Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  Path bowed. Monkeys chattered from a warm nook beside the thermal pipes; the escaped endangered pets of the pampered rich, scavenging a living in Qaanaaq the way pigeons did in Sunken World cities. “Such are the twisted pathways of human trust. Any message for her?”

  “The usual,” Ankit said. “Tell her that I love her, I miss her, I’ll get her out of there.”

  He put his hand on her arm. He smelled like a forest. “My inside woman is a good person. She’ll pass your message on. Your birth mom is surviving, and that’s all anyone can hope to do in the Cabinet.”

  “Thank you, Path,” she said, and stepped back, out of the shadow, into the street, where the vortex struck her hard, and she walked against it, farther out onto Arm Five. A woman rolled on the grid, babbling to herself about demons and oppression, her body shaking with end-stage breaks.

  Ankit’s jaw chimed. She tapped it and heard the voice of her contact at Families. She’d messaged him that morning, trying to find out what might happen next with little Taksa, the girl with the breaks, and how she might be able to help.

  Sorry to tell you, Ankit—Bashir family already deregistered. Awaiting transfer to the dereg ship. One good thing, transfer times have gotten crazy lately. Average wait six months. Ten thousand people flagged with the breaks, still in their homes. Waiting. Eventually they’ll be processed and put on the continental shuttle. Allotted space at one of the coastal camps.

  Beside her, three seagulls struggled against the wind, then yielded to it. She reminded herself to breathe.

  Taksa’s father had been right. You know what happens to those families. She’d heard. She hadn’t wanted to believe.

  One shred of hope: that six-month transfer wait. That must mean something. Nothing ever took so long. Maybe it was an AI malfunction, or a new protocol was about to be rolled out that couldn’t be announced until some obscure other protocol finished its task. Decommissioned glacial calving ships being refitted for refugee transport, maybe, or the Swedes completing work on another West African camp. Qaanaaq was governed by a hundred thousand computer programs, which mostly got along well enough, but sometimes contradictory or irreconcilable mandates sparked a squabble that brought an agency’s operations to a standstill until a human or—more likely—another AI intervened. She’d have to look into it further.

  Another tiny hope for Taksa, even slimmer than the first: asking her boss for help.

  Idea for your campaign speech next week, Ankit wrote. I’ve been seeing more and more cases of the breaks in my constituent visits. Families. Kids. No one is talking about it. Certainly not your opponent. People are scared. If you show leadership on this issue it has the potential to increase your lead by 3.6%.

  That last bit was made up. Put a decimal point on the end of a lie and her boss would swallow it every time. Whispering pleas to the universe—and wishing she could stop worrying about this family—Ankit headed home.

  The problem was, Taksa’s father was just so similar to the man who raised her. The same profound humility, sturdy and essential as his spine. They’d been profoundly decent people, which wasn’t a given when it came to Qaanaaq. Or, really, anywhere. Few families would have helped a ten-year-old who demanded to know who her birth mother was—filed the appropriate paperwork, guided her through the bureaucracy labyrinth as best they could.

  Both were dead now. Reflexogenic circulatory collapse, like so many of their generation—the decades-later legacy of corporate chemical spills and gas leaks. Pain in her chest made her stop walking, remembering. How well her father cooked, her mother’s paintings. How they gave her the grandfather’s name they were never able to have a son to carry. She resolved to buy some rice balls and make an offering before their photos—and then remembered that she made that resolution often, and followed through rarely.

  She didn’t deserve the place where she lived. Few scalers ever landed a spot that nice, a job as good as hers, and it was a comfort, sometimes, to reflect on how lucky she was, and how hard she’d worked to get there, when you thought about how many Qaanaaq orphans were dying slowly in the cold green light of the methane-sodium streetlights that very moment of new diseases no one understood and no one wanted to talk about, and how easily she could have been one of them—and Ankit had to work hard to see it that way, instead of the other way, the one where she was turning her back on her people, where she should be doing more, where she and everyone else who got a raw deal from this shitty city should get together and demand what was rightfully theirs, like those weird seditious anonymous City Without a Map broadcasts always seemed to be hinting at.

  Sudden shock: her brother, grimacing out at her from a fading bootleg flicker flyer. Advertising an upcoming fight, already in the past. Listing gambling sites and odds.

  She’d gone to see him once, after she’d gotten her job and could access her file from Families, learn that she had a brother she’d never known existed—though nothing more than his name. When she found him he’d been strung out on something, probably synth caff, after a fight, and she’d known at once that something was wrong with him, mentally—the breaks, she’d thought at first, but no, this was something different—and she’d spent too long without a family and she couldn’t stop herself, and before she’d gotten through her carefully prepared introductory speech he had started gibbering and wailing. His friends had apologetically dragged him off, with a practiced ease that made her think these breakdowns were common occurrences. Since then she’d followed his career, at a distance. Become something of a beam fights fan. Betting on him every time, even though he always lost. He’d lost in this fight, to that new guy Hao who all the boys at her office were crushed out on.

  Probably Path was lying. Probably the whole sudden-moment-of-human-concern thing was a business strategy, beloved by fences everywhere, favored by criminals whose specific niches required a never-ending leap of faith on their clients’ part. Ankit really wouldn’t ever know.

  At fifteen, she’d resolved to never visit her mother again. Her presence made her mother agitated, which might land her in several days of psychophysical therapies that Ankit suspected would not have been out of place in a nineteenth-century mental institution. That was why she never wrote to her, never called. The Cabinet hadn’t come by its reputation by accident; there was a reason some of Qaanaaq’s toughest criminals flinched at the memory of it.

  But Ankit was happy, in spite of everything. Helping her mother out, even when she wasn’t sure if the help ever reached her, made her feel good. Less helpless, less alone. The night was cold and dark and she would not have had it any other way.

  She slowed alongside a knot of stalls where women sold rotgut out of flasks. Raucous, ageless women. Ankit had bought shots off them when she was sixteen, one at the beginning of a night of scaling and a second at the end of it. She bought one now, from her favorite, whose stuff tasted like apples and pine sap. The woman’s smile said, I have watched you, I have seen you at your worst.

  “What’s so crazy about it?” the vendor said to another. “All those animal workers, the ones who work with, what do they call them—‘functionally extinct predators.’ They make them get those shots so the things don’t kill them. Like that boat out on Arm One where they got tigers and alligators still, for rich people to rent. Not such a big leap from that to something that would let you meld minds with a killer whale.”

  Ankit paused to savor her shot, and their conversation. Cold wind seared her skin, but inside she was a goblet of fire.

  “My husband’s friend worked for one of the juntas,” another vendor said. “They all had their own secret unit they tried out all kinds of drugs on. He saw some shit, in Chile. Rumor was the Yucatán squad had a doctor, on contract from one of the North American pharma states, could inject you with something that let them hook your mind up to theirs, know everything you know. How else do you think they took down the narco government?”

  “Narco government fell because of the rioting,” said the third vendor, scowl
ing skeptically. “Second Mexican Revolution. No magic beans or science fiction required.”

  “For all the good it did them.”

  They would go on all night like this. And Ankit could have stayed, buying more liquor or simply standing in the wind at the edge of the circle of the nightlamp light.

  This was always here, waiting for her. Qaanaaq night. Her drug of choice. But she was a creature of the day now, and if she relapsed into her addiction she’d lose everything she had.

  “See you next time,” the woman said when she handed back her shot glass.

  Her building’s lobby was warm and bright, with that particular brand of heat the geothermal ventilation system provided—wet and slightly salty, or maybe that was her imagination. She slowed her step to appreciate the heat after being so cold, and then her jaw chimed. A surprisingly swift response; Fyodorovna could barely be bothered to do any work while she was in the office, let alone when she was out of it. Her voice filled Ankit’s ear:

  The breaks is toxic. There’s a reason politicians won’t go near it. People think it’s just criminals and perverts. Whether or not that’s true is irrelevant.

  Ankit typed: It’s not true. And somebody needs to do something about it.

  Fyodorovna responded: People are, I’m sure. Software is. Predictive is working on a plan of response. Scientists working on a cure. Something. Let the people whose job it is to worry about that worry about it.

  Ankit knew her boss well enough to know that the conversation was over.

  Upstairs, in her room, she pressed her forehead against the glass, looked out into the night, felt warm, felt bad about it. Turned her head to look in the direction she was always trying not to look.

  It was still there, of course. It always would be. A sliver of building rising above the others in the distance: the Cabinet. The tallest building on Arm Six. Qaanaaq’s psych ward. She’d scaled it, once. The only time she’d ever gotten caught. The only time she’d scaled something for a reason, to get inside, to get something out. To get someone out.

  The last time she went scaling. The time that her fear held her back. Froze her solid. The black sea, so far below, the wind screaming into her, the building slick with frozen mist. They’d caught her there, rooted in place, and there’d been nothing she could do about it, and here she was now, rooted in place, still helpless. Still afraid. Still obeying the rules. It was Fyodorovna she feared now, not Safety, even though she knew they were both ridiculous, but the end result was the same. She was groundbound. She never took that leap, the one that made the difference.

  And so: She did something stupid. Something she knew was stupid. Something she did anyway.

  She took the photo of Taksa, which was blurry enough to not be identifiable as any particular person, but rather conveyed a very generalized idea of Happy Little Girl, and cropped out any background elements that might give away whose home it was, and autoqueued it to post the next day to Fyodorovna’s channel, with one line of text—If the breaks affects one of us, it affects all of us.

  And then, because she was still angry, she made another stupid decision. One she hadn’t made in years. She opened her screen and navigated to the Cabinet site and submitted a visit request, to go and see her mother.

  City Without a Map: Boundaries

  Do not talk about the past here. Do not ask your neighbor why they left wherever they are from; do not expect your newfound friends to wax nostalgic for homes that no longer exist. Perhaps the past holds more than merely pain for you, but you can’t assume that this is true for anyone else. We want to smell it, taste it, hear its songs, feel its desert heat or summer rain, but we do not want to talk about it. The things we’ve been through cannot hurt us here, unless we let them. The fallen cities, the nations drowned in blood. The cries of our loved ones. Those stories we lock away. We will need new ones.

  All cities are science experiments. Qaanaaq is perhaps the most carefully controlled such experiment in history. An almost entirely free press. Minimal bureaucracy, mostly mechanical, the city overseen by benevolent software. The shareholders pay the taxes, and they can afford to. If food and rent cost far too much, that is between you and the merchant. Swedish is the most common language, yet only 37 percent of the population speak it. There is no official language. There is no official anything. Qaanaaq has no government, no mayor. Those functions are fulfilled by a web of agencies deputized by Qaanaaq’s shareholders. Each Arm elects a manager to serve a four-year term, to help citizens navigate the agencies and hold municipal employees accountable for bad behavior. These eight people are the only politicians in Qaanaaq, and they will be the first to tell you how limited their power is.

  If the twentieth century was shaped by warring ideologies, and the twenty-first was a battle of digital languages, our present age is defined by dueling approaches to oceanic city engineering. Technologies developed for oil rig construction became fervently believed-in and fought-over doctrines. Conventional fixed platforms; spars; semi-submersibles; compliant towers; vertically moored tension leg and mini tension leg platforms. Standing on concrete caissons or long steel struts; tethered to the seabed. Ballasted up or down by flooding and emptying buoyancy tanks or jacking metal legs. Some are enlightened well-armed migratory utopias. Some are floating hells, like the plastic scrap reclamation facilities that ring the Pacific Gyre, every building and body blackened by soot from the processing furnaces.

  In Qaanaaq, software calls most of the day-to-day shots, sets the protocols that humans working for city agencies follow. In theory a tribunal of actual human beings, appointed by the founding nations, could be appealed to in extreme cases, but to protect their anonymity even this process is mediated by software, prompting many to doubt the tribunal exists at all.

  Some grid cities are less rigid about their boundaries. The Russian behemoth Vladisever set no limits on additional construction, and ten years later the city was an unruly metastasis. Hundreds of arms, impenetrably clogged waterways. In the end the army had to come in and clear it out, bomb the tangle of new structures, displace tens of thousands. Qaanaaq permits no more buildings, no new legs that reach to the seafloor. Tie any floating thing to it and you’ll pay dearly for the privilege. These floating things, in turn, are free to charge others for the privilege of being tied to them, so that whole floating villages bob in the surf in spots, to be broken up or relocated when the agents of Structural Integrity decide they pose a danger.

  One floating thing tied directly to the grid is the Sports Platform. A five-story boat the size of a soccer field, anchored at the far edge of Arm Four. Ice-skating rink on the top floor, exposed to the elements; every other story is a nest of subdividable courts and fields and tracks. The bottom level is three stories beneath the surface of the sea, and used mainly for training purposes.

  These are things you need to know. There’s a reason I’m drawing you this map, telling you these stories. Wherever you are now, no matter how trapped or hungry or scared you may be, these stories can provide an exit, an escape, a map to freedom.

  Stories are how I survived, these long bound years. Now I can share them with you.

  Like most modern sociopolitical entities—cities, states, nations—Qaanaaq operates a closed network. The Sys Wars that contributed so heavily to the old world’s breakdown spawned a terrifying array of uncontrollable malware and parasites and infection vectors. Whole countries watched their infrastructure crumble not through the agency of foreign antagonists, but under the mindless attack of rogue rootkits and autarchical worms. Botnets whose authors were dead; scareware that infected Trojan horses to produce uncontrollable new monstrosities. The World Wide Web had proved a short-lived phenomenon. Limited global and regional networks existed, the flow of data so tightly controlled that they were almost unusably slow.

  Qaanaaq’s network, by contrast, is a glorious swirling sea of data, watched over by massive unpredictable mostly controllable AIs.

  So many stories pass through it. I hear som
e of them, even in this place.

  Here is one of them:

  Eight days after the woman with the orca arrived in Qaanaaq, the killer whale was seen several times in the vicinity of the Sports Platform, which drew a dozen journalists to the sweat-and-popcorn-stinking structure.

  They found her on the bottom level. Moving through a series of martial arts forms, wielding her bladed staff with such speed and skill that she clearly didn’t need mammalian apex predators to keep her safe. The staff’s handle was a thick long walrus tusk, precisely as the rumor mill had said, but its blade was stranger and more frightening than any of the stories had suggested. Huge, pale, curved, jagged. One reporter conjectured it was the jawbone of a sperm whale, carved and fretted and sharpened, and they all wrote it down as fact. The polar bear sat off to the side, hands and head caged. Journalists sat in the bleachers and smoked and called out questions.

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Can we have an interview?”

  Only the American stepped out onto the floor. For an American, the arrival of someone like her would strike a chord—collective guilt, most likely, over the bloody war that had been waged against her kind, or instinctive hate.

  “Hello!” he called, moving closer, but she did not respond.

  He stopped at the edge of swinging range. “I’m Bohr Sanchez,” he said. “I run the Brooklyn Expat.”

  She said nothing, just parried at the air fifteen feet from him. She leaped, stabbed, dropped, and rolled. The men and women in the stands behind him laughed, idly evaluated the odds of his being beheaded before their eyes.

  “Are you nanobonded?”

  Here she stopped. She stared. She took a step closer.

  Bohr bit back his fear. His colleagues were watching. “I thought you had been wiped out. You’re not worried? About the people who tried to exterminate you? Qaanaaq has more than its share of zealots, you know.”