Pipe Dreams

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It was a normal day for Beckett Hodge. Which is to say an extraordinary day, for Beckett Hodge attracted extraordinary situations, things, and people the way black pants attract white cat hair.

Beckett—Beck to wife and friends—was, to outward appearances, an archetype—the mild-mannered and somewhat nerdish professor of computer science, habitually forgetful and distracted, his mind engaged in a never-ending background computation. He did not drink; he did not swear; he forgot his own birthday and resorted to electronic wizardry to remember his wife’s. He was a renowned lecturer and an author, too, of thick, arcane tomes about AI, nanotech and enviro-programming; every one written in what his wife, Marian, called “technese.”

In Beckett’s head, he was a fictioneer—a storyteller—though no one had ever read a word of his fiction. The clutter of scientific and academic accomplishments was merely a source of income, something he just did, the same way that he breathed, ate, slept and performed other necessary functions.

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