[story] the grace affair
author: claudia (iseepurplehair)
email: midorikumori [at] gmail.com
For my late friend Sameritan Grace, for whom I am writing this essay, I had nothing but the deepest respect. Sameritan was a compassionate individual, one who cared deeply about his field and the ethics thereof. Tragically, these are the people who become martyrs for justice, as they find life's lies unbearable.
Little has changed since the conclusion of this story. Goldwater industries is still in its prime, and I am still an engineer working for them; the only noticeable difference between then and now is the lack of my companion's official position. Everything else is virtually unchanged.
This story was born of the multiple retellings and reaccounts of the events I have been pressed to give ever since the severely edited version was released in the papers. The following is a composite of what I have told all of the judges, attorneys, juries, reporters, company owners, clerks and therapists who have asked for so many years.
Although his parents were city-bred, Sameritan Grace was born in the country. His mother and father were revolutionaries in their day; they balked at the industrialization of today and the modernization of tomorrow, and as the capital city's fifth industrial revolution loomed they took flight to a small village where life was more straightforward.
Here Sam was raised the son of a watchmaker and took to his father's craft with aplomb. He was hailed as a prodigy in the somewhat technologically illiterate town but, while many people came to rely on him for their mechanical needs, he was generally disliked.
The citizens of the town were country folk, set in their ways and generally molded into their social niches. Every one possessed the unruffled mentality of those who could see themselves doing the very same thing they were doing now in twenty or thirty years.
Not one under forty had been born outside of the village. Neither had Sameritan, but he seemed to embody the city's mechanized sense of purpose and feverish inability to remain still. If minds were machines the village would have been composed of serene flourmills, repeating the same actions over and over into infinity. Sam's mind, however, would have been a mechanical Don Quixote, constantly challenging the town's sleepy and dated worldview with the whriling and grinding of steely new cogs and wheels, the whole thing powered by nothing but its own centrifugal force.
No matter what his parents did, Sam couldn't wind his mind down to say in his one-room schoolhouse, so by the time he came of age at sixteen he had been working in his father's shop for many years and was generally avoided. However, this was of no concern to him, and in his spare time he would tinker at his desk and daydream in bronze and gold.
It was at this point in my friend's life that destiny overheated the engine of a motorcar belonging to a messenger for an important company in the city.
The page had requested technical assistance and Sameritan's father, brimming with pride, had brought his son to the man's aid. Sameritan, despite his unfamiliarity with newer motorcars, was able to sort out the problem in a short amount of time. The messenger, impressed with his work, took word along to the capital city and days later an official summons from an engineering firm arrived.
His journey away from his town made a lasting impression on Sam, as he reaccounted vividly the day I first made his acquaintance.
"I was working that afternoon, repairing a fob watch," he said with an honest smile, "and a man in expensive clothes entered and asked for me. I asked him what it was he wanted, and he told me he had an official summons from a company called Goldwater Industries. At the time I was completely unaware of any such institution, or even the existence of invention firms, but I agreed to go with him, if only to see the city. But then my father entered and, when informed of the situation, explained. He was reluctant to let me leave, as he himself had walked away from such a career and life before I was born, but eventually agreed that I should have the right to decide for myself."
Sameritan's entrance to the city was less than dramatic. I am sure he was expecting fantastic golden gates, or some other symbol of its prosperity. Anything but the gritty dark buildings that loomed out of the smoky air and the tarred wooden houses that dominated the outskirts. He pressed up against the fine glass windows of the elegant carriage, gazing out at the desolate grime-encrusted world beyond. He couldn’t possibly believe this was the paradise he had envisioned.
But then, quite suddenly, it was. As they drove on, the houses grew less dilapidated, the trees greener and more healthy-looking, the people better dressed. The fronts of the businesses, unlike the dark, shuttered facades earlier, were thrown open and yellow light spilled onto the sidewalks. People were laughing, enjoying the evening. Sam's enthusiasm began to rise once more.
He was deposited in front of a towering apartment building, given the key to his new home and left to gape at the wall of concrete that stretched up higher than the church steeple at home. The bemused country boy was eventually led to his room by the doorman, a friendly fellow who I spoke to after the whole affair had come to a close. "That boy was something else," he told me. "Kept going on about the elevator and how he thought it worked. And you know what, after talking to him I poked down into the basement for a look and he was right!"
I imagine Sameritan's old room was the same the first night he walked into it as the day the doorman let me in to look about. A small but pleasant enough place, with an extensive view of the city below. To Sam, who used to live in an even smaller space with his parents above a shop, it must have been a radical change. What he didn't know was that the entire building was filled with identical rooms - all for "discovered" boys like him, who would ultimately power the empire with their minds.
On Sameritan's first morning in the city, he was escorted once more by the doorman, this time across the street and down a block. This, he was told, was the company that had requested his service, Goldwater Industries. Even I, jaded citizen that I am, must admit the building is breathtaking. It gave off an overpowering aura of wealth and power, humbling the other merely extravagant buildings it flanked. Marble gleamed in the morning light, gold leaf sparkled. Wide stairs spilled down to the street, inspiring and intimidating the passers-by.
It was at this point that I came into Sameritan's acquaintance. The journeyman engineers' floor is divided by desks, with two men to one and a fogged glass pane dividing the two for the sake of economy. My previous desk-mate had been promoted some days earlier, so I had taken down the window to make use of both areas. I recall resenting my new neighbour for the loss of that space. But when Sam actually sat down, I felt my annoyance give way to curiosity. He was different from the other new boys, who had been slowly settling in with the more seasoned engineers for a few days now. He was still wearing country clothes, wrote his name with a stubby pencil instead of the ink pen he was provided with, and was more than willing to converse. All of the other engineers on that floor were closed, suspicious men, afraid of each other's ideas and ambitions. But this odd young man, five minutes after sitting down, struck up a conversation and asked me what I was designing.
I felt like humoring him, and briefly explained the nature of my blueprint. He seemed interested, and even gave me a suggestion or two. I politely agreed, then went back to work. A few seconds later, he rapped on the glass again.
I swiveled my chair around. "Yes?"
"What's this for?"
I wondered who had been in charge of briefing him. "To seperate the desks."
"Why'd they need that?"
"To prevent us from taking each other's ideas."
He looked surprised. "Isn't it better to work together?"
I set down my pen. "Look," I said kindly, "you do know what you're supposed to be doing, yes?"
He shook his head. "I was just told they wanted me as an engineer." He gave me an optimistic, if slightly uneven, grin. "Do I just start... engineering?"
"Exactly. Just design... anything. The senior engineers pick through the ideas we come up with and refine the ones that are useful. We're just supposed to generate them."
"Really?" Sameritan, amicable before, became positively ecstatic. "All day?"
"Yes." I went back to my work and Sameritan began his. After about five minutes I heard his voice, distant and muffled, from across the desk.
I leaned around the barrier. "Pardon?"
"Can I at least take this thing down? It's distracting. I promise I won't take your ideas."
I saw a couple of other engineers look up curiously at this breach of tradition. I sighed. "If you want."
"Thanks!"
This brief exchange over the status quo of the glass pane was the first of a series of tiny alterations Sameritan brought with him. A few things, he confided in me later that day, didn't seem quite right to him. Doubtless it was this quality of his - a constant, gentle push for things to be different - that had made him so unapproachable in his town. And it never occurred to him that people in a large business are not unlike those in a small village.
Around the second week of Sameritan's employment, he started getting small signs of the attention from the senior engineers. One would stop by on his way for a cup of coffee and congratulate him on the design of this or that, or another would invite him out to lunch. While he was very gracious and polite, he never accepted offers of dinners or meetings, insisting that his talent lay in the sheer production of ideas, not refining them.
This gained him a reputation of an industrious and modest worker, and he began to get very popular amongst his peers. However, he still thought of me as his first friend and was always willing to talk, praising whatever mediocre inventions I'd shyly request his critique of.
"This is fantastic!" he'd say, pointing out a mechanism surely he'd thought up himself, ages before I did. "Inspired! This must get you promoted. Why on earth are you still here, with the likes of me?" Sameritan was a genius, not only in terms of his creations - which were truly unrivaled - but of his motivational speech. Soon he was the most sought-after engineer in the building, and for the first time anyone could remember people were coming to him for advice with their machines.
And this progression would have been fine. If events had continued on this track, Goldwater Industries could have been revolutionized, with a whole new approach to invention and Sameritan at its idea-sharing head. Instead, one day, he turned in his folder of exquisite designs as usual, but containing one slightly unusual design he'd dismissed as a fluke, idly sketched during his coffee break and added to his portfolio as an afterthought.
Later that day he was visited by Mister Goldwater himself and several senior engineers, and there was much pompous shaking of hands and talk of promotions and the next day Sam had been spirited away to a higher floor, with a room of his own and his own title of Master Designer. Apparently that simple sketch had fantastic implications, and Sam's precious mind now had to be cared for so he could create more revolutionary designs. This was all spelled out loudly and clearly for Sam right at his desk on the journeymen’s' floor, and when they left I am certain everyone except myself hated him more than a little. I soon missed his presence, although I appreciated the double desk space once more. After all, I thought to myself, it's not as if Sam has left forever.
I heard less and less of Sameritan in the following weeks. Of course, stories from the top would filter down to the lower engineers - Master Designer Grace revolutionized the phonograph, Sameritan Grace invented a new way of communicating by semaphore, that Grace man discovered a new source of power for the generators. I doubt these were all true - especially about the semaphore, which had not been used in over 25 years - but they still held the signs of my friend's talent, and I felt strangely proud of him. How changed he was from the enthusiastic boy who had come in for the first time just a few weeks ago!
Then, no more than two months after his arrival, he suddenly asked to take me to lunch. "I miss our conversations," he wrote in a note handed to me by a clerk one hectic day. "Please let me take you to lunch tomorrow."
I went up to his office and asked the secretary to let me see him, but she told me he had left for the day. Disappointed but eager for our engagement, I went back to my own lodgings. It was directly above the one Sam had moved into on his first day, and had moved out of a month later. Now he was down the street, in the building occupied mostly by businessmen. I suddenly missed his presence very much.
The next day, as planned, I accompanied him to lunch. We went to a ridiculously expensive restaurant, where he seemed to be on good terms with the head waiter. He breezily paid for what ended up costing more than a month of my salary, resisting my efforts to reimburse him and insisting he owed me more. "You were my first friend at Goldwater," he'd say over and over. "You were the only man willing to speak to another human being without a sheet of glass. I appreciate that."
We chatted a bit more, until, over the second course, he admitted he had an ulterior motive for inviting me. I shifted uneasily in my seat. "What is it?"
Sam sighed, set down his fork. "You are probably unaware of this, but my hometown was demolished last week. A stray shell, apparently, that was intended for the city. Some sort of new design that had its flaws."
I looked appropriately apologetic, and offered my condolences. Sam shook his head.
"I know it's selfish of me to tell you this," he said somewhat morosely, "but - I just wanted someone to know."
I tried to respond as sympathetically as I could. I truly empathized with him, but couldn't help but wonder why he was telling me instead of his new friends. The conversation would have ended there, had not Sameritan continued, "It is for the best, though. That shell could have wiped out a good third of the city."
I was shocked. "You believe it's better for your town to be destroyed than this city?"
"Well, yes." Sam gave me a quizzical look. "More people live here, for instance. And we have noble institutions that require protection."
"Such as Goldwater?"
"Such as Goldwater, exactly."
For a reason I could not entirely place, this troubled me immensely. As one who had grown into adulthood in the turbulent city streets, I could not imagine it required so much protection as to sacrifice Sam's hometown. I could not help but feel my friend was placing too much stock and trust in Goldwater, and wondered if that was a sudden shift, resulting from the abrupt loss of his home.
Despite the pretense of the meeting, it was a pleasant time and, loathe to return to work, we took the long way back. We were about a block and a half away when the ground shook and a resonating roar echoed around the tall buildings. Sameritan gasped. "Was that the company?"
We made our way back to the Goldwater building to find the facade aflame. Fire crews were already putting out the blaze, and it appeared few were injured, but Sameritan didn't seem to grasp what had happened. "Who would do this?" he babbled, over and over.
"Probably protesters." I wiped my forehead. Clouds of steam were now billowing out of the windows, and people were still streaming from the shattered front doors, coughing.
"Protesters of what?" Sameritan was nearly hysterical, and I began to look around uncomfortably for a reassuring figure. After all, Goldwater Industries had taken Sam in, I reminded myself. And now it was all he had.
For some unexplainable and shameful reason, I found myself getting angry. Not at the destruction, but at my friend. He was so frustratingly naive, so unaware of his surroundings. I wanted to shake him.
"What do you think? The war."
"What?" Sam's face was ashen. He looked ill. "What does that have to do with us?"
It was then that I understood with aggravating clarity. Sameritan had no more knowledge of what it was we did than on his first day. I laid my hands on the boy's shoulders, looked him squarely in the eye.
"What do you think it is we do?"
He gave me a dirty look. "We invent! Design! Build!"
"For what?"
"I don't know! I don't adapt the inventions!"
"Sam..." I could anticipate his reaction, gritted my teeth. "Sameritan. Listen. We design machines, this is true. But what we design machines for is the army. We're backing this war."
"What?" He brushed me away. "Nonsense. We are here to improve the world. To make things better for everyone."
"No, Sam." I couldn't believe his ignorance. Now through my anger I could see everything about him was false, from his luxurious and unfitting clothing to his expression of innocent and righteous anger. I couldn't stop myself. "What Goldwater does, really does, is kill people who are trying to kill us first. The war its self is merely a catalyst - it's mind against mind now, and your precious Goldwater'll be damned if they beat us. Do you remember that design you came up with, the one that promoted you? That became the shell that destroyed your hometown. You killed them. It's your fault." I was breathing heavily, overcome by my sudden lapse of absolute loathing for the young country boy shivering before me.
I will never forget his expression - I have never seen someone so utterly hopeless, at such a loss for words. For a moment I thought he was going to lash back, or burst into tears. But then he turned and stumbled away. I went after him, calling, but he broke into a run and vanished around a corner. I didn't attempt to pursue him, but returned to my own apartment, anger draining away with every step. By the time I was at my door I felt terrible for my atrocious behavior. I resolved that the next day I would make amends, and went to sleep with a guilty conscience.
The next day I took my break in an attempt to see him, but his secretary informed me, in the same bored tones she'd used previously, that he hadn't come in. Discouraged, I made to call on him at home, but no one answered the door. I grew worried, and did the same for the next two days with growing concern.
Then, on the third day after the demonstration, I was summoned to Sameritan's office. I noticed immediately he looked more pallid, more tense than he had been before. He appeared to be wearing the same suit he wore to lunch with me, rumpled and slightly too large for his frame. He smiled in greeting, but it was really more of a manic grimace than any expression of happiness.
I sat down cautiously. "Sam? Are you well?"
He nodded jerkily. I saw his desk was covered in scraps of paper, all detailing what appeared to be the same invention. "Never been better, my friend. For you see, I now understand how this industry works. And I have invented the cure."
His voice was strained. I took that as a sign that, somewhere within the powerful engine of his brain, some crucial internal spring was about to snap. "And what's that, Sam?"
He waggled a finger theatrically at me. "Oh no, not yet. You'll find out soon enough. I just thought I should tell you first." He voice began to resemble the one I was used to; the young man who had so optimistically taken down the glass wall between us. "Because you're my friend." Despite his reassuring words, I found his mad, bright smile unnerving.
"You're not upset over what I said yesterday?"
"Of course not." He half-turned away, became occupied with a scrap of paper. "You told me the truth, my friend. And I appreciate that."
At this point I was shooed back to work. All day I sat at my desk, unable to concentrate, fearing for my friend's sanity. The knowledge that Sameritan had contributed to the destruction of his village had pushed him over the edge. I realized this was precisely why he'd been kept him in the dark; Golfwater must have been able to predict how he would respond to the revelation.
On the way home I spoke to a senior engineer, enquiring how Sameritan had been lately. The man said he seemed fine, and in fact, he was overseeing a project the lad had just designed. For a reason I could not pinpoint, this worried me immensely and I made a resolution to speak to Mister Goldwater himself the following day.
But when I came to work the next morning Sameritan seemed to be in fine spirits. He greeted me as cheerfully as ever in the lobby, and I saw him engaged in spirited discussion with some of his engineers before leaving. I wondered whether his bizarre mood had swung back to its original state. I sincerely hoped it had, and returned to my work with relief.
The days passed without incident. Then, several weeks after the explosion, I came to work to find everyone unusually tense. I signed in, then sidled over to a group of engineers from my department and asked what had happened. One mutely shoved the day's paper into my hands and suddenly I felt the same anonymous dread I had experienced when Sameritan spoke of his new invention. The latest battalion of Goldwater airships had been sabotaged. Someone had let machines loose in them that tore them apart from the inside, effectively decimating the original works and costing the company hundreds of thousands. The airships had made it out to the front lines, but had collapsed upon entering battle, leaving thousands of troops exposed and unarmed. Our side had been forced into surrender within minutes.
That day there were searches and, after they discovered Sameritan's notes in his office, trials. He did not argue his case, but simply sat while testimony after testimony spoke of his genocidal nature, his psychotic disposition, the shame a saboteur had brought to the company. All of the accusers, I noticed, had once been his admirers. I reflected that, had he not been so popular, Sameritan's case would've been dealt with much more quietly.
Sameritan was found guilty of first-degree sabotage. Even as his sentence was read out, he made no attempt to save himself, to claim ignorance of the destructive machines. He was put on a prison ship for the labor colonies, but it was brought down in a storm a fortnight after its departure and no one on board was ever seen again. The accident was given an anticlimactic paragraph in the newspaper, weeks after the event had occurred. After all, the article seemed to jibe, they were criminals. No one ought to care about them.
I am now faced with the heaviest of moral obligations. I am strictly prohibited from speaking of the nature of Sameritan's final invention, but I will say it was of a singularly organic design, radically different from any other creation designed to date. It shows the absolute tragedy of his end, for what other mechanical wonders could he have dazzled the world with? Such mimicry of natural life in man-made structures might be seen again, but outside of Goldwater's polished doors.
Knowing the nostalgic disposition of my friend, I am traveling to where his humble village once stood, the place he hated living in but loved hailing from. It is my intention to study the natural life that grows there. Specifically, I am looking for a certain parasitic plant that yields certain seeds, somewhere around half an inch in length. I am certain of what I am looking for, as for comparison I have in my pocket the tiny objects Sameritan clasped in my hand during our final meeting. I will never forget his expression of resigned nobility, nor his whispered message.
"Bring it to an end."
the end
email: midorikumori [at] gmail.com
For my late friend Sameritan Grace, for whom I am writing this essay, I had nothing but the deepest respect. Sameritan was a compassionate individual, one who cared deeply about his field and the ethics thereof. Tragically, these are the people who become martyrs for justice, as they find life's lies unbearable.
Little has changed since the conclusion of this story. Goldwater industries is still in its prime, and I am still an engineer working for them; the only noticeable difference between then and now is the lack of my companion's official position. Everything else is virtually unchanged.
This story was born of the multiple retellings and reaccounts of the events I have been pressed to give ever since the severely edited version was released in the papers. The following is a composite of what I have told all of the judges, attorneys, juries, reporters, company owners, clerks and therapists who have asked for so many years.
Although his parents were city-bred, Sameritan Grace was born in the country. His mother and father were revolutionaries in their day; they balked at the industrialization of today and the modernization of tomorrow, and as the capital city's fifth industrial revolution loomed they took flight to a small village where life was more straightforward.
Here Sam was raised the son of a watchmaker and took to his father's craft with aplomb. He was hailed as a prodigy in the somewhat technologically illiterate town but, while many people came to rely on him for their mechanical needs, he was generally disliked.
The citizens of the town were country folk, set in their ways and generally molded into their social niches. Every one possessed the unruffled mentality of those who could see themselves doing the very same thing they were doing now in twenty or thirty years.
Not one under forty had been born outside of the village. Neither had Sameritan, but he seemed to embody the city's mechanized sense of purpose and feverish inability to remain still. If minds were machines the village would have been composed of serene flourmills, repeating the same actions over and over into infinity. Sam's mind, however, would have been a mechanical Don Quixote, constantly challenging the town's sleepy and dated worldview with the whriling and grinding of steely new cogs and wheels, the whole thing powered by nothing but its own centrifugal force.
No matter what his parents did, Sam couldn't wind his mind down to say in his one-room schoolhouse, so by the time he came of age at sixteen he had been working in his father's shop for many years and was generally avoided. However, this was of no concern to him, and in his spare time he would tinker at his desk and daydream in bronze and gold.
It was at this point in my friend's life that destiny overheated the engine of a motorcar belonging to a messenger for an important company in the city.
The page had requested technical assistance and Sameritan's father, brimming with pride, had brought his son to the man's aid. Sameritan, despite his unfamiliarity with newer motorcars, was able to sort out the problem in a short amount of time. The messenger, impressed with his work, took word along to the capital city and days later an official summons from an engineering firm arrived.
His journey away from his town made a lasting impression on Sam, as he reaccounted vividly the day I first made his acquaintance.
"I was working that afternoon, repairing a fob watch," he said with an honest smile, "and a man in expensive clothes entered and asked for me. I asked him what it was he wanted, and he told me he had an official summons from a company called Goldwater Industries. At the time I was completely unaware of any such institution, or even the existence of invention firms, but I agreed to go with him, if only to see the city. But then my father entered and, when informed of the situation, explained. He was reluctant to let me leave, as he himself had walked away from such a career and life before I was born, but eventually agreed that I should have the right to decide for myself."
Sameritan's entrance to the city was less than dramatic. I am sure he was expecting fantastic golden gates, or some other symbol of its prosperity. Anything but the gritty dark buildings that loomed out of the smoky air and the tarred wooden houses that dominated the outskirts. He pressed up against the fine glass windows of the elegant carriage, gazing out at the desolate grime-encrusted world beyond. He couldn’t possibly believe this was the paradise he had envisioned.
But then, quite suddenly, it was. As they drove on, the houses grew less dilapidated, the trees greener and more healthy-looking, the people better dressed. The fronts of the businesses, unlike the dark, shuttered facades earlier, were thrown open and yellow light spilled onto the sidewalks. People were laughing, enjoying the evening. Sam's enthusiasm began to rise once more.
He was deposited in front of a towering apartment building, given the key to his new home and left to gape at the wall of concrete that stretched up higher than the church steeple at home. The bemused country boy was eventually led to his room by the doorman, a friendly fellow who I spoke to after the whole affair had come to a close. "That boy was something else," he told me. "Kept going on about the elevator and how he thought it worked. And you know what, after talking to him I poked down into the basement for a look and he was right!"
I imagine Sameritan's old room was the same the first night he walked into it as the day the doorman let me in to look about. A small but pleasant enough place, with an extensive view of the city below. To Sam, who used to live in an even smaller space with his parents above a shop, it must have been a radical change. What he didn't know was that the entire building was filled with identical rooms - all for "discovered" boys like him, who would ultimately power the empire with their minds.
On Sameritan's first morning in the city, he was escorted once more by the doorman, this time across the street and down a block. This, he was told, was the company that had requested his service, Goldwater Industries. Even I, jaded citizen that I am, must admit the building is breathtaking. It gave off an overpowering aura of wealth and power, humbling the other merely extravagant buildings it flanked. Marble gleamed in the morning light, gold leaf sparkled. Wide stairs spilled down to the street, inspiring and intimidating the passers-by.
It was at this point that I came into Sameritan's acquaintance. The journeyman engineers' floor is divided by desks, with two men to one and a fogged glass pane dividing the two for the sake of economy. My previous desk-mate had been promoted some days earlier, so I had taken down the window to make use of both areas. I recall resenting my new neighbour for the loss of that space. But when Sam actually sat down, I felt my annoyance give way to curiosity. He was different from the other new boys, who had been slowly settling in with the more seasoned engineers for a few days now. He was still wearing country clothes, wrote his name with a stubby pencil instead of the ink pen he was provided with, and was more than willing to converse. All of the other engineers on that floor were closed, suspicious men, afraid of each other's ideas and ambitions. But this odd young man, five minutes after sitting down, struck up a conversation and asked me what I was designing.
I felt like humoring him, and briefly explained the nature of my blueprint. He seemed interested, and even gave me a suggestion or two. I politely agreed, then went back to work. A few seconds later, he rapped on the glass again.
I swiveled my chair around. "Yes?"
"What's this for?"
I wondered who had been in charge of briefing him. "To seperate the desks."
"Why'd they need that?"
"To prevent us from taking each other's ideas."
He looked surprised. "Isn't it better to work together?"
I set down my pen. "Look," I said kindly, "you do know what you're supposed to be doing, yes?"
He shook his head. "I was just told they wanted me as an engineer." He gave me an optimistic, if slightly uneven, grin. "Do I just start... engineering?"
"Exactly. Just design... anything. The senior engineers pick through the ideas we come up with and refine the ones that are useful. We're just supposed to generate them."
"Really?" Sameritan, amicable before, became positively ecstatic. "All day?"
"Yes." I went back to my work and Sameritan began his. After about five minutes I heard his voice, distant and muffled, from across the desk.
I leaned around the barrier. "Pardon?"
"Can I at least take this thing down? It's distracting. I promise I won't take your ideas."
I saw a couple of other engineers look up curiously at this breach of tradition. I sighed. "If you want."
"Thanks!"
This brief exchange over the status quo of the glass pane was the first of a series of tiny alterations Sameritan brought with him. A few things, he confided in me later that day, didn't seem quite right to him. Doubtless it was this quality of his - a constant, gentle push for things to be different - that had made him so unapproachable in his town. And it never occurred to him that people in a large business are not unlike those in a small village.
Around the second week of Sameritan's employment, he started getting small signs of the attention from the senior engineers. One would stop by on his way for a cup of coffee and congratulate him on the design of this or that, or another would invite him out to lunch. While he was very gracious and polite, he never accepted offers of dinners or meetings, insisting that his talent lay in the sheer production of ideas, not refining them.
This gained him a reputation of an industrious and modest worker, and he began to get very popular amongst his peers. However, he still thought of me as his first friend and was always willing to talk, praising whatever mediocre inventions I'd shyly request his critique of.
"This is fantastic!" he'd say, pointing out a mechanism surely he'd thought up himself, ages before I did. "Inspired! This must get you promoted. Why on earth are you still here, with the likes of me?" Sameritan was a genius, not only in terms of his creations - which were truly unrivaled - but of his motivational speech. Soon he was the most sought-after engineer in the building, and for the first time anyone could remember people were coming to him for advice with their machines.
And this progression would have been fine. If events had continued on this track, Goldwater Industries could have been revolutionized, with a whole new approach to invention and Sameritan at its idea-sharing head. Instead, one day, he turned in his folder of exquisite designs as usual, but containing one slightly unusual design he'd dismissed as a fluke, idly sketched during his coffee break and added to his portfolio as an afterthought.
Later that day he was visited by Mister Goldwater himself and several senior engineers, and there was much pompous shaking of hands and talk of promotions and the next day Sam had been spirited away to a higher floor, with a room of his own and his own title of Master Designer. Apparently that simple sketch had fantastic implications, and Sam's precious mind now had to be cared for so he could create more revolutionary designs. This was all spelled out loudly and clearly for Sam right at his desk on the journeymen’s' floor, and when they left I am certain everyone except myself hated him more than a little. I soon missed his presence, although I appreciated the double desk space once more. After all, I thought to myself, it's not as if Sam has left forever.
I heard less and less of Sameritan in the following weeks. Of course, stories from the top would filter down to the lower engineers - Master Designer Grace revolutionized the phonograph, Sameritan Grace invented a new way of communicating by semaphore, that Grace man discovered a new source of power for the generators. I doubt these were all true - especially about the semaphore, which had not been used in over 25 years - but they still held the signs of my friend's talent, and I felt strangely proud of him. How changed he was from the enthusiastic boy who had come in for the first time just a few weeks ago!
Then, no more than two months after his arrival, he suddenly asked to take me to lunch. "I miss our conversations," he wrote in a note handed to me by a clerk one hectic day. "Please let me take you to lunch tomorrow."
I went up to his office and asked the secretary to let me see him, but she told me he had left for the day. Disappointed but eager for our engagement, I went back to my own lodgings. It was directly above the one Sam had moved into on his first day, and had moved out of a month later. Now he was down the street, in the building occupied mostly by businessmen. I suddenly missed his presence very much.
The next day, as planned, I accompanied him to lunch. We went to a ridiculously expensive restaurant, where he seemed to be on good terms with the head waiter. He breezily paid for what ended up costing more than a month of my salary, resisting my efforts to reimburse him and insisting he owed me more. "You were my first friend at Goldwater," he'd say over and over. "You were the only man willing to speak to another human being without a sheet of glass. I appreciate that."
We chatted a bit more, until, over the second course, he admitted he had an ulterior motive for inviting me. I shifted uneasily in my seat. "What is it?"
Sam sighed, set down his fork. "You are probably unaware of this, but my hometown was demolished last week. A stray shell, apparently, that was intended for the city. Some sort of new design that had its flaws."
I looked appropriately apologetic, and offered my condolences. Sam shook his head.
"I know it's selfish of me to tell you this," he said somewhat morosely, "but - I just wanted someone to know."
I tried to respond as sympathetically as I could. I truly empathized with him, but couldn't help but wonder why he was telling me instead of his new friends. The conversation would have ended there, had not Sameritan continued, "It is for the best, though. That shell could have wiped out a good third of the city."
I was shocked. "You believe it's better for your town to be destroyed than this city?"
"Well, yes." Sam gave me a quizzical look. "More people live here, for instance. And we have noble institutions that require protection."
"Such as Goldwater?"
"Such as Goldwater, exactly."
For a reason I could not entirely place, this troubled me immensely. As one who had grown into adulthood in the turbulent city streets, I could not imagine it required so much protection as to sacrifice Sam's hometown. I could not help but feel my friend was placing too much stock and trust in Goldwater, and wondered if that was a sudden shift, resulting from the abrupt loss of his home.
Despite the pretense of the meeting, it was a pleasant time and, loathe to return to work, we took the long way back. We were about a block and a half away when the ground shook and a resonating roar echoed around the tall buildings. Sameritan gasped. "Was that the company?"
We made our way back to the Goldwater building to find the facade aflame. Fire crews were already putting out the blaze, and it appeared few were injured, but Sameritan didn't seem to grasp what had happened. "Who would do this?" he babbled, over and over.
"Probably protesters." I wiped my forehead. Clouds of steam were now billowing out of the windows, and people were still streaming from the shattered front doors, coughing.
"Protesters of what?" Sameritan was nearly hysterical, and I began to look around uncomfortably for a reassuring figure. After all, Goldwater Industries had taken Sam in, I reminded myself. And now it was all he had.
For some unexplainable and shameful reason, I found myself getting angry. Not at the destruction, but at my friend. He was so frustratingly naive, so unaware of his surroundings. I wanted to shake him.
"What do you think? The war."
"What?" Sam's face was ashen. He looked ill. "What does that have to do with us?"
It was then that I understood with aggravating clarity. Sameritan had no more knowledge of what it was we did than on his first day. I laid my hands on the boy's shoulders, looked him squarely in the eye.
"What do you think it is we do?"
He gave me a dirty look. "We invent! Design! Build!"
"For what?"
"I don't know! I don't adapt the inventions!"
"Sam..." I could anticipate his reaction, gritted my teeth. "Sameritan. Listen. We design machines, this is true. But what we design machines for is the army. We're backing this war."
"What?" He brushed me away. "Nonsense. We are here to improve the world. To make things better for everyone."
"No, Sam." I couldn't believe his ignorance. Now through my anger I could see everything about him was false, from his luxurious and unfitting clothing to his expression of innocent and righteous anger. I couldn't stop myself. "What Goldwater does, really does, is kill people who are trying to kill us first. The war its self is merely a catalyst - it's mind against mind now, and your precious Goldwater'll be damned if they beat us. Do you remember that design you came up with, the one that promoted you? That became the shell that destroyed your hometown. You killed them. It's your fault." I was breathing heavily, overcome by my sudden lapse of absolute loathing for the young country boy shivering before me.
I will never forget his expression - I have never seen someone so utterly hopeless, at such a loss for words. For a moment I thought he was going to lash back, or burst into tears. But then he turned and stumbled away. I went after him, calling, but he broke into a run and vanished around a corner. I didn't attempt to pursue him, but returned to my own apartment, anger draining away with every step. By the time I was at my door I felt terrible for my atrocious behavior. I resolved that the next day I would make amends, and went to sleep with a guilty conscience.
The next day I took my break in an attempt to see him, but his secretary informed me, in the same bored tones she'd used previously, that he hadn't come in. Discouraged, I made to call on him at home, but no one answered the door. I grew worried, and did the same for the next two days with growing concern.
Then, on the third day after the demonstration, I was summoned to Sameritan's office. I noticed immediately he looked more pallid, more tense than he had been before. He appeared to be wearing the same suit he wore to lunch with me, rumpled and slightly too large for his frame. He smiled in greeting, but it was really more of a manic grimace than any expression of happiness.
I sat down cautiously. "Sam? Are you well?"
He nodded jerkily. I saw his desk was covered in scraps of paper, all detailing what appeared to be the same invention. "Never been better, my friend. For you see, I now understand how this industry works. And I have invented the cure."
His voice was strained. I took that as a sign that, somewhere within the powerful engine of his brain, some crucial internal spring was about to snap. "And what's that, Sam?"
He waggled a finger theatrically at me. "Oh no, not yet. You'll find out soon enough. I just thought I should tell you first." He voice began to resemble the one I was used to; the young man who had so optimistically taken down the glass wall between us. "Because you're my friend." Despite his reassuring words, I found his mad, bright smile unnerving.
"You're not upset over what I said yesterday?"
"Of course not." He half-turned away, became occupied with a scrap of paper. "You told me the truth, my friend. And I appreciate that."
At this point I was shooed back to work. All day I sat at my desk, unable to concentrate, fearing for my friend's sanity. The knowledge that Sameritan had contributed to the destruction of his village had pushed him over the edge. I realized this was precisely why he'd been kept him in the dark; Golfwater must have been able to predict how he would respond to the revelation.
On the way home I spoke to a senior engineer, enquiring how Sameritan had been lately. The man said he seemed fine, and in fact, he was overseeing a project the lad had just designed. For a reason I could not pinpoint, this worried me immensely and I made a resolution to speak to Mister Goldwater himself the following day.
But when I came to work the next morning Sameritan seemed to be in fine spirits. He greeted me as cheerfully as ever in the lobby, and I saw him engaged in spirited discussion with some of his engineers before leaving. I wondered whether his bizarre mood had swung back to its original state. I sincerely hoped it had, and returned to my work with relief.
The days passed without incident. Then, several weeks after the explosion, I came to work to find everyone unusually tense. I signed in, then sidled over to a group of engineers from my department and asked what had happened. One mutely shoved the day's paper into my hands and suddenly I felt the same anonymous dread I had experienced when Sameritan spoke of his new invention. The latest battalion of Goldwater airships had been sabotaged. Someone had let machines loose in them that tore them apart from the inside, effectively decimating the original works and costing the company hundreds of thousands. The airships had made it out to the front lines, but had collapsed upon entering battle, leaving thousands of troops exposed and unarmed. Our side had been forced into surrender within minutes.
That day there were searches and, after they discovered Sameritan's notes in his office, trials. He did not argue his case, but simply sat while testimony after testimony spoke of his genocidal nature, his psychotic disposition, the shame a saboteur had brought to the company. All of the accusers, I noticed, had once been his admirers. I reflected that, had he not been so popular, Sameritan's case would've been dealt with much more quietly.
Sameritan was found guilty of first-degree sabotage. Even as his sentence was read out, he made no attempt to save himself, to claim ignorance of the destructive machines. He was put on a prison ship for the labor colonies, but it was brought down in a storm a fortnight after its departure and no one on board was ever seen again. The accident was given an anticlimactic paragraph in the newspaper, weeks after the event had occurred. After all, the article seemed to jibe, they were criminals. No one ought to care about them.
I am now faced with the heaviest of moral obligations. I am strictly prohibited from speaking of the nature of Sameritan's final invention, but I will say it was of a singularly organic design, radically different from any other creation designed to date. It shows the absolute tragedy of his end, for what other mechanical wonders could he have dazzled the world with? Such mimicry of natural life in man-made structures might be seen again, but outside of Goldwater's polished doors.
Knowing the nostalgic disposition of my friend, I am traveling to where his humble village once stood, the place he hated living in but loved hailing from. It is my intention to study the natural life that grows there. Specifically, I am looking for a certain parasitic plant that yields certain seeds, somewhere around half an inch in length. I am certain of what I am looking for, as for comparison I have in my pocket the tiny objects Sameritan clasped in my hand during our final meeting. I will never forget his expression of resigned nobility, nor his whispered message.
"Bring it to an end."
the end