Hoagy Spreckles put a comradely arm around Vartan’s shoulders. “Don’t worry. Just run a few more phantom zones like your last one, and you’ll get an invitation from one populace or another. After that, you’ll be in like Unwyn.”
Everyone began to talk at once then, tossing out hints of how they would approach this competition.
And then in walked Mode O’Day herself.
If I had been dragging earlier, then Mode was positively flatlining. Her pretty face resembled a bulldog with dyspepsia. She carried a lump of sensate putty with her that she continually kneaded like a paranoid ship’s captain angry about his missing strawberries.
To massed silence, Mode dropped into a seat like a sack of doorknobs. She plopped the putty in the middle of the table and took out her phone. Still no one spoke. She sent the plans for the Bloorvoor district to the putty and the shapeless lump instantly snapped into the configuration of that neighbourhood, a perfectly detailed miniature we all recognized.
Mode studied the tiny sculpture for nearly a full minute. No one dared offer a word. Then with the swipe of a thumbnail across her phone’s screen, she rendered the putty into the semblance of a human hand with middle finger outthrust and the others bent back.
“That’s what I think of my populace!” she said.
And we all cheered.
So I dove right into the work of reifying my plan for the reformation of the Bloorvoor district. After so many years as both an amateur and competitive urban planner in iCity, the whole procedure possessed an intimate familiarity.
First, of course, came the dissatisfied populace. Registering their accumulating displeasure or simple boredom with their district, the continuously polled voice of the populace eventually triggered a Request for Reformation.
At that point the top ten urban planners (barring the one who had designed the failed district), along with a handful of randomly seeded contestants, were invited to enter their designs.
Any district plan arose from a planner’s innate creativity, experience, inspiration and skills, of course. But the charette process also held importance. Citizens got to weigh in with suggestions and criticisms.
At some prearranged point all the plans were locked down. At that stage they were instantiated as both phantom zone walk-through models and physical tabletop versions. (The phantom zone was littered, of course, with thousands of other amateur walk-throughs compiled on a freelance basis.) A period of inspection by the populace lasted a week or so. Then came the first and most important vote. The winning plan would govern the overnight reformation of the district. A final pro forma poll on the morning after the reformation, once the populace had a short time to verify the details of the full-scale instantiation, would award final accreditation to the planner.
Simple, right?
If you think so, you’ve never been a competitive urban planner.
I spent several nerve-stretched weeks subsisting on a diet of daffy-doze and TVP bars, trying to design the best, most exciting district I had ever designed, a brilliant mix of utilitarianism, excitement, surprise, grandeur and comfort. What governed me? Well of course I wanted to please the populace. But I was working just as hard to please myself. The aesthetics of my plan were actually uppermost in my instinctive choices and refinements and calculations.
Urban planning was my artform, iCity my medium.
I sought advice from a couple of my compatriots whom I trusted and who also weren’t involved in this competition. (I trusted any of my peers just so far.) Virgule and Yvonne saw my roughs and offered suggestions.
“You really think the tensile parms of the senstrate will support a pylon that high?”
“You used that same skin last year in Marple Cheshire, remember?”
“Siting the Jedi Temple within a hundred yards of the Zionist Charismatics? What were you thinking!”
The long hard slog to a final plan took all my concentration and energy. But still, I spared a little attention pinging the grapevine and trying to learn what the other contestants were doing.
That included Holly Grale of course. That stinker ranked two spots below me, but still within the top ten. Right this minute, as I struggled to balance greenspace with mall footage, taverns with schools, she was doing the same.
But her security was tight, and no news filtered out about her design.
Not even when I bumped into her at the reformation of Las Ramblas.
Back when the announcement that Bloorvoor was up for reformation appeared, the Las Ramblas remodeling was already in the populace-inspection period. The eventual popular vote awarded the honours to Lafferty Fisk and his plan, and tonight Lafferty was throwing the usual party to witness and celebrate his triumph.
The venue was a restaurant named Myxomycota that cantilevered out from the side of Mount Excess. Mount Excess held all the extra mass of sensate substrate not currently in use by any neighbourhood. It was in effect a solid vertical reservoir which could be drawn down or added to, and thus its elevation and bulk was constantly changing. Tonight Mount Excess was pretty substantial—minimalist designs were hip just then—affording us a good panoramic view of iCity and Las Ramblas, the neighbourhood lit up all red as a sign of the impending transformation.
The food and drink and music were splendid—I seem to recall a band named the Tiny Identities was playing—the company was stimulating, and I was just beginning to relax for the first time in ages. My plan for the competition was almost finalized, with a day or two to spare till the deadline. As midnight approached, a wave of pleasant tension and anticipation enveloped the room. Everyone clustered against the big windows that looked out over the brilliant city.
I turned to the person at my elbow to make some innane comment, and there stood Holly Grale.
Her black hair was buzzed short, she had six cometary cinder studs in each earlobe, and she wore a catsuit made out of glistening kelp cloth, accessorized with a small animated cape. Her broad wry painted mouth was ironically quirked.
“Well, well, well,” she said in a voice whose sensuous allure I found distractingly at odds with my professional repugnance for this woman. “If it isn’t Frederick Law Moses, once the baron of Floradora Heights.”
My name sounded so pretentious coming from her lips. I suppose “Robert Olmsted” might have been a less dramatic alternative to honour my heroes, but when I had chosen my name I had been much younger and dreamier.
“Oh, Holly, it’s you. I didn’t recognize you for a moment without your copy of Urban Planning for Dummies in your hand. Shouldn’t you be home trying to master that ancient emulation of SimCity?”
My jibes had no effect. “I have plenty of down time now, Moses. I’ve just locked in my design for the Bloorvoor competition.”
This news unnerved me. Only a very confident or foolish planner wouldn’t be making changes right up till the last minute. I tried to dissemble my anxiety with a quip, but then events outside precluded all conversation.
The reformation of Las Ramblas had begun.
The entire red-lit district began to dissolve in syrupy slow-mo fashion, structures flowing downward into the sensate motherboard like a taffy pull. The varied cityscape, the topography of streets and buildings and all the district’s “vegetation,” was losing its stock of unique identities as all constructions were subsumed back into the senstrate from which they had once arisen.
Of course, all businesses, clubs, cafes, workshops, restaurants and other establishments had closed down early for the evening prior to the change, and people had retreated to their homes and condos, if they had not left the district entirely. These domestic units were autonomous permanent nodes and had sealed themselves off, locking their occupants safely away. Those inside would ride out the reformation without a jolt or qualm, cradled by the intelligent senstrate. Many people even slept through the whole process. And anyone absent-minded enough to be caught out during the change would be envaginated by the senstrate in a life-support vacuole and protected till the reformation was over. Inconvenient, but hardly dangerous.