Obsolete
Diana von Birkhausen unwinds after a classified briefing
[Another installment of Surreal Tender the Technomancer. This one happens simultaneously with This Quiet Earth. Surreal and Mr. Carker were right: Diana von Birkhausen is alive. Let’s find out what she’s up to.
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
Surreal Tender was wrong.
One person survived the process of replacing every human element of her body with artifice. That person was Diana von Birkhausen.
When Diana was a girl in the 1770s, she studied natural philosophy as a single subject, one she believed superseded the older, all-encompassing discipline of metaphysics. Though a failure, her magnum opus drew on the totality of what she had received as a coherent discipline — chemistry, physics, biology, mechanics, and the other fields now treated in isolation. The technomancers were the complete expression of what had once been a unified philosophy of nature. Man (or woman, more accurately) fulfilled.
Even before her final transformation, Diana rarely met a conversant equal. Jane Sumner, later Surreal Tender, was a competent technician, no more. Diana found Jane useful because she was clever and robust, hardy enough to undertake the transformation and receptive enough to understand it. But while Jane could have been admitted to graduate study in any of the natural sciences if she had applied with her own credentials and a man’s name, Diana did not consider her a real scientist.
Such a person must move beyond received knowledge. She must innovate. Diana spent generations searching for such a companion. Little Ada — too frail, too enamored of men. Mr. Tesla — Diana wasted a long, feverish summer convincing him he would be happier as a woman (and therefore an appropriate lover for her) but then he lost his heart to a bird.
A bird.
Of course they had only corresponded by letter.
Diana was grieving by then, bitterly lamenting that astral communications could not — given the right receiver — be plucked from thin air. She had so wanted to close the circle between the human and spirit worlds.
The altered humans manufactured by Birkhausen Laboratories at its height had many powers — speed, agility, strength, endurance, quickened thought, heightened senses, and so on — but nothing that justified the danger and expense of making them. They never spoke with spirits. Not once. Not one.
Tricks with telegraph wires. Surreal Tender wasn’t the only technomancer who reported being able to slurp those signals out of air, but it never seemed important.
Until Luke Stirner invented the electric calculating machine.
“An intelligence,” Diana now said. “A spirit.”
Her new chassis — which should more properly be called her new body — had been designed, as far as externals, by young M. Le Verrier. The jade fingers he would go on to echo in his Diana Huntress sculpture now fiddled with a string of garnet beads.
“Yours is a glorified abacus.” She had just come from a top-secret demonstration of the computing machine. “The next will be more like dear Ada’s concept. An analytical engine. Then the machine will dwindle, speed up, become less of an electricity hog — that’s mere progress. Technicians’ work.”
Mr. Stirner lit her cigarette.
“I’m glad you think so highly of my invention.”
“Thank you, darling.” Diana thumbed through her beads. “And I do think highly of it. You’ve opened a door. Eventually it will speak its whole soul in electricity, even as you and I think in — what?”
“Electrical signals in the brain,” Luke Stirner said dryly. “Though I tend to doubt your speculation that we’ll one day be able to read thoughts using electromagnetic waves.”
Diana waved this away.
“We will speak with machines — and eventually each other — in our thoughts.” She lay back along the chaise longue and lifted her perfectly sculpted chin to blow a smoke ring. “We will become the astral bodies I so longed to meet.”
Mr. Stirner leaned on the back of the chaise longue and smiled down at her.
“And what of these flesh bodies that — I confess — I still find useful?”
“Obsolete.” Diana let her eyes drift closed over her thoughts. “On their way out, like the Little Blue Men who used to live in the hollow hills.” She laughed and opened her eyes. “Did I tell you we had a family of them as servitors in Belleville? Well, near Belleville. The old property, so to speak, in Nova Terra. They love service; they’re as devoted as English rustics.”
“You’ve never actually been to England, have you, dear?”
Diana’s laugh was like silver bells. Mr. Gruelle could have invented it for a fairy princess. That first delightful sound that tells you the witch isn’t going to cut up Raggedy Ann for a patchwork quilt, after all.
“I was speaking metaphorically, darling. I’m sure they have a few Bolshies in the mix.” She closed her eyes again. “But they’re still on the way out. And so are you.”
“Not yet, I hope.” Mr. Stirner studied her jade features. In some lights she looked translucently fleshlike. Other times she just looked green. “I have — or rather, my emperor has — a war to win.”
She reached for his hand; her heightened senses always knew perfectly well where he was. She gave him a squeeze. “I didn’t mean you personally, darling.”