Horse 2679 - The Travel Blog: Day 3 (Industry)

Day 3

If we cross Oak St (instead of making the choice of turning right or left) and we walk through the pedestrian mall, being careful to avoid the shriners and the lepers who play their ukeleles all day long and a weird chap who is offering to shave your back for a nickel, then if we pass the shops which sell tat, then we find two massive factory buildings - The Calculos Building and the James T Linkletter Printworks.

The Calculos Building services one of the major industries of the nation; being that of number crunching and remanufacturing. I have never personally seen inside the factory¹ and have no idea what the machines that do the crunching look like and I also have no concept of how the remanufacturing process actually happens but I do know that the factory works constantly.
The Calculos Building is constantly sending requests to the Omnitopical Card File for program instructions on processes like simple mathematics but it has at times asked for obscure instructions on things like calculus, economics, accounting, as well as weird things like topology.
The strange thing about the Calculos Building is that although it is constantly looking out for raw material for number crunching (and even tries to extend capacity while other industries are working), it only ever produces discreet packets of numbers. This massive building, with its grey steel walls and no windows; cooling towers and pipes, chimneys and nodding donkeys, only has one finished goods sending dock.

Across the street is the James T Linkletter Printworks, which is a neogothic marble building; which looks rather like the old Sun Building on the corner of Martin Place and Elizbeth Street, Sydney.
Just like the Calculos Building, nobody is allowed inside to see how the internal processes actually work but it at least is a far more sensible looking organisation. It has a scanning department and is always looking for new and interesting things to send to the Omnitopical Card File but at the same time, it is charged with the task of producing both audio descriptions and streams of words. As we are currently on tour of the inside of my mind, then you might be familiar with the kinds of products that this place makes².
If we peer over the back fences, which are topped by circular razor wire, we can see that there is a perimeter buffer which is patrolled by lions (always with the lions) and inside there are at least a hundred roller doors where truckloads of ideas, concepts, thoughts, and rules are unpacked, marshalled, tagged, wrangled, then sent inside for processing.

There are usual deliveries from books and newspapers, crates of observation from a mysterious country called the Kosmos (some of which are incomprehensible) as well as couriers delivering urgent packages of obligations, anxieties, responsibilities, fears, and very occasionally hopes, dreams and pleasure.
The thing is that the James T Linkletter Printworks which is named after a combination of fictional and real characters, is entirely apathetic about the kind of work that it produces. It produces everything from absolutely serious documents, to whimsical prose, to weapons-grade bovine dust.

All of the communication which is produced by the James T Linkletter Printworks and the calculations which are ready for shipping from the Calculos Building are all printed on A5 paper which is marked with the nation's warrant. It is a shield quartered and supported by lion and a kangaroo, a bowler hat above, with the scroll and legend 'Per Ad Ardua Astra' below. Every piece of communication, is produced upon remotely operated golf-ball teletype machines³ and only ever in a a unique Courier-style typeface. It is also exclusively printed in black ink.

On the other side of town are the lesser employed industries which include works produced by the Motor and Skills Department but let's be perfectly honest here, while adequate, they just aren't the products that the nation can get export income for. The nation is not particularly well known for its sporting prowess or its ability to produce manufactuers but it does at least have an adequate go at it.
The Calculos Building and the James T Linkletter Printworks are easily the two most valuable export producing entities of the nation and the fact that they are so close to each other and down the street from the Omnitopical Card File is no accident.

¹nobody ever goes in and nobody ever comes out
²see Horse 2679
³like the IBM Selectric II