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Carl said, “I don’t trust dirt to support a tower twenty kilometers high.”
As a little side project en route to building his tower, Carl was going to have to reboot the American steel industry.
Left-leaning people denied that the United States was a politically stable entity. Right-leaners took issue with the premise that Americans really had property rights.
For Carl was no respecter of titles and credentials. Whomever he trusted, was in his field of vision, and hadn’t said anything colossally stupid recently tended to end up being assigned responsibilities.
But like the proverbial frog in a pan of water, we’d all been getting accustomed to shifts in the climate, and weather events unheard of during the previous century.
“All things cyber. Anything with code in it. Anything connected to the Internet. This stuff creeped into our lives and we got dependent on it. Take it away and the economy crashes—just like the tower. You gotta embrace it.”
“When I was younger, I was frustrated that we weren’t building big ambitious stuff anymore. Just writing dumb little apps. When Carl came along with the tower idea, and I understood it was going to have to fly—that it couldn’t even stand up without embedded networks—the light went on. We had to stop building things for a generation, just to absorb—to get saturated with—the mentality that everything’s net-worked, smart, active. Which enables us to build things that would have been impossible before, like you couldn’t build skyscrapers before steel.”
“Shirtsleeves environment” had been the magic buzzword. I knew as much because Carl had once banned the phrase from PowerPoint slides—shortly before he had banned PowerPoint altogether, and then attempted to ban all meetings.
one of the advantages of being a middle-aged chick in this world was the freedom to ask questions that a young male would be too insecure to voice.
Its accustomed straightness was a process, not a state; it was made straight from one moment to the next by a feedback loop that had been severed.
Exploring, and embracing the dangers, not of outer space but of the atmosphæra incognita that, hidden from earthlings’ view by thunderheads, stretches like an electrified shoal between us and the deep ocean of the cosmos.
