Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  “Instantaneously,” Masaaraq said. “But he isn’t tame. A bonded animal is only as tame as its human is. And humans can be very, very wild.”

  “True.”

  “And you want to be careful. It goes both ways. You influence his behavior, but he can influence yours. Usually humans assert emotional dominance effortlessly, but you need to stay vigilant.”

  He put his hand on the bear’s shoulder, and they walked proudly through the Hub and onto Arm Five. At the entrance a Safety officer stopped them, tapping for backup and visibly trembling.

  “There’s nothing in the registration consent agreement that says it’s illegal to have a polar bear,” Kaev said. Masaaraq had talked him through this already. She’d done a lot of research before she came to Qaanaaq. “I can vouch for its behavior. It won’t hurt anyone.”

  “Unlicensed wildlife,” the officer mumbled, unconvinced, eyes out for assistance. His hand moved to the zapper strapped to his belt, but that was barely good enough to take down a chubby drunk. It’d just irk the bear, and irking the bear was probably not something he wanted to do.

  “Licensing terms only apply to registered residents,” Kaev said, another Masaaraq talking point. “This belongs to my friend here, who is visiting.”

  “. . . wanted in connection with more than one instance of multiple fatalities . . .”

  “No proof that this was the same polar bear.”

  They kept walking. In ten minutes they’d be off the grid, and Safety couldn’t do a thing about it. It’d take the combined zappers of twenty officers to slow the bear down, or authorization from HQ to use lethal weaponry, both of which would require a lot more time than that to procure. Kaev quickened his pace, but not by much.

  A lot of food processing happened on Arm Five. The smells of cooking fish and caramelizing soy sauce made the bear grumble with hunger. Kaev could feel that, too, the bear’s hunger distinct from his own, and when he focused on it he could feel his own hunger grow. A loop. An echo chamber, hunger bouncing off hunger and magnifying, multiplying, and if he just shut his eyes and let it happen the bear would be able to reach out one arm and effortlessly satisfy their hunger—

  Pain jolted him back; Masaaraq had struck him with the butt of her weapon. “Hey!”

  The bear watched her as they walked, its hostility tingling in Kaev’s elbows, like, I’ll remember that—and I still haven’t forgotten how you had my head in a cage for all that time. Soq put a hand on the bear’s other shoulder. Kaev felt this, too, the animal’s blunt mammalian happiness at the touch of someone it liked, not so different from a dog’s. A beautiful thing to be inside of.

  They reached the gangway. Soq asked, “You buzzed her?”

  “Trust me,” Masaaraq said. “She knows we’re coming. She’s got eyes on all of us.”

  Kaev had been focusing on his bear. Trying not to think. About Soq; about where they were going. About what it meant that he had a child. About how the final, knock-down drag-out break-up fight between him and Go had happened a couple of months before Soq was born. About how he and Go had had a child, together, all this time.

  About how much he hated her. And about how he could hate her, but also feel this strange feeling, so oddly like happiness, in his chest, growing bigger with every step that brought him closer to her.

  City Without a Map: The Breaks

  No one knows where or when they got the name. The origin story is something banal, most likely—they caused nervous breakdowns, full psychiatric breaks, irrevocable shattering of identity. Oldest known usage is found in transit camp correspondence, refugees using it colloquially enough to imply it had already existed in spoken dialogue. There is a deeper resonance to its persistence, a troubling question that arises if you stop to ponder it: Why do we still call it by such an informal name? Why has it not yet been replaced by something more scientific sounding, more medical, even if it were just an acronym, sad as a flag of surrender, identity dissolution syndrome (IDS) or multiplicative affiliation disorder (MAD)? Epidemics do not have medical causes; they have social ones.

  I have been stitching its story together here. Collecting scraps of history and rumor. Memories. Sick people, heads spinning with strange sights. Slum ship operators going out of business because their boats had become floating hospices for afflicted tenants. Doctors and agency officials baffled by the failures of software to devise a solution, or even the most modest of mitigation measures—almost as if someone, some powerful intelligence either human or machine, is determined to block any such development.

  Word of the breaks has spread. Babbling madmen in the streets, children screaming someone else’s secrets. Qaanaaq is adrift, they say—floundering, helpless, failing, its once mighty AI oversight no longer equal to the task of maintaining order. Safety is overburdened. The brigs are overflowing. Crowded quarantine ships remain anchored to the Arms. Hearing stories like that, people would get all kinds of crazy ideas.

  A crime boss might start plotting out a power play.

  And a woman on a mission of rescue and revenge, who for years has known that she must eventually come to Qaanaaq, who knows that the thing she seeks is here, but knows that her enemies are here as well, the people who robbed her of the thing she seeks—and so much more besides—and they are powerful, and they have the full might of the Qaanaaq municipal system behind them, might decide that the time is right for her enemies to fall, for her journey to reach its end.

  The breaks brought her here.

  Kaev

  Sure enough, they were expected. Dao stood at the top of the gangway, flanked by a tight crowd of armed, frightened foot soldiers. Kaev didn’t slow, didn’t hesitate, marched right up the gangway. The bear followed.

  “What’d you come here for?” Dao said, his palm on the button that would release the hydraulic lock, retract the gangway, spill them down into the sea.

  “You know why. To see her.”

  “What if she’s busy?”

  “Too busy for this?”

  Soq stepped forward. “Ring her up, will you? Ask her yourself.”

  Behind them, emboldened by the fact that the bear had stepped off the grid, was a crowd of Safety officers. Assembling some kind of weapon Kaev hadn’t seen before. Nonlethal, probably, but scary—the latest generation of sonic pulse cannon, maybe, the ones pioneered in Russia for knocking out crowds of demonstrators, which might also cause aneurysms. He didn’t want that pointed at any of them. If Go didn’t let them onto her boat, even the bear would be in danger.

  Dao turned his head, speaking into his implant.

  “Hey, how’s it going,” Soq said to one of the foot soldiers. She smiled back nervously. All of their eyes were on Soq. And Soq knew it. A pretty good way to impress your new coworkers, Kaev thought. So Soq, at least, was enjoying this. And so, mostly, for that matter, was Kaev. That bliss was still there, what he’d felt walking through Qaanaaq with the eyes of everyone on him. The power that comes with having five hundred kilograms of stark white killing machine at your side. The simple pleasure of not having your brain be a caustic broken worthless mess.

  He shivered, remembering. How ugly every minute had been. How even the simplest sentences, the most straightforward thoughts, would crumble in his hands. How frightening he found other humans. The joy of fighting, those rare moments, those orgasmic instants with long stretches of broken glass between them. Such a pale shadow of the pleasure he took in every instant beside the bear. And even that, the fights, he was lucky to have had. Plenty of people with broken brains turned to far worse addictions.

  Masaaraq was frowning, he noticed. Not the wary frown of someone in a tactically unsatisfying position, either. More like general unhappiness.

  “Everything okay?”

  “This is a distraction,” she said.

  “From what?”

  “From what I came here for.”

  Kaev nodded. He’d been told no so many times, when he asked her why she was here, that he’d given up asking. “Go is
powerful. Connected. Smart. Whatever you want to do, she can help you do it.”

  “If she doesn’t just kill us all.”

  “She could try.”

  “Is she powerful, or isn’t she?” Masaaraq said. “If she is, she can destroy us. We’re not invincible. Killer whales and polar bears are just like any other weapon—they can’t solve everything. And they have their limitations. I know that better than anyone.” She paused. “Almost anyone.”

  “Come along,” Dao said. He stepped away from the button. The soldiers receded. To Soq, he said, “She’s in her cabin. I believe you know the way.”

  What seemed like a small army squatted on the deck of Go’s ship, repairing fishing nets. Kaev was always surprised by just how boring Go’s criminal empire really was.

  Soq didn’t seem bored. They stopped to stare, to watch the little fingers at work.

  Kaev’s heart hammered. His blood sang. He flexed his fingers to keep them from making fists. He was on the beams again.

  And also—he wasn’t. He was a boy, young and handsome and strong, sneaking out of the foster barracks to meet a girl. A girl who didn’t mind his stutter and yips, and how his sentences didn’t make a lot of sense. A girl as strong as he was, as fearless, but far smarter. A grid grunt, like him, but unlike him she had a plan. A way to work her way up, a way to build an empire where they’d both be safe. Where neither one would be nothing.

  Go had succeeded, he saw. She’d had to abandon him—or had he abandoned her?—but she’d succeeded.

  The door to her cabin opened. She stood there. She saw Kaev first, and he could see, now, with the calm and clarity that the bear had given him, the emotions that danced across her face, the happiness and then the anger; the love and then the hate. All in a fraction of a second, then swept under the rug of her fearless-leader face.

  But then she saw Soq. And her mouth opened. She looked back and forth between Soq and Kaev, and he could have sworn he saw something inside her fall away. The fearless-leader face broke. Whatever Dao had told her, she hadn’t put the pieces together until this moment, seeing them together. Probably he hadn’t mentioned Soq at all. Probably he’d been focused on the polar bear. Which would be understandable. But Go wasn’t focused on the polar bear. Go didn’t seem to see it at all.

  She took a step forward. One hand went to her chest.

  “I—” she said, but said no more.

  Kaev took three swift fearless confident steps forward and embraced her, held her to him.

  He loved her. He had always loved her. Every other piece of it fractured, crumbled. The anger and the hate and the slow poison bitterness of being her flunky, her fall guy, her journeyman loser, and then her brutal thug, her soaker. And something similar must have been happening for her, because he could feel the slow melt, the way her arms around him went from rigid to tentative to being as hungry and firm as his. He did not need to ask, Why didn’t you tell me?, because it all made perfect sense.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be,” he said, stepping forward without letting go of her, carrying her back into her cabin, knowing she would not want her underlings to hear what they had to say. Would regret even letting them see the two of them kiss. “But me too.”

  Her eyes overflowed. Her words came fast, between sobs, sentences strung together like she’d been saving them up for ages. “I didn’t want to abandon Soq. I didn’t want to abandon you. But I had made my choices by then. I had started down this path. I had made enemies, people who would have killed you both. Jackal was already consolidating power, getting people into her corner. I was going to end the pregnancy. I should have. But I loved you too much—loved who I was with you. I knew we could never be together, but that what we had could . . . I don’t know . . . continue to exist.”

  “Shhh,” Kaev said. He saw Soq pretending to play with the polar bear. Trying hard not to look in his and Go’s direction.

  “I did it to save your lives. Broke up with you, hid Soq from both of us.”

  “And you succeeded,” Kaev said. “We’re alive! All three of us.”

  Go shook her head. When the words came, they came so fast he knew they’d spent years echoing through Go’s head. “I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve you. Jackal’s been dead for a long time. No one has seriously threatened my position in a decade. The coast was clear. I could have come for you at any time. And I didn’t. Because when I left you—both of you—it hurt me so bad. I swore nothing would ever hurt me like that again. I built a wall around my emotions. Never let anyone in. I wasn’t thinking big. I was so focused on my little goals—climbing the ladder, one step at a time. I wanted to hold on to the rung I had, and maybe get to the next one.”

  Kaev kissed her forehead. “It’s okay.”

  “I know. But I want you to know where I was coming from.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Syndicate leaders always think small,” she said, pulling one arm away but coiling the other tighter around his waist. Together they turned to look out the porthole, at the city’s jagged green skyline. “They’re really just good little capitalists, no different from any corporation head. They want to make money, and make money for their friends. But I want more.”

  “What do you want?”

  She opened her mouth. He knew that look. The look you have when you’re about to say something you’ve whispered to yourself a thousand times but never uttered out loud.

  “I want a city where people don’t have to do what I did.”

  “Seems like a pretty good reason to me. Is that what all this is about? Is it why you had me soak those guys?”

  Go nodded.

  “Shareholder, right?”

  She nodded again.

  “These are some dangerous moves you’re making. They run this city. Run the AIs that run it.”

  The city sparkled. The polar bear was letting Soq climb onto its back, with the expression of a patient long-suffering parent. At the end of their Arm, methane flares as big as buildings parabolaed up into the sky, prompting shouts of joy from the spectators who watched for them every night.

  “I want you,” Go said. “And Soq. And Qaanaaq. And we can have it. I want to think big.”

  I want to think big, too, Kaev thought, but there was no need to say it, because if there was one thing he’d learned from years of being a brain-damaged lunk, it was how words were way more likely to get in the way than help you out.

  Fill

  Where are we?” Fill asked. Wind whistled through an open door or window ahead of them. The room was freezing, and dark except for the faint green omnipresent light of nighttime Qaanaaq coming through the window. He’d met Barron outside an Arm Three apartment building that had seen better days, and followed him to the end of a hallway and through a hatchway. “What is this place?”

  “A pod,” Barron said.

  “You can afford a privacy pod?”

  “Good heavens, no,” the old man said, and laughed. “Belongs to a friend of mine.”

  Laughter from the grid outside, and the churn of the sea. Both seemed so distant. The polyglass bubble felt tiny, fragile, even though it was one of the largest and most lavish Fill had been in. He rubbed at the goosebumps on his arm. “I thought we were meeting at your place.”

  “No, alas,” Barron said. “I am far too ashamed of my little nook. Would never survive the ignominy of your sainted grandfather seeing it.”

  Lights. The walls ionized and came to life. People surrounded them. Portraits, cropped close so they could have been anywhere. Old people and young ones. Their faces empty, hunted. The pod they stood in was medium-sized and completely empty. Eight people could have fit comfortably inside it, but for the moment they were alone. Ionization and the portrait projections prevented them from seeing out. Fill wanted to focus on the imagery, but he was shocked at how nervous he was for these two men to meet.

  “Hello?” came a voice. On the wall, where an angry little girl frowned out from her mother�
��s lap, a rectangular hole appeared in the projected image as a door slid open.

  “Grandfather!” Fill said, obscurely grateful to see the old man walk in. Something about the setup unsettled him. The distant tone to Barron’s voice, the eerie imagery that surrounded them. The door slid shut and the illusion was complete again. Cold faces appraising them, finding them wanting.

  “Grandfather, this is my friend Barron. Barron, this is my grandfather.”

  “Mr. Podlove,” Barron said, his face as rigid as the ones on the walls. “I cannot tell you how happy I am to finally be formally meeting you.”

  “Please,” Grandfather said. “Martin.” They shook hands. Side by side, they looked so similar.

  A hydraulic whine, and then a sense of motion. “Are we moving?”

  “We are,” Barron said.

  Grandfather laughed. “I assure you, all these theatrics aren’t necessary. My grandson says you need help, and that you deserve our assistance. I just wanted to talk out the details. I don’t need a sales pitch. Whatever song-and-dance routine you two have put together, I appreciate it, but—”

  “This is all new to me,” Fill said. His laughter felt forced. “We’re not going underwater, are we? I’ve always hated submersible pods. I don’t know why. Ever since—”

  “Don’t you worry,” Barron said, his tongue probing his cheek, controlling the pod’s struts. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

  “Who are these people?” Martin said, gesturing to the walls.

  “I think they’re City Without a Map listeners,” Fill said. “Right? Or potential listeners? The target audience, anyway.”

  “Not exactly,” Barron said. He probed the inside of his cheek with his tongue again and the portraits uncropped, providing the context of where these people stood.

  New York City, Fill saw. The elevated subway tracks, the blackened stadium. In the decline but before the end.

  “Victims,” Barron said. “People who died with the city.”

  “How much are we talking about?” Martin said, hands in pockets, every inch the consummate financial wizard. “For the project you two are working on. Some kind of performer, you mentioned? A reader?”