The Manual

            So I'll start by explaining the factory like you've never been here. That's what you want, right?

            Starting with the basic basics, like the floor? Well, as you can see: black and white tile. The way it goes on and on, it kind of fades to gray and makes you dizzy at a distance; some technicians grow to hate it. I'm positive on it myself, not sure why. But I suppose you can grow to love a thing just because it is. The ceiling is high but if you squint you can see the lights and what are probably the girders holding them up. And between the tiles and the girders here we are: the technicians, each with our own MPH4S — our own machine.

            Can I come back to the machines? And to the stations — I think the size of the place is something to get at first. The factory, after all, is huge. You can't skip over that. I don't know how big, exactly, and I don't think anyone knows. I've met techs who went looking for an end, and I either never saw them again or when I did they had a lot of stories about giant wells or long scarce regions with dust settled so thick their wheels could barely get across. But nothing about an end to the factory. No wall, no edges. Just tile, lights, girders, and stations. So even if the factory isn't infinite—which it must not be, since machines and technicians have to come from somewhere, and since they leave all the time—for my practical sense of the place, it goes on forever.

            How am I doing?

            Alright, the machines. They're a solid, practical construction. They're set on four wheels, have four flat sides and just the ladder up the back to the seat set into the top. They tend to be about my height, and maybe twice as long as they are tall. You sit on the top and that's where the gauges and controls are. Most have the hole for the gel tank in the back, and the bricks, when the machine makes them, collect in the black metal brickbasket hidden behind the front panel of the machine.

            Well, yeah — in an obvious sense, the bricks are what the machines produce. They use gel from the tank as a combination of fuel, lubricant, and raw material. The harder an MPH4S is run, usually, the more quickly it converts the gel to bricks, though bricks made too quickly, most technicians agree, are brittle and light. The machine's self-propelled, so once it's produced a full basket of bricks, we ride it to deposit the bricks at one of the gresses—okay, yeah, the gresses.

            There are four types of stations on the factory floor: gresses, wells, benches, and man-centers. Gresses and wells are the most common. The gresses are built up out of the tile and look like little buildings inside the factory. Everything coming in or leaving the factory goes through one of the three portals in a gress. First portal is the big drain for emptying the gel byproduct. Second is the big door with a belt for conveying bricks and machines in and out of the factory. And last there's the small door for technicians—this door only gets used when we first enter the factory and when we finally leave.

            […]

read the rest of “The Manual” in Bluing the Blade, Vol. 1, No. 1, where it won the 2021 Valhalla Fiction Award