Read Insistence of Vision for Free Online Page A

followed a scent of liquid nitrogen. He carefully descended to a low-slow lane, barely dodged impact with a skylarking vette, and did a body tuck to land squarely in the catcher’s mitt at Seventh and Fifty–Eighth Street.
    With ringing ears and scraped palms, Carmody unrolled and dusted himself off, as body-repair implants swiftly dealt with the usual bruises, though not without harsh twinges.
    “Hey, watch out!” came a cry from above. He hurriedly stepped aside to make way for the next flying person, coming in for a semi-crash-landing.
    “There’s got to be a better way,” Carmody muttered under his breath. “Sometimes I wish we still had subways.”
    Ten minutes later he had signed at the desk for his father. The old man was tucked into a carrier pouch, strapped to Carmody’s chest. Awkward and heavy, but with room left to stuff in that carton of eggs.
    If I took the car, I’d have to pay ecobal fees and parking… but I’d also have a spare seat to strap him into. Or the trunk. Oh, well, being unemployed will have compensations.
    He took an elevator to the fifth floor catapult room, paid his dime and stood in line till it was his turn. Enviously, he watched some teenagers hustle past the people-launcher to an open air platform, where each one took a running start and then sprang into the sky. Well, of course anyone could do that, if you had plenty of free time to practice… and the agility of youth. Why, twenty years ago Carmody had been quite a big deal at his local hoverboard park. And he wondered if anyone still used them anymore, so graceful, silent-smooth. And it didn’t hurt when you rode a board! Only when you fell off.
    “I am a son of light,”he murmured, preparing his mind for the coming jolt-and-fling, always disagreeably jaw-jarring. “I am a son of light.”
    “You’re MY son,” groused a voice within the carrier pouch . “And need I remind you that it’s dark in here?”
    Carmody rolled his eyes.
    “Hush dad. I gotta concentrate.”
    But he unzipped the pouch to a safety stop, so his father’s gel-frozen head could look out a bit. And despite further parental commentary, Carmody focused on the mantra, controlling his implants much better this time, with less emotion and less pain, as the robot attendant held a taut saddle for him.
    “I am a child of light…”
    This catapult needed tuning, alas. It flung him with a nauseating initial spin. Fighting to correct, Carmody gritted his teeth so hard he wondered if chipped one. This time, at least, he managed to enter traffic without incurring too many micro-fines.
    “I can fly… I can fly…” he convinced himself, while roaring ahead, weaving two hundred meters above the street, tired but homeward bound.
    “I... can... fly…”
    ᚖ
    Dad just had to keep kvetching.
    “You call this traffic?” he demanded, after Carmody complained for the third time, while cruising over the southwest corner of Central Park. “When we first moved to this city, during the Big Reconstruction, only taxis and buses could fly! And just in narrow lanes! At least once a month, some fool would do a forced landing onto the groundstreet, clogging things, almost like the traffic jams you see in old movies. Now, just look at you punks, complaining about getting to flit about like gods!”
    Carmody glanced toward the free zone above the Lake, where no rules held – where fliers darted about with abandon, doing spirals, spins and loops. Sure, that looked kind of god-like, if you thought about it. Maybe Dad had a point.
    But miracles don’t seem that way, when they become real life chores.
    “Like my own Pa used to bitch and moan about his airplane flights.” Dad’s voice – or a reasonable facsimile, querulous and chiding – emerged from the encapsulating globe. Now transformed from expensive cryo-cooled to economical plasticized-state, he wasn’t even legally a person, the comments produced by an inboard AI whose algorithms query-checked their estimated