How is your head feeling? Maybe you should be back on the prop. He ignored the voice in his head.
The image of the woman rose up, persistent and impossible to ignore. He had known who she was the first time he had had the vision without knowing the reason behind her presence. Everyone knew who Siri Anders was. He remembered her mouth opening, remembered that she was saying something. He saw her right arm lift upwards, the hand clenched. She was dressed in white and the image of her was overexposed, making it difficult to recall details.
Chandrasekhar touched a button on the vanity and an artificial hum came from the oval plate below him. Both the hum and the plate were for his mental benefit, like the sulfur smell added to natural gas, making the invisible noticeable. The tingle on his skin was light and not unpleasant. He leaned against the vanity's edge and the image pushed forward in his thoughts again. Behind Siri rose a tower of floating shapes, burning with brilliance. Dozens, maybe hundreds of curved geometric shapes, twisting and spinning around an imaginary spoke. It was too bright to look directly at even with his mind, like the after-effect of seeing a sky full of lightning. It looked, at a guess, like the Central Spire of New Atlantis, except Chandrasekhar knew it wasn’t. The hum stopped and Chandrasekhar walked away feeling refreshed without having felt anything at all on his now clean skin.
The axial center of the New Atlantis Spire was an enormous column of water ejecting upwards – at its zenith the jet dissolved outward, rushing down the highest forms, before trickling out and turning into a mist at the bottom where it collected in a quiet lake. In his vision, there was no water spray, no lake. That Spire had been almost completely deconstructed several years before in an effort to recycle the gravplates that had been holding the magnificent shapes aloft. It no longer looked anything like the majestic construction it once was.
No, that spire was a long way from New Atlantis. Chandrasekhar had been fairly sure of the who and where of that scene before he had plotted his crime. He had recognized the type of pattern immediately, but it took him months to employ it. Forty-three days after his resignation was formally processed he had tried accessing the drop box account number specified in the sequence. The drop box contained three things: money, diagrams and a note.
The account contained over 12 billion Standard Dollars, a grotesque sum even with the devaluation the currency had experienced in the last two decades, a result of maintaining international currency parity.
The diagrams he was already familiar with. He had seen them before, in another context. They were half-realized plans that he could fill in the gaps to with surprising ease. With the money in the account, it was only a matter of time to construct the technology hidden in the blueprint: several months, in fact, before it was completed. When it was finished, he could finally understand the how implied in the message.
Bring her with you and return with the repper.
He thought again about the source of that message. Was it another job offer, or had they pushed past the stage of offering?
Chandrasekhar lay back on the bed, careful not to crush the staid formal suit which was laid out next to him. Hours still remained before he would need to put it on. He stared at the opposite wall and thought about the image of the woman and the spire. It was the why that puzzled him, not the what. He rolled it around in his thoughts, unable to forget it, while he waited for time to pass.
Chapter 3
Cilantro | Trans | A Social Occasion
Six rows of seats backed in imitation leather stretch out before the gate. Stephen Wald lunges for a free seat on the end. His carry-on saves the spot of an imaginary companion while he waits as patiently as possible. Only now he is getting hungry. He looks around. The gate is crowded with people. I’d have to give up my spot. I sat down too quickly, I should have gotten food first.
He remembers his niece had asked him to bring a gift back to her. With the seat problems and the agitating lines, he had forgotten all about it. He decides he’ll get her something before the return leg, something emblematic of his trip. When had been younger, his father had gone on long trips and returned with cheap souvenirs from his destinations. Key chains, t-shirts, and the like. At elementary school age it didn’t matter much what it was. The last gift his father had brought back to Wald was a stocking-sized felt bag with tiny silver stars and moons on it. Stephen hadn’t known what to do with it. What was enchanting enough to keep in a bag like that? A secret journal? Polyhedral dice? Magic tricks? In college he’d stored quarters in it for when he did his laundry. A college dorm laundry is one of the few places where he could have pulled a never-ending handkerchief out of that bag and actually impress someone, probably through absurdity alone.
The dark-skinned man seated across from Wald is clumsily eating a foil-wrapped burrito he bought from a stand across from the gate. Stephen turn to look over at the place and notices it is staffed entirely by middle-aged Korean women. He takes out his phone and considers calling someone to catch up and pass the time before deciding against it. He’d once had a friend who only found the time to ring him when she was stuck in an airport. They were frustrating calls. He’d answer the phone with a question: Where are you off to now? She had never quite made the connection.
Wald turns up the volume on his music and rolls a quarter back and forth along the top of his fingers. The scent of the burrito wafts over to him. It smells delicious. He spies flat flecks of green in the chunks falling onto the foil the eater is using as a plate. Cilantro. Wald loves cilantro – he is also slightly allergic to it. Raw pink rashes cover his wrists when touches it, and his throat closes up a little if he swallows it. Cilantro hadn’t been common component of allergy tests when he had been young and it had taken Wald’s brain a decade and a half to narrow down exactly what his body didn’t think he should be eating. If only his taste buds matched the small percentage of the population that tasted cilantro as soap, he wouldn't have to try so hard to avoid it.
His body was well within its rights to reject it – the Slavic diet of the Hungarian Wald clan probably wouldn’t have included Chinese parsley, and the Scotch-Irish cooking of his mother’s side certainly wouldn’t have. There’s a theory that says the rise in allergy afflictions is directly attributable to the changing environment of modern man. Exotic foods our ethnic make-up can’t process. Molds and pollens our bodies never learned to filter out. Cilantro shouldn’t be anywhere near the North. The Coriander plant that cilantro comes from is a foreign invader, transplanted by English colonists desperate for spices. Then again, Wald shouldn’t be here either if you looked at it like that. His people had come over on a boat just the same way.
It would explain why even our dogs have allergies these days, thinks Wald. Poor cockapoos -- taken from the savagely bloody plains of their native environment and force-fed steak on the satin laps of old ladies.
The burrito man is only half-way done. He takes a break and snacks on some tortilla chips. I should have gotten food first, thinks Wald again. Maybe a cinnamon bun. There are only a few places where it’s reasonable to see a grown man eating a cinnamon bun without slippers on, and an airport is one of them. He glances at the time on music player: ten minutes to boarding. I probably couldn’t wolf something down in that time anyway.
That, too, was the fault of allergies. A few years back a man had sued a major airline because of peanut allergy. The thing was, the airline hadn’t served any peanuts on the flight. Another passenger ten rows away from him had brought some chocolate covered nuts on the plane and the guy went crazy, accusing the stewardesses of trying to kill him. The case was settled silently out of court, but the airlines instituted a new rule that forbade passengers from bringing any food on the plane with them. Everything eaten on board was now prepackaged, screened for common allergies and available for purchase by credit card. There’s another theory about allergies – that man has had them this bad all along and was just too busy dying of disease and famine to get around to complaining.
The man acr
oss from Wald has chucked the remaining half into a garbage can. People are starting to shuffle into lines in anticipation of boarding. Stephen feels the irrational pull to queue-up. Why would I get in line just to hurry into an assigned seat? he wonders. The wrong seat, even.
The sound in his ears skips from jingling guitars to a pounding rhythm, an anthem pushing him forward to Action. He turns up the volume and throws his bag over his shoulder, headed for the Mexican food stand. He cuts across the shuffling lanes of traffic, people who can’t hear the sound and don’t know to get out of his way. He reaches the counter behind three travelers, three people who have never met each other and won’t be ordering together. There is some confusion about where to stand, especially since neither of the women at the stand appear to be prepared to handle cashier duties. Wald does a double-take at a Latino man bussing trays from the food court tables -- his nameplate reads: Carlos. In my future, thinks Wald, there is a day when I will read the letters J-e-s-u-s and I will speak the syllables hay-seuss to myself without a thought. Name recognition is marketing; Wald doesn't get to church often enough.
Over the next five minutes, two strong songs play as he glances over his shoulder at the boarding line which has split into two and begun firming. The chain breaks: a quiet, meandering tune over which he hears the boarding call. The woman in front of him is still deciding, and only one person has actually gotten their food yet. The Korean women behind the counter appear to be seriously bustling around with trays and tin cans without accomplishing much.
Wald gives up another spot and wanders over to the gate. He settles into line, still hungry.
###
Somewhere else is a lot closer than it used to be. Consider it a side effect of living in a carefree world where you can transport yourself halfway across the world in a couple hours for the price of local transit bus fare. Start with commute time: think about why you live geographically close to where you work, and think about what you would do if that commute wasn’t a factor any more. Would you get the position that fits you the best and live somewhere else affordable or exciting? When hundreds of millions do exactly that, it leaves gaps – positions no one wants to fill, subservient jobs that many people consider beneath them. Those who are starving don’t consider the jobs beneath them, and they can get here in a matter of minutes in the morning and leave just as quickly at night when they’ve finished their shift – legally or not.
The media calls this phenomenon “transourcing” and in the late 2060s, all the way through the 80s, it was a major headache for administrations already contending with record numbers of visa requests and the failing infrastructure of trade. Waves of vacationers, buoyed by reduced travelling costs and increased access, flooded foreign countries with foreign currency. Rich expatriates sought permanent residency in other nations while they maintained their lucrative jobs at home. Massive reductions in shipping costs resulted in vastly increased trading potential while at the same time flaws in customs regulations were being flouted left and right – when millions of middle income families own induced gravity vehicles capable of making international trips in the blink of an eye, border checkpoints and port inspections become little more than token irritants to the irredeemably honest. It was a regulatory mess.
Nowhere were things messier than 25 miles off the southeastern coast of the Florida Key’s Islamorada in the city of New Atlantis. A floating island -- or, as one scholar described it in advocating one possible legal position, an ocean-going vessel permanently located in international waters, unregistered with a single nation of origin. The convolutions of maritime law only increased the confusion surrounding the legal status of New Atlantis, which generally followed US custom as much as it saw fit and no more. It maintained this privileged international position through the clout of its manufacturing monopoly on gravplates. In the mid 70s, this meant the city served as a gate and as a hub – a laissez faire port of call for tourists, smugglers and transourcing shift bosses.
Shift bosses -- well-known figures who skirted the line between respectable service providers and human traffickers -- ran the business and process of shifting manifold thousands of laborers to and from work and home every day, like a massive temporary placement firm. They offered a panoply of services in skilled and unskilled positions; if a robot didn’t do it and most people didn’t want to, they would find someone who did. Their job descriptions comprised traffic cops and accountants – they dealt in bulk, and their job was to keep things moving at a reasonable pace. Few managed to keep people moving like Ban Kian.
Ban Kian, born in 2009 in the state of Kansas, with a name that bore more traces of his Laotian heritage than his countenance, spent his young adult life in prison for drug trafficking. On his release, he worked for a time as a day laborer, hiring out himself and his hard-up acquaintances for remote jobs. This didn't last; Ban saw too much potential in the gravcar -- a potential to do knock-over jobs and get out before the police could react. He and his gang got caught by an overzealous junior manager while robbing an Orlando bank. Following a second stint in prison, Kian was determined to become legitimate, and eventually grew to run the biggest shift company in New Atlantis.
Kian worked strictly with unskilled foreign labor, divided into two groups: those with some English, and warm bodies. The presentable, working as maids and cooks, made $10 a day, clear. The bodies did what they were told to do, and worked to pay off the rent and food costs they incurred at the Atlantis compound they were transported back to every night -- or morning, depending on which 18 hour shift they worked. Their indentured servitude generated vast cash flow for Kian, who supplemented his income with illicit items smuggled on the bodies constantly streaming back-and-forth from the mainland. A favorite technique was to feed the inert, tasteless compound propicyn to the workers in a sesame paste; on bonding with the cystine found prevalently in human hair, the compound becomes the opiate-like drug mitylpropicyn -- easily recovered in situ with some shearing and a strong depilation solution. A small idea that provided a picture of the times: men and women with bent backs and hair shorn to their skulls. That was the image Kian cultivated. He was a provider of clean-cut, well-bathed employees who were too scared to steal from the lady of the house's jewelry box.
Kian died in October of 2074, when he and an associate of his, one Kurt "Tung" Cross, fell out over a division of payment. According to Cross, he had been promised a large sum for delivering a group of laborers, a group he later described to an American court as all willing volunteers, anxious for employment. He had no defense for killing Ben Kian; when Kian had offered him less than agreed upon for the laborers, Cross had walked up to him and shot him in the heart -- preferring that location to the head, as it was less messy for the shooter. When asked if he felt any remorse, Cross replied that it was a matter of business, not revenge, and Kian probably deserved it, besides.
After a decade of tremendous power, the local shift bosses began to fade in importance. The oft-delayed predictions of machines absorbing menial positions came true, albeit slowly. The absentee landlordism of D. Anders contributed to the demise of transourcing as well. Nations had begun resolving their trade and travel issues resulting in increased international pressure for stricter regulation; New Atlantis lacked the leadership to fight it. This lead to a unique predicament for New Atlantis as tens of thousands of individuals passing through the city every day suddenly had few places to go. Many of them stayed, their legal status as dubious as that of the airborne island they now inhabited. In the span of a few years, a city planned with allowance for 20,000 people was home to more than 100,000, many unemployed, all crowding each other elbow-to-elbow and head-to-foot, as growth spread vertically. Plenty would have been happy to leave, if only they had had somewhere to go.
###
Chandrasekhar walked unhurriedly along a clean avenue in the under-twilight glow, and smelled spice. A cluster of tall buildings had hidden the eclipse of the setting sun against the city’s rim, but now the light emanating
from crystalline tapers set along the street bolstered the dim luminescence of the sky. They were simple objects, old technology: acrylic prisms set in the underlayment as they had been in wooden frigates centuries ago, reflecting sunlight through their length – only these were upside down and half a mile long, though their tips only reached a matter of meters. When the sun dipped farther than the rim, beneath the true horizon, small pins of light sparkled into existence from beneath them, splitting along the length of the crystals and illuminating the pedestrian boulevard.
This was the Second Ring, north-west district: an area referred to as the Museum Arc or Sutherland after the parkway that ran through it. It was well maintained and sparsely tenanted compared to the dense vertical suburbs of the outer rings -- safer, too -- and it was usually dead by closing time. Tonight, Chandrasekhar could hear his destination before he reached it. After a sharp turn, the neo-Palladian façade of the Atlantis Collection’s new eastern wing swept out before him. A billboard of a banner welcomed the loud and well-accoutered patrons who were bubbling out from under the ground in front of the main portico.
As he strode up to the entrance, Chandrasekhar’s brain picked details from a cursory inspection of the scene. Spring '98 Patrons Gala read the banner. Engraved on the lintel of the portico: Siri Anders Wing. He was surprised at the number of youth, dressed in their finest. There was something odd about the building. The wing’s construction looked deceptively traditional, part of the never-ended Italianate revival, if you can call a renovation job part of an architectural revival. Chandrasekhar knew the structure had originally been a Florentine villa in ruinous disrepair, transported to this site and reconstructed in situ. That was it – there were missing elements: columns that should have been there; arched segments that needed mechanical support to stay up; a nearly imperceptible gap of inches surrounding the pediment above the portico. It was a subtle use of gravplate technology.
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