Miranda

It’s early floornight and Miranda is home alone doing all she can to relax. She left the office early, filled with a sense of indifference about it all: how does one decide the value of filing paperwork when the entire world has just shifted? All the organization in the world is not going to help the Sphere now. A composed, inspiring leader might help it, and Miranda has not been feeling very composed or inspiring lately. Fuck the office. Get her head together, and maybe then she can do her job, the job that matters.

So here she is, sitting on her big plush couch in her big empty living room, with her Xanax and her gin. Behold, ladies and gentlemen: your leader. The EPRN Chief of Staff.

(The actual head of EPRN, Miranda’s boss, lives in the Sphere but is never seen or heard from directly. Everyone knows that this is how EPRN works; everyone knows that Miranda reports to someone else, but that person’s existence is never discussed. Miranda often feels that she is a sort of figurehead, but she’s the closest thing to a leader anyone can see.)

As she burrows into her second gin and tonic Miranda’s thoughts shift further and further away from administrative matters of any sort and further toward the topic that her thoughts have been edging around all day: what to do about Maria. What to feel about Maria.

This has been, perhaps unexpectedly (but then again maybe not so unexpectedly) one of the most direct ways in which the reintegration has changed Miranda’s life. She has been in the Sphere for three years, give or take. The loss of the world outside does not hit her very hard. Her parents are gone, but she never talked to them anyway. Her friends on the surface mostly grew more and more distant as she got more deeply involved in the intelligence community; the ones that didn’t were mostly from the intelligence community and followed her in her absorption into the strange new beast that was EPRN—a new international organization formed hastily in the wake of Cept and Salim’s discoveries—and ultimately followed her here, to the Sphere. She has lost very little.

But the loss has made her face something she has been quite successfully looking away from for many months now. She had always imagined her time in the Sphere, even her time in intelligence, as somehow having an end—and that end ushering in an age when maybe even she, rigid and blunt workaholic that she was, might be able to lose herself in something like . . . well, romance. It couldn’t happen in the Sphere, of course. Here everything was pure focus and discipline and naming those damn heteropneums if the paperwork said she had to name them.

(She had known, on some level, that she was kidding herself about this: that there was no way to push ordinary human concerns out of her life, even when she had jumped at the chance to work at the literal bottom of the ocean because she had thought it offered the opportunity to do just that. Like having a cabin on the moon, away from the whirling chaos of human life. But of course down here one needs other people even more. The ordinary human mind simply can’t be productive without a base amount of human contact. She imagines Ratio explaining this to her in a torrent of jargon, and winces and then laughs.)

But now, near the bottom of G&T #2, she is face-to-face with what she really knew all along anyway: that the people in the Sphere are all she has. She has heard James’ reports from the surface. It is not clear if civilization remains. There are more continents to check, of course—an entire globe to check—but the first reports are not promising. There are roving bands of strange children, and what kind of civilization would tolerate that?

Here are some relevant statistics. The population of the Sphere is about 75% male, and Miranda is not interested in men. Miranda is, G&T #2 lets her admit clearly to herself, very interested in Maria N., and Maria N. displays what look like signs of interest in her. But, for one thing, Maria N. is 21 years old and Miranda is 32. Those are not numbers that make Miranda feel good about herself, even with the moral support of G&T #2. Maria is a grown woman, not a child—but she’s a grown woman who’s had months, maybe years of her life stolen from her by the duty of constant branching.

And what’s more, she is a crucial asset to the Sphere. Even now, though, in a world seemingly without heteropneums? But who knows when they’ll need a weapon in this new world? The last thing the Sphere needs now is any kind of disruption of what it’s always considered its proudest technical capability, the sheer power of a decomposed Maria. The second-to-last thing the Sphere needs now is a scandal, a controversial involvement between its Chief of Staff and its greatest pilot. But then on the other hand the Chief of Staff in question is on the end of her tether and it’s not clear how much longer she can be a Chief of Staff if she tries to be nothing else.

And what does Maria need in all of this? A whole other complicating factor.

Miranda picks up G&T #2 and drains it. As if by cause and effect—the chaos of human life intruding to make sure she doesn’t get too relaxed—her cell phone beeps, indicating a new email. Before going home she had told her cell phone not to beep unless she got an email from a high-priority address. There aren’t many high-priority addresses. Oh no.

Miranda picks up the phone and, yes, it’s what she expected:

Martin D. Hi Miranda! Meeting now

Here we go again.

•

The Sphere is indeed a sphere. This can be easy to forget, because the bottom half of it is buried in the ocean floor. If you could see it from the outside, it would look like a hemispherical dome rising from the ground. But that dome has a bottom half.

Most of it is occupied by pneumatic machinery: transformers that take in the pneuma energy captured from branchings and reintegrations and convert it into ordinary, physical energy that can power your computer or your floor lamp. These transformers are isolated, and insulated, from the inhabited parts of the Sphere because they produce enough Boltzmen to drive anyone insane from more than occasional exposure. For the most part, only engineers and technicians visit the bottom half, and only when something goes wrong.

The bottom half has one other purpose, and that is providing full-time housing for Martin, Miranda’s boss, the Chairman of EPRN.

It is a long way down. The elevator takes a full two minutes to descend. Miranda tries her hardest to think about nothing at all, and the downers humming in her bloodstream make this easier than she’d expected.

The elevator’s proximity to the bottom can be judged by the slow intensifying of the characteristic feeling associated with Martin’s quarters. The transformers down here are heavily insulated, but something still gets through. It’s not the usual Boltzman feeling, of being suddenly and transiently invaded by some distinct mental gestalt. It’s more like a constant background hum of presence. One never feels like one is alone down here. There is always someone else—an unspecified, hovering someone else, or someones else, there at the edge of perception, vanishing the moment you try to pay attention to them.

The elevator doors open. Miranda sees a narrow, metallic corridor stretching before her. She steps forward and feels an intense heat. This is a sign to stop for a moment. The moment passes and she steps forward again, and now a wind blows from unseen holes in the walls and whips at her clothing, briskly, bracingly. She waits for a moment, taking in this atmosphere, and steps forward again.

This is one of Martin’s many eccentricities. One has to pass through these moments of heat and wind before entering his domain.

She reaches the door at the end of the corridor and steps through. She is greeted with the inimitable atmosphere of Martin’s living room, a sort of tower, dimly and cozily lit, with a set of plush old armchairs in its center. Around the armchairs is a circular bookshelf stuffed with old books. The walls are lacquered wood with several inset TV screens, displaying various kinds of data. One, as always, shows the length of the last 30 floordays and floornights. The concept of variable-length days holds some special fascination for Martin, as do many things.

Martin, androgynously pretty, wreathed in short shaggy blond hair, is seated reading a book on one of his expansive green armchairs. He stands up immediately, briskly, and strides forward to meet her, a big smile on his face. He is, as usual, dressed in a suit with a carnation boutonnière. He looks ridiculous.

“Miranda! Come, sit down,” he says, motioning to an armchair.

Martin is a young man. No one knows how young, but younger than 30, and probably more like 24 or 25. He is exuberant, eccentric, ingratiating, whimsical, angelically pretty, and somehow the most important person in EPRN, the organization to which Miranda has devoted the last three years of her life and still does not feel she understands. She does not know where he comes from, or how he got here, or why he does not show his face. But when he calls, she answers.

“We have a lot to talk about, Miranda,” he says, and he smiles as he always smiles, without any apparent sarcasm or malice. Martin’s life, as he presents it, is a sequence of occasions for joy.

Miranda is terrified of him.

She sits.