by Kirsten Berg
Mason and Samanthor stand by the side of the road, next to a field of yellow-gray stalks with the consistency of bad silicone—like a cheapo sex toy that someone bought as a gag gift, but which is doomed to wind up being used for unsatisfying, humdrum sex at some point. They smell like congealing candle wax. Samanthor remembers Jolene explaining that hundreds of miles of good farmland surrounds New Lincoln, but corporations are using it to grow organic precursors for biosynthetic tech. That’s one reason New Lincoln is so cutting-edge and eco-friendly: Most of its infrastructure was grown, rather than made. But that means there’s no farmland growing actual food anywhere nearby, apart from the vertical farms inside the city.
Warren keeps trying to hack the Superlux’s OS to get it moving again, but he might as well drag the car down the road.
Samanthor’s Savant hits her with updates. Her friend Davy in Chicago says they have shortages too, though not as bad. “I’ve been trying to send a care package, but the shipping company keeps saying there’s problems with deliveries to New Lincoln right now. Hang in there, Kidface. You’ll get through this. Love etc.” According to a news item, the mayor of Chicago says there’s no room for the refugees who did make it out of New Lincoln, and they’re being housed in some stadium until something else can be found.
At least the mayor of New Lincoln is finally declaring a state of emergency, and they’re creating some system to organize and distribute the remaining food, with priority given to children, the elderly, and people with serious health conditions. The federal government, meanwhile, is considering measures to provide emergency food aid to New Lincoln. But, you know, the DeathGrip.
Mason pulls out a bottle of water and some salt packets and dribbles salt in his mouth before swigging, because he read somewhere that salt can keep you functioning during a long fast. Samanthor wants to swat the water bottle out of his stupid hands. For some reason, she’s decided all of this is Mason’s fault. He yammered about food so much, he ruined everything. She can’t sit down, or she won’t be able to stand up again, and she feels sleepy even on her feet. Her brain is running at half power, and the screen of her Savant is giving her a migraine.
“Ugh.” Warren makes a noise. “Let’s just go home so I can lie down.”
The Superlux happily starts up as soon as they tell it to go back to New Lincoln.
Warren makes his disgusted sound again, like someone chewing a snail and spitting out the shell.
Back during World War II, three dozen conscientious objectors volunteered to live on a low-calorie diet, in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Jolene studied this in school, and the pictures of scowling stick-figure men were pretty horrifying.
Jolene is one of about 30 people helping to organize the rationing program that City Hall finally agreed to set up. Her goal is to keep healthy people as close as possible to the Minnesota diet, which after all didn’t kill anybody. She attends endless meetings, during which usually responsible adults snap at one another, zone out instead of listening, and get derailed into half-hour conversations about their favorite foods that they wish they could be eating. Jolene can barely concentrate in these meetings, and only a sense of duty keeps her from staying in bed. Since New Lincoln is full of app designers, they’re trying to pull together a team to design a rationing app. We’re now at 47 days since the last delivery.
The good news is, the city’s vertical farms will continue to produce a steady (but limited) amount of vegetables for the foreseeable future, because they are self-renewing. And every food chemist Jolene knows is working on coming up with other scalable food sources, from my-coproteins to synthetics to insects. Nobody thinks help is coming from outside anymore, and anyone who had the means to leave and someplace to go has already left. Other cities have followed Chicago’s lead in putting refugees into temporary shelters, which means Jolene and the others have 1 million fewer mouths to feed. But an estimated 2 million people have remained in New Lincoln, of whom roughly 40 percent are considered high-risk.
Jolene walks through the city, along a path that used to take her past a beautiful fountain, her favorite doughnut stand, and a row of little cafés and restaurants. With her Blinkers on, she would have been able to see virtual strategy games, a whole row of extra shops, a pie-eating contest happening in five physical locations across the city, a whole range of fantastical skins. But people have been vandalizing the augmented reality emitters, and nobody is bothering to launch content updates anyway, so Jolene is stuck with a “real” world in which people lie on the walkways, where they fall over and don’t have the energy to get up again, or else scream at everyone else, eyes crunched shut. Jolene thinks about the term meatspace, how dumb it is, how rocky and barren and mostly devoid of meat the nonvirtual world actually is. Jolene wants to throttle whoever came up with the term meatspace and then sleep forever.
Jolene almost doesn’t recognize the closest couple who are yelling in each other’s tearful faces: Vera and Amanda. The two of them just shout “It’s all your fault” over and over. Jolene grabs both of them by the shoulders, until they finally stop shrieking and glare at her with bleary eyes. “It’s not your fault. Either of you,” Jolene says slowly. “It was a large-scale failure of urban planning.”
“That’s not helpful,” Amanda snarls.
Eventually, the rationing app gets up and running, and half the city’s police force is guarding the remaining food stores, and almost everyone in town receives something approaching Minnesota food levels.
There’s a new etiquette, which spreads via people’s Savants and Flings. Don’t talk about food in front of other people. But if someone else talks about food in front of you, don’t lose your shit at them. Don’t try to make anyone watch a movie, or Virtual Immersive Scenario, in which people are eating. Talk quietly, and above all don’t yell. Don’t be fatalistic. Don’t proclaim false hope, or insist that everything is going to be fine. Don’t judge other people’s weird food rituals: the way they hold food in their mouths for a long time before swallowing, mix it with water, or even cradle a piece of food in their arms like a baby. Don’t blame your partner(s) for lacking sex drive, or for being uninterested in romance. If people need to be alone, leave them alone. Most of all, don’t judge people for listlessness or apathy, or the inability to get out of bed—but do try to keep other people moving, at least enough to avoid muscle atrophy.
Jolene loses track of how long it’s been since she saw another person, but at last she finds herself sitting around with Mason, Warren, Samanthor, and Flood. Mason is still poking the “refresh” spot on that stupid real-time self-driving truck screen, full of dots in motion.
“They’re on their way somewhere,” Mason says, without even much rancor.
“This town was supposed to be for the best and brightest. The educated workforce. Now look at us.” Warren lies on the couch, staring at the picture window as it drapes pink-and-blue garlands and ribbons on the skyline outside.
“Ugh,” Samanthor says. “I’m a low-level tech. It’s barely worth paying me to do my job, versus just building a robot. I don’t think I’m the best, or brightest.”
“Are you kidding?” Mason says. “You’re Samanthor the Mighty.”
“Don’t call me that anymore.” Samanthor sighs. “I think we’re telephone sanitizers.”
“What?” Jolene says.
“It’s from a book I read. They build a superadvanced spaceship and tell the passengers they’re going to a great new planet to build an awesome civilization. But they’re all telephone sanitizers and marketing people and hairdressers. The people everyone can do without. They crash or something.”
“Wait.” Mason runs his hands through his blue pompadour, which is still perfect even on top of his emaciated features. “Who said we could live without hairdressers?”
“Some British guy.”
“Did he cut his own hair?”
“You’re distracting me. I can barely think as it is. God, my stomach hurts again. Like I swallowed a huge
piece of broken glass. What was I even saying?”
“But I mean,” says Warren. “There are a lot of creatives and stuff here in New Lincoln. I’m a info-flow designer. Sumana is writing software to help people check their Fling updates faster. And…oh God.” Warren tries to sit up and nearly falls off the couch. “Bloody hell. We’re telephone sanitizers.”
Jolene has been kind of zoning out during this discussion of hair and spaceships, because she’s as spacey as the rest of them. But now she speaks up. “I mean, this city really was supposed to be a beautiful new hope for the educated workers, those of us who can’t afford to live in any of the other cities anymore. You have all the beautiful augmented reality, the interactive everything. Right? And it’s so eco-friendly, it’s like a dream. The bioplastic cladding, all the greenery everywhere, even the inner walls that repair most kinds of damage and repel moisture, thanks to…” Jolene stops, and stares at the nearest wall. “Oh.”
Nobody asks why Jolene stopped talking, or why she said “Oh,” because they’re all zonked out. Flood is in the fetal position. Warren is watching the window change displays. Samanthor is sucking on both of her own thumbs at once, which is a habit she’s developed that everybody else pretends not to hate. Mason is refreshing the truck screen again. Everyone’s startled when Jolene jumps to her feet.
And they’re even more surprised when she runs into the kitchen of their apartment and comes back with the biggest hammer. “I need to knock a hole in your wall,” Jolene tells them.
“Uh,” Mason says. “I mean, however you choose to cope with the feelings of frustration and disempowerment and gnawing hunger is OK with me, but maybe you could pick someone else’s wall—”
But Jolene has already swung the hammer and made a huge dent in the wall between the living area and Samanthor’s bedroom.
“Hey,” Samanthor says, standing up. “What are you—”
Jolene swings and whacks again, and then again, and some kind of outer coating flakes off, revealing the stuff inside the wall. The stuff that repairs itself and repels all moisture, because it’s actually a living organism. This was a big selling point when they moved in here.
“Hey,” Samanthor says again, “Don’t mess with our—” and then she stops—because Jolene is ripping some of the insulation out of the wall and shoving it in her own mouth.
Jolene chews, which takes a long time, because the insulation is really, really chewy. Like chewing gum, mixed with shoe leather. But the taste is better than she’d expected, a bit like gravy, albeit with a weird aftertaste. She chews for a while, until she’s reduced it to something she can swallow.
Mason is saying the thing about people dealing with their feelings in various ways again, but Jolene shushes him.
“I should have figured it out before,” she says. “This town. Everything so cutting-edge and next-level. Everything organic, carbon-neutral and ‘grown rather than made.’ Including the insulation inside your walls, which is a kind of genetically engineered fungus. Surprisingly high protein, good source of iron. And the ‘self-healing’ part means it’ll keep growing back, over and over. I think I can come up with an enzyme that’ll make it easier to chew and digest, but it’s already perfectly edible.”
Mason, Warren, and Samanthor stare at Jolene, then each other. Then they wander over and begin pulling insulation out of their walls as well. Samanthor cautions them to take it slow, because she remembers how hard it was to keep food down when she ended her fast in college, so everybody just tries a mouthful. Mason has some ideas about how to prepare it, like insulation rigatoni, or fricasseed insulation, and meanwhile Warren, Flood, and Samanthor are already strategizing ways to get the word out to the entire city.
Barely an hour later, Jolene hears a chorus of hammers and drills all over town, as holes spring up in every structure. The Greatest City in the World begins to eat itself.
About the Contributors
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Locus, and Crawford awards and was on Time Magazine’s list of the 10 best novels of 2016. Her Tor.com story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award and appears in a new short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Wired, Slate, Tin House, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, ZYZZYVA, and several anthologies. She was a founding editor of io9.com, and she organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. Her first novel, Choir Boy, won a Lambda Literary Award.
Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and strategic foresight consultant living in Toronto. She is the author of the Machine Dynasty series from Angry Robot Books, and the novel Company Town from Tor Books, which was a Canada Reads finalist. As a futurist, she has developed science fiction prototypes for Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, Nesta, the Atlantic Council, Data & Society, InteraXon, and others. Her essays have appeared at BoingBoing, io9, WorldChanging, Creators Project, Arcfinity, MISC Magazine, and FutureNow. She is married to horror writer and journalist David Nickle. With him, she is the co-editor of Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond, an anthology of Bond stories available only in Canada. You can find her at madelineashby.com and on Twitter @MadelineAshby.
Paolo Bacigalupi’s writing has appeared in Wired, Slate, Medium, Salon.com, and High Country News, as well as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction. His short fiction has been nominated for three Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best science fiction short story of the year. It is collected in Pump Six and Other Stories, a Locus Award winner for Best Collection and also a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. His debut novel The Windup Girl was named by Time Magazine as one of the 10 best novels of 2009, and also won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards. He is also the author of Ship Breaker, The Drowned Cities, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, The Doubt Factory, The Water Knife, and Tool of War.
Meg Elison is a science fiction author and feminist essayist. Her debut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick award. Her second novel was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick, and both were longlisted for the James A. Tiptree award. She has been published in McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Catapult, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. Find her online, where she writes like she’s running out of time.
Lee Konstantinou is a writer and associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also a Humanities editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. He’s written fiction, criticism, and reviews. He wrote the novel Pop Apocalypse (Ecco/HarperPerennial, 2009) and co-edited (with Sam Cohen) The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa Press, 2012). Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction was published in 2016 by Harvard University Press.
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, The Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and else where. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.
Maureen McHugh grew up in Ohio, but has lived in Ne
w York City and, for a year, in Shijiazhuang, China. She is the author of four novels. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, won the James A. Tiptree Award and her latest novel, Nekropolis, was a Book Sense 76 pick and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She was a finalist for the Story Award for Mothers & Other Monsters, and won a Shirley Jackson Award for her collection After the Apocalypse. After the Apocalypse was also named one of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of 2011. McHugh teaches scriptwriting at the University of Southern California. She and her husband and two dogs used to live next to a dairy farm. Sometimes, in the summer, black and white Holsteins looked over the fence at them. Now she lives in Los Angeles, California, where she is trying desperately to sell her soul to Hollywood but as it turns out, the market is saturated.
Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the novel Autonomous, nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, she’s written for the Washington Post, Slate, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. Her book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in science. She was the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo and the tech culture editor at Ars Technica. She has published short stories in Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, and MIT Technology Review’s Twelve Tomorrows. She was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, worked as a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her new novel, The Future of Another Timeline, comes out in September 2019.
Nnedi Okorafor is an award-winning novelist of African-based science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism. Born in the United States to Nigerian immigrant parents, Okorafor is known for weaving African cultures into creative settings and memorable characters. Her books include Lagoon (a British Science Fiction Association Award finalist for best novel), Who Fears Death (a World Fantasy Award winner for best novel), Kabu Kabu (a Publishers Weekly best book for Fall 2013), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), and The Shadow Speaker (a CBS Parallax Award winner). Her 2016 novel The Book of Phoenix was an Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist, while the first book in her Binti Trilogy won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella. Her children’s book Chicken in the Kitchen won an Africana Book Award. She is a full professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.