[Surreal Tender seems to have caught hold of my brain. If this keeps up, I’ll give her a section in the Table of Contents. But she may not go anywhere, in which case you’ll have seen glimpses of a life that extends for decades in either direction of these fragments …
Also, I don’t love making up fakey science; I’d rather reason by dreams. So this first section, IDK, may retcon later. Imagine any lovely, antique, and cumbersome engine, finicky, high-maintenance, powered by magic and a careful balance of poisons.
Just joining? This is the second story about her; here’s the first. She got her name in this essay, which isn’t about her at all.]
Plenty died before Diana von Birkenhauser survived.
To pick up thoughts out of the ether — to read at a remote distance the pulses on the wires, the energetic patterns of another’s body, the perambulations of astral bodies through our skies — you needed lunite.
Breathe enough of the azure gas, you can get glimpses.
An infusion, now, filling the blood —
You can transcribe a telegraph message half a mile from the nearest line. Look at a man and see the ripples that command his hand to rise. Examine an electrified building, detect a short in the wires. (This would later make technomancers useful to insurance companies, who commissioned several of the early models.)
But lunite — luneous nitrate, isolated and stabilized by dissolving lune stone in nitric acid — is a caustic, safe in small doses for short times, dangerous in accumulation.
Engineers replaced inhaled lunite with lunite filaments run along the nerves, creating other problems. Gradually bodies were refined and resculpted to more safely house the precious lunite, until the latest models had little human flesh at all. Skin — a certain expanse was necessary, early engineers and their subjects learned the hard way. The brain, too, proved essential. Engineers scaffolded the soft tissue with lunite, which protected against unnecessary protein accumulation and staved off madness, then they defended the whole structure by reinforcing the skull. But the human mind remained.
Hearts, too, had to go. Lunite in the veins destroyed the oxygen transport system; the resulting anemia weakened the heart muscle. Technomancers of Surreal Tender’s generation eventually had their hearts replaced with miniature pumps and engines run on compressed steam and powered by a bit of angel stone — a technology now lost. The lunite in their veins protected them from the side effects of the slow decay of angel stone, but still, they tended to sickness in their bones — something like phossy jaw, but everywhere. Enter leaded-silver skeletal structures. At that point, why not make them inhumanly speedy, supple, strong?
And so it went.
It was always a chancy science. Made technomancers of some, lunatics of others. Some both, of course.
Wondrous, cumbersome and expensive, the technologies didn’t last 100 years before they fell out of fashion, relegated to the realm of curio-cabinet gadgets run on science that now seemed more occult than empirical.
Beings built to detect astral bodies and read human thoughts, indeed. That had certainly never happened.
Sure, they could detect faults in wires, but so what? Their cost hardly justified tricks more easily achieved by an electrician with modern-day tools.
They fell by the wayside.
Surreal Tender, therefore, felt little alarm at Mr. Carker’s warning. She didn’t suppose she would live very much longer, anyway. For the moment she was puissant — she thought, leaping the space between the infirmary roof and the belfry like a gazelle, then crouching on the smog-stained marble ledge — but at any moment the delicate balance of poisons powering her body could fail, and she with it.
Such was life.
A surreal life, she thought, as she had when she first learned the word. Something more than life, above but also apart, an excrescence, irrelevant to the real.
Someone’s nightmare or fevered fantasy, that was all.
Certainly — she thought, returning to her workshop with the night’s ill-gotten gains — she was Mr. Carker’s fever dream. But that was his lookout. He was grown man; let him protect himself. He couldn’t hurt her, at any rate.
She arched her back, delighting in the silent deep cambré she hadn’t been able to achieve for decades without a noise like bearings grinding.
That day, she had stood up to shake his hand before he departed without the job. Standing, she stretched by habit.
Mr. Carker took her hand and let go after a brief clasp. She couldn’t read his feeling through his glove, but his spectacles gleamed as he tilted his head.
“Could you turn around and face the rear wall, Miss Tender?”
“No. And why?”
“Sediment in the vertebral joints, sounds like — if you please — ”
She came around the desk and, despite herself, turned.
She had no skin to feel his breath on her back, but she perceived an intensification in the electrical energy in his brain, like a warm buzz quite near her. Her bodice was her body, but the heavy, supple outer vertebral structures — graphite-colored like the rest of her torso — were open to the air, allowing the steam channels within to cool and the fluid to return to the heart.
“Yes — I beg your pardon — ” Her heightened hearing told her he was replacing his spectacles with a jeweler’s loupe. Then he said apologetically, “I don’t have my tools with me, of course. But you do need get that seen to. There’s some compaction of detritus. You’re in danger of permanent scoring.”
She turned back to him. In danger, she thought, sure enough if I turn my back to every robber or thrill-seeker who waltzes through my door. But he was correct. And she had no way to get the grit out of her vertebrae.
“You were a technologist at Birkhausen’s?” she asked. “You said you were — ”
“Only a junior clerk, yes. But I learned to perform basic maintenance on the externals of the — the equipment, madam.”
She looked at her workbench. “My tools are there.”
“Just once, as a favor.” That almost-smile again. “I work cheap, but I don’t work free.”
“You’re hired, of course.”