Warlord of New York City

by Leo Champion

  She moved toward the elevator. The girl followed her in and the doors closed. An advertising jingle for Coca-Cola began to play as the elevator descended.

  “Lady Under First,” said the girl, “is your implant really broken?”

  Diana Angela was silent for a moment. “It’s disconnected, at least.”

  “I just turned mine off, Lady Under First. Do you want to verify?”

  Diana Angela slowly nodded as the girl turned her hooded face upwards. She had a round face and dark skin. She gently reached out and pressed the subdermal activation button under the girl’s temple, feeling it give easily. Yes, she was telling the truth about her implant being off.

  “I want to get that bitch!” the girl exploded. “I’ve seen her come down here before to start trouble! She tries to get people to trip on that fucking dress or spill something on it, and she sues! She sued my friend’s grampa’s restaurant because they took too long to get a seat for her size, and he lost his conurbation residency permit and now he’s…”

  Now he’s living under an unofficial sublet, Diana Angela guessed. It was none of her business how people got their residency permits, or got by without one.

  “What’s your name, girl?” Diana Angela asked, and a second later regretted the ‘girl’. The woman was tiny, but she seemed closer to thirty than to twenty.

  “Maria. I’m Maria Carmen-Alvarez, Lady Under First.”

  “My name is” – not something she wanted to give out in full to this overly friendly stranger – “you can call me DA.”

  “Lady Under First DA,” said Maria, “I’m from the good side of the family, you know. I work at a hair salon, I’m already US-5 at twenty-eight and… is it really possible to get squares by forty, if all you’ve started with is a double hash?”

  Diana Angela nodded slightly. She knew supply chain management, not hair salons, but she suspected a square would be the rank a location manager had. “Might be, if you’re good and people like you. But you need a degree for US-7 or higher. You working on that?”

  “Yeah. Home study,” said Maria Carmen-Alvarez. “But Lady Under First, I’m… there’s the bad side, too. Mama raised us to be good Intendancy, but Papa and everyone are all… you-knows. They’re don’t-give-a-fuck shitlord bottom-floor you-know-whats.” There might have been pride or defiance in the girl’s tone. There wasn’t much shame.

  “You probably want to steer clear of those guys,” Diana Angela observed. Associating with you-knows could get you purged by association, although that was more likely to happen toward the US-13 end of the spectrum than the US-5.

  “I do, normally. But… Lady Under First, you know there’s gangs down in the lower levels?”

  There are social clubs of unemployable muscle-heads, US-3s and you-knows in the lower levels, Diana thought, none of whom would last ten minutes on the streets.

  No, that was unfair. And your relative skill levels, or social status, didn’t matter if the unemployable musclegrunt got hold of you, or with his friends cornered you. The lower-floor gangs were a legit threat to be avoided, they just didn’t rank nearly as high on the threat index as most of what you found outside the buildings, in the real downstairs.

  “I’ve heard of them,” she said.

  “Sometimes they come up to the middle levels. My papa says there’s stuff you can do with electromagnetics to fuck up implants. Even if they’ve already recorded you, you can wipe it.”

  “And you miss the little dragonfly that’s watching it all and uploading in real-time,” said Diana Angela softly, “and then your papa and his friends go to prison for a long time. And you get a hash ripped off your shoulders – one hash at best – and they’ll never give you your square. If they don’t zero you by association and pull your residence permit.”

  Maria Carmen-Alvarez was silent for a little bit, hopefully – Diana Angela thought – absorbing what she’d been told.

  “Tio Pepe says if they come after him, he’s going down to the streets. They won’t chase him out there, will they?”

  No, Diana Angela thought. Tio Pepe would not be so lucky as to get a police-funded rescue if he blundered down onto the streets. She’d seen that happen before – arkie tough-guys jacked up on steroids going down through the Independent Hotel to live a ‘man’s life’. They were bigger and stronger than most gangers, and even a US-3 made a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year before taxes, which was more personal income than all but the tenement bosses and their top flunkies cleared. So they usually found their way to bootleg augments and jacks. And of course having been born arkies, they had implants.

  They also tended to pick unnecessary fights, wave around thick billfolds before walking through dark alleys, give lip to tenement high-ups, get too close to subway entrances at night, trust guns because in the games the things didn’t jam every third round, drink water from the rivers, go exploring in streetganger-occupied buildings, break their sworn word on deals, and any number of other lethally idiotic mistakes that streeter and tenement kids learned better than by the time they were old enough to walk.

  It had only been through caution and luck – a lot of both – that she’d survived her own early experiences, and she’d started not as a chest-thumping tough guy out to prove himself but as a careful, inquisitive urban explorer with a burning personal hatred of the underground vermin.

  “I don’t know,” she told the younger woman. “But you’d probably never see him again if he did. Maria, you know what I did to that bitch while she was holding up the elevator trying to bait me?”

  “No, what?”

  “I pulled out a pin and popped those double-Z honkers like party balloons!” Diana Angela grinned. “Then I went to that taco stand and emptied a whole canister of their greasiest sauce all over her. In my head, and I wouldn’t even be telling you that if you’d had your implant on.”

  “US-13s have those fantasies too?”

  “All the damn time, kid.” Kid? She was all of five years younger. But it was very possible she’d never had an implant-off conversation with a US-13 before, or any interaction at all beyond routine pleasantries and obsesquience. “Or I just beat them into jelly. In my head. But I don’t let it show, and I really don’t encourage you-knows and you-know-whats to come upstairs looking for trouble. Promise me you won’t do that, Maria.”

  Maria scowled.

  “If I wanted you to get in trouble, I’d have kept my mouth shut in the first place. You’d have confessed to sinful intent if she’d pressured you, wouldn’t you?”

  “I didn’t want to make her angrier.”

  “Bad idea.” Kid. “You weren’t doing anything. Never confess to sinful intent, because then they’ve got you whether you did anything wrong or not.” Things she’d learned well before puberty, as well as memorized quotes from unquestionable, undoubtable historical figures like Secretary-General Obama and High Speaker Komposki that could be used to counter upper-Intendancy kafkatraps.

  “Thank you, Lady Under First. That sounds like really good advice.”

  Oh God. This girl had never actually heard this before?

  Her mom’s probably a hashes-wearing retail or service worker. Sounds like her dad’s an illegal at best, maybe a you-know. Of course she wasn’t raised the same way as the designated heir of a Google fucking content vice-president!

  What the hell did they teach in schools down here, then?

  She shook her head – not really her problem. She’d have liked to buy this girl – sorry, but she was an unsophisticated kid – a coffee and spend half an hour explaining the basic facts of life on the Unified Schedule, but half an hour wouldn’t be enough to do more than scratch the surface; it’d only confuse her. Besides, a lot did change as you went up the pay grades, especially from squares to circles.

  “You watch much TV?” she asked instead with a glance at the floor number: 46 becoming 45, not much time left.

  Maria nodded. “Yeah. The telenovelas. And there’s this really funny Speaker from Brazi
l, he lives in San Francisco now, and when he purges people it’s hilarious.”

  “You want a good show that gets right what it’s like to have circles? Elliston Court. It’s about this family on the Upper East Side and there’s some really good advice in there. Everything they show the kids being taught in school, that’s stuff you want to listen to.”

  “Thank you, Lady Under First. And… no, I won’t say anything to Papi or Tio. They don’t need to get in trouble.” She smiled slightly. “Much more than they already do. But not upstairs, not past the twenty-twenty-one.”

  As the elevator started to slow, Maria looked up again at Diana Angela.

  “Can I ask you another question, Lady Under First?”

  “Quickly.”

  “What’re you down here for? It’s not to shove those circles in anyone’s face, is it?”

  “You’ve seen other circles down here,” Diana Angela said. “Probably even wreaths.”

  “Weren’t always wearing the wreaths, but you can tell ‘em anyway,” said Maria. “You need to get fucked up, or you got a secret guy down here?”

  Diana Angela smiled knowingly. That sort of thing was the usual reason people like her went down this low.

  “Maybe a bit of both, but you keep that to yourself. And no, I don’t need anyone to get me anything, okay?”

  Maria looked away as the elevator doors opened on the forty-first floor.

  * * *

  The exact location varied between buildings, but in the Madison Park it was the sixtieth floor where the interior designers’ priorities changed meaningfully. Above that point, and especially above the Madison Park’s eightieth, the ceilings were higher and there were even large atriums taking up multiple floors’ worth of space for purely aesthetic reasons. Some areas, especially in the Upper East Side South cluster she’d grown up in, had even imported parks with grass, plants and trees growing under artificial light in real dirt. It was the closest most of her society ever got to nature.

  But downstairs below the sixtieth floor of the Madison Park – it was the seventy-fifth in the Enterprise, the eightieth in the One, generally around or below the hundredth in most Manhattan buildings – the focus of the interior design architects changed to space-efficiency. The inter-district mezzanines remained, but any atriums had long since been floored over to make space for accommodation.

  There were no more soaring fifteen-foot ceilings – there weren’t even too many ten-foot ones, eight feet or 2.4 meters was the lower-level standard in the Madison Park – and the concourses and corridors seemed narrower and dirtier. It was definitely far more crowded: she knew that about a hundred and thirty thousand official residents lived on the two hundred and twelve publicly-accessible floors of this building. Fifty-five percent of those people, plus however many illegals, nobodies and you-knows, were crowded into these warrens below the sixtieth.

  And the businesses were very different. The hundredth floor had her Whole Foods Market, the people on the eightieth floor had their Safeway and so on, all on similarly-designed double-floor layouts with only cosmetic differences inside. As she rode a packed elevator down from the forty-first floor to the fortieth, however, the supermarket-designated slot was instead filled by a marketplace of independent shops and vending-machine arcades. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find some of those independent shop-owners sleeping there, too, so they could sublet their apartments. She knew for a fact that there was even a bit of illegal cash circulating, although nobody was going to let a slumming US-13 see it.

  If her implant had been connected, the sensors and the projectors would have shown her similar ads to what she’d have seen on the hundred and sixtieth floor, with a bit of local variance for whatever was in the immediate vicinity. Since it wasn’t, the ones here assumed she was a local and targeted her with that in mind, offering gyms and “fully licensed and registered US-7 medical practitioners who understand” – wink wink – “the demands of your disease.”

  Heroin- and coke-slip mills for the unemployable, in other words. The Intendancy frowned on anything psychedelic but you could do all the easy highs, the blow or brown, that you wanted if you had the right paperwork and a low-enough pay grade. A lot of higher-level people came down here for that reason, and the upper-level party scenes were largely fuelled by what they brought back up.

  The second medical commercial to assail her on the slow, crowded escalator was a hyperactive black man in a labcoat who Diana Angela first thought had snorted a bit too much of his own prescription. But no, this guy’s rapid-fire spiel was about how his clinic understood that a man needed to define himself with muscle size, and proper weight training “is only a part of a serious bodybuilding routine.” Ah. Wink-wink-steroids.

  Ten years ago that sort of thing wouldn’t have passed the advertising approvals board; they would probably have reported him. Her society had a major issue with anything remotely mistakable for human genetic modification – if interracial marriage confused the intersectionality matrix enough to justify its definition as social treason, then posthumanism was way off limits – but other measures came in and out of favour according to trends that the Intendancy deemed acceptably inside its Overton windows for political discussion.

  She supposed the leniency would turn to crackdowns when the other party took power, but there really wasn’t a lot you could do to people this far down short of revoking their Manhattan or conglomeration residence permits and making them Chicago’s problem, or Kansas City’s. Which would involve having to physically deport them there, and… she didn’t particularly envy the police officers assigned to that job, of hunting down unemployable muscleheads and stuffing them into a hyperloop capsule.

  There were any number of ways to where she was going, and over the last twelve years she’d really learned her way around the guts of this particular building. She liked to vary her specific routes to avoid establishing routines or patterns that someone might notice, as well as for simple variety.

  Off the concourse she turned left onto a primary corridor, less busy, and then from there onto a narrower tertiary, a service way. Directly inside the tertiary, on the right, were a pair of unisex bathroom cubicles. Right now neither was in use, she took the one on the right out of habit. The bathroom was dirty and graffiti’ed; no maintenance robot had been here for at least a couple of days. Bot vandalism was a constant and ongoing problem on the lower floors.

  Set into the corner of the bathroom stall was a four-foot grille that slid easily on its tracks as she lifted it. She used this particular one enough that she’d actually bothered to take care of it, applying the occasional oiling to keep it smooth.

  It had always surprised her, first as an urban explorer in college and ever since, how little in the way of sensor protections the arkscrapers’ massive and complex interior infrastructure actually had. There was no point installing a sensor without someone to react if it lit up, of course, and the locked Authorized Personnel Only doorways and hatches probably had something – but there were hundreds of grilles like this on every floor of every scraper she’d ever been to, that gave access to the exact same infrastructure almost as easily.

  She dropped the sports bag onto the floor next to the grille, took out a pair of short black denim cutoffs and a halter-top. With a smile – you want exhibitionism, you corpulent bitch? – she stripped out of the suit and changed into them. There was Intendancy-approved underwear that showed less; this was showing off the hours of work she put into making herself better.

  The suit and heels, she gathered up and stuffed into the bathroom’s trash chute. She didn’t want to carry it any further, no clothes – or anything else – that she wore out to the streets, she ever brought back into the arkscrapers for fear of some unseen contamination or radioactivity tripping a sensor. Besides, replacing the outfit would take her two clicks of her implant and less than an hour’s pay. She picked the bag back up – inside, sealed in shrink-wrap, was the outfit she would wear on the way back upstairs – an
d headed in.

  With a directed thought, she activated her implant’s night vision as she entered the air duct, turning the Stygian darkness into irrelevance. This was a main shaft, about five feet in diameter. She pulled the grate back into place and rose to a crouch, heading quickly along it for about twenty feet, her bag slung over her shoulder. The floor of the vent was curved and a little slippery under her bare feet, but she was absolutely familiar with this route; she knew this shaft as well as she knew her own apartment.

  It was uncomfortable being cramped but she was absolutely used to this particular shaft and the primary feeling in her was excited relief to finally be on her way downstairs. It didn’t take long before the shaft stopped, giving way to a vertical shaft that had once held a single elevator. For whatever reason it had been permanently put out of use, but nobody had removed the pair of smooth cables that ran down the centre of it. Nobody had touched the harness she’d placed there either, that she stepped her long legs into and clipped over her shoulders. She clipped the front of it to the available end of the thin cable she herself had placed here, a smile finally spreading across her face as she leapt into the shaft. Going down!

  The other side of the cable allowed her to control her descent; with absolute confidence she made long, twenty- and twenty-five foot drops down the abandoned shaft, bouncing slightly and then immediately releasing herself to freefall another three stories through the darkness. For a long time early on, she had had to take more care with her later falls, so as not to miss the open doorway that stuck out into the shaft somewhere below ground level. The shaft continued further, she’d once checked – another thirty feet or so to a pool of sump in the Madison’s foundations. Now, practice and instinct brought her final leap exactly level with the doorway. She swung herself into the doorway, unclipping the top of the harness and stepping out of its bottom.

  The floor was damp and slightly rotten down here, a corridor that sloped downwards for about twenty feet before turning. Over the years she’d brought hooks and shelving down, setting them into the soggy concrete wall. Sheaths and pouches hung from them, and she hung the bag of for-return clothes on an upper hook. Anything she’d wear past this point would stay downstairs.