Upon Stilted Cities - The Winds of Change

by Michael Kilman

  “Ah... well... yes, I must have set my alcove timer for too long. Please ring ahead and let him know I am headed there now.”

  “Very well, Ma’am, is there anything I can get you?”

  “Not now.” Tera turned left to walk toward the chambers but then stopped just as suddenly as she had started. “There is perhaps one thing, Vala.”

  Vala looked up toward her employer. Her eyes were almost silver, her hair dark and shiny, she couldn’t be older than thirty, and Tera felt something stir in her that wasn’t quite lust. It was a warm feeling, a quiet feeling, one that she had known only once before when she as barely an adult.

  “Vala, would you kindly take this poster down, and if any more go up in this area, make sure these wretched things are removed, they distort the Chi of the room, you know. I work very hard to make sure that my quarters and the surrounding area have a certain Feng Shui to them, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes Senator, I will take care of it right away. One thing though, Ma’am?”

  “Yes?” Tera’s head still felt funny and in many ways, she sounded, at least in her own mind, like she was talking through a funnel.

  “Well, it’s just that, well that poster wasn’t up when I sat down at my desk thirty minutes ago. In fact, I don’t think it was up five minutes ago, and no one came in here to put it up or else I would have seen them. It was bizarre, as if it went up the moment your chamber door opened.

  This was not something that Tera wanted to hear. In fact, this news made the poster all the more terrifying. She felt drawn to look into it again, to return to that complete and utter madness. There was something lovely about the madness, and that, more than anything, terrified her. It took every ounce of her strength to keep her eyes from locking on the poster a second time.

  “Silly girl, you must simply not have noticed it. Just take it down. Neither you nor I need any reminder to “Do Our Part,” do we?”

  “Yes Ma'am, but I was sure that...”

  “Just do as you're told.” Her voice was quick and sharp. Tera felt a sliver of anger rising in her. That poster needed to be out of her sight forever.

  Tera turned to walk toward the series of sky bridges that led to Senate chambers. In her periphery, she could see Vala standing and walking to the poster to take it down. She heard the poster rip a little as she exited the hall and a wave of relief came over her. She hoped that Vala would destroy the thing. It would be too soon when she saw one of those awful posters again, far too soon. Maybe she would even motion to have them all taken down and destroyed, even in the Lowers.

  4.

  Vala reached up and tore the poster from the wall. The tearing sound it made pierced her, not unlike the sound of a wounded animal made. She shivered.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Senator vanish behind the doors that led to the main corridor. She didn’t understand what was so upsetting about the poster; she could see the terror in the Senator's eyes and the surface of her mind. She couldn’t understand the fragments of thought that Tera’s mind had produced. It was all jumbled. She had never encountered such a messy mind before.

  It had been two months since Noatla had assigned her to watch over Reevas. A potential sister, Reevas was unstable at the best of times. Vala had told her sisters repeatedly that Reevas couldn’t possibly take the place of Shandie, one of the sisters lost in the incident with the Recycled Runners. But, Noatla had insisted that Vala stick around. Why wasn’t Mimi saddled with this duty? Dealing with predators was her thing, wasn’t it?

  Vala was growing tired of dealing with the Senator’s advances, and soon enough she wouldn’t be able to turn them away with a suggestion. That woman had an iron will. Every single time she redirected her thoughts with a suggestion, some poor man or woman ended up in her bed. Guilt mixed with exhaustion were eating away at her spirits, but Noatla had promised that she wouldn’t have to stick around much longer.

  She looked down in her hands at the poster again. She didn’t think anything could spook this woman. She was the very definition of a wolf in silk clothing. Even with all the strange noises and shouting that came out of her chambers that Vala expected, most of which she knew originated from the Senator’s infamous appetite for sex, she had never seen her so fearful of anything. She looked at the picture torn in half and the needless slogan, “You Must Do Your Part,” and laughed. After so many centuries, who suddenly thought it was useful to put something like this up?

  Vala turned back toward her desk and went to deposit the poster in the trash, but quickly she realized she had nothing in her hands at all. It was as if, despite ripping down the poster, she had done nothing but pantomimed the entire action.

  “What the hell?”

  She turned back to where the poster had been on the wall, and nothing but black-painted brick remained. She looked around the entry chamber. It wasn’t a big room, so there weren’t exactly many places to hide. Was someone altering her perception? She closed her eyes and did an internal check, no tinge of red, no sign of memory loss, nothing. What had just happened?

  Vala thought about how the poster had not been up when she sat down at her desk, just as she had told Tera. Something slithered up her spine. What was going on? But Vala, a practical girl, simply sat down and reached for the vidphone to alert the Senate that her mistress was on her way.

  Perhaps it was something she should make the Order aware of? Perhaps her sisters would find this interesting? A wave of calm passed over her. She shrugged off the whole thing and decided it was probably best not to tell Senator Reevas about the poster or Noatla. After all, the only thing she would gain was a longer assignment watching over Reevas.

  Chapter 6

  The Last Architect

  Dr. Rigel Solidsworth fumbled the microchip. It bounced from the grip of his personally handcrafted micro forceps and fell flat on the floor with a barely audible plop. The object, weighing next to nothing, had floated to the ground, yet the gravity of the situation was as dense as a neutron star.

  His clean suit buttoned tight left only a few scraps of blond hair poking out from under his hood. His long, pointed nose twitched, and his thin blonde eyebrows moved independently up and down as he considered his dilemma. He scratched his hairless chin with his right hand as his left hand still held on to the forceps, open and closing them like an animal who didn’t realize its prey had fallen out of its mouth.

  Then all at once, the seriousness of his situation occurred to him. “Damnation!” Rigel’s entire body shook with frustration.

  He threw down his forceps on the stainless-steel table. Grabbing his static-proof gloves, he thrust himself down on the floor, squishing his lanky body on the ground as flat as he could make it. His right ear pressed hard against the cold tile, and he stared at the chip for what seemed like an eternity.

  “Gods, years of work. Oh, my heavens.” He moved his hand toward the chip and withdrew. Again, he reached out for the chip and withdrew his hand. “Oh, gods, gods... gods, gods, gods. If I truly believed in any of you, I would curse you all.” He shook his fist at the air and then let his hand hover just over the chip, but again withdrew it in fear.

  His left hand shook, and he stopped and steadied it. He took a deep breath and then shouted, “Dennis! Dennis get in here this instant you... you incompetent... Just get in here and see what you’ve made me do. God’s boy, you are never in the room when I need you.”

  From the adjacent research space, Rigel could hear the clash of metal and glass. Dennis pressed through the thin plastic strips and emerged, one foot still stuck in a metal pan. It rang hard against the floor, and he tried several times to shake it off. He paused in the middle of his fourth attempt to shake the pan free and saw Rigel staring at him.

  Rigel’s eyes widened with horror, and his thin wispy mustache twitched left to right. “Imbecilic Cretan! Where are your clean shoes? Where is your lab coat? What in the hell are you thinking? You are contaminating the entire room!”

  “I'm sor
ry Profess—”

  “Get out! Get out! Out! Out! Out!” Rigel rocked on his side and lifted his body. He gestured at the door with such ferocity that you would swear he had the power to undo the universe simply by pointing at it.

  Mouth gaping, Dennis turned and walked out toward the lab entrance, foot still in the metal pan. He changed into his lab clothes and, reaching over, he removed the metal object from his foot.

  Rigel took several quick deep breaths. He had to calm himself; panic would do him no good. Once again, Dennis had been in the lab without proper attire. How many times would he and the other staff have to remind him? How had he even come in without going through decontamination? Rigel thought about it for a second and realized that in fact, he had never seen Dennis come in. Had he been in here all night again? All night without wearing the proper clothes? How many years would it take for the lesson to sink in?

  “You never learn, do you boy!” Rigel was shouting from the floor now, which was, in fact, useless because the entrance door was soundproof.

  “This is supposed to be a static- and germ-free environment. It’s no wonder that all of my experiences have gone wrong in the last few decades, what with you mucking about my lab for the past 25 years."

  He paused, focusing on the chip on the floor again, but averted his eyes. “Hurry up and get back in here. How long does it take you to put your clean suit on, anyway?”

  Rigel lifted his head just enough to see through the thick panes of glass. Tripping all over himself and scuttling as fast as he could, Dennis got his first leg in the clean suit. Rigel rolled over on his back. Looking at the chip laying on the floor made him feel defeated and helpless.

  Rigel wasn’t sure if Dennis’s brilliant mind was worth all the trouble. Dennis had tested off the charts in mathematics. He worked in math the same way Shakespeare had worked in verse or Bach in composing. The others members of the scholar school had claimed he was some kind of idiot savant. The boy could barely speak, was socially awkward, and was so absent-minded that he had destroyed several key computer systems, one of which was irreplaceable. But the equations that Dennis had solved and the ones he had come up with...

  They were as different as night and day. No, perhaps that was an understatement. It was quite likely that Rigel and Dennis lived in an orbit of entirely different planetary spheres and the only thing they had in common was a sun, and perhaps a little gravity, but even that was up for debate. Despite that, Rigel needed Dennis and Dennis needed Rigel.

  Rigel lay on the floor, twitching. Dennis was the only person he had ever met that could calculate equations as fast as the AI. And when he spoke, it provided insight into a world of physics that no man had even conceived of. If Dennis had been born before migration, everything might have been different, even if Dennis had personally destroyed an entire city with all his blundering.

  Dennis walked into the room. “Quickly. I need your help to get this chip off the ground, if it’s destroyed, years of work will go down the drain and I...”

  Before he could finish, Dennis had moved over to the chip, bent over, and picked it up with his bare hands.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!” Rigel could feel his pulse beating in his temples. He jumped to his feet so fast that Dennis took a step back and almost dropped the chip.

  “You... you said you wanted me to pick it up?”

  Rigel blinked hundreds of times, his mouth worked, but nothing came out. Dennis stared straight at him. After a moment Rigel let out several guttural groans that sounded like the early formations of speech.

  Dennis still did not move.

  Rigel found his words. They burst forth like a dam breaking under the immense strain of millions of gallons of water. “QUICK PUT IT ON THE TRAY!”

  Shaking at the sheer force and volume of Rigel’s words, Dennis almost dropped the chip again, but caught it and placed it, not lightly, onto the tray. Rigel turned around, tray in hand. One-handed, he forced on his jeweler's goggles and grabbed the micro-forceps, moving his head at eye level to the tray.

  He picked up the chip and turned it left and right, up and down. This went on for a full five minutes. Dennis standing just behind him, swayed his head back and forth trying to see what Rigel saw.

  After a time, Rigel let out a breath and his body relaxed.

  “It appears, despite your... blunder.” Was blunder the right word? Rigel wasn’t sure. “The chip appears to be undamaged. Now we must see if it works, mustn’t we?”

  He picked up the tray and moved it slowly over toward the gravitational simulation module. He opened the case of the computer and extracted the one circuit board he needed. Rigel had to swap out the boards depending on what research he was doing; the Senate wouldn’t spare any extra resources for Rigel, so he had to make do with what he had.

  He replaced the board, the chip embedded, and closed the door to the simulation hardware. Then, Rigel moved over to the observation room, and Dennis followed. He sealed the door and walked to the control panel. The dials looked like something out of a 1950s science fiction film, and that was on purpose. Rigel’s father had loved those old films, and with the AI interface, Rigel had created something that was both effective and allowed him a little bit of indulgence. Plus, it had the added bonus of looking arcane, so that when any members of the Senate turned up for inspections, it did not look like he was wasting his funding on anything flashy.

  “AI, begin gravitational simulation number 2011.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  The gravitational generator hummed to life. There was a potent smell of burning metal and solder. Panicking, Rigel queried the AI. “AI what is that smell? Is something happening to the circuit boards?”

  “Checking, Sir.”

  The smell grew stronger, and Rigel turned to Dennis. Behind him, Dennis sat with jeweler’s glasses on, soldering something on his lap. “Dennis, you fool, you had me terrified. What could you possibly be working on that is so much more important?

  “Professor... that’s what... well, I want to show you what—”

  “Never mind that now, Dennis, there will be time for discussion later. Come here and observe the experiment. Witness our combined genius.”

  The AI said, “Sir, a full inspection of the hardware reveals that there is no damage.”

  “I already know that AI. Really, I must find a way to program a little more self-awareness into you one of these days. But I suppose that will have to wait. Too bad that old genetics experiment had failed, huh?”

  Rigel glanced at the control panel, anticipating the worst. In theory, at least, Dennis had already solved the artificial gravity problem in his equations. Dennis had only solved it in mathematical terms and Rigel, the last surviving architect of the migrating cities—so far as he knew, anyway—had to find a way to integrate the equations into the city’s system. The problem was, and he had a hard time admitting this, that for all his genius, he didn’t understand how Dennis had solved the equation. The math checked out, and the AI had accepted the formula, but the answer was unsettling. It suggested that gravity was in itself a pocket dimension, and Rigel had spent many nights puzzling out what kinds of implications that would have if it were true.

  Rigel rocked back and forth from his heels to the tips of his toes. If this succeeded, there would be only one problem left to solve: faster-than-light travel. Then, just maybe, with a little luck, humanity would be truly saved, instead of in the limbo that migration had provided.

  Just as most of the other architects believed, Dr. Rigel Solidsworth felt that there wasn’t much left on Earth for human beings. To him, and his long-deceased colleagues, the answer for the future of the human race lay somewhere in the stars. A working gravitational generator was the first step in this goal. Once they had command of gravity, they could leave the surface and orbit the earth, not to mention the many other benefits of the command of gravity.

  Rigel had tried to convince the Senate of the idea that the city could be a generation ship, one that would travel
for thousands of years from star to star so that after several generations, humans would enter a new solar system. He had thought that with alcoves, the idea would be far more appealing because a sizable portion of the population could actually see the new planet. There were a few resource concerns, of course. In the vast gaps of space, there were no resources for energy conversion, and once you were away from the sun, the solar fusion core wouldn’t work nearly as efficiently.

  He had been optimistic. But the Senate, well, they had not. The Senate, even Senator Lightfoot, one of his former pupils, had refused and said the only way they were leaving the planet is if there was a working interstellar drive. Dr. Lightfoot had said that she too had concerns with the void of space and that without an FTL drive, she wouldn’t consider his proposal.

  Dennis moved behind Rigel and gawked over his shoulder. Rigel turned to face him.

  “This may just be it, my dear boy. All of our work comes to this, eh?”

  Dennis nodded.

  “You know Dennis, no matter what happens now, I can say without a doubt that I am glad to have found you. What a waste it would have been if that brilliant mind of yours was stuck in the orphanage, huh?”

  Again, Dennis nodded. Rigel noticed that he looked a little tired but dismissed it. The boy’s sleep schedule was erratic. It always had been.

  “I mean, I couldn’t believe it. There you were, 13 years old, and you solved equations that I had been puzzling over for decades. And all because of a field trip to the scholar school. Why, do you remember the first time I visited your meager room in the orphanage? Do you remember how they had disciplined you for graffiti? Ha. They thought it had been graffiti, those poor, undereducated fools. Uh... Dennis?”

  Dennis’s eyes were wandering at the machine, to something on the other side of the room and then back to the machine. It was clear to Rigel that he wasn’t paying attention. After a moment, Dennis noticed the silence and shifted his focus back to Rigel. He smiled and nodded, and Rigel shrugged and resumed talking.