Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  “That’s your work,” Masaaraq said. “You want to save these people.”

  “I am going to save these people,” Ora said.

  “It’s not safe,” Masaaraq said. “The city won’t rest until you’re back in custody.”

  “Let them try.”

  “We’re up against some very well-resourced enemies. We almost got taken out, in the Cabinet. We’d have been recaptured if it hadn’t been for—”

  “For the fact that I could give that woman something she needed. Something I got from helping people. The people I helped will help us. I can see the big picture. I’ve been drawing a map for a city without one. Reciting it to myself every night. I know how we all fit together, how this will play out.”

  Masaaraq looked at her with curiosity, possibly fear. The way you would if you suddenly started wondering whether the person you love might have become something more or less than human.

  “You’re the Author,” Soq said. “City Without a Map. You seed it, somehow. Right? In them? You . . . compose it, pass it on to them when you pass them the nanites.”

  Ora said, “Yes.”

  “Small boat,” Kaev said, looking worried, as Go’s transport reached the ship. “Won’t hold very many soldiers.”

  “She’s only taking a couple of us.”

  “To confront a guy who wants her dead?”

  Soq nodded. Kaev’s brow furrowed, and he stood up. “We have to go, too,” he said, but no one heard him.

  “Speaking of Martin Podlove,” Ankit said, turning to Ora. “Do you know who he is?”

  Ora paused, shut her eyes. Began to recite facts. Rumors. Things she’d called up, effortlessly, from the mountain of memories she’d inherited from every breaks survivor she’d bonded with.

  “No,” Ankit said, and they heard shouting from the other side of the boat, chains dragging and bells tolling as Go’s ship prepared to depart. “Do you know why he put you in the Cabinet?”

  “He did what?” Kaev said, but he wasn’t the only one who said it.

  Soq

  Welcome,” Podlove said, looking for all the world like some combination of hotel concierge and mad sea captain. Soq could see the uncertainty in his eyes. Go had been correct—he was a banker, not a fighter.

  “Ahoy,” Go said.

  They stared at each other across the opulent lobby of Podlove’s corporate headquarters. Salt crystals everywhere. Sharp and sparkling. Intended to impress and intimidate. Behind them, across the glass, Arm One traffic was reaching its early-morning peak.

  But the place would be bristling with well-hidden weaponry. Podlove was confident, secure in the familiar center of his universe, but he wasn’t stupid. He would have fearsome muscle in his corner. Drones and bots and autoturrets.

  Soq shut their eyes, and they could see it. Could recall the schematics, taste the bite of the drill bit installing a toxin pod. Remembered her name, the woman who’d led up the installation six years back. Knew that she was dead.

  Two flunkies stood behind Podlove. Go had two of her own. Soq, and the brass-knuckled soldier whose name they had never gotten.

  And, between the rival parties, the man with the sack over his head.

  Swallowing, finding their mouth so dry it was almost impossible to do so, Soq felt the full gravity of the situation. If anything went wrong, they would be right in the line of fire. What kind of guns and blades and projectiles and lasers were aimed at them right this second? Podlove flashed a frigid snake smile, savage and cynical all at once, but Soq could see that he was scared. And that was scary. Because scared people were dangerous. Soq made eye contact with one of Podlove’s flunkies, a scrawny thing who looked as frightened as Soq felt, and gave him a little smile, at which he snarled.

  Soq stood up straighter.

  They’d been frightened, at first, after they’d learned Go was their mother. They’d feared losing their objectivity, letting their emotions and the personal bond between them render Go perfect, special, beyond reproach. And while Soq was happy to be a henchperson, they knew that flunkies who thought their employer was always right started making dumb decisions.

  The opposite had happened. Rage, not love, tinted how Soq saw Go. The woman had abandoned Soq. Every awful thing that had happened in Soq’s life could be laid at Go’s feet.

  Either way, Soq’s objectivity was compromised, and that was a problem.

  But maybe objectivity wasn’t everything. Maybe it wasn’t even real. Soq’s head buzzed with a hundred different takes on objective reality, and—coolly, effortlessly—they could compare the times two people remembered the same things differently. Both convinced they were right. Soq could see Go as a dozen people saw her—cruel bully, magnanimous boss, ignorant grid-grunt upstart.

  Go didn’t know what Soq knew: that Ora and Masaaraq and Ankit and Kaev were on their way over. To complicate matters. Soq had meant to tell Go, and now was glad they hadn’t.

  “Is this how you dreamed it would be, when you got to the top?” Podlove said.

  “This isn’t the top,” Go said.

  “No. I suppose it’s not. But it’s as high as you’ll get. This ends today.”

  “I told you, we’re on the same page.”

  “This is him?” Podlove said, advancing to the sack-headed man. “I’m not going to pull this off and find a lit stick of dynamite?”

  Go moved to unmask the man, but Podlove stopped her with a gentle hand.

  “A curious play, at the Cabinet,” he said. “Taking all those people. What could you possibly plan to do with them, little girl?”

  “Maybe I want to found a city of my own,” Go said.

  It had given Soq hope, when Go finally agreed to Soq’s plan. Liberate not just Ora, but every Cabinet prisoner who wished to be liberated. Which had turned out to be a far higher number than projected—Soq had imagined that most would be too afraid to choose a rusty crime syndicate ship over the safe warmth of their prison. They were still belowdecks on Go’s rusty freighter. Still frightened. But free.

  The second part of Soq’s plan was still up in the air. Waiting on Go to give the go-ahead, which she might never do. Run Podlove’s program, the one Soq got from his grandson, the software that would tell them the location and access code of every empty unit being kept off the market by every shareholder, and move those people in. And then head out to Arm Eight and offer a place to every grid rat and box sleeper and overcrowded unhealthy unregistered resident. Move them from disgusting and precarious housing to impossible luxury. Balance the scales.

  Found a city within the city.

  A city of my own.

  A city where Go was the sole shareholder.

  Of course, Go wasn’t being altruistic. Soq could see that now. Go would want money, maybe just a little at first, but more and more, and Go had plenty of unbreakable men and women to drag you out of your place if you couldn’t afford it. And then rent those fancy spaces to people who could afford to pay through the nose . . . once Go got a taste of that, it wouldn’t be long before all those box sleepers were back in the boxes, and the empty units were full of one more wave of wealthy refugees. Being a landlord was the biggest racket in town, in every town, in every city, across history, and when Soq ran that software they’d be handing Go a massive empire.

  We’re on the same page.

  How would Go be different from Podlove, from every other rich and powerful player who sucked the blood of the poor, made them pay until they couldn’t pay anymore and then pushed them into the sea to sink? Soq doubted there’d be any difference at all.

  The question was, what could Soq do about it?

  Podlove pulled the sack off Barron’s head.

  “Hello again,” he said.

  Barron smiled. “You don’t look so good, friend. You look . . . unhinged.”

  “I’m going to unhinge you,” Podlove said, and there was the fear again, the uncertainty. He wasn’t Go. Threats and violence were not his native soil. His own rage frightened him. “Like a
door. Take you apart like a jigsaw puzzle going back in the box.”

  Barron’s smile only widened. “I know.”

  “Laugh as long as you can. Pretty soon you won’t be able to. Because you won’t have lips, a tongue, most of the skin on your body.”

  “It was way too easy to turn you into a medieval barbarian,” Barron said. “You, who always believed yourself to be so civilized. Another way I achieve victory over you.”

  Podlove put the sack back on and turned to Go. “Was there anything else?”

  “No, sir,” Go said, bowing in exaggerated deference. Exaggerated, but still real. Go really did admire him. She really did want to be him.

  “I’ll be in touch. Once I’ve gotten a little more information out of this one, and I can assess how to proceed.”

  “Of course. I’ll wait to hear from you. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”

  They did not shake hands. But they smiled, and Soq saw oceans of information surge in that smile. They were the same. Go didn’t want to burn down anything. She might kill Podlove, but not because she hated him. Because she wanted to take his place.

  Soq had been there. In Podlove’s place—in Fill’s. Physically, but more important, emotionally. The breaks had taken Soq there. They knew how empty all that comfort felt, how little it helped to hold off the dark.

  Once, Soq had wanted to be what Go was. To have power, to have wealth, no matter who else got hurt. To plunge the rest of the city burning and screaming into the sea, if that’s what it took. Soq didn’t want that anymore.

  It was stupid. Soq knew it was stupid. Soq did it anyway. A plan was in place, dependent on a delicate balance barely preserved. The balance demanded that Soq wait to run the software. That’s what Go had told Soq to do. Go had been very clear about what to do and when.

  Fuck Go, Soq thought.

  Six swift taps on the palate and against the inside of Soq’s cheek, and it was done.

  Everything happened far faster than they’d anticipated. They’d imagined that, if it worked at all, the decades-dormant software would take some time to get started, to trigger whatever safeguards and tripwire warnings might be set up, to say nothing of how Podlove would get word—but only eight seconds passed after Soq triggered the savage break-in software that Podlove had given to his grandson, that Fill had unwittingly given to Soq along with the breaks . . .

  The old man’s head jerked sharply, like he’d heard his name called from a great distance. He shut his eyes and listened to something his implant said. Then he opened them.

  “You fucking idiot,” he hissed to Go.

  “What?” she said, her inveterate smugness certainly damning her in his eyes.

  Above them, lights flickered. Sirens began to wail. The software read updates into Soq’s ear. It had been detected by a monitoring bot, one of millions of ancient defense systems lurking in the municipal infrastructure, set up by the shareholders to check their little monster—by releasing an identical copy.

  One of them was bad enough. Two of them, running in a state of open warfare, might make the city melt.

  Glass shattered. Soq dropped to their knees, convinced this was it, Podlove would have triggered the bullets or explosives or whatever other weaponry had been trained on them for the entire parley. And maybe he had, but the system was not responsive. Most systems, it seemed, were not responsive. A whole lot of people were yelling out on the grid.

  “Podlove, I swear . . .” Go said, her eyes terrified.

  And nothing and nobody tried to stop Masaaraq and Ora and Kaev and Liam from breaking the front windows, walking right into the Salt Cave, armed and angry, and heading straight for Martin Podlove.

  Ankit

  Ankit stayed in the little skiff when Kaev and Masaaraq and Ora and the polar bear got out. She moored it in a two-hour spot across the Arm from the entrance to the Salt Cave.

  I am the getaway driver, she thought, but she knew her role in this heist was significantly less glamorous. And exponentially more important.

  A stream of data opened on her screen, became a river; became a sea. The software was working well. Terrifyingly well.

  “Soq launched,” she said into her implant. “Early.”

  “That sounds like Soq, all right,” said the man from Soq’s slide messenger agency.

  “It’s every bit as big as they said it would be.”

  “This is fucking crazy,” Jeong said. “There’s got to be five hundred units here. Easy. And they’ve all been empty? All this time?”

  “According to Soq. Go had a lead on a handful of them, ten or twelve she’d spent a ton of resources on recon to identify. But this . . .”

  “These motherfuckers,” he said, sounding scared, sounding excited. Behind him, she could hear the clangs and hollers of Go’s boat. “All these people living like rats, while they have all this space just going to waste.”

  “It’s not waste. It’s a business decision.”

  “Fine line between good business and a fucking war crime,” he said.

  “Ain’t that the goddamn epitaph of capitalism.”

  Jeong chuckled. “You know I sleep at the messenger depot? In a capsule in my office. Sometimes I’ll go a week without stepping outside the building. Probably been a month since I left my Arm. Now I’m surrounded by all these people . . .”

  The understanding-politician part of Ankit’s brain took over, emitted a gentle laugh. “Qaanaaq does that to you. I feel agoraphobic sometimes, too. You doing okay over there?”

  “This ship is fucking crazy.”

  “Fucking crazy is how it probably is on a regular day. Now you’re in full-on gangster war mode, with a hold full of psychiatric refugees.”

  He laughed. Sounding grateful. “Something’s happening to the data,” he said. “It’s coming and going.”

  “Defenses. We anticipated this. We’re making multiple encrypted backups, including several on partitioned drives that disconnect from the network as soon as a chunk is complete. If the attack bots compromise something, switch to another.”

  “This is the easy part,” Jeong said, sounding stronger, more solid. “I’ll take a psychopathic corporate espionage AI over crying babies any day. We’ll have enough to start giving people addresses and passcodes in about three minutes. Enough to house all the Cabinet escapees, and a good chunk of les miserables from Arm Eight . . .”

  “Excellent.”

  “We’re getting pings from all over, people volunteering slots for these people. Some crazy church lady with one hand says she has space in her storefront for fifty people to sleep.”

  Ankit stood, looked across the Arm to where Masaaraq and Kaev and Liam and Ora faced down Go and Podlove and an anxious-looking Soq. A stalemate. Angry words. She ached to be there with them. With her family—her two mothers, one a mournful butcher and the other a serene poet, but both identical in the staggering merciless weight of what their love could accomplish; her sweet and sad brother; his proud angry child—even if they were all about to die.

  Especially if they were all about to die.

  “All right everybody, line up,” Jeong was saying back on the ship, and she stifled a tiny laugh at the thought of this poor frightened man doing crowd control.

  A splash from the water beside her. Ankit turned her head—and flinched, even though she’d been fully expecting to see the orca there. Maybe it was possible to get used to something so huge, so formidable, as dark as the sea and as hungry, but she didn’t see it happening anytime soon.

  “Hey, girl,” she said.

  Atkonartok’s immense head did a slow majestic dip. A nod, Ankit realized. Eerie, the intelligence it gave off. Not the intelligence of something as smart as humans, but rather the intelligence of something smarter, something making an effort to understand and be understood by these stinky smaller-brained beasts. Like right now, for example. The whale seemed to know, just from looking at her, how the whole complex plan was going.

  How much do
es she see? Remember? Feel? About the people who slaughtered her tribe, her pod? About the friends she lost? About what it meant to be alone, and lost?

  Like she had been all her life. Like Kaev had been, and Soq. And Masaaraq and Ora, who at least had known what it meant to not be alone, to love, to be loved, before they were plunged back into the well of loneliness. All these people going through life alone, suddenly plucked out of isolation and finding themselves part of a family . . . only now to be inches away from losing everything.

  “Good!” Jeong said as the chaos of background noise in her ear quieted down. “There will be plenty for everyone. We’ll start with you.”

  Children clapped. Jeong laughed. Ankit did too.

  More laughter, from the real world now, two parking slips down. “The clocks!” said a plump matron with an Addis Ababa accent. “The parking clocks all went down!”

  Ankit saw that it was true. Her own slip’s timer, which had reached eight minutes the last time she looked, was now flashing zero at a leisurely pace.

  “Free parking!” someone else shouted.

  Fuck, Ankit thought. If there was anything more unthinkable than a geothermal disruption, it was the parking clocks going down. What the fuck have we done to this city?

  A shout from outside the Salt Cave caught her attention. She looked up just in time to see Go draw the machete from the scabbard at her belt, the scabbard everyone always assumed was empty, and behead Ankit’s friend Barron with one effortless swing.

  City Without a Map: Savage Bloodthirsty Monsters

  We want villains. We look for them everywhere. People to pin our misfortune on, whose sins and flaws are responsible for all the suffering we see. We want a world where the real monstrosity lies in wicked individuals, instead of being a fundamental facet of human society, of the human heart.