"Father, come find us!" they cry, their voices drifting from the depths of the gargantuan machine built beneath his mansion.
He is a wealthy industrialist, a man of "vision," but his memory is a fractured mirror. He remembers a disastrous expedition to Mexico; he remembers the crushing grief of losing his wife; and most piercingly, he remembers the voices of his two sons, Edwin and Enoch.
The story ends at the pulsing heart of the engine. To stop the Machine from "harvesting" the world, Oswald must pay the ultimate price. He climbs into the crushing gears, choosing to end his own life and his horrific legacy, silencing the pigs and the metal heartbeat forever.
The deeper Oswald goes, the more the sickening truth reveals itself. He didn't just build the Machine; he fed it. In a desperate, mad attempt to "spare" his sons from a future of war and suffering, he sacrificed them to his creation. The voices he hears aren't pleas for rescue—they are echoes of a tragedy he orchestrated.
Oswald is not alone in the dark. The —grotesque, stitched-together abominations of swine and human flesh—patrol the catwalks. They are the Machine's children, and they are hungry.
In the soot-stained heart of 1899 London, Oswald Mandus wakes to the sound of a rhythmic, metallic heartbeat. It isn’t his own.