Blackfish City(20)
Whatever ax you have to grind, whatever lost world you are pining for, there is a press outlet for you. Probably several. And whatever happens, plenty of people have plenty to say about it.
From the Maoist Pioneer [in Nepali]:
Two weeks after her arrival in Qaanaaq, the Blackfish Woman may be the most hated person in the city. Already reactionary religious elements are whispering together, and soon they will do more than whisper. As has happened so many times before, superstition is being used to focus the angers of a desperate populace on the wrong target. And why? To displace their very righteous anger over the city’s mistreatment of workers. The very people who pay such low wages that workers in Arm Eight must sleep stacked in boxes, the very same businesses who fired pipe workers for attempting to unionize for better workplace safety, would have you believe that the arrival of weary refugees is our greatest threat, or that a battle-scarred survivor of genocide must be murdered.
From Yomiuri Shimbun [in Japanese]:
When the cities of America’s South and Midwest began to burn, and the continental United States became a hellhole ruled by marauding warlords, and the Northern Migration began, dozens of new communities began to form. Some were mobile city-states headed up by armed militias; some were ambulatory religious communes; some were united by common geographic or ethnic origin. Some were thousands strong; some numbered in the dozens. Many adapted to the freezing new climate by joining existing Inuit communities or by adopting their way of life.
Few took detailed notes. Many documented themselves in the photographs and films of average citizens, the majority of which have been lost to poor preservation, outdated hardware, and evolving file formats. Historians of the period must contend with a mess of songs, passed-down family stories, and the reports of outraged neighbors on whose shores and at whose gates they landed.
Many tall tales emerged from this seething stew of internal refugees, but perhaps the most myth-shrouded story of all is that of the nanobonded. A whole community of people who were either deliberately or accidentally exposed to experimental wireless nanomachines that established one-to-one networks between individuals, and who, through years of training and imprinting, could “network” themselves to animals, forming primal emotional connections so strong that they could control their animals through thought alone. And as with any new community in fundamentalist North America, there were plenty of people who thought that it was demonic, Antichrist-derived, the work of evil foreigners bent on undermining Caucasian hegemony. And, alas, like many communities, they are believed to have been wiped out in one of the many violent fundamentalist spasms that characterized the final years of the American republic.
An absurd story, the evidence for which has been elaborately debunked.
And yet—it would appear that one of them walks among us . . .
From Krupp Monthly [in German]:
Wilhelm Ruhr remembers the last Hive Project well.
“We were finally there,” he says, his aging eyes lighting up. “On paper, it should have worked. The nanites talked to each other. They could do so over great distances. We even engineered them to self-replicate only when their brain concentration dropped below a certain level, and to be open to network imprinting only for their first six hours. All the problems that had caused us so many headaches in the previous iterations were solved. Or so we thought.”
At the time, Wilhelm was working in Canada. These days, home is right here in Qaanaaq: Arm Three’s prestigious Kesiyn retirement center.
“In mice, it worked. They were networked. Hurt one, and the others felt pain. If one figured out how to find the cheese at the end of the maze, all of them knew how to do it. Move them too far apart, and they experienced nausea, disorientation, eventually catatonia. We probably should have done monkey trials, but the way things were going in America it was much more cost-effective to just get a waiver signed and try it out on people.”
Proximity to the border meant ease of testing on the recently deregulated country to the south. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had essentially been stripped of all its power to enforce clinical trial standards, and the residents of the resettlement villages were only too happy to take a chance in exchange for what was to them a lot of money.
“It didn’t go well. Everybody knows that by now. Personally I think a lot of what got reported was exaggerated, or that the atrocities were due to other causes. Either way, talking about it isn’t going to make much difference.”
Still, Wilhelm Ruhr does not feel guilty about what happened.
“We were trying to do something good. If it had worked, think of what we’d have been able to accomplish. A nanosynced team of scientists could solve all sorts of the problems we currently face. A lot of people died in wars to topple bad governments—should their commanding officers feel guilty about sending them to their deaths? They feel bad, probably, which is how I feel, I suppose, but they don’t feel guilty.”
And as for the arrival of the alleged “orcamancer,” rumored by many to be one of the legendary “nanobonded”?
“People ask me about them all the time. So many people. They say things like, Do I think it’s possible that the nanite strain remained in a small group of people, and that their existing meditation practice enabled them to control it? And that it accidentally came together with other types of nanomedicine? Of course it’s possible. But as for whether I think that in the course of two generations they learned to cultivate the nanites, introduce them to nonhuman animals, and form mechanically facilitated telepathic links with them . . .” Here he pauses, and chuckles. “That’s a leap not even I am willing to make, and I’m a dreamer.”