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.