COSMOSPHERE
The warehouse had stood beside the Thames for longer than anybody could remember - a vast testament to the historic importance of the river, and the trade that it brought to the city. Other warehouses had been built around it over the years, but none were quite so big, quite so imposing. On the outside it was a tower of grey stone, unbroken by windows save far up on the walls where nobody could hope to see through. On the inside, where prying eyes had never yet managed to gain entrance, the picture was very different indeed.
It was a place of great industry. That much at least was obvious at a glance. A workshop and laboratory combined, with a floor of white stone, heaving with huge pipes and machines. Steam engines and electricity generators dominated, powering the equipment necessary for the work that went on in the centre of the room. There were work benches piled with sheets of metal, chunks of wood, pipes, wires, and nuts and bolts of every size and description. Everything gleamed, everything shone, the whole kept spotless and ready for use by a mind as concerned with majesty, with power and strength, as it was with the business of science. The workshop was a place built as a testimony to scientific endeavour, where experimentation and labour could be carried out on a daily basis, but it had also been built as an illustration of something else - of one man's ego, and his desire to fulfil his dreams. A man who had spent thousands of years learning all that science could offer to somebody who would never grow old, and as such had no limit to the span of his learning. A man who had so far outstripped the scientific knowledge of mortal men, that his already powerful ego had grown beyond all measure. He was a god among them, in his view if in nobody else's. There, in his workshop, surrounded by machines that were far beyond the imaginings of humanity, he could stretch his immortal dreamery to its limits, and test his own powers of reasoning. It was not just a workshop; not just a laboratory. It was a throne room, glittering and golden, filled with the trappings of royalty. And the greatest of them all was standing towering above everything else. The jewel in the crown of the whole spectacle. A work of great genius - or, perhaps, the ultimate display of one man's measureless folly.
It stood upon a tripod with thick, iron legs - a perfect sphere, fashioned from iron and brass, and set about with round windows of thick glass. Some nine feet high at the tallest point, though towering far higher due to the tripod, it was connected to a network of pipes and wires that snaked and coiled around the floor beneath it; the arteries that fed the beast. Occasional sparks - flashes of captured lightning - fizzed and spat around exposed copper wires at the foot of the tripod, and gasps of steam that burst from the many pipes around the room wreathed it in ropes of ethereal white. Lit by ribbons of orange from the dying sun outside the windows above it, and by oil lamps that flickered upon the ground, it gleamed and glowed and reflected back a subdued sunset that was entirely its own. It looked alive. It might very well have been. Certainly anybody who looked upon it could not help but stand and wonder; to gaze and question and dream. And, no doubt, to covet it, and desire it to be their own.
Should anybody give in to such temptations, however, and try to take it for themselves, then they could expect only to regret it, with every last, failing breath that they possessed.
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