Lifeline

The imaginary strand of molecules extended away from her in an endless line. But instead of being a jumbled sequence of nonrepeating numbers, these molecules were ordered, well-posed in a razor sharp line that had no beginning or end. That was the one-dimensional aspect she recognized.

As she imagined herself moving closer to the filament, she wondered what kept the structure from falling apart, from stretching out and collapsing under its own gravitational weight as it hung in front of her. She considered why it wasn’t rigid.

Karen moved around the strand. The molecules stretched down and above, as far as she could see. She approached to touch the apparition and drew suddenly back, her mouth agape.

She wondered if others would call this a mystical experience. It didn’t matter if her colleagues laughed at her technique—they couldn’t argue with the solutions she found.

Extending radially from every molecule coursed a potential, a force she couldn’t see, perpendicular to the strand. The answer tickled the back of her mind, growing stronger, more insistent. Karen didn’t push herself, but kept her thoughts flowing, visualizing the strand, imagining herself moving along its length. The potential force remained. The same potential. And hurling herself in the opposite direction, jabbing at every molecular twist, she continued to encounter the identical binding force.

And suddenly she realized. The tickling solution burst into the front of her mind.

When she had first discovered how to master irrational numbers, Karen had wept from the revelation. Now her eyes stung with tears from the knowledge of how a one-and-a-half-dimensional strand—a weave—could grow stronger as it got longer, yet could remain completely flexible. The potential bound every molecule, and grew with the number of molecules. The distance between each molecule didn’t matter, she realized, because the potential was radial.

The implications overwhelmed her. She blinked and found herself kneeling on the floor. She stood up and closed the door, anxious not to have anyone interrupt her train of thought.

With the laser filamentation technique, she could make a strand that was, for all practical purposes, an infinite line of infinite strength and infinite thinness.

Karen Langelier hugged her knees and began to laugh to herself. No matter what, Ray’s caseload tonight could never compare with this!

Eventually, the single-molecular fiber, woven in one and a half dimensions with its own potential, became known as weave wire. Karen would have preferred something more elegant, but the name stuck.

L-4: AGUINALDO—Day 1 Minus 3 Years

Being at the Aguinaldo’s Jumpoff was like standing at the bottom of a gargantuan well. Ramis floated at one end of the zero-G core; he squinted along the lightaxis to the other end, ten kilometers away. Clusters of children played in the core, punctuated by sail-creature nymphs darting in and out, genetically programmed to keep the youngsters away from the central column of fiberoptic threads. Adults navigated the rim, leaping from bouncer to bouncer in a race around the circumferential Sibuyan Sea.

Living areas curled around the cylindrical side, snaking through the fields of taro and abaca, rice paddies, stadiums, and streams. Experimental sectors of wall-kelp covered most of the remainder of the Aguinaldo’s metallic structure.

As Ramis revolved around the lightaxis, it seemed as though his whole world might collapse and fall to the center. The sight always made him dizzy. But he smiled.

Ramis Barrera was thirteen, though smaller than others his age, and he fiercely fought against the perception that he was younger. He tried to keep aloof, avoiding others to make himself seem more independent.

Even three years before, back on Earth in the Baguio resort on the Philippines, Ramis had tried to be tough and snub his mother when she came to see him and his brother in the Sari-Sari store. Ramis’s parents owned the store, but they spent most of their time at the Scripps Institute with Dr. Sandovaal. Ramis and his older brother Salita often minded the store, and occasionally their mother dropped in to check on them. Salita would hide his newly opened bottle of San Miguel and the blue-seal cigarettes he had been sneaking; Ramis would jump down from the counter and pretend to be businesslike, to impress his mother with how mature he could act. The room would grow quiet, and they would be able to hear the sounds from outside. With only a stern look, his mother would send them back to work …

But now, up in the Aguinaldo and floating at Jumpoff, he wished she were here. The exciting but frightening vertigo waited for him above.

Ramis leaped straight up. His momentum bore him high into the zero-G core. Below, Jumpoff grew farther away as he drifted parallel to the lightaxis.