There are two problems with delegation. Now, to toot my own horn, I like to think that delegating is one of my actual skills. Something I’m good at, and not something I’ve had to learn to do and just barely manage to not suck at. For the most part, I cheerfully admit that I hold my position by sheer, unmitigated luck. If I could go back in time and live parts of my life different, the only change I’d make would be to go back and kiss Steve’s little cat-but mouth when she assigned me to clean the physics building. One of these days I need to see if I can’t figure out where she ended up.

Any actual proactive decisions I’ve made were, at best, an intuitive thing that I still don't understand. I strongly suspect that any chimp could have done as well as I, for the most part.

All that being said, I have been successful at getting the right people to fill the needs we have. We never would have been able to market Plasma Steel in a timely manner without El and Alan Beard. We never would have created our first armor prototypes without John Akins. We probably would have lost everything to venture capitalists without Ashley and her team of certified public accountants. And more, of course, who I am deeply thankful for despite not really mentioning them in my account. Like our lawyers. We have lawyers, have I mentioned that? But I can’t imagine anyone wanting to talk about lawyers. Not even lawyers want to talk about lawyers. Damn lawyers.

The point is that I have been able to shore up my many, many failings with talented people who fit in with our unusual corporate culture.

Hell, I even had free time more often than not. It wasn't unusual for me to only spend forty or fifty hours a week on the job during those first years. That's unheard of, for most fast-growing startups. I don't think I'm lazy, but there just wasn't ever that much that truly demanded my hands-on attention.

Anyway, the first problem with delegation is that people never do what you tell them to do. Or, rather, what you want them to do. Even when they're doing their job competently, even expertly, they insist on making their own decisions and having their own thoughts. It's infuriating, really. I may be the only person left in the world who still calls our primary product 'Plasma Steel.' Everyone else just calls it plasteel. Sure, they say that it's just a contraction, but I know full well they stole the term from some old science fiction series. Even the people who care about my opinion and put effort into buttering me up only avoid the term when I'm around.

It's the same problem with the Arcology. Arcologies are beginning to dot the globe, but ours will always be the Arcology. Big ‘A’ Arcology. The rest are just arcologies. Ours is the original. But people insist on calling it the Castle. I get it, I really do – it’s a big round elevated platform, five miles across, with a ridge around the outside and covered with aesthetically pleasing skyscrapers. The biggest stands a hundred and twenty stories tall. Yes, if you squint the structures on the rim look like battlements on a great wall and the towers look like, well, towers. But still, the thing is a marvel of modern engineering, calling it something as medieval as a castle just itches the back of my eyes.

Worse than just calling our home the Castle is the connotations it brings to peoples’ minds. It leads them into outright provocation. I think Alan was the first person to call me 'your highness' in person. I'm embarrassed to say I didn't squash it then, I just sputtered speechlessly for a moment while he laughed at me. And now I can't walk down a hallway without people nodding their heads to me and saying 'milord.' And I can't possibly correct or complain at all without appearing petty and snobbish. Seriously – they call me lord of the castle, highness, majesty, and so on, but I can't yell at them without seeming stuck up. And the rest of it is just as bad. Our security force refers to themselves as knights, any sort of competition we set up gets referred to as a tourney, and wimples, tunics, and corsets are getting pretty firmly lodged in local fashion.

They keep telling me I’m in charge. Aren’t the people in charge the ones who set trends? They call me a king, and here I thought that what kings did was lead the way in how people dress. Isn’t that why the French wore wigs and high heels for centuries? Because they had a short bald king once? Well, this king likes leather jackets and sweatpants. Why can’t everyone wear that?

The other problem with delegation is when crap gets delegated right back at you. You hire marketing types, but they make you decide what to name things anyways. You hire accountants, but still sign off on investments. You hire PR types and influencers, but who gets roped into judging high school art shows? Yeah, you guessed it.

Oh right, it wasn’t an art show. It was an art tourney.

So here I am, judging the first annual Junior Art Tourney. Yeah, Art Tourney, I said it again. I have every right to complain. Frankly, we're all lucky that it didn't get called Ye Olde Arte Tourney, but I'll bet they talked about it. On the bright side, I am slightly better at art appreciation than I am at physics. So I guess it could have been worse. Everything had been pre-judged by actual experts, too. So at least I could be confident that the bad stuff had been filtered out. I made it clear that I wasn't going to explain any decisions and began to browse. I was supposed to pick three winners. The winners would get permanently titled 'Artist in Residence,' which is kind of ridiculous seeing as more than fifteen percent of our total population considered themselves artists. Nothing like the concentration of artists in the Starbucks arcology off the coast in Seattle, but still crazy.

As more and more arcologies had been getting built, they specialized in surprising ways. Everyone had more amateur athletes and aspiring artist types than we had expected before the dollar went wild, but Starbuck's managed to collect some of the best artists. Disney and Warner both built large complexes in LA, and continued to dominate video entertainment – they had disproportionate numbers of actors and writers showing up. Google and HP were continuing to delve into AI and automation in their respective headquarters and attracted the relevant eggheads. The strip in Vegas had turned itself into an utterly ridiculous and stunning place – a fairyland of debauchery and games undreamt by the worst of the Rat Pack's acid-fueled nightmares. And so on. I liked to think that our Arcology was fairly generic, but we were still on the cutting edge of scientific research, especially in physics and plasma energy applications. Just having Dr. Hansen on staff attracted the cream of the crop. And, if forced, I'll also admit we probably had more renaissance fair enthusiasts than most.

The three winners of the art contest wouldn't actually get anything but recognition, but that was apparently all right. I guess recognition becomes a major currency when nothing else is getting used. We could have offered them a bigger production allotment, but no one really cared about that. Instead, the prize was simply having their work displayed prominently somewhere. I had to pick one sculpture that would be put on permanent display in the plaza dedicated to ornamental gardens, one painting that would be hung in PPI's executive offices for a year before going on permanent display in our growing art museum, and something that looked sciencey to show in the big entry foyer – the chamber between the train station and airport where new arrivals entered the Arcology.

I strolled along through the exhibits. I’d gotten crammed into a suit for the event. I hate suits – my staff said it makes me look dignified and handsome and so forth, but I’d way rather be more casual. Suits are what people wear to die in. There were other people idling around, although having a kid standing by each work gave the place a more crowded feel than was usual for an art show. Most of the people were clustered back by the buffet, watching me wander around.

The science art for the entryway was easy to pick out. There was this gigantic mural sort of painting that reminded me of the old painting with the lizard turning into a caveman turning into a person. Except this work did the same with technology and architecture – huts into stonework into aqueducts into cathedrals into glass skyscrapers into a slightly stylized Arcology; the buildings were accompanied by swirls of things like fire, wheat, chariots, dogs, railroads, rockets, and similar. It was all done in oil by a kid who’d clearly missed that class in fifth grade where they tell you to shower and use deodorant. Seriously, if he’d been older, he could have passed for a hobo. Just because everything's free doesn't mean people always bother to dress nice. But the painting was cool and it was big enough and thematic enough to be perfect in the great foyer.

The sculpture was easy too – it wasn't hard to find a piece that I wouldn't mind looking at in the gardens all the time. I ended up picking something in one of the styles where you can't tell what it's supposed to be. It was a big granite thing, reminiscent of a pile of rubble, and parts of it would make for a nice bench, and the girl who had done it was thrilled and squealed a bunch while hugging friends who had come along.

The painting for our offices was a bit harder – I actually tried to find a painting that spoke to me personally.

But at the same time, I couldn't pick anything too morbid, or obvious. I ended up spotting a small painting done in watercolors. It was basically an impressionistic rendition of that famous picture of the man and tanks at Tienanmen square. The view of the shot was from right behind the man, white shirt, black pants, holding a bag in each hand, tank looming over him. I've always been struck by the balance of power in that shot, and the painting only enhanced the tension. That had been done by the sone of one of my non-workers. I later learned that his grades were terrible, probably because he’d been spending his time honing his watercolor skills. Well, I can’t say he made the wrong decision, he’s a great painter.

I gave a very, very brief speech. Basically, I just announced their names, repeated what would happen with their art, and gave them a certificate and a little medallion pin.

And that should have been the end of it, really. An awkward day at the art gallery for me, punctuated by smiling handshakes and camera flashes. A bit of excitement, an opportunity for people to air their work before moving on. What I didn't know was that there was a woman in the crowd simply seething. She was the sculptress’s grandmother, and thanks to some unspecified family drama the old woman’s son and his wife had refused to let the woman see her grandchildren. I suppose it goes without saying that the father also did his best to prevent his mother from seeing him.

In hindsight, I've decided that the grandmother is simply as crazy as a very crazy person. I'd call her a nut or a loon, but there's a failure of logic and hostility in her mind that was undermined by any common term for crazy. She had been one of our longest-term non-worker types. She had been HR for some tool manufacturer that went underway back when. Her company had been the first where we tried hiring the workforce without having any actual work for them to do. Since we had pitched it to our own investors as a way to keep a reserve of workers handy in case of sudden shifts in demand or the market, we had to at least look like we were keeping them organized. This lady got the task of just checking on a couple of hundred people periodically. She just maintained a little spreadsheet that told us right away what someone’s old job had been, what their education was, whether they’d gotten another job and whether they wanted another job if an opening popped up.

I have no idea how much effort she spent on that, I know I never looked at any of those spreadsheets, and I doubt anyone else did either. But she was still on the list when we began inviting employees to move in.

Her son was one of our designers. Not really an engineer, but the guy who works with an engineer to make stuff look nice. Think of a graphic designer, but instead of signs he worked with consumer goods. Basically, his job was to ensure we didn’t build a teapot that looked like Hitler. He got recruited to work directly for us fairly early too.

The estrangement was enough that he had no idea she lived in the Arcology until after she ambushed him in a plaza one day. She spent her free time (which everyone had a great deal of) stalking her family. He knew that but had also cut off communications enough that he had no idea she was on our payroll or that she’d been invited along with all the other employees. Security had been notified, and they would intervene when she actually showed up and bothered her grandchildren or caused some other sort of scene with her son and daughter-in-law, but they didn't pay her much attention either.

It put us in an odd spot, really. I’m not sure what we’d have done if we’d known about the conflict ahead of time. We didn’t allow people with domestic violence histories inside, but this didn’t really qualify. It was just family drama – no criminal history was involved. Gun to my head, I’d probably have banned her and invited her son, but to be honest with myself I’d just make that decision because a designer was way more valuable than someone who maintained a pointless spreadsheet. He said he never would have come, hindsight is twenty-twenty. I don’t think he’d have stayed away, even if he’d know his mother lived here too. We were keeping track of incidents – it was clear that she was the inciting party, but she’d never quite reached the level we felt comfortable evicting her, either.

The Arcology and PPM had found ourselves in a grey zone that made it hard to act in cases like this. Legally, the whole city was a grey zone. Technically the whole arcology was private property but was also just another incorporated city in Minnesota. All of our schools were private schools and unattached to the state's public system. Same for all of our utilities. We had an arbitration system that handled civil claims within the town, although citizens were freely able to sue us directly in state court if they felt a need. But it also meant that our security wasn't really police. They investigated criminal reports, arrested people, and sometimes sent people to our arbitration courts to handle minor criminal issues. So if we wanted to evict someone, we had to carefully navigate a tangle of employee protection laws, renter protection laws, and good old-fashioned civil rights to due process.

It hadn’t really been a big deal. A lot of crime just didn't really happen or didn't really matter. Property crime, for example. Most of the city just can't be damaged by a bored teenager or angry lover. And what can be damaged can be replaced about as quickly as a particular song can be pulled off the internet. So vandalism and theft only mattered if it involved something particularly sentimental, which mostly just involved teen bully types. We didn’t enforce moral crimes – basically, we ignored anything that didn't cause a public disturbance, and even if it did cause a fuss, we just broke up the crowd and had a chat with the perpetrator. For the most part, just good zoning kept those types of issues under control. There were two promenades with a tropical climate, for example. One where all the nudists and day drinkers hung out, and one with family and children's attractions.

Most minor stuff could be solved by restricting people's access to specific areas – if a couple had a nasty divorce and didn't want to see each other anymore, they could be restricted to their own portions of the arcology. The most serious punishment we offered was exile, and sometimes referred the perpetrator, and evidence, to actual state authorities.

Assault and murder still happened, even if robbery wasn't a motivator. I’m sure our screening weeded out most of the big problems, but people still got drunk, still got angry, still acted out. Lovers got jealous, children misbehaved, and addictions drove violent behavior. We did our best to treat psychological issues, but sometimes I suspect that good psych facilities will always be a scarcity, no matter how cheap things get. We tried to be fair – treated whenever we could, looked at underlying issues, and so on. But people are still people.

This was another one of those things that got delegated back to me. The arbitration was all contractual, and technically between PPI employees. Which meant that I was the appellate judge, and anyone that disagreed with the decisions of our court system appealed to me. The fact that I regularly had to hold court didn’t help with the milord thing, by the way. It was in one of those courts that I learned all this about that crazy nutjob old lady, by the way. I never actually spoke to her in person.

But she was still the person who committed the Arcology’s first-ever truly sensational crime. A lot of true-crime enthusiasts compared it to the Lindburgh baby, or the JFK assassination, or Columbine. And since the people who care about that sort of thing point to the Green kidnapping as a major influence in worldwide arcology culture, I guess I’ve got to tell the story.

I hate it though.