Foreword for LessWrong readers: There is no (explicit) rationality in this piece. There is no biting allegory or even any particular relevance to our world today. If you squint, you may be able to see some light allusion to the situation we collectively find ourselves in. This was primarily a writing exercise in mood and description and yielding to forces beyond one's control, a la this old meme about a doomed rat. No pun intended.
For most gate-bound travelers passing through Leadside Station—often city-types, unfamiliar with pockmarked terrain and the pestering tenacity of regolith—the most striking sign of departure was simply the lowness of the Earth in the sky. Here the planet typically rested a few slight degrees above the horizon, giving its best impression of setting at the end of the day. In reality, of course, the great orb had tidally pinned its satellite companion eons ago; so, viewed from Leadside, the larger’s apparent motion against the celestial sphere amounted to little more than a lazy Lissajous curve, which it traced lunation after lunation, occasionally skimming the distant lip of Eddington crater, threatening to dip in, but never quite committing to the plunge.
As with anywhere on the near hemi, the conversational role vacated by idle weather chat had here been inhabited by a varied taxonomy of platitudes concerning the blue marble’s phases. Wistful immigrant uncles waxed poetic for the full disk, peering past elongated shadows for glimpses of homes left behind. (“Y’see that peninsula there? That’s Alaska. Most beautiful place you’re likely to see… and not too much colder’n here, haw-haw.”) Native-born zealots favored the symbolism of a new day’s early arch—or otherwise the sneering crescent of a world turned upside down. Some relished the solitude of early dawn, when the Earth was new and it seemed the whole planet slept under the shadow of night.
But here at Leadside, all the ordinary clichés wore a shade of melancholy as the tiny terminal’s transient visitors bade farewell to home.
It was with this sense of heaviness that Abdullah Lau now stared out towards the horizon, through the kinks in the fused quartz geodesic, and beheld in the distance his own home. Dr. Lau had arrived just around regional noon; the expanse of powdered basalt that stretched before him was devoid of contour, save for those rare angles where microscopic flecks of iron in the rock glimmered under stark light. With the Sun high overhead, Luna and the half-shaded Earth seemed a pair of floating bobbers, strung to parallel lines, suspended above infinite deep. Locals said this time of the lune made you feel like you could leap off the Moon’s edge and fall and fall and fall, spinning out and out and out…
Lau, for his part, soon would. He checked his hud: fifteen minutes until the transfer. He wasn’t particularly worried about missing the connecting arc; little Leadside only had two gates, and every passenger in the terminal had arrived through one intending to depart via the other. So as the second mass driver reeled up and his fellow travelers shuffled through the boarding maze, the doctor stood still and gazed a while longer at the not-setting planet.
Abdullah had been a reader since he could read. His parents did their best to furnish him with material—their little village was only home to so many books. By the age of six, he had all but exhausted its supply; lacking the means to acquire more (and by then old enough to take matters into his own hands), little Lau sought out alternatives. Though he never dared to steal under the watchful eyes of the market vendors, once a week, a lone newsman presented an opportunity. The traveler came into town Sundays bearing papers from nearby cities; on lucky weeks—during some national tragedy or scandal—a crowd would form around the stand, opining loudly about the gravity of the goings-on. At the scene’s fever pitch, the boy would nick the top paper from the cart and run off to a shaded alley to soak in current events and sports and fashion.
He carried on like this for some months… until one day the newsman caught him trying to slip a rumpled periodical back onto the stack. In one swift motion, the man snatched it from his hands, rolled it up, smacked the boy across the forehead, and promptly put a stop to the scheme.
One morning, shortly before Abdullah’s tenth birthday, the rumble of a Toyota engine heralded the arrival of what he would later regard as the greatest gift of his young life. The vehicle, emblazoned with a faded white-on-blue wordmark, caused quite a stir as it passed through the small village and rolled to a stop in the central square. When its rear hatch was opened, Abdullah was shocked; where he had expected food or water, the trunk was instead stocked with books.
The officials traded grand words. The adult Lau would learn that his village had been deemed an “archetypal example of educational poverty”, selected among thousands to receive a shipment of “storybooks, critical texts in a variety of academic subjects, and a selection of formative literature”. A young Abdullah couldn’t have cared less.
The boy was thereafter rarely spotted without the company of some volume or another. At home, he swept the floor one-armed, free hand splaying pages of verse or prose. In the field, he lay flat on his belly and pretended to pull weeds, a text sprawled open-faced before him, hidden between stalks so his father wouldn’t see. At the market, he ducked away from his mother to escape the din, holing up in the corner of the quietest stall he could find, reading for hours…
The market was some kilometers away, near the summer home of a regional telecommunications baron. His family, by far the wealthiest in the region, was an aloof bunch; a new wave of gossip swelled on the rare occasions they were spotted beyond estate walls. Abdullah had never cared for the spectacle—and he certainly had no love for the market—so he could never see any good reason to walk all that way. His mother disagreed.
One July morning, after being dragged out of the house, young Lau sat reading the great American novel in a tailor’s shaded stall. Inexplicably stocked with heavy winter garments, the tent was remarkably sound-damping—and completely empty. Where other vendors would have kicked the young bookworm out, the tailor was simply happy for the company.
Abdullah was interrupted by a boy one or two years older than he—and was surprised to recognize him as the telecom tycoon’s grandson. Abdullah’s shock only grew: the fellow began to chat with him! The older boy explained that he was home on school break; for weeks, he had been seeking a suitable conversational partner with whom to practice English. He had nearly given up when he saw Abdullah’s reading material.
The pair spoke for a few minutes before a nanny came calling. Apologetically, the elder—Amir—made to leave. He stopped in the stall’s open threshold, turned, and extended an invitation: would Abdullah join him for a fishing excursion on the family estate? Lau knew of the property’s sprawling lake; his father often reminisced about his own youth spent on its waters, before it had been placed under lock and key—and before a wealthy mogul had paid to have it stocked seasonally with bounties of tilapia and carp and mahseer. The thought of catching lunch excited him; chatting about Steinbeck, doubly so. He readily agreed.
The next day, Abdullah arrived shirtless before a brass gate, a wooden pole and line slung over his shoulder, and poked the buzzer. A beat, then a soft, unintelligible crackle emanated from a meshed speaker grille. The gate crept open. The boy walked beside a paved road for the better part of five minutes, not daring to tread barefoot on the scorching tarmac, before eventually rounding a corner and coming into view of the palatial summerhouse. In the shade of its gilded eaves, his new friend sat waiting on the stoop. Abdullah was surprised to see him dressed in a neatly pressed white kameez. As he approached, the boy rose and called out to him, clearly stifling a laugh: “Have you no clothes?”
Upon entering the house, the barefoot and thoroughly embarrassed Abdullah was quickly overwhelmed by waves of staff—materializing from out of the walls, presenting him a pristine set of hand-me-downs, whisking away his fishing pole. Amir explained that in America, fishing was a leisure sport, best enjoyed from a comfortable seat aboard a large watercraft. Today’s trip would be no different: his father was entertaining clients; they would all spend the afternoon trolling on the family yacht.
He settled in on the ship, cast his line, and leaned over the railing, marveling at the expanse of water. The family’s lake was a mere node in a vast delta. The sight was extraordinary; he hardly noticed the quiet unspooling of the line beside him.
It had just struck Lau that he could almost make out that same delta now—hundreds of thousands of miles away—when his spell was broken by a pleasant chime. He turned away from Earth and glanced around the dome, blinking. His eyes settled on the now-opened gangway doors and the sinuous throng of lightly-conversing travelers patterned out before it. He marveled at their nonchalance. For the rest of the cohort (evidently locals), this whole procedure was routine. He edged timidly into line.
Leadside’s westward mass driver was a gargantuan coilgun. In a few short minutes, it would sling the lot of them into a suborbital trajectory spanning more than a quarter of the Moon’s circumference. Their sledge and its hollow-point bullet of a passenger capsule would accelerate down the length of half a marathon’s-worth of barrel, exiting with a muzzle velocity of over a kilometer per second. The electromagnetic forces would be immense: the sheer magnetic flux could reduce the aluminum composite hull of a traditional chemical rocket to a burbling mass. Without Faraday shielding, eddy currents induced in the passengers’ bodies would boil them from the inside out.
Leadside West paled in comparison to the strongest catapults ever built; big, brutish, cargo-slinging things which had once delivered immense material wealth to Earth from the Jupiter Trojans. Still, it was one of the largest mass drivers outside of the gas giant’s Lagrange points; and as the most powerful human-rated launch system ever constructed, its operation warranted a slew of extra safety precautions.
The first was administered by the flight tech at the head of the snaking queue, who adhered a small patch to the crook of Lau’s elbow. At the capsule’s direction, the device would administer an intravenous dose of amphetamines, constricting his arteries and elevating his heart rate during the strenuous accel phase.
The cardiac strain would demand heightened oxygen uptake; as Lau made his way down the gangway toward the capsule, he caught glimpses of the second precaution. For a whole half-minute, each of the capsule’s occupants would weigh in the neighborhood of half a ton. Ventilating their lungs with high-pressure oxygen would greatly lighten the effort of breathing. For the Moon-born, it would have the added benefit of maintaining their delicate chest cavities’ healthy convex shape.
Finally aboard, Lau reached his assigned seat and lay down. The g-couch crawled around him, tickling the small of his back, rippling outward past his shoulders and haunches, eventually fluttering to a halt beneath the distal ends of his extremities. Weighing a mere sixth of his usual heft, Lau seemed to be lying on a cloud; and as the reclining chair finished molding itself into a supremely comfortable resting place, he momentarily felt drowsy. Then, roused by the unpleasant thought of latent pressure points morphing into daggers under acceleration, he shifted—promptly launching into a nervous back-and-forth with the ever-compliant seat actuators.
The rest of the cohort boarded, and Lau was forced to settle his wriggling match with the chair. Flight techs came around to strap the passengers in and check their respirators. The sensation of the disposable mouthpiece made him claustrophobic; its urethane scent nauseated him. After a minute, the voice of the pilot (a title, not a job description—the travelers would soon be at the mercy of ballistics) sounded over the intercom.
She spoke for some minutes. When critical failure spelled certain death, there was a legal imperative to thoroughly inform passengers of the risks.
Lau knew the principle: concentric stages of insulating aerogel alternated with thin sheathings to expel magnetic field lines. One by one, the sheaths would fall, stripped of their conductivity by intense EM heating. The inlaid aerogel would sustain the temperature gradient, slowing the induction of the next sheath, which contained another inset gel layer, and so forth. For this trip, the acceleration stage would kill six such concentric bilayers as the capsule heated up from the outside in. In the final phase of flight, deceleration in the magnetic net would take five more. There were plenty of layers, in theory. The doctor would have preferred more.
The pilot’s prattling had sufficed to briefly distract Lau from the respirator’s chemical odor, but as her speech came to a close, he became aware of a new sensation: in the vicinity of the patch, his arm began to itch, and then burn. Reflexively, he tensed his bicep; his eyes watered at the resulting sting. His heart began to race as norepinephrine flooded his bloodstream, shunting his nervous system into fight-or-flight. Lau realized that he was now gently suspended by his seat straps—somehow, he had scarcely noticed the capsule tipping.
The pod, which before had struck him as eerily silent, now seemed to reverberate with dissonance. A soft thud signaled their mechanical release from Leadside’s grasp; the gush of fresh station air dwindled to a tinny hiss of stale, recirculated atmosphere. Lau’s breathing hastened. From outside the capsule, he heard a repetitive, low-frequency thrumming grow in intensity like the spooling up of a jet engine, then fade as the launch chamber was evacuated.
At some point, a countdown had begun.
Lau’s eyes lolled around frantically in his skull. The numerals seemed to distend and warp.
At five a bead of sweat dribbled down around his brow.
Four brought the onset of an ear-splitting static roar. He strained futilely, as if to move to cover his ears. His arms remained strapped down.
Three. He shut his eyes. The roar became deafening.
He lost track of two.
Crushing, unabating pressure. His eardrums felt ready to cave in, his skull was pinched in a vise. Globes sinking in their orbits, lungs collapsing, screaming for air. Numbing pain, a soundless descent into utter disorientation. He opened his mouth, his chest voided.
Abdullah had been leaning over the railing, watching his line unspool as the lead sinker carried his hook down and down. No one had taught him to close the bail; he had been grabbing frantically at the thread, desperately trying to catch it, when it had suddenly snapped taut, a tremendous jolt sending him careening off the deck.
He sank, his struggle growing feebler. Oily strands reached from below, slithering across his skin, threatening to ensnare him. His mind stilled, his convulsions weakened. Then, as he was about to drift off… a stirring above…
“Alhamdulillah,” the deckhand had panted. “By the mercy of God, I heard the splash.” In the span of a few seconds, the man had registered the disturbance, signaled the captain, and leapt overboard after Amir’s young friend. It was by the mercy of God that he had landed above the spot where the boy had sunk, and it was by the mercy of God that he had reached out and plucked him from the murk.
But had the deckhand failed, nobody would’ve blamed God. They would’ve blamed Ali Dawar; of this, the baron was certain.
In this sense, the telecom magnate had gotten lucky: he would not have to answer for a death. But when the boy ran home and told his parents, and they demanded an inquiry… Mr. Dawar took a fresh, warm towel, dabbed the sweat from his forehead. He excused himself and made his way to the lower deck, to the starboard guest room.
To little Abdullah Lau, the details of his resurrection would forever remain hazy. But from the moment Ali Dawar entered the room, the memory became crystal clear. The baron had carried an intimidating air; for a second the naïve Abdullah worried about being made a Lennie to his George. But then the baron smiled and held out a warm towel. Abdullah felt foolish. And Dawar spoke:
“My boy, I hear you like books.”
There was a hiss as air rushed into his lungs, stale but sweet. Tears pooled in his lateral canthi; he could feel them streaking outwards past his temples and towards his ears. Slowly, the indomitable pressure subsided, the tunnel of his vision widened; the world drew a deep breath of color. Lau was back in the capsule, quiet but for the susurration of ventilators all around him. That same pleasant chime, and the pilot relayed the good news: they had expended only eight hull layers. Shouldn’t that have been six?
By the mercy of God, he was alive. Forces beyond his reckoning, grace beyond his control, propelling him to extraordinary heights, pulling him to unimaginable depths. Abdullah sighed through the respirator. His hud synced with the guidance computer to reveal the capsule’s trajectory; a segment of a simple arc, computed before launch. He blinked heavily. After too long, the display hurt his eyes. He wanted nothing more than the comfort of paper, nestled between coats in the heat.
Silently, the craft coasted on; falling, falling, spinning out and out and out.
This is a linkpost for Earthrise from my Substack.
Foreword for LessWrong readers: There is no (explicit) rationality in this piece. There is no biting allegory or even any particular relevance to our world today. If you squint, you may be able to see some light allusion to the situation we collectively find ourselves in. This was primarily a writing exercise in mood and description and yielding to forces beyond one's control, a la this old meme about a doomed rat. No pun intended.
For most gate-bound travelers passing through Leadside Station—often city-types, unfamiliar with pockmarked terrain and the pestering tenacity of regolith—the most striking sign of departure was simply the lowness of the Earth in the sky. Here the planet typically rested a few slight degrees above the horizon, giving its best impression of setting at the end of the day. In reality, of course, the great orb had tidally pinned its satellite companion eons ago; so, viewed from Leadside, the larger’s apparent motion against the celestial sphere amounted to little more than a lazy Lissajous curve, which it traced lunation after lunation, occasionally skimming the distant lip of Eddington crater, threatening to dip in, but never quite committing to the plunge.
As with anywhere on the near hemi, the conversational role vacated by idle weather chat had here been inhabited by a varied taxonomy of platitudes concerning the blue marble’s phases. Wistful immigrant uncles waxed poetic for the full disk, peering past elongated shadows for glimpses of homes left behind. (“Y’see that peninsula there? That’s Alaska. Most beautiful place you’re likely to see… and not too much colder’n here, haw-haw.”) Native-born zealots favored the symbolism of a new day’s early arch—or otherwise the sneering crescent of a world turned upside down. Some relished the solitude of early dawn, when the Earth was new and it seemed the whole planet slept under the shadow of night.
But here at Leadside, all the ordinary clichés wore a shade of melancholy as the tiny terminal’s transient visitors bade farewell to home.
It was with this sense of heaviness that Abdullah Lau now stared out towards the horizon, through the kinks in the fused quartz geodesic, and beheld in the distance his own home. Dr. Lau had arrived just around regional noon; the expanse of powdered basalt that stretched before him was devoid of contour, save for those rare angles where microscopic flecks of iron in the rock glimmered under stark light. With the Sun high overhead, Luna and the half-shaded Earth seemed a pair of floating bobbers, strung to parallel lines, suspended above infinite deep. Locals said this time of the lune made you feel like you could leap off the Moon’s edge and fall and fall and fall, spinning out and out and out…
Lau, for his part, soon would. He checked his hud: fifteen minutes until the transfer. He wasn’t particularly worried about missing the connecting arc; little Leadside only had two gates, and every passenger in the terminal had arrived through one intending to depart via the other. So as the second mass driver reeled up and his fellow travelers shuffled through the boarding maze, the doctor stood still and gazed a while longer at the not-setting planet.
Abdullah had been a reader since he could read. His parents did their best to furnish him with material—their little village was only home to so many books. By the age of six, he had all but exhausted its supply; lacking the means to acquire more (and by then old enough to take matters into his own hands), little Lau sought out alternatives. Though he never dared to steal under the watchful eyes of the market vendors, once a week, a lone newsman presented an opportunity. The traveler came into town Sundays bearing papers from nearby cities; on lucky weeks—during some national tragedy or scandal—a crowd would form around the stand, opining loudly about the gravity of the goings-on. At the scene’s fever pitch, the boy would nick the top paper from the cart and run off to a shaded alley to soak in current events and sports and fashion.
He carried on like this for some months… until one day the newsman caught him trying to slip a rumpled periodical back onto the stack. In one swift motion, the man snatched it from his hands, rolled it up, smacked the boy across the forehead, and promptly put a stop to the scheme.
One morning, shortly before Abdullah’s tenth birthday, the rumble of a Toyota engine heralded the arrival of what he would later regard as the greatest gift of his young life. The vehicle, emblazoned with a faded white-on-blue wordmark, caused quite a stir as it passed through the small village and rolled to a stop in the central square. When its rear hatch was opened, Abdullah was shocked; where he had expected food or water, the trunk was instead stocked with books.
The officials traded grand words. The adult Lau would learn that his village had been deemed an “archetypal example of educational poverty”, selected among thousands to receive a shipment of “storybooks, critical texts in a variety of academic subjects, and a selection of formative literature”. A young Abdullah couldn’t have cared less.
The boy was thereafter rarely spotted without the company of some volume or another. At home, he swept the floor one-armed, free hand splaying pages of verse or prose. In the field, he lay flat on his belly and pretended to pull weeds, a text sprawled open-faced before him, hidden between stalks so his father wouldn’t see. At the market, he ducked away from his mother to escape the din, holing up in the corner of the quietest stall he could find, reading for hours…
The market was some kilometers away, near the summer home of a regional telecommunications baron. His family, by far the wealthiest in the region, was an aloof bunch; a new wave of gossip swelled on the rare occasions they were spotted beyond estate walls. Abdullah had never cared for the spectacle—and he certainly had no love for the market—so he could never see any good reason to walk all that way. His mother disagreed.
One July morning, after being dragged out of the house, young Lau sat reading the great American novel in a tailor’s shaded stall. Inexplicably stocked with heavy winter garments, the tent was remarkably sound-damping—and completely empty. Where other vendors would have kicked the young bookworm out, the tailor was simply happy for the company.
Abdullah was interrupted by a boy one or two years older than he—and was surprised to recognize him as the telecom tycoon’s grandson. Abdullah’s shock only grew: the fellow began to chat with him! The older boy explained that he was home on school break; for weeks, he had been seeking a suitable conversational partner with whom to practice English. He had nearly given up when he saw Abdullah’s reading material.
The pair spoke for a few minutes before a nanny came calling. Apologetically, the elder—Amir—made to leave. He stopped in the stall’s open threshold, turned, and extended an invitation: would Abdullah join him for a fishing excursion on the family estate? Lau knew of the property’s sprawling lake; his father often reminisced about his own youth spent on its waters, before it had been placed under lock and key—and before a wealthy mogul had paid to have it stocked seasonally with bounties of tilapia and carp and mahseer. The thought of catching lunch excited him; chatting about Steinbeck, doubly so. He readily agreed.
The next day, Abdullah arrived shirtless before a brass gate, a wooden pole and line slung over his shoulder, and poked the buzzer. A beat, then a soft, unintelligible crackle emanated from a meshed speaker grille. The gate crept open. The boy walked beside a paved road for the better part of five minutes, not daring to tread barefoot on the scorching tarmac, before eventually rounding a corner and coming into view of the palatial summerhouse. In the shade of its gilded eaves, his new friend sat waiting on the stoop. Abdullah was surprised to see him dressed in a neatly pressed white kameez. As he approached, the boy rose and called out to him, clearly stifling a laugh: “Have you no clothes?”
Upon entering the house, the barefoot and thoroughly embarrassed Abdullah was quickly overwhelmed by waves of staff—materializing from out of the walls, presenting him a pristine set of hand-me-downs, whisking away his fishing pole. Amir explained that in America, fishing was a leisure sport, best enjoyed from a comfortable seat aboard a large watercraft. Today’s trip would be no different: his father was entertaining clients; they would all spend the afternoon trolling on the family yacht.
He settled in on the ship, cast his line, and leaned over the railing, marveling at the expanse of water. The family’s lake was a mere node in a vast delta. The sight was extraordinary; he hardly noticed the quiet unspooling of the line beside him.
It had just struck Lau that he could almost make out that same delta now—hundreds of thousands of miles away—when his spell was broken by a pleasant chime. He turned away from Earth and glanced around the dome, blinking. His eyes settled on the now-opened gangway doors and the sinuous throng of lightly-conversing travelers patterned out before it. He marveled at their nonchalance. For the rest of the cohort (evidently locals), this whole procedure was routine. He edged timidly into line.
Leadside’s westward mass driver was a gargantuan coilgun. In a few short minutes, it would sling the lot of them into a suborbital trajectory spanning more than a quarter of the Moon’s circumference. Their sledge and its hollow-point bullet of a passenger capsule would accelerate down the length of half a marathon’s-worth of barrel, exiting with a muzzle velocity of over a kilometer per second. The electromagnetic forces would be immense: the sheer magnetic flux could reduce the aluminum composite hull of a traditional chemical rocket to a burbling mass. Without Faraday shielding, eddy currents induced in the passengers’ bodies would boil them from the inside out.
Leadside West paled in comparison to the strongest catapults ever built; big, brutish, cargo-slinging things which had once delivered immense material wealth to Earth from the Jupiter Trojans. Still, it was one of the largest mass drivers outside of the gas giant’s Lagrange points; and as the most powerful human-rated launch system ever constructed, its operation warranted a slew of extra safety precautions.
The first was administered by the flight tech at the head of the snaking queue, who adhered a small patch to the crook of Lau’s elbow. At the capsule’s direction, the device would administer an intravenous dose of amphetamines, constricting his arteries and elevating his heart rate during the strenuous accel phase.
The cardiac strain would demand heightened oxygen uptake; as Lau made his way down the gangway toward the capsule, he caught glimpses of the second precaution. For a whole half-minute, each of the capsule’s occupants would weigh in the neighborhood of half a ton. Ventilating their lungs with high-pressure oxygen would greatly lighten the effort of breathing. For the Moon-born, it would have the added benefit of maintaining their delicate chest cavities’ healthy convex shape.
Finally aboard, Lau reached his assigned seat and lay down. The g-couch crawled around him, tickling the small of his back, rippling outward past his shoulders and haunches, eventually fluttering to a halt beneath the distal ends of his extremities. Weighing a mere sixth of his usual heft, Lau seemed to be lying on a cloud; and as the reclining chair finished molding itself into a supremely comfortable resting place, he momentarily felt drowsy. Then, roused by the unpleasant thought of latent pressure points morphing into daggers under acceleration, he shifted—promptly launching into a nervous back-and-forth with the ever-compliant seat actuators.
The rest of the cohort boarded, and Lau was forced to settle his wriggling match with the chair. Flight techs came around to strap the passengers in and check their respirators. The sensation of the disposable mouthpiece made him claustrophobic; its urethane scent nauseated him. After a minute, the voice of the pilot (a title, not a job description—the travelers would soon be at the mercy of ballistics) sounded over the intercom.
She spoke for some minutes. When critical failure spelled certain death, there was a legal imperative to thoroughly inform passengers of the risks.
Lau knew the principle: concentric stages of insulating aerogel alternated with thin sheathings to expel magnetic field lines. One by one, the sheaths would fall, stripped of their conductivity by intense EM heating. The inlaid aerogel would sustain the temperature gradient, slowing the induction of the next sheath, which contained another inset gel layer, and so forth. For this trip, the acceleration stage would kill six such concentric bilayers as the capsule heated up from the outside in. In the final phase of flight, deceleration in the magnetic net would take five more. There were plenty of layers, in theory. The doctor would have preferred more.
The pilot’s prattling had sufficed to briefly distract Lau from the respirator’s chemical odor, but as her speech came to a close, he became aware of a new sensation: in the vicinity of the patch, his arm began to itch, and then burn. Reflexively, he tensed his bicep; his eyes watered at the resulting sting. His heart began to race as norepinephrine flooded his bloodstream, shunting his nervous system into fight-or-flight. Lau realized that he was now gently suspended by his seat straps—somehow, he had scarcely noticed the capsule tipping.
The pod, which before had struck him as eerily silent, now seemed to reverberate with dissonance. A soft thud signaled their mechanical release from Leadside’s grasp; the gush of fresh station air dwindled to a tinny hiss of stale, recirculated atmosphere. Lau’s breathing hastened. From outside the capsule, he heard a repetitive, low-frequency thrumming grow in intensity like the spooling up of a jet engine, then fade as the launch chamber was evacuated.
At some point, a countdown had begun.
Lau’s eyes lolled around frantically in his skull. The numerals seemed to distend and warp.
At five a bead of sweat dribbled down around his brow.
Four brought the onset of an ear-splitting static roar. He strained futilely, as if to move to cover his ears. His arms remained strapped down.
Three. He shut his eyes. The roar became deafening.
He lost track of two.
Crushing, unabating pressure. His eardrums felt ready to cave in, his skull was pinched in a vise. Globes sinking in their orbits, lungs collapsing, screaming for air. Numbing pain, a soundless descent into utter disorientation. He opened his mouth, his chest voided.
Abdullah had been leaning over the railing, watching his line unspool as the lead sinker carried his hook down and down. No one had taught him to close the bail; he had been grabbing frantically at the thread, desperately trying to catch it, when it had suddenly snapped taut, a tremendous jolt sending him careening off the deck.
He sank, his struggle growing feebler. Oily strands reached from below, slithering across his skin, threatening to ensnare him. His mind stilled, his convulsions weakened. Then, as he was about to drift off… a stirring above…
“Alhamdulillah,” the deckhand had panted. “By the mercy of God, I heard the splash.” In the span of a few seconds, the man had registered the disturbance, signaled the captain, and leapt overboard after Amir’s young friend. It was by the mercy of God that he had landed above the spot where the boy had sunk, and it was by the mercy of God that he had reached out and plucked him from the murk.
But had the deckhand failed, nobody would’ve blamed God. They would’ve blamed Ali Dawar; of this, the baron was certain.
In this sense, the telecom magnate had gotten lucky: he would not have to answer for a death. But when the boy ran home and told his parents, and they demanded an inquiry… Mr. Dawar took a fresh, warm towel, dabbed the sweat from his forehead. He excused himself and made his way to the lower deck, to the starboard guest room.
To little Abdullah Lau, the details of his resurrection would forever remain hazy. But from the moment Ali Dawar entered the room, the memory became crystal clear. The baron had carried an intimidating air; for a second the naïve Abdullah worried about being made a Lennie to his George. But then the baron smiled and held out a warm towel. Abdullah felt foolish. And Dawar spoke:
“My boy, I hear you like books.”
There was a hiss as air rushed into his lungs, stale but sweet. Tears pooled in his lateral canthi; he could feel them streaking outwards past his temples and towards his ears. Slowly, the indomitable pressure subsided, the tunnel of his vision widened; the world drew a deep breath of color. Lau was back in the capsule, quiet but for the susurration of ventilators all around him. That same pleasant chime, and the pilot relayed the good news: they had expended only eight hull layers. Shouldn’t that have been six?
By the mercy of God, he was alive. Forces beyond his reckoning, grace beyond his control, propelling him to extraordinary heights, pulling him to unimaginable depths. Abdullah sighed through the respirator. His hud synced with the guidance computer to reveal the capsule’s trajectory; a segment of a simple arc, computed before launch. He blinked heavily. After too long, the display hurt his eyes. He wanted nothing more than the comfort of paper, nestled between coats in the heat.
Silently, the craft coasted on; falling, falling, spinning out and out and out.