One day Johan Liszt awoke to a sound he found most disturbing: silence. The machine he had spent so long to fund and built had ceased to work, and it's every noise once so busy now laid still. For not the whistling and rustling and chiming of pasts he so enjoyed to hear work, but only the uncomfortable sound of his breaths in the dust-laden air filled his attic.

In a frantic attempt he leaped from his bed – and only dressed in a nightshirt hurried over to the machine. It was not the mechanical parts he was worried about, for he had made them to last, and physics were eternal once they slipped in their proper place. No, it was rather the creatures the machine was meant to support that he was worried about.

Alas, it was already too late, and he was met with the sight of his efforts foregone. He figured that most likely they had come to pass in the early hours of the night, and despite clear attempts to survive and break out, without the machine life eventually became impossible. In a moment of uncomfortable silence, Johan laid his hand atop the barrier and mourned both the creatures and his lost investment.

After breakfast, and once the shock of the loss had settled down, his scientific heart took over; although his initial design hadn't worked, perhaps he could come to understand what fault had made his machine malfunction. So he set to take it apart that same day, bit by bit and piece by piece. But as the hours passed, he learnt that indeed every piece he encountered was intact the way it was meant to be. It would be far too long a task to take the machine apart entirely, it had taken him a whole week to put it together first.

Instead he decided to look at the creatures themselves, to see what it was that had brought them to an early end. It was then he found a peculiar thing. Of the many creatures, it appeared that one wore a small cog. And then he found another one like such, surrounded by many others: indeed a select few were crowned with the parts of his machine as if they had conquered it!

Thus Johan came to a remarkable understanding: that by deriving their own power from the machine, the creatures had deprived the machine of power.