The Architect
First Scene...
To speak or write of New Anglia as a dream, would upset some.
However, it was a hypocritical age of incivility. Major news outlets had forsaken their mission of objectivity and truth in favor of attention that would improve sales.
Trump outrage sold newspapers. The editors knew that.
The New York Times had expanded its readership by nearly 600,000 but printing articles with anti-Trump bias. Simultaneous to decrying racism, The Times had hired an Oriental editor with a viperous racist record, citing that prior tweets of new employees had no weight as indicators of personal bias or philosophy, as if her tweets were done merely as sarcasm, as satire or perhaps as a means of attracting attention.
It was an age when provoking an attack from Trump meant instant celebrity, quite apart from a reporter’s integrity or veracity.
In fact, Trump himself was the first to capitalize on notoriety as a political resource in achieving fame in the age of social media.
No one would remember from moment to moment, from election cycle to cycle, what public figures had said, or whether their most recent outrage was intellectually consistent with prior outrages.
It was a game: Trump knew it as a game and the perceptive few took notes and learned the Trumpian art of capturing headlines.
Some characterized is as sucking all the air out of a room on entering it.
* * *
For any who had followed the social trends and the rise of Trump, it was exhilarating to stick with it long enough, that the meta-strategy of Trumpism began to emerge from the mist of political smoke and mirrors.
Thinking this over, he would sit on a stool, at his broad architect’s table of the kind made irrelevant by computer graphics, and the outlines of New Anglia seemed to crystallize out of thin air, so long as the events of the past two years were a part of the ambience.
There were notions and ideas, yes, but some could not articulate the outlines verbally. For dreamers like him, it was the graphic that formed the core of his social construct.
Pondering his New Anglia as a philosophical construct, it would exist in brick and mortar by the efforts of architect, tradesman and real estate developer. But it would be designed to incorporate philosophy into the buildings, and access roads. It would extend the Mews concept beyond signage at the gate of a new real estate community.
Whereas recent real estate developments in Northern Virginia were universally open to any who could afford the entry price, New Anglia would be colony like that of the Shakers near Albany in the 1800s, and Mormon precepts, while peripheral, would none the less be a reference point from which a new group might be instituted.
It struck him that legal support would be important.
It would be impossible to colonize New Anglia under the statutes and municipal legal system of the current county. There were voices in favor of political secession from the tyranny of the current Board of Supervisors. It was not clear how many were likely to embrace New Anglia, for which a governing framework would have to be devised.
Control would be an issue: it must be subject to distributed rule by the colonists, but there must also be an ongoing template against which change must always be formatted.
The systems of governance might be modeled on traditional American institutions that, New Anglians would agree, had somehow morphed in dangerous directions over recent decades, most notably since 2008.
As he sat and sketched his graphic ideas by hand, things occurred in mind that would not have occurred had he acceded to the usual reliance on an electronic interface between thoughts and plan.
There would be no electronic link, no possibility of theft or breach or hacking of the central design of New Anglia.
* * *
Over coffee, he would close his eyes as he took a break, thinking back to a building that no longer existed on a street that was no longer recognizable in the form he had known it.
There was an alleyway that separated a printing business from that reconverted residence with its peaked slate roof, its modest front porch on East Washington Street, the sign that hung near the front door in which the ampersand between the partner last names, was simulated by a properly sized eye bolt enameled white.
There was the aroma of rubber cement, and pencil dust, and toward the back, the chemical aromas of a blueprint copy machine whose data plate must have read Keufel and Esser. There was the mimeograph, and the way the blue of the ink seemed to give its faint hue to the sheets copied.
Here and there, drafting tables were stationed where the lighting was good from the combined natural light from windows and from the overhead fluorescent tube lighting.
Centrally located were two massive oak office desks, abutting fact to face so the architect and the engineer faced generally toward each other when working at the two desks, but the expanse between of wood desk tops, of piles of specifications, notations, letters and small framed family pictures gave a vague impression of the cubicles that would be so common fifty and sixty years later.
The space of the converted residence a block from the Town Green, where junior architects, associate engineers and draftsmen worked, was arranged on an open floor plan.
While sipping his coffee, eyes still closed, he could still see the long vanished square bookcase set in the middle of the floor. On each face were shelves with books full of legal regulations, and construction pattern books figuring the dimensions of any office or household standard furniture.
There were books of architectural patterns and calculations, arrangements and diagrams for heating and plumbing and landscape systems.
In his mind’s eye and memory, he would envision reaching out to the revolving bookcase and gingerly rotating it from face to face, for the sheer tactile joy of having so much at his fingertips.
The architect and engineer, the staff, the secretary, the sign, the building and the street remained only in memory, so far away but still at his intellectual grasp at any moment.
He swirled the empty coffee cup with its few remaining grains and set it down in the sink, walking slowly back to where he had been working.
* * *
He had been working the concept for two years.
While considering what form it might take, he was reminded of Cornell Physicist Richard P. Feynman in the days before the University President surrendered to political correctness.
Feynman’s recommendation to solving problems was stark. First, write the question down. Second, think very hard. Third, write down the answer.
Perhaps it was as simple as that.
* * *
“You realize…,” she began tentatively.
He liked looking at her. It was simple: she was gorgeous. It was, in fact, a highly subjective assessment. Not everyone would find her gorgeous, but there was general agreement that her manner and looks were pleasing to more established, professional men, and many women.
It was the way her form and function were so well knitted, her intelligence, her looks and her spirit of occasional flirt that were killer.
He knew it to be a game she would play, leading men on, somewhere between being serious and playful. The men would always assume the latter and so the game would continue, which had been her objective all along.
She had been helpful, and her help was stimulating. It had taken him a few years to sort out her game, and to separate what was useful from what was merely pleasant.
“…this could be developed as a video game…,” was her verdict after looking over the manuscript.
He had toyed with formats and benefits of a number of applications: the most serious was not as a commercial novel, but as a social blueprint, a kind of philosophical utopia that he had conceived while wasting almost a year following the digital chatter as the media and politicians were stripped and exposed for the frauds they were all along.
“There must be a raft of utopian video games out there,” he replied noncommittally. The most interesting of the early science fiction books had been utopian imaginings of dreamers.
He had not set out to write another utopian novel. The writing may have come from a deeper place that lay beyond considerations of monetary value.
But then, why not? After all, she was a competent accountant with a good head on her shoulders, and knew a little of the gaming profession and how some gamers had moved into media and production with experience gaming. It was from here that he had learned of the political implications of gamers.
“I will look into it, and thanks for looking it over,” he said, suggesting that the discussion had reached an end.
He would watch her as she left, and he liked the way she moved.
* * *
It had not escaped him that there was a palpable connection between science fiction writers and those inclined toward religion.
Both fields of work combined suspension of some aspects of reality, and a heavy reliance on beliefs that could be neither verified, nor disproven.
In both, physical laws were extended past their usual realm and limits, and deduction beyond those limits led to the more interesting tenets of belief and imagination.
What an architect did, was to take a series of impressions and crystallize from those, a plan that could exist in reality, or a plan which, after the careful review by a structural engineer, might be rendered in bricks and mortar.
There were physical laws that constrained how far imagination could go in extending the precepts, beliefs and desires of the client as interpreted by the architect. Sometimes the concept succeeded to the approbation of the client; sometimes, not.
To what extent an architectural approach to the design of New Anglia might succeed, was anyone’s guess. And of the actual goal, might be debated.
He had faith that it could be marketed first, as literary work. In parallel, the application as a video game was not wholly out of the question. That some might take it as an actual blue print for a social experiment, might become, in recent parlance, problematic.
Of course, by the media rule of Trump, controversy succeeded in exposure, and for the bright spirit, exposure could always be parlayed into monetization.
***