness of the descending curve, down down down without variation, neither gaining nor losing on any of its potentially imagined neighbors, until it crosses the forward most point of the wheel and flies downward along its final graceful arc to land at the ground again.
The wheels are heavy. Something obvious from both their material — a weighty metal, likely some amalgam of steel — and a visual weight. And they lay heavily upon the ground, crushing small rocks — and not-so-small rocks — beneath them to dust as they pass over.
And the next wheel back, the same thing. And after that, and after that. All the way to the fucking horizon. And two sets of them. One on either side of the snaking long machine they supported between them.
Considered on end it would be something of a mile high. Stretched along the floor of the valley, undulating up and down with the slight variations in the level of the landscape. On end, as a building, it might contain five-hundred or more floors of human activity. But the activity of a building must move to and from the stationary location of the building. Conversely, this machine clearly moved the human activity to a location. As such, it becomes difficult to imagine that its contents were all humans. It must move some kind of product or material. Surely an ore, an extraction — some variety of commodity.
So much dust. The dust rises around the wheels. The machine floats on a cushion of the dust. The land it crosses is already dusty. But the dust generally remains settled, except for the occasional windstorm that spins up down the black mountains in the distance and blows across the plain driving the stinging grit before it. When that happens, the little animals hide in their holes, and the wind turns from gentle breezes to a stirred-up liquid force to be reckoned with. It is a force capable of stripping paint from vehicles, flesh from bone.
And when it passes the dust settles down and cakes along the floor of the valley, and the little animals crawl back out from their holes and resume their meek lives until the next wind off the black mountains in the distance.
The machine rolls, crawls along in its cloud of dust. The line it forms along the valley floor points to the distant black mountains. It points to a flame that rises from those mountains. Flaring from some industry. The flames light the underside of the low dark clouds that cling to the distant black mountains. It is possible that it is raining there.
The machine moves forward at an elegant steady pace. A humane pace. A walking pace. Indeed, next to it are walkers. Humans who are occupied with tending the machine. They are wrapped in loose cloth, which loops over their mouths to filter the dust. In their hands they carry sundry tools: oil cans, heavy wrenches, long thin tap hammers, and radios with whip antennas. A handful of people stride next to the machine every few hundred meters. On occasion, a radio squawks, and a person responds by grabbing the rungs of one of the steel ladders that hang down the side, and climbing up to walk along the top of the machine to whatever location needs attention. None of this is ever done in a rush. The machines moves slowly, steadily. And the people who tend it move slowly, steadily as well.
The largest group of people walk aside the first section of the machine. For it is hear that the machine is powered, by diesel engines three stories high. There are people who walk at the very front — though not in front — of the machine, who are tasked with checking the ground ahead to make sure the machine is not headed towards something that could potentially foul it. That scenario would be a disaster — sometimes it takes weeks to set a machine such as this aright.
Others toward the front are to remain available for any needs particular to the engines. For the engines have many needs. It is estimated that with the number of parts involved, an individual part is likely to wear out every hundred hours of operation. Those parts are replaced en route, for it is not one giant engine, but four, and only one of the four powers the machine at any given time. A second is kept running at all times, and two more are held in reserve. Not truly in reserve, since the four engines are rotated through equally.
Switching the drive engine is an operation. The machine is put into neutral and allowed to free-wheel for a moment while the current drive engine is disconnected via a series of levers in the engine control room at the top of the engine stack. The new drive engine is revved up to an rpm that matches the current drive shaft spin speed. And then slowly, gently, the new drive engine is eased into powering the machine. If all goes well, it is a smooth operation that is barely detectable anywhere along the machine. If it does not, people lose their jobs.
The engines are loud. They roll with a persistent roar that does not change since the machine’s speed does not change. When climbing a slope it may pitch up slightly, and when descending the pitch may drop. But normally, the roar washes over the flats of the plain and bounces off the distant black mountains, to come back as a clear echo that layers on top of the current roar and compounds it. The wash of sound flows back and forth and repeats endlessly.
Far back down the length of the machine, the engine roar is distant. Those who walk there might attend more to the sound of the rock crushed under the steel wheels near them rather that the distant reverberations of the engines. The sound far back along the machine is akin to a kind of silence, though only that in comparison to the roaring drone at the front. The hell fire cacophony of apocalypse has passed on ahead, and all that’s left is the quiet valley floor, being crushed to dust.
Follow the machine to the very rear, a mile off behind, to find the last few tenders walking along and occasionally behind the machine. Atop the final segment is a watchtower. Constructed of welded steel with a thin steel ladder for access, it rises twenty feet above the top of the machine. It is glassed in, to protect against the storms that cross the valley. An operator sits in there and watches up the length of the machine, radio at the ready. This operator is not solely responsible for the health of the machine — there is a full control room half way along — but is the last chance to catch something before it goes wrong.
The machine rolls along at an elegant, steady pace. A human pace. All along before the observer. In a long thin line that stretches out ahead to the horizon. The route already laid. The path that will be followed is clear.