In the year 527 al (after launch) the captain/navigator Constantine Smith arranged for his son Commodus Smith, to inherit civil and navigational command of the ship. Thus was born the Smith dynasty, which ruled unchallenged until the ascension of Quintus Smith to the throne in 811 al.

Shortly after Quintus took the throne he began a massive overhaul of the ship’s various bureaucracies. It was Quintus’ plan to streamline every interaction of the government with the people, and in this he succeeded completely. So successful was he in his campaign that he was able to grant early retirement to fully half of the administrative work forces.

So, thousands of suddenly retired bureaucrats found themselves with a bottomless well of spare time, and no clear way to fill it. A few managed to get new jobs, others filled the time to realize their creative ambitions, and the early days of Quintus’ reforms became known as a golden age for the arts. Others were less ambitious, they learned to cook Chinese food, became full time quilters, or took up Tai Chi.

For a few years things went swimmingly; former workers went on excitedly their plans for their free time, about the novel that they had been meaning to write, and how much better their racquetball game was getting. But then the first fruits of this freedom began to bear, and those who were less productive began to realize that they might never create something with their time, that they might as well spend it staring off into space for all they would accomplish with the opportunity. What to do with all this time, there was nowhere to travel to, nothing to volunteer at, and nowhere to put all those quilts. The sad fact was that it only took a thousand or so people to supply the necessities of life and keep the ship in good running condition, once Quintus cleared out all the redundancies there just wasn’t much left to do.

On top of this purposelessness was the resentment of those still working. They saw the retired having long beer fueled lunches, while they had to run about getting things done, but they didn’t see or understand the crippling malaise. Why should they be stuck with all the drudgery of maintaining the ship and growing food while their contemporaries sat around doing nothing?

But the final straw for Quintus came when the first young adults came of working age, only to find that there was nothing that needed doing. Here they were, trained, ready, on the cusp of adulthood, only to find that all that awaited them was an interminable adolescence.

Idle hands were indeed the devils playthings, and the revolt was short and moderately bloody. A horde of retired bureaucrats, unemployed punks, and overworked office rats stormed the royal chambers and ended the Smith dynasty with a motley collection of blunt objects. Five ringleaders of the mob were given power, and they busily set about undoing all the Quintus reforms. Within a short while everybody had something to do again. Mostly it was gripe about the five loudmouths who had taken over.

Needless to say, the tyranny of five didn’t last long, and it was soon replaced six-branch Republic, which ruled aggravatingly for a hundred and thirty years until it melted into a single party unicameralist autocracy. In all that time no one ever offered to simplify the government, or to streamline and bureaucratic processes. That lesson had been learned.

The door to the IPS offices was right off the Civic Hallway, the corridor that connected all the major bureaucratic offices. So when Richard Spindal left the IPS offices he was instantly immersed in the frantically spinning hamster wheel of bureaucratic oversight that was Quintus’ ultimate legacy. The Civic Hallway was wide and low and lit by blue white tracks along the ceiling. The doors to various administrate offices broke in on the hallway at regular intervals. Men and woman were going in all directions, some of them wandering lost, some carrying boxes of files, all of them busy with something. On days like this it seemed that half the ship was engaged in making the other half of the ship fill out forms, and they were all days like this. For not the first time Richard thanked fate, god, or whoever happened to be listening for landing him a job where he was occasionally called upon to do some actual work.

The accident scene was a bit over five miles from the IPS headquarters, too far to walk. Fortunately there was tramcar near by which would carry him close to where he needed to be, he just had to get to it. Richard started weaving his way through the stream of mostly frustrated people attempting to get permits for playing volleyball or having dinner parties. The wide hall stank with sweat and aggravation; it was a nervous, claustrophobic space. He slid through swirling mass of people, dancing through crevices in the flesh, avoiding collisions with those frantically running to reach an office before it closed for lunch. The entire system had become a vast thoughtless impediment to living a sane life. It couldn’t be negotiated with or understood; the only thing to do was feed the beast, to sate it with masses of nonsense. But each department wanted a piece, every office had a grasping tentacle wrapped around every other demanding it’s own say-so. All of it intent on keeping a person too distracted and too busy to even consider if there was purpose to all this activity.

Richard finally made it to the tram station. The station had a higher ceiling than the Civic Hallway, about twenty-five feet or so. The floors were polished concrete divided in the middle by a trench that housed a pair of maglev rails. An impressionist mosaic covered the walls. It showed a sun setting over a red stone canyon, perhaps meant to give the impression of open space. It was even more crowded inside the station than it had been in the Civic Hallway, so much so that the humidity given off by the commuters caused the walls and ceiling to drip condensation. Despite the crowd, there was none of the brittle tension that characterized the halls of bureaucracy outside. These people had either given up or gotten what they wanted, they could relax now.

There were departures every few minutes and soon enough Richard found himself riding along in a standing room only car, breathing other people’s air and trying not to make eye contact. The tram was narrow on the inside; lit by flickering yellow panels set in the ceiling. Gleaming steel pipes ran floor to ceiling at regular intervals, commuters gripped the pipes, bracing against the acceleration. Centuries of hands had given the pipes a deep, almost indelible polish. The walls were windowless and made of a dull heavy-duty plastic, beige accented with obscene graffiti and deep black scratches. There were no seats.

The tram stopped every half-mile, with each stop a few more got off, until it was only Richard and a half dozen others, most of them seemingly oblivious to the outside world. Fifteen minutes was all the time it took to arrive at his stop, although in subjective time it was longer. He got off the tram gratefully and started walking.

The area seemed to be a neglected athletic facility, dusty courts and rooms full of aerobic machinery that clearly hadn’t been used in decades, if ever. It always seemed odd to Richard, that given 75 square miles to live in, the population of the ship decided to all cram into one end. Periodically someone would get motivated and turn an unused space into something, a vegetarian commune, a musicians retreat, but eventually, in years or generations, the passion would fade and the son’s and daughters of the movement would move back into the dense beehive at the fore of the ship. 75 square miles, 15,000 people could vanish in a house that big.

Those who tended the interior parkland still made use of these abandoned places. The tram was the best way to move laterally on the ship, and there was an easy to find park entrance near each stop. Richard made use of one now. It was just a spiral staircase hidden behind a bulkhead, just about a hundred strides after he got off the tram. The bulkhead was locked; you had to have business in the park to get into the park. It hadn’t always been that way. Richard’s grandparents used to tell him stories about going up to the park for picnics or after-hours trysts. It had all come to an end when a fringe group decided to move up to the park full time. The stories said that they had gone feral, poisoning two acres of coffee with their waste and nearly wiping out a pig farm in a blood frenzy. Children and grandchildren of those freethinkers still roamed the park howling in their cannibalistic madness. At least that was the way Richard’s grandparents told the story.

But fortunately Richard had business in the park; the electronic lock in the bulkhead recognized him as IPS and let him through. Thirty feet was a long way to climb a staircase spiraling up a dark tube. The only sound in that tube was his breathing; it echoed back to him harsh and unnaturally loud. Feral cannibals, what kind of story is that to tell to a child?

The stairs ended at a floppy trap door made of dull checker plate metal. He pushed against the trap and it swung open, passed its balance point, and crashed to the floor. He poked his head up and found himself in a rickety wooden shed with a concrete floor. It was square ten by ten with light peaking through the slat walls. There was a motley collection of hand tools leaning along the walls, the tools were old, wooden handles beginning to shrink and crack inside rusting steel heads. Not a popular spot.

Richard exited the shed through the creaky sliding door. Outside it was bright, and it took him a minute to adjust. When he finally did he took a moment to take it in, actual open space, nothing above him for over a mile. To his left and right he could see the inside of the ship rising in a green misty curve that met somewhere behind the long band of light that ran directly overhead.

Just in front of the shack there was a rutted dirt track that ran perpendicular to the light, he had been hoping to find an electric cart parked there. There was nothing but a sign indicating widdershins to the right and clockwise to the left. He would have to walk the half-mile to the accident site. He looked down at his shoes, hard soled shiny things made for the office, and spat out a preemptive bitch for the blisters he was about to receive. Then he turned right, widdershins, and started walking.

The track ran across a field of wild flowers and high grasses, insects flitted and floated from plant to plant the thrum of their flight providing the soundtrack. The faller would have come flying over this same field at terminal velocity just before impact, not the worst thing to see before you go, then again he probably hadn’t had time to notice. Already Spindal could see the tree the faller had hit, it was a big one, with hole busted through its branches. Near the tree he could see one of the little electrical carts that the park workers used to get around. There was a woman sitting on the ground with her back to the cart.

The woman was dressed in the green short sleeve jumpsuit that the park workers wore as a uniform. As he got closer Richard began to notice details. She was about thirty and nice looking. Her hair was ear length and bleached from constant exposure to the park lights. She sat facing him but not looking at him, her arms crossed over her knees. Richard started getting worried about what lay under the tree.

Wondering what the title means? You can read about it here - Schrödinger’s Cat - Links to Wikipedia