Blackfish City(29)

Qaanaaq is a dream. At night you lie down and wake from it. Return to the real world, your life, your city, dying. Every night you are back there, watching it unfold in uncanny déjà vu slo-mo, because surely you have seen this before, surely you know what will happen, surely you will act differently, surely you will get out in time—

Grandfather had lost his son. Soon he’d lose his grandson. Whatever else he’d done, whatever horrific crimes he’d committed, it was hard not to pity him. To have fought so hard, to have acquired so much, and to end up with nothing. Well, nothing except . . . everything.

Fill had so many other questions. About the clients his grandfather had worked for when he was finished helping destroy New York City. About the things that were gone. The Metropolitan Opera; the Daughters of the Disappeared; Qaanaaq when it was still shiny and new.

Grandfather flung a crumpled napkin into the sea. Littering: another distinctly New York oddity about the old man. “I called you because I missed you,” Grandfather said, “but I also had something up my sleeve. Something I want to give you. Two things, actually. I’m not seriously worried about that . . . thing I mentioned to you earlier. Standard crime boss nonsense. We shareholders haven’t held on to everything we have for this long without learning how to weather every storm. But still. It’s silly not to take precautions. I need you to be able to access two things that only I can currently access. One is an apartment. Sealed, secret. Kept off the market. I know you already have a place—I just need you to have all the access info on this one, which so far isn’t listed in any of the residential rosters. An investment, you know. We have several of them, in fact, but this one is special to me. Your grandmother and I . . . it was where we went when we wanted to escape.”

Fill nodded, feeling very noble and dutiful. “Fair enough, Grandfather. And the second thing?”

“Software. A particularly unstable, dangerous program. Cobbled together by an alliance of different shareholders, combining ten or so very different security protocols and illegal data-mining approaches. Toxic stuff, military grade. We created it in the early days of Qaanaaq, to share information, observe patterns, keep track of our units . . . assess problems, figure out how to deal with them . . . but it hasn’t been used in twenty years, maybe longer. Too erratic. Undependable. It did what you wanted, but it would also do a bunch of things you didn’t want.”

“What do you want me to do with it?”

“Good heavens, nothing! Not for now, anyway. Just hold on to it. I have no idea whether any of the other shareholders are still alive, or have access to it—I know it hasn’t been used, it’s on the list of programs our watchdogs prowl for—but if I’m the last one with access, I don’t want it to die with me. Although maybe it should. But it’s worth a lot, and fifty years from now you may be glad you have it in your back pocket.”

“Sure,” Fill said, because all of this seemed to be making the old man happy. What did it matter that he wanted nothing to do with an empty apartment and some temperamental software? He could finally do something for the old man, play some small part in the family business. And, of course, he could not say, No, Grandfather, I’m sorry, I won’t be alive in fifty years, or fifteen, or maybe not in five months.

“I’ll send you all the information.”

“Thanks, Grandfather. Oh, look!”

Two sea lions barked and bumped chests. Both men laughed.





Ankit


Ankit bought flowers, then threw them into the sea, then bought different flowers. Scentless ones, cold emotionless white. The angry red of mainland roses would be too provocative; the purple scent of hothouse hyacinths could make the whole madhouse lose its mind.

Ankit dressed carefully, then undressed, then dressed differently. Sterile gray. Genderless lines.

“Fucking Cabinet,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror, looking at the time, wondering how many more outfits she could go through before she had to take the zip line out to her appointment. Planning every little detail was its own kind of paralysis, so she decided to leave early and kill time over there rather than keep on burrowing deeper into unproductive thoughts.

Her screen sparkled. Barron: There is absolutely no Quet-38-36.0 anywhere in Qaanaaq.

That didn’t seem right. Or possible. Qaanaaq was sick with drugs, full of smugglers and machines to bring even the most obscure pills to the far-flung arrivals who fiended for them. Anything you wanted, anything at all, someone was selling it. But she had too much else to think about, too many other things to keep from stressing out over.

Another one: I have a friend with access to a molecular assembly machine, who does off-legal drug printing sometimes. I am going to try to get him to make us some.

Good, she said, and set a five-hour block on further notifications from Barron.

Of course she hadn’t told Safety that she knew who the soaker was. She was still too much of a scaler at heart to even think about snitching. That would have been true even if the criminal in question weren’t her brother. They’d questioned her for almost an hour, standing there at the edge of the grid, apologizing endlessly for the inconvenience, seeing her fancy work clothes and mistaking her for the important person everyone else mistook her for.

She shut her eyes against the ocean of words churning inside her. The things she wanted to ask her mother; the things she wanted to say to her. Cabinet staff said to minimize dialogue, focus on physical presence, touch, caress; her mother’s psychological condition was unique, easily triggered into episodes by even seemingly harmless questions or comments.