T he knock against the heavy oak door echoed through the high office like a toneless bell, tolling another day’s beginning. Silvan calmly turned from the east-facing window where the city basked in the morning sun, walked over to his desk and pressed the button to remotely open his office doors. He didn’t need to ask who it was; only one person in the world would come to his office without being called up.
“Good morning, Mr. Silvan,” Monika Leutz said, stepping into the office and walking briskly up the first set of stairs. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs leading to the top level, where he was; she always stood on a lower level than him when she was worried or anxious about whatever she was about to discuss, as if the height difference offered some kind of shield. Her smart glasses were tucked into her front pocket, and without them she looked old and tired. “I got everything ready to move forward,” she said. “Just in case. The VIPs will begin arriving soon. What’s your decision?”
That’s all they ever wanted from him: decisions. Such insignificant things, yet so immeasurably important. Sometimes he made them on whims, other times he spent sleepless nights making sure he thought of every possible implication. In either case he had often felt like it really didn’t matter how much he thought about a decision or which option he chose; nothing ever truly changed in the banal stream of workday-long existences, nothing depended on his decisions. But he made them nonetheless because that was his place: to be the head on top of everything. He was a brain in a box on a tower rooted in the fortunes of the human world.
“Has anything changed with the protesters?” he asked.
“If anything it’s worse.” This Monika was like a frightened child version of the real Monika, standing on wobbly stilts and loosely shrouded in her domineering exterior, to poor effect. “They’re persistent,” she said, her voice breaking for a brief moment before she paused to clear her throat. “There’s talk of riots, of…of an organized assault.”
“I’ve heard.”
These dreaming kids were proving more threatening than he had anticipated. Had he made the wrong decision in openly fighting back? No, not wrong, there were no wrong decisions—or right decisions; only good decisions and bad decisions. And all a bad decision did was create a slightly different path to the same end, to the goal he would reach regardless. While this path might be longer and bloodier, it would take him right where he wanted to go. He just had to use a slightly different method to get there, one that, fortunately, he had prepared for all along.
“Move Project Unify to the next stage,” he said. “Hold the meeting immediately.”
“Certainly,” Monika said with a trace of relief, and she turned on the spot.
He would never—never—admit it to any living person, but as he watched her hasten down the stairs and out the door he felt something that may very well have been fear.
9
The self-driving skyway cart went far too slow in Mike’s opinion, but it was better than taking the helicopter to the office. At least he had the cart to himself; there had been only two helicopters making two trips each to Silte headquarters from the Plaza, so eight or nine people had crammed into a space that could seat five comfortably, six if everyone was relatively small. The skyway cart may be slow, but stretching out and breathing fresh, climate-controlled air made it tolerable.
As the cart turned to drive its way through the final building before the long, ascending skyway that led directly into Silte headquarters, Mike’s microtab beeped, and he pulled it from the pocket of his jacket, unfolding it in routine fashion. The vid-call was from a Silte HR-bot; he hesitated for a moment before tapping the screen
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