by Matt Ruff
No answer, but the barge rocked in the effluvia as something passed beneath it. A log, perhaps. Joan ordered her heart to stop beating so fast, she was forty, goddamnit, hence stoic, she’d taken on Union Carbide and Afrikaans Chemical in her day, and she could by Jesus handle a mutant fish. This conceit, repeated several times, actually steadied her free hand enough to let her yank a grenade from her belt.
Unclipping the grenade from its holster activated an internal mechanism much like the nose of an Automatic Servant. This mechanism sampled the air, found it wanting, and cued a microminiaturized hologram projector in the grenade’s cap.
Joan blinked as the translucent head of John Fitzgerald Kennedy materialized before her in the darkness. “I’m sorry, fellow American,” Kennedy said, in tones gentle but firm, “but the atmosphere around you contains a mixture of gasses with the potential for a chain-reaction explosion. Federal and local safety regulations prohibit the use of hand grenades at this time. Your government apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause you.”
Joan started to reply, but it was at that same moment that she realized what the dull roar she’d been hearing was. “Waterfall,” she said dumbly as the tunnel floor dropped away beneath her. Pitched from the deck of the barge, Joan plunged fifteen feet into swirling black effluvia; her shotgun and the grenade vanished in the tumult, but somehow she kept her oxygen mask on, surfacing in the middle of a rectangular basin the size of a football field: the Times Square Interchange.
She paddled in place, trying to orient herself. One gloved hand struck something, and she curled her fingers in what she thought was human hair, lifting it up.
“Hartower . . .?”
“Zippity-doo-day!” the severed head of the Automatic Servant greeted her. “Isn’t this a lovely morning!”
Joan hurled it as far as she could, hearing it splash down at the other end of the basin. What she heard next filled her with dread: Bolero. Ravel’s Bolero, coming from under the water, where she knew for a fact Eddie Wilder was no longer alive and kicking. The marching bassoons crescendoed and a fin broke the surface right in front of her.
Meisterbrau, having already dined well that morning, only nuzzled her at first. The shark’s sandpaper skin raked open the right leg of her body suit as it brushed past, though Joan, feeling the painful contact, was convinced the entire limb had been bitten off. She backpedaled furiously, wiggling toes she could hardly believe were still connected. Her oxygen tank clanked against the wall of the chamber.
Trapped, Joan thought, middle-age stoicism drowned in the shit. No doubt if she had been the comic book d’Arc, saint and warrior maiden of Old France, she would at that moment have ignited with righteous fury to smite her foe; but she was only Fine, and it was in sheer animal panic that she jerked her head around in the dark and saw a slim chance of salvation outlined in a circle of glowing purple lichen.
A tunnel. Not a barge tunnel but one of the old secondaries, no more than a yard wide, situated above the Interchange’s waterline and pouring out a mere trickle of effluvia. If she could climb up there . . .
The synthesized orchestra dropped to mezzo forte as Meisterbrau dove and began a wide circling turn. Joan unhooked her second hand grenade; before JFK could put in another appearance she whacked it against the wall of the chamber hard enough to fracture the air sampler. She pulled the pin and tossed the grenade as she had the Automatic Servant’s head, trying more for distance than aim. Hydrostatic shock might injure or kill the shark, but at this point Joan would settle for distracting it.
Standard Department-issue grenades came with a fifteen-second fuse, the long delay being intended to keep untrained sewer workers from damaging expensive pipes and incurring self-inflicted death benefits all at one go. Joan counted backwards in her head as she fought to pull herself up into the secondary tunnel. The lichen on the tunnel lip was slick and offered almost no purchase, and she was weak, from fright or loss of blood she didn’t know; her oxygen tank seemed so heavy it might have been anchored to the floor of the basin. She heaved herself up twice, only to slip and fall back.
Bolero had begun a new crescendo, Meisterbrau’s fin arrowing straight at her this time, when a superhero reached out of the tunnel and hauled Joan up by her wrists. She knew it was a superhero because (a) it wore a suit of rubberized armor that put her own body suit to shame, (b) anyone else would have been running away, and (c) it had a glow-in-the-dark symbol emblazoned on its chest.
The superhero spoke with a young woman’s voice: “Hang on to me,” and cupped gloved hands over Joan’s ears. Joan grabbed the superhero’s shoulders and held tight; behind her, the detonating grenade set off a chemical firestorm, and in the sudden flare of light she glimpsed the eyes of her savior, sea-green eyes set in a black, smiling face. Then the force of the explosion rammed them both down the tunnel like wadding down the barrel of a gun.
The superhero’s symbol seemed to recede before her as Joan blacked out. It was an unusual symbol, neither an atom nor a thunderbolt nor a capital letter, but rather the outline of a continent. On the brink of unconsciousness, Joan couldn’t quite remember the continent’s name; but under the circumstances, that was hardly surprising.
A Miracle in Times Square
The Automaton Delimiting Act of ’09 made it legal to employ Automatic Servants in the maintenance of nuclear power plants but barred them from operating motor vehicles or carrying firearms, so Harry Gant’s driver and chief bodyguard on the transport bus was human, a Lebanese-American whose full name Gant couldn’t pronounce. Gant just called him Louis.
Louis got them to Times Square at quarter to nine. The Gant Media & Technical School for Advanced Immigrant Teens occupied the better part of a block once dominated by porn houses and peep shows, the streamlined gloss of its architecture calling to mind an early-twentieth-century version of The Future. American critics hated the building—“academe as hood ornament,” the Architectural Digest reviewer wrote, while an essayist in Harper’s cracked jokes about the return of Flash Gordon—but second- and third-world parents recognized a landmark of opportunity when they saw it, and sent Gant their children.
And there they were now, lined up at attention in front of the school, Gant’s Immigrant Scholars of Merit: fresh-faced adolescents from under-industrialized and overcommunized nations around the globe. The school headmaster, Ms. Allagance, waved gaily as the transport bus pulled in; at her signal the front row of students burst into song.
“Hey,” Harry Gant said, absurdly touched by this display. “Whose idea was this?”
“I phoned ahead,” Vanna Domingo told him, pleased that he was pleased. “Glad you like it.”
“Thanks for the thought. Thanks much.” One might have argued that this was the same brand of fealty that he found so discomfiting in Vanna, but the Norman Rockwell associations of the scene elevated it to another, more properly American plane. “But wait a minute, what was that sound?”
“What sound?”
“That whoosh sound.”
Abrupt chaos outside the bus: a metallic clang, a grunt from Ms. Allagance, a squelching thud like a wet sack of potatoes dropped from a height, screams from the children. Gant leapt bravely from his seat and was rushing to offer aid before Louis and the rest of the security team could stop him.
A crimped manhole cover had imbedded itself edgewise into the sidewalk and was still quivering. Fortunately this was not the object that had sent Ms. Allagance sprawling. Rather, she had been struck a glancing blow by the tail of a great white shark. The big fish had landed on a mailbox and lay thrashing on a shoal of parcel post; Gant paused halfway between it and the felled headmaster, wondering which required the most immediate attention. Meisterbrau decided the issue by coughing up a human hand.
Gant moved closer: the hand was encased in some sort of wetsuit material but was no less viscerally disgusting for that. The students had stopped screaming and some were starting to walk over this way, and Harry Gant, ever mindful of public sensibilities
, had to act quickly to distract them. Meisterbrau burped a second time, spitting out a flashy wristwatch, which had barely come to rest before Gant snatched it up.
“Hey, look at this!” Gant shouted, waving the Timex Philharmonic over his head while he discreetly nudged Eddie Wilder’s hand out of sight with his toe. “Look at this, swallowed by a fish and it still plays great music, kids! What you’re witnessing is nothing short of a miracle in modern American technology! A miracle. . .”
A sliver of sunlight found its way down into the canyons and made the wristwatch gleam like a diamond. The children looked where Harry Gant wanted them to. Eddie Wilder’s soul departed this mortal plane unnoticed. The Philharmonic picked up the tempo. And Meisterbrau, down but not out, sank its teeth into a package marked MUTAGENIC BIOHAZARD—HANDLE WITH CARE.
For a New York Monday morning in 2023, none of this was all that unusual.
2
Pirate is a person who attacks and robs ships. Such robbers have also been called buccaneers, corsairs, filibusters, freebooters, ladrones, pickaroons, and sea rovers. . . . Widespread piracy no longer exists. But occasional attacks occur in some areas . . .
—World Book Encyclopedia
The Strangest Thing in the Ocean
The full twisting pathway of the effluvia beneath the city’s streets was a secret known to no one, the only complete map having been lost after the death of Teddy May. All of it eventually came out somewhere, though—Manhattan’s waste being ejected, after varying degrees of detoxification, into the East River or the Hudson. From there it passed into New York Bay (random bits of detritus scraping the keel of the Staten Island Ferry), and from the Bay it washed out to sea.
There were some awfully strange things running loose in the Atlantic Ocean in those days. Many of them made the wild fauna of the New York sewer system look cuddly by comparison. In his runaway bestseller The Shadow over Strathmere, celebrated disaster chronicler Tad Winston Peller discussed the mysterious fate of a New Jersey seaside town that had vanished without a trace one night in 2011. A popular local theory held that Mutant Amphibian Beings had come out under the dark of the new moon and carried off everyone and everything in sight.
Here is the name of one strange thing running loose in the ocean that posed no threat to life: Yabba-Dabba-Doo.
Yabba-Dabba-Doo was not Latin or Greek for some genetically drifted brand of tuna. Yabba-Dabba-Doo was the name of a submarine, a big green one with bright pink polka dots. It bore a living cargo of castaways and endangered species, and roamed the East Coast shipping lanes doing embarrassing things to people and institutions that were reckless in the disposal of their effluvia. It was said that the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s captain, Philo Dufresne, was the blackest African still living on the planet Earth, but only one person had ever succeeded in getting a photograph of him, and she wasn’t telling. It was also said that the Yabba-Dabba-Doo was powered by a perpetual motion machine that would be made available to the world—along with all the free jellybeans anyone could ever want—as soon as the human race proved itself worthy of such a boon.
This might all sound like the plot for a very expensive situation comedy. It wasn’t; it was real life. But that it was difficult to take seriously was exactly Philo Dufresne’s intention.
Too Many Adjectives
On the morning that Joan Fine first made the acquaintance of Meisterbrau, the Yabba-Dabba-Doo took up station in the waters off Montauk Point. Leaving his first mate in the control room to watch for potential targets, Philo Dufresne retired to his quarters to write for an hour. In addition to being an internationally acclaimed eco-pirate, Philo was a closet novelist, and for the past ten years he had worked off and on to complete the Great Atlantean Novel, an epic of anthropomorphized whales, porpoises, and fish. The working title was No Opposable Thumbs, and like Philo himself the book had its moments of sheer brilliance.
It would never be published.
Try as he might, Philo had not been able to correct the fatal flaw in his writing style, which a single sentence would serve to illustrate: Baruga churned up thirty-foot-high, prismatic sprays of salty brine with his gargantuan, all-powerful, spadelike flukes as the deadly explosive-tipped harpoon penetrated his warm, fleshy blubber and went off, flinging hot, cruelly sharp shrapnel into his great life-pumping heart.
Too many adjectives. Or as a smart text-editing program had once told him: “Not every noun requires a modifier.” While Philo agreed with this in principle, every attempt he made to write leaner prose ended up looking naked to him, unfinished. Causing him still further distress was the nagging sense that this inability to leave well enough alone ran directly counter to his environmentalist ethics. Unable to reform his composition and unwilling to give it up, he committed his novel like a secret memoir to the pages of a diary and kept it locked in a safe.
As he wrote that morning (using a refillable ballpoint pen, his lowtech response to the trauma of word processing), he could hear the skitter of tiny rodent feet above and around him. The decks of the submarine were riddled with a network of shatterproof plastic tunnels, warren to several hundred or so blue hamsters, an exotic breed that would have sold for ninety-five dollars or more apiece in the New York Pets-R-Us. Philo didn’t keep them for their resale value; he just liked the way they looked, liked especially the life and energy they radiated as they scampered from one end of the sub to the other. With ten bobcat cubs also in residence, the Yabba-Dabba-Doo was a truly kinetic vessel.
Hunched over his writing desk, Philo with his size and his shock of beard might have passed as a middle-aged Santa checking his famous List, but only in a revisionist version of that myth. Whether he was truly the darkest-skinned survivor of the ’04 Pandemic was a matter for debate, but he was without question the darkest-skinned child ever raised by the Amish. A Pennsylvania Dutch farmer named Gunther Lapp had found the squalling infant—a changeling the color of good earth, with green eyes like a landscape after rain—abandoned in a wheat field. Gunther, a man of great heart with an unqualified love of children, especially orphans, grew instantly attached to the strange baby, though the local bishop was somewhat taken aback by his petition for adoption. “Philo” was the name pinned to the blanket in which Philo had come wrapped; “Dufresne” was the last name of the only other black person Gunther had ever met, a government census taker who’d passed through the village in 1970.
Young Philo and the Amish community were an imperfect match at best. After Gunther Lapp’s death in 1994, Philo, who was eighteen that year, visited Philadelphia and was physically and technologically seduced by a computer science major at the University of Pennsylvania. Many back at home were quietly relieved to learn he would not be returning. After all, who but the devil would leave an African-American baby in a Mennonite wheat field?
He’d drifted into environmental activism in the early Oughts, drawn by a genuine concern for the planet but also—he tried always to be honest about this point—by an antisocial streak that badly needed an outlet. Gunther Lapp had raised Philo to be a pacifist, and he would always abhor the taking of life, but once out in the world he discovered he had no corresponding qualms about gross property damage. As he learned working for Earth First! and the Ned Ludd Society, there was nothing quite so satisfying as a morally justified act of vandalism.
Driven into hiding by the Pandemic, Philo spent the next several years literally wandering in the desert, until he met up with a Jewish Luddite named Morris Kazenstein. Morris, barely out of his teens, introduced himself as “Delancey Street’s answer to Thomas Edison.” He claimed to have composed schematics and blueprints for hundreds of useful gadgets, but for personal reasons had sworn that none of his inventions would ever fall into the hands of the military. Since defense departments around the world borrowed freely (or at inflated cost) from private industry, Morris had decided that the only way to honorably pursue his craft would be to become an outlaw. That much having been said, how would Philo like to hear Morris’s idea for something cal
led “benign eco-piracy”?
Philo listened; a pact was struck. The next morning they began laying the groundwork for a scheme that would take over a decade to reach fruition.
And so today, at age forty-seven, Philo was a pirate, possibly the most infamous pirate in history, definitely the one with the highest television audience share. Morris served as his first mate and technical sorcerer, with inventions numbering not just in the hundreds but in the thousands. The Yabba-Dabba-Doo was fast becoming legend.
At half past nine, Morris gave a whistle over the intercom: “Conn to captain’s quarters.”
Philo picked up his intercom mike, which was shaped like a dodo bird, and spoke into the beak: “What’s up?”
“Target approaching. Your favorite kind, Philo.”
“A Gant ship?”
“Unarmed and unescorted.”
A pair of blue hamsters charged by overhead, stumbling over each other in their haste; Philo smiled. He closed his novel-in-progress and put away his pen. “On my way up,” he said.
Target Selection
The first submarine to see action in wartime was the American Turtle, a oneman, hand-powered vehicle built by Yale student David Bushnell in 1776. Little more than an egg-shaped barrel with a ballast tank, the Turtle’s only recorded mission—an attempt to mine the British flagship Eagle with a gunpowder time bomb—proved an utter failure, and the sub was ultimately dismantled without having inflicted a single enemy casualty.
Submarines had increased dramatically in size, sophistication, and military effectiveness since then, but they’d never ceased to be cramped and claustrophobic vessels. Stealth weapons by nature, serious and deadly in intent, they weren’t supposed to be fun to ride in. Comfortable where possible, yes—crew morale was important in wartime—but not fun.