The "Grand Western Canal" was a triumph of moving mass, but it was failing as a system of communication. Deacon stood in the Oakhaven-West dispatch office, watching a courier collapse from heat exhaustion after a sixty-mile ride from the Oryn Estuary. The message the man carried—a warning about a silt-leak in the fourth lock—was already eight hours old. By the time the repair crews reached the site, the lock would be dry and the schedule for the entire week would be ruined.
"We are building a body without a nervous system," Deacon said, looking at the gasping rider. He turned to Miller, who was busy trying to repair a broken pressure gauge. "The horses can't keep up with the steam engines, Miller. We're outrunning our own ability to command."
Deacon spent the next week in the back of the workshop, away from the grand projects. On his bench was a mess of copper wire, jars of sulfuric acid, and lead plates. To move information, he didn't need a faster horse; he needed to master the flow of electrons. But the reality of 19th-century physics was far grittier than the theories in his head.
"The acid is eating the zinc plates too fast," Miller noted, shielding his eyes as Deacon dipped a lead lead into a glass jar. "And the copper wire we're drawing in the foundry... it's inconsistent. If the diameter changes by even a fraction of a millimeter, the resistance spikes. We can't even get a signal to travel from here to the front gate, let alone sixty miles to the coast."
"It's the insulation," Deacon replied, his fingers stained dark by the gutta-percha resin they were trying to use as a coating. "If the wire touches the damp earth or a wet stone, the current bleeds out. We need thousands of miles of silk thread and refined rubber, and we have neither."
For three weeks, the "Telegraph" was a series of expensive, frustrating failures. The Oakhaven smiths, used to the heavy, satisfying work of forging iron, mocked the "thin copper threads." They called it Cassian's Web, a fragile toy that snapped every time the wind picked up.
Deacon had to invent a new way to string the lines. He designed a ceramic insulator—a bell-shaped piece of fired clay that would keep the wire from touching the wooden poles even in a rainstorm.
The first successful line wasn't sixty miles; it was barely one. It ran from the Oakhaven-West command center to the first canal lock. Deacon sat at a small desk, his hand on a crude brass lever. A mile away, Miller sat with a similar device.
Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.
Deacon waited. The silence in the room was heavy, broken only by the ticking of a mechanical clock. Then, the small iron bar on his desk jumped.
Click. Click-click. Click.
"He got it," Deacon whispered. It wasn't a grand message of state. It was the letter 'A' in the simple binary code he had devised. But that one click represented a fundamental change in the Empire. Information had just traveled faster than the speed of a Galloping horse for the first time in history.
But the "gritty realism" of the project quickly set in. The next morning, a local farmer, terrified by the "singing wires" in the wind, had chopped down three of the poles with an axe, believing they were drawing the souls out of his livestock.
"We can't just string wires, David," Julian said, looking at the splintered wood. "People are afraid of what they don't understand. The Syndicate is already spreading rumors that these wires are how you'll spy on every household in the Marches. You're building a target, not just a network."
Deacon didn't call for the militia. He walked to the farmer's house with a small battery and a bell. He spent four hours explaining the basic physics of a circuit, showing the man how the "singing" was just the wind over the metal, no different than a lute string.
It was slow, grueling work. One pole at a time. One skeptical laborer at a time.
By the end of the month, they had managed to stretch the line five miles. It was a pathetic distance compared to the size of the Empire, but it was five miles of instant certainty. When a barge hit a submerged log at Mile Marker 4, the command center knew within seconds. The repair crew arrived before the barge had even finished taking on water.
The "Copper Nerve" was growing, but it was growing like a vine, not a lightning bolt. It was vulnerable to storms, to sabotage, and to the simple ignorance of a world that still believed the stars were fixed in a crystal sphere.
Deacon stood by the fifth mile-marker, looking toward the distant, hazy horizon where the Coast lay, still weeks of riding away. He knew that somewhere in that distance, the Syndicate was watching, and far beyond them, the Emperor sat in a palace of silk, totally unaware that the world beneath his feet was beginning to hum.