Burning Violin

Chapter Seven - Fallout

Crow left the courthouse the next morning in the company of an entire squad of lawyers dispatched by Da Vinci Law in his defense. The battalions of district attorneys had been unable to charge Crow with a crime based on the lack of any evidence pointing to his direct involvement. It was almost noon by the time he struggled down the stairs outside of the majestic classical marble columns of the County Superior Court, his half dozen lawyers providing a full physical screen of thousand dollar suits blocking out reporters.

Robert Mathers, the big name heading up his defense effort called out appropriate 'no comment's and 'my client has not be charged with any crime, nor should he be's to the throngs of reporters who had somehow gotten wind that a big story was developing here. It certainly lacked the draw of a celebrity murder trial, but it beat covering real news any day. Finally, at the foot of the grand white stairs, Mathers paused and the flying wedge of lawyers stopped with him, arranging themselves so that Crow found himself standing next to Mathers in front of twenty or so microphones and cameras.

"My client of course cannot comment on the exact nature of our conversations with the district attorneys, but it suffices to say that Dr. Crow Daedelus is not being charged with any crime here. The authorities merely required him to answer a few question about International Robotics given his long history at that corporation and the unfortunate events that occurred last night." Mathers explained in the patient tone of a grandfather explaining facts to the grandkids. He looked like a kindly old grandpa from a sitcom, but had sharp eyes that would have looked less out of place on a shark than his soft lined face.

"Can you confirm that Dr. Daedelus was fired from International Robotics only a few hours before the attacks on that company took place?" A reporter with over-collagenated lips and forehead asked in that deep bouncing pattern that only life-long on-air reporters can ever truly master.

"Dr. Daedalus's employment status is not at issue in these matters." Mathers demurred.

"Can you speculate on how badly International Robotics has been damaged in this incident?" Another reporter asked. This one was a newbie, judging by the way he asked questions in an almost human voice. "Rumor suggests Naturalist extremists were involved."

Mathers waved both his hands downwards. "Now, now. Speculating about rumors that have nothing to do with himself is simply not Dr. Daedalus's way."

"Come now, counselor, Dr. Daedalus was fired and a few hours later malicious hacking takes down International Robotics' entire operation around the globe." The first reporter persisted in a throaty voice that buzzed through every vowel. "How can these questions not arise over Daedalus' arrest?"

Cities are unique from rural areas because they concentrate vast numbers of people into relatively small areas. The density of the population itself can be a factor in democratic development. Density is the concentration of power; it is why corporations and political parties can wield such extraordinary power: they concentrate and distill power down into a small enough tool that it can be wielded effectively. The more densely power is concentrated, the more easily it can be brought bear on a political pressure point. When a population is dispersed throughout the countryside it is vulnerable to the concentrations of entrenched power, but when a population draws together into a city, its concentration rivals the entrenched. But the concentration of political power is not sufficient to ensure political consciousness; else every city would be a center of democracy. Cities are unwieldy beasts, difficult to control even if they are not politically conscious. Their presence explains why even in autocracies, cities are correlated with increased democracy, even though their weight is not sufficient to sway the system as a whole to democracy. The concentration of raw political force in cities, even when not conscious, causes autocrats to tread lightly, warping the political system around itself with an almost gravitational field.

The concentration of population into cities also is significant because the density and proximity of the population encourages political consciousness. Proximity imposes limits on government actions, because suppressive action against even a small part of the population is clear and present to many people, whereas outside of cities, government action is distant or immediate, only observable if you and yours are the target. What is nearby is relevant, and for people in cities, that circle of nearness contains far more people and events than those in rural areas. It is one thing to hear of government suppression two towns over, but quite another to be able to hear the gunfire from one's own home. A second side effect of proximity is the simple matter of communication. Just as viral epidemics spread more easily through the tightly packed urban populations, so to do viral epidemics of memes. Word of mouth communication is the most powerful form of communication, relying on the strength of personal bonds and ties, bonds which are compressed and multiplied in cities. Modern communications make personal proximity less important than in the past, but only to a degree. Communications systems are the easiest for a state to suppress, whereas word of mouth communication, while suppressible, is impossible to entirely eradicate. In poor states, where communications technologies are less widespread, they are even easier for the state to suppress.

Population density also leads to the perceived radicalization of society. Statistically, occurrences that are extraordinarily unlikely are much less likely to occur in particular small groups. The larger a population is gathered together, the more likely it is for statistical oddities to emerge, although the overall rate of their occurrence may not increase. For example, if only one in a million individuals is likely to become a serial killer, there is a vanishingly small chance of a serial killer being present in any particular small town of a few thousand people. But in a city of several million, there is a statistical likelihood that at least one will be present. This is not to say that cities are inherently more dangerous, but that their size leads to them being bastions of statistical oddities.

This statistical quirk becomes important when combined with psychological factors. Even in cities with crime rates lower than rural areas, crime is invariably seen as an issue of primary importance. The difference is that crime of a particular rate spreads out over a much greater area in rural areas, whereas in a city, that crime is compressed into a small and familiar area. Humans do not associate risk with the statistical likelihood of an event within a population, but with the perceived proximity of the event. Understanding that one person in ten thousand is likely to be robbed each year means that a town of a thousand is unlikely to see a robbery much more often than once per decade, but a city street with ten thousand inhabitants is likely to have a robbery per year. The danger seems more palpable on the city street, despite the fact that the chances of a particular person being a victim are identical in the two situations. Humans have a sort of binary psychology based on centering the universe on themselves, eliminating probability as a factor. We do not see that there is a 0.01% chance of being a random victim of a robbery on our particular city street, but rather interpret hearing about a robbery happening on our street as meaning that there was a 100% chance that we could have been the victim of a robbery. Rural areas are less prone to this phenomenon because the statistical oddities are spread out over a much larger area, thus ensuring that the occurrences that do happen immediately impact the thinking of less individuals. What this means for government is that the populations of cities put proportionately more political pressure on the state for action on social and economic issues than the same population spread throughout a rural area.

Those same forces of radicalization work in another direction in cities, generating specialists. The larger a population gathers together, the more specialized its population can become, because there are more and more people to support particular rarely needed talents. A town of a thousand will not have a world renowned cancer specialist, not because of a lack of education or talent, but because cancer is rare enough that a town of a thousand cannot support its own specialist on the topic. The smaller a population, the more generalized the inhabitants. This applies not only to professions and skill sets, but also more broadly to life choices and culture. An obscure cultural interest valued by one in several thousand individuals will be effectively non-existent in the countryside, but can find a vibrant niche existence in a city. Groups that are larger than niches, but still minorities, see a similar advantage in cities. Without a statistical increase in their occurrence in the population, specialists (whether economic or cultural) grow in power in the densely packed populations of cities.

Specialization leads to subtle differences in the politics of cities in comparison to rural areas. Technical specialists have devoted time and energy into becoming specialists in their field, and thus have a vested interest in policy insofar as it affects their specialization. This is one of the first steps towards political consciousness. In addition, the proximity of specialists within a city allows their combination and focus towards particular issues. Instead of scattering like atoms throughout the countryside, their power base is a concentrated body of mass when gathered inside a city. Specialists also are distinct because they represent an investment of time and energy by society, in other words they cannot so easily be replaced as more generally equipped individuals. The value of specialists gives them power relative to the state, power that is magnified by the density at which they are present in cities.

Almost all the tension dissipated in a roar of cheering from the assembled scientists. Janus leaned over and grabbed the railing to hold himself steady. Just short of four times the speed of light. By god, it actually worked. He straightened. "Alright people, send the signal, let's bring Mickey home and make sure he's all in one piece."

The rest of the monumental day passed in a fog for Janus. Charlie made it back okay a few hours later, although he was about to experience every test imaginable by the scientists on the station. The core worry had passed though. The ship had demonstrated faster than light travel worked, and had even carried a passenger who came through unharmed to boot.

"Tomorrow, the stars." Janus had grunted over the open circuit when Charlie asked what he thought of it all, whether he had any Neil Armstrong prepared comments to make about giant leaps and all that. He had excused himself from any celebrations, and let Charlie take the obligatory phone call from the president and returned to his quarters to mark the occasion in a private and quiet commemoration with his photos of his family. They stared down at him from the giant LCD and Janus could only whisper to them. "I did it guys, I actually did it."

At long last, Janus closed out of their pictures and checked his email one last time before bed. Thousands of messages filled the inbox, but the filters marked them as spam or from unknown parties for the most part. Anyone in the world who could manage to get his email address would have emailed him today. To be gracious, he would have to take the time in the next couple of days to go through the immense list and reply where appropriate. For now though, he only had a handful of messages from colleagues that he skimmed briefly and a solitary message from someone named "Sed & Awk" with a subject line of "Re: A photographic memory - that is the question."

Janus frowned, not recognizing the person and wondering why the filters didn't catch it if that was the case. He paused and then opened the message. It was one chilling line that kept Janus up most of the night.

"What was Samantha's first word?"

It was the army that had found Janus, Russian troops sent down for mop up observations. There was almost nothing left of him other than organic wreckage, but some medic had managed to get a heartbeat long enough to get the almost-corpse to a real hospital. Janus remembered none of this of course, he remembered nothing else until weeks later when he woke up at last from the coma with three fourths of his body replaced with cybernetic parts. The sentients self-immolated. He recalled. They had their Masada, and took most of southern Russia with them. Electronic jamming and anti-missile arrays prevented any missiles from getting out, and the closing allied forces made time precious. So they nuked everything they could reach, which included the surrounding forces and cities, and of course the church that Sylvia and the kids were helping to build, and of course my dacha.

"We'll take a break now people." Charlie announced. "We've got at least three hours before we could see something interesting. Fingers crossed now."

I survived for a reason. Janus thought. That vision of FTL could not die with me.

Uranus was far enough from Earth that it took about three hours for light to travel between the two planets. It made the math fairly easy. If Starship One traveled at exactly the speed of light, it would take three hours for it to get there and three hours for its transmission to get back to Earth. So if they received pretty pictures of Uranus in less than six hours, Mickey had become the first faster than light lifeform.

The hours passed with agonizing slowness, but no one left the operations center except for quick trips to the bathroom. No one was willing to miss this climax, although the tension was building so much that everyone feared underneath that all the work had been for naught, that Mickey was now so many subatomic particles smeared across the inner solar system.

At three hours, forty-eight minutes, Flynn's ecstatic voice came over the circuit. "Farside has contact with Starship One!" Pictures of Uranus flashed up onto the screen, a bright blue marble hanging in endless darkness. A series of pictures flashed by as Starship One rotated on small retrorockets, pulled the camera around to point at itself, and sent back the picture that NASA planned to put on lunchboxes within a week: Mickey staring out from his little window, Uranus hanging in the sky above his head.

"Starship One is away." Charlie announced to the room and over the radio where millions listened, indicating that the prototype was descending from the undercarriage of the base and accelerating under conventional rockets out from the shadow of the moon. Ten minutes until clearance. Then the drive would engage and the prototype should appear beyond the orbit of Uranus, although it would take three hours for the light to get back to Earth.

Janus remembered the last day best of all. Sylvia left early for the church, taking Samantha and Louis with her. She kissed him goodbye, a grudging acknowledgment that she would return despite the acrid arguments. Black hair twirled once as she turned. She sat in the front passenger seat, their bot doing the driving, the kids in the back. Samantha waved to him, ten years old and thinking she was sixteen already. Troops passed through an hour later on their way to a sentient outpost they claimed. Janus did not give them much thought at the time and instead spent the morning reconstructing his theory from scratch, preparing to publish it online that afternoon once he finished going over it just one more time.

"Lunar shadow cleared." Charlie said. "Drive activating." Tendrils of color surrounded the gray body of the prototype. It looked like the glittering rainbow at the edge of soap bubbles, pulsing and glistening with a moist color. "Contact terminated with Starship One." Charlie said. That was expected. The field of dark energy surrounding the vessel should have cut off everything electromagnetic, gravometric or otherwise from entering or exiting the surroundings of the craft. "Last readings from life support show that Mickey was doing fine." Charlie added. Mickey was the bright white lab mouse along for the ride. No sense calling it a true dry run unless a lifeform went along for the ride. The colors disappeared and the ship was gone. Janus' stomach clenched. There had been automatic prototypes before this, but they had been only a step beyond laboratory conditions, no matter how the press spun it to the people. This was the first real test.

"Spaceship One has disappeared into the manifold." Charlie announced. Janus sighed in relief, letting out some of the pressure. The alternative was a scattering of subatomic debris if the vessel had actually self-annihilated, but the sensors were picking up nothing of the sort.

The nukes hit the Caucuses around two o'clock in the afternoon, just after Janus had finished a fried egg sandwich for lunch - how Sylvia had hated it when he ate those, refusing to kiss him as long the aftertaste lingered. Janus remembered thinking he saw something bright out of the corner of his eyes and felt the ground lurch a moment later. He tried the television, but it showed nothing but static despite having a satellite connection. The next nuke was almost on top of the dacha, Janus later learned.

"Farside Observatory is monitoring the expected egress point." Flynn's voice announced over the circuit to the world audience. "Standing by."

Despite optimism, it took another two days before the dry run was ready to go. Janus arrived early as was his habit, and in the company of Charlie who had not spared his usual lunacy even in light of the ominous occasion. The status report on all systems was a go, to put Charlie's twenty minute rundown of all systems into its most abbreviated form. The entire team was there, all ten of the scientists and astronauts who had been sent up two years ago for the implementation phase of the most scientifically audacious engineering project since the Manhattan Project had ushered in the atomic age.

FTL. It was simple enough three letter acronym in the veritable alphabet soup of three letter acronyms of which humanity in general and government in particular were so enamored. Faster than light. Three little words, three little letters, but they spoke of ultimate audacity. Where every step of human progress to that day had been awesome in the sense of explaining and exploiting nature itself, this was the step that went beyond nature. The engine itself was supernatural when boiled down to its essence. It was greater than nature, doing what nothing in nature had managed, despite its billion light year majesty and nanometer details. Today, mankind broke the accepted rules.

Janus remembered the day he had thought of it, while doodling on the white board in his temporary office in the dacha buried in the Caucus mountains. It had been his retreat while Sylvia ministered, helped build houses and teach English and the like. She took her faith seriously, so much that she had dragged him to those cursed Russian towns on his sabbaticals from Embry-Riddle. Janus remembered bitter arguments on the matter to no avail. Regret could not begin to describe the memory of those arguments. How many people wish their last words to their wife had not been in anger? The compromise, if you could call it that, was that he would go along with her but would not participate. Janus stayed in the dacha and worked.

The moment when everything clicked with an almost audible noise of all the tumblers of all the locks in the universe rolling home at once still hung in his mind, always would he supposed. It took ten minutes before he even realized what bridge his mind had built. It took another hour to write a ten page description that he still remembered almost word for word, the brilliance of that moment burnt into his brain. He was not a humble man, he knew that paper was the best thing since Einstein, but he also knew that nothing he had done until that day had really mattered. Despite the invitations that in the end bordered on demands, Janus had never returned to Embry-Riddle. That was his old life. That was where he had been mediocre, plowing through semester after semester feeling that there was some research he was supposed to be doing, some breakthrough he was supposed to be finding, even while he zoned out for a year at a time. After Russia, there was no going home.

A Question

A cat chases a model train as it loops a figure-eight around a Christmas tree, darting amongst wrapped presents and glittering electric lights. The situation is testament to the flexibility of the animal mind. There are neither model trains nor wrapping paper nor spark-filled bits of glass in the natural habitat of the domestic feline. The cat's behavior lends itself to two alternative interpretations: we can infantilize the behavior or we can anthropomorphize it. Infantilization concludes that the cat is profoundly stupid, and that it simply interprets anything small and moving as a mouse, any lumps in the way as rocks, and anything glittering as the stars overhead, if even worth noticing at all. Anthropomorphization suggests that the cat is profoundly intelligent, and that it adapts seamlessly to concepts utterly foreign to those wired into its brain. In this model, the cat chases the train knowing that it is not a mouse, but enjoying the similarity nonetheless.

Now consider a human being instead of a cat.

Telecommunications and global transportation intertwine six billion people only 500 generations removed from tribes of a few dozen drifting through the savannahs and jungles. Do our minds adapt any differently than that of the cat? That is, are human beings profoundly stupid or profoundly intelligent?

The answer is more complicated than the question, but holds insight into how individuals interact with society as a whole. It helps explain many of the contradictions and central conflicts of modern man. In short, the cat manages to be both intelligent and stupid.

Symbols

Symbols in and of themselves are arbitrary and meaningless. Their symbolic value comes from the combination of symbols together into a system. It is the pattern between the symbols that holds symbolic power.  These patterns in and of themselves should not rationally have any meaning or power since they are merely assemblages of proxies. Only proxies that are valued more than simple proxies take on symbolic value. This is of course the central dilemma of symbols: how can something we rationally know has no power, have any power at all?

The key is in understanding that the mind can be broken into two components for the purposes of this discussion: the rational and the sensual. The rational mind can appreciate and distinguish that a toy train is not a mouse, but the sensual mind responds to the toy train as if it were a mouse. In other words, the sensual mind has no concept of metaphor. If two items evoke similar emotional responses, to the sensual mind, they are the same object. The vagaries of simile and metaphor are left to the rational mind, bereft of emotional response. Symbols therefore become real, not because people are so stupid that they believe the proxy is the same as the actual, but because our brains on a sensual level respond to the proxy as if it were real. The rational mind appreciates the distinction between proxy and actual, whereas the sensual mind responds in kind to both.

This methodology explains why it does not matter what a symbol is, or even to a degree how irrational it is. Symbols can be arbitrary because their power does not reside in any sort of measure of merit, but simply as a binary calculation of emotional resemblance. A crucifix can manifest in an infinite variety of simple and complex forms, but to the believer, a cross's symbolic quality derives from the emotional reaction tied to it. That reaction may be limited to a specific orthodox cruciform, or it may be as broad as accepting anything close to the basic shape. The symbolism needs no rational basis, and in fact rational explanations for the quality of one symbol over another are gilding applied to mask the irrational from an increasingly rational world.

Empathy

The way the mind reacts to symbols also plays an important role in how societies are structured. Human relationships naturally grow out of small family and kin groups. In the natural world, the human brain does not deal with large numbers of individuals. There are a very limited number of metaphors for the relationships between individuals. These metaphors cannot always be readily applied to the complex social relationships that arise in modern society. The rational brain can invent and adapt to these logical structures at will, but the sensual mind does not have the same luxury.

The way that the sensual mind deals with concepts for which it is not wired is to shoehorn them into existing metaphors. Nations are families. Allies are friends. Other citizens are brothers and sisters. The state is both father and mother. These similar relationships are easy to dismiss as convenient but meaningless metaphors, but the sensual mind's incapacity for metaphor reveals these relationships as critical to understanding how and why individuals react in seemingly irrational ways to government and politics. It is the metaphor of "nation as family" that produces the ideological structures of contemporary conservatism and contemporary liberalism.

The basis for social relationships is empathy, the ability to see others as oneself. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest that empathy is born not of rationalization, i.e. thinking that another's pain is bad because it reminds of the potential for one's own pain, but from feeling some shadow of that pain in one's own brain.  Empathy derives from being unable to disassociate oneself from one's peers. The pain of one is the pain of all.
This is why sociopaths have the most rational of minds: the disconnection from others leaves nothing but rationality behind. The profound alienation felt by so many individuals in society is a result of an overly rational society dismissing the structural underpinnings of society itself. In other words, if the connections between people are fundamentally irrational in nature, then the prizing of rationality above all else in a society will inevitably lead to a society with no social structure.

The startlingly frequent occurrence of alienation in the most educated and most successful individuals is a logical consequence when society is viewed in this context. An oft-asked question is whether education causes depression and alienation or whether it is something inborn in intelligence itself. The answer is that alienation is a byproduct of fully embracing modern society's focus on rationalism. Ergo, those most successful at the embrace of society's rationale are most affected by the byproduct.

All the complexities of symbolic systems and elaborate social structures can be boiled down to the basic building blocks upon which our minds operate. The human mind functions like a multiple choice exam. When we are faced with anything, be it an idea, a political party, an acquaintance, et cetera, we fit it into one of the bubbles. There is no option for "none of the above." That bubble, or writing in your own answer, is the reaction of two types of minds: the entirely irrational or the entirely rational. The madman or the genius. A madman has no regard for the social and mental rules that force an accepted answer. A genius may take the same route, because if none of the answers fit, the only truly rational response is to choose none of them. An average individual will choose the bubble that feels most similar, that evokes the same emotional response. Each bubble is a symbol. A mind divorced from symbolism cannot comprehend the way the rest of society interprets the most basic of concepts, because that interpretation is inseparable from metaphor.

Politics

As historical forces, as opposed to their contemporary political buzzwords, conservatism and liberalism have championed opposite sides of the rational/sensual spectrum. Conservatism champions the return to the way things were, the embrace of traditional values and symbols. Liberalism champions the dismantling of the traditional in favor of the rational. Each taken to its extreme is dysfunctional and horrific. Fascism's worship of symbol consumes the actual. Communism's orgy of atheism consumes the symbolic.

Both forces can also be understood through the primal symbols they embody. Conservatives sees government fundamentally as a father. Liberals see government fundamentally as a mother. These archetypes exemplify the arbitrary nature of symbols: different individuals invest different meanings in the same entity depending on their own emotional reaction to the entity in question. One cat may chase the train/mouse, where another will flee from the train/snake. It is then a logical consequence that fascist soldiers fought for the fatherland even as communist troops defended the motherland.

Traditionalism

Traditionalism is a reaction to an overly rational society, a society that forgets or explains away its old symbols. The gist of the traditionalist mindset is that things used to be better, and that they can be again if only the symbols and values of that time can be restored. The two natural consequences of conservative ideology are scapegoats and eternal war. If the world used to be better, the logic inevitably goes, then someone must be responsible for the decline. Tied back to primal concepts, the father must discipline and take control in order to fix the social disorder of the tribe. The symbols and values of society once restored must be protected lest they be eclipsed again either by other symbols, or worse, a mindset of no symbols at all.

Two potent forces of traditionalism rage against each other in the world today: Islamic traditionalism centered in the Middle East, and American conservatism centered in the rural areas of the United States. These forces provide a valuable insight into the general pattern of traditionalism since they have in many ways defined themselves as each other's opposites.

There are two important notes about the uniqueness of Islamic traditionalism. First, it is unexpectedly centered in the most prosperous Islamic nations, particularly Saudi Arabia. Second, the violence is not directed at the governments the militants see as having failed, but at foreign governments in Europe and America. These two trends are explained best in the context of primal relationships expanded to symbolically encompass societal relationships. The relationship between the west and Arab oil states has produced a small group of nations with extraordinary wealth, but little in the way of an actual economy. Islamic radicals target the most blame within their society at women, and anyone westernized and liberal.

Rural America sees a similar streak of traditionalism, which at face value has little in common with Islamic traditionalism other than its association with religion (Protestantism in place of Islam) and its general alarm at the threat modern society represents to values. The conservative renaissance of rural America has followed along with the gradual collapse of the economies of rural areas, as industry and agriculture have been increasingly exported to foreign countries. The fascinating nuance of American traditionalism is that it finds fault not with big business taking these steps, or a conservative government for allowing them, but with two scapegoats: liberals and foreigners.  On this level, American traditionalists march in step with Islamic fundamentalists. Their variations are in the particular symbols in which they invest meaning, but the pattern of those symbols is the same in American and Islamic traditionalism. They follow the same metaphor.

The reaction of Islamic fundamentalists and American traditionalists is at its most visceral the reaction of children of a cuckolded father. The reaction of children to a father who through inaction allows his wife to be raped by another man, a father who furthermore cannot provided economically for his family, is not one of revolt but of rage and shame. The target of their rage would not be their impotent father, but the invader. The source of their shame is not the attacker, but the mother who invited the attack through immoral behavior.

Liberalism

Liberalism in the modern world has demons of its own to confront. The status of modern liberalism, be it anywhere on the spectrum from communism to socialism to the mild leftism of American democrats, can be summarized simply as bewilderment. Prizing rationalism in the place of symbolism, liberalism cannot comprehend the malice of the right wing. It cannot understand what motivates traditionalists of any stripe. Internally, it cannot understand why the most alienated and lost souls in society come from the ranks of the liberals themselves.

Liberal thought is ill-equipped to deal with problems fundamentally symbolic in nature. The alienation of intellectual liberals is essentially the alienation of a child without a father. The mystification of liberalism by the disillusionment of their own ranks, and the revolt of the right wing is the reaction of a mother mystified by rebellious male children.

Power

In the ubiquity of shared natural metaphors lies power to manipulate society. No metaphor can completely describe its associated real concept. These orphaned elements are items that have no linkage to a specific element of the metaphor. For example, in the metaphor of seeing a nation as a family, what metaphorical mapping can possibly apply to the space program, or to campaign finance reform, or to the balance of federal power versus states' rights? Concepts that do not map easily into the metaphor can be hidden, whereas concepts that readily map can take on disproportionate importance.

Metaphors can be used to control debate on political action by channeling the discussion through metaphors. Political victory is assured not through a rational victory of superior ideas, but through an emotional victory of empathy for a candidate's metaphors.

Final Thoughts

The power that symbols and metaphors hold over our minds seems irresistible, a force that controls our relationships with society, a force that can be manipulated, a force that undermines the rational revolution of liberalism that in fits and starts has come to dominate the world since the Renaissance. Are we nothing more than slaves to symbols then, captive to the whims of those with the ability to manipulate those metaphors? We are slaves only to the things to which we are blind. A harmonious society requires balance, but we cannot achieve that balance unless we understand that something is out of balance in the first place.

"Well, I pulled our original calculations for the Epsilon Eridani HZ - that's habitable zone, the range of orbits around the star in which the temperature and radiation would be appropriate for an earthlike environment. Well, the endpoints of this line on the left and right are right at half an AU, which is just about the bare minimum distance, but it is still inside our estimate." Flynn said. "Our calculations show that the line is about a thousand miles wide. And the verticals we also have an idea on. If we are correct about everything else, they are moving such that their rotational period is around 4 days. That means the centrifugal acceleration on that line would be vaguely in the ballpark of earth normal gravity. Those verticals are struts of some sort. The line is a ring world, Janus, a goddamn ring world!"

The concept was as old as science fiction. Build a ring around a star out of materials with ungodly strength and spin it up to a rotational velocity such as to mimic gravity. The surface area would be a thousand times bigger than a planet, but not use nearly as many materials. It was laughably beyond human technology, beyond the capacities of any materials yet dreamed of by engineers. And yet we can see somebody doing it right now.

"How advanced must they be?" Janus asked.

"The strength of the materials alone is unimaginable." Flynn said. "It would need to be a million times stronger than steel, maybe ten million. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating since I haven't bothered to pull the numbers myself. Do you have any idea how big this is?"

"This is proof." Janus said. "The microwave signals, the patterned radio chatter. That's nothing. That is all explainable. This though, this is proof." It was the only word he could think of and it still seemed inadequate to describe the sheer awe. "Are we absolutely sure that this isn't just canals on Mars all over again?"

Flynn did not answer for a few moments. Every scientist knew that story. The warning story of not announcing discoveries before they had been double and triple checked independently. Schiaparelli had announced in 1877 that he had discovered canals on Mars through his telescope. Some could reproduce the pictures, some could not. Debate raged for decades and was settled only when better and better telescopes proved that there were only mirages on Mars, not canals. "We keep it quiet still, I should think. Try not to let it leak out until we watch a little longer, get a few more data points in."

"I think that would be wise." Janus said. He paused and then smiled. "I'll start the calculations though for the vessel to launch for Epsilon Eridani instead of Alpha Centauri." He said. "Why wait for better telescopes when we can just go there?"

Flynn laughed. "I don't care if you get a ship there first Janus, I saw them first. They're going to be called Flynnites and that's final." He hung up and Janus forced himself to go back to work although the daze of possibility clouded all his faculties. As if in a dream, he went back to work, organizing construction schedules and double-checking calculations for the dry run of the scaled down prototype coming up any day now. Tomorrow, I think. Janus told himself. We'll do the dry run tomorrow and then we'll know it works in reality.

Time passed for Janus in a blur of construction supervision on the prototype and feverous speculation on what was going on around Epsilon Eridani. Hushed calls from the dark side of the moon occurred at all times of the day, whenever news broke on Farside. Charlie, while not in on the matter of the conversations was well aware of their giddy effect on Janus. "You're like a couple of fucking school girls gossiping about the fucking football team." Charlie had said in a moment of irritation at Janus being called away again into a private call with Flynn.

Farside had been built in the late thirties, a small and almost entirely subterranean colony on the dark side of the moon designed almost exclusively around the gigantic telescope that dwarfed the Hubble space telescope in both size and function. Whereas Hubble had been limited by the size of the space shuttle, the Farside Main Optical Telescope was constructed in place from smaller chunks of the mirror that were piece together within molecule sized tolerances by sentis designed over a decade's time specifically for the job. The end result was almost the size of a football field and the favorite colloquial comparison of the media was that if a person's vision was as good as Farside, he would be able to stand in New York City and distinguish between different strands of another person's hair in San Francisco. In cosmic terms, that was nothing to laugh at. A permanent staff of six stayed at Farside, mostly for repairs and first line data processing, although a lot of the dirty work could be offloaded to Earth without much trouble. Janus could appreciate that it just wasn't the same to view the data remotely as it was to have such a powerful tool feeding you real time data. It was the difference between being on the sidelines versus being in an easy chair. No matter how great the big screen, there was an indefinable allure to actually being there.

"We've got something big here." Flynn had told him yesterday on an urgent call that had pulled Janus out of a conference with the directors of the construction project. "Both in the physical and meta senses."

"Download just finished on this end." Janus had said. "What are these videos?"

"Watch them." Flynn said with overflowing excitement. Janus could hear him lick his lips a hundred thousand miles away. "Any of them. No, actually, watch the second one alphabetically first."

The video had been an extreme blow up of Epsilon Eridani, filtered through a couple of dozen computer programs to eliminate the flare caused by the star itself being much brighter than everything close to it in the sky. A faint shadow of a line ran along the equator of the star and Janus for a moment thought it was just a slight band of cooler gases on the star's surface, but then noticed that the band continued out into the haze of light around the star that even the filters could not totally erase. Janus noticed something else, but could not put a finger on it until he let his eyes relax slightly and the background pattern snapped into place. "There's a line bisecting the center of the picture, and it looks like short vertical lines moving across it to the right." Janus said in puzzlement. "Overprocessing errors? Maybe a mechanical malfunction on the telescope causing a ghost on the images?"

"Checked all that." Flynn said.

Of course he had. Janus thought. The man's an expert in this after all.

Flynn continued after a beat. "Couldn't find anything wrong anywhere, and of course if we point ourselves at any other star in the sky, we cannot reproduce these inconsistencies."

"But you have an idea." Janus said. "Otherwise you wouldn't be calling me."

"Oh yeah I have an idea." Flynn said. "Think big."

Janus drew a blank. "I give up. What is it?"

Crow's stomach turned a little cold then and he watched Hydane swing down from the bleachers to leave, no doubt to slip into a leather and chrome infested Mercedes or BMW, maybe even a chauffeured one if he ranked it. This really was the point of no return. His bridges were burned beyond repair with this simple action. Even if no finger could ever be pointed at him, Crow would certainly be given the cold shoulder by anyone connected with the robotics industry. I've gone rogue. He thought.

Alexander looked up into the bleachers for his mandatory reassurance and Crow forced a tight smile onto a face he knew was far too pallid and strained. Another ball sailed out to the depths of the outfield and Crow found himself worrying more about Alexander's sudden burst of growth.

They left after another half hour as the younger kids started to get bored and cried or picked on one another. Crow had Nan detour through a McDonald's drivethrough to get Alexander some dinner. He heard at length about Alexander's day, although most of it only made sense in the lexicon of a kid. He already had a best friend, and had decided that he hated art class. A montage of other sloppily defined stories rolled out on the drive home.

"Get him tucked in and then come on back down Nan." Crow told the senti after Alexander finished up dinner and watched TV for a while.

"Would you like me to power down for the night?" The English butler voice asked him with a cultured politeness.

Crow shook his head. "Just come back down. I want to run some diagnostics, make sure everything on your hard drives is running smoothly."

Crow smiled and waved at Alexander and found himself a beer in the refrigerator as he waited for his alibi to come back downstairs. He blew the next four hours fiddling with Nan's various subsystems from the laptop's wireless connection. There was no real reason to have Nan down here. The senti could be upstairs in standby mode for all of this, but of course the entire point was to have those security camera eyes staring him down and recording his presence and the occasional interaction over the next few hours. That's as irrefutable as you can get. Crow thought. They can pull all of the logs for this network connection and see that I didn't do anything untoward, and the video footage on this junker's hard drive shows that I was here the entire time.

The police arrived promptly at eleven PM with a light, almost polite knock at the door. Crow answered it quickly, the image from movies of cops counting to three after the light knock before breaking the door down with a sledgehammer lighting up his imagination. He assumed an appropriately puzzled look when he answered the door.

"Is something wrong, officers?" Crow asked. He had an almost irresistible urge to tell them that there was no bachelorette party here tonight.

"We're going to have to take you into custody for questioning." The officer said. He looked bored.

"I've got a five year old kid upstairs and I'm a single dad." Crow said.

"You got a bot right?" The officer asked. "Cause what you're going to do is turn it on and take a ride with us."

"Am I being place under arrest?" Crow asked.

"Not at the moment."

"Then let me get my cell phone and wallet." Crow said. "I'll call my lawyer on the way over."

The officer glanced at his partner. Crow could see two squad cars out front, so another couple of guys must have waited in the car. These two had the exhausted look of fellows who really didn't want to care and didn't see any reason to other than a whole lot of heat coming down on them from above.

"Call your lawyer? What, you got something to hide?" The officer asked. The challenge was half-hearted, almost as scripted as the Miranda rights would have been. He was already glancing over his shoulder to his car, mind not even on the mandatory question.

"I don't know much, but I've watched enough TV to know that the first thing I do is call my lawyer." Crow said and turned to pocket his wallet and cell phone from the mess of mail by the front door.

"Before you even know what this is all about?" The officer asked.

"I have no comment until my attorney is present." Crow said. "That's the second thing I'm supposed to do. Say that until my throat bleeds."