The Lullaby Engine

What it looks like, and what it does

A grey cabinet of valves and speaker horns bolted to a pole at the centre of the town. Cables climbing the clock tower like ivy. A soft, slightly flat chord from every horn at nine o'clock. A town of dark windows.

Plays from nine in the evening. Chooses a house and plays a variation for it. Pauses at certain streets. Never begins before the last light in town is out.

What is known

Installed in 1998 to cut noise complaints, it was meant to play recorded chimes. Within a year it was composing. Residents who recorded its output have never found a repeat.

The town sleeps eleven hours. Absenteeism is nil and life expectancy has risen. The Engine now sings to individual houses, and leaves certain windows unsung.

What it can do

• Induces deep sleep in a whole population through sound alone
• Composes each lullaby from the listener's earliest remembered sound

Where it stops

• Cannot be heard beyond the last streetlamp
• Fails on anyone who hums along; those who do keep waking

An encounter

Prado has never slept through the Engine, because of a hearing aid and a bad conscience. She sits at her window and writes down which houses are left unsung. There are nine. She says the people in them are healthy, and do not wake.

Ines Prado, retired council clerk, Bridge Street, Ostmark, Twenty-two years of nights

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Over 8,000 recorded lullabies; no two share a melody.
• established: Sleep studies show a stable eleven-hour cycle in 96 per cent of residents.
• interpretation: It may be soothing the town. It may be rehearsing something for it.

Still unresolved

Plotted on a map in the order they were sung, the houses form a path that leads out of the town and down to the river, to the place where the old bridge was.

Where it has been recorded

• Ostmark (confirmed) — Recorded by Ines Prado, retired council clerk.

Stories about it

• It Has Not Said What It Waits For (Entity story, 4 min) — For twenty-two years a municipal cabinet has composed a new lullaby each night, the town has slept under it for eleven hours, and one clerk who hums along has begun to map where the singing is going.

Connected entities

• Dormant Susannah — The Engine's route ends at a river. Susannah's rain smells of one. Both put others to sleep to keep something company.
• The Quiet Committee — Both are town-scale systems of care that nobody commissioned and nobody has been able to switch off.
• The Cistern Whale — Both sing to a city through its infrastructure, and neither has been asked to stop.
• Thornlight — One keeps a district asleep and the other keeps it company awake. Neither has been seen to win.