When the FBI director again gazed absently out the jet’s window, he saw night and fog still lingering, along the endless shadow of the borderline.
The National Oceanic and Astmospheric Association research aircraft he had hitched a ride on cruised through the penumbral zone at 30,000 feet. Around him, 20 scientists and mathematicians – from meteorologists to cosmologists to topologists – assiduously tended to their instruments and measurements, murmuring to each other about “M strips” and “K bottles.”
The director grimaced. Not because he didn’t understand this stuff, but because he was beginning to. He had already learned more than he ever wanted to know about Möbius strips and Klein bottles. About how the twist-and-reconnection required by both must take place in a higher dimension. About whether or not, during the National Inversioncy, the original Force Wall had transformed itself into “a Möbius event horizon around a Klein singularity.”
All this new knowledge learned – because POTUS 45 blamed him for the “problem” with the Wall.
The director’s gaze became a glare when he thought of all the zero-probability promises POTUS 45 made during the election campaign. All those “secret plans.” For bringing back long-lost coal mining and manufacturing jobs. For implementing mass deportations and Muslim registries. For “draining the swamp” in D.C. For taking America back to some lost 1950s golden age.
The director sighed. No plan was so secret and unsecret as one that had existed only as a rumor in the candidate’s head. But when POTUS 45 needed at least one big follow-through, who but yours truly had he put at the head of the commission tasked with making real his promise of “a beautiful, impenetrable wall”?
The commission had made it happen, too, even if that had meant making strange bedfellows with Sherazad Fatima Fong-Hernandez, dissident physicist and mathematician, inventor of the superconducting thiotimoline oxide battery and self-styled “topological engineer.”
By the time the commission had need of her, Fong-Hernandez was already detained in a Stateless Persons Center. Not even her thiotimoline battery wealth could save her. She had been born outside the United States to naturalized citizen parents – a family history complicated enough to make it relatively easy to trump up illegal immigration charges against her.
When the director called on Fong-Hernandez, she was undergoing Patriotic Purity Re-education Programming for her published objections to POTUS 45’s statements as candidate and president. Glancing down at his laptop screen, the director called up the commission summary of her activities. All the usual claims: that POTUS 45’s campaign rhetoric had been replete with racism, religious bigotry, rampant sexism, xenophobia. Then she’d gotten personal, calling POTUS 45 “Mad King Donald,” an “obliviating bloviator” and an “existential threat to the future of the human species on this planet.”
Fong-Hernandez was also a funder of the “Rainbow Dressed In Black For Inauguration Day” movement, predicted POTUS 45’s administration would prove “merely a kleptocratic squeeze,” and was a noisy monkey about the director’s own golden-thumbed role in POTUS 45’s electoral victory. When her warnings of “dirty-bomb ‘terror’ attacks” necessary for consequent imposition of martial law” proved too prescient, however, the director himself had seen to it that she was arrested.
And then, because Fong-Hernandez was more than anxious to be released from re-education, the director and the commission believed they could (and felt they did) “turn” her. With Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Homeland Security assistance, she developed the topological field-distortion generators for the Force Wall – solar-thermionic, backed up by her thiotimoline hyper-storage batteries, the whole system impregnably self-contained, self-sufficient, and guaranteed to run without humans in the loop for at least 50 years.
At last, POTUS 45 had the shimmering, beautiful, macroscale-impenetrable, adjustable-height Wall he had long promised, and of which he was so proud.
Perhaps too proud, the director thought. Spurred on by Fong-Hernandez’s hints that the Force Wall could be extended to make an anti-missile shield not only naked-eye visible from outer space but also from higher dimensions, POTUS 45 set in motion the vast covert program to wrap his Wall of America about the entire 3.12 million square miles of CONUS, the contiguous United States.
When completed and brought online, the Wall of America would enclose the entirety of the national boundaries as they existed in the 1950s, prior to the admission of Alaska and Hawaii to the union in 1959.
With a shudder, the director remembered that dark night of fogged souls – when the shield-wall finally was brought online. When the Inversion happened, accompanied by the mental breakdowns of millions who experienced that change while awake (those fortunate enough to be asleep generally being able to write it all off as nightmare).
When the Wall of America became something else entirely – Fong-Hernandez’s system bending 3D space itself, twisting and reconnecting and funhouse-mirroring it backward through higher dimensions, so that a journey in any direction eventually brought the traveler back to his origin point without turning around.
When the lower 48 became a one-sided state, a CONUS-shaped, inescapable, involute, shimmering mirror-bubble of force, when viewed from orbit.
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Fong-Hernandez’s body was still hanging in her apartment closet when the director arrived on scene. The investigators would later characterize the knot in her noose as being of a type “not previously known.” The director, however, was more interested in the note found beside her body: “Boundaries in lower dimensions cease to be boundaries in higher dimensions. Boundaries among and between forces at lower energies cease to be boundaries among and between forces at higher energies. The cosmos is a boundless oneness in which all multiplicities and all boundaries participate.”
This was lined through, however, leaving only the following unimpaired text: “If you would understand everything, think nothing of it – with infinite energy in infinite dimensions. Enjoy your time-capsule time-loop lives.”
When the FBI director again gazed absently out the jet’s window, he saw night and fog still lingering, along the endless shadow of the borderline.
Shaver Lake resident Howard V. Hendrix, the author of six science-fiction novels, has held jobs ranging from janitor to fish hatchery manager to university professor and administrator.
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