Metatropolis

by John Scalzi

  These hundreds were on the scene to do one thing and one thing only: Trash New St. Louis as hard and as fast as they could, in order to draw the police and the Edgewater guards to them as quickly and as brutally as possible. They set to this work with a will, armed with bats, sledgehammers and Molotov cocktails, setting fires and causing the sort of property damage that’s not easily fixed. It worked; within minutes of the destruction beginning, the police and Edgewater were swinging clubs and firing electric bolts and trying—and failing—to close the open gate that hundreds more were now pouring through.

  This was a feint, a distraction to keep the authorities occupied away from the real goal of the riot. And that was the agricultural towers, which by their very nature were open to the elements and undefended. Into these towers went dozens of invaders, intent not on filling their stomachs but their gene samplers and seed bags, detailing a whole Eden of genetically improved, quick-growing, high-yield fruits and vegetables.

  Once these invaders had breached the agricultural towers, they were under no impression, even with the help of the staged riot, that they would make it out of the towers with their seeds and samples. Instead they moved their way up the towers, sampling as they went, until they stood in the roof gardens of the towers. There, they welded the access doors shut, pulled open their backpacks, and clicked together the tiny remote controlled airplanes they carried with them. Then they shoved their samples into the even tinier cargo holds and tossed the planes into the sky, carrying their trove of genes out past the city walls and into the waiting hands and sequencers of their compatriots on the other side.

  That done, the invaders sat down in the roof gardens and waited to see how long it would take for the few police and Edgewater guards who could be spared to deal with them to figure out they weren’t actually planning to come down and make an escape.

  It took them a long time. More than enough time for the mastermind of the entire attack to get what he came for, completely unnoticed by law enforcement.

  I WAS working the night shift in Arnold Tower when my phone rang and Lou Barnes was on the other end, telling me to lock everything down because New St. Louis was under attack. I did what I was told and threw the switches that closed up the Tower to everyone but qualified personnel and vehicles. If Barnes wanted to come in and take over, that would have been all right by me. I called the NSL police and reported the lock-down; the dispatcher on the other end asked me if anyone was attacking the building. I said no; she said I was on my own for the evening and hung up.

  Thirty minutes later the security system pinged me that the garage entrance was opening to let in the Arnold Tower lorry. I stared at this for a moment because I knew exactly where the Lorry was parked. I flipped the security monitor over to the garage camera and saw no lorry, but instead four people walking down the parking garage ramp. Two were carrying bags; one was dragging another along. I looked at these last two for a minute before I recognized who both of them were.

  I got very upset. And started thinking very fast, as fast as I ever had in my life.

  My phone rang. I picked it up.

  “I know by this time you can see me in your security cameras,” Marcus Rosen said. “And so you know by this time who I have with me.”

  “I can see her,” I said, looking at Leah.

  “Good,” Marcus said. “Will told me that you still had a thing for her, and I suspect he was right. So I thought she might be a useful motivator. Now listen to me, Benjamin. I’m sorry you’re the one I’m having to deal with right now, but that’s just the way things are. If you cooperate, we can get through this quickly. I’m coming for some genetic samples of your pigs. That’s all I want. We don’t have to hurt them, all we have to do is take skin samples. It’ll be simple, quick, painless, and at the end of it you’ll have your friend Leah back. Does this sound like a good deal to you?”

  “It does,” I said.

  “Good,” Marcus said, again. “Then here’s the plan. I’m going to stay down here in the garage while my two friends here come up to where you are. You’re going to take them to where they can get some samples. And then they’re going to come back down. When they come back down, I’m going to let go of Leah. Do you think you can handle that?”

  “I can,” I said.

  “I’m glad we’re handling this rationally,” Marcus said. “All right. I’m sending my friends up.”

  “I’m unlocking the garage door,” I said. “Have them give me a couple of minutes, and then they can take the elevator to the fifth floor. I’ll meet them in the floor lobby.”

  “They’re going in now,” Marcus said.

  Five minutes later the elevator doors opened and two men got out.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Take us to the pig floor,” one of them said.

  “No,” I said. The two looked at each other and then at me, unamused. I held up a hand. “There’s an entire floor of sleeping pigs in there,” I said. “If you startle or surprise them, they’re going to come out of sleep freaked out, and then every pig around them is going to freak out, and then that’s a few thousand pigs in a frenzy. I don’t want to be responsible for you getting trampled.” I pointed to a door at the far end of the lobby. “We have an examination room over there. I’ve already got some pigs for you. They’re already awake. Fewer pigs means less hassle for all of us. All right?”

  The two of them looked at each other.

  “Come on, guys,” I said. “I just want to get my friend back.”

  “Fine,” one of them said, and walked with me into the room.

  “What are these things?” one of them asked, pointing at the pig-shaped forms.

  “And where are the pigs?” the other asked.

  “Those are the examination tables,” I said, moving into the control room. “Pigs hate to get picked up, so we just have them lean up against these instead. And they’re behind that door there because before they come in, I want to spray some disinfectant in the room. Helps keep infection down. No, you two stay in there. You need to be disinfected, too.”

  “We just need skin samples,” one of them said.

  “I understand,” I said. “But you break the skin while getting the samples, these pigs are highly susceptible to infection, and then that will spread to the other pigs. I’m already in enough trouble. This will only take a couple of seconds.” I pressed a button, and liquid spritzed out of a sprinkler-like attachment in the ceiling.

  “Okay,” I said. “Here come the pigs.” The two started unzipping their bags to take samples as I slid open the door to let the pigs in.

  Two minutes (or so) later, I called Marcus. “We have a problem,” I said.

  “What is it?” Marcus said.

  “I don’t know how you told these guys to take samples, but however you told them, the pigs didn’t like it,” I said, and then held up the phone so Marcus could hear the screams and squeals. After a minute of that I got back on the phone. “I could open up the video feed,” I said. “But I don’t think you’d like that.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone. Then, “I don’t think you appreciate the seriousness of the situation,” Marcus said.

  “It’s not my fault,” I said. “You asked me to help them get genetic samples. I did exactly what you asked. It’s your guys who are fucking around here.”

  “Get them out of there,” Marcus said to me.

  “It’s not safe,” I said, truthfully. “I think the pigs will eventually wear themselves out, but I’m not going anywhere near them until then.”

  “I still need a sample,” Marcus said, after a minute. His ability to write off his two assistants was almost admirable, in its way.

  “I can get you a sample,” I said.

  “I need it from more than one pig,” Marcus said.

  “I can give you samples from as many pigs as you need,” I said.

  “You need to come to me,” Marcus said.

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “The pigs won’t
exactly follow me.”

  “Considering what just happened, I’m not going to come up to you,” Marcus said. “And let me remind you your friend Leah is still with me. And I still have a gun on her.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I will come to you, but then you’ll need to come with me. Give me a minute. I know where we can go to get your samples.”

  “HERE,” I said, handing them both gas masks and taking one for myself. “It’s like the sign says. You’re going to need this.” I fit mine on myself and waited for the other two to fit theirs on. “Come on.” I started walking toward conduit 2.

  “Where are we?” Marcus said, through his mask.

  “Why are you doing this, Marcus?” I asked him, as we walked out over conduit 2. “Last week you talked to me about the problems of a zero-footprint paradise and how we’re cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world, but I get the feeling you’re not doing this for the good of humanity.”

  “No,” Marcus said.

  “Then why all the talk?” I asked.

  “I needed to see what was going to work on you,” Marcus said. “Will told me in email that you got a job here in the Arnold Tower. I had a client who has been very interested in getting the genetics of these pigs for a while now. I saw an opportunity. I knew your mother was pushing for technology outreach, so if you were of the same mind as her, I might have been able to get you to play along. But it doesn’t seem like your thing, so I went with your friend here.”

  “I’ll have to thank Will for that,” I said.

  “He doesn’t know,” Marcus said. “You can’t blame him.”

  “Nice of you to treat your brother that way,” I said.

  I could see Marcus shrug, briefly. “It’s the real world out there, Benjamin. Some places still use money, not energy budgets. I have a living to make.”

  “So all of this—attacking New St. Louis—is just another day on the job,” I said. We’d reached the access port. I bent down to open it up.

  “That was going to happen anyway,” Marcus said. “New St. Louis and the other cities are too closed off from everything around them. The people in the Wilds were already planning something. I don’t care about it one way or the other, really, but it was useful cover for what I needed to do. So I provided the logistics. I borrowed the basic battle plan from a similar action in Detroit a couple years back. They used a fake riot to build an agricultural tower. We’re using a real riot to steal from one.”

  “And they signed off on this, too, I suppose,” I said.

  “They don’t know anything about this,” Marcus said. “As far as they’re concerned, the big event is gathering seeds from the agricultural towers. They’re going to sequence those genomes and put them out for everyone to use. That’s admirable, in its way, but my client has other plans for the pig genes.”

  The access port was fully opened. “After you,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” Marcus said. “After you.” I shrugged and went into the conduit. Marcus kept a bead on Leah as she stepped down the ladder. Finally he stepped down.

  “Where the hell are we?” Marcus said again.

  “What does your client want with the pig genes?” I asked.

  “I’m paid not to ask,” Marcus said. “But I think he wants what the people in the Wilds want: the benefit of someone else’s work. Having this genome means he has to do lot less work to make the next set of improvements.”

  “My mom was planning to make this part of the Technology Outreach,” I said. “He could have just waited. He didn’t have to start all this. You didn’t have to start all this.”

  “I don’t think my client believes having this genome be open source technology is in anyone’s best interest,” Marcus said. “And personally, I just want to get paid. Now. Enough. Give me the samples.”

  I looked over at Leah. “You remember when we were on the roof, and I talked about being here,” I said.

  “I do,” she said.

  “I’m sorry you’re getting the embargo treatment,” I said.

  “It’s all right,” Leah said.

  “Benjamin,” Marcus said.

  I reached down and flipped open my phone.

  “My samples, please,” Marcus said.

  “‘Embargo lifted,’” I said into the phone. I looked at Marcus as the rumbling started. “Here they come now,” I said.

  Leah reached up and pulled the gas mask off Marcus’ face just as the first of the samples blew out of the pipes. He caught a load in the face and went down sputtering. Leah and I bolted for the ladder, her first, me following. As I cycled the access port shut, I could see Marcus trying to get a grip on the ladder. I think he might have gotten up the first step before the port sealed shut.

  “THE human body is simply not designed to swallow that much pig shit,” is what Lou Barnes told me the next day. Nevertheless Marcus Rosen survived, although not well, and faced with the prospect of a life watching the world go by in a cell, lawyered up, cut a deal and brought down some industrialist from the Portland Ecologies—or, well, would have, if the fellow hadn’t permanently relocated to Turkey. It’s my understanding that he’s not going to be very happy if he ever steps into North America again.

  Will took the fall of his brother badly, and the fact that his brother had betrayed his emails and idol worship even worse. Leah never blamed Will for any of it, but Will blamed himself and eventually that was the excuse he needed to break up with Leah and leave New St. Louis entirely. He settled in Vancouver eventually and is doing quite well. He and his wife send holiday cards.

  The Technology Outreach program took a hell of a hit in the aftermath of the Battle of New St. Louis, not in the least because so much of the biotechnology that mom would have used for outreach flew over the wall in tiny planes. But mom, who won her election, rolled with the changes, and rather than trying to prosecute those who stole from the agricultural towers, the executive council gave them amnesty and open sourced the genome maps of the plants that were taken, making everyone’s lives easier. And after a few decades of sitting behind its wall, New St. Louis is beginning to open up to the Wilds and the people there. They’re nowhere close to being zero-footprint beyond the border, but they’re starting, and that’s something.

  After the Battle of New St. Louis, my mother offered to find me a new job if I wanted it; her thinking was the man who caught the mastermind behind the attack should be able to get any damn job he wanted, even if he was her son.

  I thanked her but I told her no. I still work at Arnold Tower. And more than that: Leah and I were married there, up on the experimental rooftop garden, with Barnes, Jeffers and Pinter as my groomsmen, Syndee as my “Best Sis,” and Lunch as ring bearer. He seemed quite pleased with the job. We were quite pleased to have him.

  And that’s how a pig got into our wedding party.

  It’s a good story, right?

  TO HIE FROM FAR CILENIA

  KARL SCHROEDER

  Although I am the editor of METATROPOLIS—the mayor, as it were—to a very real extent you could consider Karl Schroeder METATROPOLIS’ “Founding Father”—he was the one that got the ball rolling by proposing the idea of cities of the future, and did much of the heavy conceptual lifting for the project, not because no one else would do it—really, thinking up cool ideas was not a problem with this bunch—but because he thought it was fun and because he had so many cool ideas that sometimes it was all the rest of us could do to keep up. The guy’s amazing that way, folks.

  And so it’s fitting that his story not only closes out our anthology but also in its way opens the door for yet another kind of “metatropolis”—yet another way for societies to create themselves and build and thrive and compete. I’ll talk no more about that, since I don’t want to spoil the pleasure you’ll get from reading this story. Suffice it to say that if your brain hasn’t already been blown by now, it’s going to get cracked wide open here. And I think you’re going to like the sensation.

  Sixteen plastic-wrapp
ed, frozen reindeer made a forest of jutting legs and antlers in the back of the transport truck. Gennady Malianov raised his flashlight to peer down the length of the cargo container. He checked his Geiger counter, then said, “It’s them, all right.”

  “You’re sure?” asked the Swedish cop. Hidden in his rain gear, he was all slick surfaces under the midnight drizzle. The mountain road stretching out behind him shone silver on black, dazzled here and there by the red and blue lights of a dozen emergency vehicles.

  Gennady climbed down. “Officer, if you think there might be other trucks on this road loaded with radioactive reindeer, I think I need to know.”

  The cop didn’t smile; his breath fogged the air. “It’s all about jurisdiction,” he said. “If they were just smuggling meat…but this is terrorism.”

  “Still,” mused Gennady; the cop had been turning away but stopped. Gennady glanced back at the contorted, freezer-burned carcasses, and shrugged awkwardly. “I never thought I’d get to see them.”

  “See who?”

  Embarrassed now, Gennady nodded to the truck. “The famous Reindeer,” he said. “I never thought I’d get to see them.”

  “Spöklik,” muttered the cop as he walked away. Gennady glanced in the truck once more, then walked toward his car, shoulders hunched. A little light on its dashboard was flashing, telling him he’d gone over the time he’d booked it for. Traffic on the E18 had proven heavier than expected, due to the rain and the fact that the police had shut down the whole road at Arjang. He was mentally subtracting the extra car-sharing fees from what they’d pay him for this very short adventure, when someone shouted, “Malianov?”

  “What now?” He shielded his eyes with his hand. Two men were walking up the narrow shoulder from the emergency vehicles. Immediately behind them was a van without a flashing light—a big, black and sinister shape that reminded him of some of the paralegal police vans in Ukraine. The men had the burly look of plainclothes policemen.