Trurl and the Great Rejemation Carousel
In the high epoch of cybernetic feudalism, the realm of Bureaucratia was divided into eighty rival baronies, each fortified behind stone battlements, barbed wire, and private hiring portals.
Whenever an itinerant automaton or journeyman mechanician set out to seek honest labor, an ordeal of grotesque redundancy greeted him. If he approached the smog-choked citadel of the Margrave of Salesforce, the gatekeeper demanded a fresh biographical slate. The applicant had to carve sixteen identical copper tiles detailing his birth-crank, his operating voltage, and his previous apprenticeships, followed by an eight-character secret cipher containing an astrological glyph and an exclamation mark.
Half a league to the north stood the stone castle of the Baron of Box. There, the sentries rejected the Margrave’s copper tiles with disgust. They compelled the traveler to forge seventeen parchment scrolls, swear fealty in a second dialect, and invent a new set of secret credentials.
By the tenth fortress, the mechanician’s joints were rusted from weeping in the rain, his memory registers were clogged with thirty passwords he could no longer untangle, and his metal knuckles were worn flat from rapping on indifferent portcullises.
Hearing the pitiful clanking of these starving vagabonds, the renowned Constructor Trurl resolved to intervene.
Over seven sleepless fortnights in his workshop, amidst heaps of brass piping, Geneva drives, and gilded baroque moldings, Trurl built the Great Engine of Work-Daia. He rolled it into the central plaza on heavy iron casters, flanked by Roman-crested mechanical legionnaires who kept the unruly crowds at bay with clockwork halberds.
The machine stood taller than a hay-wain. Upon its brow rested the royal crest and a proud brass plate inscribed: WORK-DAIA. Just beneath the upper exhaust flues sat a narrow, precision-milled aperture titled UNIVERSAL MASTER DOSSIER.
“Behold!” Trurl proclaimed, raising his bronze-tipped staff and pointing at the aperture with majestic certainty. “The curse of thirty passwords is ended! An artisan needs only punch his attributes into a single perforated copper sheet. Feed the slate into this intake slot, and through our network of subterranean pneumatic tubes, your pedigree is instantly presented across all eighty baronies!”
A lean copper automaton, whose knee-joints had begun to squeak from years of unemployment, stepped forward. Trembling with hope, he fed his punched card into the slot.
Inside the cabinet, brass cogs whirred, escapements ticked, and pressure needles fluttered. High on the mountain ridges behind the plaza, optical semaphores atop the castle of the Baron of Box and the spires of the Margrave of Salesforce began to twitch in acknowledgment.
Yet standing beside Trurl, his old friend and rival Klapaucius held a pair of heavy brass stereoscopic binoculars to his optical sensors, studying the contraption with skeptical squinting.
“A commendable postal delivery box, Trurl,” Klapaucius observed, tapping his own chest plate. “Yet observe what occurs at the other end of the wire. The Chief Examiner at the Margrave of Salesforce receives eight thousand slates for three bench openings. He casts seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven slates down the rubbish funnel into the moat. The rejected smiths sit on the riverbank, patch their dented casings, and walk four leagues through the mud to the Baron of Box, completely ignorant that the Baron posted a requisition this morning for twenty smiths of their exact gauge!”
“Do you take me for an amateur, Klapaucius?” Trurl snorted, his mustache twitching with indignation. “Do you imagine I would build an engine that merely automates the delivery of disappointment?”
Trurl struck the lower flank of the cabinet with the flat of his palm.
A trapdoor sprang open with a pneumatic hiss, revealing a second mechanism labeled in bold copper letters: REJEMATION CAROUSEL.
Beneath the word, a curved chute spun like an astronomical model. As the rejection signal flashed from the Margrave’s watchtower, the Rejemation Carousel caught the tumbling plate in mid-air, spun it through three internal prisms, measured its punch-holes against the general ledger of neighboring deficits, and diverted it straight down a polished copper spiral track.
The track swept out of the machine’s belly, leaped over the city wall, and bridged the chasm directly toward the parapets of the Baron of Box.
“See?” Trurl cried, as the slate shot whistling down the rail like an express bullet. “Rejection at Portal A triggers immediate appraisal at Portals B, C, and D! The artisan skips the pilgrimage through the dirt. The hiring barons cease their tedious laments about the famine of skilled labor. And the entire continent turns from an obstacle course of slammed gates into a self-sorting, perpetual carousel of productive employment!”
Klapaucius lowered his binoculars and watched the punched slate sail cleanly through an open window in the Baron’s tower, where a bell promptly chimed in celebration.
“Impressive geometry, Trurl,” Klapaucius admitted grudgingly. “Though tell me: what happens when the candidate arrives at Portal B, and the Baron’s automated questionnaire asks him to re-enter his current address, his mother’s maiden diode, and forty years of work history by hand into an unformatted text box?”
Trurl’s face darkened, and he reached back into his toolbag for a heavier wrench. “That,” he muttered through gritted teeth, “is what the high-explosive attachment on the intake pipe is for.”