The copper pipe jammed against his windpipe again. He tasted blood, thick and metallic, flooding the back of his tongue.
"Fuck… tighten it slower, you piece of scrap," he rasped, voice already shredded from yesterday's test.
His fingers, slick with oil and his own spit, twisted the final screw on the throat collar. The device hissed. A thin stream of crystal vapor leaked out, stinging his nostrils like battery acid. He coughed once. Hard. Black phlegm splattered across the workbench, dotted with tiny glittering shards that used to be part of his lungs.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. The smear left a rusty streak on his sleeve.
'Still breathing. Good enough.'
The workshop was nothing but a corner of the old brass foundry basement, walls sweating condensation, floor littered with bent gears and discarded crystal scraps the Guild called worthless. A single gas lamp swung overhead, throwing jagged shadows across the half-finished frame on the table.
Porcelain-smooth limbs. Slender waist. A face that looked like it had been carved by someone who actually gave a damn about beauty. The Iron Angel, he called her in his head. First Virtual Diva this shit-heap world had ever seen.
He leaned back on the creaky stool. His chest burned with every inhale, like someone had poured ground glass down his trachea. He ignored it. Pain was just another trade trick. Back on Earth they'd poisoned his vocal cords with "vitamins" and called it a scandal when he couldn't hit the high notes anymore. Here, at least he was doing the poisoning himself. On purpose.
A distant factory whistle screamed three times. Shift change.
He heard boots on the metal catwalk above. Heavy. Tired. The kind of footsteps that belonged to men who knew they'd die before forty and still showed up anyway.
"Oi, new meat!" a rough voice barked from the stairwell. "You still alive down there or did the fumes finally cook your brain?"
He didn't answer right away. Instead he reached for the half-mask respirator hanging on a nail, strapped it over his mouth and nose. The filters were already black. He flipped the switch on the small steam compressor under the table. Low hiss. The device in his throat hummed to life, feeding raw acoustic crystal vapor straight into his ruined folds.
His real voice was gone. What came out now was filtered, modulated, alien.
"Still kicking, Jax," he said. The words left his mouth clean, smooth, almost pretty. Nothing like the sandpaper rasp he actually felt. "You here to collect my liver or just waste my time?"
Jax clomped down the last few steps, a broad-shouldered brute with burn scars across one cheek and a missing front tooth. He carried a dented lunch tin that smelled like boiled rat and yesterday's grease. Behind him trailed two younger laborers, eyes wide at the mess of wires and porcelain on the bench.
"Boss says you missed quota again," Jax grunted, dropping onto an overturned crate. "Three brass ingots short. They're docking your rations."
The Maestro shrugged. The motion pulled at the tubes in his neck and sent a fresh spike of pain down his spine. He welcomed it. Pain meant the machine was still working.
"Tell the boss he can shove the quota up his ass. I'm busy building tomorrow's paycheck."
One of the kids — skinny, maybe sixteen, grease in his hair — pointed at the porcelain face lying detached on the table.
"That… that a doll?"
The Maestro's lips twitched behind the mask.
"Not a doll, kid. That's the future."
He stood up slowly, legs unsteady, and walked over to the half-assembled torso. With careful, trembling hands he slotted the vocal modulation chamber into the chest cavity. Copper pipes ran from the throat collar down into a nest of crystal amplifiers. Every joint was sealed with black tar he'd scraped from the bottom of the steam engines upstairs. Crude. Ugly. Perfect.
Jax watched him, chewing on a strip of dried meat. "You been coughing blood again. I can smell it from here."
"Occupational hazard."
"You're gonna drop dead before this thing even sings, man."
The Maestro turned the final screw. The chamber clicked shut. He felt the vibration travel up the pipes and settle against his own damaged larynx like a lover's hand that didn't know its own strength.
He looked at Jax dead in the eye.
"Then I drop dead on stage. Better than rotting in this sewer for another forty years."
The kid stepped closer, fascinated. "How's it work? No magic. No Guild stamp. Just… junk."
The Maestro laughed once. It came out as a wet rattle even through the modulator.
"Magic's for rich cunts who never had to sweat for a living. This?" He tapped the porcelain cheek. "This is showbiz. Real showbiz. Back where I came from we called it pop. Synthetic. Engineered to make thousands of poor bastards feel like gods for three minutes. Then we sell them the next fix."
He reached for the activation lever — a simple brass pull-rod he'd salvaged from a broken press. His fingers shook so badly he had to use both hands.
"Watch."
He yanked it.
Steam surged through the hidden lines. The crystal chamber glowed faint blue-white. The Iron Angel's eyelids — thin porcelain disks painted with delicate lashes — fluttered open.
Her irises were polished brass, catching the gaslight like coins.
She sat up. Joints whispered. No creak. No grind. He'd spent three weeks filing every gear until they moved like silk.
The laborers froze.
The Angel turned her head. Slow. Graceful. Her gaze swept across the filthy basement and landed on the Maestro.
A soft, crystalline voice poured out of her, no visible speaker, just pure modulated tone riding the vapor.
~Hello, world. Did you miss me?~
The words were velvet. Sweet. Dangerous.
Jax dropped his lunch tin. The lid clattered across the floor.
"Fuck me…"
The Maestro's knees buckled. He caught himself on the edge of the table. Fresh blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, soaking into the mask. He didn't wipe it. He was grinning behind the fabric.
'First successful sync. Larynx holding. For now.'
The Angel stood. Her bare porcelain feet touched the oily concrete without a sound. She took one step, then another, hips swaying with mechanical perfection. Every movement screamed expensive. Untouchable. The exact opposite of the sweat-stained hellhole she was born in.
The skinny kid backed up until his spine hit the wall. "She… she's looking at us."
"She's looking at everyone," the Maestro said, voice filtered into something almost seductive. "That's the point."
He pulled the lever again. The chamber cycled down with a soft sigh. The light in her eyes dimmed but didn't die. She remained standing, waiting.
Jax rubbed his scarred face. "Guild finds out you built a talking doll that sings without their blessing, they'll string you up by your balls and call it entertainment tax."
"Let them try." The Maestro straightened, ignoring the way his lungs felt like two wet rags trying to inflate. "I didn't come to this piss-stain world to die quiet. I came to hijack it."
He walked over to a crate in the corner, pried it open with a crowbar. Inside lay stacks of crude copper discs — blank recording platters he'd pressed himself using the foundry's scrap rollers. Each one could hold ninety seconds of modulated sound.
"Tonight's the slum festival. Same shit every year. Some half-drunk Bard from the lower Guild comes down, sings about 'honest labor' in that fake-ass operatic voice, collects his coin, and fucks off back to clean air. Workers clap because they don't know better."
He picked up one platter, weighed it in his palm.
"Tonight they hear something else."
Jax narrowed his eyes. "You're gonna crash the show?"
"I'm gonna replace it."
The Maestro slid the platter into a small playback rig he'd bolted to the Angel's lower back. Hidden under layers of scrap fabric that would look like a dress when they were done.
"Kid," he said to the skinny one, "what's your name?"
"Leo."
"Leo. You any good with a wrench?"
The boy nodded fast.
"Good. You're hired. Help me dress her. We've got six hours before the square lights up."
They worked in near silence after that, only the clink of tools and the occasional wet cough from the Maestro breaking the rhythm. Leo's hands were quick, nervous. He kept stealing glances at the Angel's face as they draped her in layered rags dyed black and silver with boot polish and stolen chrome flakes.
Every few minutes the Maestro had to stop. The vapor was eating him from the inside. He could feel the blisters forming along his trachea, raw and bubbling. When he swallowed, it felt like swallowing barbed wire.
But the work continued.
By the time the gas lamps in the square above started to flicker on, the Iron Angel looked like something that had stepped out of a fever dream. Tall. Ethereal. Her porcelain skin reflected the dirty light in soft highlights that made the surrounding rust and oil look even filthier by contrast.
The Maestro fitted the final piece — a thin copper veil that would hide the tubes running from her throat to the hidden chamber.
He stepped back.
His vision swam. Black spots danced at the edges. He forced himself to focus.
'One more night. Just one.'
"You hear that?" Leo whispered.
From above came the low murmur of the crowd gathering. Hundreds of boots on cracked pavement. The clank of cheap tin mugs. Someone already trying to play a dented harmonica and failing.
The annual Peleburan Festival. Celebration of another year not dying in the furnaces.
The Maestro set the sack down gently. Leo helped him unwrap her.
The Iron Angel rose to her full height between two broken chimneys. The wind tugged at her veil.
From this height the crowd looked small. Breakable. Hungry.
The Maestro connected the final cable from his back tank to the port between her shoulder blades. His hands shook so badly Leo had to help steady them.
"Ready?" Leo asked, voice cracking.
The Maestro didn't answer with words. He just pulled the main lever on his chest rig.
Steam hissed.
The Angel's eyes flared bright.
Below, the Bard had started his set. His voice rolled out over the square, amplified by Guild-sanctioned crystal resonators. Grand. Empty. All about glory in labor and the benevolence of the upper districts.
The workers clapped politely.
The Maestro smiled behind his mask, lips cracking.
He leaned close to the Angel's ear and whispered through the modulator, voice soft, intimate, poisonous.
"Show them what real music feels like."
Then he hit the bass trigger.
A single subsonic pulse rolled out from the hidden speakers in her torso. Not loud. Not yet. Just enough to make every rib in the square vibrate.
The Bard faltered mid-note.
The Maestro yanked the volume lever hard.
The drop hit.
~Take me away from this iron hell~
Her voice exploded across the square like nothing the world had ever heard. Clean. Synthetic. Perfect. Layered with electronic pulses that made the air itself feel alive. Bass so deep it rattled teeth. A hook so catchy it bypassed the brain and went straight for the gut.
The crowd froze.
Then they lost their fucking minds.
People surged toward the sound. Mugs dropped. Fights forgotten. The Bard's voice was completely swallowed, turned into pathetic background noise.
Workers started jumping. Shouting. Some were crying without knowing why.
Up on the roof the Maestro's knees gave out. He caught himself on a pipe, coughing so hard his vision whited out. Blood sprayed across the metal in thick ropes. He could feel pieces of his airway sloughing off with every spasm.
But he didn't let go of the controls.
The Angel danced.
She stepped right off the edge of the roof.
Cables he'd rigged earlier — thin, strong, painted black — lowered her slowly into the square like a falling star made of porcelain and sin. Gaslight caught her face. The crowd roared louder.
~I was born in the dark, but I shine anyway~
Her arms rose. The rags fluttered like wings. Every movement precise, hypnotic, engineered to trigger every pleasure center these exhausted people had left.
The Maestro watched through blurred eyes. His lungs were on fire. Each breath was a conscious decision not to die yet.
'Look at them. They've never felt this before. Not once in their miserable lives.'
Jax was laughing like a madman beside him. Leo had tears streaming down his face.
Down below, the Bard tried to fight back. He poured magic into his resonators, trying to overpower the synthetic wave.
The Angel answered with a counter-hook. Higher. Sharper. A vocal run that sounded impossible, layered twenty times over. The Guild crystals shattered under the interference. The Bard's voice cut out with a pathetic squeak.
The square erupted.
People started chanting her lyrics even though they'd only heard them once.
The Maestro's vision narrowed to a tunnel. Black at the edges. He tasted nothing but blood now. His hands were slick with it on the controls.
But the show wasn't over.
He pushed the final sequence.
The Angel raised one porcelain hand. A single high note, crystal clear, pierced the night. It hung there, impossible, beautiful, while the bass kept pounding underneath like a heartbeat that refused to quit.
Then, right at the peak, he cut the power.
The cables yanked her back up into the shadows.
The music stopped dead.
Silence crashed over the square like a physical thing.
Then the screaming started. Not anger. Worship.
"Iron Angel!" someone yelled.
The chant spread like fire through dry tinder.
The name caught on fast, mixed with the local tongue in excited shouts, but the Maestro didn't give a shit. Let them call her whatever they wanted. The sound was what mattered.
Up on the roof the Maestro slumped against the chimney, chest heaving. Every inhale felt like breathing broken glass. He pulled the mask down just long enough to spit another clot the size of his thumb. It landed with a wet slap.
Leo crouched beside him, terrified. "You're bleeding everywhere, man. We gotta get you back—"
"Shut up." The Maestro's filtered voice was weaker now. "Listen."
Below, the crowd was tearing the Bard's stage apart. Not violently. Joyfully. They were singing her hook, mangling the words, but singing anyway. Someone had already started scratching her likeness onto the wall with a piece of charcoal.
The Maestro closed his eyes. The pain was a living thing now, coiled around his throat and lungs, squeezing.
'First taste. Just the first.'
He could already feel the Guild's eyes turning this way. The anomaly detectors in the towers would be lighting up like fireworks. Tomorrow there would be raids. Questions. Blood.
Good.
He wanted them looking.
He wanted them scared.
Jax hauled him to his feet. "We need to move. Now."
The Maestro nodded once. He looked back at the square one last time.
Hundreds of faces turned upward, searching the rooftops, chanting her name.
The Iron Angel.
His Mechanical Muse.
His weapon.
His revenge.
He let Jax and Leo half-carry him toward the ladder. Every step sent fresh waves of agony through his body. His legs shook. His vision kept flickering.
But inside his chest, something else burned hotter than the damage.
Obsession.
'They felt it. They'll never forget it. And next time…'
He coughed again. More blood. He didn't bother hiding it.
'Next time I'll make the whole city bleed for me.'
They disappeared into the maze of catwalks and steam vents just as the first Guild patrol whistles started screaming in the distance.
Behind them, the chant kept rising.
Iron Angel.
Iron Angel.
The Maestro smiled through the pain, teeth stained red.
Showbiz had just arrived in Aetheria.
And it was going to burn the old world down.