You Can’t Go Home

The Burj Khalifa in Dubai was once the tallest building in the world. Decades later its glory faded. When Priyansh grew up there, the apartments were slums.

Priyansh was smart and ambitious, though. He became the only Rhodes Scholar the Burj ever knew. He traveled the solar system working on ever more ambitious projects. He designed major systems aboard the space habitat orbiting Jupiter. The Degrasse-Tyson habitat orbiting Neptune was Priyansh’s.

After forty years without setting foot on Earth, Priyansh brought his son Samar to Earth to see his old neighborhood.

The shuttle weaved back and forth on counter-gravity fields as Priyansh looked confused.

“Are you lost, Poppa?” said Samar.

“Of course not!” grimaced Priyansh. “This is Dubai.”

“Okay.”

“The Burj is nearly a kilometer tall. It should be easy to find.”

Samar looked out the window. Perhaps fifty buildings soared several kilometers up.

“Yep. You’re lost.”
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Written for What Pegman Saw: https://whatpegmansaw.com/2017/06/17/burj-khalifa-dubai/

Author’s Notes:

Rhodes Scholar: “… is an international postgraduate award for students to study at the University of Oxford. It is widely considered to be one of the world’s most prestigious scholarships.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodes_Scholarship

Burj Khalifa: “…is a megatall skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. With a total height of 829.8 m (2,722 ft) including the antenna and a roof height of 828 m (2,717 ft), the Burj Khalifa is currently the tallest structure in the world since topping out in late 2008.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa

Neil deGrasse Tyson: “…is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator…he hosted the television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a successor to Carl Sagan’s 1980 series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.”