Metatropolis

by John Scalzi

  “And you’ve come to save us?” she asks, her voice turning oddly sweet as she addresses Tygre.

  “I have come to save no one.” His words are oddly prophetic, given what was to unfold. “But one can prepare better against an enemy one can see at the gate.”

  “Capital doesn’t sneak through the dark and cut tripwires,” says Bashar.

  “Oh really?” Tygre lets the words hang in the dark.

  After a long, tense moment, they move toward one of the canteens. It is late, even by the standards of the largely nocturnal world of Cascadiopolis. Food here, like most other things, is communal—made and served in groups, by groups, for groups.

  There is a test in the minutes which follow, the kind of test that gets people not killed but gently expelled. Tygre walks into the camo-netted kitchen with the hot ceramic cooking tubs and steam tables. There he takes up a fine German knife and dices down a peck of fiddleheads waiting to go into the stew, moving as smoothly and casually as if he’d been working the kitchen here for years.

  Only Bashar realizes how frighteningly quick and precise Tygre’s bladework is. Anna seems entranced by the big man’s economy of motion, the grace which he applies even to the most menial tasks.

  When he begins to dip into the spices, even the other cooks step back slightly. A delta tang soon wafts from the stuttering pots as the fiddleheads stir amid salmon fillets, jerked magpie and tiny, stunted carrots grown haphazard in the high meadows amid their cousins the Queen Anne’s lace.

  He finally looks around. “Tomatoes?” Tygre asks hopefully.

  No, there are no tomatoes, but there are peppers. Someone fetches a basket of withered green onions that bring more flavor than substance. Word passes, more vegetables and herbs arrive, strings of last year’s braided garlic, dried Hood River apples coated in nutmeg and turmeric.

  It would be a dog’s breakfast of a stew in lesser hands, but Tygre divides his pots, explores different flavors, shifts from Cajun spice to Bollywood to lazy Mediterranean with the most unlikely combinations of substitutions. He is dancing with the flavors now more than before. We come and gather round, the army of owls reconvened by the scent-lure.

  The evening which began with an expectation of blood ends in a sunrise feast. Our bellies are sated and our souls are piqued by this man who has made for us a sacrament of our own wine and bread.

  The only flaws are Gloria’s distant grumbling, and later, distant shouting of some new crisis as dawn’s pink light peeks across the slopes of the mountain looming close to the east.

  IF you build your city well enough, it will be portable. Not in the sense of snowbirds towing their homes behind straining fifth wheel rigs that burn the last of the freely accessible oil before being parked to rust. Rather in the sense that a few-score backpackers with good data storage and the right training can make their way to Vancouver Island, or the forests around Crater Lake, or even more distant locations, and create anew what has been built before.

  It is never the same. This is no greenfreak McTropolis to be stamped cookie cutter from loam and rock and sculpted wind towers. Rather, each locale has a different watershed, biological resources, landforms and contours. But the principles propagate—self-government, specialization at need, information density and power parsimony. The engineering holds true at a high level, even as configuration requirements change and available feedstocks shift with rainfall flight and spikes in net available sunlight.

  Like their similars in urban Detroit, the citizens of Cascadiopolis have made of themselves a virus, a transmission vectoring in the heads and hands of everyone who has passed through their loamy avenues. Their city—your city—walks on scores of feet in every direction to bloom wherever fallow soil is rich enough and the land runs wide enough. A virus, an invasive species, a wave of change designed to outlast the marbled halls of capital which already burn in Seattle, Chicago and the paved-over Northeast.

  TRACT

  CARDOZA walks straight toward New Kid with her rifle on her shoulder. The rest of her freshly-retrieved weapons she keeps hidden. She wills him to see her as he expects: a tired soldier coming home. He wouldn’t know a frontal assault if she dropped a flash-bang down his shirt, but New Kid ought to recognize an approaching friend.

  Even if she isn’t.

  The fundamental disorderliness of the greenfreaks works to her advantage here. They’d never acknowledged the value of uniforms, barely possessing basic security discipline. Cardoza figures she could talk her way past an even more experienced guard, with luck and no reinforcing authority close to hand.

  So long as this young fool doesn’t shoot her in the dark, she’ll be headed up the hill soon enough. Still, the cranberry taste from her dinner bar is turning sour in her mouth.

  Nerves kill more operatives than the enemy. A maxim she’s always lived by, regardless of its statistical truth.

  “H-hey,” New Kid says, not quite shouting. He’s got an old Mac-10—What happened to the bolt-action rifle she had spotted earlier?—too easy to make a mistake, shoot to kill in a moment of reflexive panic. The weapon has a short barrel and inherently lousy aim, but a dozen rounds on fast squirt could make anyone get lucky.

  “Can it,” Cardoza says in a tired voice. “I been out on extended perimeter all goddamned night. And who the hell are you, anyway?”

  Angry sergeant gets them every time. Even fish like New Kid, who’s never seen a sergeant before. Kind of like a pissed off older brother, Cardoza guesses.

  “S-sorry,” he stammers. The Mac-10 wavers, droops. Something clicks loudly.

  She realizes the fool has pulled the trigger. Wisely, Otis has not left him with any rounds in the magazine.

  “Do that again and I’ll feed you that goddamned weapon.” Cardoza mounts the last few steps to New Kid’s watch station. “You going to walk me in or what?”

  This is the critical piece of social engineering. Getting him to let her in isn’t all that difficult. She’s already won that battle just by standing here and scaring him into lowering his weapon. But getting him to walk her up the hill into Cascadiopolis—that’s the important part here and now. Because without the escort, she’ll be tripping over every alarm and booby trap that Bashar’s fetid mind has dreamt up.

  In without an escort is meaningless. In with an escort, well, she’ll figure out what to do next. Whatever’s going on up there, she needs to know. Her employers need to know.

  “I’m not, not supposed to abandon my p-post…” His voice trails off, torn between a question and slow-building panic.

  “Shithead,” she says with a heavy sigh. Don’t overdo it. “You’re not abandoning your post if I tell you to walk me in, are you?”

  Somewhere he finds unexpected courage. “My n-name is Wallace.”

  Great. Now if she had to kill him, he’d be halfway real to her. Handles like New Kid are so much easier when you need to gut someone like a perch. Real people are harder to handle.

  “Of course it is, Wallace.” She smiles, confident that even if he didn’t see her teeth in the dark, her voice would bend with her lips. “So show me you know the way up the hill.”

  “Ma’am, you already know it.”

  She leans in close. Even at this range he is barely a darker lump in the starshine, without her scope to help. It might be time to kill him now. “Don’t make me write you up to Bashar, kid.”

  A moment of indecision writhes between them like a wounded puppy. She catches the sweat-and-piss scent of his fear, musky even over the heavy fir-sap odor of the mountain air. He makes a small noise in the back of his throat, then shoulders the Mac-10. The tip of the barrel narrowly misses her hand.

  “This way, ma’am.”

  “Good,” she says to no one in particular.

  He steps through the Granite Gate. She follows, marveling that it could ever be this easy. Together they hike upward amid the rhododendron flowers almost luminous in the deep, deep dark.

  A KEY advantage of micron-scale technology is the she
er scale at which projects can be undertaken. While this statement may appear at first blush to be counterintuitive, consider the problem of distributing optical surveillance systems. Wiring-in even miniature cameras the size of gum packs requires a dedicated team and a van full of equipment and parts. But a coffee can full of microcameras can be scattered like wheat on the wind, to settle around the target area in a spray of heavy dust.

  They require no maintenance, and are sufficiently cheap to simply ignore once their quantum batteries run out. No single lens sees much, not with that aperture and depth of field, but the array of lenses is astonishingly precise. Remote processors modeled on the brains of fruit flies handle the disparate constellation of related images, but that investment needs to be made—and protected—once, while the camera dust can be scattered a hundred times.

  More to the point, those hundred scatterings cost less than the parts and labor to install a few dozen miniature cameras.

  There is a direct trend line from the Big Science projects of mid-century America—Grand Coulee Dam, the Apollo missions, the Interstate highway system—and the spread of micron-scale technology in the twenty-first century. That trend was charted by budgetary analysts, return on investment calculations, and the self-preservation of big capital.

  The error that big capital made in this arc of change is Gödelian in its self-blindness. No single activist, no network or membership organization, could compete with the capital costs of projects in the old days. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the same distribution of materials cost and dissolution of labor expense which serviced big capital’s ROI requirements had enabled technology transfer into the hands of any greenfreak with a little cash and some technical acumen.

  Mob tech.

  Nobody but the government could have built Grand Coulee Dam. Any fool can lay down a line of whale-fluke microturbines in a streambed.

  The same micron-scale technology that was meant to bind the economy and the populace to the invisible will of big capital was soon turned against the power of money. “Green” went from signifying financial assets to another meaning entirely. That change rode into Western culture on the back of fractionated surveillance and widely distributed power systems.

  WALLACE—New Kid—leads her upwards along a path that is straightforward but by no means straight. Somehow Cardoza has expected more sidestepping and long pauses. New Kid knows his backtrail, or seems to at any rate. They made the first half mile of the climb unchallenged by anyone or anything other than passive systems which remained passive.

  She is unsure of what surveillance has reported, but trailing New Kid with her chin tucked down, Cardoza feels safe enough. Cascadiopolis will in no ways be miked and monitored like downtown Seattle—the greenfreaks don’t stand for that kind of oversight. If she gets in among them, she’ll be safe enough until it’s time to run.

  At that point, her choices will be different. She has her uplink tucked into her undershirt. Her contract includes an evacuation bond. So long as no one kills her dead, Cardoza figures on getting out of the green city.

  When New Kid is finally challenged, she is almost surprised. A change in the air tells her they are close. Hundreds of people in close proximity bring their own warmth to the chill of a Cascade spring night. Likewise the faint odors of smoke, of metal, of food, of oils.

  Sniffers would have found this city, she realizes. Smarter minds than hers have worked on this problem for some time now. Sniffers couldn’t just walk in like she has done.

  Until now.

  “Wally, who you got?” The voice drifts down from a Douglas fir. A faint violet spot circles the loam in front of New Kid, targeting something which would have no difficulty shooting in the dark.

  “She’s, uh…” New Kid’s voice trails off as he realizes the flaw in his current plans, such as they are.

  “I’m one of Bashar’s specials,” Cardoza says with a rich confidence she does not in fact feel. It’s total bullshit, but that slang is regrettably common. “No names will be mentioned.”

  “You’re not turked out,” the voice drawls. “No comm bud, buddy.”

  “Not where I been,” Cardoza responds. “Now get out of my way, or explain yourself to Bashar later.”

  A grunt from up in the tree. With a click almost too faint to hear, the violet spot vanishes. “Explain things to him your own self, then.”

  Cardoza follows New Kid on up the hill, watchful for drifting violet spots. If the sentry is tracking her, they have her sighted in mid-back, where she can’t see.

  Her spine itches terribly.

  FROM The Daily Oregonian Newsblog:

  Eruptions at Three Fingered Jack?

  Observers in Santiam Junction have reported explosions along the flanks of the extinct volcano. “There was a rumbling for a little while first,” said Yellowjohn Hackmann of the Cascade Range Patrol, a citizen’s militia which controls Highway 20 through the Cascades. “We thought pulse jets at first, maybe running out of McChord AFB up north. Now it looks like a city burning up there.”

  The University of Oregon reports that Three Fingered Jack is considered extinct. The geology department was executed by Creation Science activists during the Newport Crisis, but professor emeritus David Bischoff commented that government or private activity was a far more likely explanation than a geological rebirth. “Besides that,” he asked, “Where the hell is the ash plume?”

  Fires raging along the tree line have made any efforts at direct observation impossible. Local residents have opened a reverse auction for satellite imagery, with no success yet reported.

  SHE arrives at the city amid the sounds and smells of a feast. Improbably, most of the population of Cascadiopolis seems to be out among the shadows. The clack of chopsticks echoes along with the clink of soup spoons. They eat, these greenfreaks, even as the sky lightens above the shoulder of the mountain and the mist rises off the night-damp leaves.

  Cardoza knows perfectly well that this is a time for quiet retreat and the covering of fires. Patient, stable airships circle high above watching for the flash of metal or color when dawn’s first long rays stab down among the towering trunks, the line of sunlight briefly following the contours of the land here on the west slope of the Cascades. Just as they search for the screened heat signatures and energy discharges, so they look for this.

  Everyone goes to ground when the light changes because that is the moment when shadows turn traitor.

  Still, they are here, clustered ever tighter around something she cannot yet see.

  “Reckon Bashar’s in the middle of that crowd,” New Kid says sullenly.

  Wallace, she thinks. Wallace.

  He stares at her with an air of expectation.

  “Get back down the hill, kid,” she tells him in a weak moment of mercy. “You’ve done your duty by me.”

  Though Cardoza has no intention of confronting Bashar, she pushes into the milling crowd as if she seeks the center. She can feel Wallace’s eyes on her back like that microwatt targeting laser down along the path. Screw him, she let him live. If he’s smart, he’ll just walk away.

  Though she only means to lose herself in the crowd, the scent draws her onward. It is a spell, this smell, bait for the monkeys inside all our heads. The call of the tribe, the campfire, the oldest camaraderie from long before basic training and hazing and politics and congregations.

  Strangely, they are almost silent, far more silent than such a large group of human beings has any business being.

  Thinking very carefully about what she is doing, Cardoza joins a line spiraling through the crowd. Exposure is risk. Crowds are cover. Lines are not crowds. Her worries circle like a mantra until she finally reaches the hotline as the shadows shift from gray to orange and the sun flares along the ridgeline.

  A truly enormous man is serving. He looks vaguely familiar to her as their eyes meet, which makes no sense. He is ethnically diverse and overwhelmingly handsome.

  “You are the last,” he says in a voic
e which floods her soul with sorrow.

  Cardoza takes the proffered bowl—turned from some mountain softwood, she sees—and shrugs off the spell. Charisma? Pheromones? That doesn’t matter. This man is not the key to her lock, whoever the hell he might be.

  The temptation pisses her off.

  She steps away, realizes Bashar is giving her a hard look. Cardoza hopes like hell he does not remember her as well as she remembers him. Fifteen years earlier, she was a uniformed security hack just beginning to learn what he’d already known a decade on by then, one of a pack beating on a cornered greenfreak terrorist.

  He’d broken a dozen arms and legs and killed two of her peers escaping. In time, this man had led her to ask questions. Cardoza had been a girl in a reflective visor back then. Now she is a dangerous woman among dangerous people.

  With the slight nod of one professional to another, she steps away with her steaming bowl of paradise. The eyes which bore into her from behind are not Bashar’s, though, but the big cook’s. Somehow she knows that without ever turning around.

  Then the singing begins.

  CROWN reviewed reports. Sometimes he believed that was all he ever did—review reports. Someone had to make the damned decisions, after all. The world was running down, and no amount of rewinding seemed to help.

  Someone had dumped a load of hot death on a blank spot in the map in the mountains south of Portland. While not directly impacting Crown—his timber interests were confined to the much safer Coastal Range, and even the apocalypse still seemed to require toilet paper—the fact that someone could airdrop that much hell into his neighborhood was pause for thought. Warfare had been irretrievably asymmetrical for decades now. Truck bombs in urban areas were one thing, but it took a lot of juice to loft that kind of firepower. One of the few things governments were still good at was covering airspace.

  Uncle Sam might not be able to fix a highway any more, but he had orbital assets which could tell whether you’d dyed your hair this week. Which meant that whoever had flown this load had done so with payoffs in Colorado Springs.