Tamett the scrivener returns shortly with a few stacked books. From the handwriting in common, he maintains all the documentation at present, and it is well-organized. There are comprehensive notes on both Vero's erratic procedures and also Serna's much more methodical progression through all the wire alloys available to measure their resistance as a function of radius and voltage matches the suppliers' specifications. 

"I worked for a citizen-scientist in my hometown, sir, before it changed hands," he explains. 

For most cities in Ctarria, there's little point investing in scientific equipment not directly applicable to a trade, because the wrong clan of nomads taking power could mean that equipment gets appropriated or taxed or burned. The citizen-scientists make do with what little they can afford and write letters to each other constantly so that their discoveries won't be so easily lost. They've been eager adopters of the telegraphs the partnership has established over there.

Lemrae greets them all, hoping he'll be able to remember their names. "Thank you. My name is Lemrae. I was doing some work on relays. Mostly theoretical for now, but I believe I can use them to make circuits that can change themselves in response to input. Maybe even do calculations."

He walks around the facility, looking at the equipment. There isn't much -- mostly the instruments Serna has been using, and a few random devices purchased by Vero. He's doing his best to appear in charge, but he's never managed more than a single apprentice. "As you were." he says, hoping his tone is authoritative-trying-to-be-friendly, rather than the other way around. "I'll have some in-depth conversations with each of you over the next day or two."

Taking Lord Vero's infusion, Lemrae settles into a wicker chair to review Serna's notes.

The talk of relays and calculating machines doesn't inspire any immediate interest in those present, though Tamett is politely attentive, and they resume their activities. He and Serna get to work on the next spool of wire a little stiffly, while Vero takes his time finishing his own drink in thoughtful contempation. Two out of three for an impression of authority.

A few minutes later, the sounds of hoofbeats approach from outside. Shortly after, the last of the current team enters, a woman of one of the nomadic peoples of Ctarria who is approaching middle age. Witred wears a sleeveless brocaded vest that bares tanned arms dotted with patterns of scarification, and briefly clicks her tongue at the sight of the books spread out.

"This is our new manager?"

"Yes, this is Lemrae, a telegraph-master from the central exchange!" The aristocrat says brightly. "Witred here advises us on the practical matters, she laid wires between outposts during the Last War." 

Also known as the First Industrial War, to anyone who isn't an optimist. 

Lemrae looks at Witred, trying not to stare at her scarified arms, and smiles. "That's me. Thanks for coming, Witred. I'm glad to have you." He means it. For all his skill in the telegraph office, he knows very little of what goes into actually laying the lines.

"Hm." Witred seems to be reserving judgment. Seeing the others are going about their prior activities, she collects some sort of complex saddle-spool arrangement and hefts it outside with impressive strength.

There, she puts it on the back of her intimidatingly large horse and starts criss-crossing the lot, letting the spool play out and barking complaints whenever it catches or troubles her mount that are dutifully recorded by Tamett.

Lemrae is about to ask about what they're doing, but then he remembers one of the managers he had a while ago, at a smaller telegraph post. As soon as the man had arrived he had started asking what they were doing (forcing them to stop working to explain themselves) and recommending changes. Changes that made no sense given the state of the telegraph station. The manager had earned near-universal scorn within the week.

Instead, Lemrae sits back down and lets them work: they already have a system figured out. They're clearly running some kind of test related to wire length. He'll ask more about it when they're not busy.

Over the next few days, watching the experiments and interviewing them individually yields a better understanding of what the current direction of research is. 

"- had to kill four men and have three of my horses shot out from under me, and for what? So some general can send a telegram instead of a runner from their bunker to order another wave of soldiers to run into the barbed wire and get shot?"

"The telegraph wires never lasted long, either, artillery or fools not looking where they'd tread breaking gaps in it. By war's end they'd have me lay them two at a time, an armspan apart. Blasted barbed wire was never so fragile."

"It's the larger wires that're more susceptible to it, sir, which is an odd matter when the smaller should be more delicate. The cladding doesn't help, breaks down in practice faster than the manufacturers' promises for how it ought to last, flakes or sloughs off in your hands when you gather it back up, sir."

"- and when you apply this current to this part of the tongue - you're sure you don't want to try it for yourself? - the perception is of intense sweetness!"

"If I could just find a volunteer who would keep still, I would love to try again the old needle-behind-the-eyeball experiment with a few different materials and currents to determine whether the colors stimulated are the product of the pressure as was first claimed or rather from some kind of bioelectric interaction as my tongue tests would suggest."

"- then for last month, three more transient resistivity events. The first was on the 7th with the highest temperature on the thermometer all year to date, the second on the 16th, and the third on the 20th."

Tamett has a more confident speaking voice when he's reading from his notes, and a habit of laying out the facts in a way intended to bring the listener along to his conclusion. 

While they each have their own side projects, like Witred's improvements to the wire-laying saddle design or Vero's taste tests, the bulk of their work is at least adjacent to the matter of transient resistivity.

It's a logical choice. Transient resistivity events are a common problem for the telegraphs, and they remain poorly understood. Every so often, the signal down a wire will attenuate greatly over the course of a couple of days. It seems to be more likely in wires that see heavy use, though of course any incidents on unused lines will go unnoticed. From Lemrae's own experience, trying to communicate over an affected wire is like going from someone tapping the table you're sat at to them tapping a table on the far end of a large echoing chamber. (They're also a common general-purpose excuse for any operator who doesn't want to admit their own errors, which complicates reporting.)

The standard cure is to turn the line off and on again,  disconnecting it from the power supply entirely for a few days, which works reliably but is an inconvenient service outage and a once-affected line will often be subject to more such events afterwards. Because this 'cooling-off' period is so effective and the undersea cables remain mercifully unaffected, the leading hypothesis is that these events are some kind of thermal interaction between the electricity and the material of the wires.

The problem is, trying to model those interactions starting from the relevant physical equations invariably predicts effects multiple orders of magnitude weaker than reality even with favorable assumptions. The typical defense of the thermal hypothesis is that there must be points on the line where shoddy laying or manufacturing errors make it more susceptible, to justify why transient resistivity has yet to be observed inside an electrician's workshop. 

However, the outdoors tests here have already observed several transient resistivity events, with the wire already checked over with calipers, laid by a practiced expert, on a small plot of land where the ambient temperature variations will be minimal. It is time for a new hypothesis, or at least a new round of experiments. 

Lemrae walks into the research building, hefting a stack of papers onto the table. "I got them. Signal reports from every outpost on Baleo, going back two years. This time we've got the logs of successful connections too, not just the reported problems. It'll take a while, but we can go through it and see how many events we have per year and per usage on the different lines. This should tell us if wires that get used more get more resistance." He pauses, looking around the table. "I was only able to get these because I'm a telegraph-master. It's considered confidential information. Spies, or our competitors, could learn a lot from it. So these papers do not leave this room. Nor does the fact that they exist."

He sits down, finding the summary of their experiments so far. "We've more or less conclusively demonstrated that it isn't external temperature changes, but it still might be temperature changes from resistive heating. I want to see if we can artificially induce it, or make a cooling-off period take longer, by running the line along a bed of hot coals."

"We also know that it doesn't happen under the ocean. I'm curious how much water is needed. If we run a line through a trough of water, do we still get these failures? Next time we get a failing line, I also want to see if we can speed up the recovery by immersing it in water."

He reviews the existing set of experiments again. "Do we know if the cladding breaks down faster all the time? We should leave a line on the ground for a few days without powering it. The cladding coming off could be a clue... but maybe the manufacturers are just selling us shoddy wire."

Serna wrings his hat in hesitation, then speaks up. 

"Begging your pardon, sir, but wire-heating to induce the effect has been tried without success. The only times we've observed it have been when the whole spool has been laid outside for days on end."

"What we could do is take one of those line-marking trolleys, the kind they use to organize the dockyards, and lay that hot tar-paint over the wire when the power gets cut. Murder on the turf, but it'll keep the metal from cooling."

"You'll have the same problem with the water. A single horse-trough won't be enough, and I'm not laying wire through a bog."

"No, no, no need for all that. There's a friend of mine who has horse-drawn canal routes criss-crossing her lands, roving-bridges and all. I daresay she'll permit us to lay a wire along the canal beds, no questions asked, if we only stretch the ends a little ways overland to connect her summer-house and winter-house together once the work is done so that she can bell the servants in one from the other."

DIRIGIBLE TRANSPORT "SHALL NEVER BE CHALLENGED"

MURDERS IN WESTSIDE TENEMENTS CONTINUE

OREST SINGER'S LOVE-SCANDAL!

NORTH-SOUTH RECONCILLIATION COMMITTEE REMAINS DEADLOCKED

TCHEX CITY VOWS TO RESIST NOMAD RULE "TO THE LAST"

HORSELESS CARRIAGE BOSS KICKED TO DEATH BY HORSE

Over the next few weeks, the results come in.

"Irili is delighted, and she's promised to send us immediately if there is any trouble with her line. No signs of that yet though, even using a spool that has shown the unusual resistivity thrice when laid out here."

"Day fourteen, still no shedding from the control wire."

The following day, a sweating and stained Serna rushes in with a gauge in hand and the line-drawing trolley dragged behind him, leaving a haphazard trail across the floor in his haste.

"Would you look at that! Not even half the length of the wire tarred, and instead of slowing the cooling the signal's most of the way recovered!"

Shortly after, bundling up an affected wire and tossing it in a pond has a similar result of removing the excess resistance within minutes. Neither are viable solutions for practical use, as Witred is quick to remind the jubilant team, but they are novel scientific results. 

Through all this, Tamett has been staying inside the workshop, studiously ignoring the activity outside while he tries different ways to visualize the trove of data in the papers. He pages through them with great care befitting their secrecy.

"There is a seasonal component. More failures in the north and south as the weather warms, less in winter, a more constant rate around the equatorial regions." That would be strong evidence in support of the thermal hypothesis, were it not for all the other evidence they've gathered that conflicts with the standard formulation.

"Proximity matters as well, sir. Failures in one line seem to spread to those nearby within days, so long as they're no more than a few miles apart."

He seems discomforted to review his own shorthand notes some days, looking between them and the wires brought back in after the quenching and tarring. Whatever his concerns, they don't make it into the more legible script of the lab books.

Lemrae puts the letter he's writing aside as he listens to Tamett's report. "Physical proximity... it's almost like there's an invisible storm." He twists his finger-wrap for several minutes, staring into space. "We know that compasses rely on some sort of magnetic wind or universal magnetism, which pulls all magnets to face north-south. We also know that some things can block it. A compass doesn't work inside an iron box, for instance. And electricity is generated by moving magnets near wires, and can cause magnets to move as well."

He looks at a map of telegraph lines in Baleo. "Imagine there was a storm of magnetic wind. Some sort of perturbation in the universal magnetic field. It could introduce all sorts of problems in communication. Like trying to use semaphore towers in driving rain. The storms would travel across the continent, disrupting telegraphs wherever they go. And just like how a stronger current causes a stronger force on magnets, a wire being used more is more likely to be affected." He picks up a piece of sloughed-off cladding. "Some things will keep the storm out. But when there's electricity running through the wire, the storm... batters at the walls. A body of water is liquid, so it can't be broken. Maybe it just heats up a little or becomes more turbulent. But the cladding breaks down."

He looks at the list of experimental results. "You'd expect that the storm would continue its effects as soon as you took a wire out of the water. But if the storm causes some sort of disturbance to build up, then maybe it takes a little time to build back up to a level we can detect. And that would also explain why a wire that's been affected before is more likely to be affected again." He turns now to Tamett. "What do you think? Does it make sense?"