Blackfish City(9)

And then, because she was still angry, she made another stupid decision. One she hadn’t made in years. She opened her screen and navigated to the Cabinet site and submitted a visit request, to go and see her mother.





City Without a Map: Boundaries


Do not talk about the past here. Do not ask your neighbor why they left wherever they are from; do not expect your newfound friends to wax nostalgic for homes that no longer exist. Perhaps the past holds more than merely pain for you, but you can’t assume that this is true for anyone else. We want to smell it, taste it, hear its songs, feel its desert heat or summer rain, but we do not want to talk about it. The things we’ve been through cannot hurt us here, unless we let them. The fallen cities, the nations drowned in blood. The cries of our loved ones. Those stories we lock away. We will need new ones.

All cities are science experiments. Qaanaaq is perhaps the most carefully controlled such experiment in history. An almost entirely free press. Minimal bureaucracy, mostly mechanical, the city overseen by benevolent software. The shareholders pay the taxes, and they can afford to. If food and rent cost far too much, that is between you and the merchant. Swedish is the most common language, yet only 37 percent of the population speak it. There is no official language. There is no official anything. Qaanaaq has no government, no mayor. Those functions are fulfilled by a web of agencies deputized by Qaanaaq’s shareholders. Each Arm elects a manager to serve a four-year term, to help citizens navigate the agencies and hold municipal employees accountable for bad behavior. These eight people are the only politicians in Qaanaaq, and they will be the first to tell you how limited their power is.

If the twentieth century was shaped by warring ideologies, and the twenty-first was a battle of digital languages, our present age is defined by dueling approaches to oceanic city engineering. Technologies developed for oil rig construction became fervently believed-in and fought-over doctrines. Conventional fixed platforms; spars; semi-submersibles; compliant towers; vertically moored tension leg and mini tension leg platforms. Standing on concrete caissons or long steel struts; tethered to the seabed. Ballasted up or down by flooding and emptying buoyancy tanks or jacking metal legs. Some are enlightened well-armed migratory utopias. Some are floating hells, like the plastic scrap reclamation facilities that ring the Pacific Gyre, every building and body blackened by soot from the processing furnaces.

In Qaanaaq, software calls most of the day-to-day shots, sets the protocols that humans working for city agencies follow. In theory a tribunal of actual human beings, appointed by the founding nations, could be appealed to in extreme cases, but to protect their anonymity even this process is mediated by software, prompting many to doubt the tribunal exists at all.

Some grid cities are less rigid about their boundaries. The Russian behemoth Vladisever set no limits on additional construction, and ten years later the city was an unruly metastasis. Hundreds of arms, impenetrably clogged waterways. In the end the army had to come in and clear it out, bomb the tangle of new structures, displace tens of thousands. Qaanaaq permits no more buildings, no new legs that reach to the seafloor. Tie any floating thing to it and you’ll pay dearly for the privilege. These floating things, in turn, are free to charge others for the privilege of being tied to them, so that whole floating villages bob in the surf in spots, to be broken up or relocated when the agents of Structural Integrity decide they pose a danger.

One floating thing tied directly to the grid is the Sports Platform. A five-story boat the size of a soccer field, anchored at the far edge of Arm Four. Ice-skating rink on the top floor, exposed to the elements; every other story is a nest of subdividable courts and fields and tracks. The bottom level is three stories beneath the surface of the sea, and used mainly for training purposes.

These are things you need to know. There’s a reason I’m drawing you this map, telling you these stories. Wherever you are now, no matter how trapped or hungry or scared you may be, these stories can provide an exit, an escape, a map to freedom.

Stories are how I survived, these long bound years. Now I can share them with you.

Like most modern sociopolitical entities—cities, states, nations—Qaanaaq operates a closed network. The Sys Wars that contributed so heavily to the old world’s breakdown spawned a terrifying array of uncontrollable malware and parasites and infection vectors. Whole countries watched their infrastructure crumble not through the agency of foreign antagonists, but under the mindless attack of rogue rootkits and autarchical worms. Botnets whose authors were dead; scareware that infected Trojan horses to produce uncontrollable new monstrosities. The World Wide Web had proved a short-lived phenomenon. Limited global and regional networks existed, the flow of data so tightly controlled that they were almost unusably slow.

Qaanaaq’s network, by contrast, is a glorious swirling sea of data, watched over by massive unpredictable mostly controllable AIs.

So many stories pass through it. I hear some of them, even in this place.

Here is one of them:

Eight days after the woman with the orca arrived in Qaanaaq, the killer whale was seen several times in the vicinity of the Sports Platform, which drew a dozen journalists to the sweat-and-popcorn-stinking structure.

They found her on the bottom level. Moving through a series of martial arts forms, wielding her bladed staff with such speed and skill that she clearly didn’t need mammalian apex predators to keep her safe. The staff’s handle was a thick long walrus tusk, precisely as the rumor mill had said, but its blade was stranger and more frightening than any of the stories had suggested. Huge, pale, curved, jagged. One reporter conjectured it was the jawbone of a sperm whale, carved and fretted and sharpened, and they all wrote it down as fact. The polar bear sat off to the side, hands and head caged. Journalists sat in the bleachers and smoked and called out questions.