by John Scalzi
“But the contract remains what it is, Mr. Stratton. Can’t wriggle out of these things, you know.”
I licked my lips. “I’m pretty good at not getting noticed. How’d they spot me to round me up?”
The lawyer mounted his bike. “I don’t know Mr. Stratton. Like you, I was just called in to take care of this. I’m just a turker, making some side money.” He picked up speed, pulling away from me. “You know how it works. I don’t know who you are, or what you were doing. None of my business. I was just here to pay your fine and get you on your way.”
He left me there on the quiet rundown streets. I flipped through my phone’s address book and emailed the turker’s address I’d gotten the job through, but it bounced back.
Annoyed, I started a quick jog after the lawyer, sucking air shallowly thanks to the bruised ribs. The money was a magnet, dangling just out of reach.
Turker or not, someone was going to pay me the other damn half of what I was owed.
THREE miles later second thoughts occurred as I clutched my ribs, struggling to keep up with the lawyer’s leisurely pace.
In the early morning dawn peeking over sullied and coal-stained brick I realized more and more people were filling the streets I was huffing my way through.
Again, an odd and silent community of well-off homeless stood near their collapsible mobile structures. I smelled eggs and sausage sizzling: both my mouth watered and my stomach twisted at the smell of food, not a good sign after all the jogging.
The great old Ambassador Bridge loomed over the buildings, the gaping bombed ruins of the roadway overhead thrumming in the wind. Thank you Canadian Air Force for that one…
I turned a corner, and into a scene that, for a moment, didn’t make any sense. The parking lots and gardens of this area were overrun with massive tents, large RV-type vehicles with masts, lean-looking roadboats, and tens of thousands of people.
Some sort of instant Midwest Burning Man festival, it seemed.
The lawyer disappeared into the center of the mass of people, and three very burly bikers stepped forward. Dark shades already on in the morning sun, their leather jackets festooned with tiny tags and symbols.
“Where’s your ID?” the first asked, long beard whipping about as a dust devil passed by, fluttering tent flaps and flags on poles all around. Roadboat rigging twanged a chorus.
“I must have left it somewhere,” I said, calmly walking toward them, trying to eyeball where the lawyer’d disappeared.
“Nice try. You can’t.” The nearest biker bodychecked me away. “Fucking footprinter.”
My ribs flared pain hard enough to make me suck air in through my teeth.
“Listen.” I held my hands up. That made it hurt more. “I’m not trying to cause any trouble. But I need to talk to someone…”
“You got trouble understanding?” The biker’s tone was familiar. The sort of negotiating tone used to indicate he’d agree not to stave in my skull if I agreed to leave the camp.
I backed away.
“Get out, footprinter…Get out now.”
I turned around, wincing. Back to the bar, then. Only this time I called for a cab.
But things didn’t exactly get any better there. Lawrence sat on a chair inside the door, but a big closed sign he’d hand-lettered had been hung on the door.
“What the hell’s going on?” I asked.
“Maggie went home. No bartender, no bar.”
I blinked. She had no reason to be home…it made no sense. What could she be up to? My stomach twisted. I still had a bus pass. I ran like hell in time to make the morning bus out to the Wilds.
Maggie’s car wasn’t at the house when I got there.
And the lockbox, two miles out in the depth of the Wilds, wasn’t there either.
I sat next to the empty dirt hole, my back against the root, and flung an acorn out into the bush. Cute little Maggie, the bartender too wispy to be in a brutal downtown.
She was a nomad, stringing her way through the brutal and lawless Wilds of the continent. Maggie was probably tougher than me.
Certainly smarter.
My savings had just been wiped out, and she probably had enough to make the next leg of her journey.
IT rained most of the way back. A dirty, whipping Detroit grimy sort of rain. I watched the remains of it congeal on the outside of the bus’s windows as I was jerked back and forth between the quiet mass of commuters making their way in.
I recognized one of the guys several seats ahead of me. One of the squatters in the Wilds who’d given me advice on my garden. He had dog tags hanging off a necklace, something a lot of the reclamation groups off in the Wilds had. Little kudos for each other, signs that told each other where they stood in their own subworlds.
They would be happy to welcome me into their little tribe, I had no doubt. I could teach self defense in one of their crèches. Sleep on recycled packing foam beds. Help out in their gardens.
But I’d done the farmer boy routine. I’d joined the army to leave that. Not my talent, I’d found. I’d found my talent the day seven nomads descended on the farm I was working at.
I blinked at the dirty rain. Hadn’t thought about that in too many years. The crack of a gun, the screams of the wounded.
All too easy. Shooting people, that was. Easier than deer, mostly. But it left you odd, somehow. A little less human each time, but with the knowledge that you could do it if it came to it.
I thought about standing in front of the bar. Thought about all the work put into the brick house. Thought about each bill taken home, buried near the tree.
Maggie pulled one over on me, and I didn’t hate her for it. Not a bit. I hated myself for falling into a routine, a sense of complacency and tired resignation. A miasma of life that had made it so easy for her to do this to me.
Things didn’t come to people who waited. Who picked over the trash and hoped to find treasure. It came to those who grasped.
But then I wondered if that was the same attitude that had led the world to burning up its resources and leaving the dregs for us.
Lot of maybes and buzzing going around and around in the back of my head. I quashed it all. I’d made a decision. I wanted my damn money.
After that, I’d figure out what I was going to do next.
I walked to the Edgewater compound and pounded on the gates until a dubious S. Whatten ambled out to regard me through the chicken-wired bars.
“What the hell do you want, Stratton?”
“The lawyer, who was he?”
Whatten’s pitying look dripped scorn. “Come on, Stratton. We don’t know the laywer’s name. And don’t play like you’ve never encountered one and don’t know the routine.”
I did know the routine. Since the Lawyer Protection Act lawyers used public encryption keys, not names, to protect their identities. Too many of them found hanging from lamp posts by their necks. “His key, give me his key.” It could have been someone turked to represent the lawyer in real time, with an earpiece directing him what to say and when, or an apprentice lawyer turked out, or maybe the real lawyer.
Hard to tell these days. Risky profession.
“Expired. Stratton, what’re you doing?”
“They owe me money. I want paid. I’ve seen him out by the bridge, hiding among some homeless camp. Who paid for my fine, maybe you know that?” They had to have something.
Whatten moved closer to the chicken wire. He didn’t touch it. Electrified. “You really want the lawyer that bad?”
I folded my arms and nodded.
“Okay,” Whatten said. “We want him too. We want to know what the hell is going on. You get in there, you find him out, or anything out, we’ll straight up pay you for the info.”
They were that fucking desperate for any tidbit. Hiding here in their sandbagged fort. I felt a shiver move up my back.
“I just want them to pay me up. Anything I find out, I’ll pass on.”
Whatten bobbed his head a bit, consider
ing whether to trust me. That little cloud of desperation hung over him.
He buckled. “I’ll give you a car rental chit, straight cash bonus.” He named a price.
Good price.
These kids were scared.
I took it. “What do you know?”
“Your fine, it was paid by Spaceship Detroit, a nonprofit.”
Sounded odd. “Who they hell are they?”
Whatten didn’t know.
“What do they do?”
Whatten, again, didn’t know.
But it was something. I turned my back on him.
Spaceship Detroit. They’d pay up. Or give me another job. I’d get roughed up for big money.
But mainly, I could sense it out there. Something moving through the city. Something big. And I wanted to rip a piece of it off for myself.
S. Whatten knew it was out there too. He wanted to figure out what it was.
Bad enough to pay me to do it.
Things were perking up a bit.
THE electric car the Eddies rented for me was fully charged, plugged into a public meter. It was a raked back egg-shaped affair of carbon fiber and plastic windshield on three wheels. I swiped the chit Whatten gave me by the window and the car unlocked itself and the doors swung up into the air.
I settled in, running my fingers over the wheel, adjusting the seat just so.
Luxurious.
My father used to take us out for special family trips in his car, when the farm had mulched up enough biodiesel in the yardpits.
Just like then, when the doors shut, it was just you inside. Like when you walked into your own house. The outside world seemed just that, outside. A barrier between you and everyone else.
It was like one of those animes where the hero puts on invincible, giant, techno-armor.
There was an appeal to this. I always found the electrics more fun than the combustion ones as well. Instant torque all the way down through to the wheels in an electric, no hesitation.
I cruised around Detroit, slipping past the downtown section. It was a fortress, new and shiny buildings with their backs to the Slumps. The hardy core of a new Detroit, where people could live in walking distance to jobs and necessities. Where the city touched the river, and boats with massive parasails for mobility delivered their cargo along the docks.
I drove out into the Slumps, paralleling the river, aiming for the bridge, with a stop near a park where a team of kids were playing baseball.
One of the little-leaguers of some reclamation crèche was happy to sell me a bat for cash before the coach and chaperones chased me off.
The expedition continued to the edge of the bridge, where I found an alley looking out at the main street across. Most of the homeless appeared to have left the sidewalks for the strange city, just evident in the distance under the ruins of the bridge. Things were pretty quiet, just the occasional person wandering down the road on whatever errand they were on.
I fished around inside my pockets and found a pair of painkillers, which I dry swallowed.
Then it was the long wait.
Hunting was never for the patient.
Or the hungry. Eventually, after several hours of seeing homeless wander by who weren’t the lawyer, I ventured out to look for somewhere to eat.
THE alleyway my car was in sounded busy.
I paused after turning the corner.
The car had been cut to shit with axes, door panels slashed clean off, windows yanked free, and all of this left quickly as I’d arrived.
Everyone had fled.
I got in the car, the door creaking sadly as it swung up. I shut the door, looking nervously around, and tapped the accelerator to get the hell out.
As the car lurched forward the three dozen well-dressed people of all ethnicities came out from their hiding places and started running down the alleyway behind me. They wore suits, or cargo pants with the ponchos. Ten of them carried sharp-looking axes, while the others had large bags. A couple of them had a sled dragging behind them.
This didn’t look good.
The car was in bad shape. It coughed to a gentle stop as some part fell off from underneath onto the road.
A silent and expectant mob surrounded me as I got out of the car, the bat gripped in both hands.
I would need to grab an ax as quickly as possible after the first couple swings, I reckoned.
But the crowd moved back from me.
“We don’t want any trouble,” one of the axe-wielders said. “We just want your car.”
“Storing carbon producing energy in a battery still doesn’t change the impact of the original source of the energy!” someone shouted from the back of the crowd. “Damn footprinter.”
It was the second time I’d been called that.
“Shut up, Mary,” the axe-wielder said. “Sir, just step away from the car.”
“If you can’t see how to take care of your footprint, we’ll do it for you,” the woman shouted.
“Mary. Shut. Up.” The axe-wielder turned back. “You are not helping matters.”
I still stood there, bat in hand, keeping everyone at bay. “What do you want out of me?” I asked.
“Just your car,” the man said, exasperated.
“What the hell is going on?” I really wanted to know. I felt like I’d fallen down a hole into some alternate Detroit.
“We’re turning this area of Detroit into a car-free zone. We’re lead front scavengers, looking to recycle any cars in our occupied territory into useful machines and products. We have a reprap to repurpose the materials. That’s our job.”
I didn’t know what a reprap was. But even though things were hard on cars these days, you couldn’t talk about turning Detroit into a car-free zone with a straight face.
These guys were nomadic extremist nuts of some sort.
“But what’ll you do with the parts?” I asked. “What’s the point?”
The guy grinned. “Oh, we’ll put them to good use.”
A pair of the crowd advanced on the back end of my car and smacked their axes into it.
“Hey!” I yelled, pointing my bat at them.
But the moment was past. They’d written me off as a threat and began tearing into the car with gusto.
So I grabbed the guy nearby with the axe and twisted it free. His friends hardly even noticed, too caught up in their fervor for car destruction.
I dragged the man, wrapping his cloth poncho around his neck and arms in a knot he struggled against, down to a set of steps away from the destruction.
“What…the hell?” he gasped.
Dramatic, yes. And yet, it got the attention I wanted. Now I had an axe. And a bat.
I held the axe up and looked at it. “What’s your name?” I asked casually.
“Charles.”
“Charles. Pleased to meet you. I’m Reginald.” I loosened his poncho.
“That fascist bullshit doesn’t fly, dragging me off like that,” Charles spat.
Just like these other homeless, he was well-washed, well-shaved, with short-cropped hair.
I squatted in front of him. “Charles. I could care less. You chopped up the car I was renting. I have to think that violates my rental agreement. So you know who’s going to get flack for that? Me. That puts me in a bad mood. And I’m the guy with the bat.”
“And I’m the guy with some ten thousand other guys sitting just down the block,” Charles said.
Fair enough.
I set the bat and axe down. “Okay.” I pulled a chocolate bar out of my pocket and unwrapped it. “Just explain to me what’s going on.” I waved my hand out at the camp, and the people on the side of the street.
Charles still sulked on the stairs.
I tried again. “You’re all nomads, right, passing through Detroit?” Like Maggie, but in large tribes. Like locusts.
“Yeah, nomads. Low footprint nomads. We don’t stress out the environment. Take what we need into recycling. Recycle what we have. We’re here, but we’re
not part of the city, not part of the resources being sucked.”
“So what are you doing with my car?”
“You ever ride a bike?” Charles asked me.
“Yeah. When I was a kid.”
“It’s a perfect technology. Ten to fifteen miles an hour for the energy required for a human to walk. And humans are good at walking,” Charles said. “Evolutionarily, we’re designed to just walk and walk and walk all day long. Eat some calories and watch us go. But look at this shithole.”
He waved his hands around the street. “Not a bike-friendly city?” I hazarded.
“Fuck no! We’re in the second century of having this perfect technology, but we kept focusing on something far less efficient. The streets aren’t bike-friendly, the Wilds aren’t friendly, Detroit and a lot of these other Midwest cities are throwing money at electric cars and power plants that run on coal, thinking that if they can just swap things out life can run right back on the course it did.
“Meanwhile, people run in gyms or just get fat because they keep using the lazy technology. At ten miles an hour, man, you can live within 15 miles of your workplace and still get in.”
He had more, a complete rant, but I held up a hand. “My car, though.”
Charles looked back at me. “People don’t make voluntary changes, they just float downstream. Even when there’s a freaking waterfall at the end.”
“So you’re going to make people swim upstream?”
“No.” Charles laughed. “We’re going to blow the river up. The car makers, their ghosts are still playing with the city. We’re going to make it a carless city. Whether they like it or not.”
I picked up the bat. Edgewater was dealing with ecoterrorists.
The last thing I wanted to do was get between the Eddies and these guys. Things got ugly, when you were dealing with people who’d already thought the world was ended, thanks to people like the Eddies.
No amount of lost love between authorities and eco-anarchists.
But I still wanted paid. And their little tent city under the bridge hid the lawyer.
I cradled my bat in my arms and left Charles on the steps. Around me people were dragging the remains of my rental off down the street in what seemed like thirty different directions for scrap. Or recycling. Or to whatever a reprap was.
