Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  This was a good day. A strong wind, but not too cold. A belly full of noodles. No fights scheduled, but he was heading for a meeting with Go. She’d give him his next assignment. His money would last for two more months; as long as the fight came sooner, he’d be fine.

  He’d always been fine. Somehow.

  And then, boom. His good mood gone. Who could say why, something he glimpsed from the corner of his eye, a bratty child screaming at his mother, maybe, or a baby in its father’s arms, but it was always something, some reminder of what he didn’t have, what he would not be, and his mind seized hold of it, spun it out in a dozen directions, nightmare scenarios of suffering and pain, things that were probably fantasies but what if they were memories, glimpses he’d held on to from infancy, things he’d seen . . .

  A woman interrupted the stream of hateful thoughts, but he was not grateful. She wore a ratty fur coat and a giant Russian-style fur hat and she was peering into his eyes, and what right did she have to make eye contact with him? He flinched away as if from an electric shock.

  “You are American, no?”

  “I’m—” he said, frightened, because who was she, why had she spoken to him? Did he look American? What did an American even look like? Was he American? “I’m.” And then a gibber, a bark, some loud panicky succession of syllables he couldn’t control, which made her flinch, which is what it did to everyone.

  “Our people are in danger,” she said. “Evil has come to Qaanaaq. I need strong men. Men who are not afraid.”

  Kaev wanted to laugh at the anachronistic use of the word men to mean people. But he could not laugh. I’m not strong, he wanted to say, and I’m afraid. All that came out was “I’m,” several times in quick succession.

  “She is hunting us,” the old woman said. “That’s why she came. The woman who brings monsters. She blames us for righteously trying to wipe her sinful kind off the face of the earth.”

  The orcamancer, then. His heart swelled, thinking of her. And her polar bear, hands and head caged. A fellow fighter had shown him photos, in the gym, a couple of nights ago. From the lowest level of the Sports Platform. She was real. She was in his city. He’d go to see her, soon. Not that he’d have anything in particular to do or say when he got there—he just wanted to see her for himself.

  “Will you help me?”

  Kaev fought the urge to yell at her, scold her, threaten to feed her to the orca himself, but his helpless years had taught him patience. She touched his sleeve. “God loves you,” she said. “Do you know that?”

  Kaev nodded, because that was the expected answer, that was what fundies wanted to hear, but he didn’t believe God loved him. Quite the opposite, actually.

  She pressed a scrap into his hand. “My church,” she said. “Come? Tomorrow night? We need you. Ask for Maria.”

  And then she left, and he was grateful, except that now he felt bad for her, this sweet, sincere, deranged old woman, alone in a city where no one cared about her god, on a mission to destroy something beautiful, and if she thought that strong men could do something about the evil in Qaanaaq then she was even stupider than Kaev was.

  “You’re late,” said Go’s first lieutenant when Kaev arrived at her Arm Five floating headquarters. Dao; tall, thin, levelheaded. He handled her strategy and planning, the big-picture stuff. Kaev liked the guy, even if he was an asshole. There was something wise about him, something calm. More pleasant than the lieutenants who headed up her operations, security, intelligence.

  “Delayed. I got. I got delayed.”

  “By what?”

  “The wind.”

  “Idiot.” But he said it affectionately, and stepped aside for Kaev to ascend to the boat.

  The thing was big, a tramp steamer long out of commission, its side emblazoned with the name of a corporation and a city, neither of which existed anymore. Go and her operatives ran Amonrattanakosin Group out of it, and they lived there, and they used its cargo hold for storage. And paid the hefty priority docking fee, which came with a guarantee that Safety and Narcotics and Commerce would only ever attempt to board in the most egregious cases. Qaanaaq’s whole hands-off approach to law enforcement had been successful in minimizing crime syndicate violence, but it had also allowed the syndicates to amass significant influence and legitimacy. Kaev reached the deck and turned around to look down, at his city, the Arm he’d left behind, and wondered what would happen when people like Go decided they wanted more.

  She’d fought hard enough to get where she was. He remembered the horror of her rise. Even back then, when they were together, she’d had enemies. People she wanted out of the way; people determined to dismember her. Stab wounds she ended up with. Weeks when she had to disappear.

  One woman in particular: Jackal, real name Jackie, but don’t ever let her hear you use it. A runner, like Go, with her eyes as set on climbing the ladder as Go’s were. Whatever happened to Jackal? Or the better question: how, exactly, had Go destroyed her?

  “Darling,” Go said when he reached the bridge. She embraced him. He wondered if she knew how he felt about her. How much he hated her. She must have. She was too smart not to. “A magnificent fight the other night.”

  Kaev yipped accidentally, then paused until he could collect himself. “Kid’s good.”

  “He’ll become something special,” she said. “People love him.”

  “Means money.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “And who knows. Maybe someday he’ll see you, remember you, buy you breakfast.”

  Kaev winced. He had made the mistake of telling her, once, when one of the kids he’d lost to who’d made it big ran into him on the street, treated him to a fancy meal, shared his disruptors, started crying, telling Kaev how he owed him everything. The problem with Go was that she knew him too well, knew how he felt about things. That sense of people made her a good crime boss, and a terrible ex.

  “Fight,” he stuttered out. “You have anything for me?”

  “Sort of,” she said. She went to her cabin’s front porthole, looked out onto the deck. Exactly like a captain would. She was dressed in drab green, Kaev’s favorite color. He wondered if that was on purpose. The machete scabbard hung from her belt, as always. No one had ever seen her use it. Kaev knew she wouldn’t hesitate; wondered if she’d used it on Jackal. “Dao has two names for you. See him on your way out.”

  “Names. Names?”

  “Business rivals,” she said. “I’m not going to lie to you to spare your feelings, Kaev. You’re a grown-up, at least in body you are. I need you to soak them.”

  Kaev felt very close to crying. He said “I’m” several times, and then finished in a rush: “I’m not a thug, Go, I’m not going to go rough up your enemies for you. I’m a fighter and I’ve made my peace with doing your dirty work in the ring, losing fights I know I can win, training young punks so you can make more money on them, but I’m not going to throw somebody into the water because of some business deal you need to get done.”

  At least, that’s what he tried to say. He was pretty sure he got all the words out, and maybe even in the right order, but probably too fast for most of them to make any sense.

  She patted his cheek. “Oh, Kaev. My noble warrior. I know this is hard for you.”

  “Me?” he asked. “Why. You have people. Lots. Who do this. Do this kind of thing. Better at it than I’d be.”

  “True,” she said, “and lots of them are ex-fighters. You’re getting old, Kaev. You know this. Couple of years, you won’t be able to put on a convincing show in the ring anymore. And then what? If you can do this job, and do it well—well, then, you have a whole new career opening up ahead of you.”

  “And if I refuse? Or. If I mess up. Because I don’t know how to do this thing?”

  “Then good luck with your life,” she said, her back to him, the conversation over, no point in arguing. He’d stared at her back like this before. “Needless to say, you’ll never have another beam fight again. Or unlicensed skiff brawl, or
snuff film knife fight, or anything.”

  Dao beamed him the details when he descended from the deck. And, because he really was a good man under all the assholishness, he didn’t comment on the wetness beading up in the corner of Kaev’s left eye.

  Ankit

  Ankit’s job was as good as gone. Her boss would lose. There was nothing she could do about it.

  There were things she’d never done, favors she’d never called in. Agency executives, city flunkies who could help her. Who could access and share information they weren’t supposed to access and share. Requests she’d always been too cautious to make, stockpiling them for the day when Fyodorovna would really need them.

  When I get back to the office, I’m going to start calling in those favors.

  In the meantime, Ankit read everything. Every news site and academic journal, every forum, every crazy analysis from every point on the political spectrum. She even scoured through those City Without a Map broadcasts, which she’d avoided because it seemed like absolutely everyone was talking about them that year, and it made their voices get high and excited and agitated and she didn’t need that in her life.

  If someone discussed the breaks, Ankit devoured it.

  Which made her seasick. No two sources, it seemed, were discussing the same disease. Some of the symptoms remained mostly the same, but this was the only thing approaching consensus. Where it originated, what it meant, what it did beyond the psychological consequences, how to treat it—these were all the subject of a dizzying degree of difference of opinion.

  The breaks was God’s wrath, raining down upon the nations whose hyperactive economies fucked up the planet.

  The breaks was God’s wrath, inflicted upon immoral sinful subpopulations.

  The breaks was big pharma, accidentally unleashing a monster when a handful of separate covert drug testing schemes unintentionally overlapped.

  The breaks was a lie, a myth to keep people distrustful and angry and fearful of each other.

  The breaks was a lie, a myth to distract from something far worse that was on the horizon.

  She was pissing her job down the drain. She knew this.

  Because the bottom line was: The breaks remained a phantom illness. A media mirage. Glimpsed in hazy pieces. Something no one could approach, capture, present, discuss, deal with. Argued about by foreign governments, rejecting allegations that their military labs or foulest slums had spawned it, and by insurance companies trying not to pay for treating the symptoms. Ignored by most other power players. Everywhere she looked, local software was “still collating.” Official responses were “still forthcoming.” If she could force it into the public consciousness, make it into a serious issue that Health had to address, she would lose her job—but she could save so many lives she wouldn’t care about being unemployed.

  That’s what she told herself, anyway.

  The six-month processing glitch had proven to be a fruitless avenue. Protocol rationale requests submitted under the Open and Accountable Computer Governance mandate turned up nothing. A couple million lines of code she’d never have been able to parse, that none of her contacts could penetrate, either.

  Ankit listened to ’casts, left the apartment, started talking to people. Plenty of others were just as obsessed as she was, and had been for a lot longer. Accumulating information wasn’t enough when it came to getting to the truth of the breaks. What she needed were real human minds, tics and madness and all, to turn all that data into stories.

  At a support group, she met Janna, whose brother Mikk had been a sex worker in the Calais refugee camp. Janna clutched a photo in a frame, the first Ankit had seen in years. The boy was beautiful. Dark, smiling, tattooed, laughing at an inexplicable actual raven perched on one strong extended arm. He’d loved the work, Janna said, and been very popular with fellow refugees and camp workers and aid administrators and visiting photographers and pastors, complete with a sliding scale that even the richest of men were all too happy to pay, and the money he made that way had enabled him to buy Qaanaaq registrations and a halfway decent apartment lease for their whole family.

  “Mikk was proud,” Janna said. “He hated that we had lost our home, and that we were living in such a dangerous place. But sex let him rise above all that. Sex was how he became something more than just a refugee.”

  And it was only once they arrived in Qaanaaq, and were safe and stable, that the breaks began to manifest. Janna believed they had been there for a long time, kept in check by the force of Mikk’s magnificent pride and determination to get his family out of Calais, and that once he was able to lay down his burden they blossomed.

  For Mikk, the breaks brought him back to the camps. But not Calais. Taastrup—a Danish village, somewhere he had never been. At first she thought he was fuguing into stories he’d been told, things his johns had said. But the details were too complex, his fevered mumbling too disturbing, for such a simple explanation. Janna tracked down photos, found the same things he’d been describing.

  Eventually Mikk broke. Died.

  Bodybreaking, they called it. What happened when the breaks finally killed you. The moment when your mind’s hold on the here and now finally ruptured forever and you broke free from your body.

  Taastrup. The place popped up again and again in her research. Gone now. One of many that became the target of nationalist mobs, latter-day skinhead armies angry at all the workers landing on their shores. An estimated fifteen hundred people took part in the torching of Taastrup, a pogrom to rival anything in czarist Russia.

  Looking into Taastrup took her to Ishmael Barron. He wasn’t the first researcher she’d met who was clearly suffering from the breaks himself, but in him they were further along than she’d previously seen. Midsentence she could see it happening, watch his eyes as one train of thought was abruptly replaced by another. But each time he smiled, as if no one vision was more welcome than the next.

  He unfurled a sheet of paper big enough to cover the table where they sat. She could not help but touch it, rub a corner between her fingers.

  “Five or so years ago, several years into my research, I started to see the strands come together. Separate story lines uniting into one. The story of the breaks. Nothing like paper to paint a picture. I tried to put it all down. I am not sure if I succeeded.”

  A map took up half the sheet. North America, the Arctic, Greenland, Northern Europe. Bloodred triangles for the grid cities; blue circles for the refugee camps. A tangled nest of many-colored lines. The rest was a dense sea of scribbled words, angry ellipses, accusatory question marks. Exclamation marks like multiple stab wounds. He talked her through it, highlighting reported cases and potential trends, tracing what he believed to be separate strains with different symptoms.

  They were in his apartment. A tiny place, but on Arm Five, so the building was clean and seemed safe. He was lucky he had come so long ago.

  “What’s this?” she said, pointing to a fading orange line that meandered and circled around North America before ending in Taastrup.

  “Exactly!” he said.

  “. . . Exactly what?”

  His finger traced the orange line, trembling. “That’s the most important question you could have asked. What’s your best bet?”

  “Comes up out of the USA,” Ankit said. “Some nomadic refugee group. People from one of the Black Autonomous Zones, after they got pushed out of Detroit or New Orleans or something?”

  “No,” he said. “Nanobonders. Taastrup was the last known location of any of them—a small handful that survived the final massacre went there, but, surprise, there’s fundamentalist lunatics everywhere, and they got butchered, too.”

  “Last known nanobonder location until our friend with the orca arrived, that is.”

  “Yes.”

  He scanned her face, his eyes wide, his mouth open. “I think they are the key,” he said finally, and if he was disappointed that she neither arrived at the same conclusion nor seemed floored by it now that h
e’d told her, he hid it well. “Nanobonder migration patterns are the most common thread between the dozen or so different places where the breaks are believed to have sprung up. I think that their unique nanite signature was a trigger, somehow. A key ingredient in the pharmaceutical stew that led to the creation of the breaks.”

  “I thought that the nanobonded were . . . endogamous.” She was proud of herself for remembering the word. “Insular. Never interacted with outsiders. So they’d never have taken random meds.”

  “Popular consensus holds that this is a myth,” Barron said. “Justification for atrocities. Throughout history, ‘They keep to themselves, they think they’re better than us, they hate us,’ has been a common rationale for why a group of people constitute a threat, and therefore should be expelled or perhaps exterminated. But even if it’s true, we know they established trade with some other diasporic communities, many of whom were known pharma subjects during Deregulation. They could have been dosed with something without their consent or knowledge.”

  “I know so little about them,” Ankit said.

  “And I know far too much. I’ve done so much research on them, spoken to so many people. How they originated, where they moved, who they interacted with. How they were targeted. Why. By whom.” Here his face grew very serious, and tight with an anger that looked out of place on such an old and kind man. And then it passed. “But it’s all academic now. Archaeology, as opposed to anthropology.”

  “I bet you’d like very much to talk to her,” she said. “The woman with the orca.”

  “I would,” he said. “But I don’t fancy being butchered like the hundreds of people she killed in the grid cities she visited before coming here.”

  “Is that true? I heard those reports, but I thought—”

  Barron shrugged. “I accept as a fundamental fact of Qaanaaq life that I will never know if anything is true,” he said. “Most of it is rumor. Even when you read it in the supposedly legitimate news outlets. I learned that long before arriving here, to be honest. Life becomes significantly less stressful when you accept that your ignorance will always dwarf your knowledge.”