strapped down tight in there. You should have a staff twice as big for the job you do.”
Sheldon brightened, chins tightening beneath his five o’clock shadow. “We get by,” he admitted with a certain note of pride. “How are things out there today?”
Vilaris shrugged. “Thick. Windy. Dangerous. The u’she.”
I slurped the last dregs of my soup as though I were a condemned man enjoying his final meal, then let the bowl spin to rest on the table. To Sheldon’s credit, he didn’t bat an eye while the bowl wub-wub-wubbed to a halt.
“What is this place?” I asked, studying the ceilings.
“Kingsholme? It’s the closest thing we have to a city hall. Pyras’s center of arts and culture.”
“So you guys can come in here and get free food whenever you want?”
Sheldon answered on their behalf, flashing a smile. “We’re always happy to feed the City Watch and their friends.”
“Friends?” I said. “I wouldn’t go that far.” I showed him my wristbands.
“It’s a formality,” Vilaris explained. “We’re taking him to see the Innovators.”
“News to me,” I said.
“Maybe you should see a doctor as well,” said the chef, no doubt having noticed my wounds.
“It looks worse than it is,” I said. I tapped my synthetic eye with a fingernail. Tink-tink.
Sheldon’s expression darkened. “Is he allowed in here?”
“We’ve reported it to the council already,” Vilaris said. “There’s a reason for all this.”
“Ah.” The chef gave a nod of sudden understanding. “My apologies. I didn’t realize.”
“Shel, ol’ buddy,” I said, “think nothing of it.”
When you’re a techsoul, you live without discrimination except in the presence of primies. Redbloods think they’re better than you because they don’t rust. They act like you don’t both eat and crap the same. Blaylocke had had me there for a second with his little ‘You eat food?’ ruse, but in truth he knew as little about what it meant to be a techsoul as all the other primies.
The chef took his leave after a moment of uncomfortable silence. Vilaris and Blaylocke thanked him for another fine meal. Sheldon insisted that it was hardly a meal and no trouble at all. Another series of hallways took us to a set of heavy wooden doors with riveted brass plating. The plaque on the wall read:
Department of Innovation
Prof. Dr. E. Chester Wheatley
Master Gadgeteer and Technotherapist-in-Chief
Technotherapist? I wondered. Vilaris magicked a steel key from his jacket and unlocked the door. The room beyond might as well have been in a basement for all its lack of windows, exposed brick walls lit by the orange warmth of coal furnaces and the cold white outbursts of blowtorches shedding sparks. I counted no fewer than ten men at work, each the picture of focus, armed with mallet and saw and rivet gun, encircling the skeletons of half-finished chassis like tribal hunters ganging up on big game. The workshop was a graveyard of gears, flywheels, pressure gauges, dynamos and pipes, all piled in corners, stacked on steel shelving units, and strewn about the floor.
Nobody noticed us. Vilaris had to send Blaylocke to fetch the guy whose name was on the plaque outside the door. What I’d expected to be some wizened old man was actually a guy about my age, a strapping youth bound in an exoskeleton of gleaming metal. A veil of black hair hung into his face, stringy-damp with sweat. When he removed his goggles they left wide pink circles in the skin around dark, tired eyes. I was smitten. If there was a man in this city who it could benefit me to befriend, this was that man.
“Gareth, Clint, good to see you. Chester Wheatley,” he told me, thrusting out a greasy palm.
I took it in both of mine. “Muller, Muller Jakes,” I said, shaking his whole arm vigorously. “What’s this you’re working on?”
He turned the upper half of his body to look, stiff-necked in his metal scaffolding. “Oh, that, just a new idea. My grandest idea yet. As they all are. Very secretive, you know. Everything we do here is very secretive.”
And yet we walked right in and no one batted an eye, I almost said. His secret project looked to be something meant for flight—a light, winged frame about the size of a large dog, its internal mechanisms spinning.
“It’s… magnificent,” I said. “Really, I mean that.”
Creases appeared in the skin around Chester’s eyes. I like to think he would’ve stood a little taller if he’d had that much postural freedom. “You think so?”
“Without a doubt. Clean lines, efficient machinery, thoughtful design. You’ve really taken this to a whole new level. It’s by far the most advanced model I’ve ever seen.”
Chester was confused. “The most advanced… but this is my own design. Where could you have seen anything like it before?”
“Listen, Chaz. Walk with me.” I would’ve put an arm around him if not for the wristbands. Instead I took him by the shoulders and guided him away from Vilaris and Blaylocke. “I know you work hard. I can tell you’re a brilliant man. Lots of great ideas have taken shape here, haven’t they? Yeah. This place is so full of dreams. So—” I paused for effect and panned my hands over the room, “—so… pregnant, with possibility. This is a place where dreams come alive. I can smell the inspiration.” I could smell something, but inspiration wasn’t it. “You have a gift,” I said, looking him straight in the eye, “and you’re wasting it.”
There were wrinkles between Chester Wheatley’s eyebrows. “But this… this flying machine will be the greatest invention the City Watch has ever seen. I’ve rigged up a bluewave communicator to send simple commands to it from a distance. Watch.” He picked up a black plastic box that had once been an ordinary comm. Now it had a control wheel made from a copper gear, along with three extra buttons. When he turned the wheel, ailerons on the wings flapped in reverse of one another. “It’s operable from as far away as the bluewave signal will go. This button will operate the built-in camera, after I install it. The City Watch will be able to fly it and take pictures of the outside without ever setting foot on the Churn. The Automaplane, I call it.”
“This technology is new around here?” I acted incredulous. “Hate to break it to you, Chaz, but send me up to the stream with a few ounces of gravstone and I’ll bring you back a fleet of these things. I’m sure I can find someone who still has a bunch of them lying around in their backyard.”
Chester’s bubble was burst. “Just when I think I’ve discovered something completely different,” he said, the sparkle in his eyes turned to sorrow.
This guy got out of the house as seldom as I’d hoped. His Automaplane was a blasted brilliant idea. But I had places to go and things to steal. “Hey, don’t get so down on yourself,” I said. “You came up with this entire contraption without ever having known it existed before. If that isn’t the mark of a true genius, I don’t know what is. Chaz, buddy… others around here might not see your potential, but I do. You’re one heck of an inventor, and if you don’t see it in yourself, you need to be reminded.” I reached through his scaffolding and poked him in the chest with both pointer fingers. “Your potential stretches further than you know. There are so many unexplored avenues of technology, the potential for finding that next big idea is right around the corner. Matter of fact, I think I may have already found it for you.”
“Oh yeah?” he said, perking up. “What is it?”
“I’m a techsoul,” I told him. “And I’d like to donate my body to science.”
3
The neurological pathways that connect my body to its augments are nothing short of miraculous. Don’t ask me why I was born with telerium-laced bones, skin the consistency of synthetic cloth, or bundles of polymer fibers for muscles. My veins are like fish tank tubing, my tendons and cartilage like hard rubber. Any given part of my body is twice as sturdy as a human’s. Yet somehow it all works. I think and breathe and eat and crap and sleep like a human. Only I’m not
human. Not as far as humans are concerned.
Even though I grew up the son of a mechanic, I’ve always felt like I’ve had an intimate knowledge of machinery in my blood. If something has moving parts, I can figure out how to fix it with the right tools. It’s just hard to fix your own arm when the job takes two hands. So I’d offered myself to the study of E. Chester Wheatley not because I needed his expertise, but because I needed his hardware and a pair of skilled hands.
Techsouls are the unluckiest people in the world; we’re also the most plentiful, by far. I’ve undergone more surgeries than I can count; most of the later ones I performed on myself. I’ve tried dozens of mechanisms to change the functions of my body and serve as convenient little diversions from having to think about who or what I am. When your body is part machine, you can’t ignore technology. You can’t not think about improving yourself and staying relevant. You wonder if anyone would take you seriously if you decided to say ‘the heck with it’ and let yourself go, become an outdated model with rusty joints and toothless gears. Because the best thing about being human is never having to literally stretch yourself toward an ideal that says only the newest and shiniest tech is employable, only the latest and greatest is worth noticing. Primies are free from all that. They can lose weight or gain it, build muscle or pile on the fat, but that’s the extent of the decisions they have to make about their bodies. It’s