Metatropolis

by John Scalzi

  The dandelion flower must die before its children can fly.

  With that thought, he smiles and cuts dried trillium into his stew.

  “Was it you?” Bashar asks. Close behind, silent. The man is an arrow fired in the dark.

  “It was always me,” Tygre says pleasantly without turning. He can smell the musk of Bashar’s desire for him that the other man will never admit. Bashar barely acknowledges women, finds men no fit object whatsoever for lust, but the scent will not be denied. “But I did not breach communications security, if that is your question.”

  “Could you have?” Bashar sounds fascinated.

  Tygre slices thin strips of garter snake jerky, then scrapes them into his pot. This will be a stew of the high places. After that, he faces Bashar. “Couldn’t any of us?”

  Tygre’s clicker has been heel-smashed to black sand in the stream bed these past three weeks. That city man’s contract had its uses in getting him close, passage through certain difficult barriers, but had never been his true purpose.

  “You’re in trouble,” Bashar says.

  “With you?” Tygre cocks an eyebrow.

  “With everyone, I think. The Citizen’s Executive is stirred up. There are other rumors, people with difficulties.”

  “Everybody loves me.” He grins at Bashar’s stone face. “Well, almost everybody.”

  “Everybody is coming for you. Jack City scared us all.”

  “Jack City is dead,” Tygre says. He ladles out a bowl of stew. “It would be better if it sat up for a shift or two. We don’t have that much time.” Handing the bowl to Bashar, he continues, “Here. Take, eat, and be comforted. Jack City is dead, but Cascadiopolis is going to live forever.”

  Bashar plucks a spoon from the tabletop and eats. Everything he does around this man is wrong, he knows it. The flavor stops his thoughts. It tastes of the city, of Mt. Hood, of all the vanishing green in the world. High slopes and deep loam and the bugling of elk across the valleys. Glacier melt and the buzzing silences of the burn scars in summer.

  He is consumed by a moment of transcendence, and in that moment, sees the future.

  THERE is a woman with a gun. Another woman carries a knife with dire intent. A committee votes orders for their man Bashar to carry out. A satellite rotates on its axis, acquiring a target in the Cascades.

  Children run through the bear grass shrieking at the flowers. City-building manuals are stored in quantum matrices embedded in small river cobbles that fit in the palm of a hand. Silences amid the high forests remember times before even the first nations had passed here on calloused feet.

  The world is running down, but it will always be reborn. Coastlines retreat, and there are new beaches. Floodwaters recede and there is a dove on a drenched olive branch. Empires fall but people still break the ground for grain, and their grandchildren need to keep records, and so it begins again.

  Capital, rebellion, chaos, climate change. It all comes together so it can all be pulled apart once again.

  We wonder if it matters how he died. The city-kill will come soon enough—this day, next season, ten years down the road. There is no real difference.

  Tygre’s stew, his song, his folding of the place of the green city into a simple taste and a few words—these are the winds that will scatter the seeds. Different mountains, different meadows, estuaries that have never seen a volcano piercing the sky. It does not matter. The city will be born and reborn again until stamping it out will be like stamping out worms after a rainstorm.

  And this time, capital and rebellion and ancient scholarship have combined to ensure the future restarts without having to repeat every lesson of the past. We crossed a threshold, shed our Big Science and Big Industry in favor of little things which could be carried in a pocket and last a generation.

  Ideas, ideals, and no small measure of love in a cruel and dying world.

  BASHAR sits with Anna Chao as she carves the marker. Such delicate work is not truly suited to her style of shaping stone. She is better at ashlars and slabs. Still, someone must do this thing, and by daylight, for it is too delicate to be worked in the shadows.

  Though Anna carves a flame, the city has not burned yet. People are leaving anyway. Not in a rush seeking refuge, but in twos and tens and scores. The secret societies of couples and the tribalism of work gangs.

  They all carry stones, and each stone is filled with data. Most carry tools as well, enough simple wedges and hammers and crucibles to jump start the first year of effort in some other wild place.

  The grave contains three bodies. Tygre lies in the embrace of two women who did not know one another. The blood is on Bashar’s hands in the end. That is who he is, that is what he does, killing the only man he will ever love, and striking down the enraged assassins in the moments which follow.

  His days are shortened, too. The darts which ripped into his arm have left him with a paralysis which will be fatal in his line of work. Bashar does not mind so much. He just wants to see things set to rights before he walks off on his own. “I may be some time,” will be his epitaph, borrowed from half-remembered history but still true enough.

  A stranger approaches through the woods, a man clearly not accustomed to running down roads. Bashar meets the newcomer’s gaze, an old but serviceable pistol ready in his still-good left hand.

  “You won’t need that,” says William Silas Crown. “I just wanted to come see for myself.” He nods at the grave.

  Bashar knows there is no point in asking how. Tygre’s flame was all too visible far from the night-dark forests of Cascadiopolis. He does have one question, though. “Did you send him?” Bashar asks Crown.

  “I thought I did,” Crown answers slowly. “But we were used alike, you and I.”

  Bashar, Anna and Crown stay by the grave til evening, watching the satellites transit the sky. One flares, possibly turning into the sun, possibly launching kinetics at some ground target.

  IT would be nice to say that Tygre arrived in Cascadiopolis on the wings of a storm. He did not, for he came as a man. But he left with everyone who walked away before the end, his power multiplied by his name on all their lips.

  His stone yet remains, if you know where to look, blackened by ash, covered by creepers, silent and cold as the mountain itself.

  STOCHASTI-CITY

  TOBIAS S. BUCKELL

  During the world-building discussions the METATROPOLIS authors had, prior to going off and writing our own stories, I remember Tobias Buckell being very passionate about the idea of building some of our future cities not on some new piece of land, but in the very heart of existing cities. In Toby’s specific case, he was fixated on Detroit. This made sense to me, since Toby lives not too far from the motor city and travels there frequently, and has had ample opportunities to see the city up close.

  But beyond that, I think Toby was also interested in making sure, for the purposes of his story, that the cities of the future also looked like and had a connection with the cities of the present. In other words, that the people of our METATROPOLIS didn’t just look like suburbanites wearing tunics, or something similarly ridiculous. And also, to be blunt, that the people of our METATROPOLIS didn’t look all white and privileged—something that could easily be assumed given the genre, but which would have been entirely false for how America is shaping up in the twenty-first century, ethnically and economically (although hopefully we’ll fix that latter part).

  And so Toby’s Detroit is a city that feels like the urban areas of today, populated with the people who live there now and will be there when the future arrives, however it comes. It’s also a place where just a little bit of cooperation—in its many different forms—makes the city move. Take it away, Toby.

  The day before the city rioted was a day, for me, like any other. The day before Maggie pulled me deep into the shit.

  I was up late that night, bouncing at ZaZa’s, just barely covering my bus pass for the month. Same shit, different day.

  I had this fun
ny feeling that I’d be moving on soon, which I did every couple years, as a shrimp of a man stared up at me and asked, “What are you looking at?” And I thought, there had to be somewhere more interesting to be than Detroit.

  I’d gotten into a rut here.

  The shrimp pushed at me. Spoiling for a fight.

  I’ve found that the trick to bouncing, just as much as standing around and looking perpetually annoyed, was negotiation. Not negotiation as in the I’m-going-to-give-you-something-for-something-you-agree-to-do-for-me kind, but the sort of negotiation where you agree not to stave in some drunk bastard’s skull in exchange for his leaving the club.

  And although that doesn’t sound like negotiation, with a drunk, it really is. Because it takes a lot of circuitous explanation, leading, and alternate phrasing to make them realize they’re in for a load of shit.

  “Stop. Breaking. The pool cues.” I used a calm, patient tone. It was, after all, a calm and reasonable request. Even if it wasn’t a request, really.

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  Even with all the negotiation, however, you also end up negotiating how much shit they might be in.

  It was a Monday night. Usually a slow night. No jumping DJ using their antique original iPods lacquered in sparkling silver to run the floor. No girl’s night. No happy hour. No nothing.

  Just the regulars, quietly slinking their way towards an easier form of despair, hunched over the hump of the stained wood surface at the bar. Huddled against each other, backs turned to the expanse of the empty, unlit dance floor.

  Just the core regulars, and this belligerent asshole who was up in my face.

  “What are you going to do about it?” he repeated.

  He must have thought he wasn’t three inches shorter than me. Or that he wasn’t fifty pounds lighter. This little one had something to prove.

  Screw it. I grabbed the yappy guy’s hand before he even realized it and twisted him around in front of me. He struggled a bit, so I half-nelsoned him quick, then marched him right past the bar. Several customers turned to watch, beers raised in a mocking half salute, as I gently shoved the shrimp out the doors.

  He tried to turn around and come back in, so I sucker-punched him.

  As he sagged to the dirty concrete I grabbed his collar and threw him against the brick facade of the club, the ZaZa’s neon sign blinking and fitzing in front of us. Both of us looked eerie orange, then green.

  “Come back in, I break something,” I said, and left him there with one more good shove.

  He got it. Negotiations finished.

  Back inside the gloom the new bartender, Maggie, looked up from setting a beer mug down in front of an old man with a long, white beard. “Want me to call the Eddies?” She was probably too young to be pulling bar duty. But she was good at listening to wasted customers. She was also pretty enough to pull in the extra tips she needed, and surprisingly tough. The electrified deterrent clothes she wore were remarkably effective too. I’d seen patrons writhing on the floor after a butt pinch. Now they kept clear of her like cows from an electric fence.

  “Nah.” I leaned against the bar on my elbows. “If he’s got an issue with me now, imagine what he’ll be like when he wakes up with a bill after spending a night in the drunk tank. Last thing he needs is a lien on his house or something stupid. Call a cab. And where the hell is Lawrence?”

  “Still running late.” Maggie tapped the phone in her ear. I noticed she had a bit of a bruise under her right eye, covered with makeup. I wondered what from. Asshole boyfriend? Did she like her men wild and dangerous? It was certainly none of my business…

  She cocked her head. “Want me to call him again?”

  “Forget it.” I’d have to sleep in the storage room until morning. The last bus would be leaving downtown Detroit any second. “I’ll hit the cot tonight.” Besides, it’d save me some money.

  Whoever the pipsqueak drunk was, he was lucky. He was a downtowner and could get home in a cab without spending a good portion of his day’s wages. He could afford to get drunk.

  “That’s three times this week. Go take a nap when Lawrence gets here, I’ll drop you off.”

  “Maggie…”

  “Reg, I insist.”

  No one called me Reg. Except her. I’m Reginald. Reginald Stratton. But she could get away with Reg.

  It was the cheerfulness, I guessed.

  MAGGIE let her car drive us there with a cheerful abandon, setting the vehicle’s profile to aggressive and letting it weave in and out of traffic as it whined its way on. From the somewhat revised downtown, then on past the decaying warehouses and skyscrapers of the heydays, and from there into the sudden change of the nice suburbs. The ones within a short, very short, driving distance.

  I didn’t live there, though: I lived in the decay of the Wilds.

  The further out you got, the longer it took to drive, the more gas it cost out where battery cars like Maggie’s and bikes couldn’t easily get to, the rougher it got. And that’s where I lived.

  It began with the abandoned tract houses. Many just slumped over, windows shattered, roofs failed or riddled with pigeons and shit. I grew up somewhere like this, a dead end an hour and a half away from any major urban center.

  A safe place, a protected space, to raise your little ones.

  Or so we thought back then.

  All the while burning our way via car to and from work.

  Back then.

  Now those artificial greens and wooden houses were abandoned, for the most part, given away for the land to reclaim as its own.

  At the very edge of the Wilds I had Maggie pull over into the driveway. I pulled out a hundred, but she shook her head. “Let’s take a look.”

  She followed me in. I wasn’t sure what this was about, but then, Maggie was the only one who got to call me Reg.

  “Welcome to Casa Stratton.” I waved my hand at the three acres of vegetable gardens and the large greenhouse I’d built out of windows reclaimed from houses further into the Wilds.

  “It’s a fucking mansion,” Maggie declared.

  “House belonged to some formerly rich family, once upon a time. All the stone and brickwork stopped it from getting burned up for steam engines or winter heating.”

  “And you own it?”

  I shook my head. “Course not.” No one owned them. That would have meant paying taxes. These were abandoned, but couldn’t be purchased because no one would claim them, as that would result in having to owe back taxes, with interest, for decades. All these buildings floated in limbo, just like the outer skyscrapers: the Slumps. Perfectly good real estate, abandoned and not truly owned by anyone, and thus unable to be renovated.

  I knew a lot of people who’d give their right nut to live in the close-by skyscrapers. Instead they were guarded by private security, or even on contract by Edgewater. Those owners kept them from being reclaimed, but you couldn’t trace who those owners were. They were waiting for the good times to come back.

  Who wouldn’t kill to live closer to the urban hub? Let the mega-corp farms deliver food into where you all were easily gathered? No more gardening for myself, no more hour-long commutes and most of my month’s take going into transportation costs.

  “Looks nice, though,” Maggie said. “You got an extra room, I’ll move in. But don’t get excited, this is simple business.”

  “Leaving him?”

  Maggie looked confused, then touched the bruise under her eye and laughed. “You think it’s a guy? No, it was a lot of guys. Eddies.”

  “What’d you do to piss the Eddies off?”

  “Hiding out up in a penthouse in the Slumps. They found me.”

  “Ah. So you want to couch surf me?”

  “In exchange for half the cost of your bus pass, my car’s cheap to run.” She charged up the car at work, some sort of agreement with the owners. “Plus, buses are getting less and less regular. Could all quit soon enough.”

  Halving my transportation costs
. Sounded harmless enough.

  I agreed and showed her a spare room. There were seven. No real trouble, other than having a pretty roommate who was entirely uninterested in me.

  Welcome to poverty homesteading, I thought. But it beat getting flushed out of the city by Edgewater. I’d made the same mistake Maggie had when I first arrived downtown, seeing an empty skyscraper as an opportunity.

  Fortunately I’d had enough on me to pay the Edgewater holding fee and get loose.

  Every once in a while, I wondered what happened to the homeless the Eddies rounded up who couldn’t pay.

  LATER in the night, once Maggie was fast asleep, I padded out into the backyard and off into the Wilds. Survival training-wise: flitting my way through forest and suburban ruins.

  My bolthole was about two miles from my house, next to an old oak tree. Buried near a massive root, I had my whole stake in a lockbox.

  Sure, currency could devalue, but that hit everyone equally. With cash in hand and hidden, no hacker, frauder, lawyer, Edgewater flunky, or government, could get at my savings.

  Good luck finding this out in the Wilds.

  MAGGIE, on the way in the next morning, talked about the various cities she’d bartended her way through. Living out of the back of her car, charging up and moving on. She’d seen the East Coast, she told me. Now she was moving on through the Midwest, although she wasn’t sure how the car would do in open spaces. She was thinking about saving up for an ox. Or maybe a donkey. To pull it when power ran out, or when she couldn’t get gas to fill the generator in the back of the car.

  “Driving by day, sleeping under the stars, seeing something new every day. I don’t want to ever give it up,” she said.

  I lay slumped against the passenger window in my usual morning stupor, watching the dirty sidewalks slip past. Lotta trash was building up. Every other week pickups.

  But there was something new. Something I should have noticed on the bus rides in, but was too busy balancing in the aisle to see out the window and notice. The bouncy roads kept you busy hanging on if you didn’t get a seat.