The man left their rumpled bed and dressed. Mother Rose smiled when she saw the man’s expression as he slipped through the door. It was one of fierce concentration. She lay back and lit the cigarette poised on her quellazaire and expelled blue smoke into the ceiling. It was her gift, the muse of fuck.

He strode purposefully through the hallway of deep green upholstered walls under copper flambeauxs and went through another doorway to burst into the cool night. He walked home in such a state of complete absorption pedestrians had to leap aside at the very last moment.

The man, Leonardo Reiche de Tesla, carried an extraordinary brain within his small skull. He wasn’t to realize it at the time, but it would soon revolutionize the airship and steamobile industries. He unlocked his laboratory and stepped in its comfortable heat. The remnants of the Rose’s kisses seemed to fluoresce on his neck.

He picked up a beaker of blue gas.

“Orgone,” he whispered and began work.

And thus the Reiche Engine was invented.