Transaction Engines

Every steampunk sequence eventually has to reckon with Charles Babbage. He is the reference the field cannot avoid — a real Victorian gentleman who really did design a mechanical computer and really did fail to finish it, and whose ghost has been sitting patiently on the shoulder of the genre ever since, tapping the writer politely on the ear and asking whether they have considered what an actual nineteenth century full of Difference Engines might look like. Gibson and Sterling made a distinguished job of that question in 1990 and rather cornered the market on it, at least in the English-language shorthand. For a while, “Babbage did it” became a kind of steampunk hors d’oeuvre: acknowledged, nibbled, moved past.

Stephen Hunt, working the Jackelian sequence from a rather different angle, does something more useful. He asks the follow-up question. Not what if Babbage did it. What if the state got hold of the results?

The answer, and this will not surprise anyone who has ever queued at a Post Office, is Transaction Engines. Vast, steam-driven, punch-card-hungry, and — this is important — largely under civil-service management. The Kingdom of Jackals is one of the more computationally literate polities in modern flintlock fantasy, and its administrative apparatus is powered by a fleet of these engines humming away in the sub-basements of Greenhall, the Middlesteel building complex where a great deal of what Jackals believes about itself is stored on brass and pasteboard. Everything is on cards. Everything. This will become important.

What a Transaction Engine actually is

A Transaction Engine, in its full institutional form, is a room. Or, more accurately, it is a series of rooms — one for the boilers, one for the drive shafts, one for the calculating deck, several for the card-storage, one for the mechanists on shift, and one for the mechanists on relief. It is entered through a door that is heavier than doors usually are, because on the other side of the door it is warm and loud in a way that ordinary rooms are not, and if one is going to bring a Cassarabian ambassador through for a courteous tour of the state’s inner workings, the door is what stops the ambassador from realising that the state’s inner workings sound like a distillery having an argument with a printing press.

Cards go in one end. Cards come out the other end. In between them, a considerable investment of Jackelian public money — heated by boilers, moved by pistons, sorted by needle-slots, and tended by a workforce that has developed its own vocabulary — arrives at conclusions the state has decided it wanted to arrive at. The conclusions are then, in most cases, written down again onto more cards, which are filed. The cycle continues.

Anyone who has ever worked in a modern data centre will recognise the essential logic. Anyone who has never worked in a modern data centre will nevertheless recognise the sound of it: a large machine that is doing something extremely important very loudly, and that will need to be shut down for maintenance the moment anything genuinely important goes wrong.

What they do for Jackals

The list is longer than one might expect, and Hunt is generous with the detail across the sequence.

The engines run the tax rolls. They run the census. They run the worldsingers’ registration files — every registered feybreed in the Kingdom has a card somewhere in the Greenhall stacks, and if the card is misfiled, the citizen it represents is, in an administrative sense, either invisible or wanted, and neither state is comfortable. They run the criminal records. They run the celgas ledgers, which are more politically sensitive than the criminal records because celgas is money. They run the pneumatic post’s routing, more or less; and when the routing goes off, so does the mail, which is why the Post Office has its own dedicated engine in a separate building with its own boiler and its own mechanists and its own frankly quite territorial attitude towards the rest of the civil service.

They also run — and this is the fact readers will want to sit with — a great deal of the machinery of state secrecy. The Court of the Air, being an institution that officially does not exist, is presumably not using Greenhall’s engines to keep its files. It is very obviously using engines of its own, running outside parliamentary oversight, storing observations about people who do not know they are being observed. Nobody in the sequence ever says this out loud. Nobody needs to. Anyone who has ever administered a real state’s real records will recognise the shape of the missing paragraph.

What could possibly go wrong

Everything. This is the whole point of the subtitle.

Physical cards jam. They get filed in the wrong tray by a tired clerk on a Friday afternoon and the citizen they represent spends the next eleven months being administratively dead. They get water-damaged. They get eaten — genuinely, not metaphorically — by the sub-basement rodent population, who have opinions about the paste in the punch-card stock. They get misread by needle-slots that have gone a fraction out of true, and the citizen is then reclassified from taxpayer in good standing to taxpayer in arrears, or worse.

Above the physical layer, there is the editorial layer, which is where Hunt has his fun. A Transaction Engine does not audit itself. Its output is only as honest as the mechanists tending it. A civil servant with a grievance and access to a stylus can rewrite a citizen’s history over the course of an afternoon and be home for dinner. A civil servant with a Carlist sympathy and access to the same stylus can rewrite rather more than that. A civil servant working, quietly, for someone who is not exactly the Kingdom’s government but is not exactly not the Kingdom’s government either, can do things with the engines that the Kingdom’s government would have strong opinions about, if the Kingdom’s government were ever told.

And above the editorial layer — the layer that keeps every criminal writer of the sequence in beer — there is the criminal layer. Cardsharps, in Jackelian argot, are the people who understand the engines. Some of them are respectable state employees with brass epaulettes and pension entitlements. Some of them are not, and one of the sequence’s most reliable subplots is the interface between the two populations. A card is a physical object. It can be substituted. It can be forged. It can be stolen. If you can get to the storage room, you can get to the record; and if you can get to the record, you can be someone the state will pay handsomely for the rest of its natural life. The pleasures of this trade are considerable and Hunt does not pretend otherwise.

The politics

Underneath everything, there is a very serious point.

Who controls the records controls the country. The Kingdom of Jackals is a parliamentary state, but parliament sits on top of an administrative apparatus that outlives every election, and the administrative apparatus runs on machinery that only a small class of experts understands. That is the same problem the modern reader recognises from every article about modern governance one has ever wearily read, and Hunt is well aware of the parallel. The Jackelian version of it is drawn with punch-cards and steam because that is what the world of the novels affords; but the shape of the problem — the state whose people cannot audit their own records because the records are stored in a way none of them can read — is entirely the shape of the current century’s version, and Hunt is making the point deliberately.

The comic material is in the surface. The political material is underneath it. Both are the pleasure of reading him.

Where you meet them

Book One, The Court of the Air, has a Greenhall visit and a worldsinger file that the reader would very much like to see the contents of. Book Four, Secrets of the Fire Sea, does interesting work with Jagoan administrative infrastructure that has its own parallel to Greenhall’s. Book Six, From the Deep of the Dark, has a thief in it, and thieves are always interested in what is stored on cards and where. Across the whole sequence, whenever a Jackelian citizen turns out to be someone entirely different from the person the state believed them to be, one is entitled to assume that a Transaction Engine has been, in one direction or another, quietly involved.

Take a card. Punch it. File it. Try not to be the one it is about.