The Plant - A Steampunk Story Chapter 3

There was a place inside this knot of metal limbs, a clearing almost, a hollow, from which he could see the entire manifold branching overhead, and when he sat there, on a little concrete base that for some reason had remained unoccupied, it made him feel as if the entire power distribution system was an extension of his person, and that as small and weak as he was, compared to this enormous metal monster, he was its heart, the soul in the machine, the essential component that allowed the whole system to work. Even though he knew the distribution manifold very well, and if he closed his eyes he could see its every detail, he liked to take a walk around and inspect it every time, and then, with the relief of having found everything exactly the way it was supposed to be, he sat there on his concrete base for a while, and dreamed. And, indignity of indignities, that's where he found the plant again, inside his precious, sneaking out between two pressure rated flanges and then back in via an isolation valve.