Midnight, Water City

by Chris Mckinney

  Most of us, The Less Thans, don’t live on the island or on the low floors of new seascrapers and the high floors of old skyscrapers. We live in the float burbs, clusters of domed townhouses that bob on the ocean surface and descend two stories underwater. From above, they look like sinking flowers. The townhouses are magnetically moored far enough from the shore that they aren’t an eyesore. Mostly government workers, plastic skimmers, trade people, coral gardeners, small business owners, and resort and theme park middle management, we live on means just enough to enable us to do nothing after we put in our forty hours. Maybe we can afford a once-a-month trip to the AMP clinic. Maybe we save and purchase a week-long family tour of Epcot or Lucky Cat City once a year. Maybe we collect enough social security to experience a mundane retirement after eighty. Octogenarian Boredom on a Budget, or OBB, as we call it. It’s not great, but it’s better than living on the continent. Three hundred million surrounding the quad state Great Leachate, the biggest landfill in the history of man. Penicillin rivers running like veins from Missouri to the Nashville Dam. We pretty much gave up on trying to clean that up. Figured it was easier to just come out here and start a vertical expansion.

  I’m hovering home through the satin gunmetal sky. I’ve just quit my job. I’m still reeling. I realize I forgot to take my insomnia and anxiety inhibitors. I have access to the kind a person is only supposed to take for space flight. I’ve been double-dosing every day before I get home. The second dose curbs my anxiety about taking too many anxiety pills.

  A trip would be nice right about now. Not a one-week quickie family package, but maybe a long solo tour of something far from the ocean, like pitching in a hand to replant Yosemite National Desert. I sigh. I haven’t volunteered for anything my entire life except war. Besides, I couldn’t keep a fern alive in a rainforest. It’s too late for me now, anyway. I dock my SEAL and step onto the wharf.

  I walk toward my unit across planks that light up as I go. The sun is setting and a man, about a hundred years old, a retired cryptocurrency assistant to some VP, is fishing in front of his slip. Fishing in water too deep to bring up anything with that pathetic spool of line. “Any luck, Fred?” I ask as I walk by.

  “Not yet,” he says, legs dangling over the edge, his short-legged plaid foam fit humming cool air onto his skin while sweat drips down his face.

  Not ever. Poor guy. I pass him and hear the blaring of a neighbor’s iE projection, probably a classic movie. From outside, it sounds like the kind of entertainment geared toward an old man, the main character of the program an elderly badass with no romantic entanglements, just a retired guy on a mission, using his skills to help other people. Said skills usually involve a remarkable proficiency to bloody his hands. It’s the kind of show for a man whose capacity to dream is the only thing lower than his T levels. I pass the unit and begrudgingly head toward mine.

  Two units down, a group of teens on the same color tat pill, probably red because except for their outlines, I can’t see them well. The fact that they’re half naked and masked up like it’s Halloween doesn’t help. It’s how the kids do nowadays, trying to collectively express their individuality. Hair smart-gelled itself into fins, flower petals, and snakes. They ignore me as I approach—ignore everything outside of themselves, really, whispering empty secrets and doing everything else teens have always done. Like talking about how dumb the world is even though they haven’t really had to look at it yet. If anyone undoes the work of Akira, it will be this generation. Too young to remember Ascalon, to appreciate being alive. I pass them, practically a ghost in their eyes, and stand before my front door. The plank light under me is on the fritz again. I regret not taking my astronaut-grade anti-anxiety and insomnia pills. For all I know, the chief might’ve pinged Sabrina and told her I quit.

  The door scans me, then retracts, and I step in and down the three steps to the living room. And just like every other day when I get home, I wince at the furniture I can’t afford packed into the apartment I can’t afford. Part pleaser, part superficial, I have weaknesses that have always destined me for a lifelong game of catch-up, the goal as unachievable as leprechaun gold. After Sessho-seki, people bought into the idea that money didn’t matter, or, you never know, so spend what you’ve got. I don’t have that excuse. I always spent too much, most of the time before I even made the money. I’m not sure where the impulse comes from.

  Two steps in, a beaming Ascalon waddles full blast at me, calling out, “Dada.” I beam back and scoop her up, and after she gets her split second of affection, she’s ready to move on, so I set her back down. She runs off looking for something dangerous to sit or stand on.

  Sabrina walks in. Sabrina. Back in college, she was a nationally ranked pulse racket player, permanently injured a year before going pro. The first time she told me about it, I thought, how does a kid bounce back from something like that? A future of fame and fortune shattered in an instant, just like her knee. She went to the best docs to reconstruct it, graphed cloned ligaments, then rehabbed it, but in the end, even though she was still good, that loss of a step, that loss of a .05 on her shuttle time to the pulse, dropped her from world class to pretty damn good. From then on was a life of disappointment. She had to get an ordinary job. She became a cop. One on paid leave now, since she’s married to an old man and taking care of a baby in the float burbs instead of winning global racket pulse championships. Saddled with a toddler and probably asking herself every day how time can move so slowly.

  I see the disappointment now as she drags a changing table out of the elevator. She shoots me an angry glance because I ignored her calls earlier and I’m not jumping in to help her move the table as some form of apology. She sighs and turns her concentration back to the changing table, seemingly remembering that I’m an old man who might be too weak to move furniture. Who might one day need a changing table himself. At least it doesn’t look like the chief told her I quit.

  I turn to Ascalon. She’s sitting on a remote-control ball, the latest gimmick that’s supposed to prep toddlers for iE control when they hit early childhood. Her animated program blasts nursery rhymes. It’s a 3D spectacle starring a pig with cracked-out eyes that pilots an impossibly tricked-out SEAL in an animated retro-world—currently the size of our living room—filled with fins and fenders. Ignoring her show despite the fact that it’s all around us, Ascalon picks up her simplified baby remote control and mashes buttons. The ball squirts out from under her and bounces from wall to ceiling, back and forth, zigzagging through her program. Ascalon falls hard on her butt, crying. I switch off the pig and go to pick her up. But all she wants is her mama. I don’t resent it. I’m almost relieved.

  But Sabrina pays no attention to us as she drags the changing table into the living room, scraping the faux marble floors I can’t afford. I think about how many times this very scene must have played out in the history of humanity. I might as well be walking into a cave to an angry, disappointed mate who could’ve done better, an out-of-control child, and me, a burnt-out troglodyte who predictably didn’t bring home enough bacon again. I step to the changing table. Sabrina looks ready to resentfully accept help. I think about what Akira once said to me about how the numbers to the right of a decimal point matter more than the ones before it. How most people only see things as big or small and think big is more important. And how stupid that is. Without the numbers to the right of pi, pi just becomes three, she said. As I think about Akira, I put the baby down. That someone just cut Akira up like that. I hope she was doped up enough when the laser burned through all that bone and sinew. The thought that maybe she wasn’t puts my fists into tight balls. Instead of helping Sabrina, I punch a hole through the changing table and leave. And the bones in my fingers no longer feel hollow. Maybe I haven’t lost a step, and my violence was just in hibernation, hungry again now.

  After I exit into the chewing heat, I head to my SEAL. I pass the teenagers toiling in gray cloud humidity and boredom. I pas
s the neighbor’s, the one blaring his iE, but I don’t hear his program anymore. Even Fred the Fisherman isn’t fishing anymore. Instead, he’s standing at the edge of the wharf, looking up. His eyes are welling.

  Others step out of their units, mostly youngish and middle-aged couples dressed in self-adjusting trouser shorts and sleeveless air-conditioned crops. They step out of their units and look up. At this point, I look up, too, but I see nothing but dark clouds and Ascalon’s Scar. A couple sobs behind me. Then it hits me. I turn and the float burb crowd gathers, teary-eyed. The news has broken. Everyone knows Akira Kimura is dead.

  At first, I find it odd that they are all looking up. But then I get it. They’re looking at the scar. To me, Akira was a friend. To them, some of whom aren’t even old enough to remember Sessho-seki, Akira Kimura was a deity. Deities have always lived in the sky, beyond what we can see, but this one, unlike the others, was kind enough to leave her mark up there, granting people a secure feeling of divinity. She has given us a glimpse of what none of us can truly reach. She reminds us every day that we are lucky to be alive.

  I head to my SEAL, and before I lift off, I catch the crowd growing out of the corner of my eye. Their necks are craned in unison up toward Ascalon’s Scar. The quantum clocks have stopped. Everyone is weeping except for the teenagers who, masks pulled down, are frowning at the grievers with a pure lack of understanding.

  7

  I’m flying at top speed above the ocean. Looking down at the pleats of breaking water, I am amazed at how well-organized something as chaotic as the sea can look from afar. I break to the west side of the island and dip down to the well-lit coast. Seascraper cabana beach caps to the right, the giant aquatic theme park connected to the beach, shaped like a giant oyster with a pearl-like dome in the middle. Golf courses. A couple of shabby ones for the OBB, the rest exclusively for The Money. This side of the island is where a few of The Money live, the older ones who prefer land under their feet, who own prime acreage cut from lava rock fronting vast manmade white sandy beaches. I’m gliding over the estate of Idris Eshana, inventor of the iE. He died a few years back at 121. His château is being converted to a museum, soon to be another stop on The Savior’s Eye pilgrimage. It’s next to the shuttlefield where people transport to the continents and other faraway water cities. The whole scene probably looks like any point in the history of civilization, really, the past smeared with the present.

  I remember that when Sabrina and I first started dating, she was in awe of the people I knew. Of course, there was Akira, but when this island became the center of the world, I also knew top brass like NASA Director Parker and tech moguls like Idris Eshana, who came to help plan the construction of Ascalon. This is when a lot of The Money showed up to try to pitch in, or if their help was turned away, to witness. After Ascalon did her thing, a lot of The Money ended up staying. The island is conveniently located between the Mainland US and Asia, the world’s two financial, recycling, and tech giants. I stayed friends with some of these people. I may have even saved a couple of them back in the day, when zealots came and tried to blow up the entire mission. The crazies who believed that the apocalypse was meant to be. Sabrina heard old Idris tell the story of me pulling out my rail gun and seemingly firing at random into a crowd of protesters. My own security team thought I had gone crazy and almost gunned me down. The truth is, I fired once. And it wasn’t random. I saw green. And the kid I shot was packing a dirty bomb in his backpack. But to hear Idris tell it, I performed like an action hero, and Sabrina was smitten. Idris winked at me after she walked away. Nothing like having the richest man in the world wingman you.

  It’s easy to drift into nostalgia up here in a SEAL. Not many fly them, so there’s never really traffic. SEAL licenses are only granted to first responder, military, and science personnel, and even then, you need to be of a certain rank. I own mine, but I put it up for collateral to buy the float burb unit, so who knows for how much longer. Kind of like me, it’s becoming obsolete anyway. There aren’t really serviceable roads on the island anymore, and vac tube trains, hovers, and heli-taxis get everybody where they need to go. The Money still have their SEALS and employ ex-cops and ex-military like me to chauffeur them around, dangling supplemental pension and all, but even they hardly use military-grade flying vehicles anymore. We just don’t gotta go that high.

  Maybe I’m feeling weepy about the past because of the death of my best friend. Maybe it’s the mess I just made back home. But most likely it’s because I’ve called in a couple of favors from The (old) Money pals, and it’s always been painful for me to ask anybody for anything. Another of my personal flaws that eighty years of supposed learning never stomped out. I’m hovering over a prepubescent sweep of native trees now, a forest once wiped out and then replanted. They take three hundred years to hit full, majestic maturity, so these are just twenty-foot saplings that are about my age.

  Right now, I’m heading to see Jerry Caldwell, a retired attorney from Mile High who’s also one of the heirs to the biggest corn syrup company in the world. Like Big Tobacco before it, the industry took a giant hit in the US when there was outcry that these companies were knowingly poisoning the children of the nation with GMO junk food. And like Big Tobacco, her family’s company simply concentrated production and sales abroad and continued to thrive by poisoning foreign children in countries who supposedly weren’t as free as in the US, but let their people poison themselves all they wanted. Jerry came here with her parents when the rest of The Money did, offering to throw their fortune into the Ascalon Project. But they were among the rejected who ended up just staying in their brand-new deep-sea lofts to watch. Akira was downright mean about it to Jerry’s father—the thought makes me laugh to this day. What she said to one of the richest men in the world was, “What are you proposing we do? Bribe a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite with a carbonated beverage and ask it to smile and go away?” The old man never got over the insult. But like everyone else, he stayed for the show.

  Jerry and I go way back. I actually met her through Akira. They’d gone to grad school together on the East Coast. Princeton-Columbia U. After Akira finished her undergrad degree in Japan, she split and went on to do her PhD in astrophysics. Jerry was a freshman at the time, double majoring in physics and economics. There are thousands of books on Akira’s life, but most concentrate on the crazy days of Sessho-seki, while others attempt to recreate her experiences as a childhood genius. Her piano story has been written hundreds of times, on the same level as Newton and his apple at this point. But none of the biographies delve into Akira’s college days, when she was actually learning. People aren’t into that sort of thing. They want to know what was going on when someone was doing, not learning. Besides, Akira has always been a private person. Jerry, too. So any recounting of this time in Akira’s life is speculation. And despite the fact that Akira and Jerry were best friends in college, Jerry taking this tween under her wing, hardly any of these books mention Jerry at all.

  When the world was ending, Akira hired her old PCU friend as one of her attorneys. Insult to injury for Jerry’s old man. But a couple years later, they had a falling out over what Jerry called Akira’s “psychopathic ego.” She added that if it weren’t for the fact that Akira had to live on this planet, she’d have had zero interest in saving it. I found this hilarious. There was probably some truth to it, but Jerry was bruised over the whole thing. Akira, on the other hand, seemed completely indifferent, which was consistent with how Jerry saw her. It’s weird having two close friends who hate each other, but neither ever seemed to mind that I hung out with the other, unless you counted silent judgment.

  Jerry’s the one I called to get me released from interrogation. But I’m not heading to her place now to discuss the case or Akira and the bad old days. I just need a couch to crash on, which through forty years and two wives, Jerry has always provided. She lives on the next island over, the one packed with skyscrapers built by all the rejected
Money years back, years after the Great Sun Storm, when storms in general were the least of our concern. The entire place is lit up and reaches into the sky, cloud-breaking bouquets of tech mounted with telescopes that each resident can patch into from the comfort of their high-altitude homes. Besides Akira’s Telescope, this place offered the best bird’s-eye view to an extinction-level event. When Ascalon’s Scar first lit up the sky, some thought it was Sessho-seki coming and jumped. Human feet, broken at the ankles from impact, washed up onshore for weeks after the world was saved. A page-three story to anyone but a cop who had the task of matching feet with names while the rest of the world celebrated. It sucked, too, because we stopped keeping toeprint records by then.

  My iE goes off. A reminder to take my blood pressure and anti-plaque pills. I think about my 3D-printed fake teeth, fake hips, fake hair. Neck and jowls nipped and tucked. Already on my second heart and liver, benes used up from military service. The entire thing propped up by titanium in my spine and left leg. Unlike my pain, memory, space-travel grade anti-anxiety and anti-insomnia pills, these BP and anti-plaque pills I take. This is what getting old is, expecting our second or even third livers to hold up the messes we call bodies as we weigh them down a pill at a time. I pop my pharma and descend to the ocean-generated bioluminescence that lights up the scrapers. I head toward the biggest one, the tint of the whale tail–shaped tower breaching two layers of clouds moving in opposite directions.