I was discussing with my best friend the other day what it was that she loved most about engineering (I'm only a lousy biology major and I like to work with live things thank you very much) and her stunning insight gave me the inspiration to write this very (very) short oneshot. As usual, a critical eye is always welcome!


There is such a savage beauty to machinery.

The gears under the boy's fingertips feel alive; the groans of the different apparatuses flood his ears and they sound like salvation. Where others see nothing more than cold, frigid steel cut like a broken prayer, he sees potential. Lesser men would balk at the intimating titanium rods, but not Tobey McCallister III.

On his best days, he thinks himself a composer, enraptured in various cacophonous sounds which he weaves into music. A hiss soon becomes the slow pull of the bow on a violin's string and a whirr metamorphoses into mellow percussion. This parallel brings him an overinflated sense of joy and he paces around his lab fervidly, a near waltz.

When he is creating, Tobey feels at once excited and at ease. He likens it to gazing upon Wordgirl, to those instances when he catches her dark, clever eyes before she hastily turns away. There too is love in every creation he makes, in every clench of his hand on a tool, in every drop of sweat on his brow. He inserts whispered words of passion in each nut and bolt worked into the metal. He writes poetry into their circuitry.

To Tobey, his robots provide him both opportunities and power.

To love is to be human, but oh, to engineer is divine.