Descending through the open-glass box, it appeared as if the entire city were growing into being before him.
"Your numbers are a bit off," said Alex, the engineer, as the doors opened into the lushly carpeted atrium. "But not enough to hurt anything. Planck's constant is 6.626069311 times 10 to the -34, not 6.626169311. Following your calculations, the Sun would be fusing sodium into salt, not hydrogen into helium."
"Heh...oh, well," replied Thomas. "The point is that I've created the most important scientific theory to date. Can you believe that they used to say quantum mechanics and classical physics were incompatible? Who would've thought it would all come down to the fact that both were irredeemibly wrong?"
"Yeah...well, Felicia's waiting," said Thomas, and, nodding to Alex on the way out, exited the Eutopia, and hailed a cab on the busy streets. "Soon, you'll all be teleporting from place to place," he said completely seriously to his cab driver. "Your job will have no place in society once I iron out a few multiple integrals in my Harmonizer."
"Someone should stop you, Thomas," said the cab driver. No one in the world knew Thomas's last name; he had never felt quite comfortable being known as Mr. or Dr. Aeyissaey. "What am I going to do for a living once you've monopolized - no, eliminated, the transportation industry?"
"Get a higher-paying job maintaining Harmonizers, of course!" said Thomas exultantly. "Who's going to stop me? Even the government has realized the futility of attempting to regulate the economy; after that terrible experiment in communism, they've all but ceased to exist!"
The cab driver remained silent as he dropped Thomas in front of his penthouse. Thomas half-walked, half-floated up the stairs, into the elevator; he fluidly removed his key from his pocket and opened the door.
Waiting for him was his beautiful wife Felicia. Her name was brilliantly appropriate; she was almost always wearing a smile, and she had reason to: she was one of the leading authors of the day, achieving success both popularly and critically. Her shoulders were strong yet hidden beneath the T-shirt she wore; her denim skirt reached to about knee level, revealing her untanned yet gorgeous legs. Thomas shut the door behind him with one hand, his eyes never leaving the spectacle of Felicia.
"Hey, Tom," she said. Felicia was the only one who called him Tom - the only one, indeed, who had ever attempted to. Her vivid green eyes seemed to cut like lasers through her spotless, unaged face. Though she was twenty-three years old, her countenance had the appearance of a girl barely into puberty. It lacked, as more and more faces were coming to those days, the expression of guarded pessimism so common before the return of the industrialists.
Her skin was a miracle in itself. It lacked all of the conventional standards of beauty, yet it seemed to say "screw that" and redefine the very term. It was something that could not be described in words and something tinged with Thomas's burning desire for his wife. She was the most intelligent person he had ever met, and she felt the same way about him. She had a shade of red hair that stood out, though not because of any extremity of color. Felicia had never once changed her hairstyle; she scorned all fashion trends and still came out in a completely different league than the competition. This was what all the girls with their dyes, anti-wrinkle creams, and slutty clothing were looking for, thought Thomas passionately.
"Hi, Feliz." He seemed to leap forward suddenly, like the teleporter he had struggled to build was innate in all human beings when they wanted it enough, and fell into her waiting arms, delivering an extremely sexual kiss to his wife as they fell onto the couch.