The Word of the Bedlamite (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798201991142)

It's the 1920's

But in an alternate, steam-powered world

Airships, trains, steamboats

Robot cops - Robbies

A soul-grinding prison gulag

A ruler without laws ... or pity

A machine that thinks ... and plots

A gang of smugglers

A crazy man - the Bedlamite

A plan to change everything, based on ...

The Word of the Bedlamite

Excerpt: The Control Room

We were in Panama, in what we believed was the main site for the Unit, but I knew instantly the main control panels we were looking at were dead, cannibalized for parts, most likely. So I went around behind them to track the cabling.

It went into the wall quick enough, but on the other side it descended into a mass of snake-like wires and cables, lost in a row of tall cabinets - power units. I scanned the front panels, and quickly found a panel marked "Main Circuits" with two vertical rows of heavy switches.

I finger walked down the right-hand row and read the labels that remained: Air Cond, Outside Lights, Main Halls, but a couple of others had lost their labels. I scanned the left row from the top and saw it instantly, second one down: Control Room. It was flipped off, as were all the others. Likely that meant there had been an orderly shutdown of the plant, instead of some sort of catastrophic failure. Good. Maybe, just maybe...

I scanned the panel below, and there they were: Main Power West and Main Power East.

I figured, what the heck, and flipped Main Power West on. Nothing happened, as I expected. To tell the truth, I was hoping for that. No sparks or flames probably meant there weren't any obvious short circuits. I tried Main Power East. Same thing - nothing.

Okay, next step was to try the switches above. I flipped the Main Halls switch, but unfortunately no lights came on in the hall. Could be all the bulbs were taken - could be the individual switches in the halls were off. Well, I figured, let's just try the Control Room switch - see what happens.

Instantly I heard a thunk, then a hum. Eureka - power to the control room.

I ran back to the control room and around to the front of the consoles. Several had lights glowing under pushbuttons, a row of round lights lit up two-thirds the way up a stack, and one of the monitors looked like it was trying to display a readout - a wheel was turning and a needle moved, then settled back to what must have been the bottom - zero. That made sense. The monitor didn't have any input from any kind of source.

I turned off that monitor, then tried to read the indicator lights, but they were marked in another language - I guessed French or Spanish. I was confused. The power panels had been in English. Why weren't these the same?

Didn't matter. I didn't need these panels to work. I just needed there to be a connection back to ... where was it?

Ah there. On the right, a little indicator light glowing red - there was a live connection to the main unit back in Milieu's headquarters - the site of his 'tower of glory'.

I decided that since I wasn't ready to use that connection just yet, I'd better just turn everything off for now. For one thing, if I could see there was a live connection to Milieu, maybe Milieu could see that this facility, which should have been dead, was now somehow suddenly alive. I powered everything down.