The Calculus of Nearness

About the Story

Etta Rios, a meticulous proximity designer, navigates a delicate professional crisis after a risky, hands-on fix to a building’s ventilation seam. In a neighborhood of vendors, music, and practical rituals she must justify her work, teach others, and turn a marginal technical victory into a communal pilot that lets two incompatible inhabitants live together.

Etta Rios makes living spaces behave. As a proximity designer in a dense, engineered city, she composes microclimates—layered airflows, acoustic seams and kinetic partitions—that let human bodies inhabit shared rooms without jarring one another. When two clients with incompatible physical needs ask to live in the same module, Etta must translate intimacy into technical terms: Jonah’s harnessed, predictable motion and Asha’s tactile, yielding touch require a grammar the building’s codes were never written to support. The premise sets a tightly focused drama where professional craft collides with moral choice. The book lives in the small mechanics of design—calibration drones with personalities, vendors hawking fermented sea-apple on the corner, dented clamps hidden behind century-old ductwork—and it treats those details as part of the social machinery that structures how people live together. The narrative pivots around a pragmatic dilemma rather than a single conspiracy: whether to follow conservative safety rules that enforce separation or to experiment with an adaptive hybrid envelope that risks regulatory censure but might enable real connection. The story stays expert in its attention to physical systems: simulations and mockups, a resonant seam in the midstack that amplifies motion, and a manual phase-inversion technique that becomes a decisive tool. The stakes are technical and human at once—equipment failure could endanger occupants, but overcautious code can also prevent ordinary acts of care. Etta’s arc moves from guarded competence toward something warmer; she is a professional who discovers that skillful intervention and clear documentation can be a form of care. Neighborhood life matters here: an old maintenance hand with an invaluable map, a regulatory liaison who balances procedure with pragmatism, and a roster of neighbors who learn to hold parts of the system together. Those communal threads never feel like an afterthought; they are the operative network that makes risk manageable and design teachable. What this story offers is a grounded, humane strand of science fiction that privileges workmanship and ethics over spectacle. The prose is tactile and patient, with wry touches—an apologetic calibration drone, an overturned jar of preserved apricots—that lighten the tension without undermining it. Technical scenes are portrayed with enough specificity to feel credible to readers interested in engineering, yet they remain accessible because the narrative frames expertise as a set of practical gestures anyone can learn. The emotional core moves from loneliness to connection: professional solitude gives way to a small cooperative that codifies training, oversight, and shared responsibility. This is a tale for readers who appreciate intimate moral puzzles set in a near-future urban environment, where the solution arrives through applied skill, neighborly ingenuity, and the diplomatic hard work of making systems answerable to people.

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