Meridian City! Crossroads of the continent! Capital of the world!

Built with the sanitation lessons from the cleanest and healthiest settlements of Ctarria, it is home to millions!

Headquarters of the Society of the Six-Forked Bough, collecting the greatest figures from all three continents!

Every day, ships discharge metals from Ctarria and salt from Oghel to be loaded up with grain from the fields of Baelo. With all the wealth flowing through the canal, feeding the factories and skyscrapers springing up, living here feels like being at the epicenter of the future spreading out across the globe. And the world is growing smaller to meet it, with great metal-skinned steamers crossing the oceans in record time and laying down new intercontinental telegraph lines as they go.

At at the junction of one such line, in a wicker chair in a closet-sized office, sits Lemrae Winla-Racine, Operator First Class. He wears a sheet of pale green fabric: neither the height of Meridian fashion nor what he grew up wearing, but it allows him the freedom of movement needed to maintain his instrumentation. A small piece of beautifully embroidered leather is wrapped around his right index finger, which rests on a simple key. 

A folded message is passed through a slot in the wood panelling. With well-practised movements, his left hand opens it and holds it to the light, confirming the destination city is correct. His right finger taps out his station identification, and then begins to transmit the message. He concludes with his station identification again, and receives a quick confirmation code. He writes on the message "SENT-ACK", the time, and his signature, folds it back up, and then passes it through another slot, where it falls into a waiting basket.

Messages are sent, messages are received, and all the while Lemrae makes quick notes in the logbook. Any discrepancies can be resolved. The system is efficient and multiply redundant.

Telegraph operators swear many oaths. They are forbidden to speak of the messages they see, even to others so sworn. They are forbidden to act on what they might see. They are discouraged from even thinking about their transmissions (although nobody has managed to enforce such a rule). But they cannot be prevented from noticing.

MET OUR MUTUAL FRIEND DEAL IS STILL ON

SS RHACHI ARRIVED TWO THIRDS OF CARGO ROTTEN PLEASE ADVISE

C COMPANY FIRST BATTALION DELAYED BEGIN EXERCISE ON SCHEDULE REGARDLESS

SALES OF BOOK THE MOUNTAIN EXCEED EXPECTATIONS PRINT ANOTHER 5000 COPIES

PACKAGE ETA ONE WEEK MESSAGE ON ARRIVAL

I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU PLEASE TELL ME IF YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND

For two hours, messages stream through Lemrae's fingers, which rest only when messages are coming in instead. Finally, the deluge begins to peter out. The evening rush is over. Soon, there's a knock at the door and Lemrae stands, to be replaced by one of the more junior operators.

He walks through the busy hallways of Meridian City Telegraph Station, the largest such station on the continent. Even at night, multiple operators sit ready, facilitating the near-instantaneous communication which has so quickly become so ubiquitous among governments and businessmen. The muted click-clack of sounders can be heard behind closed doors. Apprentices walk swiftly this way and that, carrying folded messages to and from the operators.

Lemrae walks downstairs to the workshop and finds a desk. He lays out a blank sheet of paper and a small contraption, which he constructed in a sleep-deprived haze last night: two relays wired together, an electrolytic cell, and a tiny light. Finally, he has the chance to test it. He holds two wires in his hands.

When he applies voltage to one relay, it clicks but nothing happens.

When he applies voltage to the other relay, the same thing.

But when he applies voltage to both relays at once, the light turns on with a dim orange glow.

Four days later, Lemrae finds himself in the office of Nosei Tersai-Verene, Master-Adjutant of the Meridian City Telegraph Station. Lemrae is dressed in his finest clothes, deep red fabric which folds over itself and swishes when he walks. Nervous though he is, he stands firmly, and speaks without a tremor.

"...so by linking these gates, Sir, we can control a circuit with telegraph signals. This diagram here shows that keying in a station identifier could connect you to that station. We'd have to change the structure of the station identifiers, but this would allow any station to contact any other station directly, just by keying in the destination. As the telegraph network expands, this will let us send messages faster and with fewer intermediate steps."

Traditional Baelo enterprises larger than a household still have a sole owner, typically the head of a mercantile family. Management and day-to-day operations are delegated to trusted subordinates, of whom any in a position of responsibility will be part of the family, married in, or subject to a patron who is. 

The Kalra Telegram Partnership is one of the new breed of businesses on the continent. Nominally owned by Lord Kalra, a web of contracts modelled on the guild oaths of Oghel entitles his partners to a share of his authority and profits. The idea is to give those partners an incentive to see the enterprise as a whole succeed, so that it may expand at a speed unchecked by the need to arrange marriages or patronage transfers for every employee of any importance.

So far, that model has been a success. The so-called Lord of the Wires has no credible challengers to his ambitions of a global telecommunications monopoly. As for Nosei Tersai-Verene, he has become a wealthy man even with a fraction of a fraction of the profits, his own attire including gleaming rings and a sporty hand-embroidered jacket imported from the cities of Ctarria worn over a comfortable wrap. He has been free to choose his subordinates on the basis of merit over marriageability or an existing patronage connection, and today Lemrae has demonstrated the value of that.

However, 'automation' is a dirty word anywhere the influence of Oghel's guilds is felt, and the Kalra Telegram Partnership is one such place. The power of the guilds rests on their promise of lifelong livelihoods for their members. It is for that reason that the spread of telegrams into the continent of rivers has met with such bitter opposition from the semaphore and courier guilds there. 

Some former semaphore operators and horse relay managers are now members of the partnership, hired to consult on how best to deploy and run the stations with their expertise. You can poach a master from the guild with a generous enough paycheck, but you can't remove the guild biases against putting people out of a job. Not only that, but Lemrae's invention and its implications will also be a challenge to all their recommendations that led to the current telegram arrangements.

The Astute Master-Adjutant drums his fingers lightly on the desk and asks a few follow-up questions about Lemrae's work while he ponders those political factors that the young inventor has not considered. 

He can already see the potential gains in speed and the reduction in necessary headcount, and the consequent profits that would bring the partnership as a whole and him personally. However, to be the one to sponsor such a proposal would be dangerous. Nosei has heard the rumors of how vicious the guilds and their people can be. Both consultants he's met firsthand have had a bodyguard on retainer even an ocean away from their homeland. 

What he needs is a way to kick this up the chain, to allow Lemrae to develop his innovation to maturity quietly and then diffuse it out without Nosei having a visible hand in it. What was that workshop that had been mentioned in the last round of correspondence?

There we go. He'd filed it away in his mind as a potential punishment posting, off in the industrial outskirts of Meridian City overseeing technicians' rote experiments instead of keeping a finger on the pulse of the world in the glamorous heart of operations here.

(There is not yet a publicly traded stock exchange in the city, but that does not mean there are no opportunities to benefit from inside knowledge of secrets shared over the telegrams. Oaths in Baelo are not quite so binding as they are in Oghel, if one has taken the precaution of putting one's patron in one's debt and if it would be terribly hard to prove that a given investment was based on private information.)

"You have done well," Nosei says. He lets his lips curl up, as though he is trying to restrain an indulgent smile instead of putting it on deliberately. "Such creativity is to be rewarded."

"Our Lord Kalra is farsighted. What is the use of building all these telegraphs, says he, if we are to be caught out like the express riders by the next great discovery? To that end, our partnership is investing in fundamental research as well as our expansion efforts. The -" shed in the middle of nowhere "- scientific facility is so new, it has yet to be fully staffed. I intend to put your name forward to manage it, and I expect that promotion to succeed."

"Go there, work on your ideas full-time without the distracting bustle of the sounders and shift-changes, but remember: We have many competitors. Keep the trade secrets you invent close, as the guilds do. When they are ready to deploy, or should you have another breakthrough, we do not want anyone else learning of it before Lord Kalra can. You may have the opportunity to present to him personally."

There, that should awe the young man into accepting without considering the details too closely. 

Lemrae rubs his leather finger-wrap and tries to focus on what he's just heard, too awed to consider the details closely. He's certainly accrued enough experience to merit a promotion, but to manage his own lab? He allows his excitement to shine though. "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

There are a few details to sort out, but they do so quickly, and soon Lemrae leaves the office, buzzing with excitement.

Lemrae has ensured his last shift is a quiet one. Partly because his mind keeps wandering, and he's having trouble focusing on the work -- but mostly because he has to say goodbye. Both to the office, and to his friend.

He's hardly alone in having one. On slow days, operators have little to do, and sometimes end up communicating. Lemrae doesn't know his friend's name, but until now it hadn't mattered. Lemrae knew he was a telegraph operator, and that was enough. They had conversed, tentatively at first, but had ended up having long, languid conversations, with a prodigal use of words that would be unthinkable to anyone paying by the letter. They knew each other well, and had shared in their ideas; Lemrae's friend was studying mathematics and natural philosophy (although his parents apparently disapproved of such a fanciful pursuit), and had provided some key insights for Lemrae's projects. Among other things, he had pointed out that there was no need to diagram the entire circuit, or to trace the flow of electricity: a diagram could include only the flow of information, with each gate treated as a single element.

For the last time, Lemrae carefully removes the paper tape from the sounder, so no record is made, and makes a few experimental taps on the key. Soon a conversation begins to flow across the continent.

PROMOTION HAS GONE THROUGH TODAY I AM GETTING MY OWN LAB THIS IS MY LAST SHIFT

They speak for a bit, trading good wishes. Lemrae wants to see his friend again. Perhaps he might even meet him in person, someday...

PLEASE COULD YOU TELL ME WHO YOU ARE I WANT TO BE ABLE TO FIND YOU SOMEDAY

A pause. Perhaps it's not fair to ask him to go first -- he had seemed evasive and nervous about it when Lemrae had first asked, and neither one had brought it up since.

MY NAME IS LEMRAE WINLA RACINE

A pause. 

MINE IS YSEAU OLSPHE

Not unusual, for someone in that part of the continent to track lineage by the grandmothers instead of the grandfathers. 

Another pause, long enough that it could be mistaken for the end of the conversation. Then the next hesitant taps come down the line, speeding up again past the first word.

ALMEI YSEAU OLSPHE

"Almei." Lemrae says the name out loud, quietly. A girl's name.

It makes sense that a woman could operate a telegraph. It requires practice and some dexterity, but no great feats of strength. But -- the mathematics --

Still, she is a good friend. Nothing really changes, right?

I SEE WHY YOU DID NOT TELL ME EARLIER

THANK YOU FOR TRUSTING ME

The words feel wooden, and Lemrae wonders if she really was right to trust him. 

I WILL SEND YOU A LETTER AFTER I AM SET UP

A LETTER IS SO OLD FASHIONED LEMRAE

Tone is difficult to communicate over a telegram. There's a knock at the door for the shift change.

I SHALL EAGERLY AWAIT ITS ARRIVAL

Lemrae casts a pained look at the door. Oh well. Noreso can wait another minute.

SHIFT CHANGE GOODBYE ALMEI

With that, he reinserts the paper tape and stands up. He casts one last look around the office and opens the door. He locks eyes with Noreso. It'll be the man's first time on his own during a busy hour. "It's all yours", he says, giving him a firm smile. "You'll do great."

Walking out into the early morning, Lemrae flags down a cab. The two-wheel, one-horse carriage comes to a stop. He gets in, tells the driver the address, and off they go.

It's a fairly long journey: the lab is further away from the city centre than Lemrae thought. Perhaps I will have to purchase a horse. With the pay of a telegraph-master, even a junior one, this is suddenly much more achievable.

The cab pulls up to a fence with a locked gate. Lemrae pays the driver and gets out, taking a good look at the facility. There's a single wooden building, with a simple fence as security. It looks small, nondescript. Underground, perhaps? Nosei did say secrecy was important.

The cab speeds away, no doubt hoping someone in this distant part of the city will need a ride. Casting a glance at the gold thread just added to his finger-wrap, Lemrae unlocks the gate with his new key.

As he approaches the building itself, the door to it is opened for him by a hazel-haired youth of coastal Ctarrian heritage.

"You must be the new manager, sir? Please, come right in."

The lad has a notebook in his hands that he steadily adds chronicler's shorthand to as they walk and talk with no sign of distraction. An ideomotorist, probably taught by one of the chroniclers' schools. 

The building is a converted farmhouse, with a hatch in the floor for a cellar that looks infrequently used. Some of the interior walls have recently been removed to make more space for lab benches and shelves of components and reagents. A few of the electrical components have currently been repurposed into a wire-based heater on a tripod to set a kettle boiling.

Two Baelo men are sat nearby. One has the clothes and comportment of a minor aristocrat, though he stands up and greets Lemrae as an equal when he enters, a perk of the partnership's legalities that many nobles do not care to honor. His smile creases his sideburns. 

"A rustic place, isn't it? Of course, you'll have the authority to put some of our funds towards improving the facilities. Then we shall be able to devote ourselves to our experiments, to furthering the bounds of human experience!"

The other man remains quiet, thumb rubbing at the rough-edged bone ring he wears, a devout or recently-bereaved omophagist. 

Lemrae looks around the farmhouse. Well. It's smaller, and not as well-appointed as he expected. It's fine, he tells himself. This just means he gets to set the direction. It means he can focus on his own work. It's fine. Definitely just fine.

"Of course!" Lemrae matches the aristocrat's enthusiasm. "I'd like to start by going over the records, checking the books. But first, your names?"

"Lord Vero, the young fellow is Tamett of Kurtur and this is Serna, our very own electrical engineer. He wired Witred, the last of our number for now, when we saw you coming, she'll be arriving soon. Tamett, would you get the logs out? We've not been established long at all, so you shan't have too much reading to catch up on."

He puts a generous slice of butter into his infusion once the kettle has boiled, offers the same to the others, and sips his own drink appreciatively.

"For the moment I've been largely continuing my own line of experiments. Mild electricity applied to the tongue to stimulate the perception of taste, tests of that ilk."

That would be classic scholar-aristocrat behaviour, following his own interests with little regard for rigor or application beyond party tricks. Lord Kalra is an exception to that norm.

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.