METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  Any citizen of Cascadiopolis is free to volunteer for the Citizen’s Executive, but the coordinators are appointed by the will of the whole. An election may be called at any time, for any reason, by any citizen, so long as a minimum of ten percent of their fellow citizens agree.

  This practice is a compromise between our anarchist principles and the unfortunate realities of existing in a world of governments, corporations and capital-intensive infrastructure. Every citizen’s core aspirations should include a dedication to the day when the Citizen’s Executive will wither away and we are all self-actualized without interference from each other or the city as a whole.

  * * *

  Tygre arises from his bed of heather and ferns and muslin. He has been sleeping in the higher slopes, where the elk browse. This is well within Cascadiopolis’ perimeter, but far away from most dosses inhabited by his fellow citizens.

  Privacy is a limited commodity in the green city. Tygre has his reasons, two of which are yawning themselves awake now in the little hollow he has just left behind.

  A little mystery is good for the soul. It does not follow that a lot of mystery is better.

  He knows better than to silhouette himself against the skyline, but there is a rock knee he climbs halfway up every day to crouch in a niche and look west into the failing light of dusk, toward the Willamette Valley, the Coastal Mountains, and somewhere beyond, the limitless depths of the Pacific Ocean.

  This place has a smell and sense of home beyond anything Tygre has ever experienced. It saddens him that his project here will almost certainly fail. In the short term, at least. But the game is long, lifetimes long if one takes the most enlightened view.

  He has come from a very hard school, hidden deep within the folds of the culture since long before this latest round of collapse-and-apocalypse was played out. Heresies within heresies, ancient wisdoms hiding in plain sight.

  The school, nameless as the wind, had gone to a great deal of trouble during the last century to make itself and its precepts a cliché. No one would know to look, think to question, or believe what they found.

  Tygre stretches in place against the rock. His skin seems to blend in to the lichens, so even his two lovers of the night before don’t glimpse him as they scowl and stare about.

  Go on, boys, he thinks. The day is just starting.

  Fuddled, they do just that, the two young men gathering their clothes and heading down into the deeper trees, unselfconsciously holding hands. Even now, especially now, that is difficult in the cities.

  He watches them with a tinge of sadness. So many never find what life intended for them. Or who.

  In time, his thoughts turn to the woman who came late to the singing the night he arrived in this place. Bashar was obviously concerned about her, but she has vanished into the shadows. This is Cascadiopolis. No one carries an ID. Subcutaneous chips are pulsed to ash. It is a reputation economy, assisted by labor traded for value without the intermediation of State authority or capital markets.

  That’s what they tell themselves, anyway.

  The result is that a woman who doesn’t make trouble, gets along well, and moves quietly among the dripping night-dark trees can vanish in their midst. Tygre is fascinated by this. Those crafts are not unknown, but they are rare. Even in a place as populated with exceptions as Cascadiopolis.

  He has thought since the beginning that either Gloria Berry or the man Bashar would be the one who turned him. Now Tygre is beginning to wonder about this woman-who-isn’t-there.

  It would be nice to talk openly with her a while. They could stand in the center of some chuckling stream, in an open space where passive listeners or ordinary eavesdroppers would be unlikely, and mutter to defeat distant lip-readers. He can imagine the conversation, the ground they might cover, the common interests their divergent agendas ultimately represent.

  Collapse will kill everyone, eventually. His school sees that as clearly as the die-hard defenders of capital do; as clearly as the generals in Colorado Springs; as clearly as the muftis in Baghdad and Mecca. The days of denial are long gone, swept away with the collapse of American politics and Wall Street. The days of agreement will never come.

  But still, they have common interests: survival, prosperity in some form, clean air and water. Children, even. A future that will arrive no matter what.

  Tygre knows full well he will never speak with the woman. She may be the knife in his back; she may be no one at all. It does not matter. He is a culture-bomb in search of a fuse. She is hiding from Bashar and the Security Subcommittee.

  Everyone is who they must be.

  In time, he climbs down from the rock, gathers up his clothing, and wonders yet again if this will be the day.

  * * *

  Offertory

  Happiness Cardoza has come to hate this city with a passion. She is a hunted animal. Not in actuality, of course, for the greenfreaks could have run her down in the first twenty-four hours if they’d been willing to call a general assembly, then have security beat the bounds while most citizens were locked down.

  That isn’t the way Cascadiopolis minds its business. Not inside the perimeter. Instead of the ruthless efficiency of corporate security, or the brutal force multipliers of the military, Cascadiopolis wars with weapons of rumor and shadow. The same people who would gut her like a line-caught salmon if they found her outside don’t even look twice at her on the inside.

  The dispassionate part of her mind, the internal observer, is fascinated by the dichotomy. The city is too big—know-your-neighbor security doesn’t work among several thousand people with a churn-in transient population. That’s a tribal practice, useful by the dozens or the scores. There is a reason military companies were sized the way they were. You know everybody.

  This place isn’t a company. It isn’t even a battalion. It’s a brigade. Only there is no brigadier.

  If it were not her life at stake, she might laugh at the way these people are betrayed by their own anarchist ideals.

  Instead she keeps her chin tucked down, works in the sawpits concealed deep in ravines where deadfall and the harvests from ultra-low-impact logging were processed into usable wood. She doesn’t ever sleep in the same place twice. People talk here, all the time, in soft, pattering voices, but they never ask questions.

  A capable woman willing to work a two-man saw for an entire overnight shift is an asset not to be doubted.

  She has met hauliers, bargemen, teachers, engineers, farmers, lifelong activists, bereaved parents, orphaned children, people lost within their own drug-addled souls, and even one ancient, renegade venture capitalist who likes to talk about the old days on Sand Hill Road down in Silicon Valley. Cardoza says little, but when it is her turn to tell some story she talks about a fictitious childhood on Vancouver Island, recalling lost Victoria before the winter hurricanes and the sea level rises finally overwhelmed that city.

  “I’m just here,” she says. It’s a common refrain, one heard time and again.

  Sometimes watchers from the Security Subcommittee pass by. Cardoza has made herself shorter, wrapped herself in tie-dyed muslin with lumps beneath that mask her muscles. They will not do face checks, these people—against what they stand for—so the pit boss just nods and security moves on.

  All it takes is one chance meeting on a path, or one question too many, and she is done.

  Her weapons and body armor are stashed amid a cache of such personal gear. They would mark her out in a moment, but she does not need them now. She has only kept the chirper, to bounce the simplest codes off satellite overflight and report back to her employers.

  Cardoza is in, but there is no obvious next step.

  This is not a city that can be set on fire. There are too many people to kill them all in their beds. They are too spread out to be gassed or strafed.

  It would take fire from the sky, as has happened further south along the Cascades recently if rumor is to be believed, to stop these people.

  Worst of
all, in her hiding, she has not seen the singing man since. Tygre, his name is, and it’s on everybody’s lips. He spends too much time around the Citizen’s Executive, around that stone bastard Bashar—people she can’t afford to be near. Close, but not close enough. Far, but not far enough.

  So she clicks out her simple codes, ignores the whispers about government spies in hiding, and watches the path ahead of herself with the paranoia of a hunted animal. Something will break soon, Cardoza is confident. So long as it is not her, she will survive.

  * * *

  Crown stalked his office, worried. Two weeks had passed since the bombing at Three Fingered Jack. He’d sent people into the resulting burn zone. There had definitely been something there. A fraction of the size of Cascadiopolis, perhaps a hundred people total, but it had been there.

  Like aspens spreading along a mountainside, the greenfreaks sent out runners.

  What drove him nearly to distraction was a complete vacuum of information about who had ordered the strike. Colorado Springs was uncharacteristically silent—the Air Force leaked like a sieve at command levels, when the right questions were asked by the right people at the right cocktail parties. Not this time. Likewise corporate chatter was mute on the subject. Not even Edgewater was talking, and that hit was very much their style.

  Strange.

  It was a wildfire, nothing else. Nothing to see here, citizen, move on, move on.

  Reports from his Cascadiopolis assets were just as thin. Asset Tau had fallen silent, though Asset Chi had indicated in code that Asset Tau was still active in the city. Their codes were too thin to communicate everything Crown so desperately needed to know now, though.

  “Streeter!” he shouted.

  Another silence, which was even stranger.

  Crown stared out the window, looking across the sullen brown waters of perennially flooded Willamette toward Portland’s east side. Despite the recent rain half a dozen smoke plumes rose. More warehouse bombings, some street front rising against the dammed capital represented by stored merchandise.

  “What the economy does not kill on its own, we kill for it,” he whispered. “Streeter!!!”

  A clerk stepped diffidently through the door. Berry, his name was. A fairly recent promotion to his personal staff. Crown couldn’t remember the young man’s first name.

  “Ms. Streeter has gone out for coffee, sir.”

  “Coffee?” Crown was incredulous. “Seven years here, she’s never gone out for coffee. Besides, we have catering.”

  Berry shrugged.

  Crown realized the young man was dressed oddly too. Though his coat was cut the same as all staff uniforms in the arcology, the weave was too dark and glossy.

  Even before he’d framed the thought as to why someone would be wearing Kevlar in his presence, Crown sprinted for his desk. He dropped and rolled as Berry opened fire with something that hissed like a fire extinguisher. The blast-grade window behind him rattled hard under a rain of darts.

  A riot gun was clipped to the bottom of each pedestal of his desk. Crown snatched the right-hand one free, flipped the slide, rolled once, and fired through the modesty panel. It was sheathed in the same mahogany of which the desk was built, but thin fiberboard on the inside for precisely this purpose. The scattershot from the riot gun left a cloud of splinters.

  Beyond the ragged hole, Berry slipped in his own blood.

  Crown put a second burst into the young man’s head as he fell. He counted to three, listening for footsteps, then low-crawled around the left side of his desk.

  Nothing. No one.

  And killing Berry meant no questions could be asked.

  He rose, dusting himself off. He’d been played, and he knew it. Streeter was compromised, possibly beyond repair. A little too old school, maybe, to stay bought. And Asset Tau was in the same position. No one on his staff could be trusted now. Not even for money.

  Only Asset Chi, a contractor, seemed to have remained loyal—out of reach of the infection here.

  Riot gun at the ready, Crown tapped out 911 to reach arcology security. That at least was answered.

  “What is your emergency.”

  “Suite 900,” Crown said. “Challenge Buster.”

  “Seven niner Eugene,” security replied promptly.

  “I need a hard team up here now. Trust no one except me.”

  Strobe lights began to flash as blast doors slammed all around his level.

  Waiting for rescue or death, whichever came first, Crown tapped out a coded message to Asset Chi. Whether the asset would ever receive it was an open question, but he had to try.

  Maybe something could be salvaged—if not here, with his backups in Istanbul or Hong Kong.

  * * *

  The chirper embedded in the seam of Cardoza’s microfiber camisole buzzes as she works a log. A week on observation and two on penetration, the only message she’s received from her employers was a single-bit ack to her informing them of the contingency penetration. Now she’s on one end of a two-man saw and the stupid buggers want to talk.

  She ignores it. The chirper’s memory will keep the message in place until she can sensibly retrieve it. No way to parse the click code against her skin when she’s working this hard. And stopping to scratch where it itched isn’t her way.

  They work a while, she and her saw-mate—a whippet of a boy named Mueslix still struggling to be a man. Human sawmill is hard work, but at least the wood stacks up like bodies so you can mark your progress. Mueslix has a very misguided case of the hots for Cardoza, and smiles too much, but he’s okay.

  His callowness makes her wonder what ever happened to New Kid for abandoning his post and bringing her in. Cardoza has stayed away from anything to do with security, for fear of discovery. Not to mention fear of Bashar.

  Cardoza has missed something Zazie the gang boss called out. She can feel Mueslix slacking off through the change in the tension of the blade, so she slows her own effort.

  Moments later they are all silent. This is a day shift, for safety reasons, so everyone can see Zazie just fine.

  “We’re on a stand down,” she says, her voice carrying despite its softness. Zazie has a command voice Cardoza has admired, much more difficult for a woman to accomplish than a man. Deeper voices mean bigger muscles, after all.

  It’s all monkey politics in the end.

  “What’s up?” Mueslix asks.

  “Security Subcommittee says we might be seeing incoming soon.”

  Crap, Cardoza thinks. Someone sussed her inbound signal. The chirper has no battery, only a static accumulator powered by the movements of her body, and it’s small enough to pass anything but a very thorough pat down. A tight enough sweep with the right gear would detect the fragment of silicon and carbon fiber. Or a strip search.

  I am just one of two thousand here, Cardoza tells herself.

  They drift off into the woods by ones and twos, leaving the site behind but taking their tools. She finds a moment’s privacy and scratches where it itches despite her principles. She must ditch the chirper very soon, and wants to understand the message that may yet be worth her life.

  * * *

  An excerpt from the Bacigalupi Lectures:

  We talk about secret societies all the time. The Masons, the Illuminati, Opus Dei. Paranoid fantasies, right? How secret could they be, with their temples and their lodges?

  Nonetheless, behind the glare lie simpler, harder truths. From the earliest priestly cults in mud brick cities lost ten thousand years ago to the politic parties of today, memes propagate through channels of secrecy and trust. The cell system so beloved of revolutionaries has always existed. We call it family. Friendship. Lovers. The 1950s housewife gossiping over the back alley fence with the milkman. The beat cop having lunch with the City Hall reporter.

  We no longer have beat cops or milkmen, any more than we have priests of Baal Melqaart. More’s the pity, some people might say. But they’re wrong.

  Those relationships still exist. And
with the world dying around us, they are stronger than ever. Secret societies of two and three are everywhere. The true unit of economy is the exchange between individuals. Forget capital markets and balance of trade. I give you something, you give me something else. Tomatoes from your windows box. Ammunition. Sex. Information.

  It doesn’t matter.

  We are all secret-keepers. We share with our intimates, share less with our tribe, and tell nothing to the Man when he knocks down the door to ask questions. Some people know where to score good blow, other people know the true reason for the street layout of Washington, D.C.

  The substance of the secret is irrelevant. The form of the secret is everything. Carry what you know into the world, gather what people have to tell you, and you are one of the Illuminated.

  We began in light, so shall we end in light.

  * * *

  Cardoza hunts. The message was clear, one of her employer’s own conditionals. She has a termination order.

  This has become a suicide job. She’s almost certain of that. There are large bonds which will be paid in the event of her death, money to flow to a sister she hasn’t seen since early childhood. She doesn’t care so much now. Walking away would probably be just as fatal at this point, and accomplish less.

  Newcomer, the message had said when she unpacked it. Terminate newcomer.

  She knows who they mean. Tygre is everyone, everywhere. People say he’d already joined the Citizen’s Executive, the tenure and seniority requirements waived. Others say he’d charmed Symmetry’s torturers, and they do his bidding now.

  Her body armor is still in the cache. She slips into the carbon mesh panels, tightens the straps with all the weight of ritual. She sorts through her weapons—some things cannot be carried openly here, even now in the end game. A gas gun with shellfish toxin-laced needles will do, she thinks.

  Turning, Cardoza find Mueslix staring at her. How had he gotten so close?

  “You’re on the Security Subcommittee,” he says, his voice shaking. “You was spying on the log gang.”