by Tim Maughan
“Right. Sure.”
The CGM ship, quarter of a million tons of steel and abandoned cargo, dwarves them as they slip past. As Rush’s eyes adjust to the night he sees Toby wasn’t bullshitting him. The CGM ship isn’t alone; there looks at first glance to be dozens of container ships parked here, just a few miles off the coast of Ningbo port, all abandoned by their crews when the networks died, as the algorithms in Copenhagen and Beijing that guided them fell silent. Ningbo was, for decades, one of the world’s busiest ports, and ships would have been anchored here for days on end at times, waiting their calculated turn to glide in and be filled with the material existence of global capitalism. Rush tries to imagine what it must have been like here in those last few days, the last few weeks—crews waiting patiently on their vast vessels for instructions that never came, nursing anonymous cargoes, clueless as to what was happening. He wonders when the restlessness must have set in, when the anxiety must have become too much. What the rumors must have been. When the mutinies must have started.
“Toby said you’d heard back from the Zodiac?”
“Yeah. Yeah, all clear, man. Even a free berth for us. We can slip straight in, apparently.”
“No signs of life?”
“Not much, from the sounds of it. Few scavengers in the stacks, just the usual.”
“‘Just the usual’?”
Simon looks at him. “It’s fine, man. Nothing to worry about.” He slaps him playfully on the arm, turns his attention back to piloting.
Rush sighs, shakes his head. Simon. Simon fucking Strickland. Nothing to worry about.
* * *
Just days before everything went to shit, Rush had heard from Simon, a suitably cryptic e-mail appearing in his in-box. Simon, his wavelength ever tuned to the near future, had guessed something was up, had seen the patterns emerging in the flows of goods and data that made up the supply chains he obsessed over. But watching the news and markets wasn’t enough for him—he was an ethnographer at heart, and he needed to be out there, watching the collapse from within. His plan was to take the Dymaxion out for what might well be her final voyage; one last orbit around the world to watch global capitalism collapse in real time.
For Rush the timing was perfect. Like everything else, the airlines had stopped running, the airports ground to a halt. The Dymaxion might have been going in the wrong direction—taking literally the longest way around to where he wanted to go—but it was the only chance he could see of getting there, of getting back to Scott.
So less than a month later they were steaming out of Dover and along the English Channel, as aging RAF fighter jets streaked overhead toward a French coast that erupted in the low booms and lightning flashes of dropped ordnance, on an apparent adversary in some secret war the U.K. public knew nothing about. They rounded Portugal and Spain as the glow of burning cities lit the horizon, and picked their way through a Mediterranean filled with flotillas of refugees, as many of them trying to flee a collapsing Europe as reach it.
Simon had, largely, held it together while they watched the world collapse around them. In the Suez Canal he’d successfully bargained for their safe passage after the ship had been boarded by militia, three terrifying hours spent on their knees at gunpoint under a fierce Egyptian sun, while Simon negotiated with their leaders behind closed doors. Rush has no idea what he said, what he gave them, or what promises he made, just that he reappeared looking exhausted and shaken. He barely spoke to Rush or any of the crew for two days. But they got out of the canal without being stopped again, just waved through by gunmen at every checkpoint, shaken up but alive. The crew, mainly Filipinos and southern Indians, always joke that Simon is their lucky charm, some blundering, haphazard talisman that always comes out on top. The crazy, lucky bastard, they call him.
But that time nobody was laughing.
Rush slips out the sliding door on the starboard side of the bridge, breaking out of the air-conditioned chill as the humidity hits his skin hard, sweat instantly appearing along his arms. He leans against the weathered balcony railing. The sky is lightening, revealing dark, ominous structures against the blue. The vast steam stacks of a shuttered power plant tower above the port like an abandoned fortress, dead ever since the stream of bulk carrier ships laden with coal had dried up. Ningbo was one of China’s many input/output gates, Rush remembers reading somewhere—the rest of the world sent ships full of coal here, and in return got back ships full of cheap consumer goods. This was why the supply chains existed, in order to make transactions that logic dictated were most efficient on local scales work on global ones, through sheer size, brute force, cheap labor, and global inequality.
Simon comes out and joins him on the balcony, and with his first mate they fire up the outside docking-control panel, guiding the huge ship sideways into the berth on submerged aft thrusters. Simon peers over the side, trying to judge the distance.
“Fuck, can’t see shit.” He grabs the walkie-talkie from his belt. “Guys, need some light.”
Almost instantaneously a chain of small bright suns flare into existence along the quayside as the recon crew of the small inflatable Zodiac motorboat ignite their preprepared flares, plumes of white smoke billowing across the asphalt shoreline. The flares themselves are too bright to look at directly without singeing his retinas, but Rush stares past them, the flickering light revealing elaborate Chinese symbols and road markings stenciled in yellow on the concrete floor. Beyond that the stacks rise, thousands upon thousands of shipping containers, piled six stories high in neat lines, a seemingly unending field that stretches almost to the horizon, where it meets with apparently deserted apartment blocks. Up until the crash Ningbo was a city that existed just to fill and move these containers, and when that ended there must have been little left for its population to do. Nobody from outside knows how the crash must have gone down in China, but Rush imagines the cities hollowing out, the tower blocks emptying of confused people and the great Chinese migration reversed as they headed back into the countryside in search of family, food, and answers.
Shouts from the decks below and bursts of radio static. Ropes are thrown out, the Zodiac crew busies itself tying up the ship. Rush still stares out across the box city, though, silent in the morning light. He goes through this every time they pass one of these ports, regardless of the continent—transfixed by the sight of capitalism on pause, the secret network that kept the world running mothballed and abandoned.
His train of thought is interrupted by a huge burst of light above them. One of the Zodiac crew has climbed the top of the vast, five-hundred-foot-high super-post-Panamax crane that towers above and over them, and lit a flare. As it’s slowly waved back and forth it scatters light across the crane’s vast skeletal frame, yet more smoke rising into the dark sky. It looks to Rush like an act of victory and defiance; like news footage of freshly liberated citizens climbing to the top of statues of their now-fallen dictators, to deface their heads and celebrate their liberty in that brief moment of joy before worrying what will happen next.
“Haha! It’s Chris! The crazy fuck!” Simon yells and waves excitedly back. “Chris! CHRIS!”
Rush shakes his head, but gets why they’re so excited. Despite spending the last couple of weeks skirting around the mega-ports of the South China Sea, they’d never managed to come into harbor anywhere. You can’t just dock a huge fucking container ship like the Dymaxion by the shore and walk off—and perhaps unsurprisingly most of the suitable berths at the ports were filled with abandoned ships. Apart from the Zodiac crew, who went ahead and scouted out the ports in their little inflatable speedboat, nobody from the Dymaxion had set foot on Chinese soil as yet on this trip. Which had been the root of huge frustration and anxiety for Simon; Rush had seen it eating him up, the usually unfazed and endlessly enthusiastic figure reduced to pacing the bridge during the day, moping in his office at night. It was, of course, the main reason for this whole elaborate mission, for the last four months they’d spent risking their
lives at sea: to take a container ship halfway around the world and back up the global supply chain. It wasn’t the first time Simon had done it—he’d taken the Dymaxion up the chain at least once a year, to Rush’s knowledge—but it was the first time he’d done it since the crash. The first time he’d done it since global capitalism had collapsed, since the vast data networks that managed the ships and ports had vanished, and since the algorithms that decided what you wanted to buy and then brought it halfway around the globe from a Chinese sweatshop to the shelves of your local store had burned in the data fires along with the rest of the digital age.
It had all been building up to this for Simon, Rush realized. Decades of studying and picking apart the supply-chain networks—their vast spaces, both digital and very real—and now what he really wanted was to see them dead. As endlessly intoxicating as they were in their scale and grandeur, he could see Simon had grown disgusted by them; by the endless money and labor that had been piled into what was history’s greatest engineering achievement. The pinnacle of human effort had been to create a largely hidden, superefficient, globe-spanning infrastructure of vast ships and city-size container ports—and all to do nothing more than keep feeding capitalism’s hunger for the disposable. To move plastic trash made by the global poor into the hands of hapless, clueless consumers. A seemingly unstoppable beast built from parasitic tentacles, clenching the planet with an iron grip.
On his previous, precrash voyages Simon had ferried dozens of architects, designers, journalists, and futurists on the Dymaxion—all the hip infrastructure tourists, ready to pay him thousands so they could see it all firsthand, so they could ooh and aah at the Apollo-project levels of human engineering, so they could be wooed by this moonshot built to fill shopping malls. They’d spend a few weeks on the ship, staring out at the fields of containers in awe, before returning home to their speculative models, VR art installations, and thousand-word prose-poem odes to post-Panamax cranes. But Simon had started to hate it all. It had silently consumed him with anger and fury at its extravagance, its wasted potential, its inhuman cost. This, Rush was sure, was why this final voyage was taking place. Simon wanted to see it dead. He wanted to make sure, while the rest of the world crumbled, that it was crumbling too, and that it couldn’t come back to life, that it couldn’t start up again and reanimate the globe-consuming consumerist beast it had grown and fed. Simon wanted to see it dead, and to know he had outlived it, as though that meant he’d had some personal role in its defeat.
And, right there at that moment, as Simon excitedly barked instructions over the radio to his skeleton crew, Rush felt it too. For the first time since that rooftop back in Bristol, he felt that unlikely rush of victory, like they’d actually done it, the impossible destruction of the machines that were eating the planet, that they’d spent their whole lives raging against. They’d done it. They’d slain the beast. They’d won.
* * *
“How long we going to sit here, man? Really?”
Simon looks up at him from the charts and printouts that spill across his desk, scratches his head with the chewed end of a biro. “Seriously, Rush, don’t fucking worry, yeah? It’s just a minor technical difficulty. We’ll be moving in no time.”
“We’ve been here three days.”
“It’s not a problem. Engine room’s working on it. Just give it a couple of hours.”
“I hope so. When I signed up for this I didn’t think it was going to end with me dying of scurvy in the middle of the Pacific.”
Simon laughs. “Scurvy? What the fuck? There’s a reefer full of frozen orange juice out there.”
“Simon, we picked that up in Yemen. We finished it all off before we cleared Japan.”
“Really? You sure?” He starts to rummage around in his unknowable mess of papers. “I’ve got the manifest here somewhere…”
Rush sighs, shakes his head, watches Simon submerged in paper chaos. A single drop of sweat runs off his forehead and onto a chart showing the positions of the Pacific’s WWII munitions dumping grounds. Since the engine stopped the AC has been packed in, too, and it’s getting hot on the ship. He heads out on deck to grab some air.
The Pacific is flat, tame-looking. He hopes it stays that way. He’s spent the last few months keeping busy learning what he could about the weather radar—it was the only storm warning they had now, since the trickle of data from the satellites had finally dried up. At least the GPS signal seemed, for now, to be stable.
He leans against the railing, looks out across the mainly empty container hold, down into the still water. The ship feels deserted. It’s meant to have an operational crew of eighteen, and they’re down to just seven now. There’d been more than forty of them when they’d started—academics, futurists, some of Simon’s filmmaker friends, and a bunch of his students—but they’d lost most of them along the way. The biggest loss came when they stopped over in Sri Lanka, a blissful three weeks they spent on beaches and in jungles that ended in screaming and mutiny. A large contingent refused to get back on the ship, wanting to stay in paradise, to see out the end of civilization from the beach, surrounded by fresh fruit and curry. Rush could hardly blame them.
Something down in the Dymaxion’s bowels rumbles, her heavy steel skeleton groaning around him. Rush looks up and sees a puff of black diesel exhaust leap from the smokestack. He smiles, exhales, and the radio on his belt erupts into static burst and the sound of cheering and chatter, and amid it all he hears a screeching Simon shout, “Full steam ahead!”
The crazy, lucky bastard.
* * *
Every major city they’d passed in the last five months seemed to be shrouded in a dark mist, a residual, permanent smog formed from the smoke of constantly burning fires.
Manhattan is no different, and as its towers rise up ahead of them Rush can’t help thinking that they look defeated somehow, as though the smog is holding them captive, smearing their reflective façades in a dull grease.
Like the other cities they’d glanced at from offshore there was no way of knowing what was fueling the fires, of breaking down the percentages into how much was civil unrest, out-and-out warfare, or just an energy-starved population trying to keep itself warm.
He tries to peer into the Brooklyn shoreline as it slides past them, to see down streets and past apartment blocks, but the Zodiac is bucking too hard against the waves, shaking his skull with every impact. Easier to stare ahead, at the horizon, at Liberty Island and at that bruised, smeared skyline.
The original plan had been to bring the Dymaxion into the bay, to see if there was a free berth at the Bayonne container port, but when the first Zodiac recce had reported back that a U.S. Navy destroyer was sitting just off Battery Park, Simon had quite understandably dropped anchor out past the Verrazano Bridge. The garbled radio transmissions they’d picked up heading up the coast, from the few stations still broadcasting, painted a confused, often terrifying picture. Civil wars, militia takeovers, military coups, EMP strikes, shadow-government-sanctioned massacres. Some of it was clearly bullshit, badly communicated rumors, fake news, and conspiracy-theory mythology. Most likely, that destroyer was just sitting there watching out for pirates, but maybe they’d not be happy to see unannounced visitors, and it was better to be safe than sorry.
Rush had told them they could drop him in Bay Ridge, and he’d work his way from there on foot, but Simon was insistent he’d take him closer. Pretty soon they’re scouting around the mess of slipways and jetties that explodes into the harbor around Red Hook, until Toby finds somewhere practical to kill the Zodiac’s engines and tie up. Glancing up and down the shore, Rush vaguely works out where he is. It’s only an hour’s walk from here to Scott’s place, he figures. There’s an IKEA near here, a big one. They came down here on his first, and last, visit. They ate meatballs in the café and looked out at this same view.
It was less than a year ago, but it feels like a decade.
He hugs Toby hard and then climbs out after Simon, who
has lifted his bag out of the Zodiac for him. They stand for a moment, looking at each other.
“Well.”
“Well, this is it.”
“Sure is.”
It was, Rush realized, the first time since they’d left Ningbo that he’d seen Simon on dry land. He looked uncomfortable, out of place. Physically eager to get back to sea. It was as though this was breaking some theoretical fourth wall for him, stepping across some ethnographer’s line in the sand. His mission was to observe the end of capitalism from the supply chains—from the sea—and to step onto land was to make some ethical break, to go native. Or, perhaps more honestly, to shut down a detached position he’d maintained for himself, an emotional safe distance.
Suddenly he wonders questions he’d inexplicably never asked Simon, about family, home, friends, loves. Connections.
Now isn’t the time.
“You sure you don’t want to come with me?” he asks him instead. “Look for supplies?”
“Nah. Don’t think so. Push up the coast instead, try to find somewhere more chilled to land. Sure you don’t want to come? Last chance?”
“I’m sure. I’ve come all this way…”
Simon laughs. “You have.”
“Thanks. Thank you, man. I couldn’t—”
“Ah, shut up. It’s been a pleasure.”
They hug, and hold each other for a moment. When they separate Rush feels a tear on his cheek.
“Good luck, man,” Simon says. “Hope you find what you’re looking for. I hope you find him.”
“Thanks. You take care, okay? Don’t fucking die out there, Simon, please?”
And then Simon is back in the Zodiac, and it’s motoring away across the calm bay, out toward where the Statue of Liberty stands, somehow looking ancient now to Rush, like the kind of relic of a lost civilization he feels Americans always secretly wanted it to be.
