Okay true that passage did not specify anything about the content of Nolle’s Story. Here is some of that, then.

You hear how Nolle grew up in Errria, an Industrial parish near the City. Industrial meaning Manufactories full of Weavers and their Looms, creating the raw Fabric you used in your work. Brewers and their Vats, Printers and their Presses. People pursuing crafts but not Cræfts, work but not Vocations.

You hear how he inherited an Akkade, the quirky, little-understood Device on which he discovered his ever-unfolding fascination with Algorithms. In the middle of trying to describe it, he pauses the story to retrieve it from upstairs. It is a fairly self-contained hunk of fine Machinery, about a cubic Span of Metal and Lacquered Wood and Resin, in which you cannot tell which intricacies are functional and which are ornamental. On the front of it is a sort of slate bearing a grid of embossed dots, upon which is mounted a maze of pearly chiclets of resin in a variety of satisfying dimensional ratios. Each chiclet is connected to at least two other rectangles by a fine wire wrapped in braids of slightly lustrous fabric. Nolle demonstrates pulling this slate out, revealing another like it but with a different maze of wired rectangles, and slotting the removed slate into the back. Then he does this again and again, each time allowing the entire stack of them to slide forward to position the newly frontmost one at the front of the whole armature, eventually returning to the originally frontmost one. Its design is as foreign as could be from your smooth, crisp Precious Headphones and Musical Device.

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