Active Support
“Some doors, once they’re closed, they’re hard to open again.”
Julian Hartsock. “Active Support.” Precipice: The Autobiographical Ramblings of Julian Hartsock. (Chapter) A & A Publications, 2123.
NEUROTICISM (Volatility) — (Hartsock, Julian Q.) 34th Percentile:
Volatility (NV) is an individual’s tendency toward mood swings and difficulty moderating negative emotions. Individuals with moderately low NV are unlikely to suffer wide or acute mood swings and are naturally more emotionally stable than subjects higher in Neuroticism. They may struggle in highly stressful or threatening situations; however, they tend to mediate fear, anger, and anxiety well and return to baseline fairly quickly. Individuals moderately low in Volatility are usually composed, steady, and infrequently overread or overreact to stressful situations.
A score in the (34th) percentile, coupled with the distribution profile of psychometric measures herein, suggests a mostly stable personality rarely prone to unwarranted outbursts of emotion. The subject’s NV score, combined with a moderately high EA (Extraversion-Assertiveness), low AC (Agreeableness-Compassion) and extraordinarily high G (IQ), creates a complex grouping of factors where extreme stress may be focused outward onto others, especially in group settings. Subject may have particular difficulty maintaining composure when reliant on less capable, less intelligent co-workers or subordinates.
On this one, MM³ was slightly more verbose than usual, stating: low to moderately-low NV at 34 indicates a stable personality with low propensity to emotional outbursts. I always knew Dad was a cold fish, but numbers-wise, he must have been a zero, because 34 was a much lower number than I was expecting. All the stories about my mother, both from him and Pop, had led me to believe that my mother was a seriously loose cannon. Relative to Dad, I thought I was as well. Turned out I was pretty normal—more stable than normal, actually. It got me to thinking. Maybe my mother wasn’t such a loose cannon after all. Maybe she was average and settled down with a man who had the emotional variability of a brick. Maybe that drove her nuts. It sure drove me nuts sometimes, but that’s another story.
This story starts over a hundred years ago, in the Oval Office. In a meeting that was classified for several decades, a CIA Chief went into the White House to brief the President on a program designed to conceal operatives in plain sight. Halfway through the meeting, she informed the President and his staffers that she wasn’t actually who she appeared to be. She was wearing the face of a colleague. The President got up, walked over to her, inspected her face, and then returned to his chair behind the Resolute Desk. When he gave the word, the CIA’s Chief of Disguise peeled off a mask that was so lifelike no one in the White House had any idea she’d been in disguise. A completely different-looking woman emerged from behind that meticulously-crafted latex mask. These peel-off masks were considered five-second faces by the Agency. They had to be able to go on in five seconds with no mirror, be perfect, and be quickly concealable. The removal technique agents were taught to use was to stuff the masks into their armpit and calmly go about their business wearing their own natural face again. The program was extremely effective. It sounds ludicrous these days, but not only did these masks prove useful in spycraft, apparently, they experienced a revival in well-funded criminal syndicates during the early days of facial recognition before multi-factor surveillance put an end to the mask’s usefulness, particularly by gait-analysis, geo-fencing, and brute-force individualized vector tracking.
I first read about this presidential encounter in a book about early computing techniques in the age of espionage. It’s quite a fanciful story. Many people have avatars in VR that hide their identity or adopt one they prefer for whatever reason. But even now, or perhaps especially now, such a scene seems cut from mythology—the secret visitor with a concealed identity. The mystery guest peels off his face to reveal that Apollo himself is visiting your humble hearth. Good thing you killed that fattened goose and treated your guest as duty required.
At the time I read that story, I wondered about it, and the more I considered, I began to think that not only would I have been as witless if I encountered someone wearing a five-second face, so would everyone else. Perhaps the cameras can’t be fooled anymore, but we sure still can. I started wondering if such a thing was still out there. Could someone get a genuinely convincing face and put it on for Halloween? I even looked into it—this was back while I was still a student, so I didn’t exactly have resources. It turned out for a weird constellation of counterintuitive reasons, the answer was no, or at least getting a life-like five-second face was damn near impossible.
The first reason the technology fell by the wayside I already mentioned. Facial recognition’s ubiquity, once it was cross-referenced with other digital identification factors, meant that anyone wearing such a disguise would not only be almost immediately detected, but the anomaly of a person employing deceptive practices like this would instantly draw attention to the user. The second reason they more or less disappeared was that the rapid improvement in CGI and AI image generation meant that the film industry—the proximal origin of the CIA’s five-second face program in the first place—had rapidly decreasing demand for costumes and practical art design, and eventually, even the actors wearing those costumes.
The final reason is the really interesting one from a psychological standpoint—the uncanny valley. This was a curious concept that was better known around that time, especially with respect to robots. The term was coined by an early Japanese roboticist, who noticed that people developed an affinity for robots the closer they appeared to be “human-like.” However, this affinity only worked up to a point. Once the robots crossed some ineffable threshold of almost-human, they began to creep people out. They enter the uncanny valley of close-to-but-not-quite-human objects. This was a problem for early computer-generated and AI imagery before those techs passed all the way through that valley. Then, people couldn’t tell the difference. Similarly, in order for agents to remain properly concealed, the five-second masks needed to convincingly bridge that same uncanny valley, but curiously, that didn’t work so well for costume makers. I found that out when I investigated the topic more deeply for reasons that will soon become apparent.
This phenomenon is well known in the costume and novelty industry today. It isn’t that today’s companies can’t print somebody a perfect latex mask that would’ve made even that CIA chief gasp at their seemingly impossible believability. They simply aren’t profitable at scale. Once the manufacturers crossed the uncanny valley into almost-convincing, it made people uneasy—not a great party trick, as it turns out. Similarly not great at parties, is fooling everyone so convincingly that no one can tell you’re wearing a costume. Part of the fun is that everyone realizes you’re in costume. So back over the valley again the costume makers went.
Also, curiously, they told me this applied for almost all masks—non-human as well. Turns out, scary demons and various monster or animal masks that appeared too realistic tended to scare the shit out of children, and they unofficially adopted an industry norm they call the six-year-old threshold—as in, if it fools and scares a six-year-old, it’s too realistic and won’t sell, except in one market—creepy sex weirdos. No further comment here on that potential rabbit hole, or hell hole, depending on one’s proclivities. Just be forewarned, I don’t think of myself as a prude per-se, but even the briefest, most cursory glance at the tamest things just on the other side of that threshold sent me back swiftly, content to label that entire subculture as a parchment map from the middle ages: Here there be dragons.
So what would the world’s richest ever human want with a five-second mask you probably don’t have to ask yourself. No. That much is obvious. What was not public knowledge after I became one of the world’s most recognizable faces was that I commissioned a modest collection of them. And, after making sure A & A was supporting the city of Clearwater’s public agencies to a very generous level, I had an understanding about this fact with the city’s various Chiefs of Police down through the years. It was an interesting initial discussion that took place at our headquarters. That may strike some as funny that the Chief of Police for the city was meeting with the CEO of a private corporation. Just writing it smacks at least of preferential treatment, if not outright corruption. But when you’re A & A, and you’re preparing to bring millions of tons of payload down from outer space for distribution across maritime and terrestrial infrastructure in a large coastal urban area, turns out, you do have a lot to coordinate with the municipality. So I got to know the Chiefs well.
Mostly, my people took care of the actual coordination. Cass and the various teams under him in terrestrial logistics, which internally we called the T-Log team, were in charge of all the ground and sea transport, up or down the space elevator. We had nearly a thousand police details daily once the Space Ladder was fully operational, most of which were permanent posts. Similarly, Hazmat trucks and shipping containers with potentially dangerous loads fell under the purview of Clearwater Fire and the environmental offices at City Hall and the Port Authority. But every year, when the various chiefs and city officials came in for our yearly coordination sessions, I always had to go down and greet everyone. And for the first few years, while the tower was going up, they were about the only people in the city who knew or cared who I was when I met with them. I could walk around Clearwater back then like a regular guy. So the first Chief, Alden M. Harper, was certainly not starstruck over the first few years I knew him. He was a serious guy, though, and I got the feeling he didn’t particularly like me. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t personal. It struck me that he was just a gruff guy who didn’t care for too many people after policing them for three decades. So I decided I wasn’t going to be a smartass and stage a re-enactment of that original CIA meeting once I got my hands on my first five-second face in that first year after the Space Ladder opened. I just wanted to let him know that I planned on going out in public incognito.
I told Chief Harper I wanted a private word with him, and when he stepped in my office, I explained the problems I was having not being able to go out in public anymore, and he wasn’t too sympathetic.
“The President doesn’t do his own shopping after he gets elected, Julian,” he told me. “Part of owning the world’s only space elevator is people tend to recognize you.”
I explained that I’d got my hands on a five-second face.
“A five-second what?”
“Face,” I told him. “My own father would walk right past me.”
“You think you could fool me?”
“As much as your finely-tuned cop instincts would probably stand the best chance of anyone I know, Chief Harper, if I hadn’t told you beforehand, you wouldn’t stand a chance.”
He raised his eyebrows and I pulled out my mask and pulled it over my head. It was my crusty old man I called Jack. Alden Harper took one look at me and shook his head.
“Well shit!” the Chief said. “Thank God for vector tracing tech or that shit would be a genuine problem in my line of work. Where the hell did you get that?”
“I had it specially made. The thing is, Chief, I figured your back board would flag me as suspicious if I went out in it. I just wanted to give you a heads up so your surveillance officers don’t freak out and make a public spectacle of me.”
“They sure would if the AI flagged you, and it would.”
“Which would kind of defeat the purpose of my getting it in the first place. I was hoping I could convince you to put the word out to your people not to flag me if I go out and about as old Jack here.”
He laughed. “Tell you what, Julian, I’ll give Old Jack the run of the city if you promise to loan him to me if I ever get in trouble with my wife.” Then his eyes got wide and he paused. “Damn. The unholy hell the women in my life could unleash on me if they knew such a thing existed, my God. They might save a lot of money on beauty products and time getting ready, though. Five seconds, you said? Save me a lot of time waiting around.”
“I’ll keep Jack a secret,” I said, laughing. “The secrecy is kind of the point.”
Chief Harper told me he’d tell his surveillance unit to clear my alter egos as long as I sent him a VR rendering in advance so the cameras could be pre-programmed to identify me immediately when their cameras flagged the anomaly.
Over the years, I never told anyone about it except my closest body guys. Not Flor, not Cass, not even Gunnie when he was around. I wanted my small cast of five-second characters to be the best kept secret in the state of Florida—just me and the Clearwater Police, who were surprisingly tight-lipped over the years, probably because I always made sure they were well taken care of, both during their service time and after. A & A needed a well-functioning, orderly city after all. And my lineup was damn good. Old Jack had several friends, but none were quite as anonymous as he was. Perhaps it was Jack’s crusty appearance, or maybe it was the fact he was my go-to alter ego when I was thinking through a tough problem, which usually translated through the Jack mask as a particularly mean scowl. People left Jack the hell alone. It worked great for me for years. I’d go out with a two-man tail who had my location tagged and kept line of sight at all times.
It was excellent. I could go get a taco off the street, hold conversations with people in line while I waited if I wanted, have a meal at a restaurant, walk along the beach, even go for a swim on that public beach if I felt like it. I did have to be one of my younger alter-egos if I wanted to go shirtless in the summer, though. I was always in much better shape than Old Jack. I never figured that would be the thing that got me caught.
I didn’t notice the girl who was tailing me. She began following me down the walkway along the beach about halfway between my house and the promenade outside the Space Ladder. My security guys had eyes on her and shot a text alert to my watch, and in all the years I’d been going out, it was something that probably happened a handful of times, maybe once or twice a year.
It was winter, which meant it was a comfortable cool and dark by the time I’d left the house. I didn’t turn around, even when the second alert came in that just read “10 yards. SF Mid-20s,” which I understood to mean “single female in her 20s.” I didn’t feel particularly threatened.
“Hey,” she finally shouted to me. “Hey, excuse me!”
I figured it would have seemed weird to ignore her, so I stopped and turned around.
“This is going to sound funny,” she said when I looked her way. “But, are you a robot?”
“Am I a robot?”
She looked at me very carefully. There was still some ambient dusk light, and the waterfront was well lit on the way down to the Ladder, so we could see each other pretty clearly.
“Yeah. I think you might be,” she replied. “There’s something funny about you.”
I smiled at the prospect. I figured if I was going to be outed it would be for a person in disguise, but I couldn’t figure how somebody at a glance could mistake me for a robot.
“I’ll happily answer your question, but first I’d like to know your motivation for asking.”
“My motivation?”
“Sure. What prompted you to stop me and ask the question? Present your evidence for my status as robot and I’ll answer.”
“Well, how about that response for one. Who talks like that?”
“That’s actually a point against it,” I said. “Designers program robots to speak in a familiar manner to people to help them feel more human.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“Maybe I’m in the industry,” I said, “or at least, I have some familiarity.”
“I bet you do.” She started nodding her head as though she’d figured it out.
“You still haven’t cited your evidence.”
“Now that I’ve talked to you, I can say, your voice is off. You don’t sound like an old man, but the real reason I spotted you is your gait. Both your gait and your posture are perfect.”
“Perfect? That’s a strong word. What makes a gait perfect?”
“Yeah, perfect. Not close to it or even nearly perfect, but, I mean, spot on. I’m a physical therapist. I specialize in rehabbing lower leg injuries with athletes, so I do gait analysis.”
“Is that so, Ms.?”
“Meridel,” she replied, closing the gap between us to shake my hand. “Meridel McInerny. I’m at University Medical. Sports medicine. I’ve never seen a person who appears to be as old as you walk like that. Makes me wonder what you do.”
I smiled and shook her hand. “A walk along the beach is good for the body and the soul, at any age.”
“That’s not an answer.” She didn’t let go of my hand.
“I am not a robot, Meridel. I promise. My name’s Jack.”
“Your hand feels real, Jack,” she said, turning it over to inspect it. “But that’s not an old man’s hand either. They’ve done an amazing job with your dermis. It even feels warm to the touch.”
“They?”
“You know. Them,” Meridel replied, gesturing toward the tower with her head. “It’s kinda creepy how lifelike they’ve made you. Your eyes are like ... God!”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Yeah, those A & A guys are pretty creepy. Still, I’m curious, though, you have to be pretty damn good at your job to pick out somebody’s gait from across the walkway.”
“No. It just stands right out. When you do something, you get it, like a plumber gets pipes.”
“You didn’t tell me what makes a gait perfect. You just what, eyeball it? When you’re working with clients?”
She looked at me curiously but answered. “The ideal foot pronates at seven degrees from heel-strike to toe-off. The knee’s center of mass tracks directly over the second toe. Stride length is consistent on both sides. The pelvic girdle and shoulders remain consistently level indicating good muscular balance and equal leg length in both lower extremities. The spine is neither loose nor rigid with a moderate S-shaped curve. And you are not an old man.”
“I’m definitely not a robot. Watch.” I took a step back from her and balanced on one foot, and then I stood up on my toes, remaining balanced for a couple seconds before slowly lowering myself down and putting my other foot down. “Bipedal robots don’t balance like we do, Meridel. Do you know why?”
She shook her head at me.
“They use gyroscopic proprioception that’s unilateral, for one, while humans use three separate senses to balance. But primarily, it’s because it’s damn near impossible to emulate the adaptability and function of the midtarsal joint. Nature is still the best engineer.”
“See, you are a robot. How else would you know all that?”
“I took robotics courses when I was at Caltech. Bi-pedal locomotion was fascinating.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Well, nonetheless, I am human, and it was a pleasure meeting you, Meridel. If I ever have a leg injury, I’ll look for you.” I began to turn toward the tower.
“Wait, wait, wait. Not so fast,” she said. “I still haven’t figured you out.”
“Mysteries abound in this world,” I joked, starting to walk away.
She stepped beside me as though to follow.
“See. Who even talks like that. You’re not an old man. So what other choice is there? You’re one of their robots. On the way back to your home. They keep you in the tower? Or did you, like, escape from some research lab or something? Or maybe they let you out to see if people will notice there are super realistic robots walking around among us.”
“I don’t know. Perhaps you should go down and ask those creepy A & A people. They could probably use someone like you.”
“A physical therapist?”
“Clearly they need help simulating a more believable geriatric gait. I bet you could help them with that.”
And as I said it, I walked a few steps with a hunched, stiff old walk that I probably should have been using from the outset.
“Okay,” she said, reacting immediately to that obviously human act of mimicry. “I’m calling bullshit. What’s going on?”
I started thinking about my way out of it. If I called in my security, I was outed for certain, and I didn’t really want it to become common knowledge in Clearwater that I snuck around in a mask from time to time. On the other hand, I had this really awful thought, because here was this woman I kinda liked—her energy, her curiosity, the way she talked to me—and the first thing that popped into my head was, What is the smoothest possible way to get this woman to sign an NDA and get rid of her. I hated that thought.
“What are you doing tonight, Meridel?” I asked her.
“You mean later? Right now?”
“Now, I guess.”
“I was taking a walk along the waterfront.”
“Have dinner with me?”
She looked at me and sorta laughed. It was the kind of look that said, thanks but no thanks. The last thing I’m looking for is a geriatric boyfriend, which might have been my ticket out of the situation, but I wasn’t too certain I wanted that out anymore.
“You’re serious?” she asked me.
“You came up to me,” I said.
“Who are you really, Jack?”
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m not an old man—well, not this old. And I’m not a robot either. But I can’t tell you who I am right here.”
“Why not?”
“It’s sensitive. I can’t have you freaking out on me.”
“Why would I freak out on you?”
“Promise me you won’t if I tell you who I am?”
She shrugged and looked at me funny. “I promise. I won’t.”
“My real name’s Julian.”
And I could see her processing, wondering why that was such a big secret. She didn’t quite get it. I gestured toward the Space Ladder with Old Jack’s wrinkled head. Then her eyes got wide.
She put her hands over her mouth. “Your voice! Now I recognize—” she said, working to restrain the volume of her own voice. “I couldn’t put my finger on it. Oh my God, is that a—” She started reaching for my head.
I put my hands up to stop her and simultaneously shushed her. “You’re freaking out.”
She got really quiet fast and froze.
“I am freaking out,” she whispered, laughing. “Okay. Okay. Sorry. I’ll stop.”
I shook Old Jack’s head at her. “Let’s just walk a little, Meridel. Nice and calm. Like a couple of normal folks out for an evening walk on the waterfront.”
After she calmed down, we had a good laugh about it. I didn’t need to explain. “I get it,” she told me. “I can’t imagine the bubble you must have to—”
“Yeah, let’s not talk about that out here,” I said. “What kind of food are you in the mood for?”
She opted for Indian, and, after a nice long walk, I opted to bring her back home and have the food brought in. The drawback to the mask, even at night in Florida, is that it doesn’t take long before you start to sweat. I couldn’t imagine the first-generation versions, because I had some cooling nanomaterials mixed into the latex in mine and it was still a very short-lived experience in the daytime. So to be able to take off Old Jack’s head and sit down with somebody new to a meal, at that point in my life, it’s hard to express what a beautiful and simple pleasure that was, a rare one as well.
We sat on my veranda. For a little while, Meridel was still freaking out, repeating that she couldn’t believe it was actually happening. And for me, it’s a nightly occurrence to have dinner with me. For everyone else in the world, more or less, it’s a never occurrence. I’m just a guy in their newsfeeds every other day. I don’t really exist as a human being.
Meridel, though, she was a delightful human being, 29, moderately pretty in a typical way, and she wasn’t even trying that hard, which was also endearing. She had a sense of humor, and just as important, was seemingly as eager to turn it on herself as anyone else, including me. That too was a rare treat for me. Flor was about the only person in my life at that point who dared.
“Do you have a dog, Julian?” she asked me after we’d finished eating.
“I don’t, no.”
“I figured, but then I also thought, your house is big enough he could be in some other wing snoozing away.”
“No, I never got one. I grew up on a farm, too. We just didn’t have a dog. My grandfather did, though. He always did. Not sure why Dad never did. Why do you ask?”
“I hope you don’t mind if I say so. I mean, I don’t mean to insult you, but it strikes me that you might be a bit less lonely in this big house. A little unconditional love, even of the canine kind—that goes a long way.”
“What makes you think I’m lonely?”
Her eyes got wide, and I could tell she was suddenly trying to suppress that honesty.
“You don’t need to bite your tongue around me. I can take it,” I told her.
“Well, what kind of guy goes out wearing a mask just to pretend to be normal? And then you come back home where you’ve got security out in a booth, but then in here, cameras, drones outside, sentry bots. Do you even have a human cook?”
“I do.”
“Okay,” Meridel said. “So some human contact.”
“I’m not a hermit. I work seven days a week. All my top people come in to the office unless they’re international, and they’re all in Clearwater almost as much as their own countries. I have plenty of human contact.”
“I’m not talking about contact, though. Intimacy. I’m talking about intimacy. A dog doesn’t respect the boundaries your employees do.”
“Touche, I guess.”
“Was it your mom?”
“Was what my mom?”
“You said your grandfather had a dog and your dad didn’t. Was it because your mom didn’t like them? It’s kind of odd your dad would grow up around dogs and not have one on a farm when he grew up.”
“I suppose it’s possible. I couldn’t say.”
“Do you know how she feels about them?”
“I never really knew my mother, Meridel. I was four when she walked out on us.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s sad. I didn’t know.”
“We did okay, Dad and I.”
“Yeah, but you don’t like to talk about it. I can tell that much.”
“I think I probably got that from Dad. He didn’t like to talk about it, so I guess I got in the habit of never bringing it up, or thinking about it for that matter.”
“Does she know?”
“I’m sorry, know what?”
“That you’re you? Who you grew up to be? You’re telling me she never came to see you?”
“I don’t know if she knows. I can’t imagine she doesn’t if she’s still alive. Some doors, once they’re closed, they’re hard to open again. Better left closed maybe.”
I think she could tell by my tone I didn’t care to go any farther down that road.
“I can’t have a dog,” I said after a long silence. “Your previous question. I made a mistake answering it that way.”
“How do you mean?”
“I do this sometimes. I try to talk to people like I’m a normal person, but I started out meeting you in the least normal way possible precisely because I’m not a normal person. I started with deception. I think it’s only fair that I be honest with you.”
“It seemed like a perfectly normal answer.”
“Yeah, that was the deception. The real answer is that I can’t give any time to a dog. It can’t happen. I could buy a dog, but the reality is that the house would become more the dog’s home than mine, because I’m at the office or away on business almost all the time. So really, the dog would belong to my staff. I’d come home and the dog would be like, ‘Who the hell’s this guy? He smells familiar.’”
“You’re telling me you don’t have ten minutes in the morning and night to take your dog for a walk down the beach?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. And even if I did walk, I couldn’t be present with the dog, if that makes sense. I’d be thinking of something else. It wouldn’t be fair to the dog.”
“Okay.”
“So, this is going to be a really clumsy segue here, Meridel, but it’s about me not being normal. I’ve really enjoyed our time together, and that intimacy thing you were talking about earlier, it’s kind of a high-stakes game with me.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean it literally. This is the part of my life that really sucks. It makes it very hard to get to know anyone, because I need to have this conversation up front.”
“Do you have it a lot? Because you’re not that good at it. You’re scaring the hell out of me, Julian.”
“No, actually. Yeah. You’re right about that. I could be better about the way I present the problem, but the issue has to do with your safety, primarily. We can do our best to be secretive and try to continue getting to know each other, but eventually somebody’s going to find out. You might like to tell someone who you had dinner with, for instance. Even if it wasn’t me, you’d still have that instinct. That’s just normal. People tell the people in their lives what they’re up to.”
“But you don’t want me to?”
“It’s not about what I want. You can’t right now. I’m butchering this explanation.”
“Why did you reveal who you were to me, Julian? And, I’m sorry, but could you do me the courtesy of giving me the real answer up front, not the normal one?”
She had a gentle smile on her face. It was just the right smile. I don’t know for the life of me how anyone can be that intuitively empathetic, like she knew exactly what I was feeling, and she’d only just met me a few hours earlier.
“I’m not proud of it.”
“Great,” she replied. “We’ll do honesty from the start the right way. The tough stuff.”
“I had a sense about you almost immediately, that I liked you, Meridel.”
“That’s a good start,” she joked, but she was clearly waiting for the ugly part.
“Also, the longer I talked to you, I had a little voice inside my head trying to figure out the fastest way to get rid of you without my being discovered. And then, once it was clear you wouldn’t go away without an answer, all I could think about was the smoothest way to get you to sign an NDA and send you on your way. And I hated it. I hate that my life has become that, but it has. I hate that I think that way, but I do, and now that you’re here in my home, there’s another voice in my head that’s telling me it was selfish of me to let you in. Those might not be good answers, but they’re honest.”
“It’s selfish of you that you might be lonely and might be reaching out to another person for companionship? How could you, you devil?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You joke, but it’s not that easy. This dinner, us sitting together like two normal people, that can only happen inside this bubble around us. And it’s a fiction. Another deception.”
“I don’t see how that’s true. I had a very nice time with you, Julian.”
“I did too, Meridel. Let me put it to you this way. Obviously, you saw the gates and the cameras and the security guards and the sentry bots on our way in?”
“Of course.”
“Do you have that at your house?”
“My apartment. And no. But I’m not a gazillionaire or whatever you are.”
“Your security would have to radically change the instant anyone had reason to believe that I cared for you. I mean instantly and forever.”
She began to look at me more seriously, as though it was sinking in.
“You joke about gazillions, but it’s serious. The Space Ladder moves more value up to and down from space annually than the cumulative GDPs of the bottom one hundred sixty nations on Earth combined. My company controls that and a forty-nine percent stake in the Osaka Space Lift. And now that I’m talking, that voice that was telling me a minute ago that I was selfish for bringing you here is now shouting at me ‘I told you so’ and that I’m a dumb asshole.”
“Well, you’re not dumb. You’re kinda famous for not being dumb.”
“A selfish asshole then?”
“Maybe. But how are you supposed to meet anybody?”
“It’s funny. Before I got rich, I thought, ‘If I ever get rich, I’m going to live in a normal house like everyone else.’ You know? No big deal. No Mister Big Shot with his big mansion. Then you realize that there was a good reason every king ever had a castle. It wasn’t because kings liked castles, it was because kings didn’t last very long in the countryside.”
“Look on the bright side, Julian, at least you don’t need a moat and a drawbridge.”
“I mean,” I started grinning. “Don’t give me any ideas. I may not be able to have a dog, but absolutely nothing is stopping me from digging a moat and filling it with alligators. I wouldn’t even have to bring them in. It’s Florida. They’d just show up and make themselves at home.”
“I’m not sure it would help your image as a loner.”
“That’s true,” I conceded.
We both laughed at the thought for a little bit.
“So what do you want me to do?” she asked me. “I’ve had a good time, and despite how abnormal you may think you are, I really enjoyed getting to know you, Julian. If you want me to sign an NDA and never talk about it again, I will. Not that anyone will believe me anyway. Is that what you want?”
“That’s what that voice in my head is telling me.”
“Yeah, but I thought we established that voice is a selfish asshole.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “What do you want, Meridel? If I told you I’d like to see you again, would you be open to it?”
“I think I would.”
“Even with all the baggage that entails?”
“Secrecy could be fun.”
“It could. Until it isn’t fun anymore. And then it’s deadly serious.”
“That’s life, Julian. There’s always tradeoffs.”
“I think probably it should be your call, Meridel. I would love to see you again if you would too, but I’d like you to think about it seriously.”
“How do I get in touch with you?”
“Tucker will let you know.”
“Your security guy?”
I nodded. “You have to follow his instructions exactly—getting home I mean. I can’t go with you.”
“I see.”
“For—”
“Yeah, I get it. My safety. Secrecy. All that. You have to stay in your castle.”
“Don’t let the alligators out of the moat on your way out.”
Watching her go was almost a surreal feeling. My nights were very much consumed by quiet contemplation, planning, the thoughts that have to be thought to change the galaxy. And now there was this person I liked. This new person. Warmth.
And then there was that voice again: These things are luxuries. You’re going to disappoint her.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Meridel, and I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother. I found myself getting angry that she’d brought it up. She couldn’t have known, though. The simplest of questions getting to know someone. If I’d done it more often, or at all, I’d have realized what a sore wound that still was. Decades of ignoring it. And that’s not to say it festered; it just never healed.
Over the course of the next several weeks, Meridel and I talked over secure video streams, and I had Tucker arrange several meetings—dates, I guess you would’ve called them in previous eras. I had no idea what people called them anymore, but mine involved sneaking around in masks, dummy cars, vehicles hired under false names (including multiple boats on two occasions), and the sneaking around did have its appeal. It was kinda fun pretending we were spies from a bygone era. We had a good time, especially when we went out on a small fishing boat. Meridel didn’t go out on the water much, which I thought was odd for someone who’d lived such a big chunk of her life in a coastal city, and she didn’t fish much either. She seemed to be impressed that I knew so much about it for someone from the Midwest.
“My friend Gunnie got me into it,” I told her.
“You’re friends with a gunnery sergeant?”
I had to laugh. “No. His name’s Gunnison. When he was here in Clearwater, we used to go out on his boat. I had to get my own when he left.”
“Where’d he move to?”
I smiled. “It’s going to sound like a smartass answer, but it’s the truth. Jupiter. Orbiting Europa actually, but Jupiter is kind of the main attraction out there.”
“You’re not kidding, are you?”
I shook my head.
“So am I ever going to get to meet this Gunnie?” she asked me.
“It’s possible. We send videos every now and again, but the time delay makes it hard to have much of a conversation. I try not to go too long without checking in. I imagine it gets pretty lonely out there.”
“Any friends here on Earth I can meet, Julian?”
“Someday maybe,” I said. “They exist. They’re kinda scattered around the country mostly. The world too, I guess. Gunnie’s the only one on Jupiter.”
We fished for sheepshead for a few hours. It was pretty cool out there. Meridel even pulled a couple in, which was good for a first time out. She had a knack for it.
The following week, I snuck her into headquarters after hours. Not that it was a particularly romantic spot, but it was a controlled environment where my team could dictate surveillance and bring the two of us in without any chance we’d be spotted. Internally, they’d billed the event as a dinner with an important client, which wasn’t totally unheard of in A & A’s history, and the catering staff did a great job decorating the observation lounge into a cozy spot to have a quiet dinner. Toward the end of the evening, as we were looking out the window toward the Space Ladder, I could feel our relationship beginning to evolve toward the physical.
“I’m curious,” she said. “Don’t feel like this is a you question, because I ask every man I’ve ever seen this question, because I think it tells a lot about a person.”
“Okay,” I replied.
“When did you lose your virginity, Julian?”
I laughed, not at the question itself, but I think the prospect that it was telling of something. I couldn’t figure what.
“I went to college in California when I was fifteen,” I told her. “Funny thing about girls at a technical college, Meridel, is that they kinda dig guys with 200 IQs. So, it didn’t take me long.”
“Fifteen?”
I shrugged. “I was almost sixteen, about a month away.”
“How old was she?”
“A junior, undergrad, so probably twenty-one.”
“Cradle robber!” she laughed. “My, my, my.”
“Believe me, it was mutual. She didn’t rob anything.”
“Just poor baby Julian of his innocence.”
“It’s funny, though. I didn’t have any real steady relationships out there either, even before all this.” I gestured to the tower. “Once I had the concept, it was just work. Even in Clearwater, before the tower went up, it was just me and the work, the occasional office gathering. Even when the tower started going up, I used to sneak out at night, walk around with a baseball cap and glasses. That was a good enough disguise back then. Go down to the Silvergate Plaza and walk around looking up at it. Then it got so high you couldn’t see the top of the tower anymore. It was a very different city back then.”
“A different world,” she said.
“I have a question for you, Meridel.”
She gestured for me to ask and then turned toward the window.
“Why no neural adjuncts? I imagine in your professional life it would help with real-time assessment, designing recovery regimens, that sort of thing.”
She frowned at the question. “How did you know?”
“The eyes have a tell.”
“Really?” She was dumbfounded. “I’ve never ... wouldn’t people ...? I mean, wouldn’t that be widely known?”
“I have access to information a lot of people don’t. You aren’t being evasive, are you? I’d like to know.”
“I don’t believe in it. I think we’re born as we’re supposed to be, as God made us.”
She seemed almost ashamed to say it, perhaps apprehensive.
“I didn’t know you were religious. Why didn’t you say so until just now?”
“I guess I was worried you’d think it was stupid. You know, Mister Space Elevator. World’s most brilliant scientist.”
“I don’t know about all that. But I do know I don’t have all the answers to the mysteries of the universe. And I am quite an open person, scientifically speaking.”
“Whatever that means.”
I laughed, and she seemed to ease up a bit.
“You don’t have an implant either? I’d have figured.”
I shook my head. “I used to, but I took it out.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“Scientific reasons. See, same conclusion and we both got there different ways.”
She smiled at that. “You don’t think it’s stupid, God and all that?”
“No. I think it’s very human, and, uhm, we’re human. At least I think I still am. You seem to be.”
She seemed to stand a little closer, and for the rest of the night, that physical tension between us kept building. She stayed with me that night back at the house till the early morning hours. We still thought we had to be careful about being seen together, but it was clear things were evolving. We would have to make a decision soon. That was preferable to being found out and having the decision made for us.
Meridel asked me on one of our lunch chats that following week if I was ever planning on showing her the Space Ladder. The irony there was that it was one of the most difficult places for me to be anonymous. I’d have to coordinate with four different heads of security—Tucker, obviously, and then the A & A terrestrial group at the base of the Space Ladder, the car-based teams, and the station chief up at Apogee. Space was a pretty difficult place to sneak around, even for me.
I told her I’d look into it but that it might be difficult if we still intended to keep our relationship quiet. I had business in Japan that week, so I told Meridel we could figure it out when I got back.
Meridel was not the only secret I was keeping from the world then. Come to think of it, I was keeping a lot of secrets. Some of them I kept from everybody. Some of them I kept from my people. Some of them I kept from governments. Some of them I shared with a select few.
At the time, I was working with several of A & A’s Japanese physicists on the space-based supercollider. That team thought it was all theoretical. My team, and the Japanese government’s each had a different piece of the puzzle. Apart from myself and Flor, there were only two other living human beings who understood what that particle collider meant to the future of humanity—hyperdensity, the potential for faster-than-light travel. Many of the meetings I had in Tokyo took place in secret. It occurred to me several of my Japanese contacts could arrange a clandestine meeting on Uchukaigan. The government had offices in the outer ring of the station, and like every government agency I’d ever encountered worldwide, they kept regular hours. I just had to ask the right person for a favor—onegai shimasu.
Meridel was pretty excited. Not only was she going to get to go up the Space Ladder, but she was getting a shuttle ride out of the deal too, and I suppose, it was her first trip to Asia. Although, it was debatable whether the space above Osaka was technically Asia. We argued that point for a bit before deciding that no, the space station at the top of the Osaka Space Lift—Uchukaigan—didn’t qualify, because you didn’t have to go through customs until you came down the Space Lift. That made it more like an airport, we agreed. I told her I’d bring up some excellent Japanese food to make up for it.
On the outer ring, there were several types of government offices. My friend His Imperial Majesty, had the nicest digs, even though they were a bit small compared to the other expansive spaces on Uchukaigan. The Japanese, though, had a way about small spaces, and I don’t know how they so consistently did it, but they’re always able to make the smallest, seemingly insignificant spaces radiate with beauty and calm and meaning. I’m sure there’s a Japanese word for it I don’t know, and the fact we don’t have a word for it in English tells you the disconnect is real.
When the Emperor’s people spoke to me, they didn’t ask what I needed to use the space for—his personal diplomatic meeting room, mind you. They only insisted that I and my guests remember to remove our shoes before entering and not spill any food on the tatami, which was not going to be a problem, I promised, because I had other plans. They gave me specific key-codes so that I could come and go as I pleased and promised absolute confidentiality on the surveillance.
The aesthetic was not unlike the private rooms in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo—stately, dignified, distinctly Japanese, warm light, beautiful clean wood. It was a stark contrast from the public spaces on Uchukaigan, and certainly anywhere on Apogee. Our modest little station had nothing resembling the Emperor’s diplomatic suites.
When she arrived, Meridel’s heart was still reeling a little from her first experience in zero-G, and she was just getting her legs back under her walking along the outer ring. I picked up her eyewear and talked her to the back corner door of the customs house, which managed downward cargoes and things of that matter.
“Hey,” I said to her from behind a partially open door. “In here.”
“Hey,” she said back, sneaking inside with me. “What is this place?”
“I had a friend find us a room we could be alone.”
We walked through the customs house, down through the vacant government offices, and finally to the diplomatic suites. We took off our shoes, as requested, of course, and proceeded down through the Emperor’s suites.
“Who’s your friend, Julian?” she asked, looking around at the palatial decor.
“The Emperor.” I kinda shrugged, a little embarrassed to be answering that way.
“Yeah, sure. Just the Emperor. I didn’t know Japan had an Emperor. I thought that was, like, history by now.”
“It’s a ceremonial position. Kind of like the King of England or the President,” I replied, grinning.
We stayed within the main corridor that ran in a straight line, and with Uchukaigan more so than Apogee, the outer ring was so vast that there was almost no perceptible curvature in the floor of the outer level. Meridel couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the fact that we were walking on the inside layer of the outer wall. I tried to explain it to her like she was walking on the inside wall of a ship’s hull—just a donut-shaped hull spinning around to create the false sense of gravity.
“The very cool thing about this particular ship,” I told her, “is that it’s a glass-bottomed boat.”
The Emperor’s lounge had a gigantic glass floor that opened to space, and because it was night in Japan, there was no tint to the window to protect the eyes, just the moon, as big and beautiful as you like, and the Earth beneath us, curving away in all directions, spinning like a clock. I put out a hand and invited her out onto the window, almost like I was asking a girl onto a dance floor.
“Seriously?” she asked.
I nodded and took her hand, and she stepped out with me slowly, like a scared cat for the first few steps. But she started smiling and shaking her head as she looked down past her feet, down to the Earth and the black space around it.
“What do you think?” I asked her.
“Remarkable.”
She looked up at me and suddenly got disoriented, quickly looking back down again at her feet to keep from losing her balance.
“The Emperor won’t mind?” she asked. “Us being out here like this?”
“I shared a meal with him and his family on this very spot a couple months ago. You were asking me about friends. He is actually a really great guy, definitely one of my favorite people down there.”
I gestured to the Earth.
“Amazing,” Meridel said.
“Wait here. I’ll get the food. Lunch for you?”
“And for you, Julian, Osaka time?”
“Midnight snack, but I’m still on Clearwater time, mostly. Mainly, my body’s just confused.”
I had a blanket from my hotel in Osaka, which we spread out just enough that the two of us could sit together with room for food between us and the edge of the blanket right at our sides so that it felt like we were floating on a magic carpet in orbit with carpetside sushi service.
“I love sushi,” Meridel stated. “It’s like my favorite food.”
“Masa is the top sushi chef in all of Osaka,” I said. “The only problem is that he spoils you really fast. Impossible to get sushi this good in the States.”
“You mean I’ll never properly appreciate grocery store sushi again?”
“Holy hell. That’s just a fierce bout of food poisoning waiting to happen.”
“Gazillionaires and their fancy sushi,” she quipped. “You know most normal people aren’t on a first-name basis with their sushi chef.”
“Their world-famous sushi chef.”
“I was just saying ...”
“I was never a normal person, Meridel, even when I was a normal person.”
“I was actually thinking that on the ride up. The display in the Atrium, past the gate—I never went inside before. So I was listening to the presentation there.”
“I’m not familiar,” I told her.
“I suppose you wouldn’t be. You go in the back door, right?”
“Something like that.”
“The thing kept saying over and over again, ‘Active Support this; Active Support that.’ And I was like, what the hell does ‘Active Support’ mean? As a caregiver or a therapist, it’s kind of a concept I’m familiar with, at least I think so.”
“The display didn’t explain it?”
“Sort of. I think I got it.”
“It’s a pretty simple idea. All your bones, for instance, and the steel girders of traditional buildings stand up under their own structural might—passive support. No energy required but the inner cohesion of the materials holding the structure together. And when that cohesive strength fails, bones break, buildings come crashing down.”
“Landslides.”
“Exactly. And active support is the opposite—a force gets supplied upward. In the case of the space towers, that energy is magnetic. The catch is that the magnetic force has to be constantly supplied with a huge electrical current to keep the electromagnetic field stable so that the towers stay up.”
“Yeah. All those hurricane-proof fusion reactors A & A operates underground. The display said that too.”
“Active energy—Active Support.”
“I think it’s ironic. That’s what I was going to say—that you, Julian Hartsock, genius of all geniuses, his greatest contribution to humanity is creating this Active Support. I was thinking on the way up you could use some of that in your own life.”
She caught me cringing at that statement. As much as I tried to take it in stride, Meridel was so damn empathetic, she could read me anyway, or maybe I didn’t hide it as well as I thought I did.
“What?” she said after a few seconds of silence. “What’s wrong?”
“I hate that word. I’ve gotten pretty good at grinning and nodding politely, but maybe it’s just hearing it from you.”
“What word?”
“Genius. I kinda hate it.”
“You are a genius, right? By definition?”
“Maybe it’s not the word,” I considered. “It just irks me, like deep in my gut.”
“Why?”
I shook my head. “I’ll try to explain.”
We’d both eaten our fill of sushi by then.
She sat patiently, quietly looking into my eyes as I contemplated how to articulate what I thought might be at the root of that feeling. It was maybe a full minute, and she just sat there in silence with the most loving, patient look in her eyes.
“You know all that energy that fortifies the magnetic fields holding up these towers,” I said. “That comes from somewhere, right? A bunch of different places now, actually. The reactors planetside. Backups in the two stations, the Allegis Array as a tertiary emergency backup if any of the other layers of emergency power fail.”
“Right,” she said, gently pushing me toward my point.
“The thing that really holds the towers up is the idea—the mathematics, the application of multiple magnetic fields reinforcing each other, overlapping and woven together like an unbreakable tapestry made of energy. There was a time when that math only existed in one place.”
I pointed to my head.
“And that’s not genius?”
“It is. Sure. But at that time, that idea was worth nothing. It only existed in theory. It did nothing for anyone. It didn’t have value until hundreds of thousands of other people, with their work and ingenuity and grit, they put it into action and made it a reality. I couldn’t even make that happen. I needed bankers and lawyers and engineers and miners and smelters and logisticians and countless other professionals to turn that mathematical concept into a design and then a strategy and then a plan and then a company, and finally, all that work turned the idea into an object. The thing that irks me about that word, I think, is that I would still be a genius if I did the math, kept it in my notebook and said to myself, ‘cool idea, guy, but it’s so much work and such a grand scale that nobody would ever be crazy enough to build it.’ Being a genius means nothing to me. It’s the work I care about, the application of my mind.”
“That’s important to you.”
“It’s everything. Everything. Every second I am alive is a gift. I’m going to be honest with you, Meridel. I’m going to tell you something that scares me. I’ve thought it, but I’ve never said it out loud before.”
“Okay.”
“I have an obligation to humanity. Very few people who have ever lived understand this burden. Maybe it’s easier to understand up here, sitting here looking down on the Earth from this tower. Every single person you passed on the way up, and in a small way, every single person beneath us on the Earth is affected every day by the mathematics that originated here.”
I pointed to my temple again.
“I know it sounds incredibly arrogant, but it’s not. It doesn’t come from that place. It comes from a place that sees the threats to humanity, that sees the horizon, and not only do I see these things, but I have the ability to do something about them—to steer the ship in the right direction, as it were. I also see the incredible future we could have if we do the right work today. That voice we talked about that first night I met you, Meridel. That voice is an asshole, yes, but he’s also not. He’s also got the right motivation—to make every second count, because the unique combination of my mind and my ability to marshal incredible resources to solving impossible problems is a combination that doesn’t exist anywhere else on Earth.”
“Not arrogant at all,” she joked.
I could see in her eyes she was deflecting. She was afraid of the intensity. Hell, I was afraid of it, and it was me. That was who I was at the very foundation of my being, and I’d never exposed it to another soul.
“I think I understand what you’re saying, Julian. You put a lot of pressure on yourself.”
“That’s true,” I said, nodding. “Maybe the understatement of the millennium.”
It got very quiet, and I could feel this powerful weight between us.
“So what do you want to do about it, Julian?” she finally asked me. “Because I may not be a genius, but I’m pretty sure I understand the situation well enough.”
“How would you describe it?” I asked her.
“Well, we like each other. Maybe we could even love each other. Definitely, I could.”
“Me too,” I agreed.
“But there’s that obligation you believe you have to humanity.”
“It’s real, Meridel.”
“I don’t doubt it. It’s ... I don’t know ... maybe it’s my faith talking, but it almost seems biblical in a way. Maybe that’s why I understand it, the passion. It is a kind of calling to a higher purpose, just material and of this world rather than spiritual.”
“That’s actually a very good way of putting it.”
“I hope you don’t think that belittles it in any way. I don’t mean to say that obligation isn’t as important as you think it is. But it’s also why you’re alone. You know that, right?”
“I know.”
“Thousands of monks lived their entire lives in silence copying the bible onto parchment by hand. I think it’s the same passion. Maybe you are religious, Julian.”
“I’m open to that possibility.”
“You’re a very open person,” she joked.
“Scientifically speaking,” I replied, smiling back at her.
“You don’t have to be a monk, Julian. I think you can be if you want. You do it well, and it’d be hard to make a case the world isn’t a better place for it thus far. But you could choose to have a different life that does a remarkable amount of good still. Or maybe you couldn’t. I don’t know. I think it’s a bit like you told me that night we met. You need to think about it very hard and decide which asshole voice in your head you’re going to listen to.”
I shook my head at her and laughed. “I don’t know how it’s possible you know me like you do.”
Meridel scoffed and looked down, off to the side of the blanket. “This spinning moon is freaking me out. It’s like it’s over here and over there and over here again. It’s like ...”
“It’s almost like our brains aren’t wired for space,” I said.
“Exactly! This is a very weird place to have such a deep conversation.”
“It’s probably fitting for us. Weirdest relationship ever.”
“I know, right? One thing you weren’t lying about was the temptation to talk to somebody. I haven’t even told my mother.”
It didn’t phase me when she said the word “mother.” I was more than used to other people having a relationship with theirs. It was normal, common. But she sorta winced after she said it, almost like she was sorry she might have touched a sore spot.
“I never told you about her,” I said.
“I thought you didn’t know her.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t know about her. I never got her side of the story, but my father and grandfather have both told me pieces of the story. I know there are two sides to every story, but there’s also the truth, and I have no reason to doubt they’ve told me the truth.”
“Do you want to tell me about her?”
“I think it would help.”
I didn’t know what it would help or even why I said that, but Meridel smiled and gestured in a way that let me know she would listen if I wanted to share. So I told her everything I knew.
“My mother’s name is Dahlia Pickett. Dad and Pop only ever knew her as Sam. I always thought her middle name must have been Samantha, but when I finally did look her up about midway through my time at Caltech to see where she was, I found out my maternal grandmother must have had some Arabic ancestry. Sam was short for Samina. She was a professional dancer who grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of a very wealthy financier, a brilliant guy who passed away a few years before I moved to Clearwater. But judging by their ages, he was definitely an older guy when she was born, probably early fifties, I’d guess. I’m not sure if that affected who she grew up to be, but it was clear he doted on her. She worked for a few years very steadily as a dancer in New York, all kinds of shows and events, and she partied. She was an alcoholic and probably did some other party drugs as well. Her parents put her in rehab when she was twenty-five, and when she got out, my grandfather the financier, he wanted her out of New York—away from her old friends and the party scene. So he offered to set her up with her own dance studio if she went anywhere but New York, and for some reason I’ve never understood, she ended up in a quiet little suburb of Cleveland.
Sam, my mother, met my father at a county fair where she was chaperoning or coaching her little troupe of dancers or whatever you would call it. It’s a dance coach, right?”
“I think so,” Meridel said. “How did they meet? I mean at the fair?”
“I never got the story out of Dad. He doesn’t really talk about personal stuff. So that one never came up.”
“What do you talk about with your dad?”
“These days we don’t talk a lot, maybe a couple times a year. When I was growing up, it was mostly schoolwork, day-to-day stuff. And on his end, corn mostly.”
We both laughed.
“The thing about Dad is that I can understand what she saw in him, like a polar opposite. She wasn’t in Ohio that long before they met, and she was just trying to settle down so she didn’t drink herself to death, I think. And Dad is just the steadiest person you’d ever meet, and he was a pretty strapping guy when he was younger. So she meets this farmer, a little bit older than her, the most rooted guy she’d probably ever met. And for Dad, I suppose from his perspective it was like this beautiful, sophisticated dancer flitted into his life and showed an interest in him. Reasons be damned, a girl like that doesn’t come around too often in Colebrook. She was pregnant a few months later, and I think they both thought that was it—they were going to stay together and be a family.”
“Did they get married?”
“No. Never. I suppose that should’ve been a tell. But, you know, a lot of people live one life, mainly. Like Dad. He was a farmer, always a farmer. Till the day he dies, he’s going to be a farmer, which is great. He loves what he does. My mother and a lot of people like her, they live a number of lives. I think I’m more like her. And I think she stayed in Ashtabula as long as she could tolerate it. At least that’s what I want to believe. She stayed for me until she couldn’t do it anymore—another life to live. For her, I think the place, the farm, the quiet life, Dad, it was what she needed in that time in her life. And then she left and never looked back.”
We sat in silence, looking at each other, and then down at the Earth. It was a surreal moment for a minute there. The Emperor of Japan’s private suite, this random beautiful person I’d met by chance on one of my ridiculous walks, our levitating magic-carpet picnic blanket in space, and I’d told Meridel just about everything I’d ever been afraid to tell anyone.
“I’m glad you shared all that,” she finally said. “It explains a lot.”
“A lot more than how old I was when I lost my virginity?”
She laughed. “Yeah. I’d say so. Although, I still think that’s telling.”
“It may very well be. I’m sure it tells something.”
“This has been one of the most interesting experiences of my life, Julian, this lunch ... I guess it’s a late lunch Florida time, in the dark above Japan. But I think what you’re trying to say is what those little voices in your head were trying to say from the very beginning. You’re not ready to be in a relationship, not now. Maybe never.”
She could see the disappointment in my eyes. It wasn’t that she was wrong. It was that she was right, and it hurt that she was.
“You know, you wouldn’t be the first billionaire workaholic to marry a wife he saw for fifteen minutes a day and spend even less time with his kids. But you couldn’t do that, could you?”
“No. I couldn’t.”
“So, you’re a monk. You’re a kind of very-much-not-normal monk. A space monk.”
She was joking and smiling to mask the pain. Giving when she had no cause to.
“Oh, Meridel, I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. I’m glad we met.”
“Me too. I’m also glad that if it had to end, it ended before we got discovered and made a fiasco of your life.”
“I’d have sued you for custody of Old Jack,” she joked.
“You’d get the alligators from the moat. I’m keeping Jack.” She smiled, and we got up. “If you want to stay up here tonight, I can get you a place.”
Meridel shook her head. “I need to be getting back. It was a fun little dream, these past few weeks.”
“For both of us.”
As I escorted her back out through the Japanese government offices, I couldn’t help but feel that it was a strange coda. Such a similar weird walk together with this same stranger from weeks before. From the beach in Clearwater to the Japanese customs division in outer space, and all on account of Old Jack. When we got to the door she stopped before I opened it.
“Julian, I want you to remember that you do have a choice. You can only carry what you can carry. It doesn’t matter how smart or how powerful you are, no one man can shoulder the world.”
“You are shockingly wise, Meridel McInerny,” I told her. “If I can ever do anything for you.”
“Yes,” she said. “I almost forgot, and I would’ve regretted not saying this, but if you want to do something for me, you need to forgive your mother. Even if she never comes to see you and you never seek her out. You need to forgive her in your heart. She didn’t go away because of you, Julian. And that’s not why she stayed away when you became successful. It’s because she’s afraid of what you’ll think of her. Think about what it must be like for her to contemplate approaching you. Please consider it.”
We kissed goodbye and embraced for what seemed like minutes. I didn’t want to let her go.
And then, almost as though the kiss and the hug didn’t happen at all, I was standing alone, behind a door in an empty office thinking that I had too much of my father in me—steady, pragmatic, a brick. I must have stared at the back of that door for ten minutes before I turned around to go clean up the mess we’d left on the Emperor’s window.
Ah, the life of a space monk with voices in his head. They started talking again as I packed up Masa’s dishes. We were less than a year out from FTL travel if all went well at the collider. People were growing more profoundly and disturbingly misanthropic. The AIs were growing bolder. Better to be guided by the asshole voices in my head than by the electrical impulses put there by the forces that dominated by algorithm. Somebody needed to watch the Earth from the parapet. With an NV in the 34th percentile, I wasn’t so unsteady that I couldn’t master my heart and tend to my obligations. But I damn well still had enough heart to feel it.