Blackfish City(41)



Ankit said, “Play,” and began to climb.

Context: When the first breaks cases started popping up, Qaanaaq had been a powder keg. Overcrowding; collapses of unsafe slum structures. Demonstrations. Many of the city’s mass congregation mitigation measures had been introduced back then. Ankit remembered it, vaguely. A friend of her foster father’s sitting in their living room, his brown face blackened with dried blood. Caught in a peaceful demonstration that became a street brawl when the slum enforcers brought out zap sticks.

Street protests were an oddity in Qaanaaq. Present—common, sometimes—but performative. Nostalgic. Like horse-drawn carriages in twenty-first-century cities. Immigrants from elsewhere believed in them, but Qaanaaq’s native-born political activists treated them like parties, chances to take photos. With such minimal explicit human decision making, there were no targets to pressure, no places where a strategic crisis could force a policy change. You could call on an Arm manager to issue a statement, but everyone knew how little that could achieve. The real decisions were made by machines, a hundred thousand computer programs, and you could scream at a data server farm until you were blue in the face without getting anywhere. Even if a mob burned one down, there were dozens of backups, many of them floating in bubbles orbiting the geocone.

“Run!” someone called to her.

She’d never been to an indoor scaling course before. Like most serious scalers, she’d scoffed at the concept. Once you’ve been out there, hurtling through the frigid sky, the safe legal version seemed insulting. Nor could she say, exactly, why she’d decided to visit one now. But run she did, when the coach commanded it, leaping over foam obstacles and then flinging herself against a replica of a rotating cellular antenna and swinging around on it.

Yes, she thought. That is why I came here. The body has a way of thinking that is very different from the mind’s. Maybe moving the old muscles will help me figure this all out.

Context: Barron’s friend’s molecular assembly machine could not produce Quet-38-36.0. Some deeply buried safeguard stopped it.

Context: That had never happened to him before. He’d called friends, asked them to try, gotten the same result.

Context: For some reason, Quet-38-36.0 could not be produced in Qaanaaq.

“Jump!” the coach called, a split second too late. This coach was no scaler. Or if she was, she’d been so subpar she’d been forced to flee to the safety of a padded indoor course.

Context: Martin Podlove was scared of her. But he was scared of other things more.

He had refused her requests for a meeting or a call. The three times she’d gone to his office, intending to wait in the Salt Cave until he walked out and corner him then, she’d found out that he’d left hours earlier by a different exit. She’d drafted messages and deleted them unsent. She had to be in his presence. Had to corner him. Had to see him squirm, read his face for tells. And if she merely sent a written message, who could say whether he’d smugly send an enforcer to soak or slaughter her?

What she knew: Podlove had ordered her mother’s incarceration. He’d slotted her Code 76. She didn’t know why, and she didn’t know what she could do about it. And she didn’t know why his employees were being attacked all of a sudden—she’d seen the clips of her brother beating the shit out of a slum enforcer a day after she’d seen him soak a Podlove bureaucrat, and she knew it couldn’t be a coincidence—but she knew it was making her job harder. Podlove was battening down for a siege, and would be even more inaccessible than he normally was.

She was in midair, when her jaw bug chimed. Rolling hard landings had never been her strong suit, and the distraction made this one even worse.

“Hello,” she said several harsh seconds later, sitting on the floor and cradling her ankle.

“Ankit,” said the caller, his voice so old, New York–accented, and she thought at first it must have been Barron—but this man drew out the second syllable of her name too long, and his tone was too hard, too cold.

“Who is this?”

“Dak Plerrb, calling on behalf of Mr. Podlove.”

“Ah,” she said, forcing herself to breathe slowly. “This is a surprise. Is he on the line?”

Plerrb laughed. “No, no. But he did want you to know that he’s noticed. How determined you are, to talk to him. Visiting, writing.”

“I wanted—”

“And researching! Spending so much time looking into him. The Qaanaaq web, the global web, all sorts of places.”

Outrage flared up, but she fought it down. Of course shareholder flunkies could get reports from the security programs that monitored data behavior. They could probably control them, too. He wanted her shocked, angry, thrown off.

“He wanted me to call and let you know how serious he is when he says that this is not the time to be fucking with him.”

Breathe, Ankit. One breath, two. Don’t rush this. When she spoke, her voice was ice. Was wind. “Do me a favor and ask him why he had my mother locked up in the Cabinet.”

But there was no answer. Her screen said the call was terminated. Had he heard her question? Would he ask Podlove?

She stood. Shifted weight from leg to leg. Her ankle wasn’t sprained. She climbed back up the mock building stilts. Grabbed a horizontal bar; swung her body to the next one. And the next.

The old muscles kicked in. Facts fell together. All at once, Ankit saw: The shareholders want the breaks to be an epidemic. They’re pulling the strings to make the problem worse. To prevent solutions. That’s why the molecular printers can’t produce Quet-38-36.0. Why there’s a six-month wait for quarantine transfers.

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