Peripheral Visions: King for a Day

Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

King for a Day

"Do you think it's true?"

Caduceus Trimble tried to ignore the whisper one servant softly questioned another with as he passed by. They didn't know he'd had his hearing refined and improved years ago – now, though he was in his eighties, his hearing was more acute than it had been when he was a teenager.

Trimble kept walking away from the research building he'd built on his estate decades ago, in the first flush of his mammoth success, first as an inventor and then, later, as a venture capitalist. He had perfected his most ingenious innovations in that lab; then, as a condition for his financial support in world-changing technologies like full-sense recording and transphasic materials science, he had required the science startups working on those things to set up their home bases in that same structure, where he could keep an eye on them.

He'd taken to sleeping in the research building – specifically, in Dr. Emon's lab. That was where he'd woken up only a few minutes ago. He liked the quiet of the lab spaces, a quite that was different from his library or even his own opulent bedroom in the mansion located across the estate. There was a soft hum in the building, almost a buzz, that carried a sense of home and comfort for him. Trimble laughed at the thought that he knew many kinds of technologies inside and out – their principles anyway – and yet he didn't know what the source of that sound was. Servers? Generators? The central air unit? Or was it the hum of ideas? Trimble had always surrounded himself with brilliant people. They kept him on his toes. They made him more brilliant just by being right at hand, to debate and daydream with.

Dr. Emon had been one of Trimble's most insightful and productive fellow daydreamers, helping him work out difficult kinks and paradoxes in his latest... indeed, his last... project.

"Everything is ready," Trimble had said to Dr. Emon instead of "Good morning."

Dr. Emon had looked at him with a mixture of tenderness, pride, sadness, and anxiety. Trimble liked it that he inspired affection, respect, and fear in equal measure.

His remark hadn't been a question. Neither had it been a statement. Dr. Eamon nodded.

"My greatest accomplishment," Trimble said, more to himself than to Dr. Eamon. "After this... there is nothing else to work for, nothing else to wish for. So I think the celebration is entirely justified, don't you?"

Dr. Eamon smiled, but behind the thick lenses of his glasses his magnified eyes were damp.

***

"Do you think he's really going to do it?" one caterer from Trimble's vast, always-busy kitchen asked another.

"Hush up," the second caterer replied, glancing warily in Trimble's direction.

Trimble had entered the kitchen with a spot of breakfast on his mind. Nothing too heavy; just an egg sandwich with a little ham, a little cheese, made just the way his head chef had perfected.

But now, eating his breakfast sandwich at a table in an out-of-the-way corner of the kitchen – a kitchen he knew Chef Garnier used for his own hurried meals – Trimble found he couldn't concentrate on the meal. He finished the sandwich methodically, refusing to hurry; he dabbed at his lips just as methodically, ensuring no flecks of yolk clung. Then, methodically, he rose from the table and left the kitchen, stopping only by his bedroom to freshen up and select the day's wardrobe.

He considered the formal tux; his most expensive business suit, which he used for delivering talks and addresses to governments; his casual attire. Smiling, he reached for one of his most relaxed casual ensembles. This wasn't going to be a day of ceremony, but of celebration; he didn't want to set a somber mood. This wasn't a funeral, even if it was the last day of his life.

Indeed, it would be his best day. Trimble had long been a captain if industry... several industries... and he'd long been what they used to call a Master of the Universe, even though man's reach into the great expanse of the cosmos was just beginning to extend beyond this one paltry solar system. But there was still something to be longed for: Caduceus Trimble was finally, for a single glorious moment out of his entire life, going to be King for a Day.

It was something he's thought about and half-planned since he was a child growing up in suburban Pennsylvania. His parents hadn't been poor, but neither did they believe in luxuries like birthday parties or fancy dinners, or even cookouts with friends and neighbors on summer evenings. Lovers – infrequent as they had been – had speculated that some of Trimble's most defining personal traits stemmed from a childhood in which he'd wanted for nothing, and yet had felt to him like a form of penury. Trimble was avid about tracking profits and expenses and fastidious about personal expenditures, but he was also determined to have the best of everything – and to manufacture the best of everything, too. This compulsion sometimes required him to pay for one venture's shortfalls with the profits made from some other initiative, but Trimble refused to cut corners.

Today would be different... or rather, more of the same. Today was all about indulgence and needless expenditures, and Trimble was determined that no corners would be cut here, either. There was a small fairground set up in one corner of his estate where children and adults alike – all his staff, all his workers and their families – could play, seek excitement on whirling rides, and find adventure in the full-sense galleries.

There was a vast food court that Chef Garnier had spent months preparing for. The caterers Trimble had seen buzzing around were getting the final preparations done. Athletics had been arranged, and trophies waited for the victors in two dozen competitions inspired by the Greek Olympiads. There was also an exhibit of Trimble's life and career – with working models of the machines he's envisioned, designed, built, or else simply paid others to bring into existence – but that was one part of the transformed estate Trimble had no plans to visit. He knew his own career well enough, both its successes and failures.

After milling with the crowds at the carnival, hosting a midday banquet, and then watching the Olympiad, Trimble intended to deliver one final address during an unforgettable feast of eighteen courses. Then he would retire... back to his humble cot in the lab building, rather than to his imposing mahogany bed.

Retire from the festive day, leaving others to carry on without him.

Retire from his long career, in which he had changed the destiny of the human race, lifting his species from the bottom of Earth's gravity well to the stars that waited.

Retire, indeed, from the string of challenges and victories that had been his life.

***

"Do you think he's really going to do it?" Trimble heard whispered over and over again as the day progressed; as wrestlers struggled for advantage and racers tested themselves against one another; as well-wishers swarmed, among them powerful politicians and even more powerful priests. None of them had power over Trimble, though; rather, his trillions gave Trimble power over them, and over the ways in which science and society would continue to evolve. He had set up trusts to make sure of it.

"Do you really think he's going to do it?" he heard old friends and old rivals whisper, and young men... the sons of old friends and rivals... murmur to one another and to the young women they squired on their arms.

"I bet he won't," Trimble heard one youth – still in college, Trimble was sure; probably at one of the reformed Ivy League schools – laugh to a friend.

"Oh, I bet he will," the other young man said. "I heard he was going to drink a cup of poisoned wine and go out like Socrates."

"Who?"

"Dude. Pay attention in class sometime."

"No, dude, you quite taking those stupid courses that are gonna be outlawed someday anyway."

The young man disappeared into a swarm of other youths, carried off in the games and rides of the carnival. But the whispers persisted.

"He's gonna do it in public," a matronly woman speculated to her husband, a billionaire from the financial services sector. The couple were seated in a box in Trimble's private opera house during the early evening's showing of "Don Giovanni."

Trimble awaited the husband's response, which his enhanced hearing picked up easily over the aria in progress.

"No, my dear. He's a private man. He's going to go out in spectacular fashion, for sure, but away from prying eyes."

"What do you mean?"

"He hired the world's most famous dominatrix to take a flame thrower to him at midnight!"

Trimble managed, just barely, not to laugh aloud at that.

"He's going to do it," voices around the formal dining hall murmured, their quiet plenitude amounting to a steady susurrus. "Right after the announcement," some predicted, while others speculated, "Right after dessert."

Trimble shook his head. How excited they all were, how fascinated, and how wrong.

But he did have an announcement to make. As soon as he began tapping the spoon on his cut-crystal water goblet, the murmurs around the hall faded away. Not a fork clattered or knife ground against the bone china at all two hundred sixteen place settings across the long table at the head of the hall, plus another eleven tables arrayed in ranks across the room.

"Dear friends, dear longtime collaborators, dear fellow visionaries," Trimble said, his voice carrying effortlessly in the room's flawless acoustics. "You've all come here very kindly to accommodate an old man's whim. But you've also come because the rumors have spread that I intend to commit suicide tonight."

There was a gasp and a tumult of exclamations – none of them sincere, of course.

Trimble held up a hand and silence returned. "Please, spare me. It's human nature to be curious; it's human nature to be drawn to spectacle of all sorts. But I want to put your minds at ease... and maybe break a few hearts with disappointment. I'm not planning to kill myself."

Chuckles at his joke mingled with applause.

Trimble held up a hand again. "Instead, I'm going to leave the workaday world in another, very different fashion. It's a sort of transcendence... a sort of escape from the grinding process of time. No, I'm not looking for an ending, but for the beginning of something entirely new."

More applause.

"What is it?" someone called out... someone drunk, Trimble assumed, since no one sober would dare breach protocol this way.

But then again, what did it matter? What would the social consequences be – no more invitations to Trimble's gala celebrations? No, this was the last one, as certainly as it was the first.

"A dream of life – that's what it is," Trimble responded. "Life eternal. Can there be such a thing, in a universe condemned to grind itself down and sputter out in a mere few hundred billion years? A universe doomed to infinite expansion, infinite attenuation, infinite isolation, darkness and silence descending at least... a true eternity, indeed, with no more suns and no more striving. We can see eternity coming, yes. A chilling eternity, an inferno of emptiness. Of course, all life everywhere will vanish by then... so what does immortality mean for one faint flicker, one mere soul?"

Trimble gazed out over the hall and its assembled guests. All of them were in finery; only Trimble himself was looking more relaxed, less starchy and uptight in his light and comfortable clothing.

"That is something you'll have to wait to discover," he said, and a loud groan – exaggerated, for his pleasure – echoed from the vaulted ceiling. "I, meantime, will remain eternally curious about your response. Will you admire this final innovation? Will you seek to emulate me? Or will you hold steady to your course, to play out your biologically-driven lives to the final predestined beats of your transient hearts?"

No one said anything to that – puzzled by his words, Trimble thought, or maybe unimpressed by his purple valediction.

"My friends, my colleagues, my rivals," Trimble called out. "For the next four hours I will be in the very center of the estate, resting on the dais. Some of you call it the pagoda. Well, call it what you will, that's where I will be, looking to every direction at the night's carryings-on, the dancing, the fireworks, the theatrical presentations, and the concerts. And just before midnight... yes, then I will take my leave of you. So, if you want a few private words... or if you simply want to enjoy the party and then be on your way... well, follow your own desires. This night is mine, yes, and yours too. I want only to give you what you'd like for yourselves while I arrange for my own happiness. And now... I've never been much for dessert, so I leave you to enjoy the final courses."

Trimble made his way along the long table to a doorway in the wings. "Good night!" he called to the hall as he stepped through the door and then closed it behind him.

Making his way outside, across the estate, and to the dais, Trimble savored the music on the air, a scent of flowers, the perfection on the evening. Once seated up on the platform, in the largest of a circle of chairs where conversations could happen, Trimble gestured to a waiting attendant. "Cognac," he requested.

"Right away, sir," the attendant said crisply, and within moments the glass was on the small table at his elbow.

Trimble fished a cigar out of his jacket pocket. The attendant stepped forward, a lighter already glowing in his hand, but Trimble waved him away and produced his own small flame. Then, puffing, glass in hand, he allowed the cognac to warm until he could detect its delicious, delicate aroma. He sipped.

No one joined him on the dais. That didn't surprise him. Trimble had never had close confidants among the other Owners who exercised possession over society, its wealth, its power. His true intimacy had always been with other technologists.

Watching the crowds, listing to music from distant stages and bandstands, and then appreciating the light show of the fireworks display, Trimble nodded to himself. He'd timed everything perfectly. Within months... a year or so at most... the world would change. Old social structures would collapse. There were many reasons for the coming transformation: Social unrest... the economic house of cards that this world was build on finally giving way... comet strike... asteroid strike... alien invasion... mammoth solar flare... the inevitable chaos and perdition of careless ecological devastation... Trimble had seen all of these inevitabilities in the crystalline depths of his oculus, the device peering into parallel universes and proximate futures, pulling images from tangled skeins of probability and this reality's interweaving strands of cause and effect. He didn't care what the exact fate of this particular world might be; he'd seen enough to know that all such worlds underwent spasms of transformation, humiliation, and destruction.

He'd be gone, and safe – safe from consequences and accidents and random outcomes, safe from time itself – before the world he left behind met its fate.

The fireworks ended. Midnight was close.

Trimble finished his cognac and left the charred stub of his cigar in the ashtray. Rising to his feet, he nodded at the attendant, thanking him aloud and, in his thoughts, wishing the young man luck.

Then he headed for the lab, where Dr. Emon waited for him.

"Everything ready?" he asked.

"Everything ready," Dr. Emon said.

"Did you go out and join the celebration?" Trimble asked, reaching under his shirt to adjust the setting on the device he'd worn under his shirt for the past twenty-four hours. The device gave off an almost imperceptible whine... a buzz, a sigh, a sound as soothing as the hum of the lab itself.

Dr. Emon shook his head. "I didn't feel like celebrating."

"Oh, that's a shame," Trimble said, genuinely sorry. "It was a unique day. A day to remember."

"And you," Dr. Emon said, helping Trimble get situated on the cot – a high-tech medical table and not a cot at all, but Trimble liked thinking of it in humble terms – and turning to the readouts and capacitors to his right. Then he looked back at Trimble. "Did you enjoy it?"

"So much," Trimble sighed, smiling. "Truly... there's nothing left to be wished for."

"I'm glad." Dr. Emon flicked a few switches, then looked back at Trimble. "Ready?" he asked.

"I'm ready," Trimble said, caressing the device on his chest once again.

"And here you go..."

***

Trimble woke up from a dream. It was something happy. He wasn't sure what, exactly.

Then he remembered the day ahead, the many diversions and delights that were in store.

Was the dream the same as the day?

Dr. Emon was there, already looking awake and alert. Of course he was. He'd had to have been working for a few hours already to ensure the device was properly calibrated, that the chronotic sine waves were aligned...

"Doctor," Trimble greeted him, voice raspy with sleep. "Is everything ready? Everything okay?"

"The temporal phase generator has linked already," Doctor Emon said. "To... well, I don't know, exactly, but I assume it's the point in the future we were planning to connect with."

"Tonight," Trimble said. "Midnight."

Dr. Emon shook his head. "A temporal loop. Eternal. Self-sustaining. The same day, unique and yet repeating... forever."

"A perfect day," Trimble said. "And at its center..." He smiled, then put a hand to his own chest... to the warm device that hummed beneath his robe.

"You," Dr. Emon said.

"Your brilliant device," Trimble said. "Our brilliant device, but the one you perfected."

Dr. Emon smiled shyly.

"And I..." Trimble stretched, looking forward to the festivities to come. "I will be a king for that day. That never-ending, always new day."