TetherWeaver

Prologue

For millennia, Mother Earth bore humanity’s ambition to grow. Then, in an instant on history’s clock, she was relieved of the burden. As swiftly as the human population had exploded into a giga-civilization of billions over just two centuries, it dwindled to millions, without leaving a trace of evidence to explain why. No World War III. No asteroid collision. No Zombie apocalypse. Kendrik and his colleagues called it the Anthrorecession.

The smaller civilization that coalesced in the aftermath was governed by different codes, but human nature hadn’t much changed. In an age of restraint, a luminary like Kendrik lived a conflicted life. The tragedy was already unfolding, a young philosopher eroding in an institution stripped of wonder, a dreamer slipping toward disillusion. Weeks ago, he had been weighing surrender to the eccentric margins against assimilation into a banal life with the inner circle. Now, at best, he faced total trade reassignment. At worst, the ultimate disgrace. Exile.

Exchanging trades wasn’t uncommon, but the margin of personal choice in the matter was thin. Citizens adapted to the community’s needs, just like the community coevolved with the earth, an ancient constitution that pruned and preserved the new havens of human prosperity. They were not cities or colonies. There was no mother country. For as long as anyone could remember, people had lived in the network of havens scattered across the globe. Kendrik considered them like outposts, dropped into the wildernesses to observe without interference. He admired the earlier era of ingenuity, when havens proliferated technology that smoothed the environmental aberrations of coexistence with the planet’s ecosystem into barely detectable ripples, a feat achieved after many re-discoveries.

Once the post-Anthrorecession equilibrium had steadied, pockets of peoples had adapted by implementing clever, continuous, small-scale manufacturing and renewable energy harvesting. Experts still bickered over how long the neo-dark age lasted. It could have been hundreds or thousands of years.

While civilization decayed around them, small proto-havens had evolved quietly and steadily in secluded parts of the world to provide for their own medicines, materials, food, and energy. All the while, deference toward the planet’s equilibrium tempered the pace of development. Particle accelerators and telescope arrays remained only as fossilized memorials. Earth had granted a chance, small but just big enough, for a new age of humanity. The havens wouldn’t wager it again. They would no longer barter with Mother Earth.

Much had been lost, but centuries of lucrative archeological expeditions colleted a treasure of archives that had rekindled humanity’s romance with nature’s mysteries. The commissioners who studied lost ideas for the Global Congress of Historical Philosophy had become the heroes of the new world. Kendrik, an early but established career commissioner, was adrift in their esteemed ranks. He was beginning to think the universe made a cruel mistake, creating in him a visionary during a time that had become content.

His quest had devolved over the years into a research fishing expedition, leaving him casting glances at musty pages with fading wonder. The duty to discovery had begun to feel like a fabricated bane. If he could not hook an idea to impress the Arkon Council soon, or even himself, he might have to live the rest of his life in the wilderness with the homesteaders. Out there, his skills would be meaningless, his sole purpose survival. He would have nothing but a distant view of the railway between havens to remember civilization.

And he’d still be fishing.

Chapter 1

Outside the Observatory

It might have appeared to a common citizen, peering out from a workspace, or passing by on an errand, that a few commissioners of the Congress had simply happened upon each other at a crossway. The five of them might have met by chance for several reasons any other day, but this morning, they had sought each other out. What they had on their minds couldn’t wait for afternoon banter.

“The other havens are putting stock in it, too? Scholarkon commissioners, our most esteemed ranks, think there’s truth to the myth?” The youngest of the group was in disbelief.

“It was apparently discovered among the homesteaders,” an older commissioner added.

Another commisioner stopped them in their tracks and scoffed. “Out in the wilderness!? No. They are savages. Simpletons. Without libraries or the Congress, they have no means to cooperate for such a development.”

“Prefect Westin will have to reopen the evaluations. It’ll draw the support needed. The directive is coming directly from the Global Academy,” said a commissioner who spoke with more authority than the others.

“The havens gave up on this race decades ago. They tried for centuries before that. What could they hope to uncover?” the youngest cut in again.

 “Maybe they know someone already has a lead on the tether, they just don’t know who. Commissioning a race could draw them out.”

The group paused.

“Maybe” said the senior commissioner. “I’ll have to secure an official seat in the evaluations. We shouldn’t talk about this out here anymore. Rodney, get down to the archives and start digging.” He urged them on their way towards the Observatory doors.

In the Observatory Studio 

Kendrik’s tenure as a junior commissioner had settled into a daily routine. Anyone looking could find him in his empire of folly—numerous work benches covered with gadgets and concoctions. He had more surfaces cluttered up than any three of his observatory mates combined. Most of them gave him a wide berth. All the better for them and Kendrik. He was spraying chemicals for his pigmentation visualization research when a pressurized can exploded with a pop. The rest of his studio mates barely spared it a glance, save for an eyeroll as if to say – Here we go again.

Running his hands through his hair, Kendrik surveyed the windowed promenade around the Observatory. He had once appreciated the structure for its natural working light and spacious design, a nexus showcasing the heart of haven activity. Now, it felt more like a fishbowl. Kendrik couldn’t help his annoyance at every passerby that might be gawking. At first, the movement outside was no surprise. A small group of elder commissioners were circling the building on their way to the entrance. Hands and arms were gesturing sharply, catching his eye. Their pace was swift, halting, then swift again. It was an odd rhythm of urgency. But, after considering the roster of the company, he decided it was probably nothing to do with him. If it were, it would come his way.

He mulled over unfinished, loose-end experiments. Forget it. Today was better suited for cleaning up anyway. He couldn’t leave a wet mess seeping into everything. Kendrik tolerated clutter, but for all he knew, he’d be packing it all up any day now. And not because he was being carved out from his peers for some new opportunity like the other times. As a child, they’d transferred him to Flagstaff Haven because they needed more citizens. Several years ago, they’d pulled him out of trade school as a recruit for the Observatory. Back then, despite the circumstances, at least he’d had the companionship of a dream.

He had grown used to being an outlier, but he was still coming to terms with idea of getting kicked out.

 Kendrik turned back to his work, rifling through some papers, unsheathing and dropping more of his tools. The mag probe, one of his first inventions, klinked onto the concrete floor. Like himself, the mag probe had evolved into new, more capable versions, still unappreciated.

 “Got one!” Rodney’s voice crashed into Kendrik’s ear. He flinched, jolted out of his thoughts.

 “Earth’s sake! Rod!” Kendrik spun around clutching his ear to discover his pest of a colleague grinning. He must have slipped in with the commissioners outside.

 Rodney was a first-class commissioner, rank Pro’philos, in language interpretation. The verbal scuffle was a routine tease perfected by Rodney over their years together and suffered by Kendrik. It meant Rodney was on to something while Kendrik was presumed to be chasing dead ends, though at that moment Kendrik wasn’t chasing anything. He hated competition. It suffocated his creativity.

 Rodney would have been hard-pressed to actually impress Kendrik. “More word weeds for the dictionaries, is it?” Kendrik said, brushing off Rodney’s enthusiasm.

Books and digital storage tech were the gold of past archeology expeditions, and there were troves of them in the archives. Any commissioner could pick up a text in a lost language to author an essay theorizing some meaning between the scratches. Hence, those were the dominant research activities of the Congress.

“Believe it or not, in light of recent events, language interpretation is quite the buzz. Even you’d be intrigued.” Rodney paused. “But, tsk, I’ve said too much. It’s confidential.”

Satisfied that he’d left a sting of ostracism, Rodney continued his swagger towards the lift that led down to the Vault, part two of the tease.

 The moment for retort had passed. No matter. Kendrik usually preferred an afternoon to figure out the perfect response to his pests. He didn’t like to fuel altercations. It went against the culture of cooperation, but he always liked to know how he’d get the upper hand if needed.

 Regrettably, Kendrik had sobered to reality. For the same reason his peers gave him a wide berth in the observatory, he had lost all hope that the Arkon Council would let someone with his kind of craft into the Vault. The rejection had been slowly killing his spirit. Any commissioner would consider it a dream killer, being forever locked out, denied the freedom to venture out for new discoveries that mattered.

 The archives and digital servers housed in the Vault below the Congressional Observatory Building were restricted, accessible only to commisioners of Pro‘philos rank or higher. For all his early promise, Kendrik had stagnated at Philos—still a second-class, junior commissioner. His specialty, matter interpretation, was a field notoriously avoided, considered taboo even because it skirted to close to risk: poisoning, pollution, explosion. But, Kendrik preferred the messy, untrodden paths. How much of the Vault archives lay untouched and decaying in the dark?

Kendrik watched until Rodney entered the lift and descended to the Vault. Good. Now he could brood in peace. He reimagined the Vault as a cave full of imbeciles, Rodney included, who made a ritual of going down there just to dance around in circles, decked out in furs and feathers just so society could keep the idea of new age idiots alive without embarrassing itself. Kendrik’s imagination could still be as pleasantly juvenile as his first day in the Observatory.

His view of it today stood in stark contrast compared to that of his boyhood awe. As a Doki pupil, Kendrik used to approach the central hub of the haven with his gaze tethered to where the Observatory building crested above the trees like the haven’s own Parthenon. Before that, he’d been the spectator outside the glass watching the flurry of activity inside. Commissioners of the CHP were the distinguished intellects, the celebrities of the modern world, young champions who, after a lifetime pursuit of understanding, matured into the wise elders perched in the Congressional Observatory Building.

People relied upon the Congress as humanity’s envoy tasked with setting foot on the grounds of the past in order to steer the lives of the present. A poetic embellishment. Intelligence never precluded any institution from growing stale or self-serving.

To Kendrik, the commissioners were unchecked specialists. No one outside the Observatory truly understood what was clever about the work, only that they themselves could not do it. Naïve apprentices for the congress would one day perch in the observatory like the wrinkled old books they had studied their entire lives. For earth’s sake, people revered them for “rediscovery”. These days, Kendrik approached the central hub of the haven, eyes averted from the Observatory, as if to avoid what he really thought about it.

He read through the mission again, just like his first day, where it was inscribed around the base of the dome that topped studio.

“We, the commissioners of the Global Congress for Historical Philosophy, seek to reclaim the knowledge and ideas lost to the Anthrorecession, with a supreme mandate to safeguard the inviolate gifts of the earth, in order to secure enduring global havens of human geo-cohabitation that prosper in virtue rather than number. We pledge ourselves to an art of seeing more without taking more, of seeing more without making more …”

-Mission of the Global Congress on Historical Philosophy.

“Mentor, Kendrik?”, a voice called from across the room while Kendrik was imagining he and his colleagues all gulping around like fish for oxygen, oblivious to the lunacy of sitting there with their backs exposed, easy targets for any first class idiot to lurk over their works-in-progress.

 “Kix!”

The voice was right beside him now.

 “What?!” Kendrik flinched out of his thoughts again, teeth clenched.

But as he turned, he sighed with both relief and a flicker of shame. “Oh, it’s you.”

Roika, his apprentice, was standing a head taller than him where he sat at the counter. She had a hardened confidence, but it was carefree, not cold, easy for Kendrik to like. She always smiled easily, through her eyes and the dimples in her cheeks, just like she was now. Kendrick kept his somber look.

 “Ha! Yes, it’s me if that pleases you.” Roika let out a single, chuckling huff at Kendrik’s distress, as if she were the older of the two.

She placed a tablet beside his book, and asked dispassionately “What has you so on edge? The Arkons lurking around?”

Then, she sipped her tea and leaned against the counter beside him. “They are, you know?”

He looked up. While he’d been sulking, the attendance of the room had changed. Almost all of the Scholarkon mentors, and even members of the Arkon Council, were now in conversation with their junior commissioners, each listening with undivided attention. Where was his mentor?

 “Huxley will probably be in here soon to tell us about it,” Roika guessed, unconcerned.

 Kendrik sighed. Whatever the buzz was, he was certain it didn’t involve him. “Roika, I’m on a downhill trudge to curmudgeon-hood, and I’m smoldering into a has-been. When the Arkons realize my dead weight in the congress, do you think they’ll send me to the fields? I’m still hale enough, aren’t I?”

Roika squinted into the air, imagining the scenario, then declared with confidence, “Hu uh, your hands are too small, and you’re a little on the scrawny side.”

They stared at each other expressionless. Then, Roika gave in and rolled her eyes. “Kix, are you serious?!” she asked, watching him lean back into his chair, arms folded.

“Roika, my daily work is a task list for the footnotes of the Scholarkon’s projects. I peaked with the pigment transformation project that half of the observatory all but laughed at. ‘Second-class witchcraft’ they called it, remember?”

“Yeah, I thought it was brilliant!” Roika said, smiling again. Her sentiment was genuine. She couldn’t have known Kendrik felt pitied in that moment, but he didn’t resent it. He was in a mental limbo, second-guessing his relevance and needed a kinder voice to drown out his own.

A couple of months ago, Kendrik had prototyped a crystalline aerosol designed to work in tandem with an ultraviolet scanner to reshape the light absorption properties of a surface. At the nano level, the surface structure could be mapped by the crystalline film and stored in the scanner’s memory. Afterwards, a fresh film could be applied to a new surface and restructured to match the stored signature. It was a lock-and-key mechanism that could potentially mask or unmask invisible traces. The idea came to Kendrik after learning that, in the giga-civilization era, images were stored in thin silver halide layers. To others it was merely an aesthetic trick; to him it was a new microscope for elucidating invisible traces of… something. He conceded, even in his formal presentation to the Council, that he didn’t exactly know where the concept was needed.

Kendrik took advantage of the free ears to lament. “These people have no imagination. I’m tired of trying to breach my way into the next inner circle of this forsaken Congress. I lost my grip on original work of any mainstream importance long ago. I have nothing left to pull out of the hat for them.”

Roika set her cup down.

“Hey, that was just the room of idiots talking. You already think they’ve got their heads bolted to their shoulders. There’s more to the observatory than adding another cheap line to the knowledgebase. You taught me that, the only Philos mentor on the floor. Don’t listen to them, and for earth’s sake, don’t envy them.”

“Pff. No, I don’t envy them. I just… after centuries of digging, restoring, organizing, and analyzing, what if there aren’t any ideas left in the ground that can make any difference? We’re surviving here without any urgency for anything. And what’s my short lifetime of effort against the millennia humanity has already spent searching? I feel like one of the turbines outside, just spinning to keep the haven machine turning.”

The cycle had become too familiar: try something unconventional, wrestle through making it work, and nobody cared. Some would rather stomp it all out.

Kendrik stared off at nothing, recalling Roika’s first days as his apprentice just under a year ago at the same bench. She asked him why the building was called an observatory instead of a workshop or a library. Kendrik quietly reminisced and murmured the answer to himself. “We call it an observatory, because we are in the art of seeing more” He looked at Roika and shook his head. “It just seems like all of the possibilities for something new are locked away in the blessed Vault. How am I supposed to see anything through a Vault door?”

Roika shrugged. “I don’t know, you’re the mentor. I hope that role means something to you. I, for one, don’t want to sort through all the first-class idiots for a replacement.”

That made Kendrik smile.

Just then, the studio full of commissioners started turning their attention to the doors where Prefect Westin entered, assistants trailing behind. Kendrik couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the Prefect in the Observatory. It was definitely unusual.

Without much pause, the Prefect spoke. “Commissioners, your attention please.”

Once the room was quiet, he continued. “I am sorry to interrupt like this, but I have to announce the Arkon Council will be convening tonight in the amphitheater for urgent business. Citizens are welcome to attend, but your attendance is needed. Please, plan accordingly. We will provide more details tonight. Thank you. Please, carry on. I have a few more announcements to make elsewhere.”

The Scholarkon mentors followed Prefect Westin out of the Observatory. In minutes, it was back to the usual commissioners in the studio chatting about, failing to carry on as directed. Who could blame them? The announcement was highly irregular.

“You think Huxley is coming?” Roika asked.

“I don’t know. But the meeting is in two hours. You keep fishing in here. I’m going to attempt to run off this attitude, do something I know everyone can appreciate by putting some watts into the impact path.”

#

For Kendrik, runs around the haven served a deeper purpose than the word exercise could convey. His first strides were fueled by an eagerness for freedom, a liberation from the walls of buildings and concentration. The need to know every corner, every turn, every trail had long since imprinted an indelible map in his mind. His route unfolded like water trickling down rock, the next turn uncertain, like the thoughts that would rise to meet him.

He followed the impact path, mostly. It was one of the many ways energy was cycled in the haven. Several of the most trodden walkways were paved with a crystalline mineral that emitted electromagnetic field fluctuations when distorted by pounding feet.

The idea to harness footfall for energy was uncovered by a talented commissioner 200 years ago – Sky Emerson, a figure Kendrik admired and considered a dynamo of his time. Like the end point for all energy harvesting systems, the path eventually led Kendrik to the gravity tower. He approached its base and began his run up the spiral trail surrounding the nearly 100-meter structure, encased in vertical tracks. Metric ton blocks slogged upward for energy storage or dropped for energy use, borrowing kinetic energy from each of Kendrik’s strides. Kendrik imagined the transformation: a step’s impact turned into electrical currents, electricity elevated the blocks into gravity potential for them to fall and send it all back out to power the sprawling haven below. Seeing more without taking more, Kendrik thought, as he eagle-eyed his haven from the tower’s peak.

He took in the sight of hybrid of structures, made from modern materials or nature’s, whichever best served longevity, function, and footprint. The tower was concrete and steel, like many other multi-level structures in the central hub. But further out, shale roofs and buildings of stone and lumber were set into the angled horizon of pine forest. While running the path, Kendrik envisioned himself as part of the long line of discoveries throughout history. It was a comforting and empowering thought.

After coming down the tower, Kendrik found his stride. Uphill or downhill made no difference. He felt like he could run for days and was back in touch with something he was good at. Running. In the training corps he had been a 10-kilometer cross country leader and would have made a good carrier in times of energy drought. Back on level ground, he followed gravel paths linking homes, supply depots and food markets. Wider roads led to the haven’s perimeter where orchards, crop fields, and solar farms stretched. Beyond that the haven footprint diminished abruptly into a web of thin, rugged trails rooting into the forest.

Suspended above him, beaming into the horizon, was the railway connecting this haven to the rest of humanity, a sight that always left an ache in him. Kendrik wondered how people could see it every day and not feel the same tug out into the distance. As a commissioner he was closer to global connection than most citizens. Despite his disenchantment with the Congress, he still had an intuition, a fascination for nature’s mysteries, especially where cause and effect blurred. His teachers always told him he had a unique sight for relevance in the details: the way small parts in the energy cycles powered his world, or how the thousand daily tasks of cooperation made a community more than the sum of its parts.

At the end of his run, came the familiar feeling of peaceful exhaustion. What had started as a brute-force tactic for doing something measurable had ended at one of those blurred places between cause and effect. He stood once again at the foot of the Observatory steps. The same physical spot where he began, yet it didn’t feel like the same place. The same day offered a new chance. He wondered if the Arkon Council meeting was the impending shake-up he needed.

The work of the Observatory may have seemed like a turning wheel as of late, but it could yet give something big back. Maybe Kendrik still could, too.