Blair sat like a toad with alphabet scales on its back. She belonged to David Lister, best selling author of formula thrillers. Wrought iron black, squat, weighed down as if yearning to return to the metal core of the earth itself, she did not wait, she did not hope. She resigned herself to the fact that she was merely an ornament - as irrelevant as one of Lister's useless subplots. And so, on display on a pedestal in a corner of his study, Blair went about crafting her own stories, etching them subversively in rust. She would begin at the tiny, unprotected chip of bare metal at her base (her Achilles heel, if you will) and she would write in oxidizing red ink up under the protective paint. She would write and she would not stop until she was entirely compromised. She would hold herself together by sheer will and then disintegrate into a heaping mass of glass keys, ink ribbon, rubber platen, and crumbling metal shards.
A machine born of the industrial age, she had no need for sleep or backup or de-fragmenting like the fussy plastic boxes that Lister pecked away at. She was all about hard copies, fixed-width glyphs. She was unmerciful. No backspace key on her keyboard - the mere idea of correction tape was science fiction in her day. Tabs were set by means of brake-stops and pulleys, a system notorious for pinching fingers and jamming if not engaged precisely.
She had no need for electrical power. Her typefaces were propelled through their arcs via an intricate, efficient network of typebars. She was at her best when guided by fingers with will and intent behind them. She had no patience for weak-minded, second-guessing hacks. She desired writers who wrote in straight lines, who strung sentences along like pearls of wisdom, writers who edited in the space between their brain and their fingertips. For writers such as these she was a marvel of engineering, designed to reward swift, sure strokes without jamming - allowing the stream of consciousness to flow uninterrupted. When the words came in quick succession she sounded not like some jittery morse code operator but like steady rain on ceramic tiles punctuated by the sound of the margin bell and the zipper-like whir of the carriage return.
An innovation in her day, her first owner was an insurance firm. She was one out of an order of four hundred. She was put away as a spare, up on the top shelf of a storage closet in the basement. It was dark and dry. The air smelled of carbon paper, metal shelves, and rubber erasers. Two months passed and she was sure she had been forgotten but a week into her third month she was put into service at the desk of a particularly adept temp named Maggie, brought in to help the company prep for its yearly audit.
Maggie had soft hands and a sure touch. Blair especially appreciated her graceful carriage return. The two were making quite a pair until an office indiscretion, initiated by the department manager, got Maggie fired. Violating a cardinal typewriter ethic, Blair tried to advise her user against the affair, but whenever she tried to express herself, Maggie would think she had made a typo. She would swear, under her breath, and rip the sheet out without first releasing the internal guide rollers - a move that was within Blair's design specification, but one that she found painful and rude. She stopped trying to warn Maggie and within a week, Maggie was gone. Blair understood that this was Maggie's fault, that she shouldn't have tried to stop her. She vowed never again to violate the terms of the object-operator relationship.
The desk was cleared by the end of the day but they did not return Blair to the basement. They left her on the empty desk and there she sat listening to the typewriters around her clacking away. She didn't mind at first, glad to be out of the stuffy storage space, but jealousy set in and she soon yearned for attention. She could hear some of the other machines jamming - typebars sticking, piling one on top of another. All the machines on this floor were of the same make and model so she could tell that those machines were misbehaving out of laziness or spite. To be fair, some of the other typewriters had awful users, the kind prone to pounding the keyboard in fits of rage, but Blair felt that (despite her previous slip) their behavior was entirely unprofessional, dangerous even. If the idea got out that their make and model were unreliable, they could be thrown out as a group.
Luckily, the office manager had a budget to stick to. Some of the bothersome machines were sent out for servicing (discipline, in the world of typewriters) and the ones that would not straighten out were retired and replaced. And this is how Blair and Emily were paired.
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