"This city is absolutely awful." Elliott Sterling casually tossed his snow fox fur cloak onto an armchair and sank into the soft bed.
"No computer, no phone, no internet, and I can't even leave this mansion. What did I transmigrate here for? To serve time?"
He lay on the bed for a moment, then suddenly pushed himself up and shouted, "Conrad! Conrad!"
Before long, a middle-aged man dressed as a butler opened the door and entered. "Young master."
"Am I still not allowed out?"
"I'm sorry, young master, but my lady's confinement order won't be lifted until the end of the year. For now, you can only stay here." Conrad, the butler, bowed slightly.
Elliott curled his lip. His body's original owner had been a playboy who spent his days shirking his responsibilities and squandering money without restraint.
The spending alone would have been fine. Given the Sterling Family's immense holdings, even if he spent with abandon, its wealth would still have grown far faster than he could squander it.
Unfortunately, the original owner had gone and courted disaster, landing himself in monumental trouble. The old butler remained deeply secretive about it, and Elliott had yet to tease out exactly what had happened. He had only vaguely heard that quite a few lives had been involved.
Human lives weren't worth much, especially those of commoners.
But for Lady Camilla, who doted on him most, to have been furious enough to confine him here for an entire year, the trouble the original owner had caused was probably far beyond imagining.
One day after he had been confined, a transmigrator's soul had taken up residence in this body.
Once he had figured out his situation, he had gone numb.
"Everyone else transmigrates and makes it big. Me? I don't even have the previous owner's memories, and I can't even leave the house?"
After trying unsuccessfully to sneak out for several days, Elliott had reluctantly given up.
"Conrad," Elliott asked listlessly, "is there anything fun to do? Preferably something involving supernatural powers."
Did this world have anything supernatural? Elliott didn't know either.
From reading the newspapers, he had deduced that the current level of technology was roughly somewhere between Earth's late Victorian era and the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution. All manner of steam-powered machinery was already well developed, while the use of electricity was still being explored.
As for the specific details?
He didn't know. Trapped here all day, the only thing he could do was read newspapers, and he had very few sources of information.
This wasn't his first time asking about the supernatural, either. Ever since transmigrating, whether he probed indirectly or asked outright, the old butler had only ever shaken his head and replied helplessly, "Please stop joking, young master."
Today, however, the old butler gave him a different answer.
Conrad hesitated for a moment before speaking quietly. "Young master, there's a card game here. If you're interested, you might like to take a look."
Elliott's eyes lit up, and he rolled out of bed. "Does it involve the supernatural?"
"Of course not, but it can help pass the time."
"Let's go. Lead the way!"
Elliott wasn't particularly disappointed. He hadn't really expected the old butler to find any supernatural items in the first place. Cards would be nice, too. At least he wouldn't be so bored.
Once they entered the study downstairs, the old butler approached a bookshelf and pushed one of the books inward. Mechanical teeth clicked, a gap opened in the wall, and the bookshelves slowly slid apart to reveal a secret room.
Elliott's eyes widened in astonishment. He looked at the room, then at the old butler. He had lived here for over a month. How had he not known this room existed?
"Ahem." The old butler cleared his throat softly. "This was the previous owner's secret room. He used it for things that couldn't bear the light of day. After the family took over, we cleared it out. There's hardly anything left now."
The old butler wasn't lying. The newly revealed room was empty. The marks on the floor made it clear that it had once held quite a few things, but they had all been removed.
The only thing that caught the eye was the enormous, intricate, and precise machine on the wall.
At a glance, almost the entire wall was covered in gears and drive rods of every kind, as though someone had opened the back of a watch. A cold industrial rhythm washed over him.
"Is that... a difference engine?" Elliott blurted out.
A difference engine was a purely mechanical computer. They had appeared on Earth as early as the nineteenth century and could perform certain calculations. But with the advent of electrification, these overly complex, difficult-to-maintain machines had quickly become obsolete, surviving only in museums.
In this world, however, the technology tree had diverged slightly. The First Industrial Revolution had ended, yet the second-the electrical age-had been slow to arrive. People had ventured further and further down the path of mechanics and steam engines.
Conrad gave Elliott a somewhat surprised look. His young master recognized a difference engine?
These behemoths were still something of a novelty, extremely rare on the market and known to only a small niche.
"That's right. It's an intricate tandem difference engine, powered by steam. Since it's built into the entire wall and couldn't be moved, the family's machine priest inspected it, judged it posed no risk, and left it here. As for what it does..."
The old butler stepped forward and pulled a lever on the wall. Only then did Elliott notice the dense network of steam pipes covering the ceiling. With the hissing of pressure-release valves, the enormous steam-powered difference engine abruptly awoke, like a slumbering steel giant beginning to breathe.
"It's a gaming machine."
Conrad walked over to the machine, pulled open a concealed drawer, took out a "programming board," and inserted it into the reader slot-it really was "woven programming." This was a storage device unique to this era, using magnetic cores. Specialized female weavers worked under magnifying glasses, using picking needles to weave fiber cores into core rope memory, then assembling individual storage units into registers.
NASA's Apollo onboard flight software had been woven this way. In this world, the technology had been developed to its utmost. Preset programs were converted into a language the machine could understand, the densely packed gears of the difference engine began to turn, punched paper tape was fed out and swallowed back in, and the entire machine roared into operation.
Elliott held his breath and focused. He had only ever seen scenes like this in movies-science fiction movies, at that.
Such a magnificent machine... was meant for playing games?
Beneath the difference engine stood a table. A yellowed lambskin mat covered its ebony surface. At least, it looked like lambskin, though it was certainly large enough, covering the entire table.
Elliott sat down eagerly. Amid the clicking of rotating gears, the machine dispensed a card.
The card was still warm and smelled of fresh ink, clearly just printed. Elliott held it up before his eyes to examine it closely.
On the front was a girl's silhouette rendered in simple lines. On the back were several lines of small print:
[Unemployed girl]
"I came to this city alone, carrying my diploma and my dreams."
"Neither could get me a job."
Along the very bottom of the card were several small symbols, with labels helpfully provided beside them.
[Near death] [Hungry] [Hypothermic]
Elliott looked up and found matching icons on the difference engine's panel. Beside each icon was a miniature flip counter, clicking rapidly and rhythmically:
[Near death]: 30 [Near death]: 29 [Near death]: 28
"Interesting. Very interesting..."