Water Rising Newdelphia

By Frances Wellman

In 2400, people live in Glass Cities floating on water; toward the end of the 21st century, following the great upheaval, water had risen covering most of the usual landscape and partially destroying many databases. A group of friends is linked to the murder of Mr. Smith. Part of the resolution of the murder includes these young men and women's journey from innocence to awareness, their quest for a new land and a new frontier and the intimation that one of them may be a time traveller.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frances Wellman
• Release date: Nov 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301944897

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WATER RISING

NEWDELPHIA

Frances Wellman

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Frances Wellman

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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GLASS CITY

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2421

It is 10:30am: The winter sun is now reaching her desk from the left side and she smiles at the cheerful thought. In an hour, her cubicle will warm up slightly and she will have to ClickOn air level 2 for her individual comfort. High above, both under the Ceiling and around the Walls, there is an elaborate system of air pipes that meticulously and accurately filters the ambient air. The city temperature varies according to the season to match, to a certain extent, the outdoor atmosphere but it is never too hot or too cold. In a Glass City, to achieve an acceptable uniform result, the air pipes are moving constantly while changing directions. Amazingly, they can be connected, disconnected, or shortened instantly with only a slight hum.

Christine usually arrives at the office 15 minutes before the official time. She likes it this way because it is very quiet and in these few minutes she is free to do what she wants. She checks her face in the small mirror while pouting her mouth: lipstick, make-up, hair bang - everything is in place, I am set for the day - I don’t want to give it another thought. Sometimes, she listens to tune samples from Norzama; all others music sites are blocked by the Department but somehow, this site is not. While she listens to music, she checks the official quitting time for the day on the Sunrise and Sunset time table. Then she reads the dailies, saving out offline on her wrist-screen interesting articles, catchy pictures, and of course number games and crossword puzzles to do at home in the evening.

At official starting time sharp, the Surveillance Screen comes up; she has everything ready on her desk including the notepad to record the unusual data. As instructed, she looks at the images on the screen as if she was reading a text. To protect her eyesight she constantly looks on & off the screen. She works on the tenth floor, so from her desk she can see through the building’s windows and through the transparent city walls the ocean below, fluid and translucent thanks to the new negative Yakima technology.

The water is peaceful today even though the surface moves incessantly. Flocks of seagulls gyrate above the bridge of the Bowling Green station. All of a sudden, they settle in a row on top of the connector railings though they periodically take off to exchange their place with their neighbor. It is still poorly understood how small creatures like birds are able to survive in the poisonous atmosphere; but they seem to thrive. Secretly, Christine wishes she could keep a bird at home, to hear him sing: she had heard the seagulls squawking through the speakers and their chants seemed familiar to her. But it’s not allowed; no exception.

The CFC’s office supervises the monitoring of the outdoor air quality. Each city black-boxes are sent every afternoon directly to the CFC for decoding, data storage, statistics, and official information release. As for the birds, the CFC’s office had issued the official scientific explanation a long time ago: birds had been able to produce a counter-poison and later have evolved a gland that filters the outdoor gases. There is no argument against it; the gulls are alive and thriving.

The water taxis rush through the waves, entrenching their white foam smudge for a while to mark their territory. The other workers have almost surreptitiously appeared in their respective cubicles. The first rotating breaks will start in one hour, for exactly 10 minutes. She will have a chance to discuss the news and the dress code with her team colleagues. Christine objects privately to the constant promotion of youth and beauty in the news; she believes that you would have to be very assertive to get up the ladder if you are a woman and do not fit the criteria.

Christine wishes she would be taller; she is 5’2 and a little chubby so she always wears at least 3 heels. With her brown hair coming down just about to her shoulders she tries to convey under her bangs and her big blue eyes, generously lined, a mysterious look. But Merissa, her team colleague, finds her most of all fun, easy going, and energetic. After high school, when Christine started to work, she never felt comfortable with the other workers: it seems they were looking at her as if she did not belong here. People and things looked stiff almost like caricatures enveloped in a light-grey fluid fog that moved around according to her gaze. But now seven years later, she has slowly cleared the atmosphere and feels well enough to look forward to the breaks with her coworkers.

At the morning time-out, she asks Merissa if the outfits she is planning for next month will be within the norm; these black and white stripes are driving her crazy; she thinks it’s so ugly. Of course, she does not tell that to Merissa who is a stickler for propriety; for next month, you need at least two white stripes and the black ones need to be larger than the white. The dress can be long or short, however, there are no sleeves at all. Usually, four or five dresses are enough; one for each week. Then, Christine has to match the shoes and the handbag; it is fairly easy, because the stores have prepared these combinations for you.

Two guard boats are approaching the wharf appended to the Connector. The larger, a white one, docks first; a man in orange pressurized suit called P-suit secures the craft’s latch to the docks, in just enough time to let some passengers disembark through the connector. The small boat seems to wait its turn, but as soon as the white one backs up and leaves, it follows in the white foam.

Then, it is the turn of the dark red ferry to dock into the Governors’ Park City on its way to the Terminal Historical Building. Nobody knows why the City operates this ferry as nobody boards it except nautes; but the Council follows what is written in the City Constitution. The mechanics, nautes in short, always complain about extra duty for nothing. They go around the ship trying to figure out how such an antique boat can still float. The small guard craft came back, its hull bobbing on the water. Several times Christine lapses a little bit: she starts dreaming about the other glass cities in the vicinity, small shiny rectangles floating far away on the water. Sometime they are grey or they become invisible; most of the time they reflect the sun.

The birds have dispersed now; only a few remain: they constantly are taking off in a circle and coming back. One of the seagulls landed on top of the BG station flag pole. A southwest breeze gently sways the flag; Christine loves the sight of the birds and the flag. They provide a pleasing diversion from the routine, the conformity and the technology. Of course, she ClickOn weather every morning because it is the law; but she likes to look at the flag, the water and the sun to confirm DataTank, the main database.

Way below the bridge, a tunnel seems to undulate in unison with the waves to produce an impressionistic show. Visitors are gathering on the side tunnel of the Connector to take pictures of the landscape and the underwater tunnel. Distorted views of people moving about the Underwater Nation Station are reflected in adjacent structures. You know that it is not a reflection of the City Station because the infrastructure is bright orange.

This year Christine has been transferred to the Transportation Surveillance Section; Transportation has its own building. She analyzes the data of four of the hundreds of camera devices in the Connector passages in and out of Newdelphia: this month she and two co-workers are watching cameras 13 to 16. She has been assigned so far to Surveillance of the Indoor Air Quality, Food Production and Water Desalination; it had involved watching numbers and statistics as well as performing numerous calculations. There has been no time for watching the sea, the birds, the clouds or the people.

This assignment is different; she feels at time that her brains are split in half: the front part checking the image on the