Mother of Magic

Apprentice

Silena looked over the most recent version of the device with undisguised fascination. "I know I helped build this, but I was just following directions. This new version will work? It's a lot bigger than the last one we built."

Le hid a secret smile from the former assassin and now his adept student of science and the technology of his world. "It should. Eventually. I studied physics, but in school, we did not get overly practical sometimes, if you don't count the robot battles."

"Robot battles? What are those? Not the battle part. I think. The Robot part. " Silena asked.

Le considered how to answer that. "Robots are devices. Fairly complex. They can have arms and legs, but they are all mechanical. Fabricated. Far more complex than say a horse-drawn cart suspension. We put tiny little motors all over them to allow them to move. We built controllers that allowed us to tell it how to move. We could add eyes and ears of a sort, called cameras and microphones. We could even give them a brain, but they were not as smart as an insect in most ways. The brains help the instructions about how to move the arms and legs. What to do if it heard something. How to interpret what the camera eyes saw. Very crude. Outlines and shapes. The ones my team built could see heat. Use that to orient the robot it was up against. Very primitive stimulus-response code. It help whoever was driving the robot via the remote control to stay on target."

"Team you were on?"

"There were other teams and we would compete to see who could build the best robot at fighting the other robots. Building those battle bots is how I learned to fabricate things. Also to program at a higher level. I was deeply sick back then and this was my only activity or outlet to speak of. When I got better, I used all of that experience about movement and programming to help Stephanie's team learn how to play Baseball better. As I got healthier it let me learn to play baseball too. I understood all the principles, but I had to learn how to make my body do it. Stephanie helped me. I got good at it. It turned out that once my body was healthy I was something of a natural. Not like Stephanie, but between how I learned things and how she taught me to move and exercise, I was really good. I also knew how to build things. Practical things, like our magnet-maker. Magic makes all that easier too, but in this shop, we are all about figuring out how to take local technology and jumpstart it. Make it better. More efficient. It will be decades before we can build robots, if ever, but we can make things like electric motors more efficient. Generate more torque and force from the same amount of electricity."

Silena leaned back from her examination of the device to give Le a visual inspection. "You know what, Boss? I see that tall and strong body you have and it's really hard to imagine you ever being sick. Between that body and all your centered chill, it seems more like you'd be some sort of — I don't know — a leader of some kind? Maybe governor or president, with about 10 wives kind of thing. You are a tall cool stein of good beer, Boss. Also a fucking genius, given all the stuff we already made here." Silena gave a set of shelves along one wall of their shop a wave. All sorts of devices cluttered the shelves. "Despite all that, I'm still in awe of what we do. That the things we make and build work! Like this thing." Silena indicated the newest device of the shop that they had built.

Le, not being comfortable with praise, bypassed it and focused on the latest invention. "It may take a few tries to figure out the best way to operate it but yes. Balance the cooling times needed to keep the device from melting versus the right amount of time for the iron to take on the field, but it will work. All the tech is there."

"We melt iron ore, pour it into these ceramic trays, stick it in here, turn it on, and even with this big air gap around the slide trays this thing makes the ingots into magnets? Better than our last magnet maker?"

"Yes. Our next one will be better still, as soon as we figure out the cooling and get the pump built to take the heat and run at the volume we need to cool the coils that generate the field. Then we move the copper coils in closer to the ferrous or other magnetizable metal as it cools from molten to solid and becomes an even stronger magnet."