~
It was one of those mornings.
A cool breeze was blowing in off the ocean, and wisps of clouds dotted the crimson sky. Charles couldn’t yet bear the thought of going into office and finding out which sub-atomic particles had folded kataward rather than anaward, or vice versa, the bevy of communiques that would be waiting in his inbox, the myriad tasks he needed to ask and learn about, to make sure that the research was proceeding toward its goal and that no one on the business side would be concerned about delivery dates or costs. Not just yet.
He turned right at Hill Street instead of left, striding uphill instead of down. The streets of Redwing were busy at this time of the morning, people commuting from home to work, buses and trams shooting down the streets on either side, the skyscrapers towering over him. Lining the roads lay the pots of soil, where, just a few decades prior, modified organisms had been planted and nourished, only to all die early and sickening deaths. They’d mulched and burned the plants, but kept the pots of soil, as though holding on to the idea that they would one day become useful again.
Charles climbed further, two blocks more, across busy intersections, car horns screeching and trams passing with a hum, suspended over antigrav rails.
At last, Redwing Spire came into view, an enormous structure towering a full ninety stories. Two circuitous paths interlocked to form its outer frame, one running in a spiral upward, the other downward. At the top lay a large balcony with tables and a café, the perfect spot for looking out over the ocean.
Charles strode up the spire, moving faster now, as though arriving at the lookout sooner would stave off the encroaching needs of his workplace. It was not that he was bad at his job, far from it. It was that he knew the effort to be futile. So they had gone deeper than the subatomic and found the quantum folding properties in sub-atomic particles. So what? They’d spent the last two centuries documenting the myriad ways in which those particles folded across six-dimensions of spacetime, and still no end was in sight. Despite all that, the work continued. Society demanded that they know, that the catalogue be complete.
Charles reached the very top of the spire, strode over to the railing at the edge of the balcony, and gazed out at the ocean. He loved watching the water, the way its surface shimmered, especially in the morning sunlight. It seemed to him a more elegant form of what the evolvers were doing to the land, raising hills, flattening them, digging ditches, changing the course of rivers.
It had occurred to the leftists to attack the vestigs indirectly—cut off the flow of the Asym or Enim rivers, whose sources lay in Pinnacle territory; or, compromise the foundations of their walls, especially at weak points like the Asym mountain pass or the marshier parts of the Bekel plains. But there was always that pervasive fear. What would the vestigs from the parallel universe do in retaliation?
So much fear. So much useless, stupid fear. It would take so little effort to just reach out and say something, a simple message. But no. Too politically inconvenient for either side to actually do something, to take a risk of any meager magnitude. And so they did nothing. Charles supposed he might be less annoyed if they were indeed busy with so many important internal issues, but observing his own behemoth of a workplace didn’t inspire much confidence. The six-dimensional folding processes of sub-atomic particles had grown so complex that no single human, even with centuries of technological enhancements to their brain, could comprehend the concept in its entirety. The previous generation had been so convinced they’d discovered deep and glorious, the ‘end of physical science.’ Lying bare before Charles was the honest truth of the endless monotony of sub-sub-atomic particles and their folding properties. What was the point of it all?
Charles took a deep breath and reminded himself that the Tromm Ocean was beautiful, its elegance simple. Waves cresting, flattening, over and over, across an enormous space. Constantly changing itself, yet seemingly perpetual, self-sustaining.
A ping in Charles’s mind broke his reverie. He opened the message with a tinge of annoyance. A question from work, already arriving in his inbox, even though it wasn’t yet even nine.
Fine. Fine. He’d go in to work, then. At least, since he was here, he could get a voltage. That would take the edge off the morning at least. And the queue at the café was short. Charles strode over and got in line, looking over all the delectables on display—semiconductor biscuits, direct-alternate-twists, even one of his favorites, acid pies. Not for him, though. He’d been carefree with his diet in his twenties, but the ones who let themselves gorge usually ended up overcharging their brains and burning out their silicon-based organs. Repair was costly and Charles was far from spendthrift. He had decided that life path was not for him.
“One voltage?” The cashier asked. “Alternating current, light on the acid, right?”
Charles smirked. “You got it.” He’d been coming here for a morning break perhaps too much. He could change careers, he thought just then, but that would only prolong his servitude to this system. He ordered himself to stop thinking about work, at least for now.
“That’ll be 3.278 kilobytes,” the cashier said, transmitting a payment authorization form.
Charles signed the form and transmitted it back.
“Thanks,” the cashier said with a smile.
“Thank you,” Charles said, and walked around the side of the counter where a barista worked a large, humming, hissing and occasionally shuddering machine dotted with sockets.
“Order up,” the barista announced. “One double-ohm, open circuit.”
“How’s it going?” Charles asked the barista. He realized, as he said it, it was a selfish act. Anything to distract himself from work. A deeper resolve lay beneath it, though. He didn’t want to be like some of the people he worked with, the ones who tended to treat anyone not employed in physics, chemistry, or math as a lesser species.
“Good, man. How about yourself?”
“Well. Looking forward to the weekend, I suppose.”
The barista pulled out a plug above what Charles presumed to be his voltage, and the machine sputtered to life, hissing. “Just a few more days, huh? What have you got planned?”
One impulse within Charles wanted to give one of the canned answers: nothing much, just taking it easy, or something equally innocuous. But not today. This was another person in front of him.
“I was thinking of scanning some old books. Perhaps The Politics.”
Charles watched for signs of being taken aback, of perhaps the barista feeling intimidated by the idea of scanning rather than simply downloading books, or the idea of being interested in a three-thousand-year-old work like The Politics, written when humanity was ‘less evolved.’ Instead, the barista grinned. “Nice. That’ll make a good scan. Have you scanned Rema and Xelas, too?”
“Most of Rema and a bit of Xelas.”
“My favorite Xelas is Banquet. And there are also Porfini’s interpretations of Xelas. His Debates are particularly good.”
“I’ve scanned most of Porfini, but not Debates. I’ll check those out. Have you seen his treatise on justice? He tore a dialogue of Xelas’s apart.”
“No, I haven’t gotten to that one. I’ll check it out. What was it called?”
“I’ll have to look it up. I think it might just be Treatise on Justice.”
“Here you go.” The barista handed Charles his voltage over the charging apparatus.
“Thanks.”
“No prob. Have fun scanning.”
“I will.”
Charles plugged the voltage into his arm and felt the rush of electricity into his system. He descended Redwing Spire with a smile, a spring in his step, perhaps because of the voltage, or perhaps because he’d had an interesting conversation for the first time in he couldn’t remember how long, brief though it had been.
Now, finally, he felt ready to start his busy day.
~
Sahaan opened the door to Charles’s chamber to find that he had returned to the table, s
itting with his feet propped up and arms crossed.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Sahaan called down as he made his way carefully down the stairs.
Charles shook his head. “Memories are coming faster now. Lots of stuff about Charles’s… the other Charles’s life.”
“Oh?”
Charles smirked. “Mostly innocuous stuff. He’s a physicist in Redwing. That’s the Pinnacle’s capital. It’s on a continent west of here, across the Tromm Ocean. There’s this café I like— he likes at the top of Redwing Spire. It’s connected somehow to me coming here.”
“A café?” Sahaan sat down.
“I know. It’s weird.” Charles pulled his feet down. “I’ll bet it’s rude to put your feet on the table, huh?”
“Don’t worry,” Sahaan chuckled. “I’m not offended.”
“It’s rude for us— them, too.” Charles scowled. “This is confusing, Sahaan. I liked it better when I thought I was the only Charles.”
“You’re the only you.”
He was still scowling. “He knew I would feel this way, you know.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like a puppet. Created for someone else’s benefit.”
“I consider you a human being. And I will make sure you are treated accordingly.”
“I appreciate that.”
A long silence. Sahaan knew what he had to do next. He had walked through the conversation in his mind all the way down the stairs and through the long dark corridors of this ancient military bunker, remnant of an ancient and ridiculous rivalry about what humanity should be. That more than anything else had convinced him to pursue the course he had chosen.
Charles now stared over Sahaan’s shoulder, apparently lost in thought.
“Charles?”
“Yes?”
“I have something I want your help with.”
“What is it?”
“A proposal that I’m going to make to the president. It’s about a treaty I’d like us to extend to the Pinnacle. The terms are that we would promise not to expand the wall system for a decade, and in return, they will provide us a way to turn the ninety-seven people inside the Portal City quarantine zone back to their original forms. I also want it to outline a framework for the eventual establishment of a full diplomatic relationship, from regular communication channels all the way to embassies, if we can take it that far.”
Charles smiled widely and chuckled.
“What is it?”
“Just a memory. Charles wasn’t entirely certain what I would find here. He hoped for something just like what you described, though. I’ll do what I can to help.”
“Thank you, Charles.” And now the hard part. Dread was already tormenting Sahaan, deep in his gut, making him queasy, but he tamped it down. It had to be done. “Now, before I ask for any more of your help on this matter, there’s something I have to tell you.”
“Oh?”
“I haven’t lied to you. Not this whole time we talked here, or even before the train. But I have left something out. Treaties are built on trust, Charles. I couldn’t go on doing my job if I’d felt I’d misrepresented my side at the very beginning of a treaty’s creation. And so, what I have to tell you is this. My full name is Sahaan Ekeer. But my grandfather married a woman named Vibha, whose maiden name was Thiksay. I am Stok Thiksay’s great-great-grandson.”
Charles blinked, his smile had faded, but he had not taken on a frown either. His eyes remained locked with Sahaan’s, impassive.
“Charles?”
Charles spoke quietly. “This is… quite some news.”
“I can imagine that the opinion of Stok Thiksay in the Pinnacle is quite poor.”
“It is the one thing that all political groups have in common.”
“Do you want some time alone?”
Charles paused, looking at the corner of the room impassively for some time, then slowly shook his head up and down.
“I understand.”
Sahaan stood, and with his cane clanking against the metal floor panels, made his way slowly up the stairs and out the door of Charles’s chamber.
~
Charles surged up the spiral ramp of Redwing Spire, not a run or a jog, but the briskest of walks. When he arrived at the balcony café, he joined the queue straight away. While waiting in line, he pondered over what he’d read over the weekend. Porfini’s Debates had certainly been intriguing. Was a person entitled to personal autonomy, or did they owe something to the community that had allowed them to thrive? What did a proper education consist of? Were mental and physical activity both equally important? Intriguing questions.
“Hi, Adam,” Charles said to the cashier.
“Hey, how’s your morning going?” With this he sent over the payment authorization for Charles’s usual.
Charles validated the authorization. “Good. I’m excited. My band’s playing later this week. It’s our first time getting a gig downtown.”
“That’s great to hear. Good luck. Or is it, ‘break a leg?’”
Adam laughed. “Either’s fine. Thanks!”
Charles moved around across from the charger where Brad stood preparing a triple-watt shock.
“I finished Debates,” Charles announced.
“Oh yeah? What’d you think?”
“Great stuff. Especially gets you thinking about the education system we’ve set up. We decided that we could offload physical maintenance to machines, but we just created all these other problems for ourselves. Overenergize yourself and bad things happen. And the expansion of memory hasn’t helped us, either. It just allowed us to discover that the complexity of the material universe is that much more infinite.”
“And we came up with all of that when making yourself better just meant exercise and reading.” Brad held up one of his hands and turned it around in the air. “Makes you wonder, right?”
“If all this is really worth it.”
Brad nodded. “Have you ever heard of Broderick Wayland?”
Charles shook his head.
“He’s a writer in Eveling. Writes books that are intended to be scanned instead of downloaded. Do a search.”
Charles searched.
“You’ll have to page a bit,” Brad added. “He doesn’t usually make the first result set.”
After scrolling through random entries for public record entries for Broderick Waylands on various continents, Charles finally happened on a network pub-portal for a Broderick Wayland in Eveling. A bit more searching, and Charles found Broderick’s book, available for free: Going Nowhere as Fast as Possible.
“Interesting title,” Charles observed.
“I think you might like it.”
“Thanks!”
“By the way, I finished Treatise on Justice.”
“And?”
“Makes you wonder whether or not we’ve over-complicated our legal system, huh?”
“Well, there is that, but I think you could also make the argument that we had to scale up the complexity when we made ourselves more complex. We over-complicated ourselves first.” Charles glanced just then at the café queue, which had grown to a full eight people. “Well, I’d better head off to work. Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll let you know what I think of Wayland. Sounds like a good one.”
“See ya, Charles.”
Charles plugged the voltage into his arm port and began down the Spire. A contemporary author concerned about the effects of induced evolution? Who’d have thought that possible? But it would have to wait until the weekend. Before him lay five long days of guiding a team in the collection of data about sub-atomic particle behavior. He released a sigh. Talk about going nowhere fast.
An idea struck him—he recalled the discovery he’d made that he dared not share with anyone. But it was out of the question. Just thinking about it was dangerous, especially in an open-web area like downtown Redwing. He pushed the thoughts aside and turned to his work calendar. Yes, it would be a busy week indeed.
~
&
nbsp; Back on the surface, Sahaan set his handheld to block all incoming calls but left his data connection active. The web had exploded with activity.
The first major theme he noticed amongst the posts were scenes in Portal City, mostly of vacant intersections and looted storefronts. Video footage of the containment facility was also popular. The nanite barrier surrounding it shimmered. That shimmer was the effect of nanite warfare, the Reclamation’s defenders versus the Pinnacle’s evolvers. So long as the Reclamation’s nanites remained numerous enough to hold off their opponents, they would be fine—so long as the power held, so long as the Pinnacle nanites didn’t receive a software update that would allow them to break the stalemate…
The second major theme was of people in other cities hoarding food and constructing nanite-resistant shelters of their own design. Sahaan shook his head. Those would do little good in the case of a full-on breach.
News reports varied depending on the political affiliation of the station doing the broadcasting.
Guardian networks had all but announced the apocalypse. They now had incontrovertible proof of the existence of nanite-bodied who desired to breach the Reclamation’s walls (never mind Catherine’s description of all the other groups), and the dangerous Reconciliation government had allowed one visitor to explode into nanites and were making no motions to extradite the other one. In fact, Senior Consul Sahaan Ekeer was still talking to the visitor, for whatever good that would do!
Reconciliation networks had taken Catherine’s message as a clear indication that they had been right all along (never mind Catherine’s description of the dangerous, radical parties still bent on the Reclamation’s destruction). These stations were all but ignoring the situation in Portal City, and what little coverage they did give was to insinuate that those fleeing were behaving irrationally. Senior Consul Sahaan Ekeer’s discussions with the visitor were the indicators of a rational government taking the proper steps to ensure a diplomatic solution to their problems.
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