Impossible machinery

On the wall the heavy plant has stopped minding the rules. Two giant gears in a green gearbox pass straight through each other; a turbine’s blades run through a concrete pillar without a scratch; a press punches neat round holes in a drift of steam; a forge hammer stands under a ceiling it has dented into a crater, grit still falling; on a frozen shore a camera iris the size of a building closes its blades over the setting sun; a whole brick factory rides on its own conveyor belt; in a warehouse the floor is a record with a tonearm the length of a lorry on it; and a drum machine no bigger than a fuse box, set into a wall, drives a hall of enormous pistons.

The workshop’s own machines are small and do one thing each: the The metronome keeps time, and the lamp needs oil, a wick and a glass to stay lit. None of the big ones is shown taking anything in: no fuel going into them, and no hands at the controls. What comes out of them is Slop, whenever nobody decides anything, and the First Batch was their first spill; a picture doesn’t show it, and why they run is left unsaid. The one works in the games is the Slop Works, and Drip doesn’t say who works there. They are plant of that kind, running on being impossible rather than on anything that could run out; whether they are the Slop Works, the codex doesn’t claim. Like everything on the wall, the pictures are machine-made.