Free The Prophet's Ladder by Jonathan Williams

overseeing the final design, construction, and management of the aforementioned robotic spiders, named Solifuges after their resemblance to a certain class of arachnid.
    Todd glanced around the conference room. The project team itself was a marvelous invention of the 21st century. Talent from every corner of the earth sat along each table edge. A communications specialist from Japan, Saudi hydraulics engineers, a Scandinavian software programmer, a Canadian imaging expert…the list ran on and on: 27 persons in total from 14 different countries, including the UAE and his own United States.
    All official work would be conducted in English as, for better or for worse, it was the lingua franca of the age, especially in engineering and academic circles, for which Todd was eminently grateful. His hour-long Arabic lessons, twice a week now, were coming along slowly. It would be some time before he could converse about anything more complicated than the weather or a grocer’s bill, let alone robots and spaceships.
    “Thank you all for your input today. Tomorrow we will begin touring the assembly floor clean room at the tertiary compound at zero-nine hundred hours. Let me know if you need directions to the facility.” Todd tapped an icon on his tablet computer and the hovering image of the spider vanished in a flash of mist-laden light. That never ceases to wow me . Feels like I’m in a movie. Supposedly a Korean tech conglomerate had invented the vapor-hologram technology, and these desk models were not yet for sale to the general public.
    “Hey, boss. Want to grab a drink with us?” Todd looked over his shoulder as he slid his computer into a briefcase. It was John Bolivar, the only other American on the team. He had come from Alcaeus Space Systems, a robotics technician much like himself, and was one of the highest paid members of the project team, given his experience and background. Thirty-five and educated at Stanford and MIT according to his bio sheet. Parents were from immigrants from Colombia, and had settled in the San Fernando Valley.
    “Thanks, John. Nah, I have to get back to Anne. She’s off to lecture at the city university for two weeks starting tomorrow, this is our last night at home together for a bit.”
    “Absolutely understand. Say hello for me! I look forward to meeting her sometime. Maybe coffee or lunch with me and the wife?” John smiled. Tanned with pearly white teeth and fashionably unkempt dark hair, his complexion was as well suited to the Arabian Peninsula as it was to sunny Southern California.
    “Sure thing, John. See you tomorrow.” Todd slipped out of the conference room and headed downstairs, waving his security badge at the guard at the front desk. He’d biked to work today, before the sun had risen and the desert had gotten too hot. Al-Hatem had been good enough to install bike lanes on all their highways from the work complex to the company village. Now the sun was setting, a ruddy red ball on the horizon, heat waves obscuring any distinct scenery, warping its visage like the static waves on an old television set. As he pedaled his thoughts drifted over the day’s work. It had been two months already and the team was coming together, overcoming any cultural or linguistic barriers through sheer determination and drive; the project they were working on was something the world had never seen before and they all knew it. If it were successful, and to Todd’s mind that was a big if, Al-Hatem Aerospace would reduce the cost of transporting materials to space by a factor of a thousand or more. It would enable humankind to construct larger orbiting stations or assemble space-going vessels that would dwarf any previous interplanetary probes. Asteroid mining for rare metals and other elements would become economically feasible. Moon colonies, all that crazy stuff that Hollywood had assumed would be commonplace in the twenty-first century could actually come true. It would make NASA’s old