Elizabeth and I were walking on a balcony that stretched above one of the promenades. This promenade was filled with formal gardens, and the heavy scent of flowers filled the air. Elizabeth was a pretty girl – long blond hair and blue eyes. El had set us up; she did that a lot. Frankly, I'd been on this date a few times, and it wasn't the last time I'd been on this date either.

  As per usual, the walk was a bit awkward. “So, Elizabeth, where are you taking us?”

  She tossed her brown hair over her far shoulder before answering, “There's a stall out here that I love. Fondue. I commed ahead, we've got a pot waiting for us, and a selection of meats and vegetables.”

  “A pot? Of cheese?”

  “No, silly,” answered Cora. This date was a brunette. “It's broth. I think he starts with a vegetable broth, adds some citrus, seasonings, it's almost tart when he's done. No onion or garlic though,” she finished as she winked a green eye.

  “I'm not sure I've ever had fondue, I thought it was just a Velveeta thing.”

  “Oh, I love it,” she said breathily. “Since you're cooking it right there, you can do everything exactly how you want it.” I suppose it was a good way to eat on a date. Some variety, finger foods but solid healthy stuff, nothing greasy or insubstantial. Now, if only we had something to talk about while boiling meat in broth.

  Brylee went on as we walked through a petting zoo on one of the lower promenades, her brown eyes flashing. She said, “I'm so excited. Mark, the guy who runs the stall, used to be a big wine snob. He still imports as much as he can get ahold of, but I don't think anyone else around has the collection of old wines that he does. And with you in tow, I think he'll actually share.”

  “Ah, I understand now.” I smirked, “I'm getting used.”

  She almost didn't seem to hear me, “He'll pull out all the stops, I'm sure. I wonder if you can talk him into giving us a tasting? That would be so much fun.”

  It sounded good, but to be honest I don't think I've ever been interested in food or drink enough to talk about it at length. And yet all these girls never seemed to think of anything else. I guess that was one downside to the arcology, no weather to talk about. “So, Emily, what do you do to keep yourself busy?”

  “It's not like I'm stuck up or obsessed or anything, but it can be hard to get anything really good without connections. Just another reason I'm glad to be out with you.” She smiled at me again, pulling at a strand of red hair that had escaped her bun. Then she looked at me and seemed to realize I'd said something. She stumbled, and said, "Wait, I'm sorry, what was that?"

  “How do you spend your time? I know that's kinda a loaded question, but what interests you, you know?” I tried to keep my voice casual, but I was hoping she wouldn't start talking about wine and fondue some more.

  “Oh, nothing much, really. Nothing that compares to what you do, after all.” Against the rich brown of her skin, her teeth were very white. I remember that clearly. “I mean, you can do anything, right?”

  “Well, sure, But so can you, or anyone, really,” I answered.

  “Not like you, Ward,” she said. Her tightly braided black hair swung as she looked up into the air. “I mean, you're you! This whole place is yours, right? Your idea, your plan, your city. People do what you say, it's incredible, I can't believe I'm here with you.”

  “Ah.” I decided that maybe I'd be engrossed with the shrubbery below. But then she'd inform me that the gardens were oh so beautiful. Or maybe romantic - the girls' vocabularies did vary. The dinners were usually nice, and I took their word on how nice the wine, food, or entertainment was. Once in a while, we'd go see a show, a concert, maybe, or a play. There was always something worth spending an evening on. After that, I'd take her back, deal with varying levels of pushiness, and go home.

  Now, this was a much more enjoyable evening, even if Oscar wasn't nearly as cute as Naomi, Christina, Clare, or Kyleigh. He also wasn't nearly as good a chef as most of the stalls that El's string of girls had been taking me to. But grilled chicken and old friends could be far more satisfying than fancy dishes and a blind date.

  “So how'd it go last night, Lisa is sweet, isn't she?” El was very pregnant. I don't know why she and Alan had waited as long as they did, but they were pretty excited by their impending twins. Frankly, it made her go from simply statuesque to complete intimidation.

  “Sweet, yeah, I guess. But that was kinda all she was, you know,” I said. “She only wanted to make small talk or to talk about what I could do. Where do you find these girls, anyways?”

  “Oh, I meet them here and there. Lisa is a nurse in my neonatal clinic.” El patted her belly, “Didn't she tell you?”

  “No! She wouldn't admit anything beyond not really liking horseradish,” I said. “My office AI has more personality than she showed me.”

  “Ward, she was probably just intimidated. You should give her another chance," Alan came in, handing me a plate of chicken, along with corn and potatoes.

  “If she was his type, it wouldn't matter,” said Oscar.

  Alan asked, “What is your type, Ward?”

  I took a bite of chicken and chewed carefully. I honestly didn't really have an answer to that question, “Why are you all ganging up on me?”

  “Because you're lonely, Ward. Or you should be. And I'm worried you're going to find yourself getting bored.” El had taken her plate with a grateful look to her husband. “Your big complaint about these girls is that they're only interested in your position and power, and not you. Right? And your second big complaint is that they're shallow – don't have any interests beyond the moment. Don't talk about anything but dinner, the music you're both listening to, stuff like that.

  “Do you realize that that's all you're bringing to the date? When's the last time you did something on your own? An activity that wasn't directly related to running the castle?”

  “The arcology,” I muttered.

  “The castle. The First Castle. The one that you've made yourself king of, milord," said Alan sarcastically. "Don't get me wrong, this place is incredible, and frankly, I think pretty much all two million of us are grateful to you. But we also don't want to see you go all Howard Hughes on us, either. Jars of piss and piles of tissues just aren't a good look for anyone. I know that El centers me, Ward. I think a girlfriend – or wife – could center you, too,” said Alan. Clearly, the two of them had had this conversation before.

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  “Or a boyfriend,” chimed in Oscar.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” I took another bite while I tried to redirect the conversation.

  “I would if these two were willing to try something less conventional,” said Oscar with waggled eyebrows.

  Alan threw a roll at him, “Even if I was queer as a duck, El would still do it for me, Oscar.”

  “You wound me, if only in your misunderstanding,” said Oscar as he clasped his hands to his chest. “It was never you who caught my eye – it is your lovely gravid wife who pulls my heart.”

  El threw a roll at him too, before rounding on me again. “Well, I'm going to keep looking for you, since you won't do it yourself. If you are gay, just let me know. There aren't quite as many nice young men to choose from, but they're out there. And maybe they won't be quite so intimidated.”

  “Nope, sorry. There won't be any beard-baiting in my kingdom.” They all threw rolls at me for that.

  I was on another boring date that El had set up when the professor commed me. Sort of, I still wasn't wearing a badge, but Hansen had figured out who I was with and commed her instead. We had just finished eating somewhere nice but unmemorable and had talked mostly about the tricks and intricacies of designing furniture. On the bright side, furniture was still more interesting than cooking. Apparently, the design program was rather clunky, and while it was easy enough to make minor adjustments to the measurements or textures of someone else's design, it was rather tedious to create something new from scratch. I did make a mental note to follow up on that – design work was one of the very few productive jobs left, and if we could improve the design software so that beginners could focus on design rather than the program, that could be beneficial.

  Mara was as cagey as all the rest had been about telling me what she did. I suppose she might have spent all her time designing couches and chairs, but I kinda doubted it. Of course, the fact that Hansen knew her comm code was kind of a giveaway. Her badge beeped, and she tapped it, allowing Hansen's voice to interrupt our date.

  “Mara, are you still with him?”

  I pitched my voice a bit louder, to carry across the table, “I'm here, professor. How're tricks?”

  “Mara? Is that you? If you're still on that date, bring Ward down to lab eight. I want to show him something.”

  I rested my forehead on the table while Mara answered, “Sure thing, boss. It'll take a bit, even this time of night.”

  “See you in five then,” responded Hansen. Her badge beeped again as the connection cut.

  Her lips didn't open as she smiled briefly at me, and the smile didn't reach her eyes either. “Marching orders, do you mind?”

  “Not at all. I have never once regretted giving Marshall Hansen some of my time,” I gave her a real smile. Frankly, I wish I could have spent more time with the old man. “So... when I asked how you spent your time, you didn't tell me you worked with the professor.”

  “Well, I do, my PhD work had kinda stalled out before I moved here. Half the reason I came was that I could use what I knew and keep on learning without dealing with degrees and publishing and so on. I research for him, now, sure. But...” she trailed off.

  “But what?”

  “But, it doesn't get me out of bed in the morning, either, you know? It's a job, that's all. So I spend eight hours a day fiddling with equations, I don't know about the rest. Not really. I make weird chairs, fill up my apartment before getting rid of everything so I can start over, I go out, dance, drink, meet with friends. It's a life, and I guess I'm happy enough. At this point though... I don't know if I'd keep bothering with the research if I had something else to do.”

  “I get that, I think,” I said. “Tedium is better than boredom?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “And duty helps. I don't want to let Dr. Hansen down. Or anyone else in my lab. And maybe, I'd feel guilty if I didn't do something I can really feel is important.”

  “Make sense,” I nodded. I'd decided years ago to not follow up when people dropped hints in conversations like that. We were walking towards the lifts. Every third level had a series of transports on axis lines that would carry people towards the acrology's hub and another set of transports that circled the hub. At the hub, and at intersections between the axis lines and circle lines, were vertical lifts that carried people up and down. All of them moved continuously on a schedule, and you generally only had to wait a few minutes for a lift to arrive. Each tower had its own elevator too, but those were on call like normal elevators.

  The research and development labs were near the core of the Arcology, only a few levels below us. Along with the administrative offices, they formed a buffer of sorts between the residential areas and the industrial and agricultural areas. We would take a lift along the nearest axis towards the hub of the arcology, transfer to an elevator down, and then to a third lift out towards lab eight.

  “So, Mara, what exactly does lab eight do? Any ideas what Hansen wants me to look at?”

  She grinned at me – a real one this time, her eyes lighting up as they crinkled around the edges. “I've got a few ideas. But I'm certainly not going to ruin the surprise.”

  We rode in silence for a few minutes. If she wasn't going to ruin the surprise, I certainly wasn't going to rise to the bait and beg, either. We made it to the lab, and I was unsurprised to find it to be a near mirror image to the labs I'd been seeing Hansen in since the beginning. One wall was covered by a row of cabinets filled with miscellany, the opposite wall had tables and a few diagrams taped to the wall, and Hansen himself was hunched over a workstation in the corner.  

  A large machine thing in the center dominated the room, although this one was a bit sleeker than the erector set we used to play with. It was pretty clearly the same sort of gizmo as the old thing we'd started with though. Other than the cosmetic differences that came with more standardized parts, the only major change was a folding chair hanging from a chain on the ceiling. It dangled on the field end of the drive and it hung at an angle and swung back and forth, looking as though a strong fan was pushing it.

  Dr. Hansen turned and waved us over as soon as the door clicked open, his face creased into a broad smile, “Come here! This is big! I don't know how big, you'll have to tell me, but big!”

  I'm not totally stupid, I had a good guess. As I walked over to his station I asked him, “did you finally crack the drive?”

  His face fell and he turned on Mara, “Did you tell him? I told you not to tell him where you worked.”

  “You gave that away when you commed me, Dr. If you wanted it a secret you should have been more discrete. So quit blaming everyone else and pay attention for once,” said Mara.

  While she wasn't willing to let him walk over her, I didn't really want it to escalate. “So you cracked it then, we have a working plasma drive?” I was also interested in the drive.

  “Yeah, watch that chair.” Hansen flipped a few switches, to no apparent effect. I started to ask another question and got shushed. He said, “Listen, do you hear that? That's the field.”

  Sure enough, there was a slight hissing sound, like wind through a vent. The dangling chair began to swing around more violently, jerking back and forth and even slamming into the ceiling at the end of its arc.

  I smiled, this was just too cool. “The chair is falling on the edge of it, yeah, and it's stable?”

  “It is stable,” answered the professor. "Ish."

“It's controllable, too. We can extend the field farther or closer, increase and decrease the intensity, and even adjust the direction that the force applies. We've had some trouble with balancing the fields though, it pushes but it rarely seems to push straight. Mara here thinks it does something to its own inertia on top of the kinetic field, but I'm pretty sure it's just an engineering problem.”

  I probably shouldn't have, but I reached out into the field. I could tell right where the edge was – it slapped my hand away hard. Stung, too. “That's the shear, right there. It can be a bit rough, try this instead,” said Hansen as he handed me a mop.

  So I pushed the mop head into the field. I watched as the threads fluttered downstream and I had to use my strength to keep the mop straight. I mostly just felt a steady push that as I pressed my weight against it. Too cool.

  “Ok, this time, we keep it quiet,” said. “I want fully-realized applications before we spread it. It's not like the armor and consumer goods where we needed cash right away, and it's not like the generator where everyone benefited immediately. This is big, and for once I want to consider it before moving on.”

  “No problem,” said Hansen. “I get it. Right now, only you and Mara know about this. We'll need to bring in some more engineers if you want applications, but I'm sure we can find some who can keep their teeth together.”

  "Besides, I'm sure we're going to need a crazy amount of work to get the kinks worked out. Just because you know how to make rocket fuel and a nozzle doesn't mean you can actually build a rocket that flies straight. It's a good thing we've got a lot of people who like to design rockets around."

I was still playing with the field when Mara touched my shoulder and asked, "What should we work on first?"