From a High Perch (original short story)
Posted: 2007-05-28 01:18am
This piece took entirely too long to gather itself together, but any feedback is welcome.
----
"From a High Perch"
Never before have I felt so guilty.
Sitting atop this perch for so long, it feels as if I’ve watched everything happen. Some still look back on the childish days of living in suburbia as a sort of grand old golden age, but any forward-looking mind chalks that up to lame sentimentality. We never – collectively or individually – knew any kind of maturity back then. Those comfortable years of living in isolated mini-worlds of our own did nothing to develop us, with the possible exception of ever more creative ways to escape the meaningless constructs we’d built up around ourselves.
One recollection of those days comes to mind – always and repeatedly. It was a humid afternoon in 2013, only a few weeks after the start of a new school year – my last year of high school. I’m probably the only conscientious fool who still remembers the events of perhaps two or three minutes out of that class period.
Mr. Langhben trotted around the aisle space between desks, gesturing half-crazily while lecturing on whatever topic we were covering that day. I’d never been indifferent to the subject of economics, but the man just struck me as one of those countless people who didn’t ‘get it.’ After some years and some series of changes, those people didn’t shock me anymore.
“ … so what exactly is the point in pouring billions of dollars of funding into such projects?” He paused, clearly satisfied with his artfully used rhetorical questions. Langhben arched his eyebrows, leaning back against his desk. “Oh, fans of NASA will love to tell you about the so-called ‘trickle-down benefits’ of huge investments like the Apollo missions, but… how much of that is actually true?” We must have been talking about cost-benefit analysis that day. Space exploration. The matter roused my interest, as per usual.
“Whenever you have to decide on funding huge projects, you’ve got to give them a huge amount of consideration. Am I right?” The class gave its approval in nods and mumbles. I looked up from some idle doodling on a sheet of lined paper.
“The fact of the matter is,” he went on, “many people let others do that consideration work for them. Again, I’m talking about the average taxpayer. When those top research experts come up in front of Congress to sell their latest space-age adventure toy… very few people have the mind to question why we need to spend billions of dollars on it. Those who do ask the obvious question usually just get brushed aside as being ‘uninspired’ or ‘behind the curve’ – you’ve all heard it before.”
By that time I’d been looking intently at Mr. Langhben and half the class was looking at me. I had a reputation for loving every bit of progress made toward an orbital lift system – I eagerly kept tabs on every one of NASA’s developments.
And something about those few minutes of sidetracked discussion continues to eat away at me. Mr. Langhben went on and on about how we can’t spare such precious taxpayer money on what he loved to call “high-tech toys.” He leveraged the fact that he had a teaching job, shamelessly, to change the minds of his students forever. I knew he was wrong. I said nothing.
Before the whole propped-up suburban life came crashing down around us, I prided myself in knowing that it was going to happen. Unlike the oblivious crowds around me I had seen that a horrible mess would arrive at our doorstep soon enough. That became my own little source of arrogance. In hindsight it’s quite obvious; sensing your balance slipping and feeling the fall are entirely different matters.
First they moved out of the low-density, low-soul housing subdivisions in droves – and yes, I flocked along with the crowd. Millions could no longer afford to burn the cheap gallons of fuel to float back and forth between Living Room Land and Office Land every day. It happened all because those cheap gallons stopped coming cheap. Bulging and straining with the new influx, the metropolitan havens we built with cheap oil cried out through the news and personal anecdotes. World traveled fast about the sewer backups in New York, Chicago, L.A. – even San Francisco. It sounded like something out of early-industrial-revolution Britain. The cities got noisier, filthier, more dangerous, yet I still managed to avoid the thick of the mess. I held onto a job taking orders in that crowded café in Oakland earning half the minimum wage. So much for my master’s degree.
I lucked out – the uncountable multitude of people left without a job or any enjoyment to satisfy them kept on swelling and hemorrhaging into the inner cities. And how could they possibly find happiness in the cities? Their happiness depended on reality TV, the mall with all its consumer comforts, their cars. The energy-starved concrete jungle offered them a definite maybe on tomorrow’s food and a place to go to the bathroom at best. That was hell.
Of course, there was hell – and then there was Hell. Sensational news of the Maldives islands finally drowning under rising water levels will always stay vivid in my memory. There were millions in the third-world countries who literally ran to high ground, all thanks to the invisible consequences of our three-car families. I’ve been told on and off that Hell got particularly nasty. Hell still suffers just like hell did, and whenever a bursting-at-the-seams family from the Indian coast or the Indonesian lowlands comes up here to the station, I try to hear their story.
You might be left to wonder, what did I do throughout all of this? Day-to-day details remain imprinted in my mind – I even recall stealing a few ration coupons to make ends meet – but there’s only one overriding memory about those putrid years which stays with me.
I said nothing.
Oh, I had all the excuses lined up. Graduating with an anthropology degree, I held onto this haphazard notion of really, earnestly having some kind of potential. And if only, I consoled myself, if only this stupid peak oil crash had never happened and if only the economy had held itself up a few years longer, I could have made a world of difference by now.
Why does this past attitude bother me now, almost twenty years after the worst of the Oil Depression ended? Perhaps I’m the only humanities major who does this, but I draw deep answers – inspiration, even – from numbers.
Allow me to explain. Take a palm-sized number, six for instance. Square it, and you’ll get thirty-six. That’s hardly significant. Square that again, and you’ll get one thousand two hundred ninety-six. Then comes one million six hundred seventy-nine thousand six hundred sixteen – the beginnings of your classical geometric curve. Throughout my university days I carried this strange infatuation with the geometric curve. It seemed to follow that the progress of mankind isn’t linear – we exploded. We rushed out of Olduvai Gorge after evolving, boomed in numbers throughout Eurasia, kicked off a whole new order of change with the industrial revolution – and then the information age. Every small bit of change in the beginning ends up making such a cosmic difference later on. And marveling at that notion went far deeper than my curiosity for anthropology. Change had happened this way for eternities in the past – and without a shred of doubt I became convinced that it would so continue for an unknowable eternity to come.
Perhaps I spent too much time drinking in the sight of the awe-inspiring flames to realize that some very valuable property was burning. I must force myself to admit, although it’s difficult even now, that I somehow came to treat the whole suffering world as some sort of a case study. Mentally gaping at what threatened to become the collapse of industrial civilization, I simply sat there and took notes. What was I doing? Where was my mind?
Those last two questions I’ve only begun to earnestly ask myself in the past few days. There’s a tranquil quietness up here in the orbital station which I’ve enjoyed since day one of this job. Now that I consider it, I haven’t been down on the Earth’s surface in nearly two years.
The first space elevator went into service in the spring of 2041, carrying a small industrial capacity up into orbit. They promptly started mining nearby asteroids in part with the blessings and funding from NASA. Massive hydroponics farms began to pop up in Earth-orbit at a dizzying speed, helping to alleviate some of the planet-side food shortage problems. By the end of that decade, millions of people were living in space and it seemed as if half the shipping in the universe all rode up and down that thin carbon-fiber tether stretching from Earth’s equator up into high orbit.
Even amidst all this, I still hadn’t woken up.
My most striking memory of coming up to this orbital station for the first time? The fact that I traveled alone. Even back at the very dawn of mass space travel, small families, couples, and friends – they all sat in close proximity inside the elevator climbers, slowly rumbling up toward new lives. Some were already slated for engineering jobs, some went up in hopes of managing part of a hydro-farm, and many simply wanted to escape the hell and political chaos on the home planet’s surface. Slowly crawling up toward my new position in a job consultancy firm, I already had the vague concern that I was only along for the ride. What difference could I possibly make?
I ought to have known better than to invoke a self-fulfilling prophecy. My days began with that usual spurt of exhilaration which never fails to accompany the start of a new job. That, in time, faded, and I fell into a quiet routine along with all my coworkers. Clients came up to our firm on an occasional basis. I seemed to earn recognition and title in Diamond’s Consulting by breathing.
About those numbers: around this time I began to realize that even the smallest difference in the beginning really does hold enormous potential. Take our original starting number of six, and add one hundred-thousandth to it. This is nothing at first. But when squared three times in a row, our end product becomes one million six hundred seventy-nine thousand six-hundred… and thirty-eight. Twenty-two greater than when we started with a simple six. Somehow, the concept that one one-hundred-thousandth could – no, ought to – make such a divergence struck within me a deep dread. As if there had been a colossal and important task which lay forgotten. For God’s sake, twenty-two is nearly four times the starting value of six. I mentally trembled at the thought of such worlds of difference. Could those have been my descendants? Am I that lazy tribal member doing less than his share of work while the population of Olduvai Gorge begins to fan out, to reach its potential and explode?
I quietly float through another week, occasionally doing my bare minimum of research to meet a client’s needs. Word comes from my supervisor one day that some breakthroughs have been made in life extension technology. Good news, you old workhorse – Diamond’s Consulting gets a trial batch of the vaccines! You up for it? C’mon, someone’s got to be the guinea pig in clinical trials like this. No, no, it’s not the physical risk that bothers me. Yes, I’m up for it.
But do I deserve to live forever?
----
"From a High Perch"
Never before have I felt so guilty.
Sitting atop this perch for so long, it feels as if I’ve watched everything happen. Some still look back on the childish days of living in suburbia as a sort of grand old golden age, but any forward-looking mind chalks that up to lame sentimentality. We never – collectively or individually – knew any kind of maturity back then. Those comfortable years of living in isolated mini-worlds of our own did nothing to develop us, with the possible exception of ever more creative ways to escape the meaningless constructs we’d built up around ourselves.
One recollection of those days comes to mind – always and repeatedly. It was a humid afternoon in 2013, only a few weeks after the start of a new school year – my last year of high school. I’m probably the only conscientious fool who still remembers the events of perhaps two or three minutes out of that class period.
Mr. Langhben trotted around the aisle space between desks, gesturing half-crazily while lecturing on whatever topic we were covering that day. I’d never been indifferent to the subject of economics, but the man just struck me as one of those countless people who didn’t ‘get it.’ After some years and some series of changes, those people didn’t shock me anymore.
“ … so what exactly is the point in pouring billions of dollars of funding into such projects?” He paused, clearly satisfied with his artfully used rhetorical questions. Langhben arched his eyebrows, leaning back against his desk. “Oh, fans of NASA will love to tell you about the so-called ‘trickle-down benefits’ of huge investments like the Apollo missions, but… how much of that is actually true?” We must have been talking about cost-benefit analysis that day. Space exploration. The matter roused my interest, as per usual.
“Whenever you have to decide on funding huge projects, you’ve got to give them a huge amount of consideration. Am I right?” The class gave its approval in nods and mumbles. I looked up from some idle doodling on a sheet of lined paper.
“The fact of the matter is,” he went on, “many people let others do that consideration work for them. Again, I’m talking about the average taxpayer. When those top research experts come up in front of Congress to sell their latest space-age adventure toy… very few people have the mind to question why we need to spend billions of dollars on it. Those who do ask the obvious question usually just get brushed aside as being ‘uninspired’ or ‘behind the curve’ – you’ve all heard it before.”
By that time I’d been looking intently at Mr. Langhben and half the class was looking at me. I had a reputation for loving every bit of progress made toward an orbital lift system – I eagerly kept tabs on every one of NASA’s developments.
And something about those few minutes of sidetracked discussion continues to eat away at me. Mr. Langhben went on and on about how we can’t spare such precious taxpayer money on what he loved to call “high-tech toys.” He leveraged the fact that he had a teaching job, shamelessly, to change the minds of his students forever. I knew he was wrong. I said nothing.
Before the whole propped-up suburban life came crashing down around us, I prided myself in knowing that it was going to happen. Unlike the oblivious crowds around me I had seen that a horrible mess would arrive at our doorstep soon enough. That became my own little source of arrogance. In hindsight it’s quite obvious; sensing your balance slipping and feeling the fall are entirely different matters.
First they moved out of the low-density, low-soul housing subdivisions in droves – and yes, I flocked along with the crowd. Millions could no longer afford to burn the cheap gallons of fuel to float back and forth between Living Room Land and Office Land every day. It happened all because those cheap gallons stopped coming cheap. Bulging and straining with the new influx, the metropolitan havens we built with cheap oil cried out through the news and personal anecdotes. World traveled fast about the sewer backups in New York, Chicago, L.A. – even San Francisco. It sounded like something out of early-industrial-revolution Britain. The cities got noisier, filthier, more dangerous, yet I still managed to avoid the thick of the mess. I held onto a job taking orders in that crowded café in Oakland earning half the minimum wage. So much for my master’s degree.
I lucked out – the uncountable multitude of people left without a job or any enjoyment to satisfy them kept on swelling and hemorrhaging into the inner cities. And how could they possibly find happiness in the cities? Their happiness depended on reality TV, the mall with all its consumer comforts, their cars. The energy-starved concrete jungle offered them a definite maybe on tomorrow’s food and a place to go to the bathroom at best. That was hell.
Of course, there was hell – and then there was Hell. Sensational news of the Maldives islands finally drowning under rising water levels will always stay vivid in my memory. There were millions in the third-world countries who literally ran to high ground, all thanks to the invisible consequences of our three-car families. I’ve been told on and off that Hell got particularly nasty. Hell still suffers just like hell did, and whenever a bursting-at-the-seams family from the Indian coast or the Indonesian lowlands comes up here to the station, I try to hear their story.
You might be left to wonder, what did I do throughout all of this? Day-to-day details remain imprinted in my mind – I even recall stealing a few ration coupons to make ends meet – but there’s only one overriding memory about those putrid years which stays with me.
I said nothing.
Oh, I had all the excuses lined up. Graduating with an anthropology degree, I held onto this haphazard notion of really, earnestly having some kind of potential. And if only, I consoled myself, if only this stupid peak oil crash had never happened and if only the economy had held itself up a few years longer, I could have made a world of difference by now.
Why does this past attitude bother me now, almost twenty years after the worst of the Oil Depression ended? Perhaps I’m the only humanities major who does this, but I draw deep answers – inspiration, even – from numbers.
Allow me to explain. Take a palm-sized number, six for instance. Square it, and you’ll get thirty-six. That’s hardly significant. Square that again, and you’ll get one thousand two hundred ninety-six. Then comes one million six hundred seventy-nine thousand six hundred sixteen – the beginnings of your classical geometric curve. Throughout my university days I carried this strange infatuation with the geometric curve. It seemed to follow that the progress of mankind isn’t linear – we exploded. We rushed out of Olduvai Gorge after evolving, boomed in numbers throughout Eurasia, kicked off a whole new order of change with the industrial revolution – and then the information age. Every small bit of change in the beginning ends up making such a cosmic difference later on. And marveling at that notion went far deeper than my curiosity for anthropology. Change had happened this way for eternities in the past – and without a shred of doubt I became convinced that it would so continue for an unknowable eternity to come.
Perhaps I spent too much time drinking in the sight of the awe-inspiring flames to realize that some very valuable property was burning. I must force myself to admit, although it’s difficult even now, that I somehow came to treat the whole suffering world as some sort of a case study. Mentally gaping at what threatened to become the collapse of industrial civilization, I simply sat there and took notes. What was I doing? Where was my mind?
Those last two questions I’ve only begun to earnestly ask myself in the past few days. There’s a tranquil quietness up here in the orbital station which I’ve enjoyed since day one of this job. Now that I consider it, I haven’t been down on the Earth’s surface in nearly two years.
The first space elevator went into service in the spring of 2041, carrying a small industrial capacity up into orbit. They promptly started mining nearby asteroids in part with the blessings and funding from NASA. Massive hydroponics farms began to pop up in Earth-orbit at a dizzying speed, helping to alleviate some of the planet-side food shortage problems. By the end of that decade, millions of people were living in space and it seemed as if half the shipping in the universe all rode up and down that thin carbon-fiber tether stretching from Earth’s equator up into high orbit.
Even amidst all this, I still hadn’t woken up.
My most striking memory of coming up to this orbital station for the first time? The fact that I traveled alone. Even back at the very dawn of mass space travel, small families, couples, and friends – they all sat in close proximity inside the elevator climbers, slowly rumbling up toward new lives. Some were already slated for engineering jobs, some went up in hopes of managing part of a hydro-farm, and many simply wanted to escape the hell and political chaos on the home planet’s surface. Slowly crawling up toward my new position in a job consultancy firm, I already had the vague concern that I was only along for the ride. What difference could I possibly make?
I ought to have known better than to invoke a self-fulfilling prophecy. My days began with that usual spurt of exhilaration which never fails to accompany the start of a new job. That, in time, faded, and I fell into a quiet routine along with all my coworkers. Clients came up to our firm on an occasional basis. I seemed to earn recognition and title in Diamond’s Consulting by breathing.
About those numbers: around this time I began to realize that even the smallest difference in the beginning really does hold enormous potential. Take our original starting number of six, and add one hundred-thousandth to it. This is nothing at first. But when squared three times in a row, our end product becomes one million six hundred seventy-nine thousand six-hundred… and thirty-eight. Twenty-two greater than when we started with a simple six. Somehow, the concept that one one-hundred-thousandth could – no, ought to – make such a divergence struck within me a deep dread. As if there had been a colossal and important task which lay forgotten. For God’s sake, twenty-two is nearly four times the starting value of six. I mentally trembled at the thought of such worlds of difference. Could those have been my descendants? Am I that lazy tribal member doing less than his share of work while the population of Olduvai Gorge begins to fan out, to reach its potential and explode?
I quietly float through another week, occasionally doing my bare minimum of research to meet a client’s needs. Word comes from my supervisor one day that some breakthroughs have been made in life extension technology. Good news, you old workhorse – Diamond’s Consulting gets a trial batch of the vaccines! You up for it? C’mon, someone’s got to be the guinea pig in clinical trials like this. No, no, it’s not the physical risk that bothers me. Yes, I’m up for it.
But do I deserve to live forever?