Repetition

by Alan Gallauresi

  What's happening? yelled a slurred voice from inside the secondary cabin. Chandrasekhar flicked his finger and replied calmly. We’re about to crash. Lie in the sleeping pod, now. And to the computer: Execute.

  The car swooped, diving up into the city’s understructure. The chasing cars followed suit. A blinking icon indicated another incoming audiovisual communiqué. Well past conversation. Chandrasekhar whistled, allowing himself some emotional response now that there was nothing left for him to do. He watched the docking ports and subscrapers rush by in a blur for a few uncomfortable seconds and then looked up at the calming green sea below. The rim grew larger until it filled up the entire view as he leaned back into the control chair.

  A blinding flash followed by darkness. Then, slowly, the dim glow of the cockpit’s lights. Chandrasekhar felt a growing nausea, a feeling like being upside down. Suddenly the gravplates adjusted and he felt his own weight again.

  The viewport was uninterrupted black. His irises widened as seconds passed, and he finally recognized glitters of light that soon grew dazzlingly bright without an atmosphere to filter their waves. Chandrasekhar reviewed the ship's heading: the computer had already put them on course, and he verified the series of numbers flickering past. Reading right to left, the display went from a blur to a steady ticking at the seconds markers. The indicator stopped at months; if everything went to plan, the journey shouldn't need the year place.

  Chandrasekhar leaned back, his attention spent. He trusted the computer to make small adjustments based on empirical data, like determining changes to thrust based on the exact weight of the passenger in the secondary cabin. Unlike the human brain, the computer was an excellent predictor, and the fact that it was navigating only the second interstellar flight in human history, or that the other passenger was an unwilling traveler and the richest woman on Earth made no difference in its calculations.

  Chapter 2

  True Security | Patent Reform | Wake and Shave

  Steven Wald stands motionless, deaf to the world, in a deceptively short line at Security Gate 2, Terminal B. It’s fifty-four -- no – fifty-three minutes before boarding time on his flight. There are maybe twenty people ahead of him waiting to show their tickets and another ten in a traffic jam at the metal detector slash full body scanner checkpoint. He is waiting until the last minute to turn off the music streaming through his earphones -- insulating him -- but he’s already stowed every other piece of non-clothing into the pockets of the small carry-on bag slung behind him: his keys; a leather belt with an oversized metallic buckle; his antiquated phone; gum; his thin 3-fold wallet.

  The man ahead of him shuffles forward a bit. Wald matches his movement mechanically.

  Strange, that – Wald had been raised to be neurotically careful about flashing money. Amazing how completely natural it feels here to remove your wallet from the protection of your pocket, flaunt it about while you fumble around with your loose change and then put it out of your sight and in ready reach of anyone with the brass to take it. But no one would. It didn’t used to be like that. The most security you would have seen thirty years ago would be a sign to remember your possessions and beware of pickpockets. Pickpockets love signs like those – people stop and touch their wallets and valuables just to make sure they are there. It saves thieves the trouble of figuring out which pocket they’ve put them in.

  Airports used to be common areas. Back in the glory days, your lost love could come right up to the gate and magically catch you just before you boarded to Botswana. No required ticket to get in the way. You reunite, get engaged on the spot and switch flights to Bermuda -- leaving five gates down, where a barely competent thief nicks your wallet and slinks off to eat unhurriedly in the food court, thirty feet from the scene of the crime and 239 miles away from you noticing. That doesn’t happen anymore. Modern airports, with their plastic bins full of possessions and identity checks, have made us extremely safe – just maybe not in the way we expected, or the way they intended.

  Wald catches a few words over the roiling noise in his earphones: a pleasant voice questioning the size of toothpaste and toiletries. It reminds him of a joke he’d heard from a comedian somewhere: Airport security is like uncomfortable sex – a lot of fumbling around in your bare socks, and anyone with more than 3oz of liquid is in big trouble. Wald grins to himself. They should put that up in a series of signs as you get closer to security. Not the punch line, just “Airport security is like uncomfortable sex.” Like Burma-shave, or tourist trap leads. You move along slowly, trying to puzzle them out, and before you know it, you’re there.

  The line shifts forward. Wald glances at his ticket, double-checking his gate. His eyes fall on his seat assignment: 17-B. He fights a wave of irritation and skips to the next song in the playlist. The line is getting close to the first checkpoint and he grudgingly hits pause and places the device in his bag. A few minutes later and he is positively identified by a security agent who looks him over like he’s a pair of shoes missing its price-tag at a half-off sale.

  The next stage of the process. Wald is pleased to see several explicit signs directly ahead of him, next to the grey plastic bins. There is never a circumstance when it should be outright assumed that a person knows to take their shoes off – airports, boats, Japanese houses, they should all have signs. People desire the expected -- signs give them that. An airport security line is no place for the unexpected.

  He chucks his shoes into a bin – slip-on half-boots, perfect for travel –then places them both on the conveyer. He approaches two full body scanners and waits to be told what to do. He is waved through two machines that confirm he is just as expected: organic, non-explosive, slightly overweight, slightly under-endowed. He is greeted at the end of the gauntlet by a burly man with a permanent smile. Sir, you've been selected ... Stephen's ear canals swell up and filter out the rest of the patter. He moves his arms widely in response to the man's gestures and, off-balance, leans in toward the transportation agent as he is patted down. Carlos, reads the name tag. When I was young, people were stuck with the bland Carl; now everyone was the suave and cosmopolitan Carlos. I missed the chance to introduce myself to women at parties as Stefan by a couple of decades.

  Steven spreads his legs apart and wonders when he had implicitly accepted the change. Carlos holds up his arms and shows Stephen the back of his hands before patting below the waist, demonstrating that he isn't getting any kicks from this. One of us ought to, Carlos... somebody somewhere has to enjoy their job.

  I Saw You: Friday morning, airport security line. You smiled at me and made my day. I was in a rush and didn't get a chance to say anything, but when accidentally bumped, I felt a thrill. Think you felt it too. "C" -- call me and make my week!

  Carlos gives him a satisfied nod, then, still smiling, waves him on. Wald retrieves his belongings and begins to dress. Pull up your sagging pants and put on your belt. It’d be embarrassing and undignified if we weren’t all doing it.

  He glances around. Gate D13. Seat 17-B. Wald rubs his forehead. So much effort, just for the privilege of sitting down in a chair for seven hours and 39 minutes.

  ###

  The antepenultimate application of a miraculous variably induced gravity device is a commercially viable airship. And the variably induced gravity device is, indeed, nothing short of a miracle – a tiny, nearly flat chip of hardened metal that needs no power to operate and costs pennies to produce. Or rather: cost pennies during the interval when they were produced, a period just shy of six decades.

  A small electric charge applied to the integrated controller allows finely tuned regulation over a powerful gravitational beam. The simplest geometrical uses are the most powerful – say, by attaching the device to a rectangular shape on a two dimensional plane. Place the device on the bottom and you have a lifter. On the top, and you have a crusher, a hammer of force. Diagonally -- alternately a method of propulsion or deceleration. Off center from a rectangle on an axle, and you have a motor that requires
no power or a generator that produces it endlessly. With the potential contained in that device, it’s an absurdity to dwell on something as mundane as a commercial airship, and only a man with a particular vision of the future or an overwhelming abhorrence of air travel would bother about it.

  Make no mistake. D. Anders bothered about everything he could think of to apply the device to, and later, anything a brain-trust of inventors paid in profit percentages could think to apply the device to. Every aspect of daily life, every tool in the garden shed, every modern convenience – everything that could conceivably benefit, now or in the future, from having a variably induced gravity device attached to it was patented. Among the litany of significant and ridiculous applications of the device listed in patent records assigned to D. Anders’ VIG Company: a self-propelled elevator designed to remove height constraints in skyscrapers; a noiseless floating scooter; self-carrying luggage; a universal battery; a guided meteorite bomb; a brown-on-all-sides convection oven; the fingerless massager; the gravcar; an internal organ position stabilizer for EMT use; the back-saving forceless shovel; several variations of popular sexual gratification devices; a gravity-neutral load-bearing truss system for floating bridges; no-touch forceps; ground-effect shoe lifts; a cheap and effective space elevator (never built).

  Not since the industrialization of energy through mass relays of copper wiring had such a single idea blossomed into thousands of products -- far too many products for VIG to manufacture itself. Though VIG was the sole producer of induced gravity plates until its takeover, its story is not one of massive development or corporate conglomeration, but patent licensing and silent ownership. Anders’, and by extension, VIG’s, philosophy was one of limited control and maximized effect.

  The clock started ticking on VIG’s existence on November 30th, 2028, the date on which the USPTO approved US Patent #27877488 for a Method and Apparatus to Variably Induce Gravity Independent of Mass – a patent vaguely named and attached to a bafflingly complex set of diagrams and formulas. The patent was granted for 20 years. Similar patents were registered and granted in various locales across the world, and in some cases, rejected. Once the importance of the device became clear, many countries – including much of Eastern Asia and Africa -- refused to grant a patent for it, instead devoting resources to the research and development of their own induced gravity device. These occurrences failed to dissuade Anders in any way. He continued to patent everything he could, anywhere bureaucratic regulations would let him.

  The clock ticked forward several years. Every time he patented an improved device, D. Anders infringed on a new market and made new enemies. Anders strong-armed his way through the companies in his way with irrefusable deals: license a patent for the self-powered, free floating and dirt cheap version of your product for a non-controlling equity in your business or VIG goes to your competitor and offers them the same deal. If neither side bit, he would buy out a publicly traded corporation, spin them off and retain 49% of their stock. If no other option was available, that product simply didn’t get made: e.g. self-carrying luggage, invented in 2031, and not produced until 2048. Yet the overall strategy was wildly successful: by 2043 VIG owned minority stakes in over 100 of the top 500 corporations and was involved in an estimated 23% of worldwide manufacturing. By 2047, the estimate topped 35%.

  The clock ticked again and patent challenges grew stronger in tandem with VIG’s overarching dominance. This occurred in two major ways, both of which had a profound impact on VIG and patent law itself.

  The first tactic was a concerted effort by anti-patent lobbyist groups who contended that induced gravity was an imperative invention that should not be subject to traditional patent law. They espoused technological manifest destiny and cited Anders’ many idle patents as proof that current patent protections were stifling innovation rather than protecting it. They contended that the rising dominance of small-scale repping machines meant production could no longer be realistically controlled on a corporate level, making patents ineffective. The formation and funding of these groups has not, to this date, been subjected to sufficient scrutiny, but speculation that they were sanctioned by corporate competitors lacks verisimilitude – companies battle over patent disputes regularly but almost universally push for a strengthening of patent application.

  The second approach centered on the validity of the original patent. Patents are designed to protect specific, reproducible inventions or innovations. By the late 2030’s, it was apparent to foreign patent thieves and knowledge-thirsting scientists alike that the patent was neither reproducible nor understandable. The methods which appeared to be inordinately complex to patent clerks emerged as meaningless gibberish to trained professionals. At the same time, attempts to reverse engineer the basic gravplate device had all failed. The device was a single repped plate of shape memory alloy with a small chip attached. The plate was hollow; if it was pierced in any way, the device failed instantly, revealing an inside shell, lightly ridged with lines, and containing a viscous fluid. A miracle liquid, some contended. Yet analysis showed it to be nothing more than inert mineral oil. Snake oil, others contended – a scientific fraud, cold fusion all over again.

  The clock ticked. In 2047, one year before the end of Anders’ original patent term, the U.S. government overturned all of VIG’s patents. The decision threw patent courts into disarray – VIG’s patents stretched to every conceivable industry and there was mass confusion over the validity of existing and prior patents. Unequipped to deal with the repercussions, the U.S. courts issued a three year moratorium on patent infringement cases. Invention’s manifest destiny had come, and this was the Wild Wild West.

  In 2047, one year before the end of his original patent terms, Anders – hero, visionary, flim-flam man -- owned a company which comprised greater than a third of the world’s manufacturing capability, a world building his unlicensed products. He had bullied his way into inconceivable influence and power over a span of 20 years. He had perpetrated the greatest hoax in the history of the world: a magical perpetual motion machine sold by the millions to a duped populace. A swindle of the greatest magnitude, ruined by a niggling detail: somehow, no matter what science or common sense said, his inventions had the gall to keep on working.

  ###

  Thirteen hours before the abduction, Chandrasekhar woke to a dull pain, absorbed in a dream. It was the same dream as every other night for the past fifteen months, a dream that hadn’t exactly occurred yet. “Dream” was just shorthand for what Chandrasekhar conceived of it as – something closer to a set of memories, a partial life that was half-forgotten. Asleep, he felt he remembered it all. On waking, he struggled to grasp hold and force a recollection, but the memories faded the quickest when he wrinkled his temples and concentrated.

  This morning was no different – clarity swallowed up in the mundane actions of opening his eyes and moving his joints. As he stretched over to the mirror, the dream washed out and he picked out two threads that remained like detritus: the image of a beautiful woman framed by a spire of shapes, and a sequence of numbers and letters. Every morning, they were what remained from the shadow of laying dead in that medipod.

  Chandrasekhar looked at the reflection of his face. By now he was well used to the fact that it looked so much like him. It had been a surprise when he’d looked for the first time after the reconstruction – the medipod had spent days working on him to fix the damage, slicing his brain stem away and rewiring it into a new, reconstructed body. He had been prepared for a horror, a monstrosity. Instead he had seen a man just like himself. It was Chandrasekhar, exactly – just temporarily bald. He had never seen his scalp bare all over and it had taken him the greater part of fifteen months and five haircuts to be sure of his face. He pursed his lips over the vanity of feeling comfortable in his own skin. He ought to feel lucky he was alive; the procedure that had given him another chance was nearly a century old but had been botched so badly in the past that it had basically been made illegal. Chandr
asekhar was a special case. He guessed he should be glad for the enveloping pain he had to endure.

  An unneeded alarm sounded near him and he clicked his throat to stop the noise. As he ran some clear powder through his hair he thought about the last time he had slept in, slept past the alarm. Well before the reconstruction, before he had been hired in Acquisitions even. Chandrasekhar studied the line of his beard along the jaw and brought out a trimmer from the cabinet. He pressed the wide, curved plastic against his throat and tiny hairs fell noiselessly down. He maintained the hairline for pragmatic reasons: it covered up the tiny twitches of his muscles that occurred along where the ceramic-metal implants lined his face. He could remember pain, the feeling like his jaw had been shattered and wondered whether the embedded triggers and sensors still the originals. Maybe the medipod had collected the old ones like a tooth fairy and kept them in the materials bank, fixed up and ready for the next damaged patient in his line of work.

  Even then they must have expected I would go back to work, he thought. Else, why leave the implants? Of course they had wanted me to. I’m trained, expert. The last job had been a bad, but with a new body and months of rehab, he had been healthy and fit. The psych tests proved that, to himself if not to his employees, especially the ones he had lied on. Chandrasekhar rubbed a gel on his teeth and gums, waited a few seconds, and spit.