sight of it.
There were over a thousand sandstone ziggurats in the city, and each one was enormous. As the Subject wound his way downward—his sleeping chamber was high up this particular structure—Marguerite’s view was panoramic. The towers were all very similar, nautilus-shell spires coiling upward from red tiled plazas, the industrial structures distinguished by the smokestacks erupting from their peaks and the streams of light or dark smoke dispersing in the still air. All over the city, freshly wakened natives filled the external ways and crowded the open spaces. The sun, rapidly rising, sent fingers of yellow light down the east-facing canyons. Beyond the city Marguerite glimpsed irrigated agricultural lands; beyond that, brown scrubland and a horizon jagged with distant mountains. (And if she closed her eyes she could see the afterimage lingering in contrary colors as if unmediated by a billion dollars’ worth of incomprehensible technology, as if she were actually there, breathing the thin atmosphere, fine dust burning her nostrils.)
Subject reached ground level, walked on through parallel bands of light and shadow to the industrial tower where he spent his days.
Marguerite watched, ignoring her desk work. She was not a primary viewer nor was it likely she would notice anything pertinent that the five focal committees had missed. Her job was to integrate their observations, not to make her own. But that could wait at least until after lunch. The security shutdown meant that exterior agencies couldn’t read her reports in any case. She was free to watch.
Free, if she wanted, to dream.
She grabbed lunch at the Plaza’s west-wing staff cafeteria. Ray wasn’t there, but she caught a glimpse of his assistant Sue Sampel picking up coffee at the checkout. Marguerite had met Sue only once or twice but felt genuinely sorry for her. She knew how Ray treated his employees. Even back at Crossbank, Ray’s staff had cycled pretty quickly. Sue had probably already applied for a transfer. Or soon would. Marguerite waved; Sue absently nodded back.
After lunch Marguerite buckled down to her paperwork. She vetted a particularly interesting report from a Physiology team leader who had put a thousand hours of video through a graphics processor, marking the motile parts of Subject’s body and correlating its changes with time of day and situation. This approach had yielded surprising amounts of hard data, which would need to go out to all the other divisions in a high-priority FYI bulletin. She’d have to compose it herself, with input from Bob Corso and Felice Kawakami of Physiology whenever they got back from the Cancun conference… a bullet-point summary, she supposed, with hints for follow-up, keeping it as succinct as possible so the various team bosses wouldn’t bitch about the added infoload.
She kept Subject on the wall panel so she could look up from her work and see the Subject doing his. Subject worked in what was almost certainly a factory. He stood at a pedestal in a vast enclosed space under a spotlight that illuminated his station. Similar beams of light demarked similar aboriginals, hundreds of them, arrayed behind him like phosphorescent pillars in a gloomy cavern. Subject took modular parts (cylindrical devices as yet unidentified) from a bin at the side of the pillar and inserted them into prepunched disks. The disks rose from a chamber in his pedestal on an elevated platform and subsided again once he had completed them. The cycle repeated every ten minutes or so. To call it monotonous, Marguerite thought, was pushing the limits of understatement.
But something had caught her attention.
Because the Subject was more or less stationary, the virtual camera had rotated to image him head-on. She could see Subject’s face, stark in the overhead light. If you could call it a face. People had called it “horrifying,” but it wasn’t, of course; only intensely unfamiliar. Shocking at first
There were over a thousand sandstone ziggurats in the city, and each one was enormous. As the Subject wound his way downward—his sleeping chamber was high up this particular structure—Marguerite’s view was panoramic. The towers were all very similar, nautilus-shell spires coiling upward from red tiled plazas, the industrial structures distinguished by the smokestacks erupting from their peaks and the streams of light or dark smoke dispersing in the still air. All over the city, freshly wakened natives filled the external ways and crowded the open spaces. The sun, rapidly rising, sent fingers of yellow light down the east-facing canyons. Beyond the city Marguerite glimpsed irrigated agricultural lands; beyond that, brown scrubland and a horizon jagged with distant mountains. (And if she closed her eyes she could see the afterimage lingering in contrary colors as if unmediated by a billion dollars’ worth of incomprehensible technology, as if she were actually there, breathing the thin atmosphere, fine dust burning her nostrils.)
Subject reached ground level, walked on through parallel bands of light and shadow to the industrial tower where he spent his days.
Marguerite watched, ignoring her desk work. She was not a primary viewer nor was it likely she would notice anything pertinent that the five focal committees had missed. Her job was to integrate their observations, not to make her own. But that could wait at least until after lunch. The security shutdown meant that exterior agencies couldn’t read her reports in any case. She was free to watch.
Free, if she wanted, to dream.
She grabbed lunch at the Plaza’s west-wing staff cafeteria. Ray wasn’t there, but she caught a glimpse of his assistant Sue Sampel picking up coffee at the checkout. Marguerite had met Sue only once or twice but felt genuinely sorry for her. She knew how Ray treated his employees. Even back at Crossbank, Ray’s staff had cycled pretty quickly. Sue had probably already applied for a transfer. Or soon would. Marguerite waved; Sue absently nodded back.
After lunch Marguerite buckled down to her paperwork. She vetted a particularly interesting report from a Physiology team leader who had put a thousand hours of video through a graphics processor, marking the motile parts of Subject’s body and correlating its changes with time of day and situation. This approach had yielded surprising amounts of hard data, which would need to go out to all the other divisions in a high-priority FYI bulletin. She’d have to compose it herself, with input from Bob Corso and Felice Kawakami of Physiology whenever they got back from the Cancun conference… a bullet-point summary, she supposed, with hints for follow-up, keeping it as succinct as possible so the various team bosses wouldn’t bitch about the added infoload.
She kept Subject on the wall panel so she could look up from her work and see the Subject doing his. Subject worked in what was almost certainly a factory. He stood at a pedestal in a vast enclosed space under a spotlight that illuminated his station. Similar beams of light demarked similar aboriginals, hundreds of them, arrayed behind him like phosphorescent pillars in a gloomy cavern. Subject took modular parts (cylindrical devices as yet unidentified) from a bin at the side of the pillar and inserted them into prepunched disks. The disks rose from a chamber in his pedestal on an elevated platform and subsided again once he had completed them. The cycle repeated every ten minutes or so. To call it monotonous, Marguerite thought, was pushing the limits of understatement.
But something had caught her attention.
Because the Subject was more or less stationary, the virtual camera had rotated to image him head-on. She could see Subject’s face, stark in the overhead light. If you could call it a face. People had called it “horrifying,” but it wasn’t, of course; only intensely unfamiliar. Shocking at first
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