“What?” His jaw pounded excitedly, but none of the supposed sound leaving his face reached me across the table.

“Huh?” Again his mouth led his face through familiar calisthenics, even more exaggerated the third time. I still heard nothing.

“I can’t…” I shook my head and motioned toward my ear. Three times should be enough; I made the requisite effort.

It was never my idea to go to that place, whatever its name was, or any of the other nearly identical establishments we always managed to end up at. The music was far beyond loud, dominant really. The speakers, deceivingly small for such power, were strategically placed around the perimeter of the eight-meter-high ceiling. They forced all dissenting sound back into the center: hidden guards perched with authority overhead, in control of all acoustics. Every so often, they would relent in the breath between one song’s ending and another’s beginning. The interlude was always brief, but if you paid attention, you could feel other sounds, voices mostly, surge into the space. They sensed the opportunity and fought for life, but they always lost. The music would restore its sovereignty every time. It was inevitable.

Walker lunged forward enthusiastically, stretching his left hand, palm up, toward me and bracing the rest of his body on the short knee-high table between us. I grabbed his forearm and held it steady, taking care to avoid covering his PCD. His personal communication device included a pinhead projector strapped tightly to his wrist with a flesh-colored band, rendering it inconspicuous. Walker had not yet had his PCD embedded permanently into his wrist, as was the latest trend. This lapse was surprising and would be short-lived once the financial hurdle was cleared. Walker was always ahead of the cool curve. My PCD, on the other hand, was a handheld carried in my pocket. I found the monetary obstacle more daunting than Walker did, as a matter of pragmatism rather than resources.

The video was a short clip of an unfortunate guy falling asleep while standing on a nondescript metro train. The other passengers reacted in varying degrees of indecisive avoidance, but hindered by lack of space on the crowded train were forced to ultimately address the slumbering body. The clip was set on a loop and presumably to some audio for comedic effect, but of course I could not hear it. The star of the video was likely a friend of ours, or more accurately, a friend of Walker’s and someone I should have known. He defined friend liberally, casting a broad net in such designations.

This type of video yielded endless hilarity for Walker. I admired his ability to extract so much entertainment from so dry a well, as I could rarely achieve this myself. I still hadn’t understood exactly what I was intended to see, but the window for my being naturally amused had closed. It was now time to play along, so I gave it my best contrived laugh and rolled backward into my seat. After years of practice, this was an easy sell for me. Walker was appeased, and I was released from battling for conversation in the furnace of sound. I had long since dismissed that Sisyphean effort.

My response naturally incited giggles from Niki, who was waiting with great concern for me to understand the cleverness of the video the two of them mutually adored. They slouched back into the sofa in unison, her head falling comfortably into the crook between his shoulder and jaw. They proceeded onward in search of the next viral post. Niki had been hanging out with us for about three months. I could not have defined the nature of their relationship with any confidence. When she started showing up, I asked Walk about her.

“Her name is Niki,” he said.

“What’s she like?” I asked.

“Like…Niki.” Classic Walker. The ironic truth, though, was the answer was entirely accurate and nearly comprehensive. We’d hung out probably twenty, twenty-five times since we first met: Her name was Niki. There was little more to be said.

Walker’s assessment was the same answer he would have given six years ago at university. If I could remember any of his college girlfriends, I probably would have also recalled him using the same approach to describing any one of them. We had been randomly assigned to room together when we arrived on campus as freshmen, not knowing another soul among the twenty thousand young adults we were to be educated with. I was told on many occasions, and not only by Walker, how lucky I was to have landed that assignment. I’m not sure I ever fully believed it.

It was true Walker had many words, and that was a commodity I frequently found myself short of. I cannot deny I did acclimate more quickly to the college environment as a result of his presence. There are some who might argue I would have never acclimated without him. But for his many words, in the end, I found Walker did not have much to say. The danger, I suppose, of spending too much time with the storyteller is you are vulnerable to the realization of the stories all being essentially the same in some way or another. Perhaps that was my frustration. Or perhaps my frustration was with the two things he seemed unable to do while talking: listen and feel. But then again, the others may have had it right: I was just a bunch of sour grapes.

I was a few centimeters taller than Walk, but I never felt it when we were together. He was naturally thicker than me, but the difference was modest when we were young. His physique was thick through the quads and buttocks in a way that is unusual for guys. It gave him a low center of gravity, which might have been useful athletically, but for as long as I had known him, he had little interest in sports. “I’m a Walker, not a runner,” he would say, and it amazed me every time he was able to pull off such a stupid line. The combination of anatomy and attitude made you certain fat was somewhere in Walker’s future, but at the same time, this did not worry you for him. I was fairly certain he’d do fat well.

The biggest physical contrast between the two of us, though, was hair. And as I think of it, the hair was likely the biggest contributing factor to his propensity for pulling off those stupid lines. Rich, dark brown in color, and so thick you felt small articles could be lost within, it cradled his head like an entity unto itself. Its waves were enough to mesmerize but not obsess over, and it seemed always ready to go. Walker would jump out of bed ten minutes before class, throw his hands through it a few times, and strut onto campus looking as though he had been grooming himself all morning. His face had a triangular shape with a narrow chin and jaw lines swooping up in reverence to his hair. His light-brown eyes were set slightly too close in the way that makes you feel uncomfortable if you study them long enough. Yet the most common effect his face gave was, “Sure, I’m handsome, but take a look at what’s upstairs.”

Sitting to my right was Tad. He was sitting physically, but mentally he was flying around the room, taking everything in. Tad and I were the last two people you might accuse of being friends. We had almost nothing in common. He was a fashion superstar of sorts, technically an amateur but soon to go pro. Most nights he was working the trade: constantly scanning, assessing, and strategizing for the next fashion battle. In fairness, Tad would cringe at this explanation and dismiss me as ignorant. The crowd was his muse, he would tell you, among other eloquent metaphors expounding the virtues of his style.

And I would have had no rebuttal; I admitted to being entirely lost in this realm. The one thing, and perhaps the only thing, Tad and I had in common is we could both buckle your knees with a wicked bender on the baseball diamond. At least we could do so back in the days of our youth when we possessed the liberty of such trivial endeavors as playing ball. Neither of us plays any longer, but there was a time when we were a deadly combination, pitching for our district and taking our team to the city finals. Despite grand differences in our interests since, the camaraderie of that experience was resilient.

I also believe there was a piece in both of us longing to preserve our personal past. We were each other’s history, or at least a reminder of it. For me, Tad was a simple reference point to a time when my mother was still alive. That alone was of value and worth enduring awkward discussions about the latest trends in hats, which were irrationally confusing. Sadly, I did not know what memory I served as a marker for Tad. I am certain he never told me and regret I never asked.

Tad was tall, over two meters. His height was accentuated by the linear posture with which he carried himself, direct and confident. His dark skin matched his coffee-black hair and its tight curls. He always wore it clean and neat, longer on top and in the back than around the ears. His heritage was complex and interwoven with many ethnicities over the years, and at every turn his genetics served him well.

When it came time for college and our playing days were over, Tad went abroad to study. During those years, I only saw him once a year during break. After graduating, though, Tad returned to Brownton, and we reconnected. He would only come out with us about half the times I messaged. Though he never discussed them, it was not hard to figure out Tad was moving in other social circles. Whenever I questioned him about other mutual friends from secondary school, he always dismissed the question as uninteresting. I was the only “old” friend he kept in touch with, he would say. So there was always a piece, or perhaps pieces, of Tad impenetrable to me. It was the portion he kept to himself, or as I often interpreted it in those days, the portion he was keeping from me. It could not have been hard though. I was not much of an interrogator.

Unexpectedly, Tad caught my eye. His eyebrows bounced once. “We’d better go,” I read on his lips.

He reached across the table and flicked a ripple through Walker’s screen, causing him to flinch and Niki to kick the table, which initiated a domino reaction of toppling glassware. Tad paid no mind but motioned concisely with his thumb and was immediately sliding through the crowd toward the exit. I let the lovebirds gather themselves and follow Tad ahead of me. Deference comes natural to me, but it was not a logical choice, which I’d like to think also comes natural. I was the least adept at navigating a crowd, and it wasn’t long before I fell behind and out of sight.

 When I finally broke from the mass, I lunged for the lift, barely beating its closing door to stay with the group. It efficiently dropped us fourteen floors at a speed just short of unsettling. We were headed to the cinema and the third, fourth, and fifth floors had the newest screens and latest technology. As quickly as the doors opened and spat us out, we were again hustling after Tad. Even in the more sparsely occupied spaces, the generous and assertive strides of his tall frame left the rest of us feeling as though we were chasing him. Our group grew by three when we reached the theaters. We swiped our way in, grabbed victuals from the concession area, and were soon sitting in the auditorium.

The film was a drama and a departure from the shows we typically saw. It was notable for the absence of action and the ambiguity of the protagonist. The story followed a pair of siblings as they dealt with the terminal illness of their father. Unpredictably it was more concerned with their relationship than either character’s relationship with their dad. At the first marker, I chose the story line that kept the elder son in the same district as the dying father, turning down an opportunity to move to one of the provinces. It was a difficult choice for the character because his love interest and a potential career advancement awaited him on the province. An hour or so into the movie, I managed to briefly swap glasses with those sitting around me and steal glimpses of their version of the story. I must have been the only one in our group who had the first son stay. The snippet I got through Walker’s glasses showed a scene in some far-off wilderness. I was perplexed by how the story got there but could not linger in his goggles while the film progressed.

After the show, the crew headed off for more drinks. I wanted to learn about the other story lines in the film, but the script for the remainder of the evening was predictable. We would end up at another obnoxious venue with heavy-handed music restricting dialogue of any significance. I opted to pass on the nightcap and went home instead. That night was the last I saw either Walker or Tad before the accident—or more accurately, the incident.

There was nothing accidental about it, but there are many who still refer to it in such terms. They insist on the misfortune, bad luck, and fatefulness of it all. These are like the glutton who laments the calamity of his heart attack with an ironic blindness to the contribution of his diet. Though not universally true, there are circumstances in which men are sooner to admit forces beyond their control than their own folly. Even impotence is preferred to error in some cases. But it is not for the benefit of the delusional I record these events. I have given up on them. Instead, I write to refute their message and for the sake of those who will come after them. For the sake of those who will hear their lamenting and otherwise would not know why these events truly came to pass. Because knowing the end without the means is only a recipe to repeat the end. Ultimately there is some truth in the admission of powerlessness: it is just not as arbitrary as they would have you believe.

The following week, I found myself sitting across the table from a smug look. It was the face of my nemesis, and every characteristic of his expression doubted I had gotten it right. We had just completed an exhaustive exchange following a scripted format: his condescending question; my cowering explanation; his rewording of the question based on the presumption his first attempt must have been too complex for my simple mind; my rewording of the answer seeking an even more submissive delivery; his resigned acceptance on a temporal basis cloaked in numerous inferences we would likely have to revisit this point. Design-review issue number two: repeat. Design-review issue number three: repeat. Design-review issue number four: repeat. Ad nauseam.

This process occupied hours of my morning and certainly would have lasted all day if Dr. Liu had not prioritized lunch and strict boundaries on work hours over even the health of his own ego. Besides, there was always tomorrow for the further study of just how vastly superior was the intellect and knowledge of Dr. Harvard Liu in comparison to the common engineers with whom he was forced to deal daily. Fortunately for my sanity, however, that dialogue could continue with a different audience if I could simultaneously convince him my project was worthy of approval and I truly understood how much smarter he was than me.

The good news: after all the interrogative theatrics, the verdict of the first question would be largely deferred to the results of the computational analysis. The bad news: the second matter was highly volatile and often dictated by such unpredictable influences as the accuracy of the local café in completing Harvard’s morning coffee order or the nature of his conversation with his mother the previous night.

After a brief wait in silence, the three-dimensional image popped up over the table between us. The computer-generated projection was a model of our entire city with my project highlighted in full detail. While the visual presentation of the model could be manipulated through a great many variables, the default view deemphasized the majority of the hundred-square-kilometer city by means of a wireframe graphical representation, contrasted with the fully rendered structure of the project of interest and the surrounding frames to which it was connected. Like all the buoyant nautical cities, or nautropolises, Brownton was built on a standardized grid in which interconnected cube-shaped modules were compiled over time into a composite urban mass.

Our standard grid was ten meters, which was the most common increment used, but other city-states had adopted alternate standards. Ten was the standard gauge for as long as I’ve been alive, but my engineering history class at university described struggles between competing standards in the early days when the infrastructure was still only an extension of the land-based city known as San Francisco. In those early days when the sea level started to rise, the first frames started as the natural response of reclaiming land being lost. As the changes to the shoreline became more severe, the frames became more prolific. Eventually the developments progressed to an extent at which they were forced to talk to each other, work with each other, and even connect to each other. The regulation of these structures naturally fell to the local city government, which was already regulating the construction of land-based buildings at the time.

From the lineage of that organization came the power Dr. Liu used in defense of his personal insecurities. I waited patiently as he cumbersomely manipulated the model controls to bring up a closer view of the improvement project that was the subject of our meeting. He was incredibly inept at navigating the model, but pride prevented relinquishing the controls to me, so I bit my tongue and waited, a common posture for me in those meetings. On the table beneath the model, two separate sets of screens provided access to the voluminous data generated as the output of the structural analysis. I occupied myself by feigning review of the numerical analysis results.

The process was not far from intuitive. Since Brownton had severed its last connection with land, additions, improvements, or alterations to any of the individual frames had to be continually evaluated to assess their impact on the global stability, and buoyancy, of the system. As practicing structural engineers in the city and its various provinces, we had the resources to perform this evaluation in our respective offices, but because the city evolved continuously, the final word on such assessments happened under the arrogant and clumsy hand of Harvard and his colleagues at the Brownton Department of Building and Development.

In the case being reviewed, our client planned to develop a new twenty-three-story office tower in the central business district. The proposed floor plan was C-shaped and occupied a footprint consisting of three grids by two grids, or thirty meters by twenty meters, which the developer I worked for had recently landed through a foreclosure sale. It was a good deal for their group but, in the end, was of little consequence to me: the rich getting richer. The program included a modest three stories, or one grid level, below the city base at sea level. With the level below, the structure totaled nine vertical grids. Of course, the improvement required the phased removal of over thirty frames from an early vintage, which demanded verification of both the neighboring frames and the city grid in whole. All of this was included in the analysis my firm provided and thus further cause of Dr. Liu’s concern.

True to form, at ten minutes short of noon, Dr. Liu concluded, by his own superior devices, the project deserved to go forward. His agreement meant months of high-pressure work for me, as the structural engineer, and the architects who would fully develop the contract model from which the project would be built. But I was not yet bothered by the magnitude of what was to come as I flew out of the city offices before the signed authorization had even landed on the clerk’s desk. My years on the job had taught me to relish, ever so briefly, the small victories.

Warm, permeating sunshine welcomed me as I hit the sidewalk and headed up the street on a line for my favorite spot in the city. The downtown traffic was lively and moderately volatile in the middle of a weekday, but I darted across a one-way street nevertheless. I held a growing belief in the conspiracy theory that the algorithms governing the manipulation of self-driving autos were embedded with intentional anomalies to create occasional collisions. The goal, according to the conspiracy, was to control pedestrian behavior. And yet this suspicion had not grown strong enough to influence my own decisions as a pedestrian. I was just too familiar with the neighborhood and unconsciously trusting.

My destination was an elevated stretch of public park surrounded by the tallest office towers in the city. More specifically, I aimed to get there before my precious lunch hour was completely depleted or I succumbed to the constantly lurking guilt pulling me back to the piles of work in the office, whichever came first. The grid modules, the atoms of our city, fit within the larger framework of city blocks, which I understand to be a concept that existed long before we started living on this manmade island. Every tenth line of frames was owned by the city and visibly served as roadways for automated vehicles and mass transit. Hidden below the surface level, these arteries served as much more. Not only did these routes house the city’s infrastructure and additional under-base transit, they were the structural spine upon which the city floated.

In the densest areas of the city, these frames had been strengthened and deepened far beyond that which the average citizen would expect and at an expense far beyond that which the average citizen would support. On that day, I was bound for Train Park, as it had affectionately become known. It was a long, narrow park located on the roof of a two-grid-tall development. It extended two full city blocks in length, spanning over Miner Street. Although I never confirmed it through historical research, I had overheard guides telling tourists the park was a replica of one designed by a famous architect over a major transit center in San Francisco. I was nearly sprinting as I entered the public space beneath the park and headed straight for the lifts providing access to the rooftop. Two meters from the open lift, I was airborne and landed in the center of the small platform that moved slowly around the end radius before turning back toward the upward path. I grabbed the vertical pole to land the jump and stabilized myself just before it turned the corner and zipped up to the rooftop in a single breath.

My eyes struggled to adjust to the intensity of sunlight on the open roof space. Two prominent manipulations collaborated to ensure the park space was almost always warm and sunny. This fact ranked high among the list of why I was so drawn to the place. First, one of the prioritized criteria for the navigation of our city was avoiding bad weather. To some this was an unnecessary extravagance: toting a couple million people around the Pacific for the sake of a little sunshine. But when it came election time, those folks were proved to be in the minority. Whether or not they were willing to defend it in casual conversation, most voters chose sunshine. Second, the designs of the buildings around Train Park worked in concert to funnel natural light in its direction. Although there were competing theories as to the driving force behind it, this had long been a design requisite of any development within the district and was enforced with vigor by the planning commission.

That day, the park was full of visitors, as expected. It still felt, though, as it always did, different than the street below and the rest of the city, for that matter. As I stepped off the lift platform, my stride immediately shortened and pace slackened. Calm washed over me, continued through me, and then trailed off behind me as I moved quietly along the manicured paths. Somehow the air was lighter and the sounds of the city less harsh. I never figured out the first phenomenon, but I knew the latter was by design: cutting-edge noise-reflective technology had been implemented at the perimeter of the park and as an invisible canopy over it.

In Train Park, I often found people talking to each other directly and with a casual demeanor unlike any other place in the city. They looked at each other in an uncommon way. Many spoke in hushed tones, even whispering, and I often wondered if the park prompted them to this or they created the park ambience by doing it. I turned softly off the central path onto a winding route that led up a gradual incline to a terraced garden.

There were numerous secluded areas in the park, but this was my favorite. Clusters of redwoods and sequoias filled the space, creating a cavern of shadows and coolness. Of course, while the signage identified these giant evergreen trees as redwoods and sequoias, anyone who had taken even an elementary life science class could deduce they must be bastardized versions of those magnificent trees, genetically altered to survive with less water in our nomadic environment. They were also biologically only a whisper of the grandness I had read natural redwoods grew to. But while the urban park setting limited their actual heights to much less, disproportionate girth in the trunks and the use of synthetic optics combined to yield the illusion of seventy to eighty meter giants to the visitor immersed amongst them. Further reasoning would also inform an astute park goer that seclusion was a fallacy here, as the entire park was draped in video surveillance. Despite these realities, it was far and away my favorite spot in the city.

I ducked off the path, which had generally dispersed anyway, and lay down quietly behind a trunk two and a half meters in diameter. I rested my head on a ridge extending from a tree base and propped my feet up on a similar adjacent protrusion. A heavy sigh slipped out from deep inside me and dispersed into the calm. I gazed upward without focus into the network of branches above. It was not an immediate peace but one that came along slowly, aided by the distraction of the pretend solitude and the lingering feeling of a small accomplishment deserving of a small reward.

My pocket vibrated with an incoming call. I forgot to turn my PCD off, which I could usually get away with for half an hour or so. Despite being offline for the past few hours as a result of the morning meeting, I shut it down temporarily. Gradually I settled into the soft bed of needles and leaves mixed with the ground cover. Before long, mental relaxation rolled into physical relaxation, and I was reminded of how tired my body was. Letting go of a measure of the stress made letting go of consciousness a smaller step; I could feel sleep just around the next corner.

But before I reached it, a distant screeching sound pulled me with growing force from my drowsiness. A lone scream—a horrific human scream—rose above the screech and was joined without hesitation by a chorus of screams. My eyes were yanked open. The screeching continued through the commotion and was accentuated by jarring collisions, a crescendo of reverberating tremors passing through the ground I rested on. But it was not the climax. Just as I was pulling myself to my feet, a massive crash threw me back to the ground and sent the entire park shaking and gyrating as if a tsunami had just hit. I heard one of the smaller redwoods a few meters away crack and looked up to see its trunk twisting toward me. Instinctively, I dove out of its path and headlong into the trunk of the next tree I had already forgotten was there. I blacked out on impact.