Repetition

by Alan Gallauresi

  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 needs met, do we still not want? Where is the absoluteness of joy without the pole of hate and loathing by which to measure it? This is a Heaven without men, surely, and for men there is no Heaven. Carsten disputed the existence of Paradise while promising its coming, drawing on Genesis: Paradise is the tree of God's seed -- the moment of God's action -- which has not yet come to fruition. Paradise will be the moment when the unfortunate collusion of circumstances becomes bright with the predestination of the first possibility.

  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; music playlist generators; optimal traffic pattern solutions; optimal Go solutions; meteorological predictors; power station regulators; statistics packages; language interpreters. They were a subset of human ingenuity, distributed plugins with a standardized interface for relatively dumb clients to use and forget on the fly. They were as diverse as human need, and worked as well as humans designed them to.

  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.

  Chapter 8

  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!

  He casts a glance over the seats in front of him, staring at a sliver of 17-D's profile. Her left hand is busy straightening the pleat of her skirt. Wald catches a glimpse of purple on her ring finger. Too far away to be sure, but Wald thinks it must be multiple amethyst stones -- definitely not a solitaire. Possible that it could be a vintage piece, but more likely it was just a decoy.

  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.

  Here is one argument: cities are grown, not built. The great metropolises of ancient and modern day were not deliberate or rationalized; they existed as confluences of human requirement. Settlements near rivers had fresh drinking water and nutrient flooded fields, not to mention mercantile influence. A town situated on a hill commanded the countryside, atop desert tablelands or inside a star fort nestled amongst intruding forest. “Planned” cities, from Brasilia to Fordlandia were not living entities, they were monuments of hubris. But hubris doesn’t deny success: Fordlandia is buried in acres of jungle, while Brasilia is the fourth most populous city in Brasil, and by all accounts a lovely place to visit.

  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 only to Nevada -- they are yours. When VIG came looking for them armed with ultra-masers and gravplates, they found them in rectangular fields of stone: sliced platters of raw earth, meters-thick and hundreds of meters wide, floating freely and moveable with an infant's strength. When the shadows of the great monoliths fell over fields as they worked their way to the Atlantic, even VIG's money could not prevent the legal battles to come. Did the minerals need to be extracted on site to be licensed in Wyoming? Was the state of Maryland entitled to taxes on the products of the quarrying? Even as the plates slid into place along the underside of the factory, people decried the raping of the landscape, or worried about rock plates falling from the sky onto their roofs. Not in my sunshine.

  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 ca
me 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.