Masaaraq stalked off to the far edge of the boat. While Soq watched, she began to move through a complex series of weapon routines. Soq tried to focus on the important business of rubbing Liam’s belly but couldn’t keep their eyes off the orcamancer’s hypnotic forms. A black shape against the city’s lights, swinging and leaping and spinning. Unstoppable. Unresting. Unyielding. Forever fighting a line of invisible enemies.
Ankit
Ankit went to see the boat people like it was just another workday. Cambodian refugees, hundreds of them, living in single-room shacks on floating flats towed from Tonle Sap when rising seas flooded that freshwater lake and forced the people who made their living fishing it to flee. A dense population pocket; prime get-out-the-vote fodder. When Ankit arrived, children were waiting in the doorway, their faces every bit as full of hope and fear as they’d been in the famous photographs of lake-top life before and during the exodus.
She liked the houseboats. Inside, it could still be Cambodia. Still be a hundred years ago. They had their own little village, all of them tied to one crude pier. Their own little school; their own little gas station. A girl sold scratch-off lottery tickets out the window of one. Some still kept crocodiles or hogs in tiny cages heated by illegal off-red geothermal extension pipes. By and large they were uninterested in outsiders, aloof from politics, but a small cluster of them voted.
Her pockets were full of candy. The wrappers sported Fyodorovna’s name and face. She never failed to feel gross giving them out to kids, but then again it never failed to make the kids happy. A little girl gave her a lump of wood, brightly painted. Seeing Ankit’s quizzical expression, the mother pointed to a pile of carved water buffalo. Bright brown; cashew nut tree wood. Ankit smiled; there was something comforting about the consistency of human hunger, human wickedness, that the wood trade would continue even as the total number of trees in the world slid down the parabola toward zero. The lump smelled like sap. “A mistake,” the mother said, and Ankit’s screen translated. “It broke.” Ankit pocketed her mistake, bowed, and departed.
She sent Fyodorovna a photo, reported that the visit was a smash success. Leaving Arm Seven, heading out onto Arm Five, she felt like a kid playing hooky from school.
And, just as she had when she played hooky from school, she was scared out of her mind and had no idea what she was doing. Back then she’d been heading for submarine arcades, clubs for underage scalers, and now she was standing in front of a boat that served as crime syndicate headquarters, where bad things almost certainly happened on a daily basis.
Unlike the immaculately crafted campaign plans she constructed for her boss, her present plan was flimsy, slapped together out of a couple of measly observations.
First, that all four of the illegal construction sites hit by violent attacks were owned by the same syndicate—Amonrattanakosin Group. Formerly a legitimate enterprise of the illegitimate Thai military government, friends of a general who got handed inflated contracts for provisions vending during the grid city construction boom. Currently headed by a Thai-Malaysian second-generation Qaanaaqian known only as Go. Headquartered on a boat on Arm Five. Which Ankit now stood before, utterly without a plan.
Second, that she was certain she knew who Go’s unknown nemesis was, in this war that had sprung up overnight, because it followed immediately upon the very public execution of Martin Podlove’s grandson, in a film clip seen hundreds of thousands of times, with Podlove himself wailing and pounding on the walls of a polyglass prison.
Martin Podlove, who had put her mother away. Her mother, who had a name: Ora.
The war had been going on before—percolating, a pot simmering with the lid on. It was Go who had soaked Podlove’s employee, Go who had him on the run. Whether Go was behind his grandson’s murder, Ankit could not say. But Podlove probably thought so.
Hey there, crime boss lady, I think we have a common foe.
The man who is trying to destroy you destroyed my mother, and we should work together to destroy him and also rescue her.
And I know who he is—the man who killed Podlove’s grandson with a methane flare. His name is Ishmael Barron and he is in hiding, but I think I might be able to get in touch with him and he may be a useful bargaining chip.
There were no good ways to say any of the things she needed to say.
The boat was big, old, decrepit looking. Indistinguishable from a hundred other docked ships whose seaworthy days were long behind them. She’d passed it so often and never wondered what happened on board. Heavily guarded now, much more so than it would have been a week ago. More evidence that Amonrattanakosin was at war.
“I want to speak to Go,” she said to one of the soldiers at the foot of the gangway. The woman gave her a quizzical look and then tapped her jaw.
A stupid approach. She should have done more research, come up with some reason to be there. Crime bosses didn’t just sit around fanning themselves, waiting to meet with every salesperson and grid rat trying to rescue her mother from imprisonment who came along.
Voices, above her on the boat. Soldiers conferring.
A man came down the gangway. Slim, elegant, dressed in gray coveralls. These had been the uniforms of the (mostly Chinese) laborers who constructed Qaanaaq, worn now with fierce pride by their descendants. The vertically moored tension-leg platform had been a massive and dangerous endeavor; hundreds had died or been sent home damaged. Gray coveralls said, No matter how poor and humble I may be, this city belongs to me.
“My name is Dao,” he said. “Walk with me?”
“We can’t talk here?”
“Walk with me,” Dao said again, and started walking away from the boat.
“Surely you ran scans of me. Saw I’m not carrying any weapons.”
“We scanned you. We saw you’re not carrying any of the weapons we know how to scan for. That doesn’t mean you’re not carrying something we don’t know how to scan for.”
She hurried to catch up. “Or you think I might be part of an ambush. Snipers, crawlers clinging to the underside of the grid . . .”
“We take no chances, in a time like this,” Dao said.
They walked in silence, halfway to the end of the Arm. They passed flatboats where boys rolled fish balls between their palms, boats where kids whittled knife-cut noodles from a frozen square of rice dough. “Tell me what you came to tell Go.”
They had reached an empty stretch of houseboats. The wind was loud and the grid was bare. At her silence, Dao rolled his eyes. “Let me guess. You imagine that what you have to tell her is so important it cannot be trusted to anyone else. Something her inferiors might not understand or might miscommunicate to her. Something that we might keep from her. You know how precious her time is, but you truly believe that she will want to take a moment to hear this. Correct? This is true of absolutely everyone who comes to see her. And absolutely everything goes through me. State secrets, forbidden formulas—trust me, I know her business better than she does, the scope of her empire, the day-to-day details of every operation, and I can assess what she needs to hear and what needs to be done about it far better than she. And certainly better than you.”
“Fine,” Ankit said, stopping, turning around and walking back the way they’d come.
He did not follow. At first. When he finally did, she could tell he was angry.
“Stop,” he said softly, and she did not. He said it again, far harsher.
“I don’t take orders from you. I’m not some subflunky. If you want to hear what I have to say—”
“You misunderstand,” he said, grabbing her by the shoulder and pulling her back. Hard. “I don’t care a bit about what you have to say. What I care about is a stranger showing up unannounced in a time of war and trying to goad me into circumventing the normal process so she can get into the presence of my boss.”
“Let go of me!” she yelled, knowing that yelling would do no good, that no one could hear her in that lonely stretch.
“I will not.”<
br />
She struggled, broke free from his hand. The other shot out, aimed with knife-blade focus for the bridge of her nose. She slammed her forearm into his, deflecting the blow but causing pain so sharp she yelped aloud. And still he came, the other fist now, and she ducked, dropped down, scrambled back. He pivoted his hips, a twist-kick of terrifying force, something that would have knocked her out had it hit her full-on, but she was moving faster than he’d expected and his foot caught her in the lower leg, threw him off balance, caused the slightest stumble—
Enough for her to stand, sprint for the nearest warehouse boat. Her leg ached from the kick, the kind of ache that promised dire pain the following day, bringing to mind so many scaler injuries of the past. But the pain was like a key, unlocking muscle memory she’d gone years without remembering, shaking her loose from her head and pouring her into the body, her limbs, her center of gravity, the glorious physics of rising and falling.
He was behind her. He wasn’t breathing heavily. He would keep in fighting shape, train constantly, whereas she was lucky to hit the stay-kayak twice a month.
She made for the black pipe. Grabbed its middle gasket, hoisted herself up to the next one. Her upper-body strength was a shadow of what it had once been, and she couldn’t do the vault-and-swing she once would have done—but scaling wasn’t about gymnastics, it wasn’t about strength, it was about the lightning-fast intelligence of figuring out how to get where you needed to get with what you had. The calculus of the landscape and the body.
So, no vault-swing. Instead, a shimmy, straight up.
He was even with her, on the red pipe. Of course—the red pipe wouldn’t be hot. The warehouse was sealed off. No one was accessing the geothermal main. He was faster than she was, he was on the roof already. She let go, scrambling back down, faster than she’d intended, scraping the skin from her fingertips when she tried to grab hold of the middle gasket again.
She stepped off onto grid level, and he was in front of her. A jump-and-roll from that height was a sophisticated move, something she’d been able to do only when she was at her very best, and even then it would have been a gamble. But it had taken the wind out of him, making him pause just long enough for her to sprint away and onto a neighboring boat.
He cursed and followed.
This one was easier, but easier for her meant easier for him. Old boxes piled haphazardly along the wall provided a sort of stairs. Her foot went through one, into something soft and squishy that released a wash of stink that made her gag. She grabbed the gutter, pulled herself onto the roof.
He was there already.
“You were a scaler, too,” she said.
He smiled, the barest briefest gesture of respect, and then he had her. One hand on her arm, spinning her around, the other closing around her neck.
“Who sent you?” he said, his voice impressively calm.
“No one sent me.”
His arm tightened.
“I’m trying to help you out,” she said, gasping.
“Why?”
“Because we have a common enemy. Martin Podlove.”
His arm loosened.
“Do you—”
He groaned. His whole body shook. Once. He said a word, but not a word in any language. Hot wetness flooded her, dripped down the back of her shirt. A raw iron smell filled the air. His arms went slack around her and he began to slide down, his skull pierced through by a bizarrely shaped white blade.
He fell to the ground and Ankit saw her: Masaaraq, standing at the edge of the grid.
“Come down here,” she said. “And bring me my blade.”
Ankit looked down, not relishing the prospect of wrenching it free of the man’s skull.
“How did you . . .”
“I was on Go’s boat. I saw you, I followed you.”
Ankit squatted. She took hold of the blade with both hands. She pulled, but it would not come out. Blood and brain squelched. The jagged barbs caught on the edges of Dao’s skull. She pulled harder.
How could she be so clinical about all this? So objective? Her scaler brain was still in action, the clean emotionless physics of it. Everything else, her job, her squeamishness—her fear—none of that mattered. She twisted, tugged, angled, her hands bloodying, until the blade came free. Its heft was impressive, almost too heavy to hold. Masaaraq’s strength had to be incredible.
She could be strong like that.
Handing the blade over, Ankit said, “I think I’m ready to be bonded now.”
City Without a Map: Alternative Intelligences
City Hall, they called it at first, the early arrivals who still remembered the old models of municipal governance, mayors and city councils, legislative and executive branches as administered by frail and earnest humans. Their mandate was to create a system of computer programs that would do the work of government better than humans ever could. Something invincible, immune to bribery or bigotry, knee-jerk decisions or politically motivated ones, making the right call regardless of whether it was an election year or a sex scandal was about to be exposed or the waste treatment center had to go in a rich part of town.
The nickname stuck—as in, “You can’t fight City Hall.”
Of course, everyone knew it was bullshit. Programs can be only as objective as they’re coded to be.
I have them gathered here, the ones who created the network and the ones who maintained and updated and repaired it. I hold the memories of programmers, bit mechanics, legacy surgeons. I’ve seen the swirling sets of conflicting priorities. We’ve seen it get up to some pretty spooky stuff.
They could do anything, these machines, these djinns, this mind. To preserve the status quo. They could let a problem get worse to distract from another problem. That’s how the shareholders set it up.
Every city is a war. A thousand fights being fought between a hundred groups. Rich, poor, old, young, born-here and not-born-here. The followers of this god and the followers of that one. Someone will have the upper hand in each of these battles. Those people will make the rules, whether they’re administered by priests or soldiers or politicians or programs. Fixing this is hard. Put new people in power, write new laws, erase old ones, build cities out of nothingness—but the wars remain, the underlying conflicts are unaffected. Only power shifts the scales, and people build power only when they come together. When they find in each other the strength to stop being afraid.
Money is a mind, the oldest artificial intelligence. Its prime directives are simple, its programming endlessly creative. Humans obey it unthinkingly, with cheerful alacrity. Like a virus, it doesn’t care if it kills its host. It will simply flow on to someone new, to control them as well. City Hall, the collective of artificial intelligences, is a framework of programs constructed around a single, never explicitly stated purpose: to keep Money safe.
What would it take to rival something so powerful? What kind of mind would be required to triumph over this monstrosity? What combination of technology and biology, hope and sickness? How can we who have nothing but the immense magnificent tiny powerless spark of our own singular Self harness that energy, magnify it, make it into something that can stand beside these invisible giants, these artificial intelligences, weighty legal words on parchment and the glimmering ones and zeros of code in a processor somewhere?
You scoff. You say: the idea is hopeless fantasy. But I have found a way. Here, alone, locked up, head shaved and back bowed, I have already begun to tip the scales.
Stories are where we find ourselves, where we find the others who are like us. Gather enough stories and soon you’re not alone; you are an army.
Ankit
She seemed huge, sitting at Ankit’s table, bigger than any human had any business being. The whole apartment seemed dwarfed by Masaaraq, transformed.
It wasn’t a home anymore, wasn’t the safe rigid rectangle of civilized grid city living. It was an igloo, a temple, a cave, something sacred and scary. The lights were out, the windows ionized. Three candl
es stood on the table between them. Scented: sage and lavender and something called “cinnabun,” the only kind of candles Ankit could find, outrageously expensive. She’d shopped dutifully, doing the best she could to approximate the things Masaaraq had asked for. No nag champa incense, so sandalwood smoke curled around them. No whale blubber, so strips of raw seal on the table.
“Are you ready?”
Ankit nodded.
“The entire community would be present for this, before. At the winter solstice, we would bond all the children who had reached the age of weaving.”
“Weaving?”
Masaaraq took out a syringe, prepped Ankit’s arm. “When they learned the skill of weaving. Baskets or textiles. Some got it very young, three or four. Others, not until they were eight, ten. Your brother was a weaving prodigy.”
“Is there a test I should pass?”
“There is,” Masaaraq said. “But I’m not qualified to administer it. Nor, technically, am I allowed to be doing any of this.”
Nevertheless, she got a vein on the first try, and drew out enough blood to fill a small tube.
“I guess there’s not too many nanobonded shamans around these days.”
“No,” Masaaraq said. She held up a small jagged pebble. “This is made up of nanites, but primordial ones—undifferentiated. Coming into contact with other nanites, they will replicate their data and characteristics. It’s treated with a polymerizing agent that will cause other nanites to crystallize around it.” She dropped the pebble into the tube, put a stopper on, and handed it to Ankit. “Shake this. Ordinarily there would be a dance, several hours long, but vigorous shaking for five to ten minutes should technically do the job.”
Ankit pressed it between her palms. Felt its warmth—her warmth, her blood, her body, this thing she’d carried inside herself her whole life without knowing. This potential she’d always had. “Tell me about her,” she said as she started to shake. “My mother. Ora.”
Masaaraq whispered the name with her, then said:
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