The renegades of that schism and their descendents became the Brotherhood of Eankke; no sanctuary was to be found beneath the firmament in the wars that ensued. The industry of Khimaire then turned to slaughter - to great engines of siege and sacrifice; in this age of mechanical warfare, advancement was rapid indeed - from the kytoon and paravane, void dirigibles and barrage balloons that encircled the heavens, ceaselessly surveilling the mire of entrenched tunnels raked into the ravaged earth beneath endless bombardment delivered from the Great Dark Sky.
To command this theatre of killing required the utmost coordination - for the land beneath was soon rent into featureless ruin and desolation. To intercept the movements of the Enemy necessitated not only secrecy, strict adherence to accurate timekeeping in accordance with the schedule of artillery - but also, simulation. Only through simulation could the manoeuvres and branching permutations of possibility behind the labyrinth of every strategem and ambush be explored and precisely evaluated. Your Lord High Intelligencer - back then, only a mere mercenary commander - was amongst the first to grasp this.
But Streynsham's imagination leapt far beyond - for he foresaw a need for a calculant engine assembled for an entirely different purpose.
>>5683931Whilst the War Office assembled vast yet crude linearithmic engines for simulating and intercepting the movements of infantry, artillery, trench formations and aerial manoeuvre - Streynsham developed and experimented with a machine that could simulate Men. The very consciousness of Being - the hidden thoughts and dreams of anyone. With such a machine - the beginnings of the Algorismus - no war could ever be fought, or indeed arise: for one could look into the motions of the mind of the Adversary, the very future of their thoughts, words and deeds, and destroy them utterly before they even knew of their own wickedness themselves. It could be said that this machine would exist outside Time itself - or at least the mortal conception of time. Streynsham realised that to create such a machine, he would have to draw upon the blasphemous rites of the Synthemata, of ancient Khimaire - for a machine thinks differently in the absence of the flesh. Streynsham even anticipated that the immense intellect of this apparatus would rapidly surpass that of any singular indvidual, perhaps even the combined cogitation of an entire city...
