Metatropolis

by John Scalzi

  “Don’t thank me yet.” I looked out over the city with a sinking feeling in my stomach.

  Was it just about the apartment now? Or had I gotten sick of skulking about in the Wilds by myself?

  Or had a strong taste of the Mock Turtle’s Kool-Aid gotten to me?

  A little bit of all of the above, I figured.

  WE rushed the security guards quickly enough, and I set teams to boarding up the doors. Jax were scattered on the streets. Protest signs wavered on the walls outside, thanks to projectors dropped all over the street.

  Charlie had stuck with me, and he looked at the team. “Not a lot of us here.”

  “Enough are,” I said. “We have to hold out until we get the all clear from the project or until we’re all rounded up.”

  The Opera House was a recognizable building, a part of the history of the city. The Eddies would not ignore this.

  Sure enough, my phone finally buzzed. CMO S. Whatten. “Stratton? I’m getting reports you’re at the Opera House?”

  “We’re barring ourselves in for the night.”

  I could see on my heads-up glasses that the Eddies were starting to stream this way.

  “You sure about this?” Whatten asked. “We were just about to get a temporary city ban on bikes and end the whole protest. You want to take it up to this?”

  “It’s too late, Samuel,” I looked around at the project volunteers. “We’re here for the night.”

  The first Eddies were pulling up at the perimeter of our jax field.

  But then, so were hundreds of people on bikes, and cars, and on foot, coming to see the latest star singer, sports player, or whoever they idolized.

  Thanks to personal interest profiles, and thousands of turkers working to invite them down to the Detroit Opera House for a special showing of…whatever it was their interests indicated they would come down to see for a free showing.

  These people weren’t working for anyone, or getting paid. They wouldn’t be classified as part of the protest.

  But they were indirectly working for us.

  The Eddies formed up, clearing away the jax. Their riot teams rolled up and out with battering rams to come in after us.

  “Frustrated fans, execute,” I ordered.

  Outside, whisper campaigns started. The Eddies were here to take away the impromptu concerts being planned. They were here to ruin the fun.

  Now this was incitement.

  The project’s lawyers were going to have to earn their money when I got bailed out later tonight.

  My streaming video didn’t show who threw the first bottle. But when it broke on the pavement, the Eddies moved their focus from the Opera House to the massive crowd outside.

  Charlie, sitting next to me in one of the balcony seats, swore. He was looking at the streams on a small pad in his hands.

  Outside erupted.

  It was clear enough these weren’t anti-car protestors. The Eddies had a two front war on their hands now. It bought us until just past midnight, as the Eddies had their backs to us to deal with the frustrated and unruly crowds trying to get in.

  “You don’t have room in your cells for us,” I told Whatten when he called me again. “Why bother now?”

  “We’ll make do,” he hissed. He sounded tired. The friendliness I’d found in him earlier had been wrung out.

  “We have no weapons. We’re just trying to make a point.”

  “You’ve well made it all day. We’re going to make a point as well.”

  By one in the morning they had the whole outside of the Opera House surrounded, and they’d started smashing in one of the doors.

  “Get up here,” I ordered, moving to the location. We pushed our way forward with planks, doing our best to keep it reinforced.

  They fired tear gas in, noxious smoke roiling through at us. We had masks for it and kept on pushing back at the splintered planks we’d nailed up, our shoes slipping on broken glass.

  “Eddies’re in the back,” Charlie reported. And we split our forces.

  But there were more Eddies. As each new breach appeared we split to deal with it.

  At two in the morning I ordered the bulk of the project volunteers to fall back to the next floor. The volunteers at the doors faced the Eddies, who punched through and started dragging them away.

  I left half of the remaining volunteers to hold upper floors, leaning against doors, or just forming human chains.

  The rest of us, a hundred now, took to the roof. Barricading anything we found on the way up there, we had fewer doors to defend.

  “They only can land a handful at a time by helicopter,” I told a nervous Charlie. “And unlike the military during a riot, they’re not going to shoot us, because that won’t turn them a profit, will it?”

  The hundred of us on the roof saw dawn break, helicopters hovering around the edges of the building, Eddies camped outside with fellow project members zip-tied to each other and sitting outside in one long line.

  When they got through, the Eddies kicked and beat us down. Making their point.

  But by then, we really didn’t care, did we?

  Mock Turtle himself came to spring us. “Are you ready to see your apartment?” he asked.

  But I found that I didn’t want it.

  “What’s the next project?” I asked.

  IT was late in the morning, a year later.

  I packed up my home, folding my tent back down. The skinnable walls faded, their pictures and vistas disappearing as I shut the tent off.

  I packed the trailer behind my bike, and as I locked it down, the rest of the city around me started to wake up. The smell of fresh coffee wafted over the neighborhood lines as slow wakers got stumbling.

  Fresh bread, airshipped in from a vertical farm in Columbus, or so everyone said, also filled the air. But I was in a hurry, and had decided to skip breakfast.

  Everything folded up and away, with a quick double check to make sure the chalked-off area of my lot for the night was clean, and I was off.

  Friends from the last months of slow pedaling across the great American West waved at me as I cranked along through the streets of a tent city that had gone up overnight. Five thousand in this particular tribe.

  I passed security along the edge and they let me through. Then it was out along the back roads and trails with my electric-assist trike, with the aerodynamic trailer behind me with all my belongings bumping along.

  I had found, over the last year, that I didn’t need much. I’d gotten rid of a lot of things as I’d moved my way West.

  This last leg was easy, coming down out of the mountains. I passed a handful of other bicycles and small cars, a few gas-powered.

  And there it was: Los Angeles.

  I had two reasons for LA. For one, it was our next project. We had a new code name, didn’t want the local Eddies to sniff us out ahead of time. We were trickling into LA a little bit at a time. Project Ceres had an ambitious hundred building goal, enough to completely feed the entire city, thus putting the project in the financial situation of becoming a major agribusiness and funding the formal creating of vertical farms anywhere it wanted. A different aim than the spaceship concept, but one I could still get behind.

  We’d been perfecting our methods all throughout the center of the country, gaining recruits, resources, and abilities.

  The second reason was Maggie.

  She was out here in the city. With the Mock Turtle’s resources, I’d found her.

  I wanted to thank her.

  It sounded ridiculous, but sometimes it took losing something important to you for you to shake yourself out of your old habits and seek out something new. Something different.

  Sometimes, something better.

  THE RED IN THE SKY IS OUR BLOOD

  ELIZABETH BEAR

  Elizabeth Bear had a heck of a year last year: Her short story “Tideline” has racked up all sorts of awards, including a Hugo Award, and she’s also released a number of novels. She’s the Energizer B
unny of science fiction: She just keeps writing and writing and writing. Fortunately, we all benefit from her output.

  Bear’s story here is excellent in its own right, but one thing I’d like to point out is how it, with Tobias Buckell’s “Stochasti-City,” is an excellent example of how the working relationship among the writers of METATROPOLIS came into play. One of the things we did as writers was to show each other our works in progress, so we could see how others were solving the problems of fleshing out this world we created, and to make sure that our own stories connected with the others.

  In the case of Bear and Buckell, their two stories, both set in Detroit, are an interesting and complementary set, and you can hear how the two share story elements and themes, even as their stories stand on their own. It’s proof to me that the idea of communal world-building and individual story writing can pay off in ways both expected and unexpected.

  Handlebars stung Cadie’s palms as her front tire popped off the curb and slammed cracked asphalt. Flexed elbows absorbed the jolt, but she still felt the sting across her shoulders. She skittered sideways between an autorickshaw and two pedestrians, and entered the traffic flow. Detroit had never had much in the way of public transportation, and decayed infrastructure made the public streets practically impassable.

  Cadie knew that. Knowing it didn’t manage to lessen her irritation much when she had to stop on Randolph Street and dismount so she could lift her bike over a pothole that stretched the width of the road. Another day, she might have ridden over and popped the bike up the other side, but today she couldn’t afford to risk a tire. She was already late and didn’t have the spare cash for a new tube.

  Heads turned as Cadie swung a leg over her machine again and rocked up onto the pedal, balancing on the scarred ball of her sneaker. She shook her dreads down over her shoulders, tossing back the one that always wanted to spring forward and sway like a pendulum in front of her right eye. Some yoob in a business suit turned around to stare at the stretch of her cargo pants as she kicked off and leaned forward. She could have flipped him off, but it was more fun to pump toward him, pedaling furiously, and tip his hat into the filthy street.

  “Bitch!” he shouted after her as she vanished into the stream of rattling trucks and electric squirts. Then she did flip him off, without turning, the finger pointing down stiff and rigid beside her pumping haunches. Somebody else whooped laughter, a steel bracelet bright with rubber-edged jingling tags rattling on his wrist as he waved, but Cadie’s antagonist shouted something she lost in a roar of giant wheels and the blare of her headphones as she slid in behind a truck. She was pretty sure it wasn’t his phone number.

  And if it was—she grinned as she pedaled down the echoing soot-blackened channel, anonymized by traffic—she had all the men in her life she needed.

  THOSE wrist tags bugged her as she slid along through traffic, finally making better time now. Every counterculture has its recognition signals. Hanky codes and earrings. Slave rings and crossed wrists. Cryptic magnetic decals on the bumper of a car. Peace signs, band badges, piercings, dyed hair, long hair, cropped hair. Ankhs, safari vests, and Leathermans. Gang signs and team insignia. The colors of the tribe.

  Every counterculture has its ways of keeping the gate. Some are secret for purposes of exclusion and control. Some are secret by force of necessity. Some flamboyantly broadcast their existence, but adopt impenetrable habits of speech. Some are driven underground at first, for centuries or decades, only to emerge when the conventions of society change.

  But then they cease to be the counterculture; they lose their passcodes and secret handshakes; the recognition symbols that once served to discreetly identify them to friendly eyes become an open badge of membership. A Christian fish. A rainbow flag. Nuances of nonverbal communication are lost when it becomes safe to speak aloud.

  Lately, Cadie had been noticing the tags. Rattling silvery metal, worn on a steel ball chain looped around throats under tailored sport coats, through the worn buttonholes of frayed denim jackets, hooked on a keychain carabiner. Sets of three or five or seven, once nine, always odd numbers, the thin sheets of metal rolled in colored rubber at the edges for safety and perforated like lacy antique punch cards. She hadn’t gotten a good look at a set, but she thought there was some transparent, refractive material sandwiched between layers of metal, visible where the cutouts fell.

  They weren’t customary—she’d catch somebody with a set every couple of days, a few times a week. Once, she’d seen two in a day.

  She wondered, sure. Googled around a little, checked a couple of trendy stores that sold fashion accessories. Found nothing. The thing that struck Cadie odd was that the tags—which looked more than anything else like miniature fine-jewelry replicas of dog tags—were the only thing the people wearing them seemed to have in common. She hadn’t realized they were a recognition signal until she’d seen a bum in two pairs of too-short trousers, seven tags rattling against his filthy collarbones, nod in passing to a businesswoman walking between her bodyguards. A leather strap supporting a pilot electronics tote crossed the shoulder of her designer suit. Five tags swung freely from the strap loop.

  The businesswoman had smiled faintly and nodded back.

  BY the concrete footing of a converted warehouse, Cadie locked her bike and set the zapper. Somebody had stenciled an outline of a grinning man smoking an upside-down pipe on the wall; whatever the encoded message was, Cadie didn’t get it. She hustled up steps to a rusted steel door that had once been painted orange. Somebody had told her there was no word for the color “orange” in Hindi; there was only yellow and red, and whatever lay between them had to be assigned to one category or another. It seemed strange to think about at first, but then she realized that all the colors between blue and green didn’t have their own names either. Just names by association, teal and turquoise and aquamarine. But weren’t those colors just as real as blue or green? Didn’t they have as much unique identity? Who was it that decided that they had to be one or the other?

  So if you spoke another language and orange stopped being orange and became yellow, what then? Did the color itself change? Or was it just your perception of it?

  Cadie nerved herself and tapped her code on the pad beside the door. Whoever was inside could see her on the cams. Facial recognition software had already identified her when the print-reader on the keypad slid a bar of blue light along her fingertip. From its intensity, it seemed as if Cadie should be able to sense a chill.

  Multiple system redundancy.

  The battered door sagged against its hinges as remote locks slid back. Cadie squared her shoulders under her battered denim jacket, setting the fine swags of chain across the breast pockets swinging, and stepped inside.

  IT was a long walk, past the guard’s office with the door propped open by a chipped wooden wedge. The guard—a big warm man burdened with the parentally reprehensible name of Celsius Washington—waved at her as she passed, his Marine Corps ring and his shaved head catching bands of light. She waved back. With meaty lips and chipped white teeth, he grinned. “Your little girl is growing up fine, just like her mom.”

  Cadie rolled her eyes and flipped him off like the guy on the street, but when she gave Cel the bird it was a different gesture, with more English in it and framed with a smile.

  More coded signals. Sometimes a fuck you was just a fuck you. And sometimes it was a whole bunch of other messages, and the fuck you was only the carrier wave.

  Consider how Cel pressed both hands over his heart and leaned back in his chair, head tipped winningly to one side. Fatigued metal groaned under his shift of weight. She walked on past, leaving the finger behind, framed in the door until her arm dragged it after.

  And heard him laughing all the way down the hall to reception.

  Here, the character of the building changed. From reclaimed property and scarred tile to soft carpet in bright tertiary colors complementary to walls and furniture. The receptionist, James, had hung up his suit
jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his immaculately pressed shirt, but his tie still snugged crisply below his Adam’s apple and a semiautomatic pistol was clipped into a magnetic rig on his right hip. The reflected light from security monitors under the console wall gilded him blue.

  “Hello, Ms. Grange,” he said. He touched the control for his headset and announced her, indicating a chair by the next set of security doors. James held up a plastic envelope while she retrieved a butterfly knife with a pierced steel handle and a can of tear gas from her inside pocket. She dropped her weapons in and he bent the flap over, tucked it inside, and placed the resulting package in his top desk drawer, which he locked.

  “I always expect you to swallow the key when you do that,” Cadie said.

  James tucked a coil of light brown hair behind his ear, a transparently flirtatious gesture. He had great big hazel eyes with heavy eyelashes, and was at least ten years too young for her.

  And so what? “You’re not staying long enough for that to be effective security.”

  She laughed and took the indicated chair, listening to the whisper of her metal fringe as she leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. Too much work, not enough sleep. But there was no easy solution for that in her life, either.

  After a suitable pause, James cleared his throat to draw her attention. She straightened, blinked, and was already rising when he said, “The staff will see you now, Ms. Grange.”

  The inner door swung open as she turned toward it. She passed within, was wanded, and walked through the imaging portal. The security staff were used to her jacket now, but they still gave it a thorough hand-examination. It was heavy in part because there were layers of body armor behind the swinging chains.

  Nothing extravagant. Nothing she’d want to rely on to protect her from a gunshot. But a little extra edge, the sort sensible people acquired.

  Cadie smiled when they gave her back her jacket. “How bad is the coffee today, Angelina?”

  The woman with the wand, a broad-shouldered veteran whose straight black hair fell in a clipped line across her forehead, shrugged. “It’s been on for a couple of hours. I’d see if it melts the spoon before I trusted it.”