Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  “This one needs to be quiet,” Go said. “The first one had to make a very clear statement, but this one needs to be . . . more uncertain. It should unsettle the target—your victim’s employer—but create just enough doubt that the target doesn’t feel confident unleashing a violent response.”

  “And. Who.” Deep breath, Kaev. You can do this. It’s just human speech. Everybody does it. “Who’s. The. The. The target?”

  She’d stroked his face, and laughed, and dismissed him.

  Kaev watched Abijah walk down Arm Eight. Tight clothes, like many insecure people who wanted to show off their muscles wore. Big boots that gave him an extra inch of height. Go’s target had to be a shareholder. What other common ground could there be between the bureaucrat and the slum thug? Kaev could see the fear in people’s eyes when they saw the enforcer pass. How their faces tightened. So he was well known out on Eight. He’d fucked up a lot of people. Kaev felt his lip curling, a snarl he could not keep in check.

  “Look!” someone called, and pointed to the sea.

  A giant onyx blade, seeming to be as big as a person, slid through the surface of the water. The orca, Kaev thought, and felt the hairs of his neck prickle. It kept rising, and there she was, straddling its back: the orcamancer.

  She is real.

  She was so close. So big. He wondered what her black clothes were made of. He shut his eyes and felt a strange flare, like remembered warmth.

  “She comes through here every other day, seems like,” someone said.

  “Wonder she doesn’t get hypothermia, out there in the ocean.”

  “You got to be human to get hypothermia.”

  The Arm Eight rabble continued the debate, but Abijah was oblivious, did not see her. Did not slow down. Kaev watched until it was clear the orcamancer would not be resurfacing this side of the Arm, then hurried to catch up with his quarry.

  Abijah entered the gully between two cafés on tall stilts, unzipping already. His actions exaggerated. He wanted everyone to know he was going to go piss or fuck something.

  Here you go, Kaev. An easy one. Duck down and sneak between the stilts so no one sees you entering the gully, sneak up behind him, knock him the fuck out. Push him into the sea.

  Kaev did not duck down. The orcamancer would not have attacked like that. She never hid. Whatever she’d come to do, she wasn’t trying to be secret about it.

  “Hey,” he said when Abijah stepped back onto the grid.

  “Hey!” Abijah said, recognizing him, unable to place him.

  “Kaev,” he said, loudly, so the crowd between the two cafés could hear. He extended his left hand. “We met at the arena gym, remember?”

  “Yeah!” his quarry said, smiling, and paused for an instant, thrown off by the unexpected hand, before extending his left to take Kaev’s.

  When he had it, Kaev pulled. Hard. He swung his body around, letting his right shoulder lead, swinging his elbow into his opponent.

  A killing blow. The kind of move you never use in a beam fight, because it’s unsportsmanlike. A thing you keep up your sleeve for those hopefully-never occasions when it’s you or the other fighter. Kaev pulled back at the last instant, striking the man’s right clavicle instead of his windpipe. He heard it snap. Felt the man drop.

  Pain incapacitated Abijah. He screamed. He bellowed. He sobbed. He tried to ask, Why? Thugs never learned what fighters learned—how to battle through pain—because they only ever hurt people who couldn’t fight back.

  Kaev looked up. A couple hundred pairs of eyes were on him. They clapped. They cheered. They held up screens to capture the moment.

  Kaev smiled. Already he was running the scenarios, anticipating the ugliness that was in store for him, the revenge Go would take for his disobeying her, the punishment Safety would impose when they caught him. But there was another arena skill he had up his sleeve: how to put all his fears for the future into a box and briefly forget about them.

  Someone recognized him, or ran facial rec with their screen. She called his name. Others heard her, joined in. Kaev shut his eyes and basked in it.

  For once, they were cheering for him.

  Fill

  Whales swam through the air above him, white against the dark blue twilight. Thick powdery snow, the best kind for the light projections. Their simple AIs pinged on the shape of a child and turned to swim circles around her. Fill felt oddly abandoned. When he was that age, he’d believed the snow projections loved him and him alone.

  Behind him, the sea lions barked.

  He loaded the latest episode of City Without a Map, broadcast in Mandarin. He didn’t like the ones recorded in languages he didn’t speak. His implant had the best translation software—even replicated perfectly the voice of the original speaker—but something did not survive the transition. No machine could match the earnestness, the hunger, of the original Readers.

  Fill could feel the wet gathering in his clothes. A mark of his privilege, that this happened so rarely. The rich could have expensive dehumidifiers and lattices of salt polymer in their walls, to help strip away the ever-present damp. Everyone else in Qaanaaq just put up with being wet all the time. Having eczema. Having worse.

  The little girl screamed with happiness as the whales combined into a tyrannosaurus and proceeded to chase her.

  When I’m dead, the snow projections will still be here. This whole city will keep on working.

  Fill had spent his whole life believing the city belonged to him. After a certain point he’d started to think maybe it was the other way around, but that was wrong, too. He meant nothing to Qaanaaq. Qaanaaq did not see him, did not know him, and nothing would change when he was slotted into his plastic sleeve and weighted with salt and dropped into the sea at the end of his Arm. He watched the waters churn. The water that would swallow him.

  “Fill,” said a rusted familiar voice, and then he was being hugged.

  “Grandfather.”

  He settled into the embrace. Startlingly strong. Fill knew that his grandfather was as mortal as any man, yet he could not imagine any sickness or weapon that could reduce him.

  “You still love the sea lions,” the old man observed.

  “Of course,” Fill said, conscious for the first time of the rapt expression on his face, watching the piers where giant mammals flopped and dozed and barked.

  But he hadn’t loved them, not always. There had been a time when the sea lions were kid’s stuff, something he couldn’t be bothered with. Every kid went through that, he imagined, but when had he come out the other end? When had he become adult enough to give in to childish joy? Once again the eerie feeling came over him: the suspicion that what he felt might not be his. An unwholesome tingle traveled up the length of his spine, amplifying itself as it went, until his shoulders shook and his teeth came together in a sharp clack, cleaving open the side of his tongue.

  “Everything okay?” his grandfather said, feeling him flinch, touching his sleeve.

  Fill swallowed blood. “Of course. Just cold is all.”

  “Shall we go inside?”

  “No. I like it.”

  What would he think, dear old Grandfather, if he learned I had the breaks? The dirty dirty taint of the poor? Smile politely, walk away, run home, burn his clothes, and cut all ties with me? What does he think when he sees them, the sick and dying, the men and women huddled on the grid about to break free of their bodies? Does he sneer, does he blame them for their bad decisions? Does he see them at all?

  “How are you really, Grandfather?” Fill asked. “What takes up your time these days?”

  “Managing my empire,” he said with a grim laugh.

  “I thought you had people for that.”

  “That’s true—well, then, I spend my time looking over the shoulders of the people who manage my empire.”

  “That sounds boring.”

  “I wish it were.”

  “What’s been going on?”

  Grandfather spent a long time looking at t
he sea lions. Then he seemed to come to some kind of internal decision. “I’m under attack. Nothing I can’t handle, but it’s annoying all the same. A crime boss has gotten too big for her britches. This happens. Somebody wants more than the niche they’ve already carved out for themselves, and they make a move on a shareholder.”

  “What does one do in a situation like that?”

  “We bide our time, typically. People get tired of throwing pebbles at a brick wall, eventually.”

  “Are you really that invincible?”

  “No one’s invincible. But we set this city up. Everything’s stacked in our favor. Patience is all we need—maybe a trip out of town, if things really heat up, or a Protective Custody stint in one of the cushier suites in the Cabinet.”

  “So that urban legend is true? That the Cabinet has posh rooms to hide VIPs in, alongside the overcrowded wards full of screaming lunatics?”

  “Very true.” The old man looked at his hands. “Of course, once in a while a shareholder will go a little crazy. Meet violence with violence; slaughter his or her enemies. A separate part of the playbook. That’s not my style.”

  Fill looked down onto a shifter skiff. Portions of the boat floor rose, fell. A worker from Recreations controlled it all from the rows of subdermals up and down her arms. Platforms circled and spun as she did. Children cavorted there, but they avoided eye contact with her. Augmentation was minimized in Qaanaaq, looked down upon, considered uncouth. In some grid cities, and most of the still-peopled places in the Sunken World, augmentation was much more accepted. Even obligatory. Fill wondered where she’d come from, whether she’d chosen them willingly. Whether she liked them.

  A woman stood before him. Flickering, so that at first he thought she was a snow projection, but no—the projection was passing through her, a kraken now, dappling her body and then departing. Tall and beautiful, dark skin. Bald. Well into her fifties. Wearing clothes that were way too thin for the Qaanaaq cold. Like hospital robes. She stared at him. Smiling, maybe, but maybe not.

  A shuttle bark disgorged passengers. They climbed up onto the Arm, passed between him and the woman, and when they were gone so was she.

  A breaks vision? Fill shivered, licked his lips, tasted blood again. Resolved to bring the woman up, during his daily talk with Barron. Resolved not to. “Isn’t it funny?” he said, blundering into it, because if there was one skill glib gay boys learned it was how to ease archly into a fraught topic. “I realized I know almost nothing about you! Most of my friends can find their family histories in the cloud, but you—shareholder erasure! Our family name is a great big digital void. Which can’t have been cheap, by the way.”

  Grandfather laughed. “So it’s an oral history project you’re working on.”

  “Something like that. I know we’re from New York. How did we . . .”

  “Get out? Strike it rich?”

  “I have to assume that we were at least a little rich from the start.”

  “Your father never wanted to know.” A scowl, at the past, at the grid they stood on. “When he was little, maybe. He wanted the fairy tale. The movie version. But as a grown-up? Ignorance is bliss.”

  Fill blinked away the mention of his father, the tears that threatened to rise to the surface. “Is it that bad?”

  “No one survived without getting their hands at least a little filthy. But I think you are strong enough for the truth. You’re stronger than he was.”

  “I’m not,” Fill said, the notion so ridiculous he had to laugh. “I’ve never done a goddamn thing. Like, period.”

  “You are. I’ve always seen it in you. The fact that it’s never been put to the test doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

  “That’s sweet of you to say,” Fill said, unconvinced. “And my father? You never saw it in him?”

  “Your father was a good boy. But he was not strong.”

  Images arrived unbidden. His father, departing for Heilongjiang Province to cover the Famine Migration. The camera equipment he let Fill inventory. “Mom always said he was brave. To go to those places. To take those pictures.”

  “Your mother wouldn’t know strength if it kissed her on the cheek,” Grandfather said. “If you’ll pardon my saying so. Doing something dangerous and foolish is the opposite of strength.”

  “What is strength?” Fill asked, feeling that they were close to it now, the Thing, the Secret, the story his father hadn’t wanted to know.

  “I worked for a security firm. Buildings and events. Simple stuff: hire the guards and send them to the place that needed guarding. But these were insane times. The Real Estate Riots were in full swing—you’ve heard of them, surely? About to evolve into the Real Estate Wars. I believed that security was about more than muscle. I talked the owner of the company into creating a new division, letting me lead it. Headhunting some of the biggest names in New York public relations. Intelligence, I called it. Because security wasn’t about keeping bad guys out anymore—it was about keeping the bad guys from seizing what was yours. Squatter gangs, politicians susceptible to pressure, ready to use eminent domain to take property away and give it to the poor.”

  Fill tried hard to keep his eyes from glazing over.

  “My unit went into neighborhoods, put agents in masquerading as tenants, assessed the situation, identified fault lines. Divisions between people. Once you know how to whip people up, they’ll do all the work for you.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “My specialty was religion. Fundamentalists, mostly. There’s a lot of them—all sorts, though Christians were the easiest. Pretty soon we had dozens of contracts from all the biggest real estate developers. The manufacture and strategic deployment of mass idiocy, I told people. Practically put it on my business card.”

  Business cards—Fill had heard of those.

  “Manufacture an outrage. Provide a target. Identify the people whom people listen to, the pastors or the PTA moms, and pay a couple of them to make a stink. I mostly just copied what was happening in politics. When we went national, I acquired several groups that had run election campaigns.”

  Grandfather paused, watching Fill’s face. Waiting for a response. Fill was fairly sure he’d missed something. Sea lions clapped the rotting wood of their piers.

  “A lot of people died, Fill.”

  “Ah.”

  “Some scenes played out, in Harlem and the Lower East Side, that . . . well, let’s just say your father would have found quite a lot to photograph there. A smaller scale, but easily rivaling anything that came out of Calcutta. I regret it now, but what can you do? And you and I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t. All my work, all over North America—none of that could have happened without New York.”

  Fill knew all about this. City Without a Map had taught him.

  Remembered smoke blackens the sky. The shouts of long-dead citizens ring out in the street. Explosions: tanks firing on squatter strongholds; high-class cultural events bombed by tenant army activists.

  Qaanaaq is a dream. At night you lie down and wake from it. Return to the real world, your life, your city, dying. Every night you are back there, watching it unfold in uncanny déjà vu slo-mo, because surely you have seen this before, surely you know what will happen, surely you will act differently, surely you will get out in time—

  Grandfather had lost his son. Soon he’d lose his grandson. Whatever else he’d done, whatever horrific crimes he’d committed, it was hard not to pity him. To have fought so hard, to have acquired so much, and to end up with nothing. Well, nothing except . . . everything.

  Fill had so many other questions. About the clients his grandfather had worked for when he was finished helping destroy New York City. About the things that were gone. The Metropolitan Opera; the Daughters of the Disappeared; Qaanaaq when it was still shiny and new.

  Grandfather flung a crumpled napkin into the sea. Littering: another distinctly New York oddity about the old man. “I called you because I missed you,” Grandfather said, “but I als
o had something up my sleeve. Something I want to give you. Two things, actually. I’m not seriously worried about that . . . thing I mentioned to you earlier. Standard crime boss nonsense. We shareholders haven’t held on to everything we have for this long without learning how to weather every storm. But still. It’s silly not to take precautions. I need you to be able to access two things that only I can currently access. One is an apartment. Sealed, secret. Kept off the market. I know you already have a place—I just need you to have all the access info on this one, which so far isn’t listed in any of the residential rosters. An investment, you know. We have several of them, in fact, but this one is special to me. Your grandmother and I . . . it was where we went when we wanted to escape.”

  Fill nodded, feeling very noble and dutiful. “Fair enough, Grandfather. And the second thing?”

  “Software. A particularly unstable, dangerous program. Cobbled together by an alliance of different shareholders, combining ten or so very different security protocols and illegal data-mining approaches. Toxic stuff, military grade. We created it in the early days of Qaanaaq, to share information, observe patterns, keep track of our units . . . assess problems, figure out how to deal with them . . . but it hasn’t been used in twenty years, maybe longer. Too erratic. Undependable. It did what you wanted, but it would also do a bunch of things you didn’t want.”

  “What do you want me to do with it?”

  “Good heavens, nothing! Not for now, anyway. Just hold on to it. I have no idea whether any of the other shareholders are still alive, or have access to it—I know it hasn’t been used, it’s on the list of programs our watchdogs prowl for—but if I’m the last one with access, I don’t want it to die with me. Although maybe it should. But it’s worth a lot, and fifty years from now you may be glad you have it in your back pocket.”