1 Arlene De'soto
The grand hanger was filled with the splendour of the world. Intricate machines of every ilk gleamed, every bolt and rivet polished like a princess's mirror.
Amidst the peacock colours of the guests, the men in coattails moved, clipboards in hand- black suits and white coats an immaculate contrast to the engineers they consulted with at every turn.
Typically, the flow of the crowd followed the experts, their conversations a mocking echo of the conversations of the judges.
Before a hulking ape-like machine, they came to pause. For a moment, one of the crowd admired the elegant linkages and powerful frame, before his companion nudged him and whispered a few words that caused his eyes to widen in shock….
And then giggle. The crowd began snickering. This machine before them, the boiler was tiny! For a powerful body, such a tiny boiler was not unlike a man suffering from inadequacies in certain sensitive areas.
The judges, too composed to laugh, merely smirked and raised eyebrows, their five monocles glinting. After all, they'd seen countless inventions, and of those, how many failures had they witnessed. The two men who'd brought this machine here seemed to have absolute confidence, but, all such inventors did- right up until their machines failed and their name was less than mud.
Ignoring the crowd, one man began his speech while the other, a youth with dark hair, delicate features and suntanned skin climbed the side of the machine, and hidden from sight, opened a hatch. He looked at his hand as he unfurled it- a single rough stone reflected in his eyes.
Moments later, the machine roared to life- drowning out the sound of shattering glass. Monocles and jaws hit the ground and there was a single question on the lips of all.
HOW?!
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Have you ever hated something fiercely, and yet, found yourself totally reliant on it?
Perhaps then you might understand exactly how the residents of Lumiere- and one Arlene De'Soto, felt about the Red Mud.
It was an unfortunate truth of the world that while metal was everywhere, not all metals were as accommodating as others. Steel, tin, copper- all paled in comparison to the difficulty of extracting alumina.
But Alumina was needed. Ordinary mechanisms could be made with ordinary metals. But Devices could only be produced with complicated heat-sensitive alloys…
So the lend-lease dutchy of Quirm, knowing that the fields of Red Mud near Lumiere were rich in alumina, created the Light of Lumiere. Arlene's father sometimes regaled her of its construction; how as a man of a mere twenty two years of age, as a young engineer he'd been called up by the director of his firm and told a hard truth. They'd failed to lay the footings in winter, and so, they had to build the plant five months faster once they were laid to be able to finish it on time. He'd been asked 'how do we gain five months'- and he would then talk of how they'd worked in the fields to weld the vast sixty meter plates of the great mixing towers together, using cradles and tracked welding devices to ensure perfect horizontal seams.
Arlene sighed. She was sitting outside her apartment, staring at the Lake of Lumiere. Or what was once the lake.
The Light of Lumiere alumina plant required a vast pool of water to settle the mud before processing.
That wasn't the only thing that it had brought. Prosperity came hand in hand with noxious fumes that blanketed the town when the wind blew from the north. And the hum.
It was only truly quiet once every few years, when they shut down the great turbines for maintenance.
As an engineer, Arlene saw beauty in her father's handiwork, and took no small amount of pride in it. But it would be much easier to appreciate, if it could've only been built further away from the city itself. Today though, she, appreciated the breeze that stung her eyes. It let her lie to herself. Believe that she wasn't really crying.
For the fifth time that day, she opened the letter and removed the card within.
Her watery eyes skipped to one line in particular-
"We acknowledge your outstanding performance in your master's year and appreciate your choice to continue your further education at Quarkton College. However, while you are welcome to undertake a Doctorate in Device Engineering, we cannot extend the Manny Memorial scholarship to cover any further studies you undertake."
She could practically hear the thud of the hammers on the typewriter- with those final words of doom. From here she only had two options. She borrow money to complete her degree. Lodge an appeal. Or give up and go into the workforce, forever only an engineer with a masters. Well, three options.
That said, two of them were so unrealistic as to not count in the first place. An appeal would be rejected- and her dream of being an inventor by appointment would never happen without a doctorate.
The difference between an engineer with a doctorate and one with just a masters was like heaven and earth.
A masters engineer just had to create an invention or mechanism. A doctorate engineer had to create an original, or objectively better version of an existing component. It required brilliance, inspiration and insight at the level of a genius. The kind of person who could invent a better ball-bearing.
Her father had been awarded an honorary doctorate for his work on the Light of Lumiere. Then they had realised that with a sixty-meter diameter, the separator towers which traditionally had their drive mechanisms in the centre, would require an exponentially larger amount of torque to turn the armatures.
Her father designed the tower so that it was bevelled towards the centre and placed a rail on the outside edge. The arm was then driven from the edge instead of the central pillar - and used the immense leverage to provide the same amount of torque despite their much lower size.
The design pioneered there would be mirrored in far off places.
The… real problem that Arlene had was, even if she had the money to do a doctorate, she couldn't think of anything to invent. It was one thing to spend another four years of her youth hunched over books on tensile strength and irregular heat expansion- it was another entirely to commit to doing that without being sure if she'd emerge as a true inventor candidate.
If she had the physique of a Craftswoman instead of an engineer, all she'd need to do was train herself until her fingers could bend metal and her eyes see micrometre detail and then she could strut around to the adulation of all without the chore of thinking….
But she didn't.
She put the letter away in her haversack, the flap of the bag nibbling at the edge of the paper for a moment before sucking it away into its depths. Like many magical items, the bag had developed a personality over some decades of use. Despite its usefulness and even its status as a legacy from her grandfather, her father had passed it on to her when she'd departed for college with an eagerness she only later came to understand. The haversack neither increased in weight nor size based on its contents- up to a certain limit. The problem was that it was as capricious as a cat. If you stuck your hand in without being certain about what you were trying to retrieve, it would take great pleasure in deliberately misinterpreting your intentions. Once, Arlene had stuck her hand in looking for something to eat during a lecture, only to withdraw instead of the sweets she'd squirreled away- a mouldy sandwich that the blasted bag must've been saving for decades. Thereafter she was known as a wielder of fearsome 'biological weapons' by her classmates. Idly, she stuck her hand in the bag looking for anything else her grandfather might've left in it. Her hand closed around something cool and rough.
She stared at the rock for a moment before dropping it next to her doorstep with a mixture of disgust and resignation.
She had two months before she had to reply to the letter. During that time she could look for some side work, visit her father and try to get her life in order.
Her first stop: Lumiere's engineering exchange.
