Thaddeus

First subplot for The Nonplussed, concerning the American civil war before the arrival of Cannibalus the Starvling.
.
.
.
Thaddeus Thomas is an Amish (maybe not Amish) inventor and the designer of an absolutely gargantuous piece of agricultural machinery - an all in one combine harvester, sprayer, baler, disc harrow, thresher, subsoiler, cultivator, swather, tedder, and cultipacker - proposed as 'the ultimate farming implement' and dubbed the Agriculturizerator. Thaddeus submits his blueprints to the US patent office.

The Agriculturizerator measures roughly 300 meters across the business end, 450 meters in length, and rises to a height of 150 meters - about 30 square acres of machinery, or the approximate equivalent to 16 square city blocks. Its function is to scour the Earth, processing raw material at the front end, and excreting harvested crops out the back, with everything happening inside of it as it lumbers slowly across the landscape. It takes one 'growing season' to traverse its own length of 450 meters, resulting in about 30 square acres of crops each 'season'.

Thaddeus constructs a 1/100th scale working prototype, approximately 10 ft wide, 15 ft long and 5 ft high as a proof of concept for demonstration purposes to help secure funding for the full size Agriculturizerator. Although the mini-agrizator performs beautifully, investors balk at the 600 billion dollar development costs. As a last ditch effort, Thaddeus attempts to secure government funding and is laughed off of Capitol Hill.

Sabathius Malachi -

(back story of Sabathius and his motivations as they relate to Thaddeus not quite figured out yet, but I do know one thing, Sabathius is an evil bastard)

- urges Thaddeus to pitch his machine as a Weapon of Mass Creation, reasoning that since war is always going to be inevitable, adding a capability for warfare on a massive scale to the front end of the Agriculturizerator would revolutionize warfare in a positive manner by generating an entirely new system of justification - both politically and morally - for the unavoidable and naturally occurring state of violence which defines our condition as a species, and with a built in bonus of getting to turn your enemy into millions of tons of groceries at the end of it.

Of course, Thaddeus doesn't buy into this line of bullshit, and -

(plot device, yet to be congealed in my brain as an idea)

- happens.

Eventually, pretty quickly actually, president Goolsby is convinced by Sabathius that the Agriculturizerator could be used to completely pulverize Atlanta, kinda like how they did in the original civil war 200 years ago. So he gets his greasy hands on it, renames it the Pulverizerator, puts it into full production with emergency war powers, and then proceeds to raze Atlanta to the ground...

...which totally pisses off Dempsey Witt by the way. Pres. Goolsby will find out later the hard way that he never should have pissed off a suicidal 70 year old war hero without a single shit left to give. It's gonna be pretty cool, that reckoning.