--- W A X W E B --- { 04:45 / 1:25:00 } --- { Hands : Ella } ---

Hands : Ella

As a result, Ella Spiralum lost her job as a telephone operator.

	Telegraph messages are frames in an animated film. The ears of Mickey are made from a thousand dots, and Minnie, his mouse mate, who secretly loves Felix, the happy but tormented cat, has her own face made out of a thousand Western Electric logos, placed side by side in a clever fashion. That's one picture, and you need a million to make a never ending story (1,000,000 divided by 30 frames per second, by 60 seconds a minute, by 60 minutes an hour, is only a bit more than 9 hours, not much even in the life of a mouse, but if we imagine that there has been heavy editing, and also expect that each mouse watches only a few minutes of programming every day, then perhaps this never ending story will do, especially if several mice have their lives in program rotation at one time, and if we allow for repeats and urgent news interrupts and of course commercials...). An assembly land of messages; a conveyor in the center leads a complex message in process of assembly across the floor, and as it passes the telegraph workers wrench and weld pieces of paper onto its' antic growing mass. At the other end of the line, when all of the workers have had their hand at the thing, attaching the parts they are assigned to attach from the never-empty bins they are assigned to empty, the final invention, or assemblage, a giant self-propelled machine made out of messages rolls out the door, an immaterial sort of car made out of pages of clock-stamped telegrams pasted on by hand here in the telegraph factory.

04:45

Ella Spiralum, Ghosts, and Zoltan Abbassid:

Soon after sending that message to her brother, Ella loses her job in London as a telephone operator at the telegraph company. Ella isn't too discouraged, as in truth she is an electrical inventor, and found the telegraph job discouraging. Ella, now a free agent, makes an effort to return to inventing full-time. She hopes to create a device capable of transmitting moving pictures through the telephone.

To help Ella make ends meet during this period, Hive-Maker gets her part-time work as a photographic medium at the Supernormal Picture Society, sponsor of his distant expeditionary cinematographic work. Ella ends up running the Society's weekly photographic seances, at one of which she meets the dead wife of Zoltan Abbassid, and so soon Abbassid himself, a man destined to be her husband, and in addition the very man who sold her brother the Mesopotamian bees, brought all the way from Basra.