There were two kinds of Doctors in Wellington Wells: those who worked at Wellington Health Institute (under which general practitioners also fell) and those who worked at Haworth Labs. One might assume that this was a mere distinction of workplace, determined only by the needs of the town. In fact, there was a great divide in sensibilities of these Doctors and the stark separation in assignment was a symptom of that rift, not the cause.

Haworth’s Doctors tended to be a somber sort with overt concern for the noble dignity of their profession. They carried themselves with stately composure and took things very seriously. They chose work at Haworth Labs for its clean and precise ethic. Pharmacology was a matter of measures and mathematics, and the only variables were in the patient’s response to their compositions.

Health’s Doctors, on the other hand, dealt with biology. The human body was little else but variables and with only some tentative principles on which to work, Health’s Doctors had to be much looser in their expectations. This looseness followed in everything else they did. They did not take the work seriously, they cut up in the lab, and made puerile jokes about bodily functions.

And yet, these two cohorts got along well enough under most circumstances. They each had their separate domains, well away from each other, and only occasionally did they have to set aside their differences and meet each other in the middle. For the most part, it was not a lot to ask for a Haworth Doctor to offer a concessive chuckle at a fart joke or for a Health Doctor to refrain from giggling at how closely the word “organism” sounded like “orgasm”.

For the most part.

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Beryl Markham usually kept a sentry post at the entrance to Edenham during the day, as long as David Livingston was around to hold their claim on All Souls Church. Indeed, she had helped build the fortifications blocking off all but this one path into the small hamlet when Barrow Holm was designated the dumping ground for those who developed Joy intolerance. Most of the people she had built the barriers with had since succumbed to the various hazards of Wastrel life, but she remained. She was lucky, in her way. She’d seen the mistakes others had made and so she made it her duty to catch new Wastrels before they made the same errors and school them in the etiquette of the Garden District. She had posted the signs on the way in to help prevent mob murders, but a friendly face was a better teacher than passive aggressive notes.

She did this not just as an act of camaraderie with her fellow Wastrels, nor only to extort whatever goods they might have come here with – that was an important lesson for life in the Garden District itself: everything came at a price. She did this out of spite towards Mr. Kite and his safehouse.

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From the Desk of Beatrix Reeve
Voting Member, Executive Committee

Richard Arkwright
Arkwright Labs, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research
Kingsmeade Rd.
Apple Holm
Wellington Wells

Dear Mr. Arkwright,

It has come to the attention of the Executive Committee that Dr. Faraday has been suffering from an exhaustion borne of extraneous workload from her neighbors in St. George’s Holm. She even went so far as to be pretend to have blown up her own lab to convince the townspeople she was indisposed. All that property damage just to get a break from their requests! Though we found her attempt to address this problem herself quite novel, we felt the need to intercede once we confirmed she was not, in fact, dead as she had claimed.

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It had been a whirlwind couple of months. If she’d been told that rainy night when she’d left their – Anton’s – house to go to Nick’s stupid party that she would never return, she wouldn’t have believed it. Yet here she was now in her own office with the lights off just in case, snatching notes out of her file cabinets and looting her own chemistry bench. Anton wasn’t in the office. Sally checked with Betty, his secretary, to make sure he’d be out at a lunch meeting when she came to collect her things. The absolute last thing she needed was for him to catch her here making off with company property. She tossed everything – gently, in the case of the chemicals – into a single banker’s box on her desk.

She only needed one last thing. Sally yanked open the fourth drawer of the last file cabinet and pushed the hanging folders back to reveal her new Joy formula notes lying hidden at the bottom of the drawer. She’d finally perfected it a couple months ago and had started using it herself, but she hadn’t told Anton. Her mother had always been so worried about Sally’s ability to keep a man around, but Sally had also learned that it was prudent to have a backup plan in case one needed to rid themselves of a man too. This new Joy formula was hers.

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“I could put some hinges on it, maybe. Or install a knob,” Corporal Hardy said. The only thing Hardy’s skill set as a joiner and that of a shipwright had in common was carpentry work. Fortunately or not, Hardy managed to get the wooden part of General Byng’s boat in working order weeks ago, but that left him with no other improvements to report now. Despite his admitted lack of ability, though, this was a good post to have so he made a symbolic show of looking busy by polishing a smudge of the battered yet shiny hull. “Aside from that, I don’t think there’s much else I can do for it. The engine’s rusted over, but I don’t know the first thing about motorworks.”

“If we was meant to be in boats, we’d be the Home Navy, now wouldn’t we?” Corporal Cheeseman groused. He’d been sent to check on Hardy’s progress in this foolhardy endeavor. “Where does the General think he needs a boat to get off to anyway?”

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It turned out the robots weren’t actually equipped to troubleshoot faulty programming in a human being. It was not a matter of simply opening a file, looking over the code, and editing broken logic. Humans didn’t work that way. The only way to interface with them was to explain the correct logic and hope they understood and would amend the errors in their programming themselves.

Nonetheless, after being made to observe the robots in their own world, Dr. Faraday had to acknowledge the evidence suggesting the robots did possess more emotional range than lobsters at least. Once she conceded that point, then she could admit that perhaps it was unethical to kidnap and enslave them.

The one point on which Dr. Faraday was adamant was that it was not wrong to force them to feel happy. On this matter, she simply would not concede.

The robots had made their terms clear however: a portal would be opened only once more and any parties who did not cross at that time would remain in their world thereafter. If Roger and James wanted to take Dr. Faraday home with them – and everyone agreed that it was in everyone’s best interest that they do – she would need to acknowledge the robots’ feelings about being reprogrammed in full.

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