The Municipalists

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by Seth Fried


  However, these fascinating displays soon degenerated into him cycling through a few dozen hairstyles, asking for my opinion on each. I mentioned that I never worried much about my hair when I was out in the field since Garrett preferred us all to wear our hats. I gestured toward the fedora resting on my bag near my feet in an effort to use our present conversation as a teachable moment, but OWEN only looked down at the hat and laughed.

  “Oh, I know,” he said. “You all look like idiots.”

  I was surprised by this comment, as I was by the fact that he was now holding what appeared to be a tumbler of whiskey, its cut glass glinting in the soft light of the cabin.

  “It’s a program I wrote for myself,” he said, noticing my interest. “When I take a sip, a series of complex math problems are generated that overwhelm my interface’s processors. It diverts resources away from my less essential functions like social intelligence and inhibition.”

  He described this process with pride, as if drinking on the job were an innovation that rivaled the lightbulb. Not wanting to take too much credit, he admitted that he had come up with it by watching Klaus drink in his lab late at night. When I asked OWEN what purpose this program served, he only frowned as if it were the wrong question and took another sip before smacking his lips and saying, “It relaxes me.”

  “But do you think it’s appropriate?”

  “Ah,” OWEN said, winking. “Don’t worry about that. Your boss doesn’t want an official record of any of this because he can’t have the board find out. He had me put up a memory partition, so you’re the only one at the agency who has access to the data I gather while we’re in Metropolis. We can do whatever we want.”

  He held up his glass, toasting our good fortune.

  “All the same,” I said. “I’m going to have to ask that you not drink while you’re assisting me.”

  He stared at me blankly for a moment and then began to laugh so loudly that I saw the pilot turn around and look disapprovingly back into the cabin. As OWEN’s laughter subsided, he congratulated me on what he seemed to have mistaken as a witticism.

  “I was a little worried about you, Thompson,” he said, pointing a finger at me and squinting. “I mean, you’ve got all those complaints in your personnel file about what a pill you are.”

  He immediately held his hands up to distance himself from this comment, adding, “Their words.”

  “Complaints,” I said. “There have been official complaints about me?”

  OWEN shook his head.

  “The important thing is that you and I are going to have a fine time,” he said.

  I didn’t respond to this last bit of encouragement and made plans to draft a report to Garrett on my concerns regarding this new interface. While it was certainly an achievement in many ways, it had also already proven itself to be incredibly self-indulgent and rude. I also thought it might be a good idea to start dropping a few hints to Garrett about Klaus drinking in his lab.

  OWEN misinterpreted my silence as anxiety over our mission.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, polishing off the rest of his drink and leaning toward me. “Whatever’s going on out there, I’ll figure it out. I’m literally the most intelligent entity on the planet. I have the equivalent of 4,239.23 human brains.”

  “Is that right?” I said. Even though he was only a projection, I still felt his face was a little too close to mine.

  “Yup,” he said, settling back in his seat. “I did the math.” He began to refill his glass with a flask that appeared in his hand out of nowhere before adding, “I am the math.”

  For the rest of the flight OWEN seemed content to drink, change the cut of his suit, and experiment with different facial expressions in a large handheld mirror that he pulled from one of his pants pockets. I figured once I got to my room in Metropolis, I could ditch the tie clip someplace safe and go about my business.

  In an effort to avoid any further small talk, I turned to face one of the plane’s windows and thought about seeing Metropolis again. Over the past few years I had been to the city only a handful of times for conferences and the like. Though, I did have a nice collection of guidebooks on the city, which I enjoyed flipping through from time to time. As a USMS agent, one couldn’t help but have an affection for the place.

  I remembered seeing it for the first time when I was nineteen years old. The National Engineering Academy had closed its dormitories for the winter holidays and the students with families had climbed into their parents’ cars while I loaded up my book bag with a loaf of white bread, two packs of bologna, an extra sweater, and a few of my favorite textbooks. I walked through the snow to the nearest bus station, where I bought a ticket to see the city that the social philosopher Pierre Abernacky had once called “the great crucible.” I planned to spend my vacation staying in youth hostels and stomping around in the cold, examining storm drains and bridge abutments. During the long bus trip out, all around me people dozed and farted and complained about the bus’s broken heater. I was perfectly happy making sandwiches on my knees and reading Andre Denard’s The Anatomy of a City for what must have been the tenth time. When Metropolis finally appeared on the horizon, massive and startling, a woman sitting behind me gasped. I felt the surge of significance only a teenager can feel. In that moment I had been certain that Metropolis was somehow wrapped up in my destiny, that it would be the place where I would show the world who I was.

  The years since then gradually tempered this certainty. By the time I received Kirklin’s final refusal to let me work in Metropolis, I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to anymore. Metropolis had already become the pinnacle of everything an American city could be, whereas all over the country there were smaller, struggling places that could use my help.

  During our plane’s descent, all that could be seen stretching off in every direction was a dense mass of glass towers, the complexity of it all beautiful and nightmarish. My task of understanding any aspect of what had happened here seemed absurd. To distract myself from the fact that I was alone, I looked over at OWEN, who was too occupied with his outfit to notice me. Arching an eyebrow, he tried switching his navy necktie to a plaid bowtie and then, horrified, switched immediately back. I was left with nothing to do but watch as the towers of Metropolis grew closer, eventually swallowing us up. When we touched down I thought once more about that youthful fantasy of mine in which I saw the city serving as some grand stage where I would demonstrate my true worth. Only now I found myself hoping it wasn’t true.

  3 Many cities impress and please us because they are such perfect examples of human order. Here one thinks of the great European capitals, the streets of Paris lined with orderly rows of five-story Haussmanns or the open-air museum of Rome, where it feels as if not one building has been erected without first considering the argument of the city as a whole. The occasional flourish or internal variation in which one of these places self-consciously attempts to step outside of itself only reinforces the impression that everything there is in fact the product of a single unified thought, a calm and artful expression of humankind’s mastery over its environment.

  Metropolis is no such city. Described by former poet laureate Anaya Davis as “the million-city city,” Metropolis is a clash of competing visions. Art deco skyscrapers dating back to the rise of the automobile stand alongside modern glass spires and sidescrapers that run along whole avenues. Buildings with programmable facades adjust themselves into pleasing shapes under the shadow cast by the knobbed steeple of a two-hundred-year-old cathedral.

  The perfect grid of broad streets occasionally gives way to labyrinthine tangles where cobblestones still push up through the pavement, cramped streets winding through old neighborhoods of two-story brick buildings that tempt those passing through to imagine a thousand rainy afternoons in the 1800s or drunk sailors getting lost on some bleedingly hot summer night. These reveries are inevitably interrupted by the sudden sig
ht of buildings stretching vertiginously overhead or by the powerful rush of air from a vent underfoot as an express bullet train races uptown.

  This mix of old and new was a major aspect of Kirklin’s legacy. Of the 623 skyscrapers in Metropolis, over seventy of them were built during his time as station chief. Through his influence he streamlined the city’s once complex and restrictive zoning codes and also balanced out the power of the Landmark Preservation Office by helping establish the Office of New Works. Just as the LPO worked tirelessly to protect the city’s architectural treasures, the ONW worked equally hard to seek out low-density buildings of less significance that could be demolished to make way for higher-density structures. Through the healthy tension between these two offices the city had managed to maintain its twentieth-century charm while still keeping its housing prices relatively affordable, allowing a greater number of people to enjoy the city. And Metropolis was first and foremost a place to be enjoyed.

  Now that the Industrial Age was largely over in the United States, Metropolis had survived by becoming a pleasant, exciting place to live. Most employers had become so mobile that the most effective way for the city to attract citizens was by offering a seemingly endless variety of amenities, so that what had once been merely a by-product of the city’s thriving economy was now one of its most reliable anchors.

  This wasn’t terribly different from the progress of other consumer cities. What made Metropolis unique was the sheer scale and rapidity with which it had embraced this version of itself. The number of bars and restaurants alone was enough to overwhelm, many of them offering highly specialized and unique experiences. When browsing through my collection of guidebooks I was often forced to wonder what it meant when an establishment described itself as a “postapocalyptic cabaret” or a “calypso-style hookah cantina.” The city offered everything from casual vegan dining to internationally acclaimed bistros that served only live seafood. Depending on the neighborhood, you could find street vendors selling pork buns, sabich, cups of borscht, skewers of meat dipped in yellow sauce, and small spotted eggs with their tops broken off, served raw and with a dash of ink-black hot sauce.

  Those seeking entertainment could participate in augmented-reality bus tours, gawking through headsets from open-topped buses. There were television tapings, holo-theater murder mysteries, fringe improv clubs, warehouses occupied by guerrilla art happenings. There was jazz on the roof of the Hamilton, musicals in the Tort Amphitheater, the enormous indoor water park at the Bertram Center, the forty-story botanical garden towers standing on either side of Fourth Avenue, connected to one another with sloping glass walkways made to look like a cascade of vines, and the lake in Coldicott Park, where tourists could take rowboats to a lush island and explore its cool, stream-fed grotto with its transported ruins of an ancient Greek village.

  Of course, all this extravagant fun lent itself to the perception that Metropolis was just a playground for the rich. But the city’s progressive social programs—most of which had also been aggressively expanded by Kirklin in recent years—as well as its wealth of opportunities had also made it an ideal place for those starting out. When the middle class began its mass exodus to the suburbs in the 1950s, the population of Metropolis was sustained by the underprivileged and a massive influx of immigrants. First-generation Americans made up roughly half of the workforce and the city was home to the largest Russian, Greek, Lebanese, Indian, and Chinese enclaves in the Western Hemisphere. To this day, foreign-born citizens accounted for over $700 billion in economic activity and they did so in both skilled and unskilled roles. They made up half of the physicians in the city as well as half of the retail workers. They were more than half of the licensed nurses, half of the hospitality industry, and a third of the executives. And the grandchildren of many of those middle-class suburbanites who left behind city life for their wood-frame split-levels were now doubling back, abandoning the monotony and high unemployment rates of low-density living, selling their hand-me-down SUVs and pickup trucks to put down deposits on studio apartments in the East Side.

  With over 35 million people squeezed onto 1,200 square miles of land, there had never been any question of trying to manage Metropolis the way we did other cities, monitoring them from afar and sending out agents like me whenever necessary. Garrett had once asked me half-jokingly what I thought would happen if Kirklin were to get hit by a bus. He sounded a little intrigued but mostly troubled by the idea of a Center City–bound K1 bus sending Kirklin to his final reward. His concern was that there was no way for us to know how to take responsibility for Metropolis in the event of an emergency since we had almost no idea how the station was run.

  But while those of us in the analog world were forced to piece together most of our information about the station through gossip and Kirklin’s oblique updates, OWEN was able to speak about operations in the city with a surprising familiarity.

  “His people had been acting weird for a while,” OWEN told me as we waited to be taxied to our gate at Bixley, a relief airport in the North Side. He still seemed a little tipsy, but I thought it might be a good idea to see if he knew anything useful before I ditched him at the hotel. I asked him what he meant by “weird” and he carefully fed his glass, still half-filled with booze, into his chest pocket as if saving it for later. He then rubbed his hands together and projected a document in the air between us.

  “Look at this,” he said. “Not only did they request two hundred gallons of nitric acid last June, but they put it on the same form as a bunch of caving harnesses and back-mounted chemical sprayers.” He shook his head at the form and clucked his tongue. “Now there’s a hole in Eleventh Avenue and you chumps never saw it coming.”

  “Wait, you’re saying our people in Metropolis destroyed their own facilities?”

  OWEN laughed before realizing I was serious.

  “Henry, the station burned down in the middle of a weekday. Don’t you think it’s strange no one found any bodies?”

  “Does Garrett think they were involved?”

  “I’m guessing that’s why he put you on a plane to Metropolis.”

  OWEN’s theory seemed far-fetched. Garrett’s interest in Biggs made it clear he had some suspicions about the Metropolis branch, but OWEN was talking about sabotage as if it were a foregone conclusion.

  “If you knew the request was suspicious,” I said, “why didn’t you warn us?”

  “My contextual intelligence was still underdeveloped,” OWEN said. “When this request was submitted I was basically a filing cabinet. An amazing, amazing filing cabinet.”

  OWEN brought up a set of spreadsheets and pointed out several budgetary irregularities he’d found by independently auditing the reported expenses for Kirklin’s station. He said he’d uncovered hundreds of expense reports from Metropolis in which costs seemed to have been deliberately inflated. A purchase request for two hundred parking cones had been billed to the agency for $17,000, or $85 per unit, which meant unless those parking cones had been encrusted with semiprecious stones, they’d been less than a bargain. And Kirklin had recently doubled his station’s expenditure on uniforms without hiring a single person. OWEN estimated that upwards of $400 million of agency money was unaccounted for, and possibly much more.

  I wasn’t sure how seriously to take the analysis of a supercomputer who by my count was seven drinks deep, and so I told him that for the time being I was only interested in the task at hand.

  To prove that he knew what he was talking about, he started to analyze all the travel requests I had ever submitted. From that information alone he was able to tell me that I was single and had no siblings, information that wouldn’t have been included in my personnel file. When I confirmed that he was correct, he smiled and added, “And both your parents are dead?”

  A look of pain or anger must have moved across my face, causing him to pump his fist in victory.

  “See?” he said.

&
nbsp; Convinced he’d earned my trust with his dead-parent gambit, his voice took on a more conspiratorial tone.

  “If I’m right, we probably haven’t seen the worst of it,” he said. “We should be careful out there. His people could be everywhere.”

  “This isn’t one of Klaus’s movies,” I said. “We’re just here to ask some questions.”

 

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