No response was forthcoming from the Anders camp. As the compliance date neared, life on New Atlantis appeared to change very little to outward appearances. Gravplate shipments proceeded as slowly and consistently as they had before the ultimatum; no changes in policy were announced. Inside the city, inhabitants displayed that mixture of apprehension and strangely jubilant expectation that occurs with a momentous shift in political climate. Few expected any response -- political, military or otherwise -- from their reclusive governor, if he was even still living.
There was fair speculation on this point. It had been a full decade since Anders had ceased to make public appearances, and longer since he had been visibly involved in governance of New Atlantis. The aura of eccentricity and the curtain of limitless money veiled his movements, and the rumor that he was incapacitated with illness or even already dead was persistently bandied about.
On the momentous day of June 29th, the streets of New Atlantis were empty of all but stragglers, like the last few caught out in the early stages of a blizzard. Civilian Enforcement agents had received instructions to stand down; the flight control system that controlled millions of gravcars each day had suspended all flights, grounding travel in and around the city. The populace quietly watched U.S. forces take possession without incident on news streams, or celebrated with abandon at multi-day parties thrown to coincide with the transition. The dreaded air-shield was in-operational by intent or happenstance: revelers looking out their windows saw military armored vehicles flitting undeterred through the topside air, a spectacle of traffic few native Atlanteans had observed before in their city of protected sightlines.
The day after the momentous day of June 29th, life continued. Parties wound down and sobered up. Men and women went to work in other nations in their gravcars. Stricter regulation would come later -- for now, economics dictated continuity. Several babies were born with gratifyingly clear citizenship; a copper skinned girl died from a pulled plug and an inoperable brain tumor. The most unusual circumstance in New Atlantis that day was a report from soldiers tasked with the securing of the gravplate manufacturing center indicating that the factory had no manufacturing capability at all. It was, in effect, nothing more than a warehouse filled with pre-made gravplates and the raw materials of production. Anders, the sick/dying/dead perpetrator of the greatest fraud on Earth had had one last scam up his sleeve.
The day after the momentous day of June 29th, Star City lazily drifted up from its moorings, an encompassing shadow sliding slowly out from under its bulk. The city accelerated vertically using the decades-old grav technology and the even older ion drives that would propel it through space. It is impossible to say what the nearly 4000 people aboard thought as the earth receded and the sky became an aurora of charged particles dancing against the protective dome of their new home. Above was their future; below was the dust they were kicking from their feet. The dust and shadow completely dulled the glint of exposed quartzite flakes in the engraved keystone of the cradling dock.
We gotta get out of this place, read the inscription, if it's the last thing we ever do.
###
The pod chained him down, one cerebral nerve at a time. He was brought low, the idyll of pure thought interrupted by the flesh. He tried to hold fast to the ideas in his head, his mind frantically reviewing them as their details stole away.
Chandrasekhar rose to the surface of a warm pool. A shudder ran through him as his new body registered pain. He twitched in response as the stinging sensation moved in patterns across his limbs. He awoke to darkness; his limbs were still immobile but he had regained consciousness. He experienced a shock when the pain lifted and did not return. He had not felt this unburdened since before his body had been rebuilt the first time.
The medical pod opened and fluid sluiced down to the base, leaving his body momentarily cool like after an alcohol swab. Chandrasekhar lifted his legs easily, planting his feet on the ship's deck without any discomfort. A brand new suit greeted him from a molded bench in front of him. The ship's architecture was half-familiar, half-alien. He realized that the ship was an amalgamation of the Boots and technology from the derelict ship in the replication bay. With a click of his jaw, an image projected itself in the air as he worked his way into the suit. So his implants still worked, could still control this ship. Logs from the medipod scrolled in front of him: nine days of being reborn. He skimmed through it, then raised his hands to bring up a schematic and started as one appeared without him gesturing. He'd better review those medical logs in detail later.
He stared at the schematics for a minute. He couldn't explain how half the systems worked, but he understood their purpose and he had confidence he could repair them if needed. He hoped he'd be able make more sense of them on the way home.
Home. Was he sure that was where he was going? He thought of the spire and the girl, nothing but a memory, and rushed his way to the cockpit. The ship was massive, and he should not have known where he was going, but path lights embedded in the deck throbbed with energy, urging him to his destination. He asked the computer for an audio log on the ship's construction; it took a moment to alert his consciousness that the ship was speaking in a different language. He understand that too, just like he had understood the schematics when he shouldn't have.
He arrived on a wide deck, bare of any furnishings. A curve sliced through the hull, to all appearances emptying directly into space. He considered that he had not put his helmet on in his rush, but the atmosphere was comfortably normal. Through the hull window, Chandrasekhar saw the bright drives of Star City retreating languidly. Anders. He thought of her, alone on that world. They had come a long way, and Chandrasekhar was free -- perhaps Anders was free now too, free of their entwined future and free of her attachment to humanity.
The disc of Star City lingered in the view, as if she was offering him a choice.
The moment Chandrasekhar thought of acting, a chair molded itself out of the floor material behind him. The ship had altered course before he had sat down, obeying his intent without prompting. He marveled at the technology: this was something new coming down the line. This is the opportunity to react.
The bow of the ship had come about. A display showed Star City aft, still floating slowly away, while the computer offered a new course for Chandrasekhar to confirm. He hesitated, trying to lose himself in the impractical sea of stars. There was an enviable permanence to its endlessness.
The display brightened as the ship's running lights came on. Chandrasekhar waited, and saw acknowledgement in the flare of the City's massive ion engines as they increased in intensity before converging to a tiny point in the distance. The stars shown through where the disc had been a moment ago.
He toyed with the ship's movement, feeling intimately in control. He relinquished control to the computer and prepared for the journey. A panel slid from the rear wall, and a glass bottle slid along the floor. The deck under the bottle was forming and reforming, creating the illusion of a sliding platform as the object was propelled forward. Chandrasekhar turned toward the bottle as it came to a measured halt. He examined the label, finding it to be a particularly good vintage of wine. He lifted the bottle, noticing an engraved plate underneath it. Cosmic Wheels, it read.
He hesitated for a moment, not wanting to waste something good, then brought the bottle down with a crash. The liquid and loose shards melted into the floor, leaving the deck featureless. In an instant, he was hurtling homewards.
He smiled, then tried to remember something he had been thinking of in a dream.
Epilogue
The Drake Equation is represented by the formula N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L. The left hand N is the number of civilizations that we could ever hope to add to our friends list, and the right side is a 3rd-grade multiplication problem of manifold guesswork factors. The equation, about as arbitrary and unscientific as formulas get, is the cosmological equivalent of predicting the weather: a shot in the dark. The idea is to have a star
ting point -- the tiniest bit of context to proceed from.
Equations that govern settlement offers from defendants in civil trials have the same illusion of reason. They start with medical bills. Parties may disagree on the magnitude, but, like R* -- the formation rate of stars in our galaxy -- the number has some practical justification. When a victim is maimed, rather than killed outright -- if, say, the person is subject to permanent crippling pain that prevents them from leading a normal life -- the medical costs get projected into the future. Experts may have wildly differing opinions on what those projections mean even when based on evidence, like fp that determines the likelihood a star will have a planet.
But it is emotional damage that is the biggest crapshoot for settlements. How do you evaluate how bad and how many? Bigger is not always better. If an act is widespread enough to affect tens of thousands of people, it becomes impractical to pay them all. Say you buy printer cartridges that lie about how much ink has been used, you might get a $12 rebate check after the lawyers get their cut and the settlement is parceled out; if you work forty years in a coal mine and get Black Lung, you might get nothing. A case like that is statistics coursework -- percentages of the cost of doing business, and the cost of living. We're all dying -- that's nothing new. When a handful of people die in unusual circumstances, that's a human interest story. It forces the defendants to work out work out a suitable calculation, one that adds in the price of buying non-disclosure and represents a definite value which may be accepted before a trial.
This calculation has no relevance for juries, who are as imprecise and unpredictable as the cosmological factor fi, representing the fraction of planets in our universe that could support intelligent life. To defendants, civil case juries are dangerous things; they routinely award obscene amounts of remuneration for injury and loss of life. Think of it from the jurors' point of view. They are marched into a tight jury box and told where to sit. For hours on end, they sit silently in their uncomfortable seats, separated from the persistent distractions of modern technology. The trial divorces them from their daily lives, sometimes sequesters them from everyone they know. They eat when the judge decrees they will eat; they hurry off to the bathroom only when it is deemed appropriate. There's a point to these constraints -- the defendant's right to a fair and speedy trial, at minimal cost to the state, for one -- but also to provide the optimum environment for the jury to concentrate. To completely abstract themselves from their own daily lives and apply their minds to the big picture.
At the end of the proceedings, the jurors are called upon, perhaps for the only time in their lives, to put a story of human pathos on one side of an equation and balance it out with a nice round sum on the other. Sometimes these sums are greatly reduced on appeal. At other times, the awards are set aside by judges who have much greater experience in translating tragedy into fiscal reward. On rare occasions, the amounts are so enormous that they can bankrupt individuals and corporations, even industries.
The airline industry has always been very familiar with bankruptcy; over forty airlines declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy since deregulation heralded the end of the golden age of flight, including over half of the top five carriers in the U.S. What is not very familiar is a large reserve of operating capital. Airlines are long-tail investments. They make huge initial expenditures in fleets, conceivably recouped over time, but subject to manifold guesswork factors: how likely people are to vacation this summer; ongoing maintenance; income from snack packs; cost of laundering blankets; labor agreements; number of hurricanes this fall; accepted levels of price collusion; fuel costs; fuel hedging options; average fatness of a customer; trained pilot availability; terrorist plots, real and imagined; safety, real and imagined. As their fleets age, their positions become untenable, almost as if they or their executives never planned to be around at that far future where man would commute daily to the Moon in spaceships. Struggling for economic viability, they work on thin margins, raking in money and bleeding it out just as fast. Chapter 11 curtails that bleeding, allowing the airlines to continue operating while being forgiven large debts to creditors, debts that if paid out immediately would force the airlines to liquidate. Interestingly, criminal restitutions, such as settlements awarded in cases of civil negligence, are not dischargeable under Chapter 11.
On December 5th, 2011, a jury awarded $304 million dollars to the plaintiffs in a suit against the two airlines involved in a tragic accident on the tarmac of McCarran International. $304 million is a large sum, enough to live out several lifetimes in luxury or bankroll any number of start-ups, especially when awarded to a single person. It is a sum that effectively killed two of the leading air carriers in the U.S., dissolving their structure and permanently grounding their planes. Those planes were too old to be acquired at cut-rate prices as typically happened after an airline liquidated. The most profitable routes were cherry-picked by other carriers while many others were never resumed, resulting in a record number of multi-leg flights shuttled through giant hubs. In the years following, ticket prices increased two-fold due to rising fuel costs and expenses, while the number of domestic daily flights were cut to less than half, making air travel an even more unattractive an option than it had been. The industry limped along in imitation of the heady early days of manned flight -- when air travel was a curiosity, not the expected -- waiting for a change that would herald the silver age of flight.
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