What happened at this point is a matter of controversy. Patients reported that they became unaware of their bodies while their minds became fixated on the ideas they were imagining; at the same time, they were suddenly aware of details and permutations that made the original idea seem childishly simple to accomplish. Their minds would flit from one idea to another while maintaining hold on the original suggestion. When the session ended, they confirmed, almost universally, that they were able to accomplish their behaviors -- for example, refraining from smoking -- with greater focus and ease. They were unable to recall the particulars of any other ideas, however.
A few, less satisfied, patients were suspicious of the role of the medipods in the process. According to the Glassers, the pod was only used to induce a controlled, restful state, similar to a sensory deprivation pod. Yet, almost all of the patients indicated moments of unexpected elation, like that of taking drugs. The rather outlandish idea that the Glassers were administering something like cocaine via the medipod turned out to be a leading theory during the subsequent investigation by the state medical board. The fact that medical effects of the cocaine didn't quite match up with the experiences of the patients made the investigators look at alternate explanations. One suggested that the medical pod actually performed a form of brain surgery, fusing the circuits of the behavior pathways -- creating a permanent connection between the idea and the dopamine transmitters than anticipated the result. This allowed the patient to maintain an idea in their prefrontal cortex, indefinitely and at-will.
The medical investigation stalled, but the paperwork turned up more practical considerations: Ellen Glasser's California medical license had lapsed, and Ted Glasser was not a doctor at all but a psychologist with a graduate degree from a foreign university of suspect reputability. The Glassers shut the clinic down before further inquiry took place, returning to Indiana where Ellen Glasser still retained a valid medical license.
She was heard from again, several years later, when she and three area hospitals were required to pay $24.2 million dollars to the United States in settlement of a kick-back scheme the government believed the parties were involved in. Allegedly, Glasser had contracted with the hospitals to sell them Matsushita brand medipods at a discounted cost, and as part of the terms offered a retroactive rebate on any previous pods sold by Matsushita. The total rebate summed several million dollars and was alleged by the government to be an illegal inducement offered in order to secure the hospitals' business -- a matter of subjective interpretation, considering defense argued it should not be a crime to afford hospitals with the latest medical technology at a discount without expectation of quid pro quo. The government considered monetary remuneration sufficient to resolve the allegations, allowing Dr. Glasser to continue practicing general medicine until she retired alongside her husband, who had left the community after writing two obscure books on the Glasser Technique. The books made no mention of medipod technology, concentrating solely on the use of psychological methods for self-improvement.
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His body was failing him for a second time. In the delirium of pain and hyperoxia he was suffering, he recognized his organs were dying -- his lungs shattered, welling with blood. The pain had him shell-shocked: he had been most acutely aware of an uncomfortable bumping along his back without realizing he was being dragged; now he was only grateful it had stopped. He was lying in the most comfortable bed he could imagine. His limbs were tingling from the warm liquid surrounding them. A curved wall of white aluminum slid in front of his eyes and Chandrasekhar fell into unconsciousness.
The medical pod rejected large swathes of his flesh, cutting them out with the practiced, uncaring precision of a butcher. His shot lungs were the first to go; the pod sustained him mechanically while replacement organs grew in the medipod's base. The pod triaged the remaining problems: damaged nerves; blood loss; elevated oxygen; broken bones. Chandrasekhar had been right -- his body had failed. Unsalvageable. The pod made a quick decision and killed him, slicing away his brain stem.
Chandrasekhar was free; his mind roved among the stars. He conjured a million ideas, remembered a million things he had forgotten.
He thought of a girl he had known in grade school. She had had a piggy nose, and blondish hair that smelled like artificial cherries. If he had thought of her in the past, he would have wondered if she had really existed, or whether his mind had just filled in the blanks, but now he knew she was real.
He remembered his last moments of consciousness: Siri dragging him up the ship's ramp. The interior of the ship was half-familiar, half-alien -- an amalgamation of the Boots and the ship in the underside dock. No -- not the dock, the repper, an enormous replicator on a scale that was difficult to believe; a scale large enough to construct ships. His mind could work out the new ship's capabilities from a glimpse of a schematic display they had passed on the way to the pod. The ship had not been constructed all at once; pieces had been retrofitted from the Boots of Steel's engine technology. His brain surmised the materia reserves on Star City had lacked the flexible metal elements required for the ship's composite technology, likely osmium and iridium alloys. He realized this was not a copy of the ship he had seen in the bay, but the ship itself, completed from the materia banks of the Boots itself.
He thought of the spire and the girl, and it was nothing more than a memory; as strangely unfamiliar as a path you had spent months walking over after years of absence.
He imagined an object in six dimensions. It worked simply, like a child's toy. He saw the object projected in front of him in three dimensions, the edges overlapping like waves. It was just a reflection, a slice. Nothing like the true object at all -- like a cross-section of the human body sandwiched in perspex. He broke the projection open in his hands; liquid spilled out. He tried to fix it, to put it back together just as before, but the true object turned and twisted. He could not repair the reflection, so he reinvented a way to create it again. Suddenly the search for the replicator was obviated, nothing more than a triviality.
His mind ran through a dozen scenarios, each unconnected by purpose or obvious meaning.
He remembered dying the first time; remembered thinking of spinning discs hurtling through space. He recalled how natural, how obvious it seemed, and how desperately he had hid it from the evaluators who had pried him with questions.
Amidst his dreaming, he conceived of a grand idea, an idea which could not be debased.
Chapter 17
Statistics | We Gotta | Cosmic Wheels
The probability of a plane crashing on landing is an extremely small and highly predictable number. These days, the last few moments of a plane's descent happen so suddenly that even the most frightened air traveler hardly has time to fret. That quick descent technique was invented decades ago and took years to put into commercial practice due to safety concerns over traffic management, concerns which were presumably worked out eventually. Bottom line: it saves a lot of fuel.
At altitude all the passengers see is an abstraction: a modern art painting of green and brown checkerboard, pitch-black studded with fireflies. As the craft descends, there's a short phase of recognition as football fields and cars become discrete entities. Then, a quick rip of the band-aid and you're on the ground, safe and sound. All the same, a passenger can be forgiven for feeling nervous about the chance of crashing. Those statistics are magnanimously inclusive, and not meant to be selfishly applied.
The passengers on Flight 1645 from Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport in Hanover, MD to McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, NV, barely see a thing. Not the fly-by advertisement it used to be, notes Stephen Wald as the man in the window seat ahead, 16-A, cranes his neck in search of incandescent monuments. Next to Wald, 17-A and 17-C sleep with an enviable peace. Stephen gazes into the dark as the runway lights level-off to parallel. The plane's wheels bump the ground firmly and the cabin begins to whine with pressure. People awake and lift their heads. Five seco
nds later, the pressure is gone as if it had never been there in the first place.
Ladies and gentlemen...
The physical and mental compartmentalization holding Wald together for the past 6 hours and 23 minutes collapses. His legs are cramped and hurting. He needs to relieve his bladder as soon as possible. Sequences of numbers fill his head now that he isn't sublimating the impulse. 4, 7, 14, 20. 7, 12, 18, 6, 12, 19. He wants to flee to the comfortable hotel room, get to the table. Down on the floor he could breathe deeply, really breathe like nowhere else.
... please remain seated with your seat belts fastened...
There is an impending rustle of action in the plane. Wald hears the commandment but doesn't obey. He slips the clasp of the belt off quietly so it doesn't make a click and rubs his thighs with his hands. He wants out, now. The jet is approaching the terminal quickly. We won't have to wait for a gate.
14, 13, 14, 10, 14.
... cell phones but all other...
The probability of winning money at a blackjack table over the long run is an extremely small and highly predictable number. A card-counting technique can temporarily place the advantage with the practiced player. It takes a certain mentality, quick with numbers, neurotic over details. Still, the advantage is small, and it's only a matter of time before the casinos will catch on and kick you out. Making large sums over a extended period requires elaborate scams -- multiple people, multiple tables, multiple splits. For a single gambler, there's a short window. The variability over the short term means more fluctuations. A compressed chance to win big, and a nearly equal chance to lose big. That's why they call it gambling.
15, 20, 22, 27. Wald bends down to grab his carry-on, arms out, chest on thighs. Nearly perfect crash position. Inside lies his wallet, and the cashier's check for $30,000. Free money, he thinks. Free capital at least. $30,000 -- the bonus they had offered him to come back to his dead-end job as a consultant when he'd quit five days ago, the day he'd planned on quitting months in advance. $30,000 -- the unemployment hardship withdrawal he could pay back within 30 days without interest, according to the contract with the mortgage equity lender. He didn't need 30 days - a weekend would suffice. Come Monday he might be back in that familiar 9 to 6:30. I hope it don't kill you, said the poet. Wald had long two days to flip a coin between the seemingly inevitable and a sublime potentiality.
17-A is awake and reaching for the magazine he’d dumped into his seat pocket. Wald’s carry-on has its shoulder strap is caught on the low seat ahead. He bends lower, struggling with it. Figures! he thinks with a kind of joy, now that the present of this flight had become the insignificant past. A shadow passes by the window.
The right prop of a grounded and off-course deVilliers Echo EHC-8-401 (2x2 seat configuration, maximum capacity: 68 passengers) slices through the fuselage, immediately aft of the 12th cabin window. The rotor’s immense power drives the blades into the plane several dozen times a second, causing a localized but devastating carnage. A blade nicks passenger 17-A, a young, energetic American man of Malaysian descent, in the back of the neck. The angular rotation results in a clean cut to 17-A’s cerebral stem: he is brain-dead instantly. The prop pushes forward, catching and disintegrating the top of seats along the way. It reaches 17-C, a middle-aged woman versed in music and art, with a harelip and small thighs. She has her back turned to the window as she prepares to get up into the aisle; the prop deforms her body into clay as it spins slower and slower, its power cut. The shadow outside slows, gently, and then lies still.
Passenger 17-B also lies still. It takes him many moments to realize he can sense no pain, that he is physically unscathed, that the blood on him is not his own. He doesn’t believe it. His mind is beyond numb – simple movements don’t register. He has no idea how long he has been crouched over on himself, inert, lifeless. No reaction comes; no wave of emotion overwhelms him. He is blank.
It’s an emptiness that lasts long after the screams have been replaced with sirens and the cabin is nearly empty -- as the medics take her poor twisted mass away on a stretcher, as they pull Wald out to get at the man on his left, and as they pepper him with questions. They insist on carrying him out on a stretcher, despite Wald’s protests that he wants to stretch his legs. Just next to the oversized exit where the emergency door should be, laying on a metal struts and a narrow, padded mattress, Wald feels the air of the clear desert night. He breaks down and begins to sob, filled with an eternal and unreasoning gratitude toward the unknown passenger in 11B who may or may not have been the one to open the door.
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The ultimate application of a miraculous variably induced gravity device is a spaceship the size of a city. The effort required to support a habitable ecosystem is obscene: untold billions of gallons of water; millions of tons of topsoil; perfect control of atmosphere; impermeable protection from debris and radiation; phenomenally efficient and powerful engines; most importantly, a living purpose for its occupants. The idea is not much more than a fairytale.
Another fairytale: in the middle of Death Valley, one of the most sapping and brutal environments on this great Earth, there is a narrow cleft between the ragged hills. Surrounded by nothing but blanketing heat, the unnamed site remains inaccessible to all but the most devoted hikers. When the rain falls with rare abandon -- as it did in the record setting year of 2004 and again in 2063 – the caked soil dries back into dust almost immediately. Weeks later, a carpet of achingly beautiful flora blooms, covering the clearing in dazzling color. Rusting oranges and reds mix with burning yellows and fuchsia; the green undertones push through with an otherworldly vibrancy. In 2004, few people saw this sight in anything but pictures. In 2063, a short trip by gravity car allowed tourists to flock in by the tens of thousands; they spent a few minutes oohing on and picking the trodden flowers for their loved ones before the torrid air forced them to return to the conditioned comfort of their vehicles. Later that year, the forest service declared the valley a protected preserve and cut off tourist access permanently.
In 2087, the Star City dry-dock loomed over roughly 120 square miles of scrub on the nowhere border of California and Nevada -- 60 miles from the fairytale valley and 70 miles from the ghost city of Las Vegas, where crystal towers also grew out of the desert sand. The government had leased the land to Anders and VIG in friendlier times, when the idea of a sister city to New Atlantis permanently floating off the coast due southwest of the Santa Monica pier appealed to American interests. Now, nearly a decade since construction had begun and still several years from planned completion, the project was more than an embarrassment to the government. It was something to be feared.
We’re frightened in cycles; we forget our fears and find them again elsewhere. That applies to the grandest of terrors in the arsenal of man and nature: hurricanes; terrorism; cheap ballistic missiles; global warming; deregulation; the gays; overpopulation; any other religion; enjoyment of sex leading to gonorrhea; wildfires; chemical weapons that work as well as people expect them to; the corruption of power; nuclear war. In 1963 -- the year the Kingsmen proved rock and roll was best when you took someone else's material and made the lines so unintelligible that they were taken out of context and repeated until they became an anthem – nuclear war was an extremely popular fear, one that lead to the signing and ratification of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in the fall of that year. The initiative may have provided some comfort for those worried by the prospect of weapons so devastating that humanity might kill itself off. This particular brand of Armageddon later fell out of style; today few people plan to die in a nuclear holocaust, preferring other methods instead.
Historians often credit the decline of the nuclear threat on the unraveling of the Cold War; a combination of reluctance to use atomic weaponry as evidenced by (largely token) restrictions on the arm race such as the PTBT; and the lack of an effective defense as propounded by the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction. It is the last principle that equated defense with aggression which underscore
s the government’s shift in policy toward New Atlantis in the spring of 2087. On May 4th, the government, in conjunction with the Security Council, presented a list of complaints to D. Anders, private citizen of “the United States Protectorate of New Atlantis”. The list included:
1. Aggressive implementation of gravitational air-shield technology
2. Human rights violations in the form of suborning illegal immigration and inadequate work conditions
3. Illegal monopolies of essential materials (a reference to sole control of gravplate manufacturing and steadily declining shipments of them)
4. Tax evasion and money laundering through shell organizations (several listed, including the VIG parent corporation, Global Tourist Insurer (LLC), Matsushita Medical and the New Society of Artists Foundation)
The complaint ended with a eight week deadline and a series of conditions for compliance: relinquishing control of VIG assets, including the gravplate manufacturing center and dismantling of the air-shield surrounding the hemisphere of New Atlantis.
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