Blackfish City(53)

They reached the gangway. Soq asked, “You buzzed her?”

“Trust me,” Masaaraq said. “She knows we’re coming. She’s got eyes on all of us.”

Kaev had been focusing on his bear. Trying not to think. About Soq; about where they were going. About what it meant that he had a child. About how the final, knock-down drag-out break-up fight between him and Go had happened a couple of months before Soq was born. About how he and Go had had a child, together, all this time.

About how much he hated her. And about how he could hate her, but also feel this strange feeling, so oddly like happiness, in his chest, growing bigger with every step that brought him closer to her.





City Without a Map: The Breaks


No one knows where or when they got the name. The origin story is something banal, most likely—they caused nervous breakdowns, full psychiatric breaks, irrevocable shattering of identity. Oldest known usage is found in transit camp correspondence, refugees using it colloquially enough to imply it had already existed in spoken dialogue. There is a deeper resonance to its persistence, a troubling question that arises if you stop to ponder it: Why do we still call it by such an informal name? Why has it not yet been replaced by something more scientific sounding, more medical, even if it were just an acronym, sad as a flag of surrender, identity dissolution syndrome (IDS) or multiplicative affiliation disorder (MAD)? Epidemics do not have medical causes; they have social ones.

I have been stitching its story together here. Collecting scraps of history and rumor. Memories. Sick people, heads spinning with strange sights. Slum ship operators going out of business because their boats had become floating hospices for afflicted tenants. Doctors and agency officials baffled by the failures of software to devise a solution, or even the most modest of mitigation measures—almost as if someone, some powerful intelligence either human or machine, is determined to block any such development.

Word of the breaks has spread. Babbling madmen in the streets, children screaming someone else’s secrets. Qaanaaq is adrift, they say—floundering, helpless, failing, its once mighty AI oversight no longer equal to the task of maintaining order. Safety is overburdened. The brigs are overflowing. Crowded quarantine ships remain anchored to the Arms. Hearing stories like that, people would get all kinds of crazy ideas.

A crime boss might start plotting out a power play.

And a woman on a mission of rescue and revenge, who for years has known that she must eventually come to Qaanaaq, who knows that the thing she seeks is here, but knows that her enemies are here as well, the people who robbed her of the thing she seeks—and so much more besides—and they are powerful, and they have the full might of the Qaanaaq municipal system behind them, might decide that the time is right for her enemies to fall, for her journey to reach its end.

The breaks brought her here.





Kaev


Sure enough, they were expected. Dao stood at the top of the gangway, flanked by a tight crowd of armed, frightened foot soldiers. Kaev didn’t slow, didn’t hesitate, marched right up the gangway. The bear followed.

“What’d you come here for?” Dao said, his palm on the button that would release the hydraulic lock, retract the gangway, spill them down into the sea.

“You know why. To see her.”

“What if she’s busy?”

“Too busy for this?”

Soq stepped forward. “Ring her up, will you? Ask her yourself.”

Behind them, emboldened by the fact that the bear had stepped off the grid, was a crowd of Safety officers. Assembling some kind of weapon Kaev hadn’t seen before. Nonlethal, probably, but scary—the latest generation of sonic pulse cannon, maybe, the ones pioneered in Russia for knocking out crowds of demonstrators, which might also cause aneurysms. He didn’t want that pointed at any of them. If Go didn’t let them onto her boat, even the bear would be in danger.

Dao turned his head, speaking into his implant.

“Hey, how’s it going,” Soq said to one of the foot soldiers. She smiled back nervously. All of their eyes were on Soq. And Soq knew it. A pretty good way to impress your new coworkers, Kaev thought. So Soq, at least, was enjoying this. And so, mostly, for that matter, was Kaev. That bliss was still there, what he’d felt walking through Qaanaaq with the eyes of everyone on him. The power that comes with having five hundred kilograms of stark white killing machine at your side. The simple pleasure of not having your brain be a caustic broken worthless mess.

He shivered, remembering. How ugly every minute had been. How even the simplest sentences, the most straightforward thoughts, would crumble in his hands. How frightening he found other humans. The joy of fighting, those rare moments, those orgasmic instants with long stretches of broken glass between them. Such a pale shadow of the pleasure he took in every instant beside the bear. And even that, the fights, he was lucky to have had. Plenty of people with broken brains turned to far worse addictions.

Masaaraq was frowning, he noticed. Not the wary frown of someone in a tactically unsatisfying position, either. More like general unhappiness.

“Everything okay?”

“This is a distraction,” she said.

“From what?”

“From what I came here for.”

Kaev nodded. He’d been told no so many times, when he asked her why she was here, that he’d given up asking. “Go is powerful. Connected. Smart. Whatever you want to do, she can help you do it.”