The Sartre Mechanism.

I had just fought my way through a blizzard, on the request of a friend who invited me over to witness the completion of a recent project. I hung my snow-covered coat on something that, by the look of it, might very well have been a time machine. A silhouetted shape across the dark room, invites me to make my way through the unlit workshop and join them.

Arched over a heap of what I first perceived to be a exposed innards of some camera-like mechanism, my friend held a minuscule weight above an equally small machined brass hand. After allowing only ever the briefest of time to settle myself before the inscrutable contraption, they carefully lowered a pea-sized weight onto the machine's opened palm. Whirring and clicking, a second arm emerged. Plucking a gear out from its own ticking body, the clasp gently swung across and over itself to lay the cog down into a velveted box at its side.

For each ascending counter-weight descended a ballet of tiny articulated ratchets spun at the end of rotating arms. Little hammers knocked screws off, pulleys pried pins out of their holes, each equally occupied at the business of their own dismantlement. Screws, nuts, bolts, shims, and soon the fingers and the ratchet themselves, joined the rest of the hardware in the cushioned cut holes where each and every bit of the machine was expected to land.

A single weight swayed, balanced at the end of the last tin rod, every other thing already thrown in their place to rest. All but these two components rested in the box, the equilibrium broke, the rod tilted toward the box; both fell exhausted in their designated shapes.

Written by Voidshaper & Neauoire.