by Ken Liu
Dump trucks of soil lined the block, the air hazy with dust as they offloaded dirt onto conveyor belts leading into the building. Vacuum hoses and other contraptions moved the dirt elsewhere.
And everywhere, a swarm of humanity worked furiously.
MockTurtle wove his way through the sidewalk, his people—blinded by their visors and tasks—magically moving aside at the last second, a sea of humanity parting for him in his wheelchair.
“Welcome to the single most coordinated sudden attack of urban renewal ever witnessed,” he proclaimed. “Two hundred thousand souls, dedicated to turning this building into a sustainable structure.”
My knees were weak. “The Eddies are going to call in the military.”
“Since dawn we’ve been quietly working on the infrastructure of the building inside, doing as much prep as we could. Parts have been manufactured off-site for months now. We’ve all been rehearsing on 3-d models in massive multiplayer online simulations for a year, since we identified the target. It’s going to take eight more hours to get the soil in and then finish the interior modifications once that’s in place for the full occupation.”
“But what is it?” Why did they need soil?
“People have been taking over unused buildings and repurposing them in decayed areas for as long as we’ve had cities. But what is the point in taking over structures like this, if we don’t have any new paradigms to offer?” MockTurtle led me back toward the building. Inside the giant lobby people were working on a series of ponds. Sprinklers up over my head briefly went through a testing cycle, dropping mist into the air.
My host continued. “It began in an online game that let people design homes. Many used it as a place to test how to make more efficient homes, or redesign existing homes in niches in cities. Eventually the designers realized we had the economy of a small country. And so they wondered how they could face some of these problems, of how to be responsible dwellers. Out of that grew a community plan to create an embassy to the world.”
We took a glass elevator up through the building’s levels: I was seeing apple and orange trees, rows of furrowed soil. I recognized all this. Farms. They were building farms. Like the skyscraper farms in New York. No need to worry about seasons. Much more efficient acreage. You could reuse the water as it filtered down via gravity.
“We used a squatter at first. That triggered a response from the Edgewater contractors here to evict that person. They have a contract to protect this building. Our hackers were able to then follow the report that Edgewater delivered about the incident back through several shell companies to the actual owner of this building.”
We’d passed twenty rows of farms and gardens. Now it turned into apartments and corridors.
“That information was made public, prompting liens and backtax collection actions against the owners which forced them into bankruptcy. Now we’re claiming ownership, and offering to pay taxes and be good stewards. Under a subsidiary company based out of Turkey.”
“Turkey?” I said. “Why Turkey?”
“We have allies at the top in America. Allies who want us to succeed, who played the simulations, who know what we planned. And from a simple financial point of view, if we own the building, we’ll pay our taxes, raise the value of the building, and maybe even offer a plan to revitalize the Slumps. Since we put in a claim via a Turkish company to build an embassy, ostensibly for Turkey, we are technically on Turkish soil. They have a rule that says if you can erect a building in a night where the owner doesn’t notice and try to stop it, then you can stay there.
“So we will be allowed to have this land if we can finish this project in one night. But the previous owners, under a reconstituted company, are counter-filing having the building taken away, and are trying to stop us by getting the Eddies over here, because we have no building permits and we’re taking up the streets. It’s all legal fictions and weirdness, but we need to stop the Eddies from coming over here.”
He’d taken me to the top of the building, where a carefully landscaped set of gardens sat. With a waterfall trickling away already. I understood. Spaceship Detroit. A whole building that could sustain itself in all manners. This wasn’t recycling our forefather’s leftovers, or scrabbling about for what we could get today, this was its own direction. And it could be made right on the foundation of the existing.
“So how bad do you want that apartment? I could take you to see it, it’s just under our feet. Recycled oak floors, two bedrooms…” I held up my hand to quiet him. We looked out over the twinkling skyline.
I’d had a feeling it would come to something like this. Riding the back of the tiger meant getting bashed up. It never came without consequences.
“I need three hundred very dedicated people,” I said. “Not the cyclists. People ready to get hurt. Because the Eddies are not going to go easy.”
“You can have thousands,” MockTurtle said.
I shook my head. “Any more than a few hundred is going to get the military involved. They’ll be able to meddle with the project, easily enough. We want just the Eddies to stay involved and away from here.”
“What are you going to do?”
I pointed off in the distance. “By the park, the Detroit Opera House. We take and hold it all night. It pushes over from nuisance into hostile, but with only three hundred of us, and them thinking it’s today’s protestors, they won’t escalate this into a major emergency. But get your lawyers ready.”
MockTurtle reached out with his good hand. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” I looked out over the city with a sinking feeling in my stomach.
Was it just about the apartment now? Or had I gotten sick of skulking about in the Wilds by myself? Or had a strong taste of MockTurtle’s kool aid gotten to me?
A little bit of all of the above, I figured.
We rushed the security guards quickly enough, and I set teams to boarding up the doors. Jax were scattered on the streets. Protest signs wavered on the walls outside, thanks to projectors dropped all over the street.
Charlie had stuck with me, and he looked at the team. “Not a lot of us here.”
“Enough are,” I said. “We have to hold out until we get the all clear from the Project or until we’re all rounded up.”
The Opera House was a recognizable building, a part of the history of the city. The Eddies would not ignore this. Sure enough, my phone finally buzzed. CMO S. Whatten. “Stratton? I’m getting reports you’re at the Opera House?”
“We’re barring ourselves in for the night.”
I could see on my heads-up glasses that the Eddies were starting to stream this way.
“You sure about this?” Whatten asked. “We were just about to get a temporary city ban on bikes and end the whole protest. You want to take it up to this?”
“It’s too late, Samuel,” I looked around at the project volunteers. “We’re here for the duration.”
The first Eddies were pulling up at the perimeter of our jax field.
But then, so were hundreds of people on bikes, and cars, and on foot, coming to see the latest star singer, sports player, or whoever they idolized. Thanks to personal interest profiles, and thousands of turkers working to invite them down to the Detroit Opera House for a special showing of… whatever it was their interests indicated they would come down to see for a free showing.
These people weren’t working for anyone, or getting paid. They wouldn’t be classified as part of the protest. But they were indirectly working for us.
The Eddies formed up, clearing away the jax. Their riot teams rolled up and out with battering rams to come in after us.
“Frustrated fans, execute,” I ordered.
Outside, whisper campaigns started. The Eddies were here to take away the impromptu concerts being planned. They were here to ruin the fun.
Now, this was incitement. The project’s lawyers were going to have to earn their money when I got bailed out later tonight. My streaming video didn’
t show who threw the first bottle. But when it broke on the pavement, the Eddies moved their focus from the Opera House to the massive crowd outside.
Charlie, sitting next to me in one of the balcony seats, swore. He was looking at the streams on a small pad in his hands.
Outside erupted.
It was clear enough these weren’t anti-car protestors, the Eddies had a two front war on their hands now. It bought us until just past midnight, as the Eddies had their backs to us to deal with the frustrated and unruly crowds trying to get in.
“You don’t have room in your cells for us,” I told Whatten when he called me again. “Why bother now?”
“We’ll make do,” he hissed. He sounded tired. The friendliness I’d found in him earlier had been wrung out.
“We have no weapons. We’re just trying to make a point.”
“You’ve well made it all day, we’re going to make a point as well.”
By one in the morning they had the whole outside of the Opera House surrounded, and they’d started smashing in one of the doors.
“Get up here,” I ordered, moving to the location. We pushed our way forward with planks, doing our best to keep it reinforced.
They fired tear gas in, noxious smoke roiling through at us. We had masks for it and kept on pushing back at the splintered planks we’d nailed up, our shoes slipping on broken glass.
“Eddies’re in the back,” Charlie reported. And we split our forces. But there were more Eddies. As each new breach appeared we split to deal with it.
At two in the morning I ordered the bulk of the project volunteers to fall back to the next floor. The volunteers at the doors faced the Eddies, who punched through and started dragging them away.
I left half of the remaining volunteers to hold upper floors, leaning against doors, or just forming human chains. The rest of us, a hundred now, took to the roof. Barricading anything we found on the way up there, we had fewer doors to defend.
“They only can land a handful at a time by helicopter,” I told a nervous Charlie. “And unlike the military during a riot, they’re not going to shoot us, because that won’t turn them a profit, will it?”
The hundred of us on the roof saw dawn break, helicopters hovering around the edges of the building, Eddies camped outside with fellow project members zip tied to each other and sitting in one long line. When they finally got through, the Eddies kicked and beat us down. Making their point. But by then, we really didn’t care, did we?
MockTurtle himself came to spring us. “Are you ready to see your apartment?” he asked.
But I found that I didn’t want it.
“What’s the next project?” I asked.
It was late in the morning, a year later.
I packed up my home, folding my tent back down. The skinnable walls faded, their pictures and vistas disappearing as I shut the tent off.
I packed into the trailer behind my bike, and as I locked it down the rest of the city around me started to wake up. The smell of fresh coffee wafted over the neighborhood lines as slow wakers got stumbling. Fresh bread, airshipped in from a vertical farm in Columbus, or so everyone said, also filled the air. But I was in a hurry and decided to skip breakfast.
Everything folded up and away, with a quick double check to make sure the chalked-off area of my lot for the night was clean, and I was off. Friends from the last months of slow pedaling across the great American West waved at me as I cranked along through the streets of a tent city that had gone up overnight. Five thousand in this particular tribe.
I passed security along the edge and they let me pass. Then it was out along the back roads and trails with my electric-assist trike, the aerodynamic trailer behind me with all my belongings bumping along. I had found, over the last year, that I didn’t need much. I’d even gotten rid of things as I’d moved my way West.
This last leg was easy, coming down out of the mountains. I passed a handful of other bicycles and small cars, a few gas-powered.
And there it was: Los Angeles.
I had two reasons for LA. For one, it was our next project. We had a new codename, didn’t want the local Eddies to sniff us out ahead of time. We were trickling in a little bit at a time. Project Ceres had an ambitious hundred building goal, enough to completely feed the entire city, thus putting the project in the financial situation of becoming a major agribusiness and funding the formal creation of vertical farms anywhere it wanted. A different aim than the spaceship concept, but one I could still get behind.
We’d been perfecting our methods all throughout the center of the country, gaining recruits, resources, and abilities.
The second reason was Maggie.
She was out here in the city. With MockTurtle’s resources, I’d found her.
I wanted to thank her.
It sounded ridiculous, but sometimes it took losing something important for you to shake yourself out of old habits and seek out something new. Something different.
Sometimes, something better.
Homo Panthera
Andrew Leon Hudson
Andrew Leon Hudson is an improper Englishman often to be found in Spain, and has been writing full-time since the beginning of 2012, partly in an attempt to appear as unemployed as everyone else in the country, partly to lead a fulfilling life. He has the spectacularly diverse employment history that every good novelist's bio demands, but due to unfortunate circumstances that good novel is no longer out there.
This is part of a larger evolutionary science fiction project, one that ranges from urban India to sub-Saharan Africa to the favela slums of Brazil. But first we find ourselves in a remote nature reserve in Central America, and discover that the future of environmental conservationism will be militant—quite literally…
The canopy was high, but a second canopy of hanging mists formed a false sky just overhead. The trunks of ceibo and care tigre faded into a close distance, shadows against a grey wall just beyond reach, sheets of moss and ropes of lianas draped from their branches like voluminous sleeves and excessive jewellery, all corrosion green. Monteverde, Costa Rica.
Anxo walked with a slow, steady and all but silent pace. With periodic glances at the ground before him, he noted patches of undergrowth or fallen wood lurking in the humus, anything that might give him away with unwanted noise at a careless footfall; but mostly his gaze was up, scanning the cloud forest for signs of movement other than the slow drift of the thick atmosphere all around.
He was above average height for a Portuguese, which made him tall for Costa Rica. Broad across the shoulders but lean in profile, when he dropped into a crouch it was like a sheet of paper curving and dipping beneath its own weight. Unlike the smooth flexibility of his body, his face was hard and flat, angular, immobile.
His fingers traced a distinctive print in a patch of bare soil: the hind pad of a jaguar, the biggest cat of the Americas. One of the last. An adult, female, four years old, somehow at the peak of her health. He did not know this from the print. He knew it from the file, and many months of stalking.
Anxo paused to urinate, a brief exposure, into a tube that led through the same charcoal filters that strained clean the sweat wicked away by his undergarments, and the moisture his backpack drew into itself from the humid air. He sucked on his collar tube, drinking from the two litre reservoir he’d just started to refill.
Pushing up beneath a tight, matt-black rubberised sleeve on his left forearm was the oblong bulk of his tracking computer, featureless to the eye, worth a fortune. A field of nodules on its underside patterned a simple map against his skin. It had demanded eight months of constant use before he gradually began to visualise its touch, another sixteen before it became second nature. Tactile sight, utterly indecipherable to anyone but him.
Now its rippling pressure traced a topographic image, showed the jaguar’s direction and the distance between them. He knew without thinking, without looking, that the broadcast tag was four hundred metres away to his one o’clock, moving south-southw
est at walking speed.
Adequate distance, just. But time was running out.
Ahead the forest floor sloped upwards, formed a short level ridge before a sharp decline. He unslung the SVU-DS sniper rifle from his pack as he lay along the ridge’s edge, touch-checking the safety as he watched the mist for his target.
His hands paused as the tracking computer pulsed for attention—the jaguar had stopped. It resumed movement heading east-west, the same line as the small valley below him.
He pondered.
Then the target ghosted out of the mist.
Anxo settled the bullpup rifle’s timber-camo stock into his shoulder, hunched up on his elbows, the toes of his boots braced into the tangle of plant life that broke up his silhouette, finishing the work his digitally-designed camouflage began.
Two more targets appeared, ten and twelve metres further back from the first, which came on with appropriate caution. Anxo grudgingly acknowledged it, for what that was worth, but it didn’t change anything.
He zeroed in on the target’s head, recognised the blank, watchful features. This was the one.
He waited long enough to be certain that there were just these three and not more still further behind, then momentarily clenched his left hand against the body of the weapon, pumping his forearm beneath the tracking comp, long and short. Morse code: VC. 3T. PP.
On a screen, eight thousand kilometres away, would appear the words Visual Confirmation. Three Targets. Permission to Proceed?
He tracked his aim back to the second and third targets, marking each of the three in relation to the others, hovering on the last. Five seconds later, the tickling map on his forearm was replaced by a series of light pats, as silent a communication as his own had been. PG. SI. AD.
Permission Granted. Support Inbound. Agent’s Discretion.