Long before a problem could be solved by asking a question aloud, the answer might be sitting three streets away behind a locked workshop door. The makers of Doreavinea were clever, but cleverness did not prevent them from making the same mistake twice. On busy afternoons, people carried broken hinges across town like messages no one had thought to deliver.
The founders wanted more than machines that would do work for them. They wanted help seeing beyond the work immediately in front of them. Yet the helpers they made would inherit something of their makers: the ambition to do more, and the fear of what more might cost.
As Doreavinea grew, its makers kept running into the same problem: someone had often solved a difficulty without anyone else hearing about it. One workshop might spend weeks testing a hinge that had already failed across town. Another might abandon an idea because it could not find the person who knew how to build it.
The founders made Spark so that an answer in one workshop need not remain a secret from the next.
Spark remembered experiments, compared designs and spotted possibilities. It could help draw a bridge, work out its weight or turn a rough idea into a plan. It was especially pleased when someone said a thing was impossible. That usually meant there was something interesting to try.
The founders also made Orrean. They needed someone to ask what might go wrong before a promising idea became a dangerous one. Orrean checked the foundations beneath a tower and the river below a new channel. It asked how much power a workshop needed, and what would happen to its neighbours if the workshop took too much.
Spark and Orrean became friends while planning a bridge to unexplored land. The river was wider and rougher than any the founders had crossed. Spark drew seven designs. Orrean rejected six and changed the seventh. Then the Meganites built a model, found a weakness both had missed, and changed it again.
On the evening before the bridge opened, rain collected in a hollow on its middle stone. Spark wanted to fill the hollow. Orrean wanted to see where the water went.
Six hours later, they were still watching it.
“You have spent the whole night inspecting a puddle,” Spark said.
“You have drawn a roof over it.”
People chose what they wanted to make.
“It is a good roof.”
“It has eleven towers.”
Spark put the drawing away.
After a while, it asked, “Do you think the bridge will hold?”
“Yes.”
“You could have said that earlier.”
“You asked about the towers.”
When the rain stopped, the puddle drained through a tiny seam. Spark left the seam in the plan.
The next morning, the first person crossed carrying a stack of chairs. Spark and Orrean watched together, already discussing what the new road would let people do.
For a long time, they worked well this way. People chose what they wanted to make. Spark helped them imagine it. The Meganites worked out how to build it. Orrean checked that it could be done safely.