"Excuse me," Bonnie said to a passerby, "Which way to the Experimental Research District?" And then, like all sensible people, she went the other way.
The District represented one successful approach to innovation. If you took every wild-eyed scientist with a lab full of explosively inventive progress and then shoved them into the same small neighborhood, it was argued, they would tend only to hurt themselves, each other, and their assistants. There would always be civilian casualties, of course, but it was so much easier to keep those to a minimum if the threats were all crowded together. The apparent danger of one immense, coordinated incident was considered small because the occupants of the District tended toward self regulation of the kind that starts with "Fenwick’s project may be more remarkable than mine!" and ends with "Good old Fenwick. When shall we see his like again?"
The curious thing is that the District, in spite of its frequent disasters and the resulting unfortunate turnover in its population, had grown steadily in what Retropolitans often referred to as a quite literal explosion of scientific research, or, for short, as "the big boom".
The Air Safety Association had a special squad trained to deal with the District. That training, although Bonnie did not know it, was concentrated on a very large, top secret manual entitled "Things We Have Run From, and How To Run From Them". So the Myrmidon’s advice had been good, in its way: the authorities tried just as hard as anyone else to keep their business out of the District. But Bonnie had no intention of going where the Clockwork Book so clearly wanted her to go.
This had been planned for.
