Blackfish City(22)
Her ears still rang from the screaming fit she’d gotten from Fyodorovna. It was almost comical, the mood at the office, the way everyone avoided eye contact with her, the sounds of shouting and pleading that came through the walls from the damage control phone calls her boss was forced to make.
With effort, Ankit was able to block all that out. She was here, wasn’t she? She was doing what she had to do to make things right. Even when she wanted desperately to be anywhere else. Still no visit confirmation from the Cabinet. Processing, it said when she checked the status of her request. What was going on with Qaanaaq’s computer infrastructure, once the envy of the world, the stuff of legend?
She shut her screen and breathed in the stink of money.
The Salt Cave, they called it. Sharp artful salt crystals jutted from the walls, the residue of polymerized desalinization. The smooth crystals formed walkways several stories above her, shored up by old wood beams. Secretaries carried screens to meetings. Clients drank coffee. Out on the grid, a cry went through the crowd—wild-eyed people making a noise like buoys clanging, passing the sound from one person to the next.
Upstairs, Ankit knew what she would find. Corporate offices were all alike. Either they all hired the same lone decorator, who was paid obscenely well to reproduce the same palette and aesthetic, or they hired a whole flock of them and paid them poorly to copy each other down to the slightest detail. Classical landscape above the reception desk; abstract expressionism on the south wall; the walls a blue shade of white. Or, Ankit thought, perhaps there was software for that, too, and every two years it issued a subtle new change to keep the look evolving over time. Salvaged wood instead of brushed steel for the filing cabinets; cactus bubbles instead of air plant terrariums hanging from the bathroom ceiling. The lack of imagination among the rich was its own kind of machine, its own species of artificial intelligence.
A message from Ishmael Barron. A response to something she’d sent him at two A.M.
She’d found something. Maybe nothing. Maybe not. The medical log of the Taastrup infirmary, a few enigmatic lines in a mass of hundreds of thousands. Patients suffering symptoms identical to the breaks—potential early cases—who’d been dosed with something called Quet-38-36.0—a tranquilizer, derived from an atypical antipsychotic—and been successfully sedated indefinitely. Remarkable, if these were indeed early breaks cases, because tranquilizers typically didn’t work on the breaks. And she’d shivered, to think of all that data, a quintillion pages’ worth of science and study and learning and theory and fact and fiction, still there, on old open servers and suspended-animation websites, like so much coastal land mass swallowed up by rising seas—open to all, for the taking, except no one cared, no one had the slightest desire to dive into that wreck. What else was there a cure for—what other horrific problems might be so easily solved?
Never heard of Quet-38-36.0, Barron said. But it sounds promising. Let’s do more research.
Stupid, to take out her screen to see Barron’s response. Now Ankit couldn’t help but see the notifications stream in. New poll numbers; new press hits. Free fall had stabilized, somewhat. Fyodorovna’s subsequent silence on the subject of the breaks had emboldened her opponent. He posted photos of sick people crowding Arm Seven. Beggars babbling; children having fits. Tiny rooms where a dozen cots had been crammed. If she cares so much, why isn’t she doing anything for them?
“Ankit, hi,” said Breckenridge, emerging from the bathroom, extending one wet hand. She took it, smiling to beat the band. “Oh good, they offered you coffee. Walk this way.”
She followed him down the too-wide hallway, into the too-wide meeting room. Shareholders couldn’t help showing off. It was who they were. They all had front corporations to handle their holdings, raking in the cash and paying the taxes and hiring the management companies.
“Bad mistake your boss made,” Breckenridge said. “Messing with the breaks. That stuff is poison. Tragic situation, but . . .”
“I know,” Ankit said, smiling like she didn’t want to punch this guy in the throat, him and everyone else who had such pat responses for everything they didn’t want to think too deeply about. That stuff is poison. Terrible shame but.
“I assume that’s what you’re here about?”
“Mostly, yes,” she said. They sat. “That, and some intel.”
“Intel? Or money?”
“Both,” she said, although of course all she had come for was money. An intel exchange was performative, a cover for the in-person meeting. She’d needed to look him in the eye when she made the ask. Except now that she thought about it . . . maybe someone so close to someone so powerful would have some information she could use. “We’re taking a beating. We need to buy some more messaging bots, screen time, that kind of stuff.”
“I’ll see what we can do. I already put the request in to the shareholder who heads up Fifty-Seventh when you asked for a meeting. I figured that’s what it was about. You really could have just sent the message.” He gave Ankit the sense that he slept under his desk. Not from poverty but from self-annihilating salaryman work ethic. “What was the intel you needed?”
“About the breaks.”
“Are you serious? You need to learn your lesson, lick your wounds, and move on. Fyodorovna isn’t planning to pursue this, is she? Make it a campaign plank?”