The Last First Bit

This chapter is paradoxically named, slightly, and it's the last origin story before the plot blasts off. (Woo! Cheesy metaphors!)

Kareem Rosalowski was, in the eyes of Reyes Fahlman, a genius who was squandering his talents as a combat pilot instead of going into space to further the study of mathematics. But who was Reyes to say? He was only an analyst for the Air Corps, and Kareem was only a pilot. The Air Corps didn’t even think he was a very good pilot; passible, certainly, but not exceptional, and nowhere near as remarkable as Reyes thought he was.

Reyes would say he had any say or any experience in the matter, because he’d never personally encountered Captain Rosalowski. The numbers were there, though, Reyes would say with great insistence, and why shouldn’t he? The numbers were there, and they showed exactly what Reyes was telling everyone they did: Kareem really needed to get his hands on something with a little more impetus, like, for example, a rocket. 

There was no great personal reason for Reyes to set in motion a series of events that would ultimately lead Kareem to a job at ACRONYM, other than a vague fantasy of riding to the stars (or at least beyond the atmosphere) with his mathematically-prophesied ace. Reyes didn’t really want to go into space, not specifically, but there was only so much math to do regarding Earth, and there was quite a bit more math to do regarding space. A potentially infinite amount of math; possibly even the answer to infinity itself. Reyes was perfectly willing to climb into a rocket if it meant he would be able to do lots and lots of math. 

He did lots of math already, and even more math during his breaks. Reyes Fahlman was quite comfortably settled into a pleasantly-situated obsession. He did a job with math in it. He liked to do math. Simple geometry would reason that he loved his job as a result; simple geometry would be right. Reyes was entirely content to be an Air Corps analyst, except he wasn’t. The vast majority of the math he did when not doing math for work centered on the rapidly decreasing number of interesting math problems he would be able to do if he continued at his current rate. Hence suggesting that Captain Rosalowski should be promoted to director of flight operations: A situation which had a 67% chance to result in Kareem’s resignation (the odds might have been higher, but Reyes accounted for Kareem’s drastic unpredictability. Math can be unclear, even though it’s perfectly explicit. To Reyes, it was alway perfectly explicit and perfectly clear also, and it always said just the way things were; with Kareem, it was just the way it had always been. 

Reyes might not have met his theoretical astronaut, but he knew right away that Kareem’s only limiting factor was boredom, and he was already bored of flying slightly-supersonic aircraft. Sure enough, the moment Kareem’s long-awaited promotion came through, he left the Air Corps, and came face to face with the possibility of several long months spent in exquisitely brutal ennui. Then a mathematician Kareem didn’t know had approached him, and offered a potentially viable solution: Space. A week later, Kareem and Reyes were standing at the gates of an ACRONYM training camp. 

There were two other people standing with them. One a nondescript young woman, already wearing a grease-stained jumpsuit (Emily had “needed” to rebuild the engine of the bus they rode in), the other a hefty, wiry, and heavily surreptitious young man about the same age. Neither of them looked to be far out from college, and they explained that the case was such. Both were chatty, and both were equally welcoming of the fifth arrival to their waiting game. The fifth arrival was, of course, Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker, who was dressed sparsely by the standards of everyone but Kareem, who thought that jeans, a ball cap, and a blank grey t-shirt were perfectly adequate. Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker had her wallet in one pocket, and a newspaper in the other. She read the newspaper with vigorous derision while Reyes tried to think of some way to start a real conversation; everything had been much too polite up until that point. 

Then Cypris had lowered the newspaper, and looked at the others as though they’d only just walked up, then she said: “Hi, I’m Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker. You can call me Cypris if you don’t want me to break your clavicle.” 

The others proceeded to call her by her full name, heedless of their clavicles. Only Kareem, who had gone diving with sharks, knew what honesty looked like; and Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker had it plastered all over her face. It was more or less around that point that Kareem decided that he would happily follow the exuberantly-named newcomer into space; watching through all of the security cameras at once from across the country, Jonathan Griggs was actively coming to that conclusion. The conclusion was only cemented by Emily’s and Conrad’s immediate and simultaneous response: “Hi, Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker.” Then Reyes made the mistake of asking the circumstances that led Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker to a gate outside an ACRONYM training camp; thirty minutes later, Cypris was still talking about her ex-husband. She would have continued talking if the gate hadn’t opened, and if they hadn’t have been loaded up on a shuttle bus, and carried to the front door of the main building.

They were very alone when they stepped through to the lobby. Conrad, if the hyperbole is to be ignored, saw a tumbleweed drift across the carpet. It lodged under a chair, but it didn’t actually. The tumbleweed might as well have been there, the room might even have looked less deserted without it. Emily glanced over her shoulder at the rapidly retreating rear-bumper of the shuttle bus. Reyes stared thoughtfully at the ceiling tiles, and began to calculate their surface area, then the surface area of the ceiling, then the volume of the room, then the probability that someone would do something drastic in the next two minutes. 

Kareem found a golf cart parked nearby with the keys in the glovebox and a full tank of gas. The ACRONYM training camp seemed a lot smaller while golf-carting than it did while standing, waiting, and wondering outside the main gate. The golf cart was also much faster after Emily had tinkered with it than the manufacturer (or a few laws of physics) had intended for it to go. ACRONYM was much more careful with the keys to their golf carts after that.