Only a metallurgist… really?

Who would you call in if a major road thoroughfare was haunted, or even if it exhibited strange behaviour or inexplicable electromagnetic behaviour?

That was the challenge I faced when filling out the cast of characters in Falling. The hero, Dale Milling, seems to be the focus of the paranormal, but not everybody sees or understands that until it becomes too big to ignore.

Barry Paul, the man who’s taken care of Dale’s needs since the accident and during the long transition from being disabled to newly abled – including the implanting of the technology into his body to reconnect his spine and give him access and control to his lower body again – is his orthopaedic specialist.

When Dale crosses Sydney Harbour for the first time since the 2019 disaster that sees over 600 killed and experiences both pain in his back and overpowering nausea in his stomach, Barry’s the only person he can think to talk to about it.

Scientists (to say nothing of parapsychologists and ghost hunters), are so far out of Dale’s experience he wouldn’t know how to find and talk to one even if anybody did suspect the supernatural at such a nearly stage.

But when his emotional state of being deteriorates, especially when he’s convinced something dark and unnatural has hold of him from across the city, a psychiatrist is the next logical step.

Meanwhile, Barry does indeed find anomalies in and around the systems of the new bridge that can’t possibly be related to Dale’s having new, more severe nightmares.

And right here’s where Falling perhaps unwittingly reveals the era in which it was first conceived (the early 1990s) when Barry goes to a metallurgist.

Maybe he had some connection to the university department where he found the guy, Asian-Australian Dr Donald Chin-Hsei Lambert. I don’t know (it’s not explained in the final version of the story and I don’t remember if it was in earlier drafts). That line of enquiry goes right up to the level of the city government and Barry is assigned a liaison/fixer of sorts in Albert Dimitriou.

Even back then I should probably have imagined he’d go to a civil engineer who’d engage a series of consultants or scientists in architecture or city planning who’d then go on to bring in metallurgists, industrial electricians, surveyors, etc.

But if I was writing Falling nowadays I’d have someone go on to collect experts in not just the above but everything from machine learning to Internet of Things.

Any major road bridge built in the middle of a capital city in this day and age would be collecting and synthesising visual, usage pattern, wear and tear and financial data from a thousand signal-gathering devices, from cameras to motion sensors and LIDAR scanners to license plate payment systems.

The stuff the bridge is actually made of (ie metal) might have a bearing on unexplained phenomena that’s been observed, so someone like Donald Chin-Hsei Lambert would probably be involved somewhere, but there’d have to be some sort of project manager wrangling experts who can advise not just on metallurgy but the lighting system, security, traffic data patterns, predictive maintenance, revenue and countless other major areas.

And that’s not even counting all the systems driving, maintaining and managing the cable car ride, something quite distinct from the cars, buses and trucks on the road below.

Back in 1991 I had no idea either how many disparate areas of expertise would be needed to handle the running of something like the Sydney Harbour Bridge or how systematised it would all be in the big data and AI ages 30 years hence.

It’s only the latest example of how I tried to keep the story fairly timeless but how, as more time passes, it dates itself. If it isn’t something as globally profound as the absence of the COVID pandemic it’s something as easy to miss as the fact that supermarket checkouts don’t have cash registers anymore.

Maybe a decade or so after Netflix makes a 10 part event series out of Falling some other enterprising producer will do a remake and incorporate all the stuff I failed to include because I started writing it in such a different world.

They’re doing Harry Potter again after what feels like five minutes, so why the hell not?