Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean your physics are wrong.

Hey, you know that one computer law thing? Every eighteen months or so the power of the chip doubles or something like that. I was resting up after that fight on Spalding Street… no, not that one, the other one… it got me to thinking, and I decided to do a little research.

Turns out, there was this guy in the really early 1900s, or at least the late 1800s, who was into energy research. Early atomics, before they had any theories as to what they were doing… yeah, like the Curies. And he ran some numbers that told him that after so many years, humanity would have so much energy to work with. He eventually figured that by 1922, we’d perfect atomic power and everyone would have all the electricity they’d ever need or want.

Of course, it didn’t turn out that way. Most people think his math was oversimplified. Then I started wondering about things. Look, we’ve had cars around for damn near a hundred years now, right? And the fuel efficiency has only marginally improved in all that time. That’s not right. We still have nuke plants that use the same technology, with only a scant number of improvements, as the power pile used in the Manhattan Project, except for the safety systems which have been ramped up a lot. Sure, computer technology keeps accellerating, but energy supply was on a steadily increasing curve for thousands of years and then BAM! It’s only rising a little bit every year.

So of course now I’m wondering what the heck is going on and decide to ask the experts. There’s this old clockworker, Lyle Manley, you don’t know him. I go over to his house… because he doesn’t like telephones. Says they’re too new fangled. Can I finish please? Anyway, I don’t think anyone, clued in or not, knows more about energy than Lyle, and I go and talk to him. He has me sit down in this old style chair and gives me the straight dope on perpetual motion. Most of it went over my head, but I did come away with the ideas on entropy and what Lyle called perverse entropy. The perverse entropy is what’s used in perpetual motion machines.

…sure there is! Some mechanomancers dabble in it almost exclusively.

…because they keep blowing up. And that’s the problem. See, there’s no middle line, at least that’s what Lyle said. Something’s either getting better or worse. Back in the 1800s, the early ones I mean, there were all sorts of designs for perpetual motion machines. Some of them showed a small amount of sense, because they included a brake, but that’s not enough. I think Lyle said something about that not being viable, and like I said a lot of this shit goes over my head. But remember, better or worse. No middle line. A machine like that keeps going faster and faster and faster until it flies apart from its own energy.

The thing is, that’s what SHOULD have happened.

Look at it this way. Thermodynamics is science that says eventually the universe will run down, like a watch. So who wound the watch up? They had to postulate the Big Bang to make it make sense… no, that’s ‘posture’. A postulate is something that you need to imagine exists to make other stuff make sense. But everything about humanity, especially Western Civilization, throws that right out. It’s getting faster, and faster, and faster, and by all rights it probably should have exploded by now or something.

So somebody or some group is trying to slow everything the hell down, like they’re trying to drag stuff on. But it’s not going to work. Eventually the system is going to flip its lid and things will just keep slowing down. Things will keep getting worse and worse until there’s nowhere else to go.

…look, if the system eventually explodes because things get too hyper, then the energy has to go somewhere, right? That means new possibilities, other things that could happen. New universe, maybe. If it winds down, then that’s it. Game over. End of the line. Frankly, I would much rather go out in a blaze of glory, which means taking out the people trying to hold humanity back. You want in?

And if not, are you gonna finish those fries?