This is How it Works

Hollen remained completely motionless, his thick, calloused hands gripping the edge of his oak desk like an anchor. His pale eyes drifted back and forth between the engineering schematic of the pear-shaped pneumatic converter and the massive, sprawling organizational flowchart laid out beside it.

For nearly half a century, Hollen had earned his living shaping iron with sweat, coal, and muscle. He had watched young boys enter as terrified apprentices and leave decades later as master smiths. He had watched open charcoal hearths yield to forced-draft coking furnaces. He had reluctantly allowed steam-driven machinery onto his shop floor only after Ernest had patiently convinced him that machines wouldn't replace a craftsman's eye—they would simply give his arms the force of fifty men.

Every single shift had felt revolutionary at the time.

Compared to the sheets of vellum currently covering his desk, those past forty years felt like a minor footnote.