Hieroglyph (7 page)

This was a pretty white-collar passenger manifest, but this was Friday afternoon and most of the workers were headed down for the weekend—as we could see when we looked into the windows of the crowded coaches spiraling down the opposite way.

For the hundredth time since leaving the funeral home, I reached out and patted the bundle of ashes in my bag. Carl had had a lot to be proud of and had not been shy about taking credit when earned. But I knew, just from watching his reactions, that he took special pride in having created countless blue-collar jobs. His family back home had been steelworkers, electricians, farmers. Carl had always been more comfortable with them than with the crowd at Sun Valley or TED, and when he had passed, the outpouring of grief from those people had been raw and unaffected.

As we spiraled up, we revolved through all points of the compass every four minutes or so. Views down the brown expanse of the Swath alternated with the panoramic storm front now blotting out the evening sun. The top fringes of the anvils were still afire with bent sunlight but their bases were hidden in indistinct blue-gray murk, cracked open here and there with ice-white lightning.

The car began to hum and keen as it pushed its way up into an eighty-mile-an-hour river of air. Bars of shadow began to flash down over us as we passed upward through a structure that resembled a six-sided ladder, with each rung a giant wing. For this part of the tower was not so much a structure in the conventional sense as a stationary glider. Or perhaps
kite
was the correct word for it.

The idea dated back to the very first months of the design process, when the engineers would work late into the evening tweaking their models and wake up in the morning to find long e-mails from Carl, timestamped at three
A
.
M
. The weight of the tower—what Carl called the Steel Bill—kept growing. Sometimes it would creep up stealthily, others make a sickening upward lurch. The problem was wind. The only way to win that fight—or so the engineers thought at first—was to make the tower beefier, so that the downwind legs could push back. Beefy steel catches more wind, increasing the force that's causing the problem in the first place. Not only that but it demands more steel below to support its weight. This feedback loop produced exponential jumps in the Steel Bill whenever anything got adjusted.

It wasn't long before someone pointed out that, from an aerodynamics standpoint, the tower was a horror show. Basically every strut and every cable was a cylinder—one of the draggiest shapes you can have. If we snapped an airfoil-shaped fairing around each of those cylinders, however, leaving it free to pivot into the wind, the drag went down by an order of magnitude and the Steel Bill dropped like—well, like a wrench dropped from the roof of a Top Click casino. And those fairings would have other benefits too; filled with lightweight insulation, they would reduce the thermal ups and downs caused by sunlight and direct exposure to space. The steel would live at a nice in-between temperature, not expanding and contracting so much, and brittleness would be less of a problem.

Everyone was feeling pretty satisfied with that solution when Carl raised an idea that, I suspect, some of the engineers had been hiding in their subsconscious and been afraid to voice: Why not fly the tower? If we were going to all the trouble to airfoilize everything, why not use the kind of airfoil that not only minimizes drag, but also produces lift?

Wings, in other words. The tower's lateral braces—the horizontal struts that joined its verticals together at regular intervals—would be enclosed in burnished-aluminum wings, actuated by motors that could change their angle of attack, trimming the airfoils to generate greater or lesser amounts of lift. When the jet stream played on the tower's upper reaches like a firehose slamming into a kid's Tinkertoy contraption—when, in other words, the maximum possible crush was being imposed on the downwind legs—the wings on that side would be trimmed so as to lift the whole thing upward and relieve the strain. Performing a kind of aerodynamic jujitsu, redirecting the very energy that would destroy the tower to actively hold it up. The tower would become half building, half kite.

© 2013, Haylee Bolinger / ASU

People's understandable skepticism about that scheme had accounted for the need to maintain a huge empty swath downwind of it. Many took a dim view of a building that wouldn't stand up without continuous control system feedback.

When we had boarded the helirail, I'd exchanged a bit of small talk with Joe, the engineer sitting across from me. Then he had unrolled a big display, apologizing for hogging so much table space, and spent most of the journey poring over a big three-dimensional technical drawing—the servomechanism he was going to take a look at. My eyes wandered to it, and I noticed he was studying me. When I caught him looking, he glanced away sheepishly. “Penny for your thoughts,” he mumbled.

“Oh, I spent years talking to concerned citizens in school gyms and senators in congressional hearings, selling them on this idea.”

“Which idea?”

“Exactly,” I said. “You've grown so used to it you don't even see it. I'm talking about the idea of flying the tower.”

He shrugged. “It was going to require active damping anyway, to control oscillations,” he said.

“ ‘Otherwise, every slot machine on the Top Click will have to come equipped with a barf bag dispenser.' Yeah, I used to make a living telling people that. ‘And from there it's a small step to using the same capability to help support the tower on those rare occasions when the jet stream is hitting it.' ”

Joe was nodding. “There's no going back,” he said. “It snuck up on us.”

“What did?”

He was stumped for an answer and smiled helplessly for a moment. Then threw up his hands. “All things cyber. Anything with code in it. Anything connected to the Internet. This stuff creeped into our lives and we got dependent on it. Take it away and the economy crashes—just like the tower. You gotta embrace it.”

“Exactly,” I said. “My most vociferous opponent was a senator who was being kept alive by a pacemaker with a hundred thousand lines of embedded code.”

Joe nodded. “When I was younger, I was frustrated that we weren't building big ambitious stuff anymore. Just writing dumb little apps. When Carl came along with the tower idea, and I understood it was going to have to fly—that it couldn't even stand up without embedded networks—the light went on. We had to stop building things for a generation, just to absorb—to get saturated with—the mentality that everything's networked, smart, active. Which enables us to build things that would have been impossible before, like you couldn't build skyscrapers before steel.”

I nodded at the drawing in front of him, which had been looping through a little animation as we talked. “What's new in your world?”

“Oh, doing some performance tweaks. Under certain conditions we get a rumble in the tower at about one-tenth of a hertz—you might have felt it. The servos can't quite respond fast enough to defeat it. We're developing a workaround. More for comfort than for safety. Might force us to replace some of the control units—it's not something you can do by sitting on the ground typing.” He nodded toward the luggage rack by the door where he had deposited a bright yellow plastic case, obviously heavy.

“That's okay,” I said, “sitting on the ground typing wasn't Carl's style.”

As if on cue the car dinged to warn us of impending deceleration. Joe began to collect his things. A minute later the car stopped in the middle of a sort of pod caught in the fretwork of the tower like a spider's egg case in a web. Lights came on, for it was deep dusk at this point. A tubular gangway osculated with the car's hatch, its pneumatic lips inflating to make an airtight seal. Air whooshed as a mild pressure difference was equalized, and my ears popped. The door dilated.

Joe nodded good-bye and lugged his bag case out into the station, which was a windowless bare metal tub. A minute later we were on our way again.

“I just wanted to introduce myself. Nicky Chu.” This was the astronomer en route to the Top Click. “Sorry, but I didn't realize who you were until I heard your story.”

“Have you spent much time up there, Nicky?”

“Just once, for orientation and safety briefings.”

“Well, you're always welcome in the bar. We're having a little private observance tonight, but even so, feel free to stop in.”

“I heard,” Nicky said, and, perhaps in spite of herself, glanced toward the messenger bag. “I only wish I could have shared one of these rides with the man before . . .”

The pause was awkward. I said what Carl would have said: “Before he was incinerated in a giant kiln? Indeed.”

A SENATOR HAD ONCE
described the Internet as a series of tubes, which didn't describe the Internet very well but was a pretty apt characterization of the Top Click. “Shirtsleeves environment” had been the magic buzzword. I knew as much because Carl had once banned the phrase from PowerPoint slides—shortly before he had banned PowerPoint altogether, and then attempted to ban all meetings. “The Cape of Good Hope is not a shirtsleeves environment. Neither was the American West. The moon. The people who go to such places have an intrepid spirit that we ought to respect. I hate patronizing them by reassuring them it's all going to be in a shirtsleeves environment!”

This sort of rant had terminated some awkward conversations with casino executives and hoteliers. I had donated a small but significant chunk of my life to getting him to admit that my job would be easier and the Top Click would be more valuable if it had a breathable atmosphere that wouldn't cause simultaneous frostbite and sunburn. Building one big dome on the top was too inflexible, and we had ended up with a mess of cylindrical and hemispherical structures (because those shapes withstood pressurization) joined by tubular skybridges. The Top Click helirail terminal was a hemispherical dome, already awe-inspiring in a Roman Pantheon way even though it was just a shell. Radiating from it were tubes leading to unfinished casinos, hotels, office buildings, and the institute that Carl and some of his billionaire friends had endowed. The observatory was there, and that was where Nicky went after saying good-bye and exchanging contact data with me. I shouldered the bag with Carl in it and hiked down a tube to a lobby where I changed to another tube that took me to the First Bar in Space. Frog, the video producer, walked with me; having slept most of the way through the ride, he was in the mood for a drink. I helped him tow his luggage: a hard-shell case full of video gear and a Day-Glo pink backpack containing the parafoil he intended to use for the return trip.

It was a pretty small party. Carl didn't have a lot of friends. Alexandra, his daughter from a long-dead marriage, had flown in from London with her boyfriend, Roger, who was some sort of whizbang financial geek from a posh family. Tess was there to greet me with a glass of wine and a kiss. Our kids were off at college and at camp. Carl's younger brother Dave, a college volleyball coach, had come in from Ohio. He was already a little tipsy. Maxine, the CEO of Carl's charitable foundation, and her husband, Tom, a filmmaker. We took over one corner of the bar, which was pretty quiet anyway. Marla the bartender and Hiram, one of the regulars, were watching a Canadian hockey game on the big screen. Hiram, a teetotalling Mohawk ironworker, was knocking back an organic smoothie. Frog grabbed a stool at the other end of the bar, ordered a Guinness, whipped out his phone, and launched into a series of “you'll never guess where I'm calling from!” calls.

It was lovely to be home in my bar with my wife. I was just a few sips into that glass of wine, starting to wish that all of these nice guests would go away and leave us alone, when heads began to turn and I noticed that we had been joined by a woman in a space suit.

Not totally. Nicky Chu had had the good manners to remove the helmet and tuck it under her arm. She said, “Sorry, but I think we all need to get under cover. Or
over
cover is more like it.”

“Over cover?” I asked.

Roger broke the long silence that followed. I don't know, maybe it was that British penchant for wordplay. “What's coming up from beneath?” he asked. “And how's it going to get through the floor?”

“High-energy gamma ray bursts,” Nicky said, “and some antimatter.”

“Antimatter?” several people said at once.

“I'll explain while you're donning,” she said, and started backing toward the exit. “I'm afraid you're going to have to put down your drinks.”

Donning, as most of us knew, meant putting on space suits. It was to living on the Top Click what the life vest drill was to an ocean cruise. Thanks to the space tourism industry, it had become pretty idiot proof. Even so, it did take a few minutes. They were stored in a vestibule, which for very sound reasons was a sealable windowless capsule. Nicky insisted we drag them out into an adjacent sky lobby—a future restaurant—with big west-facing windows. She wanted us to get a load of the storm.