Kristen
It had its certain comforts and learned familiarities, but New York had never felt like home. The initial novelty of Manhattan and all of its cultural and architectural grandeur had long waned, and what she once regarded with wonder, she now felt only a moldering cynicism. These days Kristen Jordan considered the soaring edifices and crowding streets to be the material shape, the substance, behind the insatiable and thoughtless ambition of the modern. Nudging her straw against the melting ice cubes at the bottom of an empty vodka tonic, Kristen looked about the shabbily decorated and dimly lit college bar. Glowing neon beer signs and television screens hung on walls that enclosed a dozen booths and tables. A distinct smell of stale beer and hot wings hung in the air, yet the nearby conversations of fellow academics, exultant and self-assured, ignored this atrophy.
Kristen studied genetics at Columbia, and her brilliance was unrivaled. Sitting quietly and gazing across the young faces of the bar, Kristen wondered if she stood out among her outwardly preoccupied and self-satisfied peers, or if they too were all carrying unspoken anchors of anxiety and doubt. On some level, though, she knew her general restlessness was an unfortunate byproduct of her intellect, and not an affliction shared by the masses.
From across the table her fellow graduate student Steve Armstrong had started rambling over the loud rock music, his hand clutching a perspiring glass of beer. “My point is that there’s a difference between intelligence, or even consciousness for that matter, and awareness. They’re two entirely different phenomena that are always lumped into the same category. Don’t you think?”
Kristen Jordan groaned and rolled her eyes, which elicited a laugh out of another graduate student sitting beside her, Cara Williams.
“I don’t care, Steve,” Kristen said, her voice distracted and leaden. “I hardly think it’s a topic worthy of lengthy discussion. There’s no way of knowing for certain because that kind of technology doesn’t exist.”
“Are you kidding me?” Steve gulped his beer and glared at her, his words faintly slurred. The alcohol added a note of indignation to his tone. “You’re saying we shouldn’t consider how a new technology will operate?”
“Please not another booze-fueled theoretical science argument,” Cara said. Steve and Kristen ignored her.
“No,” Kristen said to Steve in her ever-composed manner. “I’m just saying this specific discussion is comparable to cavemen arguing whether a gas-powered or an electric-powered car is superior. It doesn’t matter—a hybrid won’t exist for thousands of years. You know? Yes, it’s a worthwhile topic, but not at the present, and certainly not while we’re out having drinks.”
“I take it this is the type of conversation I should start to get used to around the Columbia crowd?” Cara asked.
Kristen nodded with a begrudging smirk. “Honestly, and shamefully, yes, this is pretty much par for the course. Professor Vatruvia likes to handpick researchers who are big on ideas and less caught up in practicality. The result is a strange group of argumentative theorists.”
“And a staggeringly high ratio of undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome to boot,” Steve added. Kristen laughed.
“Well, however Professor Vatruvia chooses his people, it clearly produces results.” Cara said, leaning back as a waitress hurried by and plopped down a fresh basket of cheap chips and salsa. “I must say I’m a little intimidated to be working on the same research team that actually created the Vatruvian cell. Were you two working with Professor Vatruvia when he won the Nobel Prize?”
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Anthem's Fall
Science FictionThe young emperor Vengelis Epsilon narrowly escapes the reckoning of his empire at the hands of strange machines known as Felixes. The Felixes are identical in every respect to the godlike men of Vengelis's world save for their mechanical blue eyes...