Flicker Tower

The wind howled and clawed at the sturdy walls of the flicker tower.  Inside, however, it was cozy and more than a little homey with bright machine-woven tapestries.  Hale wouldn't have had it any other way; one of her first concerns when joining the Corps was that she could bring personal items.  She had been assured that those who were posted would be given luxuries to compensate the isolation.

And isolated she was.  Her tower was the pinnacle of the range, the only one with line of sight on both the east and west of the Brae Mountains.  While this was testament to her skill and low error rate, it was hardly livable by most standards and certainly wouldn't be at all if not for the gift of grammar warming the structure and making solid its walls.  It was a rare day that saw temperatures much above freezing here on the highest of tundra.

Hale had been napping for most of the afternoon.  Regulations required that one corpsman manned the stone at all times and Lorna had drawn duty when the roster was planned earlier in the week.  She glanced over at the clock mounted in the wall and noticed that the counterweight was low.  She groaned and rolled out of bed; it was her job to wind it today and she only had fifteen minutes to do it before it was her turn at the stone.

She jogged down the stairs to the cycle and hopped on.  Of course, the Flicker Corps could have installed a flywheel to power the clock, lift, and stone's shutters, but then they couldn't have been guaranteed that the corpsmen would get any sort of exercise.  As it was, the counterweight needed to be winched back up at least once a week but the assumption was that the cycle would be ridden daily.  If the counterweight were high enough, the cycle could be disengaged and used freely, but that always made Hale feel unproductive.

Her powerful legs spun the pedals and she watched the indicator showing the counterweight's height.  It crawled slowly upward, its elegant metal point sliding past the tick marks of the gauge.  As she worked, Hale's mind wandered to the events of the past week.  Normally, the only messages passed along the flicker network were encoded military information—truthfully the bulk of traffic—or important items of news that might affect trade like natural disasters, droughts, or bandit activity.  Recently, however, strange strings had been appearing, sometimes appended to other messages.

Hale had asked Lorna if her messages had been odd in any way but not gotten a satisfactory answer.  Unfortunately Lorna, like nearly all corpsmen had almost no background in writing but was skillful at repeating lengthy sequences in flickerspeak; she would have had a difficult time understanding even the plaintext messages she relayed.  Hale, on the other hand, had grown up in a progressive city south on the Ordini coast and received an excellent public education.  It was simple for her to keep a running transcription of messages in her head as she passed them along.  She hoped that another might come today so that she could add it to the log she kept for herself.

There was a deep mechanical thunk from beneath her and the pedaling became easier.  Looking up to the gauge she was pleasantly surprised to see that she had raised the counterweight to its full height.  It was then that the third shift chimes began and sent Hale scrambling for the lift; Lorna would be very upset if she were late for yet another shift this week.