Zerpa Imaginscape Book One: Imaginscape, #1

By Daved Muttart

In the future, travelers don't hop on a plane, they hop into someone else's imagination.  The most popular imaginers can host up to three million travelers at a time.  Competition is intense.  With intense competition comes cutting corners.

 

Stanton Zerpa investigates imaginers who cut corners.  His current case involves several travelers who have lost memories as the result of going into an imaginscape.  Several victims cannot remember what happened inside the imagination they traveled into.  More seriously, one traveler has lost his memory of an event occurring prior to his travel.

 

Then Emily, Zerpa's girlfriend, is plunged into a coma.

 

The doctors try every possible therapy.  Zerpa investigates every possible cause.  Will he be able to rescue her?  And if so, what will it cost him?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daved Muttart
• Release date: Nov 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393291985

Book preview

Chapter 1

Live interviews were always a challenge but Stanton Zerpa was finding this one especially difficult.  The woman sitting on the other side of his desk kept flailing her arms about.  Three times she’d knocked the blue marker into the pens and Zerpa had had to repeatedly realign both the pens and the markers.  He didn’t want to rebuke her because he could tell she was in distress.  Plus her story was critical to determining the source of the possible malfunction of the couplers he was investigating.

The allegedly defective coupler was implicated in the injury of five travelers.  Their consciousnesses had gone into the imagination without difficulty, along with the consciousnesses of their fellow 2.5 million travelers.  But when they’d come out, none of the five could recall the events of their travel inside.  Worse, one had also suffered a loss of some of his pre-existing memories.  For most products, a malfunction affecting less than 0.0002 percent of users would not be a problem, but visiting an imagination had to be flawlessly safe.  If the memory losses indicated a persistent problem, they were potentially catastrophic, especially in today’s hyper-competitive environment.

Zerpa knew that his boss would want Heilig’s coupler cleared with all due haste.  And that should have been the only thing on his mind.  Instead, the Lead Investigator was being distracted by the fact that his pens were out of order.  Zerpa liked his pens arranged in their holder from blue on the right, then green, then purple, then black with red on the left.  On the far side of the holder should be three markers: blue, black and red, in matching order.  He did his best to concentrate.  Rebuking the woman opposite might cause her to omit important details. 

The coupler under investigation was the latest model.  It was smaller and lighter.  It ran on less than ten percent of the energy required by the previous model.  More importantly, it allowed ten times the throughput.  With the old model, it would take ten hours for a million travelers to enter an imagination.  The new model had accommodated all two and a half million travelers in just under three hours.

The woman’s story was similar to those of the three other travelers Zerpa had already interviewed that morning.  She had been eagerly anticipating entering Heilig’s imagination for several days. 

We were, she said, supposed to have met an ancient holy man and healer.  He would mingle in and amongst us.  Most of us wouldn’t recognize him, but we’d sense something changing.

What exactly was supposed to have changed? asked Zerpa.

Transformation.  Our souls becoming alive.  It was going to be so real.  And our bodies, all our aches and pains would be healed.

Zerpa restrained himself from telling her that none of it would have been real.  It would have all been a figment of her imagination.  Or rather a figment of the rather more expansive and extensive imagination of Konrad Heilig.  Her imagination would merely be tasting Heilig’s.  What actually happened?

I entered the sleep facility as always, laid down on the bed, and tapped my connector.  She turned to show him the side of her neck.  She winced when her fingers touched the gauze bandage there.

Zerpa had insisted that her mini-connector be surgically removed for analysis.  But her wince told him that it would be counterproductive to his interview to inform her that he had been the cause of the surgery to remove her implant.  What happened next? he asked.  Please be precise.

What always happens.  My arms went limp, then my legs.  Colors flashed.  My head spun.  Then black, as if I was asleep.  Except instead of stepping inside, I woke up immediately.  They said I’d been out for five days.  But it felt like only a few moments.

Did you remember anything?  Anything at all?

She shook her head.

Did you see the ancient holy man?

A tear dribbled down her cheek.  Nothing.  I didn’t see nothing!  Her voice sounded as if it was about to break into a wail.

Outside his office, Zerpa caught sight of his Unit Leader pacing up and down.  But Zerpa had no intention of acknowledging L. Patrick Tolson until he’d completed his interview.  A proper investigation was a meticulous investigation.  What happened next?  There was no point in asking this woman to be precise.

I woke up in my bed.

Did you recall anything else?

He saw her scowl at him as if he hadn’t been listening to her.  No.  At the check-in, they told me that the full five days had passed.  I didn’t believe them until I saw the date on the newsfeed.  They took me aside and then some butcher cut into my neck.  She pointed to the bandage but this time was careful not to touch it.

In the hall, the Unit Leader tapped on his watch.

Did you feel anything different? asked Zerpa.

She shook her head.

What ache or pain did you want to have healed?

My ankle.  She pointed to the bottom of her right leg.

Did your ankle feel different, in any way, after you came out of Mister Heilig’s imagination?  Nothing inside the imagination was supposed to affect the traveler’s physical body, but Zerpa knew that the power of suggestion sometimes produced physical effects.

She wiggled her ankle, then rotated it.  No different.  It still hurts.

Did you feel transformed?

No.  She sighed, now totally defeated.

As soon as Zerpa escorted her through his office door, his boss squeezed in.  The Unit Leader’s face was flushed.

Tolson, like Zerpa, was wearing a suit and tie, but while his Lead Investigator avoided ostentation, Tolson had gold cufflinks at the end of his sleeves, and beyond them on his left wrist, a gold Rolex.  At forty-eight, he was a full decade older than Zerpa.  Zerpa was tall and trim, his skin perpetually tanned as the result of the Hispanic half of his heritage.  Tolson was shorter.  Pasty white skin and the beginnings of a tire around his waist reflected his sedentary lifestyle.

Tolson jerked a thumb in the direction of the woman waiting by the elevator.  When’re you going to wrap this up? he wanted to know.

I have to meet with the technicians who are examining the defective coupler—

"Allegedly defective.  And you don’t need to meet with them.  They’ve already filed their report."  Tolson tossed a thick document onto Zerpa’s desk.  It was bound on the left side with black plastic and had clear plastic covers, front and back.  Standard Bureau.

Zerpa opened the report and kept his eyes focused there even though he wasn’t reading.  Plus I have to interview the attending psychiatrist about the memory loss—

Already done.  Another report thumped onto his desk.

And the technicians who analyzed the mini-connectors—

Already done.  Tolson handed over five more reports as if he was dealing cards.

I need to talk to all the technician’s together, said Zerpa.  The defective—

Tolson cleared his throat.

"The allegedly defective coupler, continued Zerpa, may have not been compatible with the five mini-couplers."  The last of the five technical reports had jostled his pen holder; Zerpa put his red pen back into its proper place.

The techy techs will be here within the hour.

Zerpa held up the reports.  That doesn’t give me enough time to read—

Tolson pulled out the report from the psychiatrist.  "If you’re going to meet with the technicians, you can ask them to give you the bottom line.  The shrink’s report is the only one you need to read.  Come on, Stanton, let’s wrap this up."

Zerpa managed to stifle his response to the inappropriate use of his first name and tapped the two other reports.  There may be an important detail in—

The only important detail you need to worry about is completing this investigation by end of business today.

There were so many things wrong with what his boss had just said.  First, completing his report wasn’t a detail, it was a conclusion.  Second, an investigation couldn’t be completed on an arbitrary deadline; every relevant fact had to be assembled and considered.  Third, they were an arm of the government, not a business.  But instead of pointing these errors out and being told to ‘pick his battles’, Zerpa opened the psychiatric report and began to read.

Tolson cleared his throat again.  The two men locked eyes.  Zerpa knew that Tolson wanted him to turn to the last page of the report and satisfy himself with reading the conclusion.  He sighed and turned to the last page.  But as soon as Tolson had smiled and left his office, Zerpa got up and hung his jacket on the hook behind his office door.  A moment later, he returned to the first page of the psychiatrist’s report.

The traveler who’d been most seriously injured had lost his memories of the week preceding his travel into Heilig’s imagination.  Additionally, he couldn’t recall designing and ordering the diamond necklace he’d purchased a month ago and planned to give to his wife the day he returned from his travel.  No other memories appeared to have been affected.  His intelligence was as before and his ability to perform as an engineer was intact.  Emotionally he seemed upbeat.  Unlike the other travelers who’d reported a lack of recall of their travels, he was able to recall snippets of what had happened inside Heilig’s imagination.  The psychiatrist speculated that this might be the source of his cheerfulness, but she conceded that she had no basis for any such conclusion.

There was a lengthy appendix for each of the five travelers, but he would read those after digesting the technical reports.

Zerpa frowned as he tapped the psych report against his desk.  There were a number of reasons why a traveler might not recall what had gone on inside another’s imagination.  The most common was an overactive safety protocol, an easy fix.  Almost all the other causes could also be swiftly rectified.  But the fact that the psychiatric patient had suffered the loss of pre-existing memories was more worrisome.  And his ability to recall parts of his experiences inside the imagination was an odd anomaly.

Zerpa’s theorizing as to possible causes of the travelers’ injuries was interrupted by the arrival of three technicians.  All had examined one or more of the mini-connectors which had been implanted into the affected travelers.  Zerpa made three piles of their reports and placed each pile in front of the technician who’d authored them.  All three had worked on the defective coupler.  Allegedly defective.

Did the mini-connectors malfunction in any way? asked Zerpa.

All three techs shook their heads.  Five plastic baggies, each containing a pill-sized object, instantly appeared on Zerpa’s desk.  Each small pill-shaped device had several fine filaments protruding from one end.

Did they fail to properly interface with the new coupler?

Again the techs shook their heads.

Were there any commonalities?

The technician in the middle, the eldest and the one the other two seemed to be deferring to, shook his head.  No.  Each came from a different manufacturer.  The oldest one was five years old.  The newest one was certified only six months ago.  Three had the last software updates.  One had skipped the latest update.  One was short a firmware and two software updates.

What about Mister A’s connector?  Mister A was the traveler who had forgotten about the necklace.

His was manufactured three years ago and was up to date.

Anything else?  No matter how minuscule or seemingly inconsequential?

All three shook their heads.  Zerpa sighed.  It was highly unlikely that three very different mini-connectors were the source of the problem.  Still, he’d have to read their reports just to be sure.  He shuffled them to the far side of his desk and slid the larger report on the possibly defective primary coupler front and center.

Zerpa stifled a sigh.  It would have been so much more convenient if the problem had resided with the mini-connectors.  At ten times faster, the possibly defective coupler was the country’s newest and brightest technology.  Travelers would flock in to use it.  Faster uploads would facilitate larger numbers of travelers accessing the most powerful imaginations available.  The Chinese had a primary coupler which had three times the throughput of the old technology.  But the new coupler, once it was made widely available, would blow them out of the water.  He cringed at the thought of the tirade Tolson would unleash when he gave him his preliminary findings.

What about this one? asked Zerpa tapping the thick report now sitting directly in front of the senior technician.  The primary coupler.

The senior technician reached into his bag and placed a black cube on the desk.  From the way he handled it, Zerpa could tell that it was heavy.  Zerpa extended his hand and slowly rotated the cube.  It was slim and smooth, not like its predecessors.  A red wire protruded out one side.  Filaments similar to those on the tops of the mini-connectors were visible at the end of the wire, but where the mini-connectors each had only a few filaments, the primary coupler had hundreds.

The filaments from the internal mini-connectors had been attached to neurons inside the travelers’ necks.  The more numerous filaments from the primary coupler had been attached to the imaginer who’d hosted the imagination, in this case Konrad Heilig.  When travelers’ mini-connectors interfaced with the primary coupler, their consciousnesses would be admitted into the host’s imagination.  Usually the mini-connectors had to be within a hundred feet of the primary coupler to interface; the new coupler allowed interfacing to occur up to ten times further away—almost a hundred meters.

When Zerpa had completed a full rotation of the coupler, he lightly tapped its top.  What did you find?

The senior technician cleared his throat.  All three technicians looked at their report.

Zerpa followed their eyes.  I’ll read your report in detail.  But for now, I want the highlights.  Then I want you to tell me what’s not in the report.

The senior technician looked offended.  "Everything is in the report."

Zerpa tapped the top of the report, pointedly not opening it.

The senior technician took a deep breath.  There were three unnecessary loops in the coupler’s hardware but we concluded that they were for redundancy purposes.

Would they have safeguarded from malfunction rather than have caused a breakdown? asked Zerpa.

Correct.

Nothing else?

The technician shook his head.

What about the firmware and the software?

The firmware was nominal—no problems.  It took the three hardware loops into account.  Much of the software is new, so it has the usual bugs.  But we couldn’t find anything specific that we thought could have caused the problems with the five travelers.  He glanced pointedly at the report.

Zerpa stood.  Thank you, gentlemen, for your reports.  I’ll read them in detail and contact you if I have any further questions.

The three technicians left in order of their seniority.  The youngest shut the door to the office behind him.

Zerpa picked up the reports on the mini-connectors and opened the first one.  Eliminating them as the cause would aid his investigation.  He knew that Tolson would have preferred him to presume that none of the connectors had malfunctioned and to concentrate on the coupler itself.  But a systematic approach was always best.

His phone chimed, indicating that he had an outside visitor.  Zerpa barely had enough time to stand and pull his suit jacket on before his assistant ushered the visitor into his office.  She stood uncomfortably close to him and smiled as she showed the visitor into his office.  She introduced the visitor but the investigator registered him as only ‘Mister A’ his designation for the purpose of this investigation.

Zerpa sat back down in his chair.  Thank you for coming, he said, following the Bureau’s protocol.  His assistant shut the door behind her as soon as Mister A sat down.

I just want to get to the bottom of this, said Mister A.

Please tell me what happened.  In as much detail as possible.

When I came out of the imagination, I didn’t have the usual sense of euphoria and the experience of the imagination flashing before my eyes.  All I could recall were brief events, like a dream.  I felt fine, but you know...  He smiled.

How could I possibly know, thought Zerpa, without you telling me?  Subsequently, were you able to recall more?

No, just a flicker of a face or a glimmer of a stream inside a forest or the rustle of a crowd.

Tell me about the stream.  Mister A’s expression had relaxed when he’d mentioned it.

There was a gurgle, otherwise the forest was completely silent.

Zerpa knew from past experience that there would be crickets chirping or birds tweeting, but Mister A had apparently not registered these.  Was there anything else unique about this travel?

"When I got home, I found a jewellery box—a necklace— hidden in my underwear drawer.  I had no idea how it got there.  No recall.  Nothing, rien, zilch, nada."

What did you do?

The inside of the box had an address on it.  I went to the jewellery store.  They told me that I’d helped design the pendant and had matched it with the chain.  When I didn’t believe them, they showed me the documentation, even a surveillance video of me discussing the necklace with the designer.

How did that make you feel?

Creepy.  But he was still smiling.

Why do you feel that this loss of memory had anything to do with your recent travel?

It occurred at the same time.  I’d picked up the necklace from the store just before I went into imagination.  So it had to be the travel.

Zerpa restrained himself from the obvious observation that proximity in time was a poor indicator of causation.  Did you feel anything different upon entering the host’s imagination?

Mister A shook his head.

What about coming back out?

When I opened my eyes, I had the sense of just having gone over a bump.  But nothing I could put my finger on.

Could the memory loss be related to your post-traumatic stress condition?

Mister A shook his head.  It’s all older stuff I lose.  Or stuff connected with... the event.  I’ve never lost anything since the event.

Zerpa made sure that Mister A’s contact information had been properly recorded and thanked him for coming in.

As he returned his jacket to the hook behind his door, Zerpa’s watch beeped.  This was a signal to take a break and to head to the water cooler where his fellow investigators would be gathering.  He preferred to take his breaks when and if required; rigidly scheduled breaks were inefficient.  But his fellow investigators liked to gather together at set times.  He’d started to take regular breaks a month ago after his performance evaluation had noted that he was deficient on the teamwork scale.

Zerpa noticed that the most senior investigator whom everyone called by his nickname ‘Buzz’, had yet to arrive.  He listened to the irrelevant conversation for a while—problems with children, wives over-spending, and the weather—until he’d got the gist of what the other investigators were talking about.  Then he began to insert the occasional comment to indicate that he was interested.

The break was almost half way over and Buzz had still not shown.  When there was a pause in the conversation, Zerpa asked where he was.

Tolson fired him, said Smitty.

Why? asked Zerpa.  He was the best—

Apparently not according to our esteemed Unit Leader.

Too many open investigations, said Boswell.

A failure to move functional & behavioral competencies beyond the benchmark, specified Smitty.

Zerpa’s watch beeped.  Everyone looked at it.  Duty calls, he said, draining his cup.

Back at his desk, Zerpa carefully read the five reports dealing with the couplers.  The technicians had run them through all the standard diagnostics and they’d performed properly.  The only difference between the units which hadn’t been fully updated and the ones that had was that the updated units had quicker throughput.  The technicians had updated the slower units.  Even after being updated, they had still performed well within acceptable parameters.

Zerpa’s watch beeped.  It was a text from Tolson.  One word: ‘Update?’

The Lead Investigator pressed a corner of his watch and a blank response screen was projected above it.  When Zerpa’s finger moved towards the response screen, a keypad appeared beneath the response screen.  He quickly typed out a response: ‘All mini-couplers check out as properly nominal’.  The connection terminated from the other end, Tolson’s usual way of indicating displeasure.

Zerpa glanced at his watch as he picked up the large report on the new coupler.  Tolson would likely give him an hour before showing up to harass him in person.  Every time he came across a report of a software bug, he underlined it with his red pen.  When the firmware was mentioned, he underlined the passage in blue.  Then he meticulously traced the operation of each software bug through the coupler’s circuitry.

All but five of the software bugs were harmless.  Their only effect would be to terminate the traveler’s passage through the coupler and bump him or her back to the beginning of the process.  Given the speed of the new coupler, the traveler would likely be unaware of the glitch.

The other five bugs would, in rare circumstances, cause the traveler’s consciousness to be caught in one of the coupler’s repeating loops.  Most of the time the traveler’s consciousness would exit spontaneously on its own after a few hundred loops.  But if the consciousness was still trapped after a thousand loops, the firmware would bump the consciousness out.

Using firmware to solve a software problem was odd.  The technicians had checked with the developer and had been assured that it was only a temporary fix.  Zerpa smiled, admiring the technicians’ thoroughness.

The coupler’s logs indicated that fifteen thousand travelers had been caught in the loop the last time Heilig had hosted a mass visit into his imagination.  Five thousand had been caught going in, ten thousand when they left his imagination.  Going in, four thousand travelers had exited spontaneously.  The firmware patch had ejected the other thousand.  Zerpa thought the round numbers odd and noted that they were in fixed proportion to the number of travelers.  On entrance, four of the five travelers who’d been injured had been trapped inside a loop.

On exit, almost ten thousand travelers had been caught inside a loop.  Almost eight thousand had exited spontaneously, a similar proportion to the loop capture on entrance.  The rest were rescued by the firmware.  But they looped around slightly more times than the travelers had on entrance.  Of the fifteen thousand, some had looped both on entrance and on exit.  Where travelers had looped both on entrance and on exit, they looped almost twice as many times on exit than they had on entrance.

On exit, all five of the travelers who’d been injured had been trapped inside a loop.  All but one had been trapped both going in and coming out.

And all five had required firmware assistance to escape.

Zerpa reached for the psychiatric report.  It was to see whether any of the five had anything in their physical or medical make-ups to make them prone to being caught inside a loop.  More importantly, whether there was anything about the five which might have made them more susceptible to having the loop trap their memories.  His boss’s hand gripping the top of the report forced him to look up.

Update? asked Tolson.

Each of the couplers employed by the five injured travelers had different operating profiles.  They all had different manufacturers.  Some had been manufactured more recently than others.  Some had been used often, others only occasionally.  None had any obvious defect and performed nominally on bench tests.  In this context, nominally is good, it means that there were no variations outside operational specifications and—

I know what the fuck nominal means.

Zerpa smiled and waited for another question.  If the Unit Leader wished to slow his investigation by asking for updates every hour on the hour, that was his right.

I told you they were fine, said Tolson.  I don’t need your chin wagging all over the place.  What about the coupler?

It is constructed with three redundant looping streams.  Some travelers get caught in these loops.

Why do they get trapped?

At present, the cause appears idiopathic.

Plain English, please.

Idiopathic means that there is no obvious cause.  I was about to examine the appendices in the psychiatric report—

How do they get out of these idiot loops?

Zerpa restrained the impulse to tell Tolson that idiot and idiopathic were not the same thing.  Sometimes they get out all on their own.  Sometimes, the firmware has to help.  Firmware is—

I know what the fuck firmware is.  Tolson glared at him.

Zerpa smiled back.

Tolson took a few deep breaths, fuming.  He pointed at the psychiatric report.  Keep me in the loop, he snapped, whirling and leaving before his Lead Investigator could respond.

The appendices at the back of the psychiatric report indicated that all five of the injured travelers were within the normal range.  Several had elevated levels of anxiety, but who didn’t these days?  One was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder but was taking medication for his condition.  Another was bipolar, but was up to date on his meds.  The traveler who’d been unable to access pre-existing memories had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder several years prior but had apparently recovered.

Zerpa picked up his phone and dialed the psychiatrist’s office.  After a moment, her assistant put him through to Doctor Jaspers.

Good afternoon, Doctor Jaspers, he said.  This is Stanton Zerpa.

Mr. Zerpa.

Thank you for your report.

I’m with a patient, Mister Zerpa.

I need complete appendices on all the travelers.

You can’t be serious.  That’s got to be at least a hundred thousand people.

Actually, two and a half million.

No.  Even if I got permission.  Absolutely not.

More people could be injured.

Not remembering what they did inside an imagination hardly counts as an injury.  It’s probably just an overactive safety protocol.

Mister A lost pre-existing memories.

PTSD patients lose memories all the time.  It’s part of their underlying condition.

The coupler has a defect.  It catches travelers in a loop.  All five of the injured travelers were caught in the loop.

How many travelers were caught in the loop?

Fifteen thousand.  Some—

Send me representative samples, said Doctor Jaspers.  No more than a thousand total.

The line went dead.

He smiled.  A thousand should be more than sufficient.  If he’d started off asking for a thousand, she would have quibbled and bargained him down.

Zerpa used a random number generator to choose two hundred travelers from each of five groups: those who hadn't been caught in a loop; those who'd been caught going in but had exited spontaneously; those who'd required a firmware assist to continue into Heilig's imagination; those who'd initially looped coming out; and those who'd required firmware intervention to exit.  Then he double-checked to ensure that the travelers who'd been chosen had a variety of times stuck in the loops.  He emailed the names to Doctor Jaspers.

Each of the appendices included the full medical records of the five injured travelers, but Zerpa decided to wait until he had the records for all thousand travelers before attempting to discern a common thread.

He pulled up the software code for the coupler’s safety protocols.  These protocols were designed to ensure that memories didn’t mix. No traveler wanted someone else’s pre-existing memories inside his consciousness.  Forgetting that one was allergic to seafood could be fatal.  Even someone else’s memories formed during travel into a host’s imagination could be uncomfortable.  A person afraid of heights would be terrified to have a memory of a parachute jump.

Two hours later, Zerpa hadn’t found a single deviation from the safety protocol coding.  The new coding copied, keystroke for keystroke, coding which had been in use for almost a decade.  Large chunks of the subject coupler’s software were new, but not the safety protocols.

The Lead Investigator then made a ‘to do’ list for the following day.  In red was a note to review the other investigations he had on the go.  Blue was to follow up with Doctor Jaspers.  Green was to empty his email inbox.  Ordinarily, he would have updated all his open investigations and emptied his inbox before the end of business.  He fretted at the break in routine as he replaced his pens in their proper order.

Zerpa had put his suit jacket back on and was picking a piece of lint off his right sleeve when Tolson ambled into his office and sat his buttocks onto the edge of Zerpa’s desk.  Zerpa’s hand twitched when the Unit Leader’s butt pushed his desk pad askew.  At least Tolson hadn’t jiggled his pen holder.

Glad to see you’re leaving for the day, said the Unit Leader, holding out his hand.

Zerpa looked at Tolson’s hand.

Tolson touched two fingers to his thumb.  Your report.

It’s not finished.

I thought I made it clear that I needed the coupler cleared by end of business today.

I require more data from Doctor Jaspers.

Tolson shook his head.  Doctor Jaspers has too many things on her plate for her to be chasing after your wild geese.

She has agreed to provide the information.  I’m sure I’ll have it soon.

Two thousandths of a chance of something going wrong is nothing.

Unless you’re one of the two.  Zerpa restrained the urge to correct Tolson’s math; he’d actually overstated the extent of the injuries.

It means that nine hundred and ninety-eight multiplied by however many travelers went in and came out were fine.

It could be worse next time.

The Unit Leader grunted.  Or it could operate without a single complication next time.

We can’t take—

Stan.  I want the coupler cleared now.

Zerpa felt a flush on the back of his neck.  Tolson’s lip had curled, gloating at his discomfiture at the use of the short form of his name.  If you want it cleared, said Zerpa, you can sign the report yourself.

You know that Unit Leaders aren’t supposed to sign reports, said Tolson.

If you want ‘Stanton Zerpa’ on the bottom of the report, you’ll have to wait until Stanton Zerpa has completed his investigation.

Tolson scowled.  As long as you hold up clearance for general manufacturing, the Chinese are laughing at us.

Just because they built a faster coupler, doesn’t mean that they’re laughing at us.  Why is this such a high priority?

You leave priorities up to me.  Right now, the country needs to be first in imagination technology.

The country is doing just fine.  Unemployment—

Fuck statistics.  Statistics don’t tell the whole story.  The only statistic you need to be concerned about is the number of travelers who can enter within a reasonable time.  Right now we’re at three hundred thousand.  The Chinese are at a million.

And Heilig’s new coupler can accommodate three million, I know.  However, if most imaginers can accommodate no more than a couple of hundred thousand, does it really matter?

Heilig has already doubled the Chinese million.  Other elite imaginers are itching to follow suit.  It’s about powering our elite forward.  Sticking it to the competition.

If there’s a problem with the coupler, it will set our elite back, not propel them forward.

Two in a thousand isn’t a problem.

Unless you’re one of—

I want this case closed.  Tolson took a deep breath.  Quick to open, quick to close.  That’s our motto.

I’ll be right on it as soon as I’ve heard back from Doctor Jaspers.

Zerpa saw anger flash across Tolson’s face.  But anger was quickly replaced by a smile.  Tomorrow, he said.  Jaspers or no Jaspers.

Chapter 2

Emily shut the door to their apartment and leaned her back against it.  It felt good to be home and even better to have a couple of hours to herself before Stanton arrived home.  A full half hour free from human contact!  Hugging and kissing her boyfriend would be great.  Then sharing the news of the day, sharing more...  But right now, all she wanted was two hours of freedom.

She relaxed for a full twenty minutes, just lazing on the couch, stretching her long legs, moving her fingers languidly through her luscious brunette hair.  Emily looked at the remote controller on the table between the couch and the television and considered watching a soap opera.  But an internal clock roused her and she went from room to room, straightening any object not at right angles and sweeping up any errant dust balls.

Then it was time to work