And now for something completely different, I will attempt to fill up the many gaps in my blogging by serializing a short science fiction story. Enjoy, and feel free to skip until I come up with another real post:
Prologue
Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.
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Thomas Alva Edison
If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. … I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.
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Nikola Tesla
Prologue
There once was (and still is, to the best of my knowledge), a kingdom named Cyrcadia, though the term “kingdom” tends to conjure up a quaint little village in the mountains dominated by a picturesque Bavarian castle overloaded with crenellations and fortifications and stained glass windows and flying buttresses, or vast stretches of desert or steppe that somehow manage to conceal a series of glittering palaces and tidy settlements.1 In this case, Cyrcadia was filed as a kingdom owing to the technicality of having a king about the place (or occasionally a queen), rather than possessing any innate royal qualities. It was a nation large enough to be worth invading but not so large that it regularly thought of invading other lands. It had its fair share of mountains, plains, and steppes, gorges, even a small desert to the south, though most of the glittering palaces had long since been converted to art museums or government offices. Cyrcadia did a bustling trade in banking, international trading, industrial technology and, in one of those strange quirks, small baked goods (just thought of a Cyrcadian glazed muffin was said to make mouths water in anticipation).
The kingdom had once been a lot closer to the hamlet-and-castle variety so favored by story books (at least in the region around Cyrcadia – the steppe-and-desert variety played a bigger part in children’s literature further south), right up to the fateful Republican Intervention of 1674. At that point, a group of the more successful merchants and traders in the area, pleased with their growing wealth and power, but wary of unimpeded monarchic power, decided to band together in attempt to get control of state policy-making – a pre-emptive measure, if you will. After all, even if you get some say in running domestic affairs, it doesn’t much help your global trading network if the king goes and sets off an International Incident over something so hard to fix a price tag to as national honor.2 After conferring among themselves, a delegation quietly spoke with some senior members of the nation’s military, with much of the discussion consisting of a philosophical discourse as to whether allegiance was truly owed to the king personally or the nation as currently personified by the king, not to mention a brief presentation on the benefits of a regular salary not subject to divine decree.
Not long afterwards, representatives from each of the leading trades, along with a few quick-on-the-uptake peasants to give the whole thing a rather inclusive feel, approached the king in his drawing room3 and presented him with a near fait accompli. The king, for his part, had received a decent practical education in negotiation, and knew when to fold. An accomplished poker player, he also knew the difference between folding and leaving the game. Arguing that the symbolic importance of the monarchy provided a valuable boost for the national psyche, he managed to secure a comfortable stipend on the condition that he occupied himself with tame, symbolic activities, like making speeches, slashing through red ribbons with a ceremonial sword, or lending his physical appearance to local currency and official documentation. In addition, the king realized he should retain some stake in the developing economy, and, an avid inventor, he casually suggested that the Royal Family be granted soliciting and licensing rights for the development of new inventions within newly-constitutionalised Kingdom of Cyrcadia. Pleased at having things go over so easily, the merchants agreed.
And so, time rolled by. Trade and industry rose and fell, economic sectors expanded and contracted, the occasional border skirmish blossomed into a full trade war or wilted into a mere exchange of threatening letters. The Royal Family, more a business firm than a tradition at this point, began downsizing its royal holdings, selling off the sixth and seventh sets of dinner silver and quietly leasing some of the better-placed real estate to build up a sizeable endowment fund for the new family pastime – the Royal Patent Office. It is no exaggeration to say that the more noteworthy technological triumphs over the years began with a bright young adventurer gaining a temporary monopoly over his or her creation through a Royal Patent. The best inventions came with decent financial compensation attached, supporting noteworthy tinkers through years of productive development.
And the buildings climbed higher, and carts started to move faster and soon began to move, shakily, by themselves, and factories moved from water wheels to fiery, belching steam engines. And eventually we reach the day where our story begins…
Where Our Story Begins
Marco Carver awoke to the sound of thunder, partly out of anticipation and partly due to the hand-made amplifier which caused the sound to echo twice around the room. Still, even in the face of a raging inferno, the attraction of sleeping just a few seconds longer is fully able to hold its own; as a physical force, it lies somewhere between magnetism and the interaction of polar molecules. Then a flash of lightning, heralding more thunder, lit up the bedroom.
The title of “bedroom” was loosely applied, at best. Beyond the four corners of the bed, the place was more of a workshop, with benches nearly covered by scraps of metal and ingeniously crafted glass beakers and tubes, shelves filled with murky-colored jars of complex chemicals4, and a coat rack bearing all manner of heavy jackets, leather aprons, gloves augmented by steel exoskeletons and a baroque pair of iron-rimmed goggles. One wall sported a chalkboard filled with a spidery web of calculations, notes and diagrams, all linked together by some unseen filament of deep thought, and all but incomprehensible to the casual observer. Dashed lines, cramped letters and scrawled numbers shimmered against the black background with an eerie bluish-white in the lightning’s gaze.
The lightning was finally enough to rouse Marco from sleep. Hurling the covers aside, he swung his thin frame over the side of the bed, jamming his feet into a pair of boots that appeared not so much stitched together as riveted together before taking a few groggy steps forward. Behind him, deprived of his weight, the bed swung upwards, folding against the wall into a carefully-constructed niche, while in its place yet another workbench popped up. All manner of schematics were tacked out across its surface the underside of the bed, now a part of the wall. A small bell attached to a corner jingled, reminding Marco to spin on his heel and examine his plans for a moment. Time was of the essence, of course, but that didn’t preclude double checking in order to avoid wasting the opportunity, as had happened during the near-disaster back in late fall5. He plastered his sooty, unkempt hair into place as he flipped through the soiled and stained blueprints.
Marco was an inventor, though he hadn’t quite earned the capital letter that let the descriptor function as a true title. He was approaching his late 20s, the point when most inventors of the realm either struck it rich or gave up and went into consulting work for large engineering firms in one of the regional capitals. He wasn’t quite ready to retire yet, though he’d received a few attractive offers from a contact with an industrial chemicals plant in upper Voral. He still lived of the proceeds of a patent from a few years back, the so-called Miracle Matchtm.6 The idea came from attending his nephew’s birthday party, where the child’s mother had played a trick by decorating the cake with candles that re-lit themselves no matter how many times his nephew had blown them out. Later, while trying to light a cigarette at the station in a brisk wind, the idea had hit him like an express train – why not combine the candles with matches? Through a period of intense research and development, during which few members of the outside world caught even a glimpse of him, he finally overcame the obstacle of having the match re-light itself even after it had been stubbed out, after having reduced a sizeable portion of his wardrobe to a smoking pile of ash.
The matches had become an instant, if modest, success after he’d presented them at the Royal Patent Office in the capital of Cyrc.7 While the proceeds from the patent licensing were certainly not enough to retire on, it was enough to keep his bank acocunts healthy while he worked his way through some other, minor, niche inventions, like a cake mixer that automatically added eggs and other ingredients or gloves that gripped things like glue without actually sticking. Still, as he finished up his double-checking and threw a brown, stained coat over his workman’s clothes, he couldn’t help thinking that this would be the invention to him over the top, to let him add his name to the list of great Inventors of the kingdom, and provide him with enough of a stipend to tinker away without concern for commercial applicability.
The challenge, as had been announced at RPO information booths across the country, was to create a substance of great destructive power that could be easily, if somewhat carefully, transported. In addition to the possibility of lucrative contracts in the mining, defense, and urban demolition industries, this invention was important enough to carry with it an RPO grant, enough to comfortably support an inventor and a decent-sized staff for a good many years. Marco longed for a personal staff8, which was generally regarded as the feature that divided the mad scientist, hyped up on a few too many fumes, from that well-regarded Pillar of the Community, the Innovative Entrepreneur.
He moved out of the room and headed over to the spiral stairs that led down from his loft of a room into the cavern of a workshop that occupied the shell of a two-story home. A fire had burned out most of the interior years ago, but as external structure was still sound he’d purchased the property for a modest sum with the initial royalties from the Miracle Match royalty. Perched along one of the ridges that semi-circled the town of Landon, one of the more far-flung of the kingdom’s far-flung settlements, its windows occasionally showed a panorama of the village as he walked down the stairs, whenever the lightning flashed over the roofs and chimneys, cobbled streets and town squares below. The rain pounded against the roof as the frame of the old building twisted and strained in the wind, accompanied by the occasional ping of a nail working its way out and falling to the stone basement floor below.
His bedroom was built into the attic, one of the few additions he’d made since moving in, as the rest of the lab was one gaping chasm of space, and quite drafty. He was reminded of this as he pulled his coat tighter around him, reaching the bottom of the stairs and moving to begin inserting vials of chemicals into the machine. Like most inventors of his socio-economic status, Marco was able to afford electrically-powered equipment yet still found a home-sized electric dynamo beyond his reach. The array of equipment before him sprawled its complicated mass of glass containers and piping out over most of the basement floor, extended in places to the upper ceiling. It was filled with capacitors and beakers and condensers and seemingly superfluous wiring, yet the whole thing looked towards one, solitary copper cable that rose from its midst like a ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds. For Marco, like most inventors of his socio-economic class, powered his experiments with lightning.9
…
However, Marco was not the only one preparing for that dark and stormy night. Further around the same ridge, in a bungalow obscured by the trees, an exquisitely dressed young woman was carefully putting the finishing touches on a mass of motors and gears and linkages that was complex enough to give a mechanical engineer a headache. Her maroon peacoat extended down to the midst of her thighs, with stylized thread working its way around the collar of her chocolate-brown shirt, then down to the cuffs that poked out of the coat’s sleeves. Tan pants ran gracefully down her legs until they overlaid the tops of trim workboots. The name embossed on the heels was Stela Addison, and, unbeknownst to Marco, Stela was pursuing the exact same patent. She moved like a figure made of high-tension cables, all wound within a quarter-turn of their breaking point.
A graduate of the Royal Academy of Engineering, she had built up a decent supply of funds working for the Army’s engineer corps as a consultant while completing graduate studies10. Following graduation, she found her higher degree temporarily worthless in the capital due to an influx of skilled refugees from a troubled neighboring republic, and so had moved out to the relatively remote reaches of Landon to pursue work until market forces moved her potential wages back to their earlier equilibrium point.11 With her income drying up due to lack of demand in the sleepy provincial town, she was convinced that the “Blast Patent”12 would be her ticket work at any of the major engineering firms. She had embarked on the quest whole-heartedly, throwing the remains of her bank account into the project.
Unlike Marco, she had not been awoken by the thunder, although this was because she had not actually slept; when consumed by an idea, she was fueled as much by sheer excitement as by near-fatal dosages of caffeine, dispensed from the industrial-looking coffee maker in her kitchen. The kitchen itself was a complex operation of rivets and sliding levers, suggesting that everything up to and including the kitchen sink could be collapsed into a very small area if more floor space were needed. Referring to a schematic on the wall, she calibrated a few of several dozen dials on the side of the machine. The contraption resembled the twisted, child-devouring step-brother of a fairground carousel, with hundreds of small vials taking the place of the horses and idle gyroscopes taking the place of the ornate trim.
“That should do it,” she muttered to herself.
Lacking any specific training in chemistry, she had hit upon the idea of brute-forcing the problem. Her machine would combine thousands of different samples known for their explosive properties (and several hundred that weren’t) in minute quantities, varying things ever so slightly each time until a test ignition was powerful enough to flip the switch that engaged the drive chain which swapped the whole thing into production mode, bringing together the right quantities for a presentable batch. Beautiful, she thought to herself. Simple mechanics at work – easy enough to let the machine do the heavy lifting for you, in a manner of speaking.
Satisfied that all of her calculations and settings were correct, she headed over to where a sturdy metal wheel jutted out of a wall, connected to the copper spike that ran up one corner of the bungalow and up through a well-sealed hole to the roof. As she turned the wheel, the lightening rod began to extend up, telescoping as it plunged through the roof and kept on going, higher and higher into the buffeting winds above.
1Whose construction costs could not conceivably be borne by a group of feudal peasants engaged in subsistence-level agriculture.
5 As a point of reference, Marco could now be described as having a unibrow mostly because the other eyebrow was missing.
7Not a consumer-minded person, Marco had failed to notice that a match that continued to re-light itself had certain drawbacks, namely setting garbage cans and national forests on fire. However, the patent eventually found a home in products geared towards overnight mountain climbers, road flares, and certain classified military projects.
8He could hardly count Mrs. Hendry, seeing as her duties were largely limited to cleaning up the less-toxic aspects of his lab on Tuesday evenings.
10Here just a patriotic addition to the name. The Royal Family certainly respected the uplifting values of education, but had no interest whatsoever in being responsible for it.
12 As it was popularly known. Occasionally, the inventiveness of inventors failed to extend to wordage.
All rights reserved, 2011. Just don’t steal this and try to make money off of it, though I’ll be impressed if you do.
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