William Dear

William Dear was a watchmaker originally from Skerries, Ireland. He became entangled with the God-Machine, as did his descendant Jon Dear.

William served in the Boer War in South Africa, and this experience led him to beg his brother Alexander not to enlist in World War One. Heartbroken by Alexander's death in 1915, William turned to a recurring project of his: he built an elaborate clockwork woman from brass and leather, as perfect and lifelike as he could make her. Unfortuantely, the one thing he could not figure out was how to create a brain that would allow her to truly come alive.

In January 1916, William was accosted by Sergeant Fox, who rather forcibly introduced him to Myles de Selby. William admitted he sometimes thought of the world as being run by a vast God-Machine, a creation with no creator; de Selby confirmed that this was, in fact true, and showed William a number of pieces of machinery he had stolen from a God-Machine facility nearby. William agreed to accompany Fox and de Selby into the facility to see it for himself.

Two days later, de Selby lead the other two through a door hidden in the countryside and into a vast facility full of clockwork servitors. Deep in the facility, Fox suddenly revealed himself to be an angel and transformed de Selby into one of the servitors as punishment for stealing. Fox then gave William an intricate clockwork device and escorted him home.

When William inserted the device into his clockwork woman's head, she came alive--in fact, he appeared in every way to be a normal human, except for the obvious keyhole in her chest where her mechanism had to be wound. He named her Mary, and doted on her for some months. Mary was deeply infatuated with William, but she was also incredibly strong, and after she attacked him in a violent outburst William became afraid of her. He secretly relocated to London, abandoning Mary in Skerries.

William married in London and had children; nothing else is known about the remainder of his life.