GMs Note: This is the first of a weekly series of educational material about the World of Brassy’s Men. The first part is "in character" and subjective. The footnotes are from the GMs and objectively true.

Your Government Presents: Educational Pamphlet #52-Zed: The Babbage Engine

Deep in a sub basement of Parliament, the very same sub-basement where the evil Guy Fawkes stored his gunpowder, lies The Babbage Engine. It isn’t the only Babbage Engine in the world, or even London, but it is the biggest, the fastest, and the most important.

Charles Babbage, the father of the Babbage Engine first began work on his Analytical Machine in 1833, but it was not until 1864, with help from Ada Byron, was his dream made into a reality.

The Babbage Engine contains what is commonly referred to as "your permanent record." The Engine contains the lineage, the public record, the publication record, and the educational record of every important member of British Society. And much much more is stored in The Babbage Engine; Scotland Yard, for example, uses the Babbage Engine to track the goings on of the less savory elements of our fair town. It is rumoured that The Babbage Engine knows so much and is so powerful that it has achieved a sort of sentience, but that is considered the highest form of nonsense by any proper scientist.

Security around The Babbage Engine is particularly tight. Only the maintenance men and the program girls may enter the room. The men do the heavy work on the machine, lifting the 8 foot brass calendars into place, fixing broken connections and the like. The program girls, led by Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace¹, are the only people Their Majesties Government has qualified to program The Babbage Engine.

Programming the Engine is not just a feat of will and intelligence, but also of dexterity and timing. The keys must be pressed at exactly the right times, and a single wrong key could destroy hours of work. Only young, unmarried ladies are allowed to be program girls, and they are hand selected by Lady Lovelace.

Most people communicate with The Babbage Engine via the Pneumatic Tube network. Like most modern cities, including New York and Paris, London is connected by a vast network of pneumatic tubes. These tubes can be used to post information (it is recommended to never send money through the pneumatic tube system) to other Londoners.

The tubes also connect to The Babbage Engine. Not directly, a program girl still needs to read and interpret your message, but financial institutions, the Houses of Parliament, Scotland Yard, and other Government institutions can use this network to quickly, and efficiently get any information they require².

Footnotes provided by the GMs:

¹ A note on Lady Lovelace: historically, she died in 1852. However, in our world, her later life was not plagued by cancer and she is still going strong at the ripe old age of fifty nine. (Rumour has it as well that she plans to retire on her 60th birthday, December 10, 1875. My heavens, that’s during the second year of the campaign).

² The Pneumatic tube network will be simulated in game with a computer network. The GMs will be able to use it to access the character database. Player may be able to use it to get information and do research; however, such queries take time. The amount of time it takes to place a query depends on your character’s status, and resources. Queries invariably cost money, and even high government officials have an official query budget and are loathe to overspend. A query can take a short as a couple of hours to return and as long as several weeks. Some queries entered during game may not be returned until after the game as Between Game Action (BGA) results. Queries are never, ever instantaneous for players.

³ Please feel free to read up on Charles Babbage and Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace on the web. Obviously, we’ve had to take some liberties with their lives, but they are still fascinating people.

Doron Swade, Curator at the Science Museum with the Difference Engine, circa 1991.