by John Scalzi
I sat, cross-legged, on top of a large stone block, in front of which was a statue of a sitting man.
It looked like Charlie’s wet dream. One hundred bikes converged from four different directions. Mock Turtle had given me a list of thousands of possibles, and I’d chosen the fittest, with the fastest bikes.
Speed would be an essential part of this equation.
A small smile quirked the side of my mouth, seeing the four sets of twenty-five bikers stream in at full tilt, pedaling away. They all braked to a sudden stop at the center of the intersection.
Now the chaos came. Cars with green lights braked, confused at the sudden clutter as the bikes made a barricade around the square of the intersection.
Waiting in electric utility vans was my support crew. I picked up my phone and selected the mailing list. “Roll out,” I typed.
Fifty men leapt out from the backs of the vans. My heavies. Anyone with a self defense or military background. They lugged plastic cones, and began placing them around the edge of the bicycle barricade.
I slipped on a pair of shades and let them talk to my phone. I needed more screen real estate. Because now, things would get tricky.
The more practical drivers, realizing something was afoot, and not wanting to get caught up in the middle of some riot or demonstration, began to try and start turning their cars around.
Finally, the signs went up declaring the area a car-free zone.
I could see Charlie standing with a bullhorn. Behold the rhetoric. Burn the gas-using relics of a failed era. Embrace the pedal-powered and walkable future.
All around the city I’d deployed bikes, messengers, and paid turks to call in the location of the Eddies. Small flags started popping up in my vision, on a map of Detroit via my heads up display glasses. Scrambling Eddies.
“Security out, ten to stay,” I sent. And the heavies melted back into the vans, which pealed off, a handful remaining off to the sides.
The Eddies were ripping up Washington Boulevard toward us. When they crossed Michigan Avenue I tapped in the scatter signal.
Just as abruptly as they’d appeared the protestors scrambled onto their bikes and took off in every direction, leaving only the stalled and snarled traffic, the cones, and the signs.
I hopped off the public art and strolled down into the park, near the empty fountain, then turned back to watch as the Eddies waded into the mess we’d created.
Angry drivers, confused Eddies not sure if it wasn’t the drivers somehow involved.
Some of them were. Paid to have trouble turning around, that was.
There was some small part of me inside chuckling. Being on the other side, there was a sort of beauty to this creative destruction. I’d always suspected there was.
Twenty Edgewater contractors, in full company uniform, were a bit frustrated.
I called a randomly selected heavy. “Atwater and Bates. Start forming it up.” It was close to the tunnel to Canada, enough to really freak the Eddies out.
The fleeing bicyclists would find warehouses, shops, and eateries to duck into. Beta group was activated and ready to go.
An electric waited for me at the far end of the park. And hopefully Charlie and his pals would leave this one alone long enough for me to get through the day.
After swinging around the effects of jammed traffic I headed for a view of the next mess.
I found a spot a block away from the intersection and parked the car. Lit up my heads-up display glasses. The Eddies were chasing bicyclists. They’d captured a few, given the ten SOS flags I saw.
Time to send in the lawyers for them.
“Atwater and Bates: go,” I ordered via my phone. The bicycles kicked into gear, and my heavies moved onto the scene to stand ready with cones and signs once more.
Since the turn of the century mobile networked insurgencies had been upsetting the balance of force in urban environments for First World militaries.
Infrastructure, Stratton. Infrastructure.
As laws ate away at the rights to demonstrate, free-form riots had begun to grow, imitating the guerilla tactics abroad. Standing still for a protest didn’t make any sense. Not when rioters would get classified as non-state terrorist entities when rounded up.
The trick was to control your membership. No violence. Which was hard to do when real insurgents waited in the wings to join protests as a cover for whatever they had in mind.
And when the Edgewater types paid turks to bring violence to a protest so that they could shut it down and levy massive fines for pure profit, one had to be quick on their feet.
Damn quick.
Even as my protestors set up, I saw Eddie flags popping up on my HUD map. They were reforming, dropping their chases, and coming my way.
Samuel Whatten was smart. Eyes on the ground reported a detachment of fifteen Eddies regrouping at Grand Circus Park.
“Security out,” I ordered. And then as the Eddies approached I ordered half the protestors to evaporate ahead of the brunt.
The remaining fifty scattered tire-piercing jax with blue-tooth signals, giving up information about the negative effects of personal transportation as practiced by the city currently.
I was sure the drivers would be thrilled with that.
But the message delivered was this: today, any cars in the area defined by the river and Interstates 375, 75, and the Lodge Freeway, would be harassed. Charlie shouted it. Agents delivered messages to blogs, podcast hosts, old media outlets, and placed battery powered projectors on overpasses all around this section of Detroit we’d staked out for the protest.
Here be no cars welcome.
Of course, we couldn’t shut down every street leading in. But if we caused enough trouble, and spread the word, enough people would get the idea and stay away because they didn’t want to get caught up in an Edgewater roundup and riot.
The effect would be the same.
And I had a few specific goals up my sleeve.
I ordered protestors to pedal out. We had a few more noncritical intersections to demonstrate at.
A few hackers under our pay tapping into Eddie radio chatter reported that the order was going out for all the compounds around Detroit to contribute extra contractors. All Detroit Eddies were getting yanked out of bed no matter their shift. Riot gear was being passed out.
Things were getting warm.
I YANKED Charlie off the streets and had him chauffeur me around in my electric car. Things were getting complex enough I couldn’t drive and coordinate at the same time.
Enough people had heard his talking points and been briefed. They were handed loudspeakers and told to carry on the crusade.
Plus, making pedal-powered Charlie drive me around appealed to me on a deep level.
“Spaceship Detroit,” I asked him. “What do you know?”
“It’s the higher level project,” he said, from the front seat. He was doing his best to follow my orders, but not chat too much. Driving me around really had irked him.
It cheered me up.
“Urban renewal.” I knew I was running a big diversion, and I wondered if true-believers like Charlie knew they were just turking out.
It was like one of those games-with-a-purpose you could play online.
You thought you were taking over the world in a digital simulation, but instead you were helping develop an algorithm for bottle-packing computers based on your reactions to certain variables.
I had to admit, I was enjoying myself a hell of a lot more than I was working as a bouncer just a few nights ago.
“It’s noon,” Charlie said.
“I know.”
“So…”
“Give it a few minutes,” I said. We passed by a series of office buildings. I could see faces in windows looking out. Word of a potential riot had gotten out. People were checking the streets before leaving for lunch.
We continued driving. As I drew more and more people into downtown, I wondered what would be happening in the Slumps.
>
Spaceship Detroit, huh?
I just hoped it wouldn’t be a massive piece of multiplayer performance art, or something stupid. Maybe some of the rhetoric had stuck on me. It would, if people flung it at you long enough.
I would love a walking city, like those European ones, where they’d eased into post-auto societies due to their medieval city layouts and historically high gas prices. I’d visited them, on my way to the trouble spots.
A city where I didn’t have to scrounge out in the Wilds, where the Slumps were utilized, and where it felt like there was action, and hope. I liked the sound of that.
“They’re coming out now,” Charlie said.
He was right. The lunch crowds were starting to form.
“Okay. Lunchtime madness,” I ordered via my phone.
Groups of twenty-five, in five different packs, descended outside popular restaurants, blocking off the roads to them with demonstrations. Again, jax, signs, and cones to muddy everything up.
Charlie’s acolytes preached their slogans, and people did their best to get away from the traffic snarls. The Eddies, now out in patrols in full force, and having gotten a sense for the rough area we’d staked out, descended quickly. They’d spread out in a rough net, and were using their own information to quickly rally to a point.
Turks with live cams gave me feeds of each demonstration, as well as streamed them live to anyone who really cared. Already some people in the city were honking horns whenever they saw a pack of bicyclists going by. Drivers, sympathetic to the cause.
Funny.
In the middle of protest number three, my heavies dragged out a bicyclist from the middle of the group. Discreet, quick, they tossed him into the back of a van, and my phone rang.
“He didn’t have an ID,” they reported. Each official protestor had a small RFID tag that responded to a challenge/response query that the support team could broadcast via their phones.
“Try and work out who he’s getting paid by,” I said.
“He doesn’t know. Just turking it,” was the response.
“The Eddies are thinking quick. Take him out into the Slumps and dump him off.”
Lunch had been successful. Late and annoyed business people, traffic tied up in all five locations. And we still were keeping just ahead of the increasingly frustrated Eddies.
A few of the protestors captured since the first demonstration had been shoved around a bit. But it was still civil.
“Lunch is over. Afternoon delight begins.” I smiled.
For the next four hours they just kept shifting the fun around the city, frustrating the traffic and Eddies. Eating into rush hour traffic as everyone left just added to it. Drivers jumped at every little glitter on the road, imagining tire-piercing jax waiting for them.
Outraged bicyclists not associated with the riots were getting arrested throughout the city as they tried to get to buses or home. The temporary protests appeared, vanished, appeared, vanished, constantly moving about.
At this point some of them were riding in the vans, getting dropped off in locations faster than they could bike to. And to be honest, there were closer to five hundred bicyclists working for me, hidden all throughout downtown.
Even though the Eddies now had extras coming in from the Slumps and the Wilds, I was prepared to keep this up all through the night, when Mock Turtle called.
“We have a problem,” he said softly.
Outside, the sun was dipping over the skyline, the buildings throwing their long shadows down the streets.
“What kind of problem?”
“Edgewater is advancing on the project. They’re liable to misinterpret what’s going on.”
“Well, what is going on?”
“Come and see.”
And the directions to one of the skyscrapers in the Slumps popped up on my phone.
AS we drove deep into the Slumps I realized why Edgewater might get nervous. As night fell thousands of people were crawling out of nooks and crannies.
Even as we drove, the streets were filling with people.
People were working on portable machine shops, or turning out parts via automated stamping machines. Others ran up and down the street with carts and toward the center of all the activity.
Spaceship Detroit. The skyscraper loomed over this section of the Slumps, where the buildings made perhaps fifteen stories at best.
Massive solar panels had already been mounted to the upper deck and outside the windows, jutting from the building like leaves from a demented, scrap metal tree. Charlie swore and stopped the car, and I got out.
Dump trucks of soil lined the block, the air hazy with dust as they dumped dirt onto conveyor belts leading into the building, where vacuum hoses and other contraptions moved the dirt elsewhere.
And everywhere, a swarm of humanity working furiously.
Mock Turtle wove his way through the sidewalk, people blinded with their visors and tasks magically moving aside at the last second, a sea of humanity parting for him in his wheelchair.
“Welcome to the single most coordinated sudden attack of urban renewal ever witnessed,” he proclaimed. “Two hundred thousand souls, dedicated to turning this building into a sustainable structure.”
My knees were weak. “The Eddies are going to call in the military.”
“Since dawn we’ve been quietly working on the infrastructure of the building inside, doing as much prep as we could. Parts have been manufactured off-site for months now. We’ve all been rehearsing on 3-D models in massive multiplayer online simulations for a year, since we identified the target. It’s going to take eight more hours to get the soil in, and then finish the interior modifications once that’s in place for the full occupation.”
“But what is it?” Why did they need soil?
“People have been taking over unused buildings and repurposing them in decayed areas for as long as we’ve had cities. But what is the point in taking over structures like this, if we don’t have any new paradigms to offer?” Mock Turtle led me back toward the building. Inside the giant lobby people were working on a series of ponds. Sprinklers over my head went through a testing cycle, briefly dropping mist into the air.
My host continued. “It began in an online game that let people design homes. Many used it as a place to test how to make more efficient homes, or redesign existing homes in niches in cities. Eventually the designers realized we had the economy of a small country. And so they wondered how they could face some of these problems of how to be responsible dwellers. Out of that grew a community plan to create an embassy to the world.”
We took a glass elevator up through the building’s levels: I was seeing apple and orange trees, and rows of furrowed soil. I recognized all this. Farms. They were building farms. Like the skyscraper farms in New York. No need to worry about seasons. Much more efficient acreage. You could reuse the water as it filtered down via gravity.
“We used a squatter at first. That triggered a response from the Edgewater contractors here to evict that person. They have a contract to protect this building. Our hackers were able to then follow the report that Edgewater delivered about the incident back through several shell companies to the actual owner of this building.”
We’d passed twenty rows of farms and gardens, and now it turned into apartments and corridors.
“That information was made public, prompting liens and back-tax collection actions against the owners which forced them into bankruptcy. Now we’re claiming ownership, and offering to pay taxes and be good stewards. Under a subsidiary company based out of Turkey.”
“Turkey?” I said. “Why Turkey?”
“We have allies at the top in America. Allies who want us to succeed, who played the simulations, who know what we planned. And from a simple financial point of view, if we own the building, we’ll pay our taxes, raise the value of the building, and maybe even offer a plan to revitalize the Slumps. Since we put in a claim via a Turkish company to build an embassy, ostensibly for Turkey,
we are technically on Turkish soil. They have a rule that says if you can build a building in a night where the owner doesn’t notice it to try and stop it, then you can stay there.
“So we will be allowed to have this land if we can finish this project in one night. But the previous owners, under a reconstituted company, are counter-filing having the building taken away, and are trying to stop us by getting the Eddies over here, because we have no building permits and we’re taking up the streets. It’s all legal fictions and weirdness, but we need to stop the Eddies from coming over here.”
He’d taken me to the top of the building, where a carefully landscaped set of gardens sat. With a waterfall trickling away already. I understood. Spaceship Detroit. A whole building that could sustain itself in all manners. This wasn’t recycling our forefather’s leftovers, or scrabbling about for what we could get today, this was its own direction. And it could be made right on the foundation of the existing.
“So how bad do you want that apartment? I could take you to see it, it’s just under our feet. Recycled oak floors, two bedrooms…” I held up my hand to quiet him. We looked out over the twinkling skyline.
I’d had a feeling it would come to something like this. Riding the back of the tiger meant getting bashed up. It never came without consequences.
“I need three hundred very dedicated people,” I said. “Not the cyclists. People ready to get hurt. Because the Eddies are not going to go easy.”
“You can have thousands,” Mock Turtle said.
I shook my head. “Anymore than a few hundred is going to get the military involved. They’ll be able to meddle with the project, easily enough. We want just the Eddies to stay involved and away from here.”
“What are you going to do?”
I pointed off in the distance. “By the park, the Detroit Opera House. We take and hold it all night. It pushes over from nuisance into hostile, but with only three hundred of us, and them thinking it’s today’s protestors, they won’t escalate this into a major emergency. But get your lawyers ready.”
Mock Turtle reached out with his good hand. “Thank you.”