Gustad, Monthana ..., Yumi ..., Dallas ..., Mary, Russel, the rest of you ..., Kiyomi ..., Mom, Dad ..., Anne ..., Doris ..., Elisabeth ..., and Liz ..., ... Elizabeth ... Elizabeth ..., Martha ..., Russel ..., Gerdhar, Ahmed ..., Mr. Carr ..., Alicia,
Curtis! Isabel!
In 2030 we were forced to sell our shares of AIG, after a long and profitable ride. I mean, we knew that, at the outset, that we would. Anyway, now the market, which had been taking such exceedingly good care of our money for a decade and a half, was going to take a break. It was going to take a break from keeping our money for us, and not only that, but making it grow and grow, and not only that, but paying us exceptionally large dividends, it was going to take a break from all of that. It wasn't even going to keep our money for us any more. From now on, it was only going to keep one tenth, or even just one one hundredth of our money for us. Shutting down. Sorry, the cash cow is entering her interval of not providing milk.
It was, then, sell your shares for cash, or say goodbye to your money. So we took the cash. We did. We did it, knowing. Knowing that now we had to take care of our own money. What do you do with a huge pile of cash? You need to invest it. But the market has shut down. The big bruisers from whom we've been raking it in are all reeling. They're down 90%, down 99%. It wasn't any good looking to them. The very face of reality was dissolving before our eyes ... and what remained, in the mist of its dissolution? A teeming hoard, even, of entrepreneurs, and a parade of them, too. And what were they all looking for? Cash, which is what we had been forced to take.
Now, though, we had to organize things ourselves, and the quicker the better. Handouts were an expedient modality, but the stock market had not, in fact, ceased to exist. If you looked in the right places, there were still expert organizers, even actually documenting their work in various kinds of filings. We knew this, and looked for opportunities.
For example, this architect in Guadalajara was developing in space, which seemed to be the trend of the future, what with the development of structural matrix and all that. He was doing shells at a fairly rapid clip, sort of as a hobby, and he was good at it. He was developing a space for making armatures, in the hills, there, too. He needed cash for some of that. Good communicator and alert thinker. We were in business.
Mind you, this kind of thing was still speculative. I mean, the structural matrix demonstrations were impressive, but it was definitely a new thing, and there were lots of questions about it. Well, we liked it a lot anyway. Why doubt ourselves? He was negotiating a contract to do an armature up in the Ohio demo, so, by all means, we financed some of it.
We were right, of course. We own about 30% of the company, and it has been one of the three major armature installers for twenty years, now. And armatures have turned out to be a very good thing. I mean, the night life!
I'm aware that most of my readers live in earlier centuries, so I ought to describe space, as we call it. The first structural matrix experiments were conducted around 2020, and by 2030 there were demos kind of everywhere. Poland was an early adopter, and their Great Matrix dominated views all over the region, a slender and tall matrix straddled Japan, and the Adirondack Matrix was slated to be the largest by far. Of course, the original experiments were in the American West, and the California Matrix was extensive, by then, and very nice, but then what happened? The Crash of 2030. So it was back to making do. But, as you would expect, a lot of prosperity has followed, since.
As everyone knows, even in 2030, the structural matrix experiments were mainly just super giant sculptures. Yes, people moved into them right away, but it was definitely a specialty. Still, they were amazing, and you could climb up into them (and tours was an early industry) and then you really were in space, so that was interesting. Awe, jeeze, I keep forgetting, you guys don't even know what structural matrix is. I mean, it rises like clouds of bubbles out of manufactories, and it's made a lot of the times out of metal, and it's, like, this matrix. And it spreads out over the countryside, like, over ridges, and down valleys, and it's just like this shimmering thing above you, if you visit those places, and then it gets connected, the whole matrix, and it can be extended to elevation, with some spots reaching 20,000 feet, which is to say, space. That's why we call it that. It's not Space, that's a whole other division of the economy, so we call it space. It's mostly what we talk about anyway, even though it seems we are headed into Space proper, and properly. (It's said that's sort of what structural matrix is about, but I'm not actually sure. space is its own thing.)
Anyway, the first structural matrix supported itself economically as a railroad, and all of them got started as basically utilities, financially speaking, outside of the tourist industry, but that was just starting. But the plan was always to live up there, and for that you needed armatures. When we got into it, development was just getting started ...
Who am I kidding? We were the initiators of structural matrix, you know that. By 2030 we had a trillion dollars in assets, but it's not that simple. We couldn't just sell it. Happily, we had invested in all sorts of stuff back in the oughts and teens, and sold a lot of it at the top, and then we were able to invest in armatures in the forties and fifties.
The actual origins of all of this is something we kind of don't speak of. It's sort of a secret. I mentioned we got our start in the American West. Anyway, at the beginning, in a certain sense - it wasn't the actual beginning, but it sort of was - we build a little railway line from a depot that we called up the hill to some fields in the valley, or, properly, it was canyon. We hired Swiss engineers, and they built it on slender cement piers, really pretty like, and to this day it trundles up and down the hill, carrying farm goods and equipment and supplies, and passengers. I remember to power it we installed twelve thousand ten centimeter square solar panels along a five mile linear array, into the desert on either side of the canyon. We were trying to push the limits at all cost.
We built a lot of stuff. We had to get people from this mesa top to the valleys below it. We built a stairway tower down some cliffs, that connected to some earlier stuff via tunnels carved in solid basalt, like in ancient times, and we built a very delicate bridge across the river and into the mesquites over there and from there you could make your way to an elevated walking path that extended into some higher desert, to a research station. The solar line intersected that making a nice x. We're still extending that system into the surrounding country.
At the particular time, we were just eking out an opportunity. You could have almost said it was, oh, an absurdity. We had to concentrate on building pleasant camp sites just so people could stay ... Ha ha ha ha ha.
October 1 2015 at 12:31 in the morning.
The thing that was essential, which the founder actually showed us, though it was in a way hard to understand, was proposing landscape spanning metastructure. It was meta because it wasn't actually doing anything, it was just there, and it was important that we built, right from the get go, a very great lot of it. due to simplicity, it was very cheap, so the question wasn't really whether to build it or not. the thing is, it has no shape, other than its own. it's not shaped around anything, or, well, it is, but only as itself. I mean, it is shaped around function. What it is is painting that in really broad strokes. By erecting sculptural metastructure we created huge expanses of completely pure potential.
We did dedicate a lot of resources to managing the structure, specifically by training metanauts. At first they were construction people, plain and simple, and they practiced the art of the bivouac. They weren't that rare of a breed, in fact. The work was fairly congenial, and not exceedingly complicated, and it was an adventure. Also, there were, even quite early on, certain facilities. If you were climbing, you could reach the First Cat catwalk, and it didn't take long for that to actually realize its potential. And you could reach the floating arena, by it, and there were a lot of presentations there.
Because of the nature of structural matrix, a lot of the design, and of assembly work, was impromptu. We would just drop off piles of matrix, and the folks would assemble them sort of as they saw fit. We made a decision not to control that closely, but we did carefully monitor it.
The other characteristic of structural matrix is that it accommodates change. In order to ensure that this was explored we developed exercises around armature installation. We would organize a void in the base of structure, build some large element in it, and then float it up through to the top. We built large components high up, then floated them downward, too, and then we moved them literally for miles horizontally, just to practice. We started turning these into transiting museums. They would collect stuff as they moved around structure.
That was an early opportunity to expand habitation experiments. We installed some of the first shells in the musea, and several groups of curators navigated space, many of them for years on end. Musea are still an important part of space today, and they still navigate it. They're like its mitochondria.
The very first metastructure bubbled up from our factory in a nebulous cloud. we changed it often for people's entertainment, and put a few small shells in it. The first actual metastructure habitat was the Great Pyramids of Tempe, of course, but for those who aren't completely familiar with it, the AZCentral Line originated there, at the time, and went as far as Seven Springs, where we built the Forty Story Towers, which made such a splash. Those were the world's first tower clusters, and that form has become so important. They're light on the earth, so they were pretty widely approved of, and they were conceived of for livability. The community up there has always been solid. But there was a ten year period when we couldn't extend the line north. We did build the branch line to Cave Creek, which is a really small train, and a slow one, but it allowed one to travel from Tempe to Cave Creek by train, and it was popular.
We did, of course, a great deal of design work. The early automation was vital to it, and that had to be created, to start with. Then we just launched a series of extremely granular proposals. Once those were in place construction was straight forward, and continued apace. We didn't use a lot of matrix proper, on those early projects, but we started building a lot of cubic matrix on matrix platforms, keeping a lot of it very light, and spreading it out wide. That's how a lot of the line ended up being built, and we introduced the first shells in there - well, tower clusters are shells - but we suspended a hundred lily pad platforms for camping three hundred feet above New River ... and kept them lightly occupied for years and years. Lily pads, by the way, swing in the wind. But some people settled them. It was, again, good, with the train connection.
