by Neil Clarke
“Sure,” Roscoe0308 said.
He was such a good boy.
What a shame.
The city sensed his footfalls on her streets as he left the control room. She tracked his face and his devices as he threaded his way along the service roads. He said hello to nurses and nannies changing shifts. He flashed his pass to the checkpoints and smiled back at their smiley face screens. Sometimes he had to smack the checkpoints with an open palm to get them to talk to him. But he was always gentle. Such a good boy.
Not all her boys were so good.
Or her girls, for that matter.
There was Galina Vardomskaya, for example, the firstborn daughter of the king of the St. Petersburg cartel. She took her baby brother to the park and left him there. Twice. Once at eighteen months and once again at twenty-four. The city watched as the boy, absorbed at first by the talking dinosaurs and self-building obstacle courses, looked up in confusion and then in horror to find his sister gone. The nearest dinosaur pinged his chip and sent his parents an alert. They picked him up a half an hour later, perfectly safe.
“I didn’t lose him,” Galina told her parents. “You can’t lose anything, here.”
It was true. Nothing was ever lost. And nothing was ever forgotten, no matter how painful. The city was like a heart that way. She had four chambers, too. She had arteries that led in and out. She kept things moving. She kept the oxygen flowing in and out, in and out, clean for dirty, dirty for clean, the filthy midnight whispers for the purest morning prayers.
“Besides, where would he have gone?” Galina pressed. As she did, the city felt her father’s blood pressure rising through the colony of machines inhabiting his own arteries. The tiny machines told his artificial joints to brace for impact. “It’s not like we can go anywhere.”
His shoulder joint was relatively new. He’d broken his organic one so many times, and the Bratva gave him a new one, but in the end even that one could not meet the demands posed by a man of his temperament. The new one came from the city’s own printers. It absorbed the shock of him slapping Galina almost as well as Galina herself did.
“It’s still true,” she said in Russian, a moment later. She adjusted her lipstick in the kitchen counter’s glassy quartz. She licked the corners of her lips and batted her eyelashes to check her mascara. It was only a little bit smudged. The makeup artists in Service Sector knew to include cornstarch in their formulations. Cornstarch was so expensive. In the early days, the city had sensed gold leaf trickling down her pipes from the face washes of elderly women. Her children preserved their vanity any way they could, all these years later. Galina went in search of ice. She broke some into a tea towel and held it to her face. “You can hit me all you want, but it’s still true. We’re still trapped. This place is still a fucking zoo.”
Occasionally the city liked to search the word “zoo.” It came up in conversation often. The city wasn’t entirely sure why. Zoos sold popcorn and ice cream and stuffed toys and brand partnerships. The city did none of that. Not any longer, anyway. All the admission fees had been charged already. Fifty years ago. By the cream of the crop.
The city was unsure what Galina and her fellow whiners had to complain about. The Descendants lived in the city debt-free. That much was covered by the contracts the Investors signed. The Support Staff (who complained regularly, and ruined their habitations, and really should have been robots, if someone cared to ask the city about it) were still paying their dues. They were renters in perpetuity, although they could work for citizenship points that would guarantee expanded rights if not expanded spaces. The citizenship points were a thorn in the city’s side; no such system had been in place when her lights first came on. It was imposed upon her as a legacy measure when some of the ground-floor Investors began to die off and started to wake up in the small hours before she turned the daylights on, pacemakers working double-time to quell their anxiety and something their counselling assists said matched descriptions of shame.
It was still better than being topside, of course. Better than living on some blasted desert heath, mutated by Christ alone knew what. They made arrangements. Or their parents had done so. (Grandparents? It was so difficult to say these days; Support Staff tended to die off so much more quickly than the Investors.) And they really were a necessary part of the ecosystem, a feature of the urban landscape. And managing their numbers had become a lot simpler once the Investors agreed to mandatory IUD implants.
The city watched as Roscoe0308 continued his journey to the exit. She wondered how she was going to stop him.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve lost my maps,” Roscoe0308 told the man at the tea stand. “Could you check yours for me, please?”
The man at the tea stand regarded the boy in the Support Staff jumpsuit through the lens of his monocle. The monocle told him the boy’s name and occupation and the fact that he had no criminal record and no enhancements that might prove troublesome later. So the man at the tea stand felt comfortable answering: “I haven’t used a map in years. No one has.”
“I know, but you must have one,” the boy said, nodding at the monocle. “We all have the base map, if nothing else. It’s just that mine’s not working. None of my maps are.”
“Well, yes, you were saying,” the tea master said. The city did not know his thoughts, but the flickering of his brainwaves indicated anxiety. Probably he was worried that the boy—dark and big and reeking of the rust and oil smeared across his sagging jumpsuit—was scaring off his usual clientele. It was a misplaced anxiety. So few of the clientele would even see the boy anyway; most of their eyes would have filtered him out by now. “But I haven’t looked at it in so long. I have no idea where it is.”
“It’s the icon that looks like a scroll,” the boy said. His tone indicated he’d done customer service in the past, and that he’d learned how to weaponize those skills.
The tea master sighed. He sighed even more deeply as he toggled through the options in his monocle. He frowned when he lit on the icon, blinked at it, and no extra layer spread itself across the glass.
“I can’t find it,” he lied.
“You can’t find it or you can’t see it?” Roscoe0308 asked.
“I’ll thank you to lower your voice,” the tea master said, although the boy had not raised it. “And there’s nothing there. There is no map.”
Surely he would give up. No one had checked the fans in a dog’s age, and the maps that led to Fan Six would no longer lead there. He could always try to fix it remotely. Besides, it was late in his shift. He would certainly much rather go home to his rack and his instant egg. Right?
“Can you point me to the nearest library?”
The Librarian quickly found its maps were gone, too. As were most of the search functions, which made looking for scans of the original blueprints much more difficult.
“Of course, we still have the paper versions in the archives,” the Librarian said, raising one claw upright. Its wheels whispered across the green marble floor as it dithered through the available options and customer service protocols. “Though technically I am not allowed to let you leave with it. But you may examine it at your leisure.”
Roscoe0308 tilted his head. “You wouldn’t happen to have any graph paper, would you?”
“My inventory says the Kids’ Korner still has some,” the Librarian said. “It may be a little mouldy, though.”
“That’s fine,” Roscoe0308 said. “I don’t think I’ll need much.”
“That’s a shame about the maps going out,” the Librarian said. “And just when you needed them.”
“My boss says it’s a citywide outage. But the Residents haven’t really noticed, since nobody uses them anymore.”
“I suppose they all know the city streets quite well by now.”
Roscoe0308 appeared to deliberate about something. “Have you ever been outside this installation?”
“Oh my, no. I’m geo-locked here. I cannot leave.”
“Makes two of us
,” the boy said. “Trust me, you’re not really missing much.” Twenty minutes later, he had made a good map that would lead him to Fan Six.
Quietly, the “panic city,” built to handle any emergency, allowed herself to finally panic.
She tried a number of things.
She blocked the door to the Support Tunnel; his chips would no longer open it. He borrowed a hatchet from a very moody adolescent boy and let himself in. (The city deducted citizenship points from the young hatchet-man. The hatchet was handmade, and she had rules about weapons.)
In the Support Tunnel, she shut out all the lights. He had a flashlight.
She cut off his communications. He began to sing to himself in the dark. Occasionally he used a can of reflective paint, the kind used to mark a segment of pavement for repair, to indicate which direction he was traveling. He was in the labyrinth, and she had neither hooves nor horns with which to halt his progress.
She shut off all the fans. If he became lost, he would eventually asphyxiate.
He had been walking for an hour when he heard the tapping.
It was light. Weak. The type miners once used, long ago, to indicate where their work buried them. He paused for a moment. “Hello?”
The tapping became a muted clang.
She thought of Cappadocia, and Özkonak, and Petra, the Burlington bunker city. She had no ability to bury him. And he was a good boy; she did not truly wish to bury him. The only thing he was guilty of was being a little too dedicated to his work. And it was important work. Keeping the city clean for the Investors. Keeping the city going. He was a good helper. A little too good.
She thought of these things as his steps and his song rang on and on through the shadows. He picked up the pace. The clanging became a calling. He began to jog, then run. He would be there in no time.
“I’m coming!” he yelled. His light bobbed up and down.
It landed on the thing in the fan.
The fan had almost cut it in half. Its arms reached forward, but the fan sliced deep into the structure that acted like its ribcage. Its fluids had tried very hard to heal it, to repair the damage, but had succeeded only in fusing the fan to the thing’s body forever. It would die here in the dark.
It was supposed to die alone. Unheard. Unnoticed.
“What level are you from?” Roscoe0308 asked.
“I’m not from any level,” it said. “We don’t believe in levels.”
“Oh, one of those,” Roscoe0308 said. “How did you get here?”
“I crawled down.”
Roscoe0308 blinked in the dark. It took him a moment to process. “You crawled . . . down?”
Now he took notice of the thing in the fan. Its odd shiny skin. The strange black fluid it leaked. The way nothing smelled like blood or shit or piss.
“I’m part of a rescue team,” the thing said. “This is the furthest anyone has gotten in years.”
“You’re from . . . ?” The boy pointed upward.
The thing blinked the insect-like disgraces that were its eyes. “Yes.”
“You mean there are . . . ?”
“Yes.”
She thought about messaging him. She could still reach him through his eyes. Don’t listen, she could say. They’re monsters. They’re not like us. They don’t believe what we believe. They’re not the type to Invest, like we did. We were better off hiding from them. If you lived the way they live, you wouldn’t need me!
But her searches told her all mothers felt this way, at one time or another. There always came a day—no matter how hard one tried, no matter how tightly one locked the door and barred the windows—when the outside world would come creeping in. When your baby’s head would turn away from the glowing hearth of home and toward the glitter of false promises. That time was now. The day was today.
Slowly she began to overload the gas mains. She shut down the water lines. Her Residents had committed to a vision of the world. They had a Lifestyle to maintain. Live Free or Die, as the old saying went. And they would surely not be as free upstairs as they had in her embrace. She knew best. She truly did. They programmed her to know best. And they trusted her to do what she knew they would want.
She blew a light and watched a fire start.
They would never leave her, now.
I have no mouth, the city thought as she went to sleep, but I could kiss you.
Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons, and The Minnesota Review, among others. His debut novel The Art of Starving (YA/SF) will be published by HarperCollins in 2017, followed by The Breaks from Ecco Press in 2018. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and he’s a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City.
LAST GODS
Sam J. Miller
The Gods were circling when the sun rose, nine long patches of black that did not brighten with the sea as the sky lit up. I watched Them, Their knife-blade fins like polished onyx slicing the surface, formation shifting but the huge old matriarch always at the head. They swam between the sunken buildings, dwarfing the concrete bunkers, sketching intricate patterns that only They—and the Watcher in the tower—and I, slinking away on the ragged hill behind the town—could comprehend. I saw my Gods, and my gut went sour.
It’s fine. It’s not your responsibility. You asked another Watcher to take your shift.
But she was a drunk, and everyone knew it. And if the warning didn’t sound—if boats were boarded while They were in the water—people would die. And it would be on me. And the village that had taken me in, sheltered and fed me in spite of my missing arms, would cast me out.
I watched my Gods, and I could taste the bell rope between my teeth. Plastic and bracken and the sweat of the other Watchers, men and women with hands. My head jerked, acting out the signal even though I was shirking my duty. Two tolls, then three, repeating: the signal that said They are here, Their formation indicates They mean us no harm, but no boats may be boarded. My neck ached. My jaw burned. And my face went red and hot, because I wasn’t in the tower, because I was skulking from the town like an outcast unbeliever. I watched the Gods, the beauty of Them, Their black implacable bulk, the white patch above and behind the eyes, and my whole body tingled with joy. And with shame.
The bell would sound. It had to. The village would come awake. Fishermen would scrape away ice and mutter prayers, and fling offerings to the Gods. Fires would be kindled, voices and laughter unleashed. This was a day like any other.
Except . . . not.
Because Kelb had come to my cabin last night. Knocked at my window. Told me to meet him at sunrise outside of town. Told me he was going . . . somewhere.
I told him yes. Even though everyone knew there was no Somewhere. Nowhere left on land to go. No animals still living, no cities away from the water still inhabited, nothing but icy poisoned wind and scorched rock. I told him yes, even though I knew I risked losing everything. I told him yes because I could not tell him no, not ever, and that had been true when I was eight and he was ten, my maimed foster brother’s only friend. I told him yes because everything Kelb did was rough, brutish, beautiful. Every morning I watched from the tower as he stumbled from his cabin, peeled off his shirt, scooped cold salt water over his black-furred torso. Kelb was oblivious to the cruelty of it, this display of fine muscled flesh and limber arms, oblivious to the hunger in my eyes, oblivious to me as anything other than the sad armless little sixteen-year-old sister of his dead best friend.
Our town looked so tiny, standing outside of it. I hurried, into the landscape of snow and sharp black rocks and bent sticks that people said had once been trees. I wanted to be out of earshot, so that if I didn’t hear the bells it might have been because I was too far away. And not because my replacement had failed miserably, and my life was over. My stomach tightened with the same old empty lonely feeling that always followed the ecstasy of a vi
sit from our Gods.
But this time the emptiness did not go as deep as it could have. Because strapped to my back, cold and sharp and heavy, was the cymbal of Summoning. Burdening me down and buoying me up. An egregious sin, and a source of salvation. I had taken it on mad reckless reasonless suicidal impulse, lifting it off the wall with one expert foot and placing it on the floor atop my torso wrap and lying on top of it and tying it tight with my feet, but feeling it there I was glad I had.
Over the hill, in a down-swoop of land that could have been the cresting of a wave, was Kelb. A dark blur at first, swelling into a man as I approached. Squatting, his bare red hands assembling from snow something forbidden. Hearing me, not looking up.
“Stop that,” I said. I kicked the little house apart and he laughed.
“Oh Adze. There’s no ocean in sight. Your precious Gods can’t see what we do.”
“They see everything,” I whispered. His blasphemy never failed to redden my cheeks with a mingling of fear and desire.
He hugged me hello, then stepped back. Put his hands on my shoulders, and then on my stumps. A gesture somewhere between brotherly and . . . not. And it occurred to me, for the first time, that maybe he did know how I felt about him. Maybe he counted on it.
“Eat,” he said, pressing a square of bladderwrack jerky into my mouth.
Around his neck he wore a thick plait of braided seaweed, studded with shards of broken glass. Not the worn-down, safe, pretty sea-glass that most of us used as jewelry. This was jagged stuff, cruel and dangerous, salvaged from the factory wrecks to the south. Only thick, strong skin and superhuman confidence kept it from cutting him.
“If I ever needed any more proof that the Gods hate us, bladderwrack jerky would do the trick,” he said.
“Shh,” I said. “You shouldn’t say things like that. Where are we going, anyway?
“To see someone,” he said, stepping faster to keep pace with me. Armless as I was, no man had legs to match mine.