They repeated the tests daily.  Sometimes the diagrams would be broken apart and he would have to construct them from pieces; other times they would be missing a component and he would be asked to draw it in with the first thing that popped into his head.  He worked quickly, treating the exercise like a Rorschach test — any answer was as good as any other.  At the end, they would ask him to identify the object.  His guesses seemed juvenile.  A molecular structure for a fabric that tightens on impact?  An advanced replication module for elemental isotopes?  He was given a partially drawn picture of a series of shifting chromatic disks.  He knew it was missing vital parts; he picked up a drafting pencil to fill in the holes.

What is this? he had asked.  Just psych tests, smiled one coat.  Don’t worry, there are no wrong answers.  Then why was Chandrasekhar repeating this test, day after day?  Chandrasekhar hesitated, putting down the pencil.  I’m not sure what to do here.  The tech had told him to take his time, then got up and left the room.  Chandrasekhar mouthed a word to himself, just a wild guess.  The next day his time had been split between the spatial tests and time with an enthusiastic therapist intent upon discovering whether there were any blocks in his consciousness that might prevent him from doing his job as intended.

His supervisor was making it clear that the organization considered him extremely valuable, that they were very unwilling to let him go.  He stressed the service he had done in the past, the service he could still offer.  Perhaps you’d consider coming back as an independent contractor.

The offer was clear: they wanted it, and they would pay for it.  Acquisitions was not interested in the legalities of its creation, only what they could accomplish with it.  They would assure him it was a gift to mankind, probably tell him he was a hero to his country.  He wasn’t inclined to be a hero; he had something else to do first.

I’m sorry to see you go.  You can’t blame me for asking one more time: how can we make you stay?  There was nothing but politeness in the man’s tone and the lines of his face.

No, he didn’t need more time.  The man reached under his desk and pulled out a report, pretending to peruse it in detail.  Let’s talk about your evaluation. 

The evaluation.  The doctors had subjected him to a battery of tests from the moment he awoke from his singular dream: physical response; limb strength; pain threshold.  The implant tests reminded him of his first year at Acquisitions.  His control was as accurate now as it had been then — the tiny ceramic sensors had been recovered or reconstructed perfectly.  Everything had gone well.  The worry he had sensed from the lab coats that he would have to retrain his muscles or lose feeling over parts of his body dissolved as he progressed through the tests.  He felt the strength in his body, as capable and useful as it had ever been.  If it hadn’t been for the pain and the dream, he could have imagined that everything was just as before.

Then came the psych tests.

Sure, let’s discuss my evaluation and all the lies in it; how I’ve shown remarkable progress in rehabilitation but my body may not be able withstand the rigors of active service; how my knowledge of operations makes me admirably suited to data and intelligence work, as long as I keep up with my tests and therapy sessions.  Chandrasekhar was silent while the old man read off the conclusions of the report.

Every weekday for the last five months he had spent the morning rehabilitating his body; the afternoons were for his mind.  The first tasks he had been given were simple pattern recognition: naming colors and images.  He had read long passages from magazine articles aloud to a silent technician.  He had spent several weeks on mathematical problems spanning algebra, combinatorics and calculus.  These were standard subjects for Acquisitions employees in his position.  He performed on a level consistent with his past results, making the lab coats nod in satisfaction.  They asked him to work on several disciplines he had not had any training in: category theory and affine differential geometry.  He struggled, inexperienced with the concepts.  The coats responded with diagrammed solutions, enabling him to complete similar problems without fully understanding what he was doing.  The effort tired him, but he thought he could sense the technicians were excited with his progress.

He graduated to spatial recognition.  He excelled at the tangram puzzles, though he could not help but conflate the shapes on the page with meaningless glimpses from his dream, as if he was seeing a film projected onto the same surface he was working on — a film of images and numbers sequenced together .  The testers showed him more complex puzzles, puzzles like blueprints for machinery.  He was asked to identify their purpose, to guess when he was unsure.  He guessed wildly at every answer, not being able to understand how the objects worked.  The lab coats had returned his answers with blank stares, and given him more complex diagrams.

###

What can we offer you?  asked a voice in his dream.

Six months of mandatory rehabilitation leave was ending in a spare, impersonalized office.  That was the character of not only his superior but the entire Acquisitions division — clean and detached.  Chandrasekhar sat in an extremely comfortable office chair across from a tired man with a tic in his cheek.  His resignation letter laid rested between them like a physical barrier, restricting the movement of their limbs on the table.

Chandrasekhar was expressing his gratitude to the organization, while looking his superior steadily in the eye.  They both knew there was no reason to be grateful; Acquisitions had been acting in its own best interests when it spent untold dollars trying to salvage his body.  A trained employee in Chandrasekhar’s line of work was not easy to acquire and keep, undoubtedly, but he suspected that wasn’t the genuine reason they had kept him recuperating all these months.

The first month had been utter hell.  From the moment he emerged from the pod, he had barely been able to stand from the pain.  The Acquisition doctors had sedated him with mitylpropicin for hours at a time, eventually letting him control his own dosage to stay conscious and relatively functioning.  Your brain is working overtime, explained one of the interchangeable men in lab coats.  Your central nervous system is sending too many signals to your brain, which is working overtime trying to interpret them all.  The pod had saved his life, but it had been limited in what it could do to reconstruct him; when he’d asked the lab coats when the pain would go away, they gave him incomplete answers and talked to him about the dangers of exceeding his mitylpropicin dosage.

What could they offer him?  He had been dead, and now he had another chance at life.  Could he start over again?  He had other thoughts, thoughts he couldn’t get rid of.

Chandrasekhar finished his speech, searching for a reaction in the other man’s countenance — an impassive mask but for the tic.  Nearly ten years ago, his superior had retired from active service and had his control implants removed.  The tissue in his cheek had been damaged in the procedure; now the muscles twitched constantly.  Comically, for those who didn’t know the old man that well.

The eyes in his blank face glanced down at Chandasekhar’s hands, making sure that he had noticed.  His hands were shaking slightly, nearly imperceptibly — unless some knew what they were looking at.  Maybe you need more time.

More time on your psych tests?  thought Chandrasekhar.  He tried to still the motion in his hands,  breathing in and out while imagining a black wall with a growing circle of light at its center, a

Another argument: deliberate cities have no soul.

At the mid-point of the 2050′s, half as many people were leaving VIG / Powder Heights every morning as came in.  Early housing had reflected new growth architecture; clean, modern and efficient.  With the advent of ultra-maser quarrying, it became just as cost effective to transplant blocks of pre-existing homes as building new.  Swaths of historic homes, still embedded in the bedrock of their foundations, floated in from depressed locations; locations where they would have been torn down to make way for cheap condos, or gone derelict, argued proponents to those campaigners who termed the process urban removal.  Despite the negative connotation, some cities even paid for the privilege of letting Anders repurpose their heritage.  The permanent population swelled. 

As the 2060′s dawned, the factory had begun transforming itself from a compound into a vibrant city.  Billions in gravplates flowed out while untold tons of critical food and supplies flowed in.  Powder Heights was not exceptional.  On firm ground or not, all cities are lopsided entities: they give and take and none are self-sufficient.  They are just as dependant on their tarmac arteries as the VIG factory and its invisible byways to fulfill the necessities of life: organic poultry; cold-rolled steel; leather chaise longueslongues; protractors and compasses; 4-ply toilet paper; nitroglycerin derivates for explosives; nitroglycerin derivates for heart medication; disposable electronics; cilantro; water.

This was the final argument: water.  Powder Heights was constantly drawing at the limit of the capacity the aquifers of the Maryland Coastal Plain could provide, sucking the land drier than it could keep up, like Vegas before the population fell.  Hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day flowed through the city’s advanced recycling centers, transforming blackwater into greywater, greywater into whitewater.  The technology was influenced by the design of multi-stage flash desalination plants, born of grand necessity in places like Dubai.  There, they had pumped out so much brine and backfilled the ocean with artificial resort islands that the coastline changed each year.  Beach-front property became sand-front, devalued and abandoned within a matter of months as the water receded away.  At Powder Heights, the waters were receding: the city was slowly running dry, one sip and shower at a time.  The city faced the same imperative as the Dubai developers: move to where the water was.

At 2 AM on March 5th, 2065, with the routine ease of road crew working at night, the city of Powder Heights disconnected from the massive water main that supplied it and the maglev station that bound it in a single location, breaking its last bonds with Terra.  It floated away east at a stately seven

The roots of New Atlantis lie in the 40 mile corridor that separates Washington, DC from Baltimore, MD.  The term corridor is fairly accurate.  In the 2030s, the suburban towns housing workers from both cities were split by the asphalt ribbon of I-95 and an oft-delayed maglev high-speed rail line.  That maglev line shuttled more commuters than all the local rail lines combined.  DC had its Metro and Baltimore had its Light Rail; in-between, there was nothing to stop for but an airport and Fort Meade.

D.  Anders had chosen the corridor for the single, massive replication factory producing VIG devices.  The land had been expensive.  As the complexity and scale of operations grew, consolidation of raw resources and expansion of distribution became tantamount.  The factory land was fully built-up, and the act of acquiring additional space was cost-prohibitive.  A logical choice would have been to relocate.  Instead, Anders decided to build up.

Vertical building regulations are uncertain, political things.  From the roof deck of the gorgeous 14-story Cairo apartment building in DC, one can see the effect of the 1899 Heights of Building Act, born of the Cairo’s offensive construction: a panorama of sunlight spilling onto Beaux-Arts monuments.  That piece of paper did as much as L’Enfant’s blueprints to say that Washington is not Chicago or New York; to say not in my sunshine.  One-third of a mile across the Potomac’s slurry, Rosslyn did not give a damn about sunshine.  It was half a city: just the skyscrapers, to hell with everything else.  Without the burden of height restrictions, it grew capitally, supplying demand.  In the unincorporated tracts northeast of the Beltway, commute times may have prevented the same population density, but definitely not height regulations.  In 2040, Anders paid out of pocket to connect his ever-spiraling center to the high-speed train line; the VIG / Powder Heights station opened two years later, transporting thousands of workers daily.

By 2047, the VIG factory was a semi-legal vertical sprawl; dozens of Frankreich bridges superimposed onto warehouse floors, cloaked in glass.  Existing supports had been retrofitted, replaced by gravplates designed to bear their structural weight in far less space.  Flying transports and floating airwalks snaked everywhere, connecting the compound into a dense hive.

Another argument: no natural resources.  Boom towns blow up, and sometimes their carcasses stick around when the silver veins ran dry or salt is taxed too heavily.  Those that do stick tend to find another resource to exploit.  What does a flying city have?

In Wyoming, it is still the rushing 1870s as far as minerals are concerned;  if you can find them and claim them on the 34% of the surface geography that remains public land — a percentage second

You are the most suspicious person I have ever met, a friend had once said.  They had been out at a trendy bar with a large group, and he had just asked her if it was working.  Is what working?  she asked.  He had pointed out the ring on her left hand ring finger.  Unless you got engaged without telling me — I take it you are trying to avoid attention?  She had shrugged and said, I suppose.  The ones I’m avoiding don’t pay enough attention to notice the ring.  It had been a sad day in Wald’s life when he realized that most of the people he met had those rings; the day he had first correlated the lack of a ring with eligibility.

Had he been that suspicious before he had started the job, or had the job taught him that?  He thinks back to previous positions, but they are hazy, from another life.  He struggles to recall how long he had been at this job.  Day-in, day-out.  Hands on keyboard, headphones on ears.  Music kicking like an EKG pulse — reassuring him that he was still a little bit alive while he sifted through 99% meaningless data, searching for that important 1%.  It’s not that I’m suspicious — I’m just looking for reasons.

Days on end had rolled together while he programmed computers to be just as suspicious as he was.  Days on end had rolled together while he had made tiny adjustments and waited for batches to finish.  The problem was, you never knew when the batch would finish, so you couldn’t just take a justified long lunch.  His co-workers had devised dozens of methods of wasting time between batches while keeping their eyes on their work: checking mail; paper clip fights; prank wars.  One guy — he was a numbers stations guy, and was half-cracked already — had taken up knitting.  He found it soothing.  Wald’s time-waster was video blackjack.  It was almost job related; he’d sit for hours looking through numbers and symbols, determining patterns and repetition.  And he could hide it quickly when a superior came by — unlike the knitter.

I don’t work there anymore…  why am I still thinking about it?  He was still so disappointingly close to it.  How long until he doesn’t remember doing it at all, like those past jobs?  Part of it was his boss’ fault.  Hi Stephen.  The call had come at the beginning of the week.  Hope you’re doing well, and I’d like to talk to you about reconsidering your resignation.  I talked with the higher-ups, and we’ve put together a package…  No, Wald wouldn’t be free while he still had the possibility of coming back.  That was part of the plan, too.

###

The penultimate application of a miraculous variably induced gravity device is a floating city: a farcical construction, obviated by argument.

The Thread | The Corridor | The Past

Wald is free; he has escaped.  Why don’t I feel free? thinks Wald.  He looks at the bodies around him; the oppressively low curved ceiling; the frayed thread belt securing him to his seat.  Ignoring current circumstances.

Seven days ago, Stephen had handed in his letter of resignation.  His boss had tried to talk him out of quitting immediately.  Take a week off, think about it some more.  I’ll give you a call on Monday and we can talk it over.  People get the wrong impression about government contracting jobs — sure, half of it is just putting warm bodies in chairs, but real work has to be done.  That burden gets split among the workaholics and the naturally competent.  Finding capable replacements is tough.

Throw in a security clearance classification and the task becomes exponentially harder.  It’s a chicken-and-the-egg problem: can’t get a classified job without clearance, and can’t get clearance without a classified job.  It’s no wonder that the government hiring process is a farcical construction.

I don’t want to think about work anymore.  I don’t want to think about airplane seats and numbers going up and down.

Wald had worked side-by-side with a guy named Jim who knew first-hand the ludicrousness of it all.  Jim had been on the government side on the contracting business for thirty years.  That side is just like the contracting side, except you can’t be fired and you don’t get paid as much.  He’d fallen into it after serving in the army; veterans, then as now, got preference in the submission process.  Well, Jim had gotten lucky enough to latch on to voice data analysis right as it was getting big.  Never understood an iota of the technology, he readily admitted, but Jim had worked his way up in management.  Thirty years later, he was the sole government person in charge of coordinating the contractors from the company Stephen had just quit.  And that’s when he retired, with a government pension and the retirement income from the military.  The department panicked — who could they get to replace a manager with thirty years of data analysis experience and a high security clearance?  They went through the formal process of opening the job up for application for eight weeks before declaring the position could not be filled as a government role.  Jim returned on the contracting side — just like the government side, except you can be fired and you get paid more — working for Wald’s old company at half-time while cashing three paychecks.

Stephen’s plan, just like Jim’s, had started on the day he had quit and unchained himself from that desk.  He had let himself go, sitting at a desk.  It wasn’t just that he had gained a few extra pounds.  He had been absorbed; he had been too busy to get hair cuts on time, too concerned with projects to take vacation.  Stephen’s conscious mind suddenly jerks him out of his reverie.  Stop thinking about work!

A few hydrogen atoms were out of place in the vacuum of space.  The Boots woke and fell back asleep, waiting for more data.

It was a quiet time aboard the ship, a cycle without adjustment, and everything was copacetic.

More hydrogen out of place.  The sample size was tiny, and the difference had not risen to statistical relevance.  Another smack on the snooze button.

Boots cycled, and pre-empted the plan to run maintenance cleaning.  Astrogation dictated a slight change in course based on the trail, and the ship complied.  It was now being forced to navigate based on unreliable data, though it did not express worry.  The maintenance cleaning was allowed to kick-off, and the computer slept.

The Boots woke, made managerial decisions and fell back asleep, as it did every picosecond; its passengers slept and dreamed.

Man is a discontented animal, continued Carsten in a paraphrase of past philosophers.  The mere continuation of happiness, he argued, was enough to turn a man unhappy again through excess or boredom.  True contentment could only be sustained for a single instant, a timeless sort of Perfection, foreign to man.  If I could make those around me truly happy, I would build a great spaceship to hold them, and sail them to a the farthest limit of a black hole.  At the very horizon, wrote Carsten, they would cease to move, they would freeze their very souls in time.  Their worries would be at an end, their blood-sin and tawdriness crystallized to brilliant stone.  And I would see that they were happy for all eternity, though they knew it not – agreeing with the conclusion of some of the world’s greatest philosophers: Heaven is far away, and strictly for other people.

###

The intelligences that watched over Chandrasekhar’s comatose form were disappointingly similar to their forebears.  They were persistent anachronisms in a future that had expected neural net balls of blinking Christmas lights, plugged directly into our brains through chrome hex-and-washer amplifier jacks.  These computers were the same old technology, faster, smaller, running on nano-scale substrates.  They were expert systems — computers that read exabytes of data, followed billions of human provided rules, and processed them through an unimaginably fast pocket calculator.  They had no consciousness other than lists of tasks to perform and conditions to be aware of; no desires, only what unavoidable programmatic impulses pushed them to do; no sense of right or wrong beyond what codified rules said was right and wrong.  There’s probably a joke about them not being too far from human in there somewhere; then again, being created and programmed by humans, it probably isn’t much of a joke.

The Boots of Steel checked on the medipods’ status while juggling a thousand other imperatives.  It flew straight, aimed at a mathematical pinprick at the center of the Milky Way, treading space that had been trod before.  It could follow the trail of its slow moving predecessor from the fluctuations in density of neutral hydrogen in its path; in the space between stars the passage of the ship might be observable for another century.  The Boots’ astrogation routine was prepared to adjust its trajectory at any moment.  So far it had proved unnecessary.

That was a high priority imperative, like the routines that maintained power to the medipods and replaced the ablative material protecting the hull.  Thousands of other routines existed without ever being utilized, a database of logic resources meant to be employed on an as-needed basis: soil analyzers;

In 2024, looking for a way to connect with his audience, Thomas Carsten invented and patented a networked high-speed printing device enabled with a high resolution camera.  As pedestrians passed in front of the camera’s eye, the device searched through databases of public profile images and incorporated that person’s details into his latest tract.  An instant horoscope of customized spirituality: personalized, often ludicrously inaccurate, and a little too real to the right person.

With the money he made from his invention, Thomas Carsten applied himself to his true purpose of attracting minds to his point of view.  He employed writers to translate his increasingly pseudo-scientific and heretical ramblings into serious works.

In his multi-part epic, “The Impotence of Omnipotent God”, Carsten attempted to reconcile his belief in an Almighty being with the lack of miraculous intervention in the events of an imperfect world.  God is the Force, Carsten argues, at the creation of the Universe; he is the existence of the Universe itself.  There was a single moment, and God acted with the power of the entire Universe, and he was the Big Bang.  In the Big Bang, as the unified forces of God’s power cooled and separated, God zigged – perfectly, in the absolute best way possible – when he could have zagged.  He zigged, and his Weak Nuclear Force took over.  Then his Gravity took over.  The particles and energy of the universe grew lumpy, a better sort of lumpy than any other possible lumpy, even if it doesn’t seem like it right now.  And now — here we are.

This was a relatable God, a God under infinite pressure, a temporarily omnipotent God making the best out of a bad situation.  Not a clock-maker constructing a perfect ticking masterpiece but a scrambling repairman with an instant to set things “right”.  Not just a clock-maker, but the clock itself , said Carsten.  This is the God of a single miracle, repeated and multiplied without limit.

“Omnipotent God” circulated several thousand copies across several cities.  It was not as successful as his more salaciously titled works, which readers felt leaned toward entertaining and away from depressingly profound.   Still, he produced a series of supplemental installments, where he managed to refute his original point by claiming that angels and ghosts were manifestations of God’s power but were rarely seen due to their existence as waves and particles.

Despite his lack of critical success and a large fortune to retire to, Thomas Carsten continued to live simply and produce largely ignored pamphlets until his death.  In his final tract, “Paradise of the Neo-Men”, Carsten once again pondered the unattainable nature of perfection, in this world or the next.  Here he muses on Heaven: What realm is there where we should not want through eternity, for our