The Basilisk's Mouth

07: IT CANCELS OUT

 Returning to the present day, Johann's mind is more agitated than it usually is. He's desperately trying to forget about Gesa, but she populates his every thought, twines her voice into every sound he hears. Thoughts of her sprout under my every footstep. He just wants to see her face again, so his last memory won't be of her bottom lip trembling, her pleading with him to pour away the drink that he cradled to his chest that very night. She has managed to do something amazing, in that she has made him ashamed. Shame truly does wonders for setting Johann on the right path, if you can manage to make him feel it. He waits in the kitchen for hours on end, sits with an open book in front of him and pretends to study there, but she never comes in. He wonders if she eats at the early hours of the morning, just to avoid him. He wonders if she eats at all. Girls can do some crazy things to get a point across.

 "It's a pretty ambitious project, but no more unimaginable than what we've done before."

 In a bid to escape every reminder of her, Johann has found himself draped across the arm of a crimson wingback in some foreign restaurant. He's in the company of other drowsy students encircling the table before him. The wood is a dark plum, and when he puts his palm against it he can feel the ambient music thrumming through the air better than his ears can. Half of the students' faces are unrecognisable in this seductive dim lighting, but despite that Johann can still tell they're all high; on nothing more dangerous than weed, probably. He isn't, of course. For all his vices, he's never touched those things since his sixteenth birthday. Remembering it still makes him shudder.

 The kid at the head of the table is the speaker, and the only one of the bunch apart from Johann that has clear eyes. He's an enigmatic character, with a plain open face, droopy eyelids and a quirk at the side of his mouth. He strokes the thick pipe of a hookah draped across his lap like it's a snake, or the cat of a Bond villain. The base of the contraption sits on the low table before him, and it's a tall, fluted thing made of blue glass. Johann breathes in the fruity smoke every time the kid exhales, and it tastes like raspberry.

 "The way it works," the speaker says over the golden mouthpiece, "is that they're accelerating these wires, right? Accelerating them to a rotation speed faster than the Earth."

 "Pretty fast," one guy said into the palm of his hand. "How'd they do that?"

 "Fuck if I know. Are any of us engineers here?"

 Johann sees a boy, face half hidden behind a mop of blond hair, twitch in his seat. He promptly falls still again when nobody answers.

 "Thought so. My point being, they get them to that speed, right? Which means there's a pretty big centrifugal force counteracting gravity. And if any smartass wants to tell me that technically centrifugal force doesn't exist," the kid peers around the circle mistrustfully, "I'll knock you into next fucking week."

 The circle is miraculously silent.

 "Anyway, if they skip this part, then the whole thing just collapses into the planet."

 The speaker takes a long drag from the hookah, and Johann's head swims from the fumes. His head falls against the back of the seat and the low thrum of music falls in tune with his heartbeat.

 "Problem being, kids," the speaker continues, his words riding on a fruity trail of smoke, "how the fuck d'you suppose they attach anything to something moving that quick?"

 "Could make a rollercoaster out of it, maybe," the blond boy says, and is interrupted by a hiccup.

 "Or, genius, you run a current through the bastards. Get some magnetism going, yeah?" Current through a wire. Gesa's careful sketch, showing a loop skewered on field lines, floats across his vision. I stamp the memory down as soon as it arises. "Then, they build a metal coating around the wires, and the magnetic field holds it up." Johann opens his eyes to the glint of grinning teeth. "Run that around the entire ring, and you've got stationary ground to work with. Then, they can start building shit on it."