Manchester, 1832
If the Derbyshire mill was a single beast, Manchester was the monster's beating heart. The air was a solid thing, a gritty, sulfurous fog that coated the lungs. Enki walked streets that ran with effluvia, the river Irk a sluggish, black poison.
He saw them—the "hands." Their faces were pale smudges in the perpetual twilight, their bodies stooped. A girl, maybe six, sat on a stoop, listlessly sorting bits of coal from a slag heap. She didn't look up. She didn't cry. She was a machine for sorting.
A factory owner's carriage rattled past. The man inside was reading a profit report, a smile on his face. This was Kur's dream made global flesh. Not a city, but a machine. Not a society, but a production line where the only purpose was to feed the engine, and the fuel was human life.
Scrapbook Entry: "They breathe smoke and call it air. They live in filth and call it progress. They have engineered a world where the soul is a design flaw. They are not building a civilization. They are operating a furnace, and we are the coal."