Repetition

by Alan Gallauresi

  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 miles per hour. As the dawn broke, the floating island blotted out the sun on the calm waves of the Chesapeake, on its way to a new destination and a new name.

  ###

  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 technique one of the doctors had taught him for managing pain. It was part of his regimen, along with physical rehabilitation and daily mitylpropicin. The drug had dulled his pain while sublimating his consciousness, pushing him underwater. He had weaned himself off it while hiding the symptoms from the people around him -- not as well as he thought, apparently.

  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.

  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 t
ests 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.

  Chapter 9

  Breakdown | Disambiguation | A Radio Song

  The sound cuts out abruptly. He studies his music device, looking for the cause. The song had just stopped; Wald tries playing the song again. No sound. He skips to the next song, which plays without issue. Several minutes later the sound cuts out again, and Wald resets the device.

  He lets out a breath and squeezes the muscles in his legs tightly, letting them go a moment later. His back is giving him pain now.

  His player lights up. Wald stabs at its screen with fat fingers, frustrated. Everything about the device is sized for flitting tween girls. He queues up the same playlist and hits play. No sound. He checks the headphone jack, checks the tiny membrane in the earphones. He scrolls through settings, finding nothing. He tries to play another song. Success! The song plays to completion, then the playlist stops completely. Maybe it was that song in particular. He pulls it up -- again, no sound -- and tries the next song. Music to his ears. Alright, I can just skip it, he thinks, but continues scrolling through the settings.

  Another song will not play. He grits his teeth. Wald tries to remember the sequence to put the device into diagnostic mode and contorts his fingers to push several buttons at once. After trying several, the device resets and offers a command console.

  Technology is bullshit. Why the duck can't it figure out that I've got big ape-descendant paws and know that I almost always miss the Z and hit SHIFT right after I type the letter A. Or use its front facing camera to read the set of my jaw when I'm typing too fast and learn exactly how I tend to mess things up.

  There's so little ambiguity in our fake futures. You stand on the bridge of the Enterprise and you say Computer and the Computer ducking well knows you were talking to it. You tell your robot dog what to do and it says Yes, master. It doesn't call an ex-girlfriend when you give it a voice command to play music.

  Stephen types in arcane commands then waits while an icon spins on the display, sometimes halting for long pauses, during which it's unclear whether the device has frozen. Captain Kirk didn't have to put up with this. He is reminded of that Twilight Zone episode where a gremlin tears up the wing of the plane William Shatner is on. He looks out the window, seeing the edge of the left wing. Still intact.

  The player is finally done with its diagnostic check. Problems found: none. Device OK. Liar.. lying right to my face. The system boots, and Wald goes through the same tests as before. He queues up the same playlist and hits play. No sound. He skips to the next song. No sound. LIAR! He feels remorse for pushing his luck. Hours left on this flight and now his player isn't working at all.

  He starts over again -- several times. He wishes he could pull back his brain and recognize how unimportant this was. His mind is stuck on this sliver of existence and he can't put it down, the same way he can't put down seat 11A. He makes an effort not to let his frustration boil over.

  Nothing is working right now. He is done; he puts the player screen down on his leg, slowly removing the earphones and wrapping them up. He shimmies the device into his pocket, trying to avoid disturbing the man on his left and the woman on his right. The last time he bumped 17-A, the man had shifted and extended his elbow farther into Wald's own space, and Stephen didn't want a repeat of that.

  He shuts his eyes with a pained expression. This is the thing about William Shatner: he's hard to pin down. He stars in two of the best Twilight Zone episodes, plays the lead in an Esperanto film in lost to obscurity and fire, then overacts his way through three seasons of the most beloved science fiction show of all time. And of course, there was The Transformed Man, his spoken-word album: alternately forgotten, reviled, and celebrated with hipster irony.

  If you can you set aside the laughable image of Shatner smoking on stage while spouting phrases from Rocket Man in tangled runs, there's an interesting concept underneath -- the idea that pop songs have taken the place of poetry in modern society, becoming our shared record of decade they were written in and love poems in one. Lines get pulled from song lyrics of our time, entering the common tongue, and to the younger generation it might as well be a famous quotation or a biblical psalm. It's inherited knowledge, and specifics are only distinguished over time, like discovering that one-third of the Christmas songs you learned as a child are church hymns, another third are German and Old English folk songs, and the last third were created for musicals by a recluse who could only play the piano's black keys.

  Stephen stares straight ahead, wondering how much flight time he has left to endure. Going to have to pull it out just to check the time. He arches his uncomfortable back and pulls the device out of a tight pocket. His legs complain at the treatment.

  He does a time-check, and finds the remaining difference too significant to calculate. He wants to mistake the period -- imagine it to be even greater that it is -- so he will be presently surprised, like a person setting their alarm clock ahead 10 minutes. He presses the power button on the player and the display flashes off.

  Ok. He stares at the blank screen.

  K-9, play me some music.

  Yes, master.

  He turns on the device and tries playing a song, and then another. He flashes the screen a simple, unequivocal gesture.

  Sorry, master.

  ###

  On the subject of disambiguation, here’s some advice for you: if you’re being chased by police K-9 units – run. Do not pause to shout out the Dutch word afslaan, meaning "halt" or "stop". It is a pervasive misconception that attack dogs are trained to recognize command words in a foreign language in order to avert accidental or subversive instructions; in reality, these canine soldiers are trained to accept the words of their master. That those words are often in Dutch, rather than German as most people tend to assume, is a hold-over from their breeding and training. It is the dog’s intelligence and fidelity, traits bred into him over millennia of domestication, which enables it to respond to the correct commands, and consistent repetition of pitch and tone that determine the resultant action.

  Lacking both fidelity and intelligence, a modern computer benefits from consistency and repetition in equal parts.

  An additional point of information: the Dutch word for computer is computer.

  ###

  The ship’s computer woke and remembered the radio signal that had been streaming into its memory for the last 40 picoseconds. The Boots' brain pulled up old, unused routine from its archive and began analysis. The pattern was simple and unexpected -- a single frequency punctuated by stops and starts. The stops came in a row: 1 stop, 2 stops, 3 stops. The ordinal numbers rolled off and hit 16. A more significant pause, and then the pattern repeated.

  The computer had learned to count on its fingers.

  The pattern shifted. Over the same time the first arrangement had taken, the computer could read the same numbers expressed in smaller number of interruptions of two lengths. The computer accepted the binary representation as a matter of course. The signal restated the numbers again. This time, there was no ending pause, and the beginning and ending of the message were both punctuat
ed with a string of numbers. It took half the time to express.

  The pattern repeated then changed again. The sequence skipped several numerals: 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16. The remaining digits repeated. The ship’s computer was sitting idle, waiting for the teacher to speak again -- the course work was elementary.

  The count went long and stopped at 1024. The longer pauses returned breaking up the next pattern in groups of four, reaching out to 4096 numbers. The next round returned to 16, but the digits didn’t match up with the previous ones. The computer had to do its’ first bit of guesswork on the test – it was doing a word problem in hex while learning its ABCs.

  A series of inverted math problems came next. 16 groups of symbols tapped through, representing the answers. The computer did algebraic substitution on each, confirming its guesses about the symbols for numerals and learning both operators and separators. The notation was unusual but predictable.