Metatropolis

by John Scalzi

  The hell of it was, I did know. Long ago, before we decided we actually really didn’t like each other, Will and I were friends, and I hung out with his family. Will idolized his older brother. He was crushed when Marcus blew off his Aptitudes and ended up out of the city. It was why I knew how to poke him in that particular soft spot whenever I felt like he had gone too far with his belittling of me.

  “Look, Benji,” Will said. “I know we haven’t been friends in a long time. I know we don’t get along. I know you resent me—” he stopped before he could actually say for being with Leah, and chose something else instead. “I know you resent me for a lot of things. And I know I’ve treated you like crap. If you said no to this, no one would say I didn’t deserve it. But I’m asking you, just this once, for a favor. I can’t get a car to get out to St. Charles. But you can. Your lorry can get through the gates and get back. You don’t even have to stop at the gates like regular cars do because the lorry has a signature transponder in it, right?”

  “You’ve thought this through, Will,” I said.

  “It’s my brother, Benji,” Will said. “I want to see him. Help me. Please.”

  I looked at Will and then I looked over at Leah, who was keeping a very carefully neutral expression on her face. But I knew what she wanted me to say, and I know what I was going to say because I knew what Leah would want.

  It takes a special kind of pathetic loser to help someone you hate just to make his girlfriend happy, I thought. There was more to it than that, I knew. But at the moment that’s exactly what it felt like.

  “Let me see what I can do,” I said. “I can’t promise anything. The same restrictions that are out there for groundcars might be there for city lorries, too. And if there are, I’m not stretching my neck out for you, Will. It’s not like I have a whole lot of job options available to me at this point. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Will said, and looked like he was going to cry. “Thank you, Benji. Really. I’m not going to forget this.”

  “Thank you, Benji,” Leah said.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, looking at her, and then looking at him. “You’re both welcome.”

  “HERE’S the deal with the lorry,” Barnes said to me. “I’m not saying yes, but I’m not officially saying no. All of us have unofficially ‘borrowed’ that truck from time to time. As far as I’m concerned it’s one of the perks of the job; a little something to make up for having to work in pig crap all day long. That said, if you take it out and something happens to it, then officially you’re screwed and there’s nothing I’m going to be able to do to dig you out of that hole. So don’t run it into a tree or hit a deer or let anyone set fire to it. Got it?”

  “I got it,” I said.

  “What do you need it for, anyway?” Barnes asked.

  “I’m taking someone to see his long lost brother in St. Charles,” I said.

  “That’s not a trip I’d want to take these days,” Barnes said. “That must be some friend.”

  “It’s not a friend, actually,” I said.

  “I’m confused,” Barnes said.

  “His girlfriend,” I said. “My ex. Still hold a candle. And so on.”

  “Ah,” Barnes. “Well, and I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but that’s got to suck for you.”

  “It really sort of does,” I said. Barnes clapped me on my back and headed off.

  The next night, late, Will and Leah and I rolled out of New St. Louis and took the bumpy city streets of old St. Louis until we found a suitable on-ramp to Interstate 70, heading west. The Interstate was not exactly in what you would call brilliant condition these days—the US federal government’s list of priorities was getting smaller and smaller, and the Interstate system had clearly not made the most recent cut—but it was workable as long as you didn’t go too fast, and the traffic out to St. Charles from NSL was pretty much non-existent.

  “So you actually have directions to where we’re going, right, Will?” I said. I had gotten to the I-70 on my own, and Will had been silent for all of the ride so far.

  Will pulled something out of his coat pocket and handed it to me. “Here,” he said.

  I took it. It was a pair of goofy-looking glasses. “What the hell are these?” I said.

  “Marcus had them sent to me,” Will said. “He had me stand at one of the gates where there wasn’t a protest, and someone came up and gave them to me.”

  “Who gave them to you?” I asked.

  “It was just some guy,” Will said. “He said he’d been paid to turk the package. Put them on.”

  I put them on; the lenses were clear and non-correcting. “Do these do anything but make me look stupid?” I asked

  “You have to turn them on,” Will said. “There’s a power switch on the rim of the lens.”

  I fumbled with the glasses with one hand until I found a slightly raised ridge. I pressed it.

  There was suddenly a bright orange three-dimensional arrow in my field of view, pointing down the Interstate.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  “The lenses are supposed to superimpose images over the real world,” Will said.

  “Well, it works,” I said.

  “Marcus said they’re from company out of Switzerland. He said they’re going to be huge in a few years,” Will said.

  “That’s great,” I said. “But am I supposed to follow this arrow or what?”

  I was. When the arrow turned, I turned. 45 minutes later, we rolled up to what looked like it used to be a city park, which had gone to pot sometime in the not-too-distant past. In the middle of the park lights flashed and music pulsed. We were at our rave.

  “What now?” I asked, once we’d gotten out of the lorry and I’d clicked on the security settings.

  “Do you still have an arrow in your glasses?” Will asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Let’s follow it,” Will said.

  We wandered through the crowd for a few minutes, pushing our way through clots of dancers. From time to time I saw faces I recognized; there were a lot of New Louies at this particular rave in the Wilds. I wondered how they found out about it, and how they got there, but before I got to spend any real amount of time on it, the arrow in my glasses suddenly changed orientation and hovered directly over someone.

  “I think I found Marcus,” I said to Will, but he was already pushing past me to hug his brother. Leah trailed behind him. I stood in the middle of a bunch of dancers with a pair of incredibly dorky glasses on my head.

  “So, okay, then,” I said, to no one in particular. “You’re welcome. No, no. Happy to help. No thanks necessary.” I sighed and took off the glasses.

  When I looked up again Leah was standing in front of me. “Come on,” she said. “Marcus is asking for you.” She held out her hand. I took it.

  As a kid, I remember Marcus towering over both me and Will. He was still as imposing as I remembered him.

  “Benjamin Washington,” Marcus said, and extended his hand. I shook it and compared my grip to his, despite myself. “I remember you very well. You were not quite so tall the last time I saw you.”

  “I was fourteen the last time you saw me,” I said.

  “True enough,” Marcus said. We were standing in a rest area at the rave, with card tables and folding chairs around us. He motioned for the three of us to sit. We did. I could tell that Will was a little puzzled why his brother wanted to talk to me when he was around. I was wondering that myself.

  “Will tells me you waited until the last minute to take your Aptitudes,” Marcus said.

  I glanced over at Will. “That sounds like something Will would tell you,” I said.

  “I was curious why you waited,” Marcus asked.

  I shrugged. “I wanted to see some of the rest of the world first,” I said.

  Marcus smiled. “And did you? See the rest of the world?”

  “Some of it,” I said, and listed the places I had traveled.

  “Ah,” Marcus said. “I see. Y
ou did see the world—but just the safe parts.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  “You went to all the other hermetically sealed places on the map,” Marcus said. “All the other cities like New St. Louis. The zero-footprint, low-impact, archipelago of new-age city-states that dot the globe. The ones that have cut themselves off from the rest of the world and think themselves virtuous for doing so. Do you think they are virtuous?”

  “I don’t know about virtuous,” I said. I had no idea where Marcus was going with any of this. “I think right about now we’re trying not to starve like everyone else is about to.”

  Marcus tilted his head at this. “You New Louies could help everyone not starve, if you wanted to,” he said. “If I hear correctly, your mother tried to get New St. Louis to share some of its technology, but no one else was buying the argument. Why was that?”

  “I think all the protests began to piss people off,” I said. “My mom got the city to give up some of its food surplus and no one seemed grateful. I think that pissed people off, too.”

  “It pissed me off,” Will said, trying to get into the conversation. Leah was silent, watching the three of us.

  Marcus smiled over at his brother but kept talking to me. “I think what bothered people about that was that New St. Louis was giving the Wilds a fish, rather than teaching them how to fish.”

  “I don’t follow you,” I said.

  “‘Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day,’” Marcus intoned. “‘Teach a man how to fish, and you feed him for life.’ Surely you’ve heard this saying. I’m saying that the people in the Wilds know the different between a fish and being taught how to fish. They resent being given the one, when they need the other.”

  “But the city didn’t have to give them a fish at all,” I said.

  “Of course not,” Marcus said. “That’s the advantage of being a zero-footprint paradise, isn’t it? You’re whole unto yourselves. You can keep your own clockwork ticking while all the world is running down around you. But it’s a lie. John Donne had the right of it when he said that no man is an island. No city is, either, Benjamin. Your mother recognizes this, at the very least; it’s why she’s trying to pass that outreach of hers. Or tried, anyway, until she realized she had an election she needed to win. I recognized it. It’s why I never bothered to take my Aptitudes. It’s why I let them come to my family’s apartment, serve me that silly court order, walk me to the city gate and shove that ridiculous credit card in my hand. They thought I was being expelled from paradise; I knew I was gaining my freedom. I wondered if you might have recognized it, too, Benjamin.” Marcus cocked his head again. “But now I’m not so sure. And I wonder if that’s not a pity.”

  I sat there for a second and then stood up. “I think I’m keeping you from catching up with your brother,” I said, and then nodded to both Marcus and Will, and walked off.

  Leah followed behind me a few seconds later. “What was that all about?” she asked.

  “I swear to you I have no earthly idea,” I said.

  “I think Marcus was trying to tell you something,” Leah said.

  “I know he was trying to tell me something,” I said. “I just don’t know what it is. And I think it’s pissing me off.”

  Leah looked like she was about to say something else, but then both she and I heard screaming coming from the dance area of the rave. She and I both looked over and saw what looked to be a really active mosh pit in the middle of it. Then a girl came weaving out into the light, holding her head while blood was gushing from a scalp wound, and I realized it wasn’t a mosh pit after all.

  I pushed Leah back toward Will and Marcus. “Go get Will,” I said. “Tell him we’re leaving now.” Leah stumbled back toward her boyfriend and I turned back just in time to see two very large and scary looking dudes coming right for me. I tried to wheel back and run, but one of them grabbed me and pushed me down. I cracked my skull on the ground.

  Things went real fuzzy after that. At some point I felt someone turn me over and take out of my back pocket the case I had my ID in. If they were looking for money they were going to be disappointed. I didn’t have cash, I had an energy budget. I tried laughing at that and it hurt so much I passed out.

  Some indeterminate time later someone hauled me up from the ground. “Name,” they said.

  I looked around for who was talking to me. “What?” I said.

  “Your name,” they said—he said, actually, since now I could tell it was a man.

  “Benji Washington,” I said.

  “You’re fine,” he said. “If you can remember your name, you’re gonna live. Are you missing anything? You have your wallet?”

  I fished in my back pocket and found the case I carried my NSL ID in. It was still there. Start fob to the lorry was still there too. I must have hallucinated the theft. I looked over to who was talking to me and realized that he was an Eddie—an Edgewater guard. One of the guys who the city was hiring to keep the protestors out. “What happened?” I said.

  The guard snorted. “You got beat on is what happened. You New Louies are dumb as hell, you know that? Go out to a rave in the middle of the Wilds, and then you’re surprised when the kids out here start taking a crowbar to your heads. Let me give you a little tip, townie: The kids out here in the Wilds, they don’t like you. If you give them a chance to crack open your skull, they’re going to do it. You got it?”

  “I got it,” I said. I felt like I was going to throw up.

  “Good,” the guard said. “You’re lucky we got tipped off to this thing or you’d probably be in the hospital by now. How old are you?”

  “Twenty,” I said.

  “Then you’re an adult and I don’t have to drag your ass back into NSL,” he said. “Go home, kid. Stay home.” He wandered off. I bent over at the waist and threw up. Then I went looking for Will and Leah.

  I found them by the lorry. Leah came running up to me to check my head; I tried to wave her off.

  “You look like hell,” Will said.

  “Thanks, Will,” I said. “I can always count on you for a good word. How’s the lorry?”

  “What do you mean?” Will said.

  “I mean did anyone smash it during the riot?” I said.

  Will checked. “It looks fine,” he said.

  “Great,” I said, hobbling over to it. “Then we’re going.”

  “I still have to look for Marcus,” Will said.

  “Will, he’s gone,” Leah said. “He disappeared as soon as the Eddies showed up.”

  “He’s still around here somewhere,” Will said. “I’m not going anywhere without him.”

  “You can stay, Will,” I said. “But I’m leaving now and I’m taking the lorry with me. If you don’t want to walk all the way back to town, you better get in the truck.”

  “Come on, Will,” Leah said. “It’s time to go.”

  Will looked extremely unhappy but got into the truck cab. Leah followed. I hauled myself up into the cab and nearly threw up again doing so. I drove twenty-five miles an hour on the Interstate all the way back.

  THE battle of New St. Louis took place a week later.

  The protestors at the gates of the city had a problem: They couldn’t get into New St. Louis. The city was sealed in like a medieval fortress, with only a few entrances, all guarded. Try to get through a gate without an ID with a transponder chip, and you weren’t going to go anywhere. Lose your ID, you were in a world of pain. I lost my ID once and I had to sit through a battery of identification tests even though my mother was on the executive board. The instant the city knew the ID was missing, they voided the transponder signal, so if anyone tried to sneak into NSL using that ID, they’d be immediately tagged as a criminal. It was a problem: if you weren’t a New Louie, you couldn’t get into the city without an ID. And if you stole an ID and tried to sneak in, they’d catch you. So if you wanted to sneak into New St. Louis, how would you do it?

  It turned out, by not steali
ng the IDs—just the information in them.

  The rave had been the honeytrap, an attractive place for bored young New Louies to be lured to, out beyond the safe walls of the city. The rave allowed the conspirators close contacts with the city kids—close enough contact that the recording devices they carried could read and clone the New Louie’s ID transponder signals. The riot afterward was an opportunity to crack heads…but also to snatch the ID information from a few extra people, like me. Since no physical IDs were stolen, no one reported any stolen identities.

  This made it easy for several dozen unauthorized people to walk right through the gates of New St. Louis. The conspirators were chosen to more or less resemble the people whose identities they had stolen, so if the gate guards were to glance down at their screens, they wouldn’t notice anything out of the usual. But since the gate guards were busy dealing with the exceptionally heavy crowds of protestors that day, apparently no one really bothered to look. The IDs checked out as the people walked through; what else was needed?

  After the First World War (I learned this later, after the Battle of NSL) the French, fearing another attack by the Germans, built a massive set of fortifications called the Maginot Line, which would form an impenetrable line which the Germans would not be able to cross. The French were so confident in the Maginot Line that when they placed their big guns into it facing out toward Germany, they never considered the idea that at some point, those guns might need to face in the other direction, toward France. This became a problem when the Germans invaded France by pouring through a gap in the Maginot Line and then were suddenly behind it, and on their way to Paris.

  New St. Louis was built the same way: It was focused on keeping people out, not dealing with what happened when they got in anyway. This was why the city was not prepared when the attack came, from behind, inside the city walls.

  The attackers were smart; they didn’t bother to attack the city’s main gates, the ones with the biggest number of protestors, NSL cops and Edgewater guards. Instead they picked one of the small, quiet entrances, one small enough to be quickly closed and sealed at the first sign of unrest by just a couple of guards—and therefore only covered by a couple of guards, who are easily dealt with by a couple dozen determined conspirators. With the guards taken care of, it was simply a matter of opening the doors and letting in the hundreds of people hiding outside.