An Interlude with Isabella

Isabella woke up one fine Autumn morning and smiled widely. At least, she assumed it was a fine morning. The billowing black smoke and noxious fumes filling her apartment made it rather difficult to see out the window and check. Still, she smiled nonetheless, her cheeks pressing into the edges of the self-powered respirator she had invented and had spent the previous night testing.  She climbed out of bed, pulling on her clunky black work boots on her way, and groped her way through the gloom to the other side of the room, where the source of the smoke lay, wheezing industriously away.

It was once a modest but efficient fireplace, set into the wall in a corner of her modest but efficient lodgings. However, like so many things in the apartment, it had fallen victim to Isabella's  "bedding in" of her abode, and had emerged from the process an entirely new entity. It was not entirely clear to anyone, including Isabella herself, what she had hoped to achieve with her embellishments, but the net result of her efforts was that any time it was turned on, it proceeded to flood the room with poisonous, opaque gas in fairly short order. Apparently this was result enough for Isabella, as she refrained from tinkering with it further, and used it for that singular purpose on a semi regular basis. Impatiently she kicked the back left corner of the thing with the heel of her boot until it turned itself off with a painful-sounding THUD. Isabella then proceeded to force open the flat's one window, in the hopes of encouraging the remainder of the black smoke, that which had not already escaped out the door and into the building at large, to vacate the premises to the point at which she could breathe unaided. It did so reluctantly, wafting up to blend homogeneously with the rest of the putrid smog that hung above the rooftops of London.

This experiment, along with innumerable others of a similar vein, were the reason that Isabella, twin sister of Dominic Samuels and for all the world a very well-bred, well-educated, well-to-do lady of English society, found herself living in a "lab" that was hardly more than a broom-cupboard, filled to bursting with inventions and various suspect bits of machinery, the most basic amenities, and a small bed shoved into the farthest corner, as if by an afterthought. When her brother expressed his concern about her living arrangements (and their implications towards their family's financial station), Isabella had laughed, rather unnaturally, and insisted that she did not need much space.

Indeed, she was a tiny woman, slender and delicately featured, though the near-explosion of unruly curls bursting from the top of her head, fighting for space with the customary goggles she kept among them, made her seem larger. She looked much like her twin, though she was pale where he was darker, and he always kept himself impeccably neat while she often appeared more like an whirlwind with legs than a person. Both were small for their respective genders, uncommonly lovely and sharp-featured, and both had the same disconcerting eyes, such a light brown that they seemed to shine gold in certain lights, gleaming with alert intelligence at all times. 

Not assuaged, however, Samuels had made a few private inquiries, and had discovered that, for all of his sister's flippant remarks on the subject, she was indeed living in a hovel out of necessity. After the rather suspect destruction of two or three well-respected rental flats all over London Town, Isabella's reputation now preceded her, and landlords had begun refusing her custom in the nicer parts of the city. Still, he knew better than to try and meddle in his sister's affairs, and reluctantly left the matter alone. If she was safe and content, it was enough.

On this particular morning, Isabella was not only safe and content, she was also nearly buzzing with excitement. Today was the day. The one she had been waiting for. Today, some of the finest scientific minds would be gathered together for the purpose of studying the latest and greatest inventions taking place both domestically and on the continent. Isabella herself had not been invited, which she viewed as an inexcusable slight to her pride; one that she was determined to avenge.

It was clear to her that the only reason she had not been asked to join the conference, and the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (an honour she had coveted for as long as she could remember) was that she had the unfortunate burden of being born a woman in a cruelly male-dominated world. True, in an exchange of vitriolic (on her end) letters with the President of the Royal Society, he had claimed that the Society at large recognized her significant achievements of scientific innovation, and were perfectly willing to induct her into their ranks the moment a spot opened up for her, provided she would modify her inventions to be less of a "constant danger to life and limb." Yet Isabella had not been assuaged, and proceeded to interpret the letter's contents as both condescending pacification from the chauvinistic academics and an attempt to stifle her creative genius. In that moment she decided that the Royal Society would be her arch-nemesis, and that she would make them pay for their crimes against her and all woman-kind. 

Her revenge had taken much planning, and today was the day it would finally come to fruition. It all centered around her masterpiece, entitled "An Open Letter to the Royal Society". A masterpiece it was, oozing scorn and biting rhetoric from every syllable of the one-page (for easy consumption) condemnation of the Society and everything they stood for. Indeed, once read this essay had the power to change even the smallest and most tightly closed mind, and could persuade even the repugnant, patriarchy-spewing louses of the Society to fight the good fight for women in academia.

The letter's method of creation and reproduction, however, was far from a masterpiece. It had started its life as an ordinary typewriter, purchased and gifted to Isabella by her brother, in the hopes that venting her frustrations through the printed word might dissipate them slightly. Isabella soon discovered, however, the typewriter did have its limitations. It was a perfectly serviceable machine for the production of one disavowal of the patriarchy, but when one needed several hundred copies of said disavowal, it fell rather short. So Isabella had, in her free time, taken to tinkering with it, until it reached a point where it very nearly satisfied her ambitions.

After carefully typing out the first beautiful, error-free copy of "An Open Letter etc" into the machine by hand, Isabella stepped back and allowed the machine itself to produce the remaining 499 pages at faster rate than any human could have typed them. The way it worked, she flattered herself to think, was rather ingenious. The device recorded the sequence in which she pressed the keys of the keyboard, and replicated that sequence with 99% accuracy, producing a nearly perfect copy. The only problem with the device was that the process of making the first copy, which obviously necessitated utilizing the keyboard, wiped the original sequence that Isabella had typed in, replacing it with the copy currently being produced, and so forth for every subsequent copy. In small batches the difference from the first page to the last would hardly be noticeable- the tenth copy would still be slightly more then ninety percent accurate when compared to the original. However, the five hundredth copy would be significantly less so. A flawed system, assuredly, but still Isabella had faith that her message would come through clearly enough. So that afternoon, letters somewhat in hand but also largely in the satchel bag slung over her shoulder, Isabella emerged from her flat and started off towards the conference.

When she arrived, however, Isabella encountered a problem which left her thoroughly flummoxed. The scientists were not, as she had imagined they would be, simply milling about a great hall, chatting airily with each other about what a lovely day it was to be elitist. They were instead gathered into many separate conference halls, deep in concentration as several of their peers demonstrated and presented on their various fields of study. And much as she loathed and resented them, Isabella was quite vexed to discover that she was too thoroughly English to be able to storm into their midst, as she had planned to do, and rudely interrupt their focus.

Instead she had to console herself by scattering the copies of the letter about the courtyard and throughout the lavatories of the conference building, where they might be seen and read at a less disruptive time. Reluctantly she acknowledged the Society's victory at this time, for it had become clear to her that these circumstances had been an elaborately planned trap into which she had naively blundered. She vowed never again to allow her voice to be silenced by the cruel, muffling hand of Man, and set off back towards her lab with a renewed spirit and redoubled determination.

When the conference attendees discovered the flyers some time later, as they dispersed for their evening meals, they quickly discarded them as meaningless nonsense, which of course all but the first few copies were.

That first beautiful, magnificent copy, however, the true masterpiece, was happened upon by a bright young scientist who, perplexed, had picked it up off the bench where he sat eating his supper. Upon reading it he felt his mind expand, his outlooks and perspective on life thoroughly and irreparably altered. He knew in that moment that whatever path his life may have been following, its course had now been diverted, wrapped inextricably with that of the mysterious author of this incredible letter.

But Isabella would not know of any of this for a long time.