Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  “We don’t need your money,” Barron said. “And there is no Reader.”

  Fill frowned. “Sure there is. Choek. She said—”

  “What I paid her to say.”

  “Then . . .”

  The portraits vanished. The lights went out. Fill heard the hush of a door sliding open, and then a second.

  Moving with surprising speed, Barron shoved Fill forward and pulled his grandfather back. Two doors slid shut. Locks magnetized. The walls de-ionized, and Fill could see outside. Two separate pods: he, alone, in one, the two old men in another. The city below, unspeakably beautiful.

  “What the hell is the meaning of this?” his grandfather hissed, seizing Barron by the arm. The pods were soundproof but miked, and he could hear them louder than life through the speakers in the walls.

  “What you said. A song-and-dance routine. You don’t remember me, Podlovsky?”

  Fill watched his grandfather’s eyes widen. No one had called him by his old name since he’d left New York City. He let go of Barron’s sleeve.

  “Of course you don’t. I was beneath notice. You wouldn’t have bothered to note the difference between my face and the faces of the thousands of other tenant leaders you were contracted to eliminate.”

  “I never eliminated anyone. It wasn’t like that.” But the old man did not sound convinced. Fill was shocked at how swiftly they had swapped roles. Gone was the timid decrepit creature halfway to senility; gone, too, was the terrifying titan of industry. Of course both personas had been an act. Of course his grandfather had been a scared guilty man trying to sound brave his whole life; of course Barron had been a vengeful monster buoyed up by rage and playing the part of a dotty old queen so as to execute a devastating retaliation for hurts a half century old.

  How long had Barron been watching him, planning, scheming, putting the pieces together, learning what he loved, how to get Fill to trust him? Or had fate dropped him in Barron’s lap one day and reawakened a coldblooded urge for revenge that had lain dormant for decades?

  “Eliminate, ugh, what an ugly word. No, you’d never do something so crass. So criminal. You’d manipulate others into doing those things. You’d sit back, and watch, and let your clients reap the benefits.”

  Grandfather took out his screen, tapped at it, trying to call for help. Nothing, of course. Pods were easy to seal off from outside signals. That was the whole point. Rich people always needed a way to escape. A place they could go and not be bothered, and not bother anyone else. Grandfather threw his useless screen at Barron, who deflected it with one arm. And then stomped on it.

  Fill didn’t bother to take out his.

  “Fine,” his grandfather said. “Kill me. Do what you came here to do. My conscience is clear. I did what I did for the sake of my family. My conscience is clear. But will yours be?”

  “I have no intention of killing you,” Barron said. And turned his head, slowly, from grandfather to grandson.

  “No,” the senior Mr. Podlove whispered. Here, his resignation broke. His unshakeable dignity crumbled. He surged forward like a crazy man, arms swinging, desperate—and was promptly struck in the gut by a club neither he nor Fill had seen Barron produce. While Podlove was doubled over, Barron swung it sideways, striking him in the face, knocking him to the ground.

  Fill cried out at the sight of his grandfather’s blood. But for his own fate, he felt little.

  “I’m the one you hate,” Podlove said from the floor. “Hurt me instead. Kill me.”

  “I am hurting you. Death isn’t a good enough punishment. To survive—to be haunted—to have to live with the loss of the people you couldn’t save—that is a fitting sentence.”

  Grandfather crawled to the door of his pod. Pressed his bloody palm to the polyglass. “Fill, I’m . . .”

  Five narrow feet separated them. But the gulf was unbridgeable.

  Fill pounded on the door, but only once. He felt no fight inside. No desperate will to survive. No drive to drop to his knees and beg.

  “One final piece is missing,” Barron said. Lights came on in the air outside the pods. Cam drones. “No one was watching when men like you made us disappear. An inconvenience for the wealthy, wiped clean. So that you could build this cushy life for yourself. So that you could go on to hurt others, the way your firm did. In so many places. With so many communities. Some of us stopped to film, but nobody cared to see. The world should see this.”

  The pods parted. Fill’s rose up into the air. Three of the drones rose with it. Three of them remained to record the other one.

  “What are you doing?” his grandfather said, and Fill could hear him just as clearly as when the pods had been practically docked.

  Fill wondered himself, but only in the most academic of ways. Shivers shook through him. The breaks, intervening. Would Barron lower the pod into the sea, open the doors, drown him? Would he raise him up as far as the strut would allow, thirty stories perhaps, and then let it fall?

  “Fill!” his grandfather screamed.

  “It’s okay,” Fill said. “I am okay—”

  The old man kept saying his name. He couldn’t hear him. The sound only went one way.

  Proximity alarms sounded. Fill’s pod shuddered, momentarily surrendering to the city’s emergency override commands, but then kept moving. Nothing so impressive there—software to disconnect from the emergency infrastructure was easy to find. The pod continued on its upward swing.

  Into what, Fill now saw. Four flames kindled in the wall of a building in front of him, inside a black circle wider in circumference than the pod he was in. Arm Three’s methane ventilation shaft. The evening’s scheduled flare.

  Fill was there. He was in New York City. He was watching a circle of cops beat a boy to death. He was watching a mother drag her child from a burning building.

  He was watching cherry blossoms shiver in Brooklyn rain.

  He was drinking expensive scotch in a hall bigger than any he’d ever imagined.

  Bloody snow. A baby polar bear. An eagle, falling.

  Right on schedule, the methane flare came to life. A coil of bright green fire three meters thick. Fill could see the crowds down at grid level. They pointed at his pod. They screamed. They took pictures. He smiled and waved. They probably couldn’t see him. A couple was kissing, oblivious to his existence, his imminent death. The pod ascended into the path of the flare. There was an instant where he could see the flames curl and wrap around his protective sphere, see the ripples rise and spread in the polyglass. Then it burst like a soap bubble, and Fill broke free from his body.

  Kaev

  The streams showed tear-wet faces, lit candles, hands clutching the possessions of lost loved ones. The ’casts played interviews with sad people and angry ones. The headlines wailed predictably, theatrically, pathetically.

  THIRD CONSTRUCTION DISASTER PROMPTS TERRORISM FEARS

  RETALIATION AGAINST WHO?

  HOW LONG WILL THIS GO ON?

  [insert name of interchangeable demagogue-of-the-week]

  DEMANDS TRANSFER OF ALL AMERICAN RESIDENTS

  Kaev stood on the grid, shuffling through outlets. Unthinkingly, he leaned back into a horse stance. His posture was perfect. The wind could not move him.

  Go had given him the basics. Four days ago, some shareholder had lost his damn mind. Martin Podlove, Go’s nemesis. She would not have imagined that he had it in him to care so much about someone, even his grandson, that he’d go on this much of a rampage. She made Kaev watch the video with her, where the old man saw the kid get killed. Watched him wail.

  “Of course he thinks I was behind the killing of his grandson,” Go said. “I declared war on him, and now this happens? He’d never believe it’s just a coincidence.”

  “Was it you?”

  “No,” Go said.

  “Would you have, if you’d had the chance?”

  “Shut up,” Go said. “He’s coming after me, and my assets. Hard.”

  And now: war. Targeting
illegal construction sites—her own. Maybe he didn’t care a fig for that poor kid, and his wild savage behavior was that of a cornered rat, or a king who could not let an affront go unpunished.

  Most people didn’t know who Podlove was. Everyone saw him, in that horrific drone footage; heard him screaming as his grandson was incinerated. Many outlets made the connection between that gruesome spectacle, broadcast for all of Qaanaaq to see again and again, and the subsequent carnage. But most thought it was a squabble between syndicates, Americans being American, brutal violence the only language they could speak or hear.

  Go talked about it a lot.

  Kaev didn’t care about any of that. His belly was full. His bear was happy, back on the boat. Slideshows on walls and in windows flashed images pulled from the feeds by bots set to scan for things pertaining to these attacks: prayer vigils, in memoriam sites, the names of the dead in forty different alphabets. Long lines of strong men and women outside Arm manager offices, employment halls. Wild hope in their eyes. Not mourners, mostly. They were looking for work. Construction sites all over the city had shut down. Other syndicate-connected businesses had started to do the same.

  The day was cold and the grid was crowded. People stood around looking dazed, or wept together, or embraced. An old woman stopped Kaev and pressed a small black square of fabric into his hand.

  “Thank you,” Kaev said, meaning it, wondering why she looked familiar.

  “Pray for us,” the woman said, her accent American, and Kaev wanted to ask, Pray for a lost loved one of yours, or pray that you and your loved ones will be protected from the wave of anti-immigrant violence that idiots will soon be unleashing on anyone they can? Instead he bowed his head to the woman and paused to take her in, to truly see her. The worn brown skin and the light in her eyes. The bandaged stump where one hand used to be.

  What happened to you, grandmother? What has life been like for you?

  The woman smiled at him, a magnificent smile, and Kaev went on his way.

  The squares of fabric were such a strange mourning custom. You’d find one, long after, cleaning out a bag or emptying out your pockets, and would have forgotten, at first, how and when it came into your possession, so that instead of making you remember some specific dead person or group of dead people it made you reflect upon mortality in general, your own in specific. Wondering whose pockets your own fabric scraps would one day clutter.

  Two scalers descended from a rooftop nearby to meet up with a messenger. Kaev braced for violence, but there was none. They were friends, the three of them, and they laughed together with the loud carelessness of the young.

  He had been young once. Had had friends. His sickness had not been so bad back then. They got into trouble, flirted with dangerous girls and boys, did crazy things, formed intense immediate bonds that lasted until the sun rose. Conquered an Arm or an arcade, ran from Safety, accidentally mortally insulted someone.

  “What a city,” the doodh pati vendor said, handing him a cup of sweet cardamom-smelling goodness. He pointed to a clumsily assembled nook where fabric flowers and methane candle flames fluttered. There were hundreds of these nooks, all over the city, each erected in memory of someone who’d died as part of Podlove’s war on Go.

  And each one made Kaev shiver with proxy guilt. He’d always known Go was a monster, but for years he’d been shielded from the evidence of her monstrosity. And he’d had his hate to hide behind.

  An illegal construction site might have fifty people working it at any moment. Most of them would have been swallowed by the sea when the grid gave way, its standard emergency practice when something threatened the structural integrity of an Arm. It would take weeks for the diving drones to complete a sweep, probing in and through the cluttered nest of twisting pipes and vents that made up the geothermal pyramid beneath the city.

  “No worse than any other,” Kaev said.

  “No, but this one is ours.”

  “Yeah.”

  Kaev went to the railing, watched the sea slosh at the struts underneath him, sipped his milk tea, smiled at the weird good fortune of being alive and unmiserable while so many people were not.

  Soq

  The biggest baddest deadliest puppy you ever saw. The bear lay on its back and let Soq rub circles into its soft stomach fur, smaller and smaller and then larger and larger.

  Needless to say, Soq had never had a dog. They’d never had a home stable enough for one, not really, and while there were plenty of grid kids with companion animals it tended to be a pretty rough life. For the animals, certainly, and for the people, when the animal was inevitably murdered or stolen.

  No one would murder this one, though.

  “Does he have a name?” Soq asked the orcamancer.

  “That’s up to Kaev.”

  “Liam,” Soq said. “His name is Liam.”

  Masaaraq raised an eyebrow.

  “He’s practically mine. If my father has a problem with it, he can discuss it with me.”

  Saying it still felt so strange: my father. The sad-eyed brute; the perpetual beam fight loser. Soq had read all about him in the long time they’d spent lounging on the deck of Go’s boat. Kaev was good, a skilled fighter with the stamina and savvy to make his fights entertaining. More than one fights writer had wondered why he lost to so many inferior warriors, and suspected syndicate involvement.

  Was that Go? Had Soq’s father been Go’s pawn, too, a tool in her rise to power, an easy way to fix fights, build resources and a reputation?

  They were belowdecks now. Kaev and Go. Not making love, Masaaraq had said—or the bear would be behaving very differently from its present lazy blissful calm. Catching up. They had a lot of that to do. And when would it be time for Soq to catch up? They imagined an awkward family dinner, screwball antics, hilarious malentendus, like the old movies that were the rage a few years back. Soq had a lot of questions, but they weren’t eager for that kind of conversation.

  “Where did you go, the other day?”

  Masaaraq frowned. “To see someone.”

  “See who?”

  “A friend.”

  “You have friends here?”

  “Shut up,” Masaaraq said.

  “What did your friend say to make you so upset when you came back?”

  “I’m your grandmother and you have to shut up when I tell you to.”

  “Whatever,” Soq said, but then did indeed shut up.

  A ripping sound snagged Soq’s attention. Masaaraq was sawing her bone-blade at a freshly repaired net.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” Masaaraq said.

  “Yeah you are. You’re slicing up that net.”

  “Shut up.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  Masaaraq said nothing.

  The polar bear had been a distraction. Soq should have been focused on the fact that they had parents, and they were reuniting, and there was a ton of backstory to get caught up on. That, and Masaaraq, the orcamancer, last of the nanobonded. And maybe they’d continue to ignore them, but an inquisitive kid like Soq could not let a chance like this go to waste.

  “You came here to do something,” Soq said. “But now you have to sit here like a schmuck while those two play house.”

  “House?”

  “Mommy and daddy. Happy family. Sexy times.”

  Masaaraq rolled her eyes. “It’s of no concern to me, what they do.”

  “But you’re here for a reason. And right now you’re wasting time. Right? That’s why you’re annoyed.”

  Masaaraq shrugged, but it was a shrug that conceded there was some truth in what Soq said.

  Masaaraq stood up. Sirens and flashing lights flickered across the water at the tip of Arm Three. Oversize evac drones buzzed in the air.

  Soq asked, “Are you here to kill someone?”

  “You have a lot of questions.”

  Soq scowled. “You have a lot of ways to not answer them.”

  “Here is a question
for you. The Cabinet. You know of it?”

  “Of course.”

  “If someone was in there. Someone you wanted to get out. How would you do it?”

  “Who’s in there?” Soq said, eyes wide.

  Masaaraq exhaled angrily and turned away.

  “Wait! I’m sorry. But I’m not sure I can answer your question. I’ve never heard of it being done before. Known plenty of people who ended up there, many of them against their will, but none that managed to bust out and tell the world about it.”

  Masaaraq nodded.

  “But you must know more about it than I do. Right? You’ve done your homework. I heard you lecture Kaev on the registration consent agreement, and you know it by heart, better than me or anyone else who grew up here. I have to imagine you spent a long time looking into this. What’ve you got? I’m pretty resourceful. So’s Go.”

  “So I keep hearing,” Masaaraq said sourly.

  “Let’s brainstorm!” Soq said. “Bounce ideas off each other. Share crazy thoughts.”

  Masaaraq laughed. “My best idea is plenty crazy already. I was going to knock the goddamn door down and march in there with a polar bear and kill everyone who got in my way.”

  “That’s a good start,” Soq said. “But they’ll have doors not even Liam here could knock down.”

  “His name is not Liam. That’s an idiotic name for a polar bear.”

  “You’ll need help. Software, maybe, a way to reroute control of the security systems. People who work there, who you can buy off or threaten or blackmail into helping you out.”

  “I’ve thought of this,” Masaaraq said, but she did not seem quite so contemptuous of what Soq might have to offer. “Some of it, anyway. Keep . . . brainstorming. I have to leave.”

  “Leave?” Soq said, laughing. “What, you have a haircut appointment?”

  “We’ll talk tomorrow. You and me and Kaev. And, what’s her name? Go.”

  “Are they my family, too? Whoever’s in there?”