Parallel lives

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History records that a certain celebrated eighteenth century inventor and engineer was an only child. However, recent cataloging of previously unseen family documents has unearthed a hitherto unknown diary of one who appears to be his younger sister. Though written in a complex secret cypher, I have successfully de-coded several tracts, the most illuminating of which appears below. January 14th, 1784 After turning down the oil lamps, I trod carefully across my makeshift workshop, eager anticipation beating in my breast, brass turnings skitterIng across the bare blackened boards. The wait had been torturous, yet the moment fast approached. Though my attic room is sufficiently distant from the house's busy centre, I had postponed the trial till now, held back testing my apparatus till I could be certain I had total solitude. The coldness, dankness, and darkness of a midwinter's Sunday evening should form no deterrent for a devout household such as this, and so it transpired: without exception, and as usual, the entire household - family and servants alike - were attending the kirk. Unexceptionally, and as usual, I was left alone. By the flickering light, the mechanism gleamed a pale ghostly yellow. Though simple enough in its construction and design, each part was painstakingly wrought, accurate beyond measure, an apposite reflection of my family's scientific and engineering renown. If only my brother could have seen it! I fancied I could hear the excitement fizzing, bubbling in his throat, threatening to burst through his famous hushed brogue even as he gazed in wonder. 'Oh, Jane! What a marvel you have created!' Yet he would surely never utter those words and thus must never see it. Never even know of it. The shame would be more than I could stand, more than he could possibly bear, outstripping even the shame I already bring to our lineage. James is a genius. His work with steam engines has brought him great fame and even greater fortune. Taking an inefficient, barely bursa escort (https://hatchresources.com/) serviceable contraption as a starting point, he has revolutionised the mining industry, created a pumping engine of greater efficiency than anyone would have believed. They are instruments of incredible beauty, of almost God-like power. Meanwhile, he has reinvented himself, become refined and upright, a man who can step into the loftiest social circles and be amongst equals. The love I feel for him is barely believable; a passion almost beyond decency. I, on the other hand, though blessed with a mind as quick, insightful and malleable as his, am disfigured, twisted, a creature unfit to be seen. Though shown a degree of kindness and patience by my God-fearing parents, I have been locked away from humanity, hidden in this cold corner of their otherwise welcoming home, an oddity, an embarrassment. Invisible. Unwanted. Unloved. To keep me quiet, unobtrusively occupied, they allow me books, tools, materials, indeed almost all I desire, though the thing I desire the most they would never allow me. A man. I want a man. A man to love me, care for me, to come to me in the night and bare me, enter me, and make me his. Make me whole. My heart aches for it. My broken body yearns for it. Gnarled fingers grasped the key and wound the spring. Hunched shoulders tightened. In the polished metal of the casing, my face - a study in deformation - glared back demonically, the physical effort twisting my mouth, baring my buckled teeth, my slobbering tongue. Bulging eyes completed the grotesque mask. In disgust, I turned away, screwed down my eyelids, while continuing to rhythmically empower the perfection I had created, transmuting ugliness into beauty, base chemical into pure mechanical. Well-oiled cogs turned and clicked. The massive coiled spring creaked its heightened disapproval. One more turn. Another. No! There is more! I rested. Breathed deeply. Stretched my aching limbs. I clutched the bursa escort bayan (https://hatchresources.com/) key once more. Sweaty fingers slipped. I dried them on my skirts and tried again. One more full turn. A half. A quarter. There. Ready. I staggered back, exhausted by the effort, excited yet daunted by the task ahead. Though naturally apprehensive, I was ready; for this moment I had waited my whole life. Sitting astride the saddle, I pulled up my skirts then hooked my feet into the swinging stirrups. A moment's adjustment and I achieved a degree of comfort rarely afforded me in everyday life. I fitted the machine perfectly; the measurements, the constant alterations, had been worth every painstaking moment, every grief-ridden hour. I closed my eyes, allowed myself the rarest smile while running my calloused hands over the wonder I had manufactured. Though he would naturally and rightfully decry its blatantly obscene function, how James would surely enjoy its brilliant simplicity, its pantographical mimicry. He rarely visits - the journey from Birmingham to this bleak Lowland city is both long and unpleasant - yet James writes weekly, sometimes twice weekly, and almost without fail. Problems that perplex him. Wonders that inspire him. He fills my monochrome existence with colour, my drab, draughty rooms with warmth and life. Beloved sister Within your uninterrupted (how I often envy you!) solitude, pray turn your clever mind and your skilled hand to this, my most pressing problem. As you know, the old Newcomen pumps use chains to transfer power via a rocking beam, but my new double-acting engines produce power on both the up and downstrokes, and thus a chain - being flexible on the reverse stroke - will no longer suffice. My conundrum is thus: to design a linkage to transfer power from piston to pump without causing sideways pressure on the piston. I know it can be done, though the solution currently avoids me, appears somewhat hazy and distant. Deadlines approach escort bursa (https://hatchresources.com/) and potential investors grow apprehensive. As ever, I am in your hands, as you, dear Jane, are ever in my heart. Love, as always, James Twin desires drove me throughout. A desire to please my loving brother, and a deeper, darker, preternatural desire to please myself. Individually, such appetites are incredibly powerful; together they are irresistible. I laboured long, slept little, till at last I surmounted it. And now I had mounted it. A modicum of amusement enhanced my satisfied smile. Poised between my frail legs was the answer to James' recently posed conundrum. Again I smiled, while stroking the taut, unyielding metal beast, its oiled and polished piston poised to pump pleasure into my tight fleshy cylinder. I tied up my dark hair, loosened my bodice, and tested the sweet, sticky fluids that oozed from between my thighs. Though already wet beyond necessity, I slapped on a handful of dripping fat - juice from the Sunday roast I'd found setting in the larder - in case trepidation or a sudden malfunction caused the flow of my own lubrication to cease. I have not the power of steam at my disposal, have neither the room nor physical capacity to construct such a monster, and so, as always, I circumvented, thought laterally, turned the problem on its head. Rather than a steam-driven piston powering a pump via a rocking beam, my device works the opposite way, the force being applied in the opposite direction: my wound spring, via my newly-devised parallel linkage, operates a perfectly penetrating piston, and via a process I have christened 'parallel motion'. I love the sound of that. Parallel motion. It describes perfectly the contrary progress of the twin parallel shafts - the piston rod and pump rod - while echoing how we contrasting siblings live out our separate lives: he constantly in the light; I, along side him, entirely in shadow. After the initial design stage, in an arrangement that better suited my particular machine's primary purpose, I then turned the problem on its side, so that rather than pumping perpendicular to the Earth as such machines are wont to do, it pumped parallel to it. But for a chill wind rattling the eaves, the house was silent.