Metal Bones for Angels
by Inayat Juno Mander
“That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show.”
— Ada Lovelace
The problem for Phoebe Lovewell was that people believed she wanted to be immortal. The masses could endure a female member of gentry daring to participate in the sciences, but to defy God’s own will? That was edging too close to fire.
That was the only reason she was here, bowing on the chancel marble steps, white skirts spread out and hands clasped together. A picture of humility while the priest spoke holy words over her. Man of cloth absolving her of sin.
He, like the others, was blind to what she could see. The celestial beauty of wires and steel and all that they could promise. Answers which could not be given by scented air and prayers. Her work was prayer made real; it would fulfil God’s wants in the ways flesh failed to.
But first, she had to make the priests believe her. Or at least tolerate her.
That was her only goal here, standing in the pulpit of a church and lying to men of cloth under God’s heavy gaze. It was fine, when her work was done He would forgive her, and they would too.
In the house of faith, she answers the priests’ questions.
“No, I have no intention to defy God. I am His child and His greatest devotee.”
He questions her faith, and she takes it, questions her motives, and she takes it, questions her love for science, she takes it. The priest finally asks, “Simply put, girl, do you wish to commit the most insolent of crimes against God’s holiness, and reject His natural order for the immortality of wicked flesh?”
Lovewell is almost insulted. Immortality is a fool’s game, for alchemists chasing stones and gold. There are better ways to build legacies and holier pursuits to follow.
Phoebe Lovewell wants to bring angels to Earth.
The monks standing at the head of the chapel building stare down at her with cruel gravity and she can sense their wary idiocy. Cowardly men too afraid to search for God themselves. Her work would bring them salvation too, but first she must lie her way out of their influence. She will not let men of cloth and flesh stop her.
“No,” she speaks.
The wooden eaves of the church sigh with relief as holy men drop their terse shoulders and demote her in their minds from potential heretic to stupid girl meddling with wires. She barely listens to the rest. Itches to return to her work as they babble, watching the sun set through the stained-glass portraits of holy bodies.
Was this show not a betrayal of God too? Bending the light of His brightest creation to colour the pulpit red. Why was it that the poets could sing stories and artists paint prophets, but her work was a condemnation, and theirs an honour? She would honour her God, and she would out-do them all. Bring the beings the artists could only dream of into this mortal reality.
Finally, she is allowed to leave. Her skirts gathered, her carriage prepared, and no thoughts for anything but home and the lab under her rooms.
Her mother’s disdaining tone haunts her the entire way home, denouncing her father’s poet heart and how it now stains her daughter of science. She doesn’t understand either, but she lets Phoebe abandon her to the manor rooms. Turns away as her child scales down the stairs to her labs.
Here there is no judgement, no watchful gaze. Only the work.
The floor is littered with copper and silver wiring, entwining like snakes with their heads reared up to bite into place, plugged into cabinets where the channels gather. Through these wires the cabinets communicate to each other across space, seemingly separate entities betraying their binds to each other with their wire guts spilling out onto the stone floor.
Her contemporaries reject her at fairs and exhibits, it used to be a point of hurt, but she knows now that she is better than them. Men of science with their paltry machines struggling to follow basic commands, while here in her lonely labs she harnesses electricity and light and the powers of the heavens.
She races through the lab, flicking switches on and collecting her record books. The inked words inside them contain the history of her every experiment. Records of failed electric impulses barely twitching mechanical limbs right through to crossed wires creating a light so bright it shattered every glass in the room.
She prepares this next attempt with the smooth efficiency of habit and all around her the ribcage of her lab comes alive, mechanical organs whirring and heaving with life. Walls illuminated by the little lights her machines emit as proof that they are on, and they are alive.
If she stands in the furthest corner of her room and squints her eyes, the lab looks like the night sky filled with stars. The dark corners of the world becoming hers to work in, to illuminate with her machines and ambitions. A gap in God’s light for her to write herself into. The rooms’ corners aren’t of interest to her now though, her concerns lie with what lays in its heart.
Amidst the winding circuit veins and the thoracic cage of her machines sits a gate built of heavy iron, star metal, glimmering with patience and the reflection of the lab’s little lights. The wires and cabinets speak to each other in their secret humming language and this weighty welded form of iron will translate their codes, will crack open the wearied marble of reality and bring forth her angels. Transform their hums into a high chorus until they reach a perfect singularity in celestial form.
This is Lovewell’s work. She knows what she is. Weak flesh waiting to rot under her God’s command, but this holy work, bringing His angels down to earth for the wicked and weak to look upon, this work will long outlive flesh.
Once she can make it work.
This isn’t the first night she has spent down here, switching currents, re-wiring boards and pulling levers. Hoping for angels and instead only inking down another set of instructions that have achieved nothing. She could use a little divine inspiration for this work and its endless tedium. Old habits die hard, so she still whispers a prayer every time she sets her machines up, watches them ready to run the experiment, and pushes the lever down.
The machine hums, the system runs, but again, nothing. She switches the lever back. Turns everything off. Writes her results down and tries again from the beginning. She is not God at the genesis. She cannot ask for light and have it brought up to her. Instead, she must work, so she works, and she works. Lets shelves fill with notebooks and nights meld into one long eternity, each clawing her closer to her destiny.
The day may have been filled with priests and lawyers and angry men looking down upon her as she sat in her innocent white frocks and pretended to be the fool, but at night she returns to herself, tools in hand, staining skirts dirty with oil. Yet there is an edge of desperation tonight that does not normally haunt her.
They may be fools but they will come for her. Take everything from her, all while her mother talks of sensible marriage for a lady.
This must work soon, before God’s weak men see her divine work undone, the holy task unfinished. It stings to know that they can still pass judgement over her. That even God can be considered the domain of men alone. Even creation.
And why shouldn’t women have a hand in creation? She grew, she birthed, she raised, was she not a god herself already? Was it truly so invasive for her to plunge her hands into the mechanics of life when she herself was already doomed to be its engine?
Lovewell bats away her thoughts, and a spider from the top of one of the older wooden cabinets. It isn’t supposed to be making homes here anyway, in a place that will not have it or love it.
She ducks down to her primary cabinet, swings its door open and plunges her hands into the thicket of wires. Unwiring and plugging, reorganising the flow of electricity. From here, what she has snatched from the skies comes through to alight her systems.
When it is done, she pulls her hands from her child’s wiry guts, wipes the amber-reddish oil on her skirts. A different set of commands now parse through it and the other cabinets, a different conversation.
She walks back to the room’s heart, to her stargate of iron and the lever that waits beneath it. Around her feet her work converses with itself through electric pulses, a perfectly interconnected community of supposedly individual components. She places her hand atop the lever once more. Hopes again, hopes that when she pulls the lever and presents it with her eternal question, “yes or no?” that it will answer well for her, loud enough to resound up to the heavens and back.
She is so tired of getting no, so tired of zeroes. No is an answer from hell, demons scream it at pleas for mercy and holy redemption, leaving people waiting for heaven in sulphur and fire, always waiting.
Lovewell rests her hand on the lever. Speaks her prayer of air and whispers while beneath her palm her machine waits for her to command it, “Yes. Yes, my work, run your machinations and bring me my angels.” She has pulled it many times, and many times returned only to her books, but there is still that old, unreasonable faith that rises in her chest.
She is reaching the end of The Lord’s Prayer when she sees the spider crawling over her wires, searching for dusty corners in which to weave its ancient webs. She wonders if it knows it is walking over the veins of angels. She flips the switch. Let there be light.
And there is.
The poised mechanics of her machinery alight at all at once, turning their power inwards so that it takes a mere moment for the heart of her work to pulse alive and offer its power up to the holy body appearing in the gate. A body which has arrived with a light so blinding it terrifies her. Flings her onto the floor and burns her flesh with a heat much sharper than the gentle warmth her machines emit as they run.
This is not the first angel that comes in soft human form with wings and warnings for prophets. This is a holy body unadulterated.
Somewhere inside the room a spider dies, somewhere in the room Lovewell begins to pray again. The angel’s light spans her lab with such a complete and beaming glow, there are no dark corners of the room anymore.
The energy of the room shifts around her. No, that’s not it. The fabric of the universe, it snaps oddly around her. The air smells of woods and wires, tastes of rock and water, and the light. The light is so bright her eyes are playing tricks, trying to find shadow and feature in the enveloping, endless white. White purer than snow, purer than skies, empty and unfeeling and singularly alone in its being, just a light without dark, without shadow, without form, without, without, with only light.
Lovewell screws her eyes shut. She can still see it, thin flesh giving her colourful illusion where once it could give her familiar darkness.
Finally, the gravity of the room shifts, her body doesn’t feel crushed like an unwanted intrusion, a bug in a white room squashed by endless light and its pure pressure. Slowly she blinks her eyes open, grateful for mercy. Curious to what she’ll see out of habit more than intention. She thinks she will see eyes or wings, feathers or cherubic features. Instead, she sees a mouth.
Not really a mouth, there are no teeth, no tongue, not even a cavern, only sound, only a thousand holy voices. The hivemind of heaven’s holy beings connected by God’s will up in His eternal kingdom. Like her machines, bound as one mind by her wires and her will in this lab.
The mouth in her lab does not speak, but sings in a million interconnected voices, and it sings out to her endless yeses.