Metatropolis

by John Scalzi

  “Let me check on this end,” Jeffers said. “It’s not your vacuum unit,” he said after a minute. “You’ve got an embargo situation.”

  “What the hell is an embargo situation?” I said.

  “It means there’s some sort of clog in the piping,” Jeffers said. “Your vacuum unit shut down because if it didn’t, you’d be spilling pig shit all over yourself right about now.”

  “What do I do now?” I asked.

  “I’m going to need you to do a diagnostic on that particular drainage tube,” Jeffers said. “There’s a diagnostic panel for the tube hardwired into its terminus, which is in the Tower sub-basement C.”

  “Why can’t I access the panel on my phone?” I said. “Why can’t you?”

  “This is an old building, kid,” Jeffers said. “One of the first built in New St. Louis. The diagnostic system is a legacy system from back in the day. Just go down there and check it out, okay? Go to the lobby and switch elevators. You have to take a special elevator down to the sublevels.”

  Five minutes and one elevator transfer later, I was in subbasement C. Even after a full day of walking around pigs and their smell, the fumes down there were something special. On a shelf facing the elevator were a set of breathing masks. YOU NEED THIS, said a weathered sign, followed by another equally weathered sign with the fine print about why the masks were needed. I didn’t need the fine print; I was getting near woozy from the fumes even before I slipped the mask over my head.

  After a couple of deep breaths my head cleared and I walked into the sub-basement, which seemed to be the top floor for several massive conduits, into which the drainage tubes from all the various floors of the Arnold Tower drained.

  “You’re going to want to open the access port to conduit 2,” Jeffers said. “Don’t worry, it’s automatic. No heavy lifting. Just walk on top of the conduit and hit the ‘open’ switch.”

  “There’s going to be a river of crap in there,” I said.

  “No there’s not,” Jeffers said. “Whenever there’s an embargo situation all the other drainage tubes freeze and the conduit empties out, because they know someone has to go and check out the diagnostic panel. It’s going to smell like hell, but you have your mask on, right?”

  I got to the access port, and lugged the switch over to “open.” “I want to talk to whoever designed this system.”

  “It’s been decades, kid,” Jeffers said. “The person who designed it is probably dead by now. Come on, Washington. Crap is piling up. We don’t have all day.”

  I carefully put myself on the access ladder coming down from the port and stepped down. There was recessed, sealed-off lighting at the top of the conduit, so at least I could see. The conduit itself wasn’t exactly clean, but it was drained as promised. Despite that, the residue on the curved floor of the consuit made me be careful how I placed my steps.

  “Where am I going?” I asked.

  “You’re looking for the third…no, wait, fourth tube junction on your left,” Jeffers said.

  I counted off the tube junctions and then stood in front of the fourth one on the left. “Where’s this diagnostic panel?” I asked.

  “It should be there,” Jeffers said. “They’re small. It might be covered in gunk. Stand closer.”

  “I am closer,” I said. “I’m standing right in front of the tube, and I’m not seeing anything.”

  “You’re sure you’re in front of the right tube?” Jeffers asked.

  “I can count,” I said.

  “Hey, Washington,” Jeffers said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Embargo lifted,” he said.

  Then I heard the rumbling. And the laughter from the other end of the phone.

  I looked at the tube and had just enough time to think oh, shit before what I thought became a reality.

  Ten minutes later I was in the Arnold Tower locker room, standing under a shower head, fully clothed, glowering at Jeffers, Pinter, and the other members of my work detail, who were mostly on the floor, laughing so hard that they couldn’t breathe.

  “I will remember this,” I said.

  “We know!” Jeffers said, and hooted so long he fell off the locker room bench.

  Around this time Lou Barnes strolled through the locker room and stopped to get a look at me.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said. “You fell for the embargo trick.”

  “Oh, God, Oh, God,” Pinter said. “Please don’t make me laugh anymore. Please, God, no.” And then he laughed some more.

  “You know they do this to everyone the first day,” Barnes said. “Think of it like a baptism.”

  “Praise the Lord!” Jeffers said, from the floor.

  “It just means you’re one of us now,” Barnes said.

  “Great,” I said.

  “It’s an honor, if you think about it,” Barnes said. “Really.” And then he busted out laughing, too. Which made all the rest of them laugh some more.

  “I will remember this,” I said to Jeffers, once he finally managed to peel himself off the floor.

  “Oh, kid,” Jeffers said, wiping a laugh tear from his eye. “We wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  I NOTICED a funny thing on the pod ride back home, which was that someone would get in the pod with me, and then get off a stop later. This happened three times before the door slid open and Leah popped her head in.

  “Trust me, Leah, you want to take the next pod,” I said.

  “What’s that smell?” she said.

  “It’s my job,” I said. “It stinks.”

  “Hey, you have a job!” she said, and came in to give me a hug. The door slid closed behind her.

  “Now you’re in for it,” I said.

  “I think I can handle the smell of an honest day’s work,” she said, and then gave her destination to the pod. We started off. “I mean, I hope you won’t smell like this at the end of every day. But first days are always stressful. What’s the new job?”

  “Pig farmer,” I said.

  “Normally I’d tell you to stop kidding around, but given how you smell at the moment, I’m willing to believe it,” Leah said.

  “Oh, believe it,” I said. I told her about my day.

  “It could be a positive,” Leah said. “It’s like an initiation rite into the tribe. If they didn’t like you, they would have just said good night to you at the end of your shift.”

  “So, when you started your job, did your co-workers do something like this?” I said.

  “No,” Leah admitted. “They took me out for a drink. But they don’t have access to pig droppings, either.”

  “I’m not sure I agree 100% with your tribe initiation theory,” I said.

  “In that case, stick with it and get them back,” Leah said. We were coming up to our stop. “Because you now have access to pig droppings, too.”

  “That’s a very good point,” I said. “And here all this time I was thinking you were a nice girl, Leah.”

  “I am a nice girl,” Leah said. “I’m just not a pushover.”

  Later at home, mom opened the door a crack while I was in the shower. I was using the graywater because I was wanting a real long soak and after my day, whining about graywater just seemed kind of stupid.

  “Syndee told me about your day at work,” mom said, through the door.

  “Did she tell you I rubbed her face in my shirt after she called me a ‘stinkpig’?” I asked.

  “That was how I found out,” mom said. “I told her I was going to let it slide this time. Do you want to have me talk to your supervisor about it?”

  “Since my supervisor was one of the people laughing his ass off about it, I don’t think it would do much good,” I said.

  “Well, then, his supervisor,” mom said.

  “I thought you said you weren’t going to fight my battles for me anymore,” I said.

  “Having your kid drenched in pig shit changes things,” mom said, and I realized she must really be pissed, because she hardly ever s
wore in front of me or Syndee. I laughed. “What’s so funny?” mom asked.

  “Never mind,” I said. I turned off the shower and grabbed a towel and wrapped it around my waist. Then I opened the door all the way and gave my mom a big sloppy hug.

  “Damn it, Benji, my blouse,” mom said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “And thanks for wanting to stick up for me. But you said it yourself. I’m an adult now. I can handle this on my own. Okay?”

  “You sure?” mom said.

  “Oh, I’m sure,” I said.

  AND so the days and weeks started to go by.

  At work, I still did menial vacuuming and Love Lounge duties, as did everyone else. But slowly I was shown the other parts of the pig trade, from handling feed and water troughs to helping the Arnold Tower vets with the vaccinations and their medical rounds. I also learned how to handle Arnold Tower’s securities and diagnostic systems—which, in fact, could be handled remotely by phone once I was given my access codes. I proved to be a quick study with the computer systems, and because of it I was put in the rotation for late night shifts, when it was just me, a couple of members of the administrative area janitorial staff, and thousands upon thousands of sleeping pigs. Late night shift workers were exempt from the solo surcharge on the pod system and sometimes I took advantage of that to take the long way around New St. Louis, cruising over the streets at night, watching my hometown slide by silently.

  Outside the city, the drought that threatened in the early months of the year delivered with a vengeance, drying up croplands all over the American Midwest and in the lower part of the Canadian corn belt. Mom was having a difficult time selling the rest of the NSL council on Technology Outreach but managed to convince them to make an emergency release of food surpluses to the surrounding suburbs and the Wilds. The generosity of the gesture seemed to be lost on the people in the Wilds, since NSL was accused of holding back on what it could have given, and the protests on our doorsteps got bigger and louder. This frustrated mom and enraged a fair share of New Louies. I was annoyed myself.

  About ten weeks after I had my “embargo” event, Jeffers and Pinter were preparing to herd their boys into another session in the Love Lounge when an apparently random computer glitch locked them out of the control room and then cycled through the session, spraying them with swine-tuned aphrodisiac just as the door slid open to admit a fine selection of very horny pigs. If the door to the control room hadn’t randomly unlatched a couple of minutes into the session, Jeffers and Pinter might have found themselves porked into oblivion. A routine check of the systems after the event found no tampering and no reason why the system would have behaved like that. Barnes ordered the software reloaded and everyone was given new security codes into the system.

  A week after that, protests at the city border finally turned bloody, as a small group of Wilds folks attacked the NSL police force, seriously wounding one of them when a rock dented his skull. I saw this particular protest from above as I slid into work; if it wasn’t an actual riot it was practicing to become one. The NSLPD told the executive council it didn’t have enough officers to handle the growing crowds. The council, over the strenuous objections of my mother, contracted with Edgewater for border control. After that the protest crowds got larger but they also stayed mostly under control. The rumor was that the Eddies got paid bonuses on a quota basis, and were just looking for someone—anyone—to get out of line. I asked my mom if the quota bonus rumor was true. She looked at me and told me that now would be a great time to change the subject.

  Shortly thereafter Syndee completed all her education requirements, got her certificate, and took her Aptitudes. She scored high enough on them that she qualified for New St. Louis’ executive training, which meant she was now on a fast track to be an administrator either here or in another city we shared “open borders” with. Despite myself, I was really proud of her.

  As for me, I got a promotion, of sorts: Arnold Tower had a lorry it used to transfer pigs or other things from our tower to Wilber Tower or Pippo Tower, the other two non-meat pig towers in New St. Louis, and the driver of the lorry had slipped while stepping out of the cab and broken his leg. While he was on desk duty, I was assigned temporary driver. I spent part of my day on the actual roads of the city, which beat vacuuming up shit. One day as I was driving along I saw Leah and Will standing on the street corner, waiting to cross. I honked as I went past, which delighted Leah and confused Will, which seemed about right in both cases. Sometimes I took Lunch with me on the trips; he sat up front with me. He seemed to enjoy the ride.

  As bad as the protests where we lived were, they were worse in other places. In California, the Malibu Enclave was nearly burned to the ground when protestors there started fires in the canyons and pushed the fire line right to the border of the enclave. A lucky shift of the wind let firefighters save the enclave; other parts of Malibu were not as lucky. When the protestors came back, they put the blame for the fires on the Enclave. Edgewater, which had a contract with Malibu just like it did with New St. Louis, saw a lot of its people get bonuses that night. The protesters saw their people go into the Eddie’s holding cells or the hospital.

  Despite the rising tensions, mom kept hammering away at her Technology Outreach program, trying to convince the other executive board members that time was running out. It was already too late to have the outreach be any use for this year, she said, but next year we’re going to see the same thing happen again, and the year after that, and the year after that. But it wasn’t doing her any good. Opinions were hardening against the Wilds, which looked more like anarchy than anything else these days.

  Eventually even mom gave up and tabled the outreach program until after the elections. Her opponent, who as it turned out was distantly related to Will’s dad, had been gaining ground on her, mostly by hammering on her for wanting to do outreach to the same people who were rioting on our borders. He didn’t seem to have any other platform, but at the moment he really didn’t need any other platform. Mom looked at what her support for Technology Outreach was costing her and had to dump it. And even though I’d been opposed to it, I was sorry for my mother that something she cared so much about couldn’t get a fair hearing.

  At the end of summer, my work group had a classic cinema movie night, which included Babe, Deliverance and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. When I saw the latter, I finally got the “embargo” reference.

  On the first day of autumn, as I pulled a night shift, I invited Leah to the experimental gardens on the roof. We brought Lunch along for security purposes.

  “It’s beautiful up here,” Leah said.

  “I’m glad you like it,” I said. “I thought you might want to see it before all the leaves fell off.”

  “Why are they called the experimental gardens?” she asked.

  “The plants up here are genetically engineered,” I said. “The botanists share the genetics lab with the geneticists who work on the pigs. The lab takes up the whole twentieth floor, actually. Common rabble like us aren’t allowed in there, but they let us come up here on our breaks and during lunch. I come up here with Lunch all the time. Lunch, the pig, I mean. For lunch. You know. I think I’ll stop talking now.”

  Leah smiled, which was a pretty thing in the moonlight. “I think it’s adorable you have a pet pig,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t use the word ‘pet’ around him,” I said. “He’s his own pig. We just happen to be friends.”

  “Well, fine,” Leah said. “I think it’s adorable you have a pig for a friend. Are you happy now?”

  “I’m getting there,” I said, and even in the moonlight, I could sense her blushing a little. Leah was still with Will, and she wasn’t the sort of girl who would let something like that slide, even for a minute. But it wasn’t a secret to her that I still wished she was with me. And I didn’t see much point in pretending that I felt any other than I did. You can let people know how you feel about them without seeming desperate, or at least, that was what I was hop
ing.

  “I like where you work, Benji,” Leah said, after a minute.

  “You’re only saying that because I haven’t taken you to sub-basement C,” I said. “Let me give you the embargo treatment and we’ll see what you think then.”

  Leah laughed. “I think I’ll pass on that,” she said.

  “Chicken,” I said. She smiled again and reached down to pet Lunch. He snuffled at her.

  One of our phones rang. It was Leah’s. She stepped away and took the call. A minute later, she came back, holding the phone in front of her. “Here,” she said. “It’s for you.”

  I took the phone. “Hello?” I said.

  “Benji,” Will said, on the other end of the line. “I have a favor to ask of you. A real big favor.”

  “IT’S Marcus,” Will said, when I met him and Leah for lunch the next day. “I haven’t seen him in nearly three years. We email a little, and talk about what’s going on, but he’s always somewhere that’s nowhere near here. Then he calls yesterday—actually calls—and tells me he’s in St. Charles and he wants to see me. He said there’s a rave he’ll be at out there tomorrow and gave me directions and the time. So I know where he’ll be and when he’ll be there. I just don’t have a way to get there.”

  I squirmed in my seat. Will asking me to take the Arnold Tower lorry to drive him to see his brother out in the Wilds was bad enough, but asking me to take it to a rave edged on the insane. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Just requisition a car from the city. It’ll put a hole in your energy budget for the month, but it’s your brother. He’s worth it.”

  “I tried that,” Will said, and he let his irritation creep into his voice. “Maybe you’re not keeping up with current events, Benji, but we’ve got a daily near-riot right outside the city. The city’s not letting people take their ground cars out into that; they’d get stripped before they got to the Interstate. Jesus, you’re clueless sometimes.”

  “Will,” Leah said.

  Will held a hand up. “I know. I’m sorry, Benji. It’s just that I haven’t seen Marcus in so long, and I have no idea when I’m going to get to see him again. You know how important he is to me.”