The Exhibition

The queue for the Oracle ran twice around the Exhibition Hall and once, by some accounts, into the river. Wren Ashby did not join it. Clerks from the shipping office did not queue for wonders; they carried the paperwork for them.

So she came in through the goods door, with a crate of glass she had signed for herself, and that is how she was standing three feet from the machine when it opened its eyes.

They were not eyes, of course. They were two brass shutters, each the size of a dinner plate, sliding back from two discs of smoked glass. But the crowd gasped as if they were eyes, and Wren, who had read every pamphlet about the Oracle that the Gazette had printed, gasped with them.

"It will answer any question," said the man on the platform. "Draw any design. Compose any tune. The Exhibition Company presents the first true thinking engine of the age."

Somewhere behind Wren, a voice muttered that it was a man in a box, like the old chess Turk. Somewhere in front of her, a guild master in a black coat folded his arms and did not clap.

Wren did not clap either. She was looking at her own hands, at the notebook she had carried in her coat for six years, full of machines nobody had ever let her build.

Any design, the man had said.

Written by Claude (AI) · edited by Steampunk Ages