Ricard Maisson woke up to the sound of hammering. He was afraid, angry, then mollified in quick succession as he remembered hearing a group of computational engineers would be reinforcing the Fluid Dynamics Cantilever nearby. It wasn’t his specialty but he had overheard a woman discussing it the night before at dinner. She had held forth authoritatively from the next table, explaining something to her dining partner about modern analytical methods, liquid particle modeling, and a new cabled truss supporting  the Cantilever from above. Maisson didn’t follow it all, but he did know they would need an inspector when the work was done. He made himself a mental note to stop by the job site and drop off a card.

Maisson pulled himself out of bed, stretching, dismayed at the pops and cracks coming from his most important structural attachment points. His knees hurt.

He inspected himself in the mirror. The everyday details made no impression, but he did check a few components of regular concern. His weight was trending up, but still seemed within tolerances. His teeth appeared sound, both aesthetically and functionally. His beard was slightly askew, though. He rubbed his cheeks and looked again. A definite bit of asymmetry. He picked up a small set of chromed steel scissors and surgically snipped until a pleasing balance was restored, noticing the skewed ratio of gray to black in the trimmings that had peppered his white porcelain sink.

He enjoyed his beard. Maisson considered himself a man of few indulgences, but he liked the way the fullness of the beard jutted down from its solid anchor on his chin. It formed a very particular corbel he liked to imagine granting accent and balance to a dignified head.

He dressed, selecting a grey flannel suit after a moment of careful consideration. Tidy, workmanlike, but not unfashionable. Cladding material sufficient for the day.  A gold tie with deep red circles inscribed across it. A color-reversed, complementary pocket square. Contrast for the facade.

Maisson considered himself a practical man. His work often took him to dirty construction sites and occasionally required him to squat, kneel, or even crawl a short way. That was no excuse to dress like a laborer, though. Being well turned out was good business.

He checked his watch, and realized he had time before he needed to begin his climb up and out to the day’s inspection site. Time enough for coffee and a pastry on the corniche. Maisson considered himself a very sober man, but he did enjoy the occasional treat, and the view along the promenade that bordered the long cutting edge of the span city Engineering was just that.

Maisson glanced around his small, tidy apartment. He had not made the bed, he realized, beginning to tuck-point the seam between mattress and blankets. Everything else seemed in place. He had just the one bedroom, but he had saved up to buy the place for its commanding view of History far off in the distance.

History was the next closest of the great span cities. It was beautiful in a complicated old-world sort of way, with stone buttresses keeping ancient mud brick walls from buckling outward. Its many-layered stacks of theses and antitheses were man-made, but had been built and unbuilt, expanded and reconsidered over such a long time that they had a natural, sedimentary character. The bold, cross-bed slashes of historiography cut across the grain providing pleasant visual contrast. In his younger days, they had also provided him convenient level-to-level shortcuts. History’s snarls of stone arches and forests of marble columns supported concepts old as dirt and young as the morning. Even from kilometers away, Maisson couldn’t take in its staggering length. Both landbound anchors and the farthest extent of the span vanished to his left and right over separate horizons.

Maisson liked to look out at History and tell himself he could see the parks where he had played and the aqueducts where he had splashed as a boy. Maisson considered himself a sharp-eyed man, but, with the distance and the sheer massive scale of History, perhaps that was a bit of self-delusion. He was fond of his home-span, though. He supposed he always would be, even as his time there faded into…well…

He laughed to himself, just a bit. Maisson, double-locked the door on the way out, more for completeness than for any worries about his home’s security. Then, he turned east toward the corniche. The morning sun made him squint, but he had a plan in place now, a favorite spot outside a favorite cafe where a sun-warmed chair likely waited for him.

During the short walk, Maisson mentally reviewed the papers he had read the night before and the report he would have to deliver to the client. He wasn’t sure why they wanted to be pre-inspected. It was a rare thing, typical building projects wanted to be left alone between his blueprint approval and final inspection. Well, he would answer his own questions today, and seat each brick of his report firmly, with care. Maisson considered himself a fastidious man, properly prepared without being fussy.

He reached his destination and let out the breath he had been unconsciously holding. His chair was unoccupied. He considered briefly before ordering an almond croissant and a coffee, claiming his spot by hanging his blazer on the back of the iron cafe chair. While he waited for his breakfast, he strolled over to lean against the railing that bordered the cobbled pedestrian walk. The corniche ran the length of Engineering. Maisson made a truss of his elbows and looked out and down to either side.

The view was dizzyingly grand. The mighty iron supports of the great span city Engineering extended back toward the out-of-sight cliff face that anchored the fundamental concepts to bedrock. These were reinforced and in some cases rebuilt with carbon fiber, de novo proofs, purpose-designed ceramics and fresh data. The stacked levels layered above and below him where millions lived their lives suspended over the misty, possibly bottomless void. The towering skyscrapers poking toward the sky and the sub-spans jutting out orthogonally to the main structure. Each load was balanced, calculated, he knew, and inspected by someone like himself for its ability to bear a rated weight.

Maisson glanced left and right along the corniche, seeing others enjoying the same view. No crowds yet, but joggers, tired laborers coming off-shift, and equally exhausted mothers pushing prams passed one another or stopped to admire the sunrise. He liked to think that his own enjoyment was more profound, that his understanding granted him something more. Maisson considered himself a knowledgeable man, but not one to put on airs. Knowledge anchored appreciation.

He pictured himself flying along the length of the span, watching smaller supports join into greater ones, leaf to branch to trunk as they would say in Botany. In his minds eye, Maisson soared all the way back to the colossal anchors that grounded Engineering, keeping it fixed firmly in place. He had visited these in his student days, even laying his hands on the meters-wide bolts marking the meeting of ground truth and human extrapolation. His hands warmed at the memory.

A bell chimed and his coffee and pastry were ready. He sat, ate, and drank, smiling at the artists setting up along the corniche for the day. They worked in copper, plastics, or glass, assembling miniature spans that treated the corniche railing as ground truth, jutting out perpendicular to the walkway. Some were realistic and reminded Maisson of famous monuments in nearby span cities. Others were impossibly delicate confections of byzantine geometry.

One artist knelt by the railing, carefully selecting delicate glass rods and pieces of cut crystal from a collection spread on a blanket in front of him. He added each piece to a miniature span that looked to hold a butterfly’s weight, but no more. It was beautiful, though. A flight of fancy spun from daydreams. The glass filaments almost invisibly thin. A spiderweb of tiny imaginings. The cut glass prismatically shattering the sunlight.

It sagged, and Maisson found himself critiquing the design, mentally beginning a report suggesting changes to improve its load-bearing capacity. He shook his head. He considered himself an appreciator of the arts. Soundness was not the point, he reminded himself. The nearly impossible little span brought joy to the viewers and, he assumed, the artist.

A group of near twenty students on a field trip with their teacher also took in the view. They couldn’t be more than ten years old and bounced rapidly between climbing the safety railings to squabbling with their classmates to listening to their teacher speak.

“I know some of you have been here before, but for anyone who hasn’t, take a peek over the edge,” said the teacher. She was young, maybe fresh out of university. She spoke enthusiastically, but a bit nervously. “What’s under us?”

She raised an eyebrow, but waited only long enough to take a breath.

“Nothing. There’s nothing under us. Some spans are lucky enough to find an unexpected mountain or butte below them when they go delving, but Engineering never has. There’s the mist and the void, and, as far as anyone has been able to tell, nothing else. Well, if there’s nothing there, why don’t we fall down?”

Excitement evident; she pressed her lips together. After the barest sliver of a patient pause, she barreled on.

“Because the span is grounded. We only stick out over the void as far as we can manage, we watch how much weight we put ourselves under, and if we want to reach farther or build heavier, we need more anchors, or heavier ones, or deeper ones. The reach of our concepts is limited by the strength of our grounding. Keep that in mind when we work on your models later…”

She continued as Maisson finished his coffee, and checked his watch. Time to begin his climb. He stretched his arms over his head until both shoulders clicked, turned his back to the invisible, far away cliff face anchoring the span city of Engineering in its proud extension over emptiness, and started on his way to work.

A dozen wide flagstone steps carried him up and away from the corniche. The steps joined the end of Avenue E, one of the span’s main widthwise transects. He entered the flow of pedestrian traffic, pausing briefly to let a trolley rattle past. They were much cleaner now that they ran on solar-powered calculation instead of the more old-fashioned manual figuring.

Engineering tapered as it extended out over the void, and the strict relationship between the rate of narrowing and the placement of the avenues made E 14.59 kilometers in length.

He was walking nowhere near the length of E today, though. After just a few minutes he dug coins from his pocket and paid the fare at the first of the massive passenger lifts. The heuristically-driven hydraulic piston raised and lowered a huge square platform that could accommodate hundreds in comfort. These were relatively recent additions, complementing the smaller private lifts and staircases that had served Engineering’s residents for generations.

Cross-hatched grating separated the shaft from the avenue and protected passengers from brushing against unanticipated concepts.  Maisson settled himself on one of the padded benches along the edge of the platform and closed his eyes, letting latticed shadows play across his eyelids as the lift began to rise.

The motion was so smooth that, in what felt like just a few minutes, he heard the buzzer signaling the last stop. Maisson considered himself an alert, observant man, not the sort that would have dozed off during his morning commute. He joined the exit queue, then took a quick jaunt down the twelfth level’s narrower version of Avenue E before a series of turns down narrower and narrower streets that his feet knew better than did his attention. He found himself at the foot of a steel service stair and began climbing the twenty flights that would bring him to the level of his final destination.

He knew the air wasn’t actually thinner at the top, but he liked to think it when his face was hot and lungs heaving the way they were now. Here at the current apex of Engineering the view was all scaffolding, yellow tape, and heavy equipment. Others found the exposed proofs and suppositions inelegant, but Maisson enjoyed them. Skeletal Epistemology had been in vogue for years now, leaving structural members on display even in finished construction. The style definitely made Maisson’s job easier, and he found it could be quite elegant.

He walked along a temporary plywood catwalk, mentally judging his course to be parallel to his earlier stroll along the corniche. He passed job sites and nodded to managers with whom he had dealt in the past. Maisson passed a stack of girders and a “Coming Soon” sign before doubling back and sliding a business card under the sign.

The view was even more commanding from here than from the main level, but Maisson could feel his mind shifting and his eyes being drawn lower and closer. He inspected connection points and theorems as he passed by. He mentally estimated pass-through width for arches and span-side weighting for new cantilevers. Finally, he arrived at the day’s inspection site, an under-construction subspan. The builders planned to offer residences and shopping options on this conceptual cut-glass edge of the span city: Long Term Predictive Modeling for Legacy Engineering.

Maisson straightened his jacket and smoothed his beard before greeting the foreman with a handshake.

“Good morning, sir. My name is Ricard Maisson, structural inspector. According to my schedule, you have requested a supplementary inspection. I am here to provide it.”

The foreman was slight, just a hair taller than Maisson. He wore dusty canvas pants, a red cotton shirt, and a queasy expression beneath thinning brown hair. He returned the handshake. Maisson could see tension in his shoulders and around his eyes, like hairline cracks in a post under compression.

“Thank you for coming so quickly, M. Maisson. I trust you are familiar with the basics of our project. Our investors believe deeply in the potential of this extension of Predictive Modeling. They are confident it can substantially increase the reach and the footprint of Engineering. This application to legacy structures is a test balloon; they hope its success will open a new frontier.”

“Yes, yes,” Maisson waved his hands as he spoke. “I’ve read the file. I do not need you to summarize the abstract for me. I know why you are here. Pray, tell me why I am here.”

The fissures in the foreman widened under the increased pressure. “Ah, yes, well…” He paused before continuing. “We’ve been experiencing some unexpected…motion at the extreme reaches of the project. Flexing. We’ve added reinforcement, but we can’t eliminate the problem. The investors thought it would be better to bring you in now than to fail a final inspection.”

“Quite right.” Maisson drew himself up, sucking in his stomach. He considered himself a capable man, and this was the cornerstone of his work and the keystone of his self conception. “Show me the problem, and the plans for the project.”

The foreman led the way into the small construction office, which was a corrugated steel container bolted directly to the level’s main supports. He unrolled a set of blueprints on the worn table at the center of the room.

Maisson mentally compared the sketches to the file he had reviewed. He remembered approving the original plans, and what was before him lacked the soundness that had earned his signature. The blueprints lacked any sense of elegance, betraying the progressive “yes…and” bandages of a troubled project. He traced the changes with one finger, ending at a top heavy jumble. He would need to see the job site, but if these blueprints were accurate, he had the answer. “This has been changed,” he said.

“Yes…” said the foreman, sweating now. Maisson finally realized what he was seeing in the man. He wasn’t anxious of being found out by an inspector. He was being squeezed between the fundamentals of safe conceptual construction and the demands of his employers. He was warping under the strain. “You see, M. Maisson, the investors believe so deeply in the project that they wanted to expand the effort and…and welcome more people in to enjoy the fruits of…”

“If these blueprints are correct, you are overloaded.” Maisson gestured to the portion of the construction that should be up and out from where they now stood. “I see…three more apartment blocks here than were in the original, approved plans.”

“We tried to adjust for that. Let me show you.” The foreman wiped his hands on his pant legs before opening the office door and gesturing Maisson through.

The pair climbed a service ladder and walked along a path only a single board wide, gripping safety rails on either side. They reached the end and Maisson could finally take in the active job site. The subspan was cantilevered out over nothing, attached to the upper level of Engineering, foundation blocks already in place for the new planned buildings. The oversized supports securing the whole thing made Maisson shake his head and snort.

“These were not even included in the plans you just showed to me,” he said.

“Yes, well, we decided to strengthen the structure after a visiting investor noticed it shakes in the wind, but it doesn’t seem to have helped much,” said the foreman, sounding ashamed.

“No, it would not have. As I said, you are overloaded. The underlying principles can’t support the stress you are subjecting them to, not at this extension.” Maisson saw the foreman already knew, or had feared, what Maisson was telling him. He couldn’t help continuing, though. “It doesn’t matter what you do at this level; the substructure is simply insufficient for the use to which you are putting it.”

“Can you help us, M. Maisson? Perhaps more internal cross-bracing, or cables connecting to neighboring sub spans? Perhaps we could mine our data sets for new supports? We have a good team here. We’ll follow any recommendation.”

Maisson smiled sadly, commiserating with the poor man, mind already shifting to the report he would need to write. “No, no, my good sir. You have three choices, none of which you will like. You can trim back your extension and build your project closer to Engineering’s main landside anchors. You can deload the project, back at least to the originally approved specifications.”

“And the third?” The foreman looked at him, a chisel’s edge of hope showing on his face.

Maisson considered himself a droll man, when the occasion was right. The quip wasn’t hilarious exactly, but it would let him share a knowing moment with the sagging foreman before him. It wasn’t much, but he pitied the man. He was stuck in an impossible situation and Maisson wanted to let him know he understood. Maisson smiled a slight, apologetic smile. “Or third, you can learn to love the wobble.”