The Premonitions Bureau of Mechanus
The Locus of Inescapable Moments, the Bureau
Location: Mechanus
A whirring cube of cogs each the size of a city block, teeth interlocking like brawling bar’lgura—located at the intersection of several important axles in the Great Machines, this is the heart of the Premonitions Bureau. It’s a cold clockwork cathedral of destiny, run by the Fraternity of Order and a small army of Inevitables. The building’s name is officially The Locus of Inescapable Moments, though most cutters just call it The Bureau.
The goal of the Premonitions Bureau is to map out Future History—to identify the shape of things to come, long before they arrive. Now cutter, this ain’t your usual nonsense with crystal balls and dowsing rods. It’s a full-scale, planar operation that gathers the visions of seers, dreamers, and half-mad prophets and amalgamates them into one continuous, clattering mechanism of fate. The bureau is run by the stressed-looking Director Imryll Quast (planar aphorite diviner [he/him / Fraternity of Order / LN).
The Machinery of Prediction
Now the Fraternity of Order believe that the cogs of the Great Machine tick according to the laws of reality, and the location of the Bureau was carefully selected by Guvner Diviners in order to maximise its connectivity to other nodes. The Fraternity has installed vast brass-plated terminals called Dream-Cradles—magical recliners connected to the Machine, for Oracles to enter their trances. Once they do, their thoughts are captured by Dissonance Coils, devices that snatch the mental echoes of foresight right from their subconscious. These fragments of prophecy—a scream heard in a dream, a glimpse of a bloodied hand, the shadow of a falling tower—are processed by The Integrators, an array of decommissioned modrons. These mechanical beings do not understand dreams, but they understand patterns.
The whole thing works like this: The Oracles mutter. The Cradles capture. The Coils translate. The Integrators calculate and correlate. And in the end, the sages of the Fraternity of Order produce The Roll of Future History—a series of predictions, each one marked with a “Certainty Index” from 0% (barely a chance) to 99.999% (nigh-inevitable). But here’s the twist: Once you know the future, you might just want to try and change it. The Bureau insists this doesn’t affect the Certainty Index—but the dark is even the high-up Guvners aren’t so sure about that.
Dreamers, Correspondents and Integrators
The Oracles aren’t locals. Mechanus is particularly poor at producing the kind of imaginative types who excel at prognostication, so the Fraternity pull ‘em in from all over the planes. There’s a Sensate who’s kept in a sensory deprivation tank. Wild-eyed Xaositects still dripping chaos-stuff from the plane of Limbo. A mindflayer seer on “loan” from Ilsensine’s cult (and watched very, very closely). There’s even a Bleaker who claims that by embracing meaninglessness, she can see every possibility simultaneously. She might be right—but she’s also one of the hardest ones to manage.
They don’t last long. Dreamers burn out fast in Mechanus. The repetitive synchrony of the plane grinds against the inherent chaotic creativity of foresight. Too long in the Dream-Cradle and the seers start hearing the ticking of Mechanus in their sleep. That beat never stops. The mortal mind, after all, isn’t meant to run on clockwork.
Here’s where things get stranger. The Fraternity’s got a field network called The Correspondents. These are Guvners stationed on every major plane, tasked with logging and reporting premonitions they hear about from common folk. If some old crone in the Hive Ward wakes up screaming about a tidal wave of blood, one of the Correspondents might just jot it down in The Ledger of Unease.
The Correspondents maintain a cross-planar registry of these unsolicited omens, which are fed back to Mechanus via Astral streaker relay. It’s a tangled mess of reports—“A sailor on the Plane of Water saw a fish with three eyes,” or “A halfling in Ysgard claims a headless warrior visited his dreams.” Most of it is drivel. But sometimes, just sometimes, it lines up with something whispered in the Dream-Cradles, and the Fraternity tightens its understanding of the threads of fate.
The Integrators are not mortal, nor are they modrons any more. They’re something… between. They’re built from the shells of decommissioned modrons, often ones who got lost on the Great March and went rogue. Their minds aren’t clean as clockwork. They hum with distant thoughts, scraps of patterns gathered from every plane. Some say each Integrator still carries the echoes of the modron it was made from, like a phantom limb, and that these echoes dream of freedom.
The Integrators don’t think like mortals. They’re pure pattern-seekers. They don’t care if an omen comes from an Oracle, a dreamer, or a scribble on a tavern wall—they see connections where none should exist. To them, the shape of a winestain on a page of the Ledger of Unease might mean as much as a Seer’s prophecy of war. They link things, building webs of correlation that no mortal could fathom alone. It’s best not to think too hard about the amount of information they sift and process as they flip through pages and reports and dream catalogues endlessly reading; they say it could drive a moral mind barmy.
The Roll of Future History
Once a week, the Bureau produces The Roll of Future History, a tight scroll of thin copper etched with its prognosticatons. It’s stamped with the Certainty Index for each event. Most of it’s innocuous—“The 437th Gear-Shift of the Fractal Cog will occur on time.” Big surprise, eh? But sometimes, just sometimes, the Roll predicts something bigger:
- The Drowning of the Blue Theatre in the Clerk’s Ward, Sigil. 87%.
- The Veneration of an Unbidden Power in Acheron. 72%.
- The Betrayal of the Scribe of Fate. 99.1%.
When predictions hit 90% or higher, people pay attention. Affected parties may try to shift fate or stop it cold—assumignt hey find out in time. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, the Integrators take all the data in and adjust the Roll accordingly. Correction is inevitable.
The Unseen Problem
Here’s the rub, and it’s a big one. The Bureau runs on a lie—the idea that fate is fixed and can be known. But by observing it, the Guvners alter it. Tell a berk they’re fated to fall in love, and they’ll seek it out. Tell them they’ll die in a riot, and they’ll try to avoid crowds. But sometimes it’s the avoidance that causes the riot. This is what they call “the Error of Self-Observation”—an error the Integrators claim they can quantify and factor into the probability calculation, but it’s a paradox they’ve never really solved.
So, next time you hear a barmy oracle muttering on the street, maybe jot it down. It might be nonsense. But if you see a Guvner running toward the Hall of Records with a scroll clutched tight, then you’ll know — the Bureau’s gears are turning, and something’s coming. Best keep your head down, berk. Future History waits for no one.
Source: Jon Winter-Holt. Inspired by the excellent Foundation sci-fi series on Apple TV, the Matrix and the real history of some backwater prime world called “Earth” — back in the 1960s, they ran a Bureau like this to track premonitions about disasters. Earthlings called it “parapsychology” like it was a new thing, as if the oracles of Delphi hadn’t been at it for millennia. The Guvners nicked the idea wholesale. Information, after all, is just another cog in the Grand Machine.