Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  “Sure,” Fill said, because all of this seemed to be making the old man happy. What did it matter that he wanted nothing to do with an empty apartment and some temperamental software? He could finally do something for the old man, play some small part in the family business. And, of course, he could not say, No, Grandfather, I’m sorry, I won’t be alive in fifty years, or fifteen, or maybe not in five months.

  “I’ll send you all the information.”

  “Thanks, Grandfather. Oh, look!”

  Two sea lions barked and bumped chests. Both men laughed.

  Ankit

  Ankit bought flowers, then threw them into the sea, then bought different flowers. Scentless ones, cold emotionless white. The angry red of mainland roses would be too provocative; the purple scent of hothouse hyacinths could make the whole madhouse lose its mind.

  Ankit dressed carefully, then undressed, then dressed differently. Sterile gray. Genderless lines.

  “Fucking Cabinet,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror, looking at the time, wondering how many more outfits she could go through before she had to take the zip line out to her appointment. Planning every little detail was its own kind of paralysis, so she decided to leave early and kill time over there rather than keep on burrowing deeper into unproductive thoughts.

  Her screen sparkled. Barron: There is absolutely no Quet-38-36.0 anywhere in Qaanaaq.

  That didn’t seem right. Or possible. Qaanaaq was sick with drugs, full of smugglers and machines to bring even the most obscure pills to the far-flung arrivals who fiended for them. Anything you wanted, anything at all, someone was selling it. But she had too much else to think about, too many other things to keep from stressing out over.

  Another one: I have a friend with access to a molecular assembly machine, who does off-legal drug printing sometimes. I am going to try to get him to make us some.

  Good, she said, and set a five-hour block on further notifications from Barron.

  Of course she hadn’t told Safety that she knew who the soaker was. She was still too much of a scaler at heart to even think about snitching. That would have been true even if the criminal in question weren’t her brother. They’d questioned her for almost an hour, standing there at the edge of the grid, apologizing endlessly for the inconvenience, seeing her fancy work clothes and mistaking her for the important person everyone else mistook her for.

  She shut her eyes against the ocean of words churning inside her. The things she wanted to ask her mother; the things she wanted to say to her. Cabinet staff said to minimize dialogue, focus on physical presence, touch, caress; her mother’s psychological condition was unique, easily triggered into episodes by even seemingly harmless questions or comments.

  She hugged the flowers to her chest. Shut her eyes and tried to remember her mother’s face.

  The woman she saw was not her mom. She knew this. She was a summary, a splice, a combination of a hundred warm, loving, smiling mothers she’d seen in movies and at the homes of friends and in the families she visited for work. Ankit had no real memories of her mother’s face from when she was a child. What she’d seen the last time she’d been with her mother had been too horrible to hold on to. Fifteen years ago, a dark red wet sobbing mess, a mouth open wide in a howl Ankit could not hear through the window in the door.

  Her jaw bug buzzed. Fifty-Seventh Street Corp., it whispered.

  She answered. “Breckenridge?”

  “Still in the hospital, the poor creature,” said a hale but ancient voice. “Martin Podlove speaking. I am the shareholder responsible for Fifty-Seventh Street Corp.”

  “Mr. Podlove, thank you for your call,” she said. “I’m surprised to hear you identify yourself so openly. Shareholder invisibility—”

  “—is a privilege we dispense with quite frequently, actually. When we know someone can keep a secret. When we know how much they stand to lose.”

  He let her chew on that for an instant or two, and then when she started to respond he said, “My colleague passed on your request for funds. I figured I owed you a call, at least. There’s something cowardly about sending bad news as words on a screen.”

  “No,” Ankit said, stricken. “No . . . you can’t do that. Fyodorovna will lose this election if you don’t help. In a different year an incumbent might be able to weather this storm, but times are too tough. Rents have been rising, out on Arm Seven. Evictions, displacement . . . People are mad, and they blame her for their problems, and they’ll choose the devil they don’t know.”

  Podlove said nothing. He was enjoying this.

  “We’re useful to you,” Ankit said, and knew, then, that the battle was lost.

  “Everyone is useful to us. Think I haven’t been backing your opposition? Think they won’t do what I ask? You know politics better than that, Ankit.”

  He tapped off.

  She looked up at the Cabinet. She stood there until the shaking subsided. Early, still, for her appointment, but the processing always took too long and she figured she could start the waiting now. Better that than standing around wishing for the ability to summon a wave of cleansing nuclear fire out of thin air.

  Entering the Cabinet felt like sinking below the sea. White noise pods lined the curved walls and the doorway, cocooning the building from the sonic chaos of the city outside. People spoke but she could not hear them, and that was part of the process, part of the therapy. She looked at the crowd in the waiting room, wondered who was there to be processed and who was simply visiting. Either way, she felt immense pity for them.

  “Ankit Bahawalanzai,” she said into the triage scanner. “Two P.M. appointment.”

  The hexagon flashed green. A door hissed open. She was pulling off her shirt before it had shut behind her, placing her clothes on the table, standing in her underwear in the center of the room, letting the lasers wipe over her, pretending she could feel them. They’d be confirming her identity, scanning for threats and communicable medical conditions and who knew what else. Medical scanning algorithms changed all the time, looked for different things, got more sophisticated in some ways, became blindingly stupid in others. A couple of years ago they had all been obsessed with hair follicle analysis. Before that it had been fingernails. She imagined the AIs getting together at conferences, arrogant as doctors, swapping stories in silicon hallways, exchanging bad ideas.

  A weird hiccup, in the flow of the white noise.

  “Ms. Bahawalanzai?”

  “Hi,” Ankit said, and felt her cheeks heat up, because this was not good, an actual human being was never a good sign.

  “I’m Michaela,” said the young woman. “Can we sit?”

  Ankit saw that the table had become two chairs. She hated this place, its expensive and unnecessary technology. Some Health facilities were nicer than others, and few were “nicer” than this, but they all shared the same redundant proliferation of scientific equipment, the telltale traces of the massive investments made in health care during the Cancer Years.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Michaela said. “But your body scans showed anxiety, tension. Your mother is not permitted proximity to those things. You understand, I’m sure. As a blood relative, especially?”

  “No,” Ankit said, “no, I do not understand. What does my being a blood relative have to do with anything?”

  “Ah,” Michaela said, frowning down at something on her screen. She had blurted something out, pertaining to some classified aspect of her mother’s condition. Something Ankit was not supposed to know. “Mentally ill people are especially sensitive to the emotional states of others.”

  “I know that. Of course I know that. But you said—”

  Michaela stood. The software would be guiding her through this stage of the conversation, surely. The Oh Shit You Fucked Up AI, Ankit thought. Would it cost her? Did they keep track of every little error?

  Her mother was Code 76. That meant that someone, maybe in Safety and maybe in Health and maybe in t
he home nations, had decided that the details of her confinement constituted a protected secret. Whatever was wrong with her, what events had precipitated it—even her name—someone had convinced someone else that these could never be revealed. Ankit had always known this. She’d made her peace with it, the way you make peace with what can never be known. Digging into things like that only made you angry, started you down dangerous pathways, got you in trouble. But when she walked out of the Cabinet that day, when she tossed her bouquet of flowers into the sea and shrieked into the rising vortex, she decided it was time to get in trouble. To dig. To find out why her mother was in there.

  To maybe possibly somehow get her out.

  Kaev

  So. Now you’re on the run. Was it worth it?

  Safety would certainly have ID’d him from the clips of his assault on Abijah. The crowd calling his name. By now they could be camped out across the street from his shipping container, waiting to arrest him. Not to mention Go, who would be furious, possibly furious enough to scoop him up before Safety got him and spend a day or a week carving him up before handing over whatever was left for arrest.

  Yes. Yes, it was worth it.

  And then there was Go’s target, the powerful man or woman who employed his two victims. Whoever they were, they’d have minders, watchers, microdrones maybe, and they would have figured out who he was as well, and were even now working out an abduction plan, were engaging the services of an old crusty interrogator from one of the fallen superpower states to torture out the name of who had hired him.

  At this, at least, Kaev smiled. He’d give them Go in a heartbeat.

  But it wouldn’t help; they wouldn’t trust a name easily given; they’d still have to torture him to verify the truth of what he said.

  But that wouldn’t matter. Pain he could handle. He’d had plenty. They’d still be after Go at the end of it, and maybe they’d get her.

  Kaev walked. Up and down Arm Six, and then Arm Seven. Head full of screaming; the roaring of savage beasts; the orgasmic cry of the crowd when the fight was at its peak, when he’d given them something beautiful, something to help them break free of the moment, their lives, their city, the weight of their slowly dying bodies . . . And what had he gotten for his troubles? Add up all the joy and pleasure he’d brought to the people of this city, and what had he received in exchange for it? Barely enough money to eke out a subsistence living. He wasn’t angry, not at them. They didn’t owe him anything. They paid their money; they had their own troubles. It was the city he was mad at. The city that he loved. He wanted to punch something, punch everything, pin it down and snap its neck, this squirming tentacled mass of thoughts and whispers and memories and contradictory beliefs that screamed and gibbered inside his head.

  Back down Arm Seven; through the Hub; onto Arm Eight. A slide messenger sped past, ululating all the way. He could hear himself yip and caw, could not make himself stop.

  Someone was singing in a high window. People were making love all around him, in the darkness of bedrooms and alleyways and coffin hotels. People were dying. They crowded him, pressed on his skull with a more-than-physical pressure. He wanted to scream, but he was good at not screaming. He spent most of his time not screaming even though he wanted to.

  He walked.

  And then: he stopped.

  Because the pressure ceased. The screaming and the singing evaporated. The fog lifted. Peace flooded him, a peace like nothing he’d ever known. A quiet. Shivers climbed his spine, building in intensity as they went.

  He looked around. Saw no one. For such an overcrowded place, Arm Eight had a weird way of feeling completely empty sometimes. Boats rose and fell with the waves on his right, and on his left were a series of squat strutted buildings on a floating platform.

  He took a few steps farther out onto the Arm and felt the peace subside just the slightest bit. Felt the squirming thing in his head start to gurgle again.

  Kaev returned to where he’d been. Took a breath; basked in the silence. Then took several steps back, toward the Hub. Again the gurgling rose inside him.

  So. Just one spot. Okay. Kaev didn’t wonder why or try to investigate what, exactly, was having this effect on him. Poke around too much at something good and you tend to find something bad. Depleted uranium, probably, the weaponized stuff scraped from the wreckage of Chernobyl or Hanul, causing blissful sensations as it killed off brain cells by the thousands. If so, better to let it kill him swiftly and pleasantly. So he sat down on the freezing metal of the curb, beside the clamps where the building platform was docked, and hugged his knees to his chest to conserve heat, and shut his eyes, and let hot tears of happiness warm his face.

  Ankit

  Ankit began with the easy stuff. The human stuff. She called her contact at Health, second assistant to the director. A sweet boy, one of a couple dozen agency flunkies she forced herself to be friends with, sending regifted tickets or day passes that had been given to Fyodorovna, even meeting up for drinks or karaoke or isolation tanking when her calendar reminded her it had been a while.

  “One of my constituents’ mother-in-law got in trouble,” she said. “Sad story, really. Locked up. The Cabinet. I felt so bad for her . . . and she’s been a loyal donor . . .”

  Joshi promised to look into it.

  Next, she called her woman at Safety. Spun the same sob story. If there had been a violent incident behind her mother ending up in the Cabinet, Safety might have a record of it.

  “We don’t use Health’s numbering system,” she told Ankit. “So that patient number won’t be helpful to us.”

  “Really?” Ankit said, surprised. “Agencies don’t coordinate that kind of thing? Seems inefficient.”

  “When things are inefficient, there’s usually a reason for it. Things are only supposed to run so well in Qaanaaq. Efficiency is expensive. Helping people get what they’re entitled to, solving problems quickly, that sort of thing is costly.”

  “Fascinating,” Ankit said, unfascinated, and angry at her for the civics lesson. “But if there was a Safety case that ended in the subject being confined to the Cabinet, you may have her patient number in the file, yeah?”

  “We might . . .”

  “You can check?”

  “I could . . .”

  “Great!” Ankit said, imagining stabbing the woman in the throat. “Thanks!”

  She scanned software markets while she waited for her humans to do their work. Humans were slow and sloppy but comprehensible. Softwares were spooky, messy, working in mysterious ways, full of secret tics and legacy apps that could bring a whole heap of trouble on her head. Suppose she bought a breach hack, and it found what she was looking for, but the packet had snitch software attached? Law enforcement, crime lords, black-budget AI could rain hell down on her at any moment.

  People made fun of them, called them old-fashioned and inept, but Ankit decided to take her chances at a human brokerage. Software archaeologists or engineers might not be able to match the breadth of scope of a machine broker, some of which could scan through thousands of softwares a second to find the right one for the job, but they made up for it with the depth of their knowledge. Even when scanning software could parse every packet of code, foresee every potential trigger, it was notoriously bad at assessing outcomes. A human broker, at least, was working with a smaller number of apps that they knew well and had seen in action enough to know more or less how likely a given software was to fuck her over. She called her favorite.

  “What’s the target this time?” Mana asked.

  The past three elections, Ankit had had some reason to call her. Shipping manifests one year, and Emirati birthrates the election before that. Access to an opponent’s email during Fyodorovna’s first campaign, when things were extra ugly.

  “The Cabinet,” Ankit said. “I need to know why someone is in there.”

  “That’s . . . difficult.”

  “Difficult. Not impossible.”

  “Correct.” She told her t
he price. Ankit had to fight not to flinch.

  A quarter, maybe a third of their entire campaign budget. Two weeks’ worth of robodustings; a week of blips. The right thing to do was go to Fyodorovna, get her to sign off. She could talk the woman into anything, always. It wouldn’t be hard . . . just time consuming.

  But going through Fyodorovna meant putting her neck in the noose. It meant that when the Arm manager lost the election, she’d blame Ankit for it. Which would fuck up Ankit’s only hope of avoiding the gutter.

  Because Fyodorovna would be fine. Arm managers always were. Some charity or shareholder or someone else she’d done favors for would find her a place. Always helpful to have a somewhat famous face up your sleeve, to impress difficult clients or charm potential money. And wherever she landed, she’d need a chief of staff.

  “Sold,” Ankit said.

  “Do you want to run them, or should I?”

  “You do it,” she said, signing off on the standard dummy invoice she always billed her. Security for a campaign donation site, on the fraudulent letterhead of an actual, legit software security firm. An audit from Finance or Campaigns might ping the fact that the firm in question never filed a corresponding invoice, but audits were like shark attacks—really terrible, and really unlikely.

  On the grid, Ankit almost collided with a shopkeeper arguing with a woman who appeared to be swathed in loops of a hundred different brightly colored fabrics. Her jaw bug translated as best it could, between Mandarin and the jerky pan-glossic stew that late-stage breaks tended to induce:

  You can’t stay here. Go over there, maybe. They serve food at the Krish—

  We made fire. All of us together. We set them all on fire.

  You need to go. I don’t want to call Safety. You’re scaring my customers.

  Your customers should be scared. We are made of fire and we will burn you all to ash.

  Joshi won first place, pinging her an hour later to say he’d come up short. The file had three separate injunctions on it, something he’d never seen before, and who was this, the Nineteenth Dalai Lama?