PULP & POPCORN

Page 62
If he never chose to do anything with it, there was no real loss to anyone.
It only took him six weeks from the day he signed the papers to completely
transform the area.
I remember taking a full day off work, like many other people from Triumph City
did, to watch what Commander Future called the "Nanoforming" of his compound. The
entire nine-block structure appears to be made of some sort of more rigid variation on the
material that makes up his living suit, a thought that does little to comfort me when I'm
trying to sleep in my new room at night.
By the time I took off to watch the construction, he was well over halfway done,
There were no crews. Nobody assisting him. It was like watching a conductor coax a
performance out of an orchestra, this one man raising obsidian towers from this urban
blight. It was beautiful, but something about it freaked me out as well.
That's my overall reaction to the Commander so far. He's remarkable, and he's
undeniably weird as shit.
__________
If, by some odd chance, you haven't heard of Commander Future by now, his real
name is Dr. Franklin Adams. He was a particle physicist with a deeply-seeded hatred of
travel. Not just air-travel, even though the one time he ever flew somewhere on a plane, he
had such a profound physical and emotional reaction that he had to be physically restrained.
It was the very notion that you had to give up time and money just to go and do something
on the other side of the plane that offended him, and he spent eleven years chasing a
solution to what he saw as a fundamental problem.
He was in the same lab where he spent just over 4,000 days at the same task,
heartbreak after heartbreak, disappointment after disappointment, when he made one small
adjustment, crossed two wires that he'd never thought to cross.
He disappeared.
Twenty-three minutes later, he reappeared two feet to the left.