Blood Vivicanti (9781941240113) Read Online Free

better view of my machine.
    I had been assembling it
for some time. I had to dive deep into the trove of my photographic
memories. I had to juxtapose old ideas to create new ones. I used
almost all the Blood Memory knowledge I had of architecture,
engineering, trigonometry, calculus, logic, and
Whac-A-Mole.
     
     
     
     
    The farther away I backed,
the tinier the cogwheel became, and the tinier it became, the more
it seemed to meld into an even larger and more complex assemblage
of cogwheels.
    The ticking and tocking
filled the whole room. It was like time counting down to something
terrible and great.
     
     
     
     
    Still, I backed
away.
    The large, complex
assemblage melded into an even greater and more intricate network
of gears, some gears large, some small, some gears internal, some
beveled, some gears helical, some spiral, some hypoid or crown or
worm. There were racks and pinions, suns and planets. There were
cage gears and magnetic gears. There was epicyclic gearing and
harmonic drives. Each worked perfectly together in a delicately
choreographed dance of inter-twining metal and teeth.
     
     
     
     
    A human would most likely
look at all this and only see old copper and brass tubes and more
wiring. A human would naturally mistake my boy as a mere machine
that could not move. A human would probably not have seen that this
was actually the forearm of a massive mechanical man, my
boy.
     
     
     
     
    Backing up, I could see
most of him.
    I had made every inch. I
had tightened every screw with my fingers. I had carried every
metal plate as if it were weightless.
    His ticking and tocking
that echoed throughout the room was the sound of his
heart.
    He seemed to have popped
from my head like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. He was alive
and there would be no shutting him off.
    I christened my boy
“Steam.”
     
     
     
     
    Growing up, my parents did
not understand me very well. They had had a child who was entirely
unlike them. But they had made me via the uncontrollable randomness
of childbirth – like most humans.
    But I was human no more.
And I wanted to be a better parent. I was seeking to control every
step of my boy’s conception and birth. So I made Steam in my own
image and likeness.
    No, he was not a girl. But
his epidermal plates were like my skin. His pipes and wiring were
like my veins. He was propelled by steam the way blood propels
me.
    Unfortunately, my image and
likeness also happened to be legless. I just hadn’t gotten around
to building the workings beneath his torso.
    No naughty bits.
Sorry.
     
     
     
     
    Backing up as far as I
could go, standing atop a car of the Labyrinth Fort, I got a great
view of Steam.
    He might have been only a
torso, arms, and head, but he was my boy, and he looked
awesome!
    His head had come together
from a mixture of railcars, mostly from observation cars, sleeping
cars, dining cars, and boxcars.
    His shoulders and upper
arms had been made from an assortment of tank
locomotives.
    His hands and fingers were
made from the various parts of railway snowplows, railway guns, and
cabooses.
    Behind each shoulder were
massive steam stacks.
    His mouth and nose was a
grill. Behind it was a great fire, burning and glowing and growing
more and more intense. His eye sockets flickered with the
flames.
    He dwarfed me.
    I was so proud of
him.
     
     
     
     
    Back in the Black
Building…
    Lowen was torturing Wyn. He
was still in Theo’s young and lean body. He had no plan of
possessing anyone else for a long time.
    He had other plans for
Wyn.
     
     
     
     
    They were in Lowen’s
laboratory.
    He had him strapped down to
a table, the way Theo had been before Lowen’s ghost possessed his
body, with his arms stretched out like the Son of God on the
Cross.
    “ You’ve surprised me,” Lowen
said to Wyn. “You’ve been a little more resilient than my current
host body.”
    Wyn hadn’t had blood in
that month’s time. He was panting heavily from weariness. He