Triadic Tales - Last Morning - Short Story (Part Three)

REACH FOR THE SKY

Triadic Tales - Last Morning - Short Story (Part Three) PART TWO PART ONE
How did he know that this would be the day that he died? To tell the truth, he did not know. And it really made no difference to him. He had lived a long time by the measure of earth's chronology. Everything was tuned to the minutes and hours of  this place in this universe. He thought about floating from universe to universe and understood why the body perished so that it made no difference what happened to it when life had passed from it. And he knew that it would be true death as far as he was concerned.
What he had done, whatever history he had made, would be subsumed in the next iteration, whatever it might turn out to be. What he had thought, his vision of a world beyond the car, would remain perhaps, joining, supplemented and being modified, by billions of other cogitations, all within the earth's chronology. It was unfathomable, what existed in the state beyond this one. No one knew. Many mansions in one house perhaps. That's what Jesus thought. Bellngham would soon find out.
The girl had risen and walked out of the kiosk. It was still too early for her to be engaged with whoever might come around, whoever might wonder about the world of rocks and all the other elements of geology. If it was geological, she could cover it in any direction and at almost any level. All it took was a touch of the screen and a few spoken phrases. The new school. Voluntary. Open. This was what Bellingham had seen as a younger man, part of the world beyond binary. Here in this place, he had won the battle. The world had moved his way.
Bellingham breathed deeply. The air was clear. The interstate was empty except for a few double-wide vehicles plying their routes. These days travel was down. One rode easily between communities. A cluster of ten communities - around 100,000 souls in all - composed a Cyber-City.  How easily worries about overcrowding could be dispelled, once the first cyber-communities began to develop.
Bye bye
She was getting closer to where he stood. He turned slowly and their eyes met. He was instantly aware of a somber but palpable person, present and unusual. She stopped.
"I'm new," she said. "You are Mr. Bellingham. I recognized you."
He nodded. Something was broken now. It made him sad.
"Peter Bellinghan," he said, "still here."
"I am here because I read your work."
"Ah. And how did you like it?"
"I'm very surprised."
"Why?"
"I did not expect the - I didn't anticipate -"
"The fact that it works."
"Yesterday was my first work day. I think I reached almost everyone who showed up. It was quite amazing."
"Tell me about it."
She came forward and stood  next to him, looking outward.
"I was explaining some elementary things to some children when this woman appeared and demanded information about Inge Lehman. I told her that I would gladly get the information if she would explain to the children what she what she knew about Inge  Lehman.  If not, she would need to come back when the children were finished. Amazingly, the whole thing transmogrified into a mini-seminar on Lehman's work and on the contribution of other woman scientists."
"Transmogrified. I love that."
"I am a word person."
"So am I," Bellingham said.
He wanted to take her hand. A child, maybe 12 years old, appeared at the entrance to the kiosk. She turned to go.
"I don't even know your name."
"I'm Amanda," she said with her back to him, She led the boy inside.
"Amanda. Good by, Amanda.," he said softly, looking out..
Bellingham turned and walked down a slight incline. There were ten such gentle spirals in the whole complex, each allowing movement up and down the four levels. Side spokes appeared at irregular intervals, allowing passage to and from the ways. Every two-hundred feet or so, there was a level space with tables and chairs and childrens' play equipment. Almost everything in the compact yet oddly spacious community had a retractable top. When there was rain it was  entirely  collected.
There was no waste. Everything was used. Just as Bellinghan had imagined before there ever were cyber-communities.
"They will have to come up with something to replace turning a corner," Bellinghan musing as he walked.
Something took hold of him. It was not a pain. But it was something definite and he walked to a table in the next square and gingerly sat down.
Again he heard music inside him. But this time it was his own. His Peace Oratorio.
Let the earth listen and all that fills it World and all that comes from it
Now it was left to him simply to sit and wait.

END

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Triadic Tales - Last Morning, - Short Story (Part Two)

TRUST
Triadic Tales - Last Morning, - Short Story (Part Two) PART ONE
Public meant free gathering and the cultivation of trust. Bellingham knew his neighbors, but he also knew thousands of the 10,000 who lived and worked and recreated themselves in this, the first completed cyber-community.   Twenty paces to his right was a kiosk. Bellingham insisted on this word for all small public spaces in the community because they were where one could find one or two persons whose job was to serve all who came. There were almost 500 kiosks on the four levels of the cyber-community. That meant there were always eyes on the ways. There was always help at hand.  It was an environment where the value of helpfulness, ontological in Bellingham's view, was palpable.
Bellingham gathered up a croissant and a Turkish coffee and greeted the young man with a silent nod. He left his customary tip, a substantial one.
He sat alone at a table in front of the kiosk. One could have a kitchen as part of one's residence, but kitchens were less and less necessary for those whose inclinations did not extend to home cooking. 
In addition to kiosks like this, there were small squares every two or three hundred feet and each square had eating places and other commercial and recreational and spiritual spots.
Bellingham felt this was his last day. He engaged in frequent conversation with the one he called Abba, Abba within him, for decades, from when he began to use his version of the Abba Prayer, the one Jesus taught. It was his a daily rule, repeated often, mostly in silence. 
"Well take me then," he said.  "Today will be just fine. If not just fine. Whatever." 
You will go when you go. You will see. Look out today from the very top.
Bellingham got up and began ascending from his level to the top. His was the second. The top was the fourth. The way wound through the stadium-like structure. It was a a walk of about a mile..
Bellingham reviewed the general  events that had led to this. The collapse of the car industry as a major player in the world economy. Runaway oil prices. The house of cards aftermath. 
Colleges and universities wiped out. Religions decimated.
Many predicted the crisis. But only a few seized on Bellingham's idea. So he was left to create this place and hope others would finally see in it a way of life beyond the ruins. A way of diversity, technological imagination, and local economies.  
There was a future for humankind, beyond the continuing downward trajectory created by addiction to oil and automobile. This community was now at capacity.
Bellingham was attracting nibbles from other entrepreneurs.  Presidents and other leaders had clung to the prospect of a solution less complete, less sensible. They were clinging to a failed reality. It was up to this place to slowly and surely become a model for the world, an admission at last that integral design lay at the center of things. The computer was created to advance reason. We did not need still more irrationalities based on the binary trap.
Bellingham looked out from the high level across the fields to where the old interstate lay. He knew this would be one of his final strolls. Behind him was a kiosk where all things geological could be accessed. A young woman he had only seen in passing was visible through the entrance. She sat before a large screen which now was simply an image of old bricks - a wall from somewhere, beautiful in its simple, nuanced repetition of shapes and tones. He thought he heard music, but it was probably just the light wind turning the solar silos.
Bellingham listened more intently and in his head he heard a song from childhood.
This will be the day that I die
His mind was oddly empty. Just the song. The girl. His sense of being moved by light wind. 

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Triadic Tales - Last Morning - Short Story (Part One)

Last Morning
Bellingham got up early. He never failed to notice the play in the surface below his feet when he got up in the morning. Footsteps now could contribute to the powering of the world. Each step he took on the thin surface - what was once the floor but which was now all sides of all spaces - activated tiny sensors that created energy. Outside on the walkway, the same play existed. The strength of surfaces exceeded that of what used to be called walls. Soundproof. Fireproof. Replaceable. They came from a plant that once made automobiles.
He spoke softly to the wall. The temperature inside and out appeared. They were identical. It was spring. He looked around his room. It was his idea that everyone should have their own room. The idea evolved. The community acknowledged the individual as requiring his or her own space. Beyond such rooms, a residence had few requirements. Common life was springing up all over. What used to be houses were now these spaces,  cobbled together in the matrix. Bellingham had come to see this as the evolution of building. We had always had the technology, Bellingham argued. All that was required was vision. His favorite Bible text was, "See and see but do not understand." 
Bellingham walked out of the room to a narrow way. He entered his wife's room. She was still asleep. He knew this was his last day. He had not shared this knowledge with anyone save his friend and old classmate Henry. Henry was a doctor and for years they had corresponded about the vagaries of their old age. Henry still kept to the life he had led since his own health forced him  to be a country doctor instead of  a globe-trotting public health pioneer.
We are our bodies, Bellingham thought and smiled. Carrie knew in a general way that Bellingham was dying and that he had reached that happy point where he had everything one might want. It was old age that would finally kick in. And Bellingham's formidable will would allow death to take place without extended care or hospitalization. 
He looked at her again. He could barely make out the motions of her breathing. Ah, there it was. She would find out soon enough.
Sun and shade were conspicuous here. 
Bellingham's vision combined an almost medieval atmosphere with the highest tech yet been applied to the ill-tended macro-sphere. He exited to a slightly inclined way and sat down on one of the surfaces that were present everywhere.
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