Blackfish City(18)
There were things she’d never done, favors she’d never called in. Agency executives, city flunkies who could help her. Who could access and share information they weren’t supposed to access and share. Requests she’d always been too cautious to make, stockpiling them for the day when Fyodorovna would really need them.
When I get back to the office, I’m going to start calling in those favors.
In the meantime, Ankit read everything. Every news site and academic journal, every forum, every crazy analysis from every point on the political spectrum. She even scoured through those City Without a Map broadcasts, which she’d avoided because it seemed like absolutely everyone was talking about them that year, and it made their voices get high and excited and agitated and she didn’t need that in her life.
If someone discussed the breaks, Ankit devoured it.
Which made her seasick. No two sources, it seemed, were discussing the same disease. Some of the symptoms remained mostly the same, but this was the only thing approaching consensus. Where it originated, what it meant, what it did beyond the psychological consequences, how to treat it—these were all the subject of a dizzying degree of difference of opinion.
The breaks was God’s wrath, raining down upon the nations whose hyperactive economies fucked up the planet.
The breaks was God’s wrath, inflicted upon immoral sinful subpopulations.
The breaks was big pharma, accidentally unleashing a monster when a handful of separate covert drug testing schemes unintentionally overlapped.
The breaks was a lie, a myth to keep people distrustful and angry and fearful of each other.
The breaks was a lie, a myth to distract from something far worse that was on the horizon.
She was pissing her job down the drain. She knew this.
Because the bottom line was: The breaks remained a phantom illness. A media mirage. Glimpsed in hazy pieces. Something no one could approach, capture, present, discuss, deal with. Argued about by foreign governments, rejecting allegations that their military labs or foulest slums had spawned it, and by insurance companies trying not to pay for treating the symptoms. Ignored by most other power players. Everywhere she looked, local software was “still collating.” Official responses were “still forthcoming.” If she could force it into the public consciousness, make it into a serious issue that Health had to address, she would lose her job—but she could save so many lives she wouldn’t care about being unemployed.
That’s what she told herself, anyway.
The six-month processing glitch had proven to be a fruitless avenue. Protocol rationale requests submitted under the Open and Accountable Computer Governance mandate turned up nothing. A couple million lines of code she’d never have been able to parse, that none of her contacts could penetrate, either.
Ankit listened to ’casts, left the apartment, started talking to people. Plenty of others were just as obsessed as she was, and had been for a lot longer. Accumulating information wasn’t enough when it came to getting to the truth of the breaks. What she needed were real human minds, tics and madness and all, to turn all that data into stories.
At a support group, she met Janna, whose brother Mikk had been a sex worker in the Calais refugee camp. Janna clutched a photo in a frame, the first Ankit had seen in years. The boy was beautiful. Dark, smiling, tattooed, laughing at an inexplicable actual raven perched on one strong extended arm. He’d loved the work, Janna said, and been very popular with fellow refugees and camp workers and aid administrators and visiting photographers and pastors, complete with a sliding scale that even the richest of men were all too happy to pay, and the money he made that way had enabled him to buy Qaanaaq registrations and a halfway decent apartment lease for their whole family.
“Mikk was proud,” Janna said. “He hated that we had lost our home, and that we were living in such a dangerous place. But sex let him rise above all that. Sex was how he became something more than just a refugee.”
And it was only once they arrived in Qaanaaq, and were safe and stable, that the breaks began to manifest. Janna believed they had been there for a long time, kept in check by the force of Mikk’s magnificent pride and determination to get his family out of Calais, and that once he was able to lay down his burden they blossomed.
For Mikk, the breaks brought him back to the camps. But not Calais. Taastrup—a Danish village, somewhere he had never been. At first she thought he was fuguing into stories he’d been told, things his johns had said. But the details were too complex, his fevered mumbling too disturbing, for such a simple explanation. Janna tracked down photos, found the same things he’d been describing.
Eventually Mikk broke. Died.
Bodybreaking, they called it. What happened when the breaks finally killed you. The moment when your mind’s hold on the here and now finally ruptured forever and you broke free from your body.
Taastrup. The place popped up again and again in her research. Gone now. One of many that became the target of nationalist mobs, latter-day skinhead armies angry at all the workers landing on their shores. An estimated fifteen hundred people took part in the torching of Taastrup, a pogrom to rival anything in czarist Russia.
Looking into Taastrup took her to Ishmael Barron. He wasn’t the first researcher she’d met who was clearly suffering from the breaks himself, but in him they were further along than she’d previously seen. Midsentence she could see it happening, watch his eyes as one train of thought was abruptly replaced by another. But each time he smiled, as if no one vision was more welcome than the next.