Wave Pools

In 2092 a gifted systician named Jonatha Sumner published her first paper on Novelty Calculation and two years later a man named Gordon Wilder first suggested the notion of a wave pool. Who was Gordon Wilder? This had become a question with which J had been obsessed. Following in his father’s footsteps he had become a talented retriever, gifted as he was at Field manipulation. His abilities had been widely recognized and had left him with a myriad of specialty options, something few in J’s generation enjoyed. But information about this man Wilder had not been forthcoming, even as he figured more and more prominently in the story of J’s life and the mystery which had come to hang about him like a black storm-cloud.

Wilder’s elusive storyline is in part what drove our man into this heap, drooling, shivering, uncontrollable, unconscious, the total calculated worth of a jellyfish. It was almost as if any knowledge of the man’s existence was some kind of mistake. Someone’s oversight. A chink in the steely armor of history protecting as it does our true past except for those tiny cracks. And through one such crack drifted this man’s name, like a leaf blowing about connected no longer to any known tree of events, no branches, no roots.

Some say he was a binary or bio systician. Some evidence points to his having been a mortician in a hospital morgue, Queens, NY.

Regardless of who devised it, it should be noted that the wave-pool concept came to under-gird the struggling economy and became the basis for many of the events in this story.

Shallow

She was not really shallow like so many in her community thought. From very early on, evoking any conceivable mind state with ease was something for which she lacked no talent, and as a result became a natural resource to which she would turn on occasion. The facility with which she would change herself so thoroughly from situation to situation astounded the folks that knew her so that the image of who she truly was was obscure to them. In fact, none felt that they really knew her at all so that while she had placed many of them into her confidence, none had ever taken her into theirs.

This was a tremendous anxiety for her. For community was valued in a way difficult to understand, for the Field had collapsed individual life. Imploded it. The information age was coming to a close and the specialized, fragmented world of the Western Mind had once again become one great grassy plain. Too void to take in at a glance. Full of predators and hidden danger. To be alone was to be forsaken. To be alone was to be devoured. So she leaned on the others and even on their children. But the rhythm of mutual support, the alternation of give and take always eluded her. It became a haunting sound that echoed all around but never within. Within there was only silence, as if the void of the Field was taking slow possession of her and would not, she knew, ever let her go.

Pedopedia

We had been running so fast for so long, and I had been so concentrating to place my feet in the right spots so as to not fall and embarrass myself that my whole mind had become a pattern of feet on ground. A constant output of foot information. It had been hard to keep up, but eventually we stopped short. He waited a beat for me and then gestured in the new direction we would be heading.

“Ready?”

We had been skirting the edge of a ridge and now I quickly looked around to see how he knew we had arrived. Off in the distance was a great white gate glowing brightly in the moonlight.

We turned off the path and began following a pattern of colored wooden pegs. He was only walking on blue ones and so I followed his lead.

“Careful”, he said.

Suddenly words began appearing and I began to hear him reading.

“It’s a kind of book”, I said.

“It’s a Pedopedia.” he replied, and as we tapped out the pattern, my pumping heart, my intense concentration and the words which began to flow to my mind all joined together as I learned the history of old science.

Diluculus leukopteros

The Daybreak White-winged Bat (Diluculus leukopteros), or Great Diurne, appeared somewhere in the latter half of the twenty-first century. First discovered in Spain and thought to be related to Nyctalus lasiopterus, this white predatory bat spread quickly across the northern hemisphere establishing itself throughout Europe and North America in less than fifty years. Apart from its pure white appearance, size and diurnal feeding habits, leukoptertos is identical to its nocturnal cousin Nyctalus lasiopterus, and has therefore been classified as belonging to the family of Vesper Bats Vespertilionidae despite its being the only known day-faring bat in existence.

In 2077, people by the thousands began making pilgrimages to a group of caves in Concan, South Texas to witness the millions of white bats that would flood from the caves at dawn. Despite the pseudo-religious nature of these pilgrimages no organized "white-bat cult" ever emerged from these gatherings and the phenomenon was relegated to rural populations throughout most of the second Civil Conflict and into the early years of the Field State. However, by around 2090 it was discovered that many D. Leukopteros were migrating into urban areas, causing many to fear that a resurgence of the sentiment would penetrate Federal centers.

The Daybreak White Wing, also called the Great White Bat was previously thought to feed exclusively on migratory birds (a trait extremely rare in bats, although found in its European cousin) but by the turn of the century roosts consisting of millions of bats existed in countless cities and were feeding on pigeons, gulls, rats, mice and passerines found in populated centers.

The suddenness of this urban migration reinforced in some the belief that the creatures were of a sacred nature bringing a message of hope while others saw them as a menace and a threat to urban life and worked to eradicate them from populated areas.