Luminarium by Alex Shakar Page A

Armation, back in the golden dawn of the war on terror.
    Possibly fearing that the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq might somehow fail to go on forever, Armation had agreed to an inspiration of Sam’s (without raising his salary or granting him a new title) and was now courting a potential client—the City of New York. Just as the U.S. military was using Urth to train soldiers for a new kind of war, the hope was that American cities would begin using it to train emergency workers, and civilians, too, for a new kind of peace. The idea, Fred had to admit, made all too much sense. The cost of doing live emergency response-training exercises in urban areas was pretty much prohibitive, even with the new Homeland Security funds. But Urth would allow hundreds of firefighters, cops, city officials, agents from the various federal agencies, as well as civilian volunteers to log on all at once from any computer anywhere and play out scenarios over and over, perfecting their response strategies without disrupting city life. The demo project under development, the main thing Sam and the others here had been cranking away at over the last few months, was a 9/11-style attack on the Empire State Building. If the city officials liked it and signed on as paying customers, the next phase would be to simulate, over a ten-by-ten-square-block radius, the aftermath of a small nuclear bomb.
    “What do you think?” Sam asked. The question sounded deliberate, like he was asking about more than the spire. Most of the time, Fred got the feeling the mere sight of him caused Sam pain, like he was standing on Sam’s bowels with every step. But then there were these other moments, when Sam seemed to want his opinion, his approval. Sam was proud of this project, proud for many reasons, but mainly—he’d found various ways of saying it in their none-too-frequent conversations over the last few months—proud there was no moral downside to this new direction, that the training was only for the saving of life, not the taking of it. He probably thought it was closer to what George would have wanted the company to be doing. Fred had his doubts, but either way, Sam was more in the right than ever, and had this been a year ago, Sam and he both would have been spinning it this way to George. Fred was certainly aware of no rational basis for the creeping anger and repugnance he felt at the sight of that virtual rubble.
    “Hell of an achievement,” he offered. Not without a garnish of sarcasm, but from his near whisper—the result of his airway trying to seal itself off—only the respect came through, so that his words trundled through Sam’s mental bomb-detecting equipment without setting off an alarm.
    “ Real physics,” Sam repeated, with another probing stare. “Actual engineering models, from the building’s actual plans. You wouldn’t believe how much work went into that.”
    “I believe it, Sam,” Fred muttered. “So long.”
    He turned to make the trek to his long-neglected desk. To clear it out. “Do you want your job back, Fred?”
    Fred stopped. Sam had blurted out the question, a headlong leap into chilly water. Maybe he already regretted it. There had been a time, shortly after they’d just started up, when George had wanted, to Fred’s surprise, to let Sam go, and Fred had to talk him out of it. He and George had fallen into their respective roles—George as the generator of big, woolly ideas, Fred as the shaper of those ideas into executable designs—with preternatural ease. Sam, on the other hand, though he was working diligently, obsessively, even, on the minutiae of the server-side code, was mulish and easily discouraged, coiled in so many knots it was a strain just to be around him. From his corner, at unpredictable intervals, would come grunts and curses, knocking everyone else out of their grooves and setting the air on edge. The slightest change they wanted implemented would send Sam into a brief frenzy, and Fred would