Miranda

“So now, with all that aside, I’d like to make a few observations.”

Martin drops this line on her after a solid half-hour of unsettlingly minor and pleasant procedural blather. It’s not Martin’s job to keep track of the bureaucratic side of Miranda’s own, and yet this evening he’s put up an impressive simulation of interest, grilling her on how she’s handled the changes in job duties, the changes even say in job titles, since the reintegration. Of course she’s handled it all splendidly, up until the moment this evening when she said fuck it and went home. Martin, magnanimous, displays what seems like sincere appreciation for her work, nodding along as she babbles and he brews tea—fussily distinctive in all things, Martin’s a solid pu-erh man—for the both of them. On both sides of them, in the dim hobbit-house atmosphere of Martin’s living room, Martin’s computer displays, multiply hued but dominated by cool green, pulse in a soothing rhythm.

And now he would like to make a few observations.

“First,” Martin says, now standing and pacing slowly about the room, “I want to note something about the pattern of floorday length over the last few weeks.” He gestures to the display dedicated to this data set. “Notice anything?”

Miranda looks. The trend is obvious. “The days have been getting shorter, and the nights longer.”

“Yes,” Martin says. “And not in accordance with any surface seasonal pattern, either. This is an unprecedented change. It began weeks before the reintegration. Before that boy was brought to us, even. What do you make of that?” He looks at her and smiles like a man who’s just learned a funny new joke.

“It probably means that LUDWIG knew the reintegration was coming,” Miranda says. “Which is not surprising. We know he’s been talking to heteropneums. Probably the same ones that triggered the reintegration.”

Martin nods. “Exactly. The same heteropneums that have followed us here.”

It takes Miranda a moment to realize what Martin means, but he hasn’t gotten qualitatively ahead of her. He’s simply been willing to take a logical leap that she had been holding back on. “The ones in the chasm. That chasm in the same direction as the giant pneumatech pulse that the sub recorded, right when the reintegration happened.”

Martin makes a slight fidgety gesture to indicate assent. “Our computer’s new friends, our reintegrators, our saviors from the biggest hostile heteropneum ever witnessed, and now the only company we have over here on the other side. Whatever they are, there must be something quite unique about them, mustn’t there? I’d love to know what they’re all about.”

Miranda is not sure how to respond to that. Martin paces, faster now.

“Miranda, how familiar are you with Mohammed Salim’s later work?”

Miranda is not sure how to answer this either. In this context, “later work” has a definite meaning: Martin’s referring to the work Salim did in the last few years before his death, when he’d fully ceded the mantle of scientific progress to Cept and driven himself further and further into mystical and philosophical speculation. Miranda has skimmed bits of it.

“Not much, I guess. As much as I’ve needed to know for my job. It never seemed relevant to fighting heteropneums.”

“Ah, but in a world almost without heteropneums, perhaps a bit more relevant, no?”

“I suppose that is possible.”

“You know,” Martin says, turning to his bookshelf and looking for a specific volume, “I think Salim’s later work has been unfairly neglected. He became a mystic, yes, but he wrote on many topics, not just spiritual ones. For instance,” now pulling the slim bound publication from the shelf, “have you ever read his report on the potential applications of Extreme-Emotion Dynamics?”

Miranda can’t say she has. Martin flips open the report to one of its final pages and reads aloud:

“. . . to conclude, in other words, the insufficiencies of Pneuma Branching for large-scale energy production do not, at least in the limiting cases recently identified by Cept et al., appear to apply to energy production strategies based on Extreme-Emotion Dynamics.

“As has long been recognized, power production via branching is inherently limited by the ‘contamination’ effect by which forced branching distorts psychological experience in the causal vicinity. Thus, while branching may be suitable in sufficiently ‘isolated’ contexts, such as the ocean-floor facility on which EPRN has recently begun construction, it will never provide an effective means of power generation for mass-scale consumption.

“However, as has been shown above, the human pneuma is capable of ‘exotic’ states of extreme emotion—unfamiliar from everyday experience, but theoretically achievable and controllable—associated with the release of large amounts of coherent, spontaneously generated energy which could be easily captured by a properly configured receptor.”

Martin lowers the booklet. “What Salim envisioned was a power plant that used intense human emotion as its power source. It doesn’t entirely come across in this report—it’s clearer in his journals—but Salim was deeply worried that if pneuma science ever became public, these kinds of plants would be designed, and the earth’s poor would be convinced to offer themselves up as fuel sources. It would be defended as a rational economic transaction, beneficial to both parties. And soon the rich would derive endless clean energy from the routinized psychological torture of the poor. This was one of the visions that drove Salim deeper into mysticism, away from the reality he saw emerging.”

Miranda, exhausted, almost half-asleep now, struggles to produce the response she thinks Martin wants out of her. Luckily for her, it is not difficult.

“So you think that’s what’s happened. All of these legends about controlled storms and captured children. Salim’s vision has become a reality.”

“Yes,” says Martin. “It’s a hard thought to bear.” He says this with no less sprightliness than he has had all evening, indeed moving about the room even faster now, looking like a man who has never had trouble bearing a thought in his life.

“Tell me, Miranda. How do you bear thoughts like that? How do you deal with the weight of the world?”

“I don’t know,” says Miranda, truthfully. “Mostly I just bury myself in paperwork and then go home and get in bed and try not to think about things like that.” It’s supposed to be kind of a joke, but it doesn’t come off like one, and Miranda wonders why she thought it would.

Martin laughs. “I can’t object to that, if it works for you. Personally, though, I have a different way. I’m a religious man. Did you know that?”

“No.” She waits a moment, and then, too tired to be tactful: “which religion?”

“Oh, none of them. Or all of them. I love creeds and strictures, but I don’t bind myself to any of them. Most of all I like late Salim. The usual word is that he became a Sufi, but he’s so much more than that.”

Martin pauses.

“But ultimately it comes down to this, Miranda. I’m a religious man because I don’t believe in this.” He walks up to the side table where their cups of pu-erh sit and picks them both up, one in each hand. “I think that there is something more than these things, something directing us. I do not know if it likes us or not. It may hate us. But ultimately, there is more to this world than you or I and our cups of tea.” And he opens his hands and the two cups of tea fall to the floor and shatter, pouring tea all over the carpet.

“That’s all for now, Miranda,” he says, pacing and gesturing theatrically, still grinning his usual grin but with a slight twist at the edges. Miranda gets up to leave, and as she is walking out, she thinks she hears Martin say:

“Enjoy Maria while you can.”

But this would make so little sense that she puts it out of her tired mind and stumbles off toward the elevator, determined now merely to make it to her bed.