Pureline

Chapter 1

THIS IS THE FIRST SHAREHOLDERS' meeting since the Pureline Tower reached its full height. Two and a half miles high, 690 floors. The tallest building on the planet. Somewhere on the other side of the globe, another Tower is being built so that the earth will resemble the Pureline logo, a circle bisected by a line, a heart pierced by a needle.

        The Tower's footprint, in order to support its height, is 3.7 square miles with a hollow, buttressed core, a park at the center that receives filtered sunlight through the glass and other openings in the frame. A new lightweight metal was developed for the Tower's historic construction, minimizing the weight of the upper floors, so that the Tower won't collapse in on itself.  The sail-like shapes of the structure's spires act as aerofoils to funnel and direct the wind, simultaneously achieving lift and powering turbines for energy. Most of the floors utilize some form of hollowed design.  The chief architect bragged that the Tower was 90 percent air.

        It is a vertical city. Inside it are parks, farms, shopping malls, apartments, restaurants, hospitals, and supermarkets. Vertical trains provide transportation. A person can spend her entire life in the Tower, her feet never touching the actual earth. 

        The Pureline directorate and authorized personnel now occupy the top fifty floors, which were pressurized to prevent occupants from suffering from hypobaric hypoxia. To minimize the Tower's lateral drift, there are three tuned mass dampers mounted at various levels in the building's core. They are pendulums, partly suspended and partly resting on hydraulic cylinders, that move in opposition to the Tower's oscillations. Each of the dampers weighs over a thousand tons, composed of stacked circular steel plates that form a sphere. If the Tower's drift reaches certain levels, the aerofoils, too, are adjusted, like the fins of a fish, to redirect the currents of the air.  

        I've only seen the middle damper, a steel moon pocked with gradients and shadows that suggest a face. The dampers have names. The lower damper is Crius, the middle is Hyperion, and the top is Coeus.  Pureline is watching over us.

OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS OF THE Tower it is spring. From these heights, the branches of the trees are a crosshatch of gray overlaid with flowers--pink, white, yellow--a maidens' well of petals. Likely the air will still be cool, almost cold, and my skin would be warmed by the sun that radiates from the cloudless sky. When I was a child, the technicians would sometimes bring me to the park at the center of our compound -- this was before we moved into the Tower--, and I could gaze up at our square parcel of sky. It was the most beautiful thing I had seen, that limitless promise. The breeze was so raw and alive I wanted to bite down on it.

        Once my chaperone had to chase me through the hedges as I crawled through them, giddy, laughing at the rustling of leaves and the dirt that stained my stockings. It was Bertelle. Everyone called him Bertie. His plump, pinched face turned rosy with anger both at the exercise forced on him as well as my disobedience. I never liked Bertie, and I was more apt to misbehave when he was assigned to watch over me. As he grabbed me by the ankle and hauled me out of the brush, I curled my fingers in the soil to slow down my capture, making an even bigger mess of myself. He had gripped me by the scruff of my neck when he finally had me, forced my face -- I couldn't stop giggling -- into his angry gaze. "Do you want to be terminated, you little rabbit?" he yelled at me, his spittle landing on my eyelid and cheek. I could smell his sour breath. He shook me a couple of quick times for emphasis. "You remember the frog, don't you?"

        I stopped laughing. I did.  Being underfoot in the lab. The engineers and technicians in their white lab coats and gloves moving like clockwork. I tapped my fingers on the jars that held the tree frogs with their pulsing throats, their golden eyes round and patterned like marbles. A few cotton balls dropped in, and the frog struggled to break free from that chemical air, its webbed feet streaking the sides of the jar before it went still. Here, then gone. At the will of Pureline. I keened and sobbed on the floor, a disruption, until Maman finally removed me. 

        The air is different inside the Towers. It's not raw. It's not alive. It's dead air. Too clean, too pure, stripped of anything that could hurt us. It's whatever temperature we want, whenever we want it. My comfort wants for nothing.  In the lab, I pull my hands down the glass walls of my chamber, and smudges trail the path of my blue fingers.

MAMAN IS DARK HAIR, THE color of wet bark, in a background of white. White walls, white tables, white lab smocks, white floors. Her hair in soft rich waves. The copper-warm orbs of her eyes under thick lashes. Her smile is crooked, the features of her face never still, but vibrating from the speed of the thoughts that travel through her muscles like electric current. I always want to touch her face, to feel that sparking orchestra that hums in her. 

        She is always the first to arrive in the lab and the last the leave.  I fell asleep as a child to the tap of her fingers on the glass screens, the spiraling fireworks of genetic code lifting from the displays and floating through my dreams. I murmured questions to her in my half-sleep, and she answered. Our call-and-response my goodnight stories. 

        Who am I, Maman? 

        You are Eve. 

        Who are you?

        I'm your maker.

        You made me?

        Yes.

        How did you make me?

        I took a single cell, and changed the instructions. And that single cell followed those instructions until you became who you are now.