Ecotones: Ecological Stories from the Border Between Fantasy and Science Fiction

by Ken Liu

  This didn’t look good.

  The car was in bad shape. It coughed to a gentle stop as some part fell off from underneath onto the road. A silent and expectant mob surrounded me as I got out of the car, the bat gripped in both hands. I would need to grab an ax as quickly as possible after the first couple swings, I reckoned. But the crowd moved back from me.

  “We don’t want any trouble,” one of the axe-wielders said. “We just want your car.”

  “Storing carbon producing energy in a battery still doesn’t change the impact of the original source of the energy!” someone shouted from the back of the crowd. “Damn footprinter.”

  It was the second time I’d been called that.

  “Shut up, Mary,” the axe-wielder said. “Sir, just step away from the car.”

  “If you can’t see how to take care of your footprint, we’ll do it for you,” the woman shouted.

  “Mary. Shut. Up.” The axe-wielder turned back. “You are not helping matters.”

  I still stood there, bat in hand, keeping everyone at bay. “What do you want out of me?” I asked.

  “Just your car,” the man said, exasperated.

  “What the hell is going on?” I really wanted to know. I felt like I’d fallen down a hole into some alternate Detroit.

  “We’re turning this area of Detroit into a car-free zone. We’re lead scavengers, looking to recycle any cars in our occupied territory into useful machines and produces. We have a reprap to repurpose the materials. That’s our job.”

  I didn’t know what a reprap was. Some kind of three-D printer, I had to assume. But even though things were hard on cars these days, you couldn’t talk about turning Detroit into a car-free zone with a straight face. These guys were nomadic extremist nuts of some sort.

  “But what’ll you do with the parts?” I asked. “What’s the point?”

  The guy grinned. “Oh, we’ll put them to good use.” A pair from the crowd advanced on the back end of my car and smacked their axes into it.

  “Hey!” I yelled, pointing my bat at them. But the moment was past. They’d written me off as a threat and began tearing into the car with gusto. So I grabbed the guy nearby with the axe and twisted it free. His friends hardly even noticed, too caught up in their fervor of car destruction.

  I dragged the man, wrapping his cloth poncho around his neck and arms in a knot he struggled against, down to a set of steps away from the destruction.

  “What… the hell?” he gasped.

  Dramatic, yes. And yet, it got the attention I wanted. Now I had an axe. And a bat.

  I held the axe up and looked at it. “What’s your name?” I asked casually.

  “Charlie.”

  “Charlie. Pleased to meet you. I’m Reginald.” I loosened his poncho.

  “That fascist bullshit doesn’t fly, dragging me off like that,” Charlie spat. Just like these other homeless, he was well washed, well shaved, with short cropped hair.

  I squatted in front of him. “Charlie. I could care less. You chopped up the car I was renting. I have to think that violates my rental agreement. So you know who’s going to get flack for that? Me. That puts me in a bad mood. And I’m the guy with the bat.”

  “And I’m the guy with some ten thousand other guys sitting just down the block,” Charlie said.

  Fair enough.

  I set the bat and axe down. “Okay.” I pulled a chocolate bar out of my pocket and unwrapped it. “Just, explain to me what’s going on.” I waved my hand out at the camp, and the people on the side of the street.

  Charlie still sulked on the stairs. I tried again. “You’re all nomads, right, passing through Detroit?” Like Maggie, but in large tribes. Like locusts.

  “Yeah, nomads. Low footprint nomads. We don’t stress out the environment. Take what we need into recycling. Recycle what we have. We’re here, but we’re not part of the city, not part of the resources being sucked.”

  “So what are you doing with my car?”

  “You ever ride a bike?” Charlie asked me.

  “Yeah. When I was a kid.”

  “It’s a perfect technology. Ten to fifteen miles an hour for the energy required for a human to walk. And humans are good at walking,” Charlie said. “Evolutionarily, we’re designed to just walk and walk and walk all day long. Eat some calories and watch us go. But look at this shithole.”

  He waved his hands around the street. “Not a bike friendly city?” I hazarded.

  “Fuck no! We’re in the second century of having this perfect technology, but we kept focusing on something far less efficient. The streets aren’t bike friendly, the Wilds aren’t friendly, Detroit and a lot of these other Midwest cities are throwing money at electric cars and power plants that run on coal, thinking that if they can just swap things out, life can run right back on the course it did.

  “Meanwhile, people run in gyms or just get fat because they keep using the lazy technology. At ten miles an hour, man, you can live within 15 miles of your workplace and still get in.”

  He had more, a complete rant, but I help up a hand. “My car, though.”

  Charlie looked back at me. “People don’t make voluntary changes, they just float downstream. Even when there’s a freaking waterfall at the end.”

  “So you’re going to make people swim upstream?”

  “No.” Charlie laughed. “We’re going to blow the river up. The car makers, their ghosts are still playing with the city. We’re going to make it carless. Whether they like it or not.”

  I picked up the bat. Edgewater was dealing with eco-terrorists.

  The last thing I wanted to do was get between the Eddies and these guys. Things got ugly when you were dealing with people who’d already thought the world was ended, thanks to people like the Eddies. No amount of lost love between authorities and anarchists.

  But I still wanted paid. And their little tent city under the bridge hid the lawyer.

  I cradled my bat in my arms and left Charlie on the steps. Around me people were dragging the remains of my rental off down the street in what seemed like thirty different directions for scrap. Or recycling. Or to whatever a reprap was.

  I promised myself that I’d be out of the city before the crazy shit started happening. But as I came out of the old, soot-stained brick buildings and looked out at the empty pavement and weeds in front of me, I wondered if I’d made an empty promise:

  The entire tent city had disappeared.

  A single, distant figure stood alone in the urban emptiness, as if waiting just for me.

  I recognized the lawyer. Even in this distance.

  The lawyer waited by his bike, both hands holding his briefcase in front of his waist. “Mr. Stratton, you are a very persistent man.”

  I swung my bat up over my back, letting it hang loose, gripped by my right hand. I wasn’t giving him a hand to shake. “Where’d they all go?”

  “Staying in one place invites complacency, and authoritarian response. Takes time to muster the resources to evict a group of our size.”

  “But there were thousands of people here, with tents, and avenues between the tents,” I protested. “They can’t just evaporate in a morning when my back’s turned.”

  “And yet they did.”

  I stood in the concrete emptiness, forced to concede his point. “A well ordered army, then.”

  The lawyer smiled. “Now, Mr. Stratton, you’re getting to the meat of it. Are you intrigued?”

  “I want the rest of the money.”

  “I know. You willing to follow this all the way, then?”

  I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. But I nodded assent. “I want paid.”

  The lawyer leaned in with a tiny black wand, which he waved over my body. Around my collar it beeped, and the lawyer flicked a switch. A tiny mote on my collar smoldered, then puffed smoke.

  “Now that the Eddies can’t follow you, I have a request,” the lawyer said. He produced a dark blue hood.

  I stared at the cloth. “Yo
u want me to wear that? You think the Eddies can’t just patch into a satellite and find where your mob took off to?”

  The lawyer sighed. “Granted. But where in the camp you are will be secret.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Here we go. I pulled the hood on. “But I’m keeping the bat,” I said, my voice muffled.

  “Whatever you want, Mr. Stratton.” The lawyer sounded bored. He pushed me forward. “There’s a sidecar on my bike, please get in it.”

  Why hadn’t he had me sit first before putting the hood on? To mess with my head? “So are you a part of all this, or are you just a turking lawyer?”

  I could feel him climbing onto his bike. We jerked into motion. “I’m a part of the project.”

  “To destroy the auto-oriented world of Detroit?”

  “Among other things, Mr. Stratton. The world cannot continue on its current path.” The lawyer was huffing as he pedaled, getting us up to a quick clip. “We have returned almost to the time of city-states, like the Greeks. Each of these cities has a different past, and set of traditions and patterns set into its habits. Some of these habits have a fundamental impact, however, on citizens elsewhere. If you dump some form of pollution into the air from a smokestack somewhere, and people are effected hundreds of miles away, shouldn’t they have some sort of say? It used to be there were country-wide principals and guidance, but in this day and age it’s city to city.

  “Now, some of us don’t have allegiances to any one place. Particularly those of us old enough to remember nationalism. You know what I’m talking about Stratton, you fought for country, once, not city.”

  “Didn’t do much for me,” I muttered. But I remember the days when bunting hung from porches and second floor windows.

  “We have no allegiance to country, city, or company. We’re neo-tribalists at best, but even then, not forming around any constitution or hierarchal structure. We’re per-project affiliations, with reputation economics as our bond. Some of us switch from one project to another, others are committed to the larger plan of trying to create substantial memetic change to our urban environments.”

  “Like getting rid of cars.”

  “That’s a sub-project, one that many have coalesced around. Some of the more enthusiastic, like those who recycled your car. Yes. But the energy use and issues of transportation are realistically a small segment of the greater issue of creating a city, or environment, that is carbon neutral and thus, sustainable. We’re talking about the long term survival of the human species, Mr. Stratton, not just whether you recycle plastic and go to work in the approved transportational manner.”

  “I’ve been hearing doom and gloom for a long time,” I grunted. “The end of the world’s always just around the fucking corner.”

  “And you think it won’t come?” The lawyer zigged through streets. Some alleys, too, I could tell by the echoes of our voices. “You think civilizations haven’t collapsed? Someone or something else will come along. They’ll name some streets after us, maybe create a museum. We still find ancient cities by satellite, after the jungle or desert has long since overrun them. Why’d they die off? Overuse of the soil, or whatever, or just plain bad planning when it came to picking neighbors. But the point is, their world ended. You can nuke a patch of ground, and the radiation will kill everything. Years later, nature comes back. Generations later, some parts of it are livable. Still doesn’t mean setting a nuclear bomb off in the middle of your living room’s a good idea.”

  “Sounds like a lot of drama.”

  “We’re sitting on an edge, Mr. Stratton. You’ve seen it all change in your life. The young around us, they’ve only known the slipping and scrabbling, watching energy prices spiral out of control. They’re content to root around in their parent’s and grandparent’s trash to look for whatever they can recover. But you know better. You can feel it, that your life straddled the point where we hit the apex, and then started sliding. Remember when we used to make things.”

  I remembered the long factory lines, the smokestacks belching. The rows of gleaming product, sitting perched over enticing price tags, all packaged in sexy gleaming plastics. They made so much you just tossed it all when you were done, because they’d make more.

  We descended a ramp of some sort, and the world grew dark outside. The lawyer slowly came to a stop, and reached over to remove my hood.

  “Don’t ask where you are,” he said. “I’m a delivery man, of sorts. Now that I’m here I can’t leave, but you may have to and you can’t know where this is. Most of the people in here don’t know where here is. Keeps it safe.”

  I clambered out into the barely lit dimness of an industrial warehouse, the windows all blacked out. As my eyes adjusted, I realized it was entirely empty.

  Until the doors swung open. People wearing large datagoggles over their eyes walked in. None of them could see where they were, or what was in front of them. But they marched like robots, following invisible lines of information.

  More came in, carrying chairs, some with desks, that they sat at predetermined points. They swarmed around each other like ants, following some larger pattern of commands. Maybe hundreds of them had already swarmed in through the room, and most had left.

  Large industrial worklights lit up the inside of the warehouse, and an entire command center’s worth of monitors had been strapped to a large metal trunk at the center, which had been quickly bolted onto the concrete floor. Thick fiber optics ran all over the warehouse, terminating in a large trunk of bound cables that ran to a dish pointed out of one of the windows that had been pulled open.

  The entire process had taken five very surreal minutes.

  The crowds evaporated, leaving ten individuals behind. One of them sat in a complex wheelchair that folded around him and held him up at eye-level. It whirred and balanced, and trailed cables behind it.

  Inside the wheelchair, the gray-skinned man moved closer to me. He had sunken eyesockets, lids stitched closed, and plastic-looking cheekbones. One missing arm, plugged into a socket on the chair. No legs, unless they were hidden in its depths.

  One ear was missing as well, replaced by a metallic ovoid with three blue lights steadily shining.

  “Mr. Stratton, I’m afraid we’ve been recruiting you,” the man said, slowing in front of me. The wheelchair raised a bit higher so his face was level with mine. A small pair of cameras on his shoulder adjusted their focus with a faint whirr.

  “Someone tipped off the Eddies that I was watching them. And someone didn’t pay the other half of what I was expecting.” For some reason, I’d been allowed to keep the bat. But bashing on a man with no legs, one arm, and no eyes was not going to be part of today’s equation.

  “Guilty as charged. Mr. Stratton, we’re looking for a leader, someone who knows the area, and someone who has a good sense of the Edgewater contractors here. There are a number of candidates, but you’re a service man with a record, and a good idea of what we’ll be facing.”

  “Listen…” I wasn’t sure how to ask after his name, so I floundered for a second.

  “My tag is MockTurtle, the community moderator for this project.” MockTurtle. A little bit of this, and a little bit of that. A risible name for a man who was about as much machine. He saw my amusement through his camera and nodded. “Yes. I do find some humor in my situation. The alternative was despair.”

  “Okay Mr. Turtle. The lawyer pitched me hard on your cause.” I looked around the warehouse. “I’m not interested. If people want to bike and walk the town, that’s their thing. I’m not getting involved in some riot.”

  The wheelchair backed away. “We’re not, as such, asking you to volunteer. We’re willing to pay for your services. And settle up on what you think we still owe you.”

  Now we were talking. “I’m listening.”

  “An apartment in downtown Detroit. Maybe even continuing work as security for it.”

  “A lease? How long, and how much?”

  The ruin of a man in front of me chuckled. �
�You’re not paying close enough attention, Mr. Stratton. See, at first we weren’t sure who we’d pick, or hire, to run the street side of this project. But then you showed up, turking for us. It was a sign. Who better to run this than someone like you, down on your luck and needing the help? When you started snooping around, well, we had to bring you in. We’re offering you an apartment. A whole apartment.”

  I stared. Like I said, there were some that would give their left nut for downtown space. I included myself in that list.

  “So you’re going to riot, to turn this into a car-free city. And you need my help.” Too good to be true, it all was. And if there was one thing I learned in life, it was a little suspicion. “No way a downtown apartment’s worth it for my help. You’ve already got an army, well trained, you showed it off when you set all this up in here a few minutes ago.”

  MockTurtle spread his one arm. I recognized what those scars came from: a landmine. Boston, or DC? I wondered. “You’re right. It’s not just the cars. That’s a diversion. An important issue, yes. But we’re involved in some urban renewal as well.”

  Which is where the apartment offer came from. They’d paid Maggie to try and overnight, I remembered. I could put a few things together. “You going to try to occupy the Slumps, are you?” All these nomads, they were going to settle in, reclaim some of these buildings. I could have laughed.

  “Not really, Mr. Stratton. It’s more complicated than that. We make no guarantees, but I will put a good faith payment up in escrow right… now. Consider it a down payment on the apartment. We need a dedicated team of protestors to keep the Edgewater contractors busy, but the protest cannot get to the size that the military is called in. You have to both keep the protest in line, and keep it out of the Edgewater’s reach. It’ll be a delicate balance. If it works, and if our project works in the meantime, you’ll have an apartment of your own.

  “If the project fails, you’re one of several people offered large cash payouts for your services on the ground, rather than volunteering your time. You will still get an equivalent pay. We are fair people, we depend on our word and reputations.”