by J L Forrest
I ducked before I even realized why, reaching for Cailín, clinging to her.
The Wharf exploded, leveling four buildings and killing hundreds.
Along Monterey Boulevard, windows rattled and a thousand merchants and customers covered their ears. Wild survival instincts returned in a rush. Dust rolled through the district. Emergency responders, drones, and robots hurried past.
A terrorist attack, said the reports.
The Moribund, they said.
Old tunnels beneath the streets, forgotten chambers, drainages which empty below the new waterline—the bots and artificial intelligences can’t secure every route into the city. In their attacks, the Moribund haven’t damaged the Corkscrew—
—“The terrorists cannot hurt the infrastructure,” say the authorities.
“They cannot harm the Corkscrew,” they say.—
—but the Wharf’s destruction has pinched supply lines. This’ll slow the preparation of Carriers, keep more people stranded Earth-side for longer. Within hours, the city rerouted boat traffic, distributing it amongst several dozen smaller ports, and Avidità announced new, tougher checks on incoming sea vessels.
The wharf burned most of today and, to douse the flames, the response teams positioned house-sized saltwater pumps along the inlet. Whatever weapon the Moribund had used, it wasn’t fertilizer-based or some other home-brew explosive.
Cailín and I had seen it before. The Preacher’s blessing from God, tested outside Salem, now delivered right here to San Francisco.
XXIII. The Blood Remains
Day 205—
Using the hostel’s bathroom sink, I scrubbed blood from beneath my fingernails. Some, more stubborn, still clings there. Maybe it always will?
I’m thinking about all the dead in the world. How much blood on my hands?
In high school, I played Lady MacBeth. Messed-up material for teenagers, but our teacher predicted the end of the world, that she wanted us prepared for dark days.
Out, damned spot! Out, I say!—One, two. Why,
then, ’tis time to do ’t. Hell is murky!—Fie, my
lord, fie! A soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?—Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him.
Last night, on a crowded street, Cailín and I found an akachōchin noodle bar, a place with farm-raised or vat-grown fish, I’m not sure which. The bar’s red lantern welcomed us in. At the counter, some withered guy said fish doesn’t taste as wholesome as it used to, but neither Cailín nor I are old enough to have ever eaten much ocean-caught fish anyway. The vegetables were amazing—sprouted in ag towers within San Jose, walled off from the sea.
CAILÍN: I’m so hungry.
ME: You’re eating for two.
Best she can figure she’s in week fifteen, showing for anyone with eyes to see. She wolfed down one bowl, slurping her noodles, then ordered a second with extra carrots. While she ate, I chatted with other patrons. Few were native San Franciscans. People have come from as far away as Monterrey, Mexico or Omaha, Nebraska, everyone bearing their own traumas.
The man behind the bar turned up his stereo. It was blaring old electronica. Most of it I didn’t recognize, but there was a bunch of twentieth-century soundscape lusciousness, heavy on the synthesizers. Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, some obscure Rafael Anton Irisarri.
Like a recurring dream, “When the World Ends” played again.
When I first left Winnipeg, I weighed about eight kilos too many. By the time I arrived at San Francisco, the med-techs called me “malnourished” and told me to up the calories—as if I’d spent the last six months on a fad diet.
We paid for what we ate, but this wasn’t difficult—many San Franciscans trade goods or labor for more money, but Avidità supplies Islanders with a universal basic income, and the hostel charges no rent. The Corporation treats us as refugees and, from our lowly position, Avidità is a benevolent Caesar. That the city works so efficiently, and cleanly, testifies to his power.
After dinner, Cailín and I wandered. Flâneur, the French say. San Francisco offered us an endless palimpsest, beautiful and varied. A few surviving hints of pre-1906 architecture shown through, along with swathes of Victoriana overarched by twenty-first century excesses and Avidità’s twenty-second-century wonders. In this Corporate City, the tallest carbon buildings reach to more than a kilometer, multiples over the partially drowned Transamerica Pyramid, whose upper storeys still function, lights glowing through the windows.
Though still populous, Francisco is emptying—fewer live here than a year ago, steadily riding the escalator to heaven—the Stations are that voluminous. Avidità estimates their capacity at twelve million.
The old International Space Station had, what, a capacity of ten, as in one-zero, as in less than a dozen?
We strolled Golden Gate Park, which remains a park, lush green and vibrantly alive, maintained with desalinated water. The risen ocean drowned the park’s western half, where new docks host yachts whose lights reflect romantically from water. The yachts remind me of Raymond, of his plan to take a boat and follow the coast up to Anchorage.
Trees shelter the rest of the park, and their leaves murmured in a cool nighttime breeze. While hundreds of promenaders enjoyed the grasses and trees, space enough exists in the park to let people whisper with each other, talk without shouting, hold hands, frolic. After months of travelling through necropolises, though, even Golden Gate feels busy.
Yet safer. I almost relaxed.
Tracing their grid, Avidità’s CopBots hovered unobtrusively. A year ago, had deployments like this monitored Winnipeg, I’d have been screaming about Big Brother. Last night, I appreciated someone else doing the watching.
Stupid.
Cuth slipped his knife into Cailín’s back, below her ribs. Pierced a kidney.
She screamed and her pain was mine. Right to my own teeth, the empathetic jolt froze me, pinned me to the soles of my shoes.
On the second blow, Cuth’s blade found my sternum. It clunked into the bone, and a fractional moment passed while neither of us understood why I wasn’t dead. Shocking pain spread from my chest, up my neck, down my belly.
I kicked him in the balls, drove the air from his lungs, and he stumbled back. He reached for me, I shoved him away, and the fucking knife wobbled, the handle dropping a few centimeters. A few hundred grams, that knife, and the bone wouldn’t let it go.
Cailín was still screaming—not panic but agony.
Diving, Cuth snatched me around the middle. His weight twice mine, he could’ve hoisted me WrestleMania-style. Yet he slipped, dropped to one knee, and he was strong but my thighs have walked thirty-five hundred kilometers.
He reached for the knife handle—
—I was faster.
The CopBots flanked us, blaring: “Citizens, cease fighting. On your knees with your hands in the air.”
Bell-like, the knife blade rang when I jerked it from my breastbone. Cuth slapped me down, my back hit the lawn, and his arms encircled my waist. His clunky head butted my abdomen as he squeezed—two of my ribs broke—
“Citizens—”
I jammed the blade into the meat beside Cuth’s neck, shoving the point behind the clavicle. I pushed and blood spurted.
The CopBots fired.
My body went rigid and my jaw locked. Electricity short-circuited me from my eyeballs to my toes. Cailín was whimpering. Cuth was silent.
I woke this morning in a hospital.
XXIV. Broken Promises
Day 205—
In the wilderness, Cailín would have died.
Instead, a huge, four-rotor, AI-driven medevac whisked her from the green and lifted her to a hospital. High in one of the carbon towers, med-techs stopped the bleeding, stabilized her, and printed her a new kidney.
I compare this to my last half year. To the premium I placed on bandaids, gauze, and anti
biotics. I forget who, but some futurist of the last century said that technology improves, costs less, and becomes more widely distributed over time, that technologies tend toward ubiquitousness.
In capitalism, only when ubiquitousness is profitable.
Here on San Francisco Island, Avidità has hoarded technology for decades. Half the gadgets here I’ve heard about but never imagined I’d see. Wonders fully formed, magical apparatuses. Avidità might as well be Zeus.
A two-centimeter gash tore the skin between my breasts, and Cuth’s knife chipped my sternum. Two floors down from where Cailín received her new kidney, a doctor and his AI Assist fixed my knife wound tout de suite, along with my broken ribs.
All I feel is sore and, in a whopping three days, they’ll release Cailín too.
Cuth, they said, will need weeks. I missed his heart, but the knife clipped an artery, punctured a lung, and severed a mess of tissue. Before I left the hospital, an officer visited me. He tipped his bowler hat at me.
OFFICER: I’m Detective Azzo Melk.
ME: How much trouble am I in?
OFFICER: None. Everyone who comes here has had some fucked-up experiences. Up north, out in the Wastes, on the seas. All the same, all desperate, all violent. Hardly anyone makes it to Oakland who hasn’t witnessed a lot of death.
ME: What’re you saying?
OFFICER: We see a mental-health issue where you see a criminal act. Besides, most of your scuffle with Mr. Richards—
ME: Who?
OFFICER: Cuthbert. The drones videoed your fight. You acted in self-defense, especially considering his attack on your wife.
Wife. That makes me smile.
OFFICER: We’re releasing you.
ME: Can I go up to Cailín’s room?
OFFICER: Of course, but I recommend you go back to your hostel first, get your belongings.
ME: Why?
OFFICER: Refugees arriving daily. We’ll free up your room, find you something more comfortable for the rest of your stay.
ME: Rest of our stay?
OFFICER: You’re in queue to ride the Corkscrew. Mr. Avidità wants everyone topside by December twenty-one twenty-seven. That’s a helluva timetable.
ME: How long before our number comes up?
OFFICER: Three months max.
ME: So soon?
OFFICER: In consideration for your wife’s pregnancy. Mr. Avidità’s orders—expecting women and parents of young children get priority.
ME: All right. You know, Cuth—the guy you call Mr. Richards—he promised he’d kill Cailín, me too. Promised.
OFFICER: Sometimes promises are broken. Sometimes that’s all right.
While walking back to the hospital, I found my eyes drawn to the Corkscrew, asking myself why we’d come here. Ever since Raymond died, I’ve had it my head—
California or bust.
Ride the Corkscrew.
Reach the stars. Or High Earth Orbit.
—but now the doubts are settling in, making themselves at home. Cailín has never offered her opinion on whether riding the Corkscrew is good or bad. “I dreamed my path,” she said, “and my path is with you.”
In the hospital, she’s down the hall. They’re testing her new kidney, and I have nothing to do but wait. In the recovery room, I make myself at home too, sit with the fay clicks and whirs and beeps of high-tech medical equipment. In the corner, a recliner overlooks the city and the Pacific.
We’re ninety-four storeys up, and from here the line blurs between ocean and sky. Already dreamlike, this reality, and so I settle back in the chair and close my eyes.
XXV. Visions, Part IV
A prophecy—
Islands not so far south of the Arctic circle, but far enough that thick evergreen forests blanket a rocky land—clouds pillow the sky, dappling and desaturating the sunlight. Our long, clinker-built ship nears the shore, rowed by strong men and women. Cold waves slap the hull, and oars grind and squeak at each stroke.
From the mast flutters our banner, its coal-hued field stark behind a round emblem. Within the emblem, a jagged, dancetty line separates weaves of rich violet and bright gold.
Below the banner, the ship’s black, rolled, fastened sails cast a cruciform shadow. Cailín stands at the helm in a dress of fluttering black, her toddler at her feet, a child with a bramble of hair as thick as her mother’s. I sit at the rudder, steering us into a tranquil inlet bracketed by temperate rainforests. A short skirt of blanched wool wraps my hips, and my hand-sewn blouse flutters, a garment of translucent white with buttons of antler.
Tree limbs overarch us, darkening the light. The leaves and needles of oaks, tamaracks, cedars, birches, firs, lodgepoles, and maples brush the flanks of our ship. Its prow touches a sand bank, and the sailors jump the sides and pull us onto shore.
On any other day, our shield-bearers would accompany us overland, spears at the ready. Pirating southward, we might’ve taken a powered boat and firearms, but this is a sacred land and a sacred day. Nothing of the modern world can touch it—we leave modernity behind us.
Unescorted, Cailín and I proceed into the interior. Cailín’s daughter remains with the shield-bearers.
“Bettina!” she cries for me. The child knows more words every day, but one of her first was my name.
A shield-bearer attempts to soothe her. Today, I do not look back.
Cailín walks ahead. The forest unfolds before us, each vista hidden until we step past a clatter of mossy boulders or ivy-clothed trees. Squirrels chatter at us. Ravens circle curiously, and Nevermore is never far away. A whiff of cedar smoke draws us forward, a campfire at the center of a circle of standing stones.
The stones are crisply worked, white granite, like gods’ teeth.
An oak looms beyond the circle. Many-colored ribbons dangle from its branches, some waving in the breeze, others weighted with sticks. The sticks form unsettling patterns I do not comprehend.
From the thickest branches hang nine armless corpses, nooses tight around their necks.
Nodens welcomes us.
He is a man and no man, a black and specific presence which sits beside the fire but sits throughout the land but sits inside us. He is handsome and horrifying, naked but armored. He is a wolf but a bear but a moose but an owl but a caribou but a cougar but most of all a raven.
I realize—he’s been travelling with us all along.
As we enter the circle he stands, taller than any man. He greets Cailín with a kiss, then enfolds me in his arms.
“Cherished,” he says.
“Blessed,” he says.
“Commander,” he says.
“Of what?” I ask.
“Of every army to come.”
“To fight against?”
“The New Gods themselves.”
“How?”
“Teach her,” says the God to the corpses, and the corpses open their mouths to speak.
Every word they utter shatters me, reframes the world, gives reality a new meaning. I can think only of modern metaphors: they rewrite me; they encode me; they re-parse me. Same hardware, altered program.
Within the circle, beside the fire, Nodens undresses me—away with the white. Undresses Cailín—away with the black. Undresses himself, which means he strips away all his disguises. He is present with us, as he was beside the dreamland fire in the wilderness west of McBride, though he wore Raymond’s face then.
He claims us, and the joy is euphoric.
XXVI. We Die on Earth
Day 245—
What was the moral of “Jack and the Beanstalk”? I’m not sure, but I remember the beanstalk had to come down.
During these last six weeks, two more bombings rocked San Francisco. The first annihilated a processing facility on the Potrero Islet, killing dozens. The second shattered a crowded market, killing hundreds. The city’s mood has darkened—the paranoia of the wilderness has invaded, and the veneer of civilization has cracked. Avidità pours resources into identifying agents of the Moribund
, into bottling up any remaining smugglers’ pipelines.
Terrorist attempts on the train station and Corkscrew platform failed. Officers captured five of the Preacher’s faithful, escorted them to Mr. Avidità. No one has seen them since.
We did see Cuth.
On the street, he looked terrified to see us. He jammed his hands into his pockets, kept his head down, and passed us by. A collar encircled his neck, a sleek device, something high-tech and locked in place.
Sadzie confronted us outside a Lamaze class on Irving Street.
“Get your bad medicine out of my head,” she told us.
“I’m not one of you,” she said. “I’ll never be one of you.”
“I don’t want anything to do with you.” She was blubbering, her words as much about convincing herself as telling us anything. “I’m heading up the Corkscrew tomorrow, and I hope I never see you again.”
That was two days ago.
She would have been about twelve hundred klicks up when the explosions hammered the Corkscrew’s platform and ripped its tensile roots from their moors, when the megastructure jolted upward, then undulated, a godly dragon of mindless carbon fiber and titanium. Forty thousand kilometers of high-tensile material unleashed its force in a wave.
Imagine being a dust mite. Imagine you witness the cracking of a bullwhip.
A monstrous, glass-shattering, ear-splitting shriek blasted the islands, the Corkscrew lifted into the atmosphere as if it might take flight, then skyscraper-sized lengths of it fell to Earth. One struck the hills east of Oakland, throwing debris a kilometer into the sky. Dust clouds rolled across the Bay and choked its New Venice.
By then, Cailín and I figured what was coming. We took an auto as far as we could, then on foot climbed Mt. Davis, hurrying up its side as quickly as Cailín could. So many people stayed in the streets, awestruck by what confronted them, heading to the waterline to gawk at the plumes or the kilometers-long Corkscrew, freed from its restraints and yielding to drag and the angular momentum of a planet.