The Somebody People

by Bob Proehl

  Racks of kliegs are aimed at the building, and cameramen hover above, checking shots. The street is snaked with electrical cords and blocked off at either end by trailers. Tanks and Joint Light Tactical Vehicles are parked with their fronts oriented to the academy’s entrance. Trucks full of weapons sit ready, and men in Homeland Security uniforms make small talk while sipping coffee or sit awaiting the application of makeup. Fahima’s knees buckle with a sense of déjà vu. Seven years ago, she looked down on the same vehicles, the same men, from the window of the headmaster’s quarters with Sarah Davenport and contemplated the war that was about to happen. Obsidianist shapers had to carve out the space for windows again after the Armistice, pulling the black glass carapace back like curtains of opalescent tar. It was a sign to the students and to the rest of the city: Bishop no longer needs its defenses. Bishop is safe. But when Fahima looks up at the building, those holes have been filled in, completing the feeling that she’s returned to the beginning and will have to fight the war all over again.

  “What is all this?” she asks.

  The Omar on her left smiles at her indulgently. “Do you not look at the permits you sign off on?” he says.

  “They’re shooting the last night of the siege,” Right Omar says.

  “But it’s daytime.”

  “They fix it in post.”

  Fahima turns back, watching through the glass as dozens of people work to re-create a moment of Fahima’s life, a place where her narrative intersected with a narrative large enough, important enough to be considered history.

  “Are any of those people famous?” she asks.

  “You really are out of touch, boss,” says Left Omar.

  “If any of them are famous, get them to the thing tonight,” she says. “All the famous ones.”

  “On it,” says Left Omar. He blocks a floating coil of cables from smacking Fahima in the head as they turn off Lexington and head toward the N station at 59th.

  When the end comes and someone asks Fahima, What achievement would you like to be remembered for? she will say this:

  I fixed the New York City subway system.

  Sleek maglev trains serpentine through pristine tunnels, piloted by telekinetics who can stop on a dime or ease to a gentle halt as they slide silently into a station. At hub points around the city, metalurges divine the location of each train and relay the information to Hiveweb operators, omnipaths embedded in slabs of black glass like Han Solo in carbonite. They’re human Internet servers, bridging the Hive and the actual world to form a communication network that spans the city, accessible by touching the veins of black glass that thread through the architecture and sidewalks. The operators redirect pilots to points of building congestion. Stations are spotless, temples of gleaming tile. Voiders move through the city like coprophages, sending the trash of 20 million inhabitants into the null. Do some of the stops smell like urine? Yes, some of the stops smell like urine. Fahima is working on it.

  Above, the city creeps skyward. With no room to expand out, New York grows up. Six buildings in Manhattan are taller than the Burj Khalifa. Rich emirates try to snatch up as many obsidianists as they can get their hands on. Fahima’s impressed by how many pass on offers abroad to complete the work that needs doing here. Between black glass and other makers, they can build at next to no material cost. New construction is mostly residential, as are the towers that used to house trading firms and banks. The financial sector of the economy has been nationalized, run by a corps of precogs. They take up little space. Wall Street is all low-income housing. Fahima hasn’t eliminated capitalism, but she’s expelled its worst practitioners. She has spiteful dreams of investment bankers in the Wastes struggling to convince anyone they have useful skills. Between the new residential units and the ones vacated on Exodus Day, there are enough apartments in New York for anyone who wants one. Waitresses can afford one-bedrooms, and bike couriers live in Battery Park. Universal housing within the city is the next step, but for now, no one sleeps on the streets in the five boroughs.

  Upstate, useless suburbs have been plowed under for farmland. Westchester County is a massive agrarian commune, the weather regulated by a team of pressure manipulators. Produce pours into the city’s new farmer’s markets. No one has to go hungry.

  Schools across the city are palaces, and the teachers want for nothing. The Bishop Foundation runs most directly, but there are others. Real arts schools, like the one the Bishop Academy used to masquerade as. Conservative prep schools that teach kids how to suppress their abilities. And the Black Rose Faction training schools, which take a mix of the martially inclined and the problem kids from other schools. Those Fahima tries not to think about.

  In hospitals and clinics, healers and menders work like sleepless saints toward Fahima’s ultimate goal for New York: no more dying. First in the city, then the country, then the world.

  After a quick transfer, they get off near the Museum of Natural History and walk along Central Park West. They pass one of the few buildings in the city left at its original height, now dwarfed at a mere fifty-eight stories. Fahima had paid it special attention, leaving its garish exterior like a blemish on the face of the city but gutting the interior and throwing the stock of the gift shop on a bonfire. They melted down the ridiculous gold embellishments throughout the huge upper apartments and sold them off to create a resource center for immigrant Resonants. Before the war, she’d cross the street to avoid falling in its shadow; now she smiles every time she goes by it.

  One of the Omars points to the sky over the park at what looks to be a translucent cloud. “We’re late,” he says, and the three of them pick up their pace, falling just short of a jog.

  Ruth Hammond refers to it as the Craft, but everyone else who works for Bishop calls it the Amoeba. It becomes bullet-shaped speeding through the air, but no one except Ruth ever sees it like that. They see it the way it is now, a translucent blob wavering like a soap bubble, hovering over the lake in Central Park. It holds Ruth and twelve worried diplomats like fruit floating in a Jell-O mold. As it descends, it casts thirteen shadows on the grass, surrounded by a vague ring. Its shape becomes more definite, flattening on the bottom until it looks like a proper UFO, an upended pie plate. It lands silently, each bureaucrat’s feet gently set on the ground, before retracting like a tablecloth yanked back by a magician and disappearing somewhere inside Ruth.

  “Gentlemen,” says Ruth Hammond. “Welcome to New York.”

  Fahima walks up to Ruth and kisses her on the cheek. Ruth grabs Fahima’s hip and holds her close for a beat before letting her go. Ruth’s hair smells like ozone and rain.

  “What time you make?” Fahima asks when she’s back at arm’s length.

  “From London in a half hour,” Ruth says.

  “They puke?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Good girl,” says Fahima. She’s aware of her habit of infantilizing Ruth to keep her at a distance. Awareness doesn’t stop her from doing it. Fahima turns to the assembled bureaucrats, who wobble on shaky legs. If Fahima had her way, they’d stay punch-drunk and susceptible the entire visit. There was talk of putting the psychic whammy on the lot of them and skipping the show, but Fahima decided that determining the global future that way was morally unacceptable. Plus, with Kevin Bishop dead and Sarah Davenport broken, no one on the Bishop staff had the psychic chops to pull it off.

  Omar distributes universal translators the size of jelly beans. The British representative attempts to shove his in his ear, and Omar explains via gesture that they’re to be swallowed. Fahima allows a minute for the gel caps to dissolve, releasing floods of nanites. Tiny sexy genius machines, Alyssa used to call them. Fahima’s mind drifts through Alyssa’s nicknames for Fahima’s inventions, the small of Alyssa’s back and how the smell of hospital disinfectants on her skin drove Fahima wild, the series of body-blow accusations Alyssa landed in their last
fight, leaving Fahima too stunned to cry until Alyssa was out the door and out of her life. She tugs at the hanging edge of her hijab, pulling her head a tick to the right and returning to the moment she’s in.

  “Gentlemen, I hope you had an amazing flight,” she says. “In case Ms. Hammond didn’t tell you, you were traveling at ten times the speed of sound in a craft that requires no fuel other than a hearty breakfast for the pilot.” She winks at Ruth and immediately understands it as a mistake. “Which, incidentally, is our first stop.”

  Omar motions for them to follow, and eleven of them fall in line. He’s singular, presenting as a perfectly average personal assistant. Fahima finds it’s best not to show them any abilities that raise serious existential questions like What does identity mean when you can spread your consciousness over several bodies? Abilities like Omar’s have been fodder for late-night stoned conversations at Bishop since the academy opened its doors. At this stage, it’s easier to keep the metaphysics out of it.

  As Fahima hoped, one of the diplomats points to the spectacle at the bottom of the hill, his mouth gawping like a fish’s. She notes the anchor-shaped mole on his cheek, flips through her mental Rolodex, and determines that it’s Eito Higashi, the Japanese minister of economy, who’s holding his translator pill pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He repeats the same phrase over and over. Fahima doesn’t speak Japanese, but what the fuck is that? is universal even without tiny sexy genius machines to translate it. She takes his hand and lifts it slightly toward his mouth, then mimes putting a pill into her own mouth and swallowing. Higashi repeats whatever he’s saying.

  “I call it the Glitch,” says Fahima. “I like giving things capitalized common nouns for names. It makes me feel like I’m in a science fiction story.” Behind her, a Yemeni boy sits in the grass. He grins as his eyes follow the parabola of an invisible object above him. On the crest of the hill, three men unshoulder bulky weapons and take aim at the spot the boy is watching. A fourth man points to the invisible object, raises his hand and clenches it into a fist, and points again. An ignorant seagull repeats a half circle of flight, jumping back to her origin point each time she reaches the end of her arc. After two seconds, they reset and repeat. They’ve been doing this for seven years.

  Once there was a boy in the air, the focus of everyone’s attention. The boy is gone, and there’s this tableau locked in a looping piece of time. “It’s a reminder that our potential is also a threat when used improperly. When used in fear or anger.” It’s a message, landing them here. Be fucking afraid of us. Be amazed but also pants-shittingly afraid. Notice I said when and not if.

  She’s glad Bishop isn’t here to see her do this. He thought they could win hearts and minds by cleaning up oil spills and curing cancer. He thought they’d get power through democratic channels and the moral arc of history. She wonders if he’d be proud of where they are or horrified how they got here.

  The light from Jonathan’s chest glows like a warm coal through his silk sheets. Carrie is impressed by his commitment to terrible aesthetics. Of course he has silk sheets. His wardrobe of Paisley print shirts and vintage bell-bottom jeans complements an apartment decorated with bead curtains and beanbag chairs. It would be funnier if she wasn’t sleeping with him.

  He wakes as she’s dressing. She pulls on jeans crisp with yesterday’s sweat, dusty from her run out to the Wastes. Last night she came directly from the road, a twelve-hour drive in a truck with a busted AC. She skipped her apartment, stopping only to pick up the bottle of whiskey that’s now on the nightstand, a swig of it left in the bottom so Carrie can claim they didn’t finish it all in one night. In a dreamy mumble, he asks her to stay. He promises coffee. This is becoming routine, which makes it worse.

  “I’ve got that thing with Bryce this morning,” she says.

  “Show and tell?” he says, tugging down on one of her belt loops. She swats his hand away, sure to make it clear it’s not a flirtatious swipe. “I don’t go on shift until seven,” he says. “You could stop by beforehand.”

  “I have dinner plans,” she says.

  “You could bring him dinner now, and he wouldn’t know the difference,” Jonathan says. “He’s got no idea what time it is down there.”

  “Don’t talk about him,” Carrie says, turning away, looking at Jonathan over her shoulder.

  Jonathan puts up his hands. “I wasn’t saying anything bad.”

  “Don’t talk about him at all,” Carrie says. What she means is don’t talk. She wishes she could keep Jonathan in one room and Miquel in another, her life compartmentalized and discreet. This room is for touching. This room is for talking. This room is mine. Physically, she has all three. She wants to build up the walls in her head, to slam and lock the doors between.

  Jonathan’s Marlboros, Bic, and Moleskine float across the room. He never refers to cigarettes, pens, or notebooks, calling each by its proper brand name and accepting no substitutes. He haunts street markets for artifacts of the old world. “I had a line come to me in a dream,” he says. The pen uncaps itself. A cigarette jumps out of the pack and into the corner of his mouth, where it hangs unlit. If he ever tries to read her one of his poems, this thing is over.

  “I’m working till close if you want to come by after,” he says. His cigarette bobs like a conductor’s baton. He stares hard at the page like the line from his dream is written behind it. The good parts of their routine are the ones that don’t involve speaking. Letting herself in with the key under the mat. Finding him already in bed, reading, or asleep, or waiting. He’s made a commitment to her. The key under the mat implies fidelity, no one else in his bed. It’s her or nothing, for now.

  “Maybe,” she says. She leaves without saying goodbye, easing the apartment door shut so she doesn’t wake Mrs. Ogilve next door, who isn’t a Resonant but seems to have superhuman hearing. There’s an R spray-painted on Jonathan’s door in hunter orange, the third time it’s happened since he and Carrie started sleeping together. This one’s been here a few weeks, and Jonathan seems resigned to leaving it alone. People in Pilsen don’t hide their dislike of Resonants. As someone with an ability that’s visibly apparent, Jonathan’s an easy mark. No amount of helping Mrs. Ogilve bring her groceries up will endear him to the neighborhood. Carrie asked him once why he put up with it, and he quoted her his current rent.

  The neighborhood bustles with life; it provides everything to its residents. North of Roosevelt Avenue, it’s risky for non-Resonants to walk around without papers to prove they’ve got a reason to be there. Within this handful of blocks, they can leave the house without documents, pick up a six-pack or tamales, and not worry.

  The man working at La Catrina passes for friendly as he fixes Carrie a café con leche and fills a paper bag with churros. He used to own the building; now he rents from a Resonant who bought it cheap after the Armistice and hasn’t been south of Roosevelt since. Chicago is the only integrated city left, an exception carved out in the Armistice, but it has its own dividing lines, some unspoken and some written into law. Non-Resonants are allowed to stay, but they’re second-class citizens, without property rights. They’re tenants in their own homes, employees of businesses that had been in their families for generations. They could stay, but Carrie didn’t understand why any would want to.

  Carrie fishes for her wallet, but the man waves her away.

  “The suit paid for you,” he says, gesturing with his chin. Carrie spins in time to catch the back of someone walking out. The sharp lines of a dark blue suit stand out among the soft curves of the other clients’ attire. Carrie stuffs a bill into the tip jar without checking the denomination and tries to catch her benefactor. She runs into an abuela waiting in line who gives her a look that says she knows what Carrie is. She can tell from the way Carrie moves through the world as if she belongs in it. Non-Resonants don’t walk that way anymore even in their own neighborhoods. Carrie eyes the dark
spot of coffee spilled on her wrist, and an irrational anger moves across her mind like a cloud of heat. The abuela sees the change in Carrie’s face, flinches, and steps aside.

  “Sorry,” Carrie says, lightly patting the old woman’s shoulder. She leaves the café and checks her corners, looking for the dark blue suit. She spots him about to turn onto Sangamon. Before taking off in pursuit, she checks the other direction. A man wearing the same suit takes the left onto South Carpenter. Carrie freezes, unsure what to do. Both suits are out of sight. Carrie convinces herself she didn’t see what she saw and that it doesn’t matter anyway. Some idiot trying to pay it forward, screwing up the natural cadence of her day with a kindness unasked for. She follows the suit that headed toward Sangamon Avenue, but only because it’s the way she was going.

  At Halsted and 16th, carrying the still-warm paper bag of churros, she waits for the number 50 bus. It’s right on time, gliding up to the curb a foot off the ground. On the side there’s an ad for Hayden Cohen’s new album. Hayden has spent the last year touring Europe as a cultural ambassador, assuring other countries that what’s left of the United States isn’t a feudal state. Carrie hasn’t talked to them in months.

  She gives a halfhearted smile to the operator, who doesn’t return it. He’s a college-age kid, hasn’t been working more than a year. Older operators, magnetics and telekinetics, banter with passengers while they maneuver their buses. It takes all this kid’s concentration to keep his afloat. Out the window, she sees the suit standing on the sidewalk. The bus windows are tinted, but he waves as if he sees her, a dainty twiddling of his fingers that’s the physical equivalent of toodle-oo. The bus pulls away from the curb, and he’s gone. Carrie moves to the back of the bus, which is full of janitors and maids, dishwashers and busboys headed into the city for work. Some of them were doctors, professors, and middle managers, but they take whatever jobs they can find.