1. The Great Machine

Art is the greatest pursuit, I think.

No better person to say that than an artist, eh? Like a lottery winner telling you investing your earnings in Powerball really works, guys! But alas, it's not to be.

I remember a friend of mine, Dayken was his name. He used to create the most beautiful portraits I'd ever seen. I distinctly remember having a conversation with him one day while he was outlining the features of a beautiful young woman in his main foyer. Dayken was a wealthy young inheritor of his family's riches, you see. Acres upon acres of beautiful grassland for him to be inspired by, and yet he saw beauty only in that of a human configuration. On this particular day, however, I remember prodding him some, teasing him about how he would draw only the beautiful and wealthy. I have only ever seen Dayken stop in the middle of a piece twice in the time I've known him, and that day was the first. He stopped what he was doing, much to the dismay of the fine young beauty sitting not a few feet away from us, and turned to me with a stern expression and fire in his eyes. However, Dayken is a shy man, so he spoke to me almost as if to not disturb the fine china resting on display nearby. "It is the beauty within that I see, Jacob" he said, "If you can find a vagrant down at the market worth exhibiting, I will gladly paint them for you if you should so desire". Of course, such was an interesting proposal to me, seeing as I had come to know many faces in my formative years down in the town's market square, and not many would I assign the label of a "true vagrant". But, in retrospect, such a proposal was foolish given the War's raging ferocity on even a small village like Samston, and the rapid introduction of The Great Machine. After all, why bother painting a vagrant (let alone paint at all) when the Machine could dispense works in such quantity and quality that even myself, being the prevalent musical talent I was, could no longer keep up with its splendid, accursed symphonies?

Indeed, Dayken or not, who could stand to a force so unnatural and yet so very human as to not only mimic humanity, but to represent it far better than any poet or creator of things could?

So, dear reader, this is the story of how I did just that, and the terrible truths I learned in the process.