New York 2140

a) the citizen

The First Pulse was not ignored by an entire generation of ounce brains, that is a myth. Although like most myths it has some truth to it which has since been exaggerated. The truth is that the First Pulse was a profound shock, as how could it not be, raising sea level by ten feet in ten years. That was already enough to disrupt coastlines everywhere, also to grossly inconvenience all the major shipping ports around the world, and shipping is trade: those containers in their millions had been circulating by way of diesel-burning ships and trucks, moving around all the stuff people wanted, produced on one continent and consumed on another, following the highest rate of return which is the only rule that people observed at that time. So that very disregard for the consequences of their carbon burn had unleashed the ice that caused the rise of sea level that wrecked the global distribution system and caused a depression that was even more damaging to the people of that generation than the accompanying refugee crisis, which, using the unit popular at the time, was rated as fifty katrinas. Pretty bad, but the profound interruption of world trade was even worse, as far as business was concerned. So yes, the First Pulse was a first-order catastrophe, and it got people’s attention and changes were made, sure. People stopped burning carbon much faster than they thought they could before the First Pulse. They closed that barn door the very second the horses had gotten out. The four horses, to be exact.

Too late, of course. The global warming initiated before the First Pulse was baked in by then and could not be stopped by anything the postpulse people could do. So despite “changing everything” and decarbonizing as fast as they should have fifty years earlier, they were still cooked like bugs on a griddle. Even tossing a few billion tons of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere to mimic a volcanic eruption and thus deflect a fair bit of sunlight, depressing temperatures for a decade or two, which they did in the 2060s to great fanfare and/or gnashing of teeth, was not enough to halt the warming, because the relevant heat was already deep in the oceans, and it wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, no matter how people played with the global thermostat imagining they had godlike powers. They didn’t.

It was that ocean heat that caused the First Pulse to pulse, and later brought on the second one. People sometimes say no one saw it coming, but no, wrong: they did. Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth’s entire previous five billion years (can we say “Anthropocene,” class?), and they searched the geological record for the best analogs to this unprecedented event, and they said, Whoa. They said, Holy shit. People! they said. Sea level rise! During the Eemian period, they said, which we’ve been looking at, the world saw a temperature rise only half as big as the one we’ve just created, and rapid dramatic sea level rise followed immediately. They put it in bumper sticker terms: massive sea level rise sure to follow our unprecedented release of CO2! They published their papers, and shouted and waved their arms, and a few canny and deeply thoughtful sci-fi writers wrote up lurid accounts of such an eventuality, and the rest of civilization went on torching the planet like a Burning Man pyromasterpiece. Really. That’s how much those knuckleheads cared about their grandchildren, and that’s how much they believed their scientists, even though every time they felt a slight cold coming on they ran to the nearest scientist (i.e. doctor) to seek aid.

But okay, you can’t really imagine a catastrophe will hit you until it does. People just don’t have that kind of mental capacity. If you did you would be stricken paralytic with fear at all times, because there are some guaranteed catastrophes bearing down on you that you aren’t going to be able to avoid (i.e. death), so evolution has kindly given you a strategically located mental blind spot, an inability to imagine future disasters in any way you can really believe, so that you can continue to function, as pointless as that may be. It is an aporia, as the Greeks and intellectuals among us would say, a “not-seeing.” So, nice. Useful. Except when disastrously bad.

So the people of the 2060s staggered on through the great depression that followed the First Pulse, and of course there was a crowd in that generation, a certain particular one percent of the population, that just by chance rode things out rather well, and considered that it was really an act of creative destruction, as was everything bad that didn’t touch them, and all people needed to do to deal with it was to buckle down in their traces and accept the idea of austerity, meaning more poverty for the poor, and accept a police state with lots of free speech and freaky lifestyles velvetgloving the iron fist, and hey presto! On we go with the show! Humans are so tough!

But pause ever so slightly—and those of you anxious to get back to the narrating of the antics of individual humans can skip to the next chapter, and know that any more expository rants, any more info dumps (on your carpet) from this New Yorker will be printed in red ink to warn you to skip them (not)—pause, broader-minded more intellectually flexible readers, to consider why the First Pulse happened in the first place. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat in the atmosphere by way of the well-understood greenhouse effect; it closes a gap in the spectrum where reflected sunlight used to flash back out into space, and converts it to heat instead. It’s like rolling up the windows on your car all the way on a hot day, as opposed to having them partly rolled down. Not really, but close enough to elucidate if you haven’t gotten it yet. So okay, that trapped heat in the atmosphere transfers very easily and naturally to the oceans, warming ocean water. Ocean water circulates and the warmed surface water gets pushed down eventually to lower levels. Not to the bottom, not even close, but lower. The heat itself expands the water of the ocean a bit, raising sea level some, but that’s not the important part. The important part is that those warmer ocean currents circulate all over, including around Antarctica, which sits down at the bottom of the world like a big cake of ice. A really big cake of ice. Melt all that ice and pour it in the ocean (though it pours itself) and sea level would go 270 feet higher than the old Holocene level.

Melting all the ice on Antarctica is a big job, however, and will not happen fast, even in the Anthropocene. But any Antarctic ice that slides into the ocean floats away, leaving room for more to slide. And in the twenty-first century, as during the three million years before that, a lot of Antarctic ice was piled up on basin slopes, meaning giant valleys, which angled down into the ocean. Ice slides downhill just like water, only slower; although if sliding (skimboarding?) on a layer of liquid water, not that much slower. So all that ice hanging over the edge of the ocean was perched there, and not sliding very fast, because there were buttresses of ice right at the waterline or just below it, that were basically stuck in place. This ice at the shoreline lay directly on the ground, stuck there by its own massive weight, thus forming in effect long dams ringing all of Antarctica, dams that somewhat held in place the big basins of ice uphill from them. But these ice buttresses at the ocean ends of these very huge ice basins were mainly held in place by their leading edges, which were grounded underwater slightly offshore—still held to the ground by their own massive weight, but caught underwater on rock shelves offshore that rose up like the low edge of a bowl, the result of earlier ice action in previous epochs. These outermost edges of the ice dams were called by scientists “the buttress of the buttress.” Don’t you love that phrase?

So yeah, the buttresses of the buttresses were there in place, but as the phrase might suggest to you, they were not huge in comparison to the masses of ice they were holding back, nor were they well emplaced; they were just lying there in the shallows of Antarctica, that continent-sized cake of ice, that cake ten thousand feet thick and fifteen hundred miles in diameter. Do the math on that, oh numerate ones among you, and for the rest, the 270-foot rise in ocean level is the answer already given earlier. And lastly, those rapidly warming circumpolar ocean currents already mentioned were circulating mainly about a kilometer or two down, meaning, you guessed it, right at the level where the buttresses of the buttresses were resting. And ice, though it sits on land, and even on land bottoming shallow water when heavy enough, floats on water when water gets under it. As is well known. Consult your cocktail for confirmation of this phenomenon.

So, the first buttress of a buttress to float away was at the mouth of the Cook Glacier, which held back the Wilkes/Victoria basin in eastern Antarctica. That basin contained enough ice all by itself to raise sea level twelve feet, and although not all of it slid out right away, over the next two decades it went faster than expected, until more than half of it was adrift and quickly melting in the briny deep.

Greenland, by the way, a not-inconsiderable player in all this, was also melting faster and faster. Its ice cap was an anomaly, a remnant of the huge north polar ice cap of the last great ice age, located way farther south than could be explained by anything but its fossil status, and in effect overdue for melting by about ten thousand years, but lying in a big bathtub of mountain ranges which kept it somewhat stable and refrigerating itself. So, but its ice was melting on the surface and falling down cracks in the ice to the bottoms of its glaciers, thereby lubricating their descent down big chutelike canyons that cut through the coastal mountain-range-as-leaky-bathtub, and as a result it too was melting, at about the same time the Wilkes/Victoria basin was slumping into the Southern Ocean. That Greenland melt is why when you looked at average temperature maps of the Earth in those years, and even for decades before then, and the whole world was a bright angry red, you still saw one cool blue spot, southeast of Greenland. What could have caused the ocean there to cool, one wondered through those decades, how mysterious, one said, and then got back to burning carbon.

So: the First Pulse was mostly the Wilkes/Victoria basin, also Greenland, also West Antarctica, another less massive but consequential contributor, as its basins lay almost entirely below sea level, such that they were quick to break their buttresses and then float up on the subtruding ocean water and sail away. All this ice, breaking up and slumping into the sea. Years of greatest rise, 2052–2061, and suddenly the ocean was ten feet higher. Oh no! How could it be?

Rates of change themselves change, that’s how. Say the speed of melting doubles every ten years. How many decades before you are fucked? Not many. It resembles compound interest. Or recall the old story of the great Mughal emperor who was talked into repaying a peasant who had saved his life by giving the peasant one rice grain and then two, and doubling that again on every square of a chessboard. Possibly the grand vizier or chief astronomer advised this payment, or the canny peasant, and the unquant emperor said sure, good deal, rice grains who cares, and started to dribble out the payment, having been well trained in counting rice grains by a certain passing Serbian dervish woman. A couple few rows into the chessboard he sees how he’s been had and has the vizier or astronomer or peasant beheaded. Maybe all three, that would be imperial style. The one percent get nasty when their assets are threatened.

So that’s how it happened with the First Pulse. Big surprise. What about the Second Pulse, you ask? Don’t ask. It was just more of the same, but doubled as everything loosened in the increasing warmth and the higher seas. Mainly the Aurora Basin’s buttress let loose and its ice flowed down the Totten Glacier. The Aurora was a basin even bigger than Wilkes/Victoria. And then, with sea level raised fifteen feet, then twenty feet, all the buttresses of the buttresses lost their footing all the way around the Antarctic continent, after which said buttresses were shoved from behind into the sea, after which gravity had its way with the ice in all the basins all around East Antarctica, and the ice resting on ground below sea level in West Antarctica, and all that ice quickly melted when it hit water, and even when it was still ice and floating, often in the form of tabular bergs the size of major nations, it was already displacing the ocean by as much as it would when it finished melting. Why that should be is left as an exercise for the reader to solve, after which you can run naked from your leaky bath crying Eureka!

It is worth adding that the Second Pulse was a lot worse than the First in its effects, because the total rise in sea level ended up at around fifty feet. This truly thrashed all the coastlines of the world, causing a refugee crisis rated at ten thousand katrinas. One eighth of the world’s population lived near coastlines and were more or less directly impacted, as was fishing and aquaculture, meaning one third of humanity’s food, plus a fair bit of coastal (meaning in effect rained-upon) agriculture, as well as the aforementioned shipping. And with shipping forestalled, thus impacting world trade, the basis for that humming neoliberal global success story that had done so much for so few was also thrashed. Never had so much been done to so many by so few!

All that happened very quickly, in the very last years of the twenty-first century. Apocalyptic, Armageddonesque, pick your adjective of choice. Anthropogenic could be one. Extinctional another. Anthropogenic mass extinction event, the term often used. End of an era. Geologically speaking it might rather be the end of an age, period, epoch, or eon, but that can’t be decided until it has run its full course, so the common phrase “end of an era” is acceptable for the next billion or so years, after which we can revise the name appropriately.

But hey. An end is a beginning! Creative destruction, right? Apply more police state and more austerity, clamp down hard, proceed as before. Cleaning up the mess a great investment opportunity! Churn baby churn!

It’s true that the newly drowned coastlines, at first abandoned, were quickly reoccupied by desperate scavengers and squatters and fisherpeople and so on, the water rats as they were called among many other humorous names. There were a lot of these people, and a lot of them were what you might call radicalized by their experiences. And although basic services like electricity, water, sewage, and police were at first gone, a lot of infrastructure was still there, amphibiously enduring in the new shallows, or getting repeatedly flushed and emptied in the zones between low and high tide. Immediately, as an integral part of the natural human response to tragedy and disaster, lawsuits proliferated. Many concerned the status of this drowned land, which it had to be admitted was now actually, and even perhaps technically, meaning legally, the shallows of the ocean, such that possibly the laws defining and regulating it were not the same as they had been when the areas in question were actual land. But since it was all wrecked anyway, the people in Denver didn’t really care. Nor the people in Beijing, who could look around at Hong Kong and London and Washington, D.C., and São Paolo and Tokyo and so on, all around the globe, and say, Oh, dear! What a bummer for you, good luck to you! We will help you all we can, especially here at home in China, but anywhere else also, and at a reduced rate of interest if you care to sign here.

And they may also have felt, along with everyone in that certain lucky one percent, that some social experimentation at the drowned margin might let off some steam from certain irate populaces, social steam that might even accidentally innovate something useful. So in the immortal words of Bertolt Brecht, they “dismissed the people and elected another one,” i.e. moved to Denver, and left the water rats to sort it out as best they could. An experiment in living wet. Wait and see what those crazy people did with it, and if it was good, buy it. As always, right? You brave bold hip and utterly co-opted avant-gardists, you know it already, whether you’re reading this in 2144 or 2312 or 3333 or 6666.

So there you have it. Hard to believe, but these things happen. In the immortal words of whoever, “History is just one damned thing after another.” Except if it was Henry Ford who said that, cancel. But he’s the one who said, “History is bunk.” Not the same thing at all. In fact, cancel both those stupid and cynical sayings. History is humankind trying to get a grip. Obviously not easy. But it could go better if you would pay a little more attention to certain details, like for instance your planet.

Enough with the I told you sos! Back to our doughty heroes and heroines!

b) Mutt and Jeff

“Did you ever read Waiting for Godot?”

“No.”

“Did you ever read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead?”

“No.”

“Did you ever read Kiss of the Spider Woman?”

“No.”

“Did you ever read—”

“Jeff, stop it. I’ve never read anything.”

“Some coders read.”

“Yeah that’s right. I’ve read The R Cookbook. Also, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about R. Also, R for Dummies.”

“I don’t like R.”

“That’s why I had to read so much about it.”

“I don’t see why. We don’t use R very much.”

“I use it to help figure out what we’re doing.”

“We know what we’re doing.”

“You know. Or you knew. I myself am not so sure. And here we are, so how much did you know, really?”

“I don’t know.”

“There you have it.”

“Look, R was never going to explain to me what I didn’t know that ended us up here. That I know.”

“You don’t know.”

Jeff shook his head. “I can’t believe you haven’t read Waiting for Godot.”

“Godot was a coder, I take it.”

“Yes, I think that’s right. They never really found out. People usually assume Godot was God. Like someone says, It’s God, and someone else says, Oh! and then you put that together and it’s God—Oh, and then you put a French accent on it.”

“I am not regretting not reading this book.”

“No. I mean, now that we’re living it, I don’t think the book is really necessary. It would be redundant. But at least it was short. This is long. How long have we been in here?”

“Twenty-nine days, I think.”

“Okay, that’s long.”

“Feels longer.”

“True, it does. But it’s only a month. It could go on longer.”

“Obviously.”

“But people must be looking for us, right?”

“I hope so.”

Jeff sighs. “I put some dead man’s switches in part of what I sent out, you know, and some of those are set to go off soon.”

“But people will already know we’re missing. What good is it going to do if your help calls go off? They’ll just confirm what people already know.”

“But they’ll know there’s a reason we’re missing.”

“Which is what?”

“Well, if I was right, it would be the information we sent to the people we tapped into.”

“That you sent out to the people you tapped into.”

“Right. People would learn that information and investigate the problem, and maybe that will lead them to us here.”

“Here on the river bottom.”

“Well, whoever put us here must have left some record of doing it.”

Mutt shakes his head. “This isn’t the kind of thing people write about or talk about.”

“What, they wink? They use sign language?”

“Something like that. A word to the wise. Unrecorded.”

“Well, we have to hope it isn’t like that. Also, I’ve got a chip injected in my skin, it’s got a GPS signal going out.”

“How far does it reach?”

“I don’t know.”

“How big is the chip?”

“Maybe half an inch? You can feel it, back of my neck here.”

“So, maybe a hundred feet? If you weren’t at the bottom of a river?”

“Does water slow down radio waves?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I did what I could.”

“You put out a call to the SEC without telling me, is what you did. To the SEC and to some dark pools, if I’m understanding you right.”

“It was just a test. I wasn’t stealing or anything. It was like whistle-blowing.”

“Good to know. But now it’s us who are in the dark pool.”

“I wanted to see if we could tap in. And we could, so that’s good. I’m not even sure that that’s what got us stuck here. We were the ones who wrote the security for that stack, and I wrote in a covert channel for us to use, and there was no way anyone could notice it.”

“But you still seem to think that’s what got us in here.”

“It’s just I can’t think of anything else that would have done it. I mean, it’s been a long time since I pissed off you know who. And no one heard that whistle blow. I meant to make it a foghorn and it came out a dog whistle.”

“What about those sixteen tweaks to the world system that you were talking about? What if the world system didn’t like that idea?”

“But how would it know?”

“I thought you said the system is self-aware.”

Jeff stares at Mutt for a while. “That was a metaphor. Hyperbole. Symbolism.”

“I thought it was programming. All the programs knitted together into one kind of mastermind program. That’s what you said.”

“Like Gaia, Mutt. It’s like Gaia is everything living on Earth influencing everything else and the rocks and air and such. Like the cloud, maybe. But they’re both metaphors. There’s no one actually home in either case.”

“If you say so. But look, you put your tap in, through your own covert channel no less, and next thing we know we’re trapped in a container decked out like some kind of limbo. Maybe the cloud killed us, and this is us dead.”

“No. That was Waiting for Godot. We’re just in a container somewhere. Somewhere with rushing water sounds outside the walls, locked in and so on. Bad food.”

“Limbo might have bad food.”

“Mutt, please. Why after fourteen years of brute literal-mindedness would you choose now to go metaphysical on me? I’m not sure I can stand it.”

Mutt shrugs. “It’s mysterious, that’s all. Highly mysterious.”

Jeff can only nod to this.

“Tell me again what your tap was going to do.”

Jeff dismisses it with the back of his hand: “I was gonna introduce a meta-tap, where every transaction made over the CME sent a point to the SEC’s operating fund.”

Mutt stares at him. “A point per transaction?”

“Did I say a point? Maybe it was a hundredth of a point.”

“Well, even so. Suddenly the SEC has a trillion dollars it can’t identify in its operating accounts?”

“It wasn’t that much. Only a few billion.”

“Per day?”

“Well, per hour.”

Mutt finds himself standing up, looking at Jeff, who is regarding the floor. “And you wonder why someone came after us?”

Jeff shrugged. “There were other tweaks I did that might have been, you know, even more of a freak-out.”

“More than stealing a few billion dollars an hour?”

“It wasn’t stealing, it was redirecting. To the SEC no less. I’m not sure that kind of thing isn’t happening all the time. If it was, who would know? Would the SEC know? These are fictional trillions, they’re derivatives and securities and the nth tranche of a jumble bond. If someone had a tap in, if there were taps all over, no one would be able to know. Some bank accounts in a tax haven would grow and no one would be the wiser.”

“Why did you do it, then?”

“To alert the SEC as to what can happen. Maybe also give them the funding to be able to deal with some of this shit. Hire some people away from the hedge funds, put some muscle into the laws. Create a fucking sheriff, for God’s sake!”

“So you did want them to notice.”

“I guess so. Yeah, I did. The SEC I did. I did all sorts of stuff. That might not even be what got noticed.”

“No? What else did you do?”

“I killed all those tax havens.”

Mutt stares at him. “Killed them?”

“I tweaked the list of countries it’s illegal to send funds to. You know how there’s about ten terror sponsor countries that you can’t wire money to? I added all the tax havens to that list.”

“You mean like England?”

“All of them.”

“So how’s the world economy supposed to work? Money can’t move if it can’t move to tax havens.”

“It shouldn’t be that way. There shouldn’t be tax havens.”

Mutt throws up his hands. “What else did you do? If I may ask.”

“I pikettied the U.S. tax code.”

“Meaning?”

“Sharp progressive tax on capital assets. All capital assets in the United States, taxed at a progressive rate that goes to ninety percent of any holdings over one hundred million.”

Mutt goes and sits down on his bed. “So this would be, like…” He makes a cutting motion with his hand.

“It would be like what Keynes called the euthanasia of the rentier. Yes. He fully expected it to happen, and that was two centuries ago.”

“Didn’t he also say that most supposedly smart economists are idiots working from ideas that are centuries old?”

“He did say something like that, yes. And he was right.”

“So now you’re doing it too?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Keynes is timeless.”

Mutt shakes his head. “Decapitation of the oligarchy, isn’t that another term for it? Meaning the guillotine, right?”

“But just their money,” Jeff says. “We cut off their money. Their excess money. Everyone is left their last five million. Five million dollars, I mean that’s enough, right?”

“There’s never enough money.”

“That’s what people say, but it’s not true! After a while you’re buying marble toilet seats and flying your private plane to the moon trying to use your excess money, but really all it gets you is bodyguards and accountants and crazy children and sleepless nights and acid reflux! It’s too much, and too much is a curse! It’s a fucking Midas touch.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’d have to give it a try to see. I’d volunteer to try it and report back to you.”

“Everyone thinks that. But no one makes it work.”

“They do too. They give it away, do good works, eat well, exercise.”

“No way. They stress and go crazy. And their kids go even crazier. No, it’s doing them a favor!”

“Decapitation, the great favor! People lining up at the foot of that guillotine. Please, me first! Chop my neck right here!”

Jeff sighs. “I think after a while it would catch on. People would see the sense of it.”

“All these heads rolling on the ground, their faces looking at each other, Hey, this is great! What a good idea!”

“Food, water, shelter, clothing. It’s all you need.”

“We have those here,” Mutt points out.

Jeff heaves another sigh.

“It’s not all we need,” Mutt persists.

“All right already! It seemed like a good idea!”

“But you tipped your hand. And it was never going to hold. It was like spraying graffiti on the wall somewhere.”

Jeff nods. “Well… pretty scary graffiti, for whoever to do this to us.”

“I’ll grant you that. Actually I’m surprised we’re not dead.”

“No one killed Piketty. He had a very successful book tour if I’m not mistaken.”

“That’s because it was a hundred years ago, and it was a book. No one cares about books, that’s why you can write anything you want in them. It’s laws people care about. And you were tweaking the laws. You wrote your graffiti right into the laws.”

“I tried,” Jeff says. “By God, I tried. So I wonder who noticed first. And how word got to whoever rounded us up.”

Mutt shakes his head. “We might have been rendered. I feel kind of chopped up, now that you mention it. We could be in Uruguay. At the bottom of the Plata or whatnot.”

Jeff frowns. “It doesn’t feel like government,” he says. “This room’s too nice.”

“You think? Nice?”

“Effective. Kind of plushly hermetic. Good tight seals. Waterproof, that’s not so easy. Food slot also waterproofed, food twice a day, it’s weird.”

“Navy does it all the time. We could be in a nuclear sub, stay underwater five years.”

“They stay under that long?”

“Five years and a day.”

“Nah,” Jeff says after a while. “I don’t think we’re moving.”

“No shit.”

c) Charlotte

Charlotte looked carefully at the woman Jojo as they sat across from each other at the long dining hall table. Tall, stylish, athletic, smart. Going out with Franklin Garr, and like him working in finance, meaning Charlotte didn’t exactly know what. But in general she knew. Making money from manipulating money. Early thirties. Charlotte didn’t like her.

But she suppressed this dislike, even internally, as people were always quick to sense such feelings. Keep an open mind, et cetera. Part of her job, and something she always wanted to do anyway, as personal improvement. She had a long way to go there, as she had a tendency to hate people on sight. Especially people in finance. But she liked Franklin Garr, strange but true, so maybe that would extend to this woman.

“So,” she said, “someone or some company has offered to buy this whole building. Do you know anything about that?”

“No, why should I. You don’t know who it is?”

“It’s coming through a broker, so no. But why would anyone want to do that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t do real estate myself.”

“Isn’t that investment in Soho about real estate? Or when you do like mortgage bonds?”

“Yes, I suppose. But bonds are derivatives. They’re like trading in risk itself, rather than any particular commodity.”

“Buildings are commodities?”

“Everything that can be traded is a commodity.”

“Including risk.”

“Sure. Futures markets are all about risk.”

“So this offer on our building. Is there any way we can find out who’s making it?”

“I think their broker has to file with the city, right?”

“No. They can make the offer themselves, in effect. What about fighting it? What if we don’t want to sell?”

“Don’t sell. But this is a co-op, right? Are you sure people don’t want to sell?”

“It’s in their buy-in contract that they can’t sell their apartments.”

“Sure, but the building entire? Are they forbidden to want that?”

Charlotte stared at the woman. She had been right to hate her.

“Would you want to sell, if you lived here?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know. Depends on the price, I guess. And whether I could stay or not. That kind of thing.”

“Is this kind of offer what you call aerating?”

“I thought that meant pumping out submarine spaces and sealing them so they stay dry.”

“Yes, but I heard the term is also being used to describe the recapture of the intertidal by global capital. You aerate a place and suddenly it’s back in the system. It’s undrowned, I think they mean to suggest.”

“I haven’t heard that.”

Aeration was a term used all the time on the left side of the cloud where Charlotte tended to read commentary, but obviously this woman didn’t read there. “Even though you invest in the intertidal?”

“Right. What I do is usually called bailing out, or rehabilitation.”

“I see. But what if we do vote to fight against this offer to buy the building? Do you have any suggestions?”

“I think you just have to say no to them, and that would be it.”

Charlotte stared at her. “You really think that’s all it takes?”

Jojo shrugged gracefully, and seeing that Charlotte began to hate her in earnest. Either she was pretending to be ignorant or she was a fool, and she didn’t seem like a fool, so there it was: pretense. Charlotte didn’t like it when people pretended to believe things you knew they couldn’t really believe; it was just a brush-off, an arrogance shading toward contempt. By this gesture she was saying Charlotte wasn’t worth talking to.

Charlotte shrugged back, a crude mirroring. “You’ve never heard of the offer too good to refuse? You’ve never heard of a hostile takeover succeeding?”

Jojo’s eyes went a little round. “I have heard of them, of course. I don’t think an offer like this reaches that level. If you say no and they don’t go away, that’s when you should start worrying.”

Charlotte shook her head. “They’re interested, okay? That’s enough to worry about, you ask me.”

“I save my worrying for things farther along the worry pipeline. It’s the only way to keep from going crazy.”

“They’ve made an offer, I said. We have to reply.”

“You can’t just ignore it?”

“No. We have to reply. So the time is here. We have a situation.”

“Well, good luck with it,” Jojo said.

Charlotte was about to say something sharp when her pad played the first bars of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Charlotte tapped the pad.

“Excuse me Miz Armstrong, it’s Amelia Black, I live in the Met when I’m in New York? I was trying to reach Vlade but I couldn’t get him. Are you by any chance with him?”

“No, but I’m going to join him now, we’re putting a new guest into the hotello in the farm. What’s up?”

“Well, I’ve got kind of a situation here. I made a mistake, I guess you’d call it, and then it all happened so fast.”

“What?” Charlotte began walking toward the elevator, and for some reason Jojo came along.

“Well,” Amelia said, “basically my polar bears have taken over my airship.”

“What?”

“I don’t think they really have, but Frans is flying us, and the bears are on the bridge with him.”

“How does that work? Aren’t they eating him or something?”

“Frans is the autopilot, sorry. So far they’ve left him alone, but if they accidentally turn him off or tweak him, I worry that it could be bad.”

“Is the autopilot something a bear could change?”

“Well, he answers to verbal commands, so if they roar or whatever, something might happen.”

“Are they roaring?”

“Well, yeah. They kind of are. I think they’re getting hungry. And so am I,” she added miserably.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the tool closet.”

“Can you get to the pantry?”

“Not without going through, you know, bear country.”

“Hmm. Well, wait just a second, I’m almost to the farm and Vlade is there. Let’s see what he says about it.”

“Sure, thanks.”

Jojo raised her eyebrows when Charlotte looked at her, and said in a low voice, “Sorry, I just want to hear what happens here, if that’s okay. And check in with Franklin again.”

“Fine by me,” Charlotte said. The elevator doors opened on the farm floor and the two women hurried over to the southeast corner. Vlade and Franklin and the boys and their elderly friend were all gathered outside the hotello, seated on chairs and little gardening stools.

Charlotte interrupted them: “Vlade, can you help us a second here? I’ve got Amelia on the phone, and she’s in a situation on her blimp there, the polar bears have gotten loose.”

That got their attention instantly, and Vlade said loudly, “Amelia, is that true? Are you there?”

“Yes,” Amelia said unhappily.

“Tell me what happened.”

Amelia described the sequence of questionable moves that had gotten her locked in a closet on an airship filled with polar bears on the loose. Vlade shook his head as he listened.

“Well, Amelia,” he said when she finished. “I told you never to fly alone, it just isn’t safe.”

“I always fly alone.”

“That doesn’t make it safe.”

“It makes it dangerous,” Franklin opined. “That’s what her show is about.”

“I can hear that,” Amelia reminded them. “Who is that?”

“Franklin Garr here. I live on the thirty-sixth floor.”

“Oh hi, nice to meet you. But, you know, I don’t mean to contradict you or anything, but it isn’t all true what you said, and anyway it doesn’t help me now.”

“Sorry!” Franklin said. With an uneasy glance at Jojo, now standing beside him (which had pleased him greatly, Charlotte saw), he added, “Are you in touch with the autopilot? Can you fly the thing?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe try tilting the blimp as straight up as it will go, see if the bears fall back down into their room? Kind of a gravity assist?”

Vlade glanced at Franklin with a surprised look. “Worth a try,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, you haven’t lost anything by it.”

“But I don’t know how well we’ll float when we’re vertical.”

“Just the same,” Franklin said confidently. “More or less. Same amount of helium, right? You could maybe even accelerate upward. You’d put a little downward force on the bears.”

Again Vlade agreed this was a good idea.

“Okay,” Amelia said. “I guess I’ll try it. Can you stay on the line?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world, dear,” Charlotte said. “You’re like a radio play.”

“Don’t make fun of me! I’m hungry. And I have to go to the bathroom.”

“There’ll be a bucket in most tool closets,” Vlade said.

“Oh my God I’m tilting, the blimp is tilting up!”

“Hold on,” more than one of them urged her.

“Oh my God they’re out there.” This was followed by some loud thumps. Then radio silence.

“Amelia?” Charlotte asked. “Are you okay?”

A long, tense pause.

Then she replied. “I’m okay. Let me call you back. I’ve got to deal.”

The call went dead.

“Yikes,” Franklin said after a wondering silence. Charlotte saw Jojo elbow him in the ribs, saw him wince and then ignore it, eyes slightly crossed.

The others stood around, uncertain what to do. Charlotte gestured at the hotello door. “Have you had a look inside yet?”

“No, we were just going to do that,” Vlade said.

“Might as well. Our cloud star will get back to us when she can.”

The hotello was really just a walk-in tent, so Charlotte and Franklin and Jojo stayed outside it as Vlade led the old man in with the two boys. To Charlotte this viewing was a formality only; beggars can’t be choosers. She went to the south wall of the farm, sat on one of the chairs by the rail, and looked to the east toward Peter Cooper Village, now a kind of bay studded with remnants of the many fifteen-story towers that had once stood there. Anything built on landfill rather than bedrock was melting. To the south some towers of light illuminated the mostly dark downtown: the old towers of Wall Street, looking like spaceships ready for takeoff. Finance coming back home to roost. It gave her the creeps.

A southern wind came in over the rail, mild for autumn, and she pulled her sweater tighter around her. The two tall glassine spires just to the south of them spoiled the view, and she hoped, as she always did, that their slight tilt to the east meant they would soon fall over, like dominoes. She hated them as architectural fashion models, skinny, blank, featureless, owned by finance, nothing to do with real life. One giant apartment per floor. People living in glass houses and yet throwing stones. She had heard that most of the owners of these apartments only occupied them a week or two per year. Oligarchs, plutocrats, flitting around the world like vampire capital itself. And of course it was even worse uptown, in the new graphene superscrapers.

The men ducked out of the hotello and sat back down around her, all except for the old man, who stood at the railing, elbows on the rail, looking down. The boys sat at his feet, Vlade on the chair next to Charlotte, Franklin and Jojo on the chairs beyond them. A rare chance to rest.

“I hate those chopsticks,” Charlotte said to the old man, gesturing at the two glass splinters. They had refused to join LMMAS, and even the Madison Square Association. She took this as a personal affront, as she had helped to organize the buildings around the bacino into a working alliance within LMMAS, like a ring of city-states around a small rectangular lake.

The old man eyed them briefly. “Money,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“I’m surprised they haven’t fallen yet.”

“Me too. They’re tilting though. They may go.”

“Will they hit us?”

“I don’t think so. They’re tilting to the east, see. They’re like the leaning towers of money.”

“Seems dangerous.” He peered down to the east. “It’s dark that way. But it looks like there’s still buildings they would land on.”

“Sure,” Charlotte said. “Hard to tell what’s there at night. I like that. It looks good, don’t you think?”

He nodded. “Beautiful.”

“As always.”

At this he frowned, then shook his head. “Not always.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not the day it went under, I mean. That was not beautiful.”

“You saw it?” Roberto asked incredulously, looking up at his face.

The old man glanced down at him, rubbing his jaw. “Yeah, I saw it,” he said. “Start of the Second Pulse. Breach of Bjarke’s Wall. I was about your age. You can’t imagine I was ever that young, can you.”

“Nope,” Roberto said.

“Well, I was. Hard though that is to believe. I can’t believe it myself. But I know it’s true, because I was there.”

He rubbed his face with his right hand, looked down blindly. The others glanced at each other.

He said, “Everyone thought it would happen gradually, and out in the boroughs it did. But they had built a surge wall about a hundred years before, Bjarke’s Wall, to keep downtown from flooding. It worked too. It was a berm. It was different in different places, because they had to fit it in where they could. Amazing they could do it at all, but they did. It went all the way around downtown, from Riverside West down behind Battery Park, up the east side to the UN building, where it cut up the rise to Central Park. Twelve miles. There were cuts in it for streets and all, where gates would close if a flood came. They closed it a bunch of times and it worked. But high tide kept getting higher, and they had to close the gates more and more. It was the same in London with the Thames River Barrier. When they closed the wall, my dad would take me down to the path running along its top at Thirty-third. Sometimes the Hudson would be raging, whitecaps all over it. And the water would get so high we could see that the river was higher than the city. You could lose your balance if you looked at both sides at once. It kind of made you sick to your stomach. Because the water was higher than the land. You couldn’t believe it. People would get the staggers and laugh, or cry. It was a thing.”

“I’d like to see that,” Roberto said.

“Maybe you would. We all went and looked. But you could see what could happen. And then it did.”

“You were there?” Roberto asked.

“I was there. It was a storm surge. I was like you, I wanted to go to the berm and see it, but my dad wouldn’t let me, he said this might be the time. My dad was smart. So he wouldn’t let me go, but then after school I went anyway. There were people all up and down the berm. The river was crazy. There was a south wind lashing it. It was raining too. You had to turn your back to it. You couldn’t take a step without you might fall. Mostly we sat down and got soaked, but we stayed, because I don’t know why. It was a thing. But then the streets on the inside of the berm were flooding. Everyone took off north on the berm path to get back up to Forty-second, because we could see that the wall must have broken somewhere downtown. Some people stood on the path shouting at us to walk and not run. They were loud. They were like—insistent. But we could see we were about to be on a berm with water on both sides of us, so we walked pretty fast. But we walked.”

For a while the old man stood there staring to the west.

“So you got off the berm?” Roberto said.

“Yes. I followed people off. We caught glimpses. The water coming in was brown and white. Filled with stuff. It fell down subway entries and then shot back up into the air. It was loud. After a while no one could hear what anyone was saying. Taxis were floating around. It was crazy. It didn’t look anything like what you see down there now. It was crazy time.”

“Weren’t there people?” Roberto asked.

“There were some. Mostly people ran uptown and got away, but some got caught somehow, sure. Floating in the water like logs, wearing their clothes. They were wearing their own clothes.”

“What else would they wear?” Franklin asked, and Jojo elbowed him so hard his chair squeaked, and he did too. Charlotte began to like Jojo a little better.

“It just struck fast, that’s all. They had been out there doing their ordinary day. But boom and that was it. Later people said it took less than two hours. The first breach was said to be a gate down near Pier Forty that gave way. After that the river tore the berm open a couple hundred yards wide. All the buildings near the breach went down. Water is strong.”

“What did you do when you got off the berm?” Stefan asked.

“Everyone walked north. We knew to get north. It felt like the whole city would go under, but uptown is a lot higher than downtown. It’s obvious now, but that day was the first time it was obvious. The flood went up to about Thirtieth. And even though it was fast, it did take two hours. So people just ran north ahead of it. They abandoned whatever they were doing and ran in the streets. We did too. Central Park had millions of people in it, standing there looking at each other. Trying to help people who had been hurt. Talking it over. No one could believe it. But it was true. A new day had come. We knew it had happened, because there we were. We knew it would never be the same. Downtown was gone. So that was very strange. People were stunned, you could see it. We stood there looking at each other! No one could believe it, but there we were. Everyone was like, well, here we are—it must be real. But it was like a dream. I could see that the grown-ups were just as amazed as I was. I saw that grown-ups were basically just the same as me, but bigger. I found that very strange. What happens next? What are we gonna do? A lot of people had just lost everything. But we were alive, you know? It was just… strange.”

“So was your home flooded?” Roberto said.

The old man nodded. “Oh yeah. But my parents worked uptown. So I walked to my dad’s office, and he wasn’t there, but they called him and he came and got me. He was so relieved to see me that he forgot to be mad. But some people he knew were missing. So we were still sad. It was a very sad day.”

He stared at the city below them, serene in the moonlight, almost quiet.

“Hard to believe,” Stefan said again.

Again the old man nodded.

They looked at the city. New York underwater. New York neck deep.

The old man took a deep breath. “That day is why they’ll never polder the harbor. I don’t know why people even talk about that. Dam the Narrows and Hell Gate, pump the Hudson into the sea—it’s crazy. Something breaks and boom, it would all go under again. Including Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx. I can’t even imagine how many people would get killed.”

“Didn’t they all get flooded too?” Stefan asked.

“Sure, but slower, and earlier, because they didn’t have the wall. Bjarke’s Wall gave lower Manhattan about ten extra years.”

“Do they know how many died that day?” Roberto asked.

“They could only guess. A couple thousand, I think they said.”

Long silence. City noise below. The slop of the canals.

The old man turned from the railing and sat down on a wooden rocking chair by the rail. “But here we are. Life goes on. So thank you for the nice tent. I appreciate it. Hopefully the boys will help me get some stuff out of my place tomorrow.”

“Some of us could help too,” Charlotte said.

“No no,” all three of them said at once. “We’ll manage.”

They’re plotting something, Charlotte thought. Retrieving something they don’t want people to know about. Well, the dispossessed often had a need to hold on to something. She had seen that often in her work. Things they held on to with all their might, that meant they were still them. A suitcase, a dog—something.

She said to the old man, “You must be tired. You should get some rest. And I think Vlade and I should get back to Amelia, see how she’s doing.”

“Ah yes,” the old man said. “Good luck with that! It sounds like she’s in a fix.”

d) Amelia

Frans tilted Amelia’s airship so far toward the vertical, bow high, stern low, that Amelia was forced to sit on the back wall of her closet, in a clutter of stuff. She forgot her hunger and her need to pee as she heard the thumps outside the closet; sounded like they could be the thumps of bears falling toward the stern, but how to be sure? Their claws, although awesome, were probably not enough to hold their massive bodies if the floor suddenly became a wall, which it had. And what would they do about it if they were now hanging on somewhere up above her? She found that hard to imagine. Although she believed with all her heart that every mammal was as intelligent as she was, an idea given solid support by evidence from all sides of the question, still, every once in a while something would happen to remind her that although all mammals were equally intelligent, some were more equal than others. In grasping the import of a new situation, humans were sometimes quicker on the uptake than some of their brethren. Sometimes. In this case, maybe it helped that she knew she was flying in an airship that had just pointed its bow up at the sky. These poor (but dangerous) bears might not even be aware they were flying, so such a tilt could have been very disorienting indeed. But who knew?

Also, some of them might have fallen only onto the back wall of the bridge, and thus still be up there. It seemed quite possible. But there was no way of knowing without going to look. And what if she did that and found them there? She wasn’t sure what she would do about that.

Gritting her teeth, holding her breath, flushing hot all over her skin, she opened the utility closet door a tiny bit and took a look down the hall, ready to slam the door again if she had to. Her view was restricted sternward, thus down, and indeed she could see bears, looking like big people in white fur coats, down there sitting on the back wall of their enclosure. One was on his back, another was sitting and sniffing the air curiously, very like a dog; a couple more were tangled in a mass, like wrestlers both of whom had lost. They were inside their room and apparently had descended through its open door, which was still open, having flopped all the way open against the wall, a lucky thing.

This was encouraging, but it left two bears unaccounted for. These might have fallen only as far as the stern wall of the bridge, and thus still be where she needed to go. Also, if she were to go out into the hall, it was not immediately obvious why she too would not slide down the hall and join the bears in their room. That would be bad. If she managed to slide down there and then stop herself, close their door and lock them in, that would be good, up to a point; but if there were two more bears still on the loose, now locked out of their own room, that would be bad. There seemed more bad than good out there, but she couldn’t stay where she was forever. Somehow she had to take advantage of the situation while it lasted. She wasn’t sure how long the Assisted Migration could stay standing on its tail; it seemed awkward and un-aerodynamic to her. She had not even known it could do it without falling. Like she was going to, if she didn’t watch out.

This gave her the idea of making herself into a little airship within the airship. At first she couldn’t figure out how to access any of the helium on board, nor how to calculate how much of it she would need to float herself up to the bow. But it turned out there was a tall helium canister in the jumble on the bottom of the tool closet with her. Some kind of emergency supply, perhaps to top off a ballonet with a microleak or something like that. Rooting around, she also found a roll of large plastic trash bags, with ties around the open ends. If some of these bags were filled with helium, perhaps double or triple-bagged, and the open ends tied shut, and all of them tied together by a cord tied to her, so that the open ends were kept at the bottom of the now-floating bags, then presumably the bags would hold the helium like party balloons, at least for a while. And loft her.

She was checking the valve on the canister of helium and getting the bags doubled inside each other, when her closet door slammed shut on her with a huge bang, scaring her terribly. Some dim memory of the Hindenburg disaster must stay lodged in the unconscious minds of anyone flying in an airship, such that loud noises are unwelcome. On reflection she decided that another bear must have slid down the hallway onto his or her fellow bears. That was good, although it left one unaccounted for; this was a worry, but she couldn’t stay in the closet forever, so now seemed her best chance.

She filled four trash bags with helium and pushed them out into the hallway on the cord she had tied around their open ends. They worked like she hoped they would, tugging her up toward the bridge. Four didn’t seem enough, though. She let out more cord for the ones already filled, tugged down to test their lift, then sat down and filled four more bags. It seemed like a lot of helium, and enough of it was getting loose in the closet that she was beginning to feel a little yucky. “We’re off to see the wizard!” she sang, and yes, her voice was munchkinly high; it would be funny if she weren’t worried about blacking out. It was time to test her method before she inadvertently killed herself. Which gave her the idea of knocking out the bear on the bridge by filling the bridge with helium for a very short interval. Problems with that plan reared their heads, and there was a tranquilizer dart gun still with her in the closet she could find and reload and take with her, so she decided to stick with the plan of floating up to the bridge to see what was going on. But oh yeah: important to get her camera headband on, and turn it on, to record for the show, or for posterity!

“We’re off to see the wizard!” she sang again, just as high if not higher, and in that same Munchkin voice she began to narrate her ascent to the bridge.

“Here we go, folks! I’m going to let these bags of helium carry me up to the bridge, and I have a tranquilizer dart gun that I can use to deal with any bear that might be stuck up there. I think one is not yet accounted for, who is probably up there. I’ll catch you up on all that later, for now I’d better get out of this room, as you can hear. I definitely feel a little light-headed, I hope that will help lift me once I get out this door!”

She wrapped the lines around her belt and held them tight in her left hand, felt the upward tug of the trash bags, and launched herself out of the closet into the hall. The polar bears down in their room stared up at her, surprised, and one tried to stand. And in fact, now that she was fully suspended from the bags and hanging freely in the hallway, she found herself drifting slightly downward toward the bears. It felt like a couple more bags would have given her the buoyancy she needed, but no time for that now; she wedged herself in the ninety-degree angle between floor and wall, squeaking, “Oh no! Oh no!”

She put one foot against floor, one against wall, as if stemming up what climbers would call an open-book crack. The airship was not totally vertical, so she had a steep but climbable V slope to wedge into. She had only done a little climbing in her life, always following the lead of her old boyfriend Elrond, and she couldn’t remember if open-book cracks were usually more or less than ninety degrees open; anyway this was what she had to work with, so she pressed outward hard with both feet and clawed with the fingers of her right hand in the crack itself, while holding the lines to the trash bags above her and as far into the crack as she could, so that they would loft her upward without pulling her away from her hold. These moves seemed to stabilize her, and after that she found that she could, with care, stem up the hallway toward the bridge. The fact that it was not completely vertical was key, and as soon as she realized that, she felt that the airship was going even more vertical than it had before. “Oh no!” she said again, but at least it was in her own voice. The air felt good. “Frans, stop it! Hold your angle!”

She clawed the floor with her fingernails and pressed outward with her toes, and stepped with teeny steps up toward the bridge. The helium bags definitely helped; it was possible she was only a few pounds from neutral buoyancy. She slipped once or twice along the way, causing her to exclaim “Oh no!” and sweat, but luckily her head camera was pointed up at the balloon bags, and she would not be doing any selfies until she got onto a better platform, no matter how much Nicole lectured her about it afterward. The footage she was getting now, which included her hands for sure, would tell the tale more vividly than any selfie. Although it occurred to her that Nicole would have asked her to use some cam-drones. She could even have sent them up to do reconnaissance on the bridge. But in fact they were on the bridge now, in a cabinet. So whatever! She was on her way.

Although it took a while, eventually she found herself at the doorway to the bridge, now looking like a square hole leading up into an attic. She had to move the lines around without dislodging herself, to let all the helium bags up through the door into the space of the bridge; then she could scrabble up the last part of the hall until she could grab the door’s handle, hanging down toward her, after which she was able to pull herself halfway into the room she had been hoping to reach for the last thirty hours.

“I made it!” she told her future audience. Then she saw the last of the polar bears, a female it appeared, lying on the stern wall of the bridge looking confused and unhappy. “Oh!” Amelia said to it. “Hi! Hi, bear! Stay right there!”

This inadvertent little nursery rhyme inspired her to make a kind of Peter Pan lifted-by-wires move up into the bridge, pulling hard on the doorjamb to launch herself upward while she also tugged the tranquilizer dart gun out of her belt. She came within a few pounds per square inch of shooting herself in the belly, but did not. When she cleared the door she toed the floor and leaped upward, and the bags helped make it quite a balletic move, almost too much so, as the bags ran into the glass front wall and she soared into the bags and then started to fall back down, back toward the bear, who was rising on her haunches with an investigative or at least troubled expression. So Amelia without the slightest reluctance shot the bear in the shoulder, then again in the chest; then she landed on the back wall right next to it. It was looking at the dart in its chest unhappily. It brushed it off, then growled loudly, so loudly that Amelia instinctively jumped up again and got another surprising helium assist, afterward flailing a bit as she pendulumed around the air of the room right above the bear, who waved at her woozily. Then the bear grew content to lie down and sleep it off, and Amelia avoided plunging through the open door to the hall by way of some deft footwork, after which she landed and sat there on the back wall beside the open door, now like a trapdoor to doom, hyperventilating. “Oh. My. God.”

When the bear seemed to be really out, Amelia asked Frans to right the ship. Then she thought it over and countermanded that request, and approached the drugged bear’s side to see if she could move her to the doorway and let her slide senselessly down the hall to her proper quarters. But she couldn’t move the bear. Not at all. The bear was a big heavy lump, like a sleeping dog that knew where it wanted to sleep and wouldn’t be budged even when unconscious. Even a dog could do that with Amelia, and this bear weighed about seven hundred pounds. “If I had a lever, I could move the bear,” Amelia said aloud. This caused her to remember that there was a come-along in the tool closet, but that was no help now.

“Here, Frans,” she said, looking at the bridge carefully. “Bring yourself around in the air so that the bear will slide toward the bridge door. Do you see what I mean?”

“No.”

Amelia had to think out the directions, then tell Frans which way to tilt. She herself was not much better at it than the autopilot, and it took some experimenting, but eventually she got the airship tilting the right way, and the comatose bear slid toward the doorway, now a kind of trapdoor. When it was close to the edge, Amelia used a broom as a crowbar and levered the bear into the doorway. Prepared for this moment, Amelia ordered Frans to shift more off the vertical at the same moment the bear rolled into the hole, and it seemed like Frans tilted fast enough that when the bear hit the stern end of the hall, it was more sliding than falling. Then it plopped through the doorway down there into the bears’ quarters.

“Now I have to close the door!” Amelia cried, and she jumped through the doorway still holding the bags of helium and lofted down the hallway like a parachutist, kind of, until she thumped down next to the doorway to the bears’ quarters, just narrowly avoiding a drop right through the open door that would have had her joining the bears, not good, but by spread-eagling she did avoid it, and quickly she closed and locked the enclosure door.

“Frans, right the ship!” she said triumphantly, and then killed the cameras and crawled up to the bathroom to pee. “Yay!”

e) Inspector Gen

Inspector Gen walked the skyways to work. Breezy fall day. Autumn in New York, the great song of the city. Wave tank patterns diamonding the canals below, lit from the south by the low morning sun. Her favorite time of year. Have to get out the heavier jacket.

In the station it was the usual scurrying about. The blunt edge of pandemonium. How could there be crime on a day so beautiful? So many different kinds of hunger. Desperate eyes in a blank face, hands manacled, chain around waist. Ah the waste. Hold the line.

She went into her office and sat down behind her desk. She kept the desktop clear, the only way to keep it from being inundated. She picked up the single note on the battered blotter and saw that her chief assistant, Lieutenant Claire Clooney, wanted a meeting with her and Sergeant Olmstead. She was about to call Claire when a ruckus erupted outside her door. She took a look and there was that same blank face, now pulled back into a rictus of despair and rage, teeth exposed, foaming at the mouth. Striking out wildly, three big street cops trying to subdue the person, Gen wasn’t sure about gender here. Cuffing behind the back was always safer, even with wrists shackled to waist. It was a lesson that somehow did not become policy, she didn’t know why.

“What’s the problem?” she asked the demented prisoner.

Gargled gasp, hissing, more foam from mouth. Drug reaction, it seemed. Gen winced as the cuffed hands together swung into the ribs of one of the cops. Would leave a bruise, but the cop hooked an arm through the arms of the afflicted person and simply lifted the person bodily off feet; struggle availed nothing, and a wickedly fast attempt to bite only bit a thrust hat, stunning the prisoner. The others pressed in and a Taser shot arched the prisoner back and into a wrap held out by another cop. The wrap was like an armless straitjacket. Off they carried the person.

“To the hospital,” Gen said, but of course they were already headed that way, and only nodded before disappearing down the hall. Bellevue was conveniently nearby.

“Does anyone know what that was about?” Gen called to those down the hall, minding other business.

“Bad shit in Kips Bay,” Sergeant Fripp said. “This is the third one today.”

“Ah hell.”

Bad drugs were always the bane of the city, right back to the demon rum. She never saw the point. To her anything beyond a beer was illness, if not hell. Here it was 8 a.m. on a fine breezy morning, poor person foaming at the mouth. People were strange.

“Do we know where they got it?”

“Looks like the Park Thirty-three area. Someone said Mezzrow’s.”

“Really?”

“That’s what she said.”

“That’s not like them.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Gen thought it over. “I guess I should go and have a word with them, see what’s up. It isn’t like them.”

“Do you want any of us along?”

“I’ll take Claire and Ezra.”

As if called, Claire showed up, Olmstead in hand. When they were seated Gen regarded her whiteboard unenthusiastically. The big screen on the other wall, filled with a live GIS map of the city marked by various kinds of tags, was just as uninspiring.

When they got to it, near the end of a long list of outstanding problems, Claire reported there were still no pings from the two men who had gone missing out of the old Met tower. Quite possibly they were dead. On the other hand, among bodies found recently, none had been them.

Possibly they had slipped away and were hiding for some reason. Possibly someone had kidnapped them. Either would be odd, but odd things definitely happened. People were well documented these days, not in any single system, but in the stack of all systems, the accidental megasystem. It was hard to stay hidden. But it wasn’t a total system in the end, so it could happen.

Olmstead brought her up to date on what he had found in the datasphere, and Gen drew things on the whiteboard, just to help her see: initials, Xs and Os, arrows here and there, lines solid or dotted.

The two men’s contract work for Henry Vinson’s hedge fund, Alban Albany, had ended just three months earlier. Alban Albany, like most hedge funds, kept its financial activities proprietarial, but Sean had found signs that it was involved in high-frequency trading in the dark pools run out of the Cloister cluster. Vinson’s earlier work for Adirondack Investing, when he had worked with Larry Jackman, had done that kind of trading, and Rosen and Muttchopf had worked for Adirondack too. Adirondack had been one of the investment firms the Senate Finance Committee was looking at when Rosen had recused himself. Rosen and Muttchopf’s recent work for Alban Albany had gotten them paid forty thousand dollars apiece. Then they had left and started moving around.

Vinson’s business security and his personal security were both handled by a security firm called Pinscher Pinkerton. An international firm, based in Grand Cayman if anywhere. Very opaque, Olmstead said gloomily, even though its name was out there, as one of the free-floating armies for hire that were now roaming at large in the world. An octopus, as subsidiary-stacked corporations were called. Or more probably an arm of a bigger octopus.

On the night Rosen and Muttchopf had disappeared, Sean said, there had been a strange event in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. A bite across everything in the exchange, after which everything went back to normal. Along with the bite, there had been a bolus of information sent to the SEC that the SEC wasn’t talking about. No obvious connection to the two men, except that it had happened that night.

“It would be good to get the SEC to tell us what they got that night.”

“I’m trying,” Olmstead said. “They’re slow.”

That was all they had that was new on that case. Olmstead had also, at Gen’s behest, been looking into the bid on the Met tower that had so troubled Charlotte. So far he had only managed to confirm that it was being laundered through the big brokerage Morningside Realty, headquartered uptown but doing business all over the tri-state region.

Gen marked up her whiteboard. Findings about the two men were in red. The Met tower was a blue box, with Charlotte Armstrong on one side of it and Vlade Marovich on the other.

She noodled around on the board for a while, trying out scenarios. They needed to find out what Vinson’s hedge fund was doing, and whether it was perhaps behind the broker making the bid on the Met. Needed to investigate all Vlade’s employees in the Met. It was a relief to think that neither Charlotte nor Vlade had a good reason to be involved in the disappearance, but Gen was suspicious of her relief. Feelings like that caused one to miss things. On the other hand, it was an intuitive business.

Suppose the two missing men had dived into Alban Albany’s dark pool while they were working there, then set up the access needed to make the flash bite in the CME. That might explain the quick response suggested by their disappearance on the same night. In high-frequency trading terms, an hour was like a decade.

Or, suppose Vinson was behind Morningside’s offer on the building, and Rosen and Muttchopf had found out about it, or somehow interfered with it. Might be standard at Alban Albany to stovepipe any corporate decisions on Rosen directly to Vinson; might be his people had instructions to keep an eye on the boss’s cousin. A black sheep patrol, that was called; many families had to have them, including families in the NYPD.

As she noodled away randomly at the whiteboard, Sean and Claire regarded her fondly. The inspector was so old school. To her young assistants it was partly cute but partly impressive, in a mysterious and possibly even frustrating way. She often got results from this whiteboard maundering, useless though it appeared. Although from time to time Sean would shake his head, even raise his hand. “This is exactly what it isn’t,” he would complain. “It isn’t a diagram, it isn’t mappable. You’re confusing yourself with this stuff here.”

“A thread through the maze,” she would reply. “The maze was always four dimensions.”

“But think six dimensions,” Sean would suggest.

And she would shake her head. “There’s only four dimensions, youth. Try to keep your head on.”

And he would shake his head. So old school! his look would say. Only four dimensions! When there are clearly six! Which Gen would refuse to ask him about. She didn’t want those two extra dimensions, so clearly fictional, explained to her. Let the youth navigate that realm.

Now she asked them what they had managed to dig up on the black sheep front. The two cousins apparently had lived in the same house for a time, after Jeff’s childhood home got inundated in the Second Pulse. This might have led to fraternal feelings or to lifelong hatred. Fifty-fifty on that, but only after starting with another fifty-fifty split, as to whether the cohabitation had produced strong emotions or complete indifference. But even that suggested a twenty-five percent chance that later on Vinson would be keeping tabs on his black sheep coder cuz.

And yet he had hired him twice for jobs. One of these hires, well after Rosen had recused himself while Vinson was being investigated. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer? Keep the black sheep in the pen? Then comes a flash bite on the CME. Trust among traders easy to lose, hard to regain. So, put the black sheep out to pasture, somewhere far away.

“Too many theories, not enough data,” she said, at which observation her assistants looked relieved. But she had a sense that the explanation might be somewhere on the whiteboard, no matter Olmstead’s objections. Garbled no doubt, but the players were there. Maybe. If it was a case that made sense; sometimes they just didn’t. “See if you can crack Morningside Realty’s confidentiality.”

Olmstead wrinkled his nose. “Hard without a warrant.”

“We won’t get one. See if you can suborn someone there.”

Her assistants snorted in tandem.

“Come on,” she protested. “Are you NYPD or not?”

They looked at her like they didn’t even know what that meant. She sniffed at them. Might have to find out some of these things by herself, on the side. Use her Bacino Irregulars. Or her friends in the feds. Or both. People still living in 3-D.

Off the two youngsters went. Soon it would be lunchtime. Her to-do list was barely dented. Eat at the desk, as so often.

Then she worked. Departmental biz. Wasted hours. Then it was almost four, and she decided it would indeed be good to visit her friends at Mezzrow’s. Time to go native, dive back down into the deep depths of home. For she too had once been the black sheep of a family.

Lieutenant Claire joined her down on the narrow long dock outside their building on Twenty-first, and they waited for Sergeant Fripp to show up in his cruiser, a narrow hydrofoil, standard now as the water police’s usual speedster.

“You really want to go there again?” Fripp asked as they boarded. White teeth in black beard; Ezra Fripp liked going to Mezzrow’s, or anywhere else that put him on or under the water, poking at the chaos.

Gen’s cynicism about the amphibious and their speakeasies and bathhouses had hardened in recent years; too many things had changed, too many crimes committed, but she could reach down to that kernel of nostalgia for the old days if she tried hard enough. “Yes,” she told Fripp.

Fripp purred up Second to Thirty-third, turned west, and glided to a halt near the old subway station. The intersections were crowded with boats following the old adage take turns when taking turns. The narrow dock on the west side was full, but police had some of its ancient prerogatives still, and Ezra nosed in without being too obnoxious about it, but without wasting too much time either. He tied off the painter to a dock cleat and they hopped up, leaving the speedster guarded by a dronecop.

On the north end of the dock they dropped down stairs in a big tilted graphenated tube that descended at a forty-five-degree angle into the submarine warren that had once been a subway station. The speakeasy door at the bottom of the stairs was in the classic style, and Gen rapped on it using the old code for the submarine gang she had been part of over in Hoboken, thirty years before. An eye appeared in the Judas window, and after a moment the door opened and they were escorted in.

“Ellie is expecting me,” Gen said to the doorman, which was not true except in the sense that it was permanently true. She and Ellie went back forever.

Soon Ellie showed up and waved them into a back room, which was dominated by an ancient but immaculate pool table, with booths against the walls. Lights were dim, booths were empty. It was early for Ellie’s place.

“Have a seat,” Ellie said. “What brings you here? Want anything?”

“Water,” Gen said, to be annoying. Ezra and Claire asked about using the pool table, and when Ellie nodded they set to, clacking balls around the table without much sign of dropping them in pockets. Ellie sat down at her corner table and Gen joined her.

“So,” Ellie said.

She was still very stylish. Swedish, and so white-blond she was rumored to be albino, which many submarine people of color found funny, in the redundant or how-can-you-tell category of jokes. Five nine, 120 pounds, well distributed what little there was of her. Glamorous. She stretched her fingers on the table as if to display them. Always she made an attempt to overawe Gen with her etched pale beauty, and Gen had to allow that it took an effort to keep this from working. Of course it was easy to stay slim on the little thread of fentanyl Ellie was on, easy to stay relaxed. Gen knew all that and yet it was still hard not to feel a little frumpy. Like a cop. Like a big black female cop wedded to her job. Ebony and ivory, chess queens black and white, the supermodel and the glump, the capo and the copette, on and on it went. But mainly old friends gone separate ways.

That was the way it had been for many years. And knowing Ellie was here meant Gen knew what was going on underwater. She knew that the dealing that got done here was small time, like regular businesses, at least compared to what could have been. Taking care of the amphibious ones meant knowing who was bringing in what to where, and developing relationships, and using the relationships when possible. This was true for both of them.

“I heard there’s bad stuff getting sold in Kips Bay,” Gen said, “and I came over to check it out. It didn’t seem like you. I didn’t believe it.”

Ellie frowned. This was too direct, as Gen well knew. But it was time to forgo gossip about new submarine fashions and such.

Ellie finished pouting at this brushback fastball, then said, “I know what you mean, Gen, but it isn’t any of us. You know I wouldn’t allow that.”

“So who is it?”

Ellie shrugged, looked around the room. The room was in a Faraday box with a magnetic charge that would scramble any recorders, and Gen didn’t have one anyway. No recorder, no body cam, it was all part of the protocol between them. Talk here rather than down at the station, et cetera. Gen nodded to confirm this, and Ellie leaned forward and said, “There’s a group from uptown putting this shit out, I think to try to wreck the feel down here. It’s so stupid I think it must be on purpose. We lost someone last week, so now I’ve pulled everyone in and put them on alert, keep an eye out for strangers and the like.”

“Who is it?”

“I still don’t know, and it’s interesting how hard it is to find out. No one underwater will say anything about it. I think they’re feeling pressure, and they don’t want to be unfriendly, but they don’t want to help either. So I’ll have to deal with that later, but meanwhile I’ve got a friend up in the Cloisters who says she heard someone up there mention that we’re ripe.”

“Ripe?”

“Ripe for development.”

“Real estate?” Gen said.

“As always, right? I mean, when is it not real estate?”

“But in the intertidal?”

“The intertidal is ripe. That’s what they’re saying. It’s got problems, it’s been a mess, but people have dealt with it, and now we’ve got it going. So now uptown wants to take it over again. It’s like, renovation’s over, time to flip.”

“But you’ve got to own before you can sell.”

“Right.”

“But what about the legal questions? No one is supposed to be able to own the intertidal.”

“Possession is nine tenths of the law, right? Then again the buying hasn’t been going that well, and maybe that’s part of it. There’s been a lot of resistance. Hardly anyone wants to sell to these assholes, even at prices you’d think would work. A lot of money is being offered. I heard ten thousand a square foot, for some buildings. But, you know. If you like the water, you can only get that in the water. It doesn’t matter how much money is offered to limpets like that. So the assholes offer more, until it’s crazy time, and then you can see that the offers are a threat, right? Like, take our mad money and make a bundle, or else. If you don’t, then it’s your fault. You’re not playing the game. Bad things can happen to you if you don’t play the game, and it’s your fault for not playing.”

“This is happening to you,” Gen said.

“Sure it is. It’s happening to everyone in the drink. New York is New York, Gen. People want this place, drowned or not.”

“Mildew,” Gen suggested.

“Venice has mildew, and people still want Venice. And this is the SuperVenice.”

“So they’re selling defective goods to make you look bad?”

“That’s what it looks like to me. It’s not my friends doing it, that’s for sure. We take good care of our own. Everything people need has been tested, and most of it is made or grown underwater. I know I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know, right?”

Gen nodded. “That’s why I came by to ask you what was up. It was weird.”

“It is weird.”

They sat there looking at each other. Two powerful figures in lower Manhattan. But no one was capable of withstanding pressure from uptown on their own. It took a team effort. This was the look on Ellie’s fashionable face, now looking kind of drawn and strung out. Gen could only nod.

Ellie smiled a tight smile. “When we heard you were coming by, there were those who wanted me to ask you if you’d go in the ring again. Bets are being laid already.”

Gen shook her head. “I’ve retired, you know that. I’m too old.”

Ellie’s smile got a little friendlier. “So some bets have already lost.”

“And some have won. I’ll come watch with you. Always enjoy seeing a match or two.”

“Okay, better than nothing. They’ll enjoy having the champ on hand.”

“The old champ.”

“Please quit reminding me. I’m older than you.”

“By a month, right?”

“That’s right.” Ellie got up and went to the door, spoke to someone.

Gen gestured at Ezra and Claire, still knocking around the same number of balls on the table. They had not misspent their youths, that was clear. Screen kids for sure. Could not handle the third dimension. Shit at Ping-Pong too, Gen presumed. “You’ve got to attend to the sixth dimension,” she told them, but that was Sean’s thing, and they didn’t get it.

“I’m going to watch some water sumo,” Gen told them. “Come along and keep an eye on the audience in there. Don’t get distracted. See if you see anyone watching Ellie during the match, watching her rather than the action in the pool.”

They nodded.

Ellie returned and led them along a long hallway, to a stairwell leading down. They took flights of these stairs down until they were far under the city streets, maybe seventy feet below low tide, in an aerated portion of old subway tunnel. Old tunnel walls and bulkheads, heavily coated with diamond spray, held out the subterranean waters. These chambers were called diamond balloons or diamond caves and could be quite extensive. The diamond sheeting was all that was keeping them dry, that and the hard old bedrock of the island itself.

They came into a big bright chamber that had a gleaming round turquoise pool cut down into its center, lighting the room like a blue lava lamp. A New York bathhouse, sure; another nostalgia trip, like the speakeasy. Same idea. The main pool was a hot tub in Icelandic blue lagoon style, with different parts of it bubbling at different temperatures. A place for people to hang out in hot water and drink and talk. All very familiar to Gen. She had spent a lot of hours in rings like this one, but it had been so long ago that she had outlived nostalgia itself, it seemed, and felt no desire to get back in the ring. Her knees ached at the thought, and sometimes she had trouble catching her breath even in the open air. No, it was a kids’ game, as so many of them were.

A crowd was arriving from other rooms and other pools, many of them in bathing attire or nonattire, and wet already. Gen sat by Ellie and enjoyed the vibe, the friendly hellos, “Oh she’s back,” “Coming back to Mama,” that kind of thing.

“Please, Gen-gen, get back in!”

“No way,” she said. “Show me what you got.”

“I’m taking even money! Even money here!”

“They’ll be here in a second,” Ellie said to Gen.

Gen nodded. “Anyone I know?”

“I doubt it. Youngsters. Ginger and Diane.”

“Okay fine. But look, afterward it’ll get all social, and we won’t want to go back to business. But I want you to find out who’s horning in on you, okay?”

“I’m trying,” Ellie complained. “I’d like to know myself.”

“So, maybe keep an eye out for a security company called Pinscher Pinkerton.”

Ellie’s eyebrows rose. “You think?”

“I wonder.”

“That’s interesting, because someone else was talking about them.”

“That is interesting. Look to it.”

Then two young women came in, already wet in two-piece bathing suits, red and blue. Both women substantial and curvy, and the crowd oohed and ahhed. People were coming in from other rooms, and this one quickly filled.

The wrestlers entered the central ring in the pool. They were nice and friendly as they shook hands. The crowd settled down around the pool, in short risers and just sitting or standing on the decks. Many were of indeterminate gender, wearing flamboyant water dress or undress. Lots of intergender in the intertidal; inter as such was a big thing now, amphibiguity a definite style, which like all styles liked to see and be seen. The big low chamber, now lit entirely by the pool lights, was in fact turning into quite a delanyden, such that it was best not to look too closely at what was happening in the corners, but everyone was really friendly. This was the norm at Ellie’s or in any speakeasy bathhouse, so Gen found it all familiar and reassuring. Ezra and Claire were looking a little round-eyed; they were clearly not denizens of the deep like Gen had once been. But they were well positioned to scan the crowd to see if Ellie was being watched.

The ref asked if Gen would preside. This was mostly a ceremonial position, as the tosses were ultimately determined by laser and camera, so she agreed, and stood to a little smattering of applause and hooting. She spanked the water to warn the two wrestlers it was time. They ducked their heads under and came up looking gorgeous. The Diane looked like a shot-putter, brown-skinned and solid; the Ginger looked more Mediterranean and seemed like a water polo player. In many respects water sumo resembled the legwork part of water polo, although in truth it was considerably less vicious than that.

They met in the center of the pool and waited for the cheers and encouragements to subside. Gen took the wand from Cy, the usual ref, who was wearing a red eyepatch tonight, and clicked it to turn on the light. A cylinder of laser red shot from the ceiling straight into the pool, tangible in both the humid air and the water, very vividly marking a red circle on the floor of the pool. This lit circle and cylinder was the sumo line; whoever got shoved completely outside it lost. A simple old game, imported from Japan to the bathhouses of New York many decades before. Gen had been a champion in her time, and she felt a little ghost of the buzz as she watched the two wrestlers settle in.

She said to them, “No poking or pinching or punching or grabbing the face, ladies! You know the rules, keep it sumo clean so I don’t have to call you on anything. We’ll go three tosses to the win, and if it goes to la belle, I’ll remind you of that.”

The two women stood about chest deep in water. Four feet was still standard. Gen said, “Go!” and they approached each other, shook hands, moved back. Then Ginger ducked down, and Diane did the same.

In some forms of the game you had to keep your head above water, but full immersion had become standard back in Gen’s time, so now these two had sucked air and were down there looking at each other underwater. A whiff of heated chlorine in the air, people quiet and watching the action below. Like a visit to an aquarium.

The Ginger made the first attack, and Diane planted her feet on the pool floor and leaned into it. Young Ginger bounced right off her, and Diane went after her; Ginger planted her feet to counterpush, so Diane twisted aside and took her opponent’s momentum and pulled her by the waist and butt. Ginger was thrown out of the circle, and Gen called the toss to cheers. One throw.

After that the two settled in and worked harder. Ginger kept her head above water, Diane did the same. They mirrored each other for a good long while, trying to frustrate each other. But being one throw down, Ginger had gotten conservative, and she appeared to be faster. In the end it was Diane who got impatient first, and with a quick wrist grab and pull Ginger got her moving and then escorted her out by a kick to the butt. People loved to see women fight, Gen liked it herself. Now it was one to one, and the smaller one faster than the heavier one. Of course that was the way it would be.

So at that point the Diane resorted to the frog. This was what Gen would have done in her own good youth. Go to the bottom and shove around down there, wedge under the other and push up as well as out. Very effective if you could hold your breath long enough, and keep your balance when frogged in a low crouch. Which this Diane could do. She managed to grab the Ginger by the ankles and spin her like a discus out of the circle.

That made Ginger very nervous, and when they began again, she went on the attack right away. But sumo was about mass staying put, so defense was always king, and queen too, and it didn’t take long for Diane to slip to the side, go deep again, wedge under, and shove off the bottom and catch Ginger right in the midriff and carry her out, Ginger just clearing the circle before Diane did, by about a foot Gen judged, the left foot, and the cameras confirmed it. Match to Diane. Both of them stood and shook hands, first with each other and then with Gen, and Gen was pleased to see they were happy to have her there. Indeed everyone there loved having a policewoman, the famous submarine inspector, there in a private bathhouse reffing the action. Just like up in the air! If things were going well.

f) Mutt and Jeff

“Jeff? Are you okay?”

“I’m not okay. How could I be okay, we’re in prison. We got ourselves lost in a prison of our own devise. Meaning me, I mean. I’m so sorry I got you mixed up with this Mutt. I’m really sorry. I apologize.”

“Don’t worry about that. Eat your breakfast here.”

“Is it morning, do you think?”

“It’s pancakes. Just eat it.”

“I can’t eat right now. I’m sick to my stomach. I’m nauseous.”

“But you didn’t eat anything yesterday either. Or the day before, if I’m not mistaken. Aren’t you hungry? You should be hungry.”

“I’m hungry but I’m sick so I’m not hungry. I can’t eat right now.”

“Well, drink something then. Here, just a little water. I’m going to mix a little maple syrup into this water, see? It’ll taste good and it’ll go down easy.”

“Don’t, you’ll make me sick.”

“No I won’t, just try it, you’ll see. You need the sugar in you. You’re getting weak. I mean here you are apologizing. It’s a bad sign. It’s not like you.”

Jeff shakes his head. Pale bearded face on a stained pillow, flecks of spittle at the corners of his mouth. “I got you into this. I should have asked you what you thought before I did anything.”

“Yes you should. But now that is neither here nor there. Now you need to drink something, then eat something. You need to stay strong so we can get through this thing. So, better you retain your convictions right now. Because I need you.”

Jeff sips some water, maybe a tablespoon of it. Some of it drips down into his beard. Mutt wipes his chin with a napkin. “More,” Mutt says. “Drink more. When you’re hydrated you’ll feel hungry.”

Jeff nods, sips more. Mutt is spooning water into his mouth. After this works for a while, he dips the spoon into the little waxed box of maple syrup and feeds Jeff some of that. Jeff chokes a little, nods, sits up, and takes in several more spoonfuls of maple syrup. “That’s good,” he says. “Now more water.”

He sits up in his bed, leans his head and shoulders against the wall. He eats a few tiny bites of pancake dipped in maple syrup, chokes a little, shakes his head at the offer of more. Mutt shifts back to water. After a while Jeff holds a glass of water on his stomach, raises it to sip by himself.

“I can feel the water behind this wall,” he says. “I can feel it move, or maybe I’m hearing it. I wonder what that’s about. I guess sound is strange underwater. It carries farther, or has more force or something.”

“I don’t know. How about some more pancakes?”

“No. Quit it. You’re hectoring me.”

“I see you must be feeling better.”

“Did Hector hector people? I somehow think he’s getting a bad rap with this word. Someone comes and lays siege to his city, tries to kill everyone in it. He organizes and leads the resistance to that, gets killed and his body dragged around by the heels, and his name becomes the verb for harassing someone? How is that fair?”

“Harassing someone to do the right thing,” Mutt suggests.

“Nevertheless. He’s been screwed. Pander deserved what he got, but Hector no. And how come the real jerks got away there? How come you don’t pull an achilles when you stalk off in a snit? Prima donnas, we call them, but prima donnas were Boy Scouts compared to him. Or how about You ajaxed that one. I definitely ajaxed that tap I tried, sorry again about that, but okay I’ll defer the sorries until later. Fucking ajaxed it big-time. Or fucking Zeus. Someone flies into a narcissistic rage, do we say he’s zeussing out? No we don’t. No ulyssesizing a situation. No agamemnonning.”

“You’re a pretty great cassandra,” Mutt mentions.

“See, I knew you read more than The R Handbook.”

“Not really. It’s just stuff you pick up by reading crap in the cloud.”

Now Jeff’s rant sinks to a hoarse whisper. He’s fading in and out, it looks like. “Crap in the Cloud. A novel of celestial sewage. I coulda written that one myself. Been down so long it looks like up to me. What I should have done is hold my horses and wait until something could’ve done some good. I definitely screwed that up, and I’m sorry. I’ll apologize later. I hope you know I only did it because I couldn’t stand it anymore. Here we are in this beautiful world, if we’re not dead and in limbo, and they were ripping our heads off. Pretending there were shortages and terrorists and pitting us against each other while they took ninety-nine percent of everything. Immiserate the same people who keep you alive. Which god or idiot did that in Homer? None of them. They’re worse than the worst gods in Homer. That’s what they’re doing, Mutt. I can’t stand it.”

“I know.”

“Because it’s bad!”

“I know. Don’t worry about it right now, though. You have to conserve your energy right now. Don’t enumerate the crimes of the ruling class, please. I know them already. You need to save your strength. Are you hungry?”

“I’m sick. Sick of those bastards ripping us off. Tooling to Davos to tell each other how great they are, how much good they’re doing. Fucking fuckwad hypocrites and bastards. And they get away with it!”

“Jeff, stop now. Stop. You’re wasting your energy on this, you’re preaching to the choir on this. I agree already, so there’s no point in saying it all over again. The world is fucked up, agreed. The rich are stupid assholes, agreed. But you need to stop saying so.”

“I can’t.”

“I know. But you have to. Just this time. Save it for later.”

“I can’t. I try but I can’t. Fucking…”

Happily Jeff falls asleep. Mutt tries to tuck a last spoonful of maple water in the corner of his mouth, then wipes his chin again and pulls the blanket up over his chest.

He sits on the chair by the bed, rocking back and forth a little. Finally he takes one of the plates from the serving tray and cleans it until it is a smooth round white circle of ceramic. On this he writes using one of the little packets of strawberry jam,

My friend is sick. He needs a doctor right now.

g) Stefan and Roberto

Stefan and Roberto were glad to see the old man settled into the Met tower’s farm. It seemed like a better place for him than his moldering squat, especially now that that building was on its last tilt into the tide. He himself didn’t agree and was frantic to get his stuff back, especially the maps. This they could well understand, and they spent the next couple of days boating over to the old wreck and venturing in trepidatiously to recover them. Once those were back in Mr. Hexter’s hands, he was so grateful he asked them to go back for more stuff. Turned out he cherished quite a few things that would be inconvenient if not impossible to move on their boat, like the map cabinet. But there were some items on his list that they could move, so they risked more trips over there. Each one exposed them to a possible bust by the water police, who supposedly wanted people to stay out of the collapse zone, but Mr. Hexter promised he would bail them out if they got busted—buy them a new boat, claim to be their teacher, adopt them, whatever it took. He didn’t seem to understand that there were situations where he wouldn’t be able to help them.

To support the cover story that he was their teacher, he gave them a little wristpad that had some audiobooks on it (like a million), and a moldy book copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by a Mark Twain. He told them to listen to the book while looking at the pages, and that would teach them to read, as long as they learned their ABCs, so that the words on the page were not just funny shapes, but marks for sounds. He swore the method would work, so the boys tried it while in their boat under the dock at night, looking at the pages by flashlight for as long as they could stand it while listening to the words, which lit up as they were being said, after which they gave up and just listened ahead in the story. An interesting story, hokey but fun. They too had been hungry and stolen food; they too had been threatened and once or twice trapped and abused by adults. It was strange to be hearing a story about that stuff. The next night they would shift backward in the audio and find the page where they had stopped reading, and look for a time while listening again. Fairly quickly they began to see what the old man meant. It was a pretty simple system, although the spelling was often strangely wrong. They got to know Huck’s story well, and enjoyed discussing it as they cross-stitched their way forward. Wild times on the Mississippi. Similar in many ways to life on the Hudson. Meanwhile by day they were boating across town once a day to recover Mr. Hexter’s books (heavy), clothes (moldy), and rubber boots (stinky).

Vlade knew now that they slept in their boat under his dock, and he often gave them food, also a free charge for their boat’s battery, so they could gurgle over to the wreck rather than row, always taking canals not cordoned off by the water police. Everyone said the three remaining towers there would also fall. They had to stay south of that whole neighborhood for as long as they could, then cut up to it.

Then one day they burbled up to the building and found that it had slumped even farther to the side.

“Man. It’s like Pap’s houseboat in the Mississippi.”

“I don’t think that was his houseboat,” said Roberto. “I think Jim and Huck just found him in it.”

“Only Jim found him. He told Huck about it later.”

“Yeah I know.”

“But why was Pap there if it wasn’t his?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think we’ve been told. Maybe later in the story.”

“Maybe. Meanwhile, we got a problem here. We got to tell the old man the place is too dangerous.”

“But is it? I think we should take a look and see.”

“What do you mean? You can see it from here!”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Come on. Don’t be like that Tom Sawyer.”

“What a jerk! I’m not like that fool.”

“Well then don’t be.”

With some of his possessions around him, the hotello had come to resemble Hexter’s old quarters, being a maze of boxes and books in piles.

“Bless you boys,” he said that night. “I’ll pay you when I can. Maybe you can help me move this stuff back when I move back, and I’ll pay you twice. Meanwhile, I suppose you might want to be getting back to your excavation in the Bronx?”

“Exactly, we were thinking that ourselves.”

So the next day they dashed into the Met’s kitchen and snatched a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven, Vlade looking the other way, as he did all the time now. They were definitely eating more regularly these days. Vlade did the same thing for the bacino’s cats. Then they were out in the chill of a fine November day, weaving a route north past drowned buildings and aquaculture pens and over the Turtle Bay oyster beds.

Crossing the Harlem River under the RFK Bridge and then the old rail bridge, the monster that people said would last a thousand years, they cut up over the east part of Ward Island to their spot in the south Bronx. They found their little marker buoy and cheered. Once moored to it they prepped the diving bell and dropped it over the side. Roberto clawed into his wetsuit and Stefan helped him get the diving gear on. All was good when Stefan said, “I still don’t see how we’re going to dig down far enough.”

“We’ll just keep at it,” Roberto said. “I can put the mud on the east side of the hole, and between digs the tides will move it upstream and down, but not back into the hole. So each time it’ll get deeper, until we hit the Hussar.”

Stefan shook his head. “I hope so,” he said. “But look, since we can’t do it in one go, you’ve gotta come up when I tell you.”

“Yep. Three tugs on the air hose, and up we go.”

Roberto hopped over the side and Stefan lifted the bell over the side and onto him. He could just see Roberto under the clear plastic, rocking the bell to the side to let a little air out from under it. A fart of bubbles burst the surface, and then Roberto and the bell were drifting to the bottom. High tide again, so quite a ways down there, which worried Stefan. He watched his friend disappear into the murk and began to monitor the oxygen tank. It was the only thing he could do to stay occupied, so he watched the dial until he saw it move, then looked around to make sure no one was approaching while they were doing their business. The sun was out, low in the south and blazing a strip of mirrored light across the slack river, which was otherwise a dark handsome blue. There were some barges in a line midchannel, but nothing smaller was anywhere near them.

Then a cat’s-paw spun across the water and struck, scoring the water with a twirl of teeny wavelets. Their boat swung around until the rope tied to the top of the diving bell was taut over the side, and the air hose likewise. Suddenly Stefan saw that the oxygen tube was taut but the rope was slack. He tugged on the rope and cried out involuntarily when it gave. There was no resistance; the rope was no longer tied to the bell! He pulled up to make sure, and it came up all the way, its end curled in the way plastic rope curled when it came untied after being tied for a long time. It made no sense, but there it was. Roberto was down there and there was no way to pull him back up. “Oh no!” Stefan shouted.

The air hose extended under the edge of the bell, its end curving up into the cone of trapped air. Stefan tugged on it three times, then shouted down it, though he knew it wasn’t going to convey the sound of his voice to the bottom. For now Roberto had air, but when the gas bottle ran out (and the spare bottle too, there under the thwart) there would still be no way to raise the bell. Possibly Roberto could push up one edge of it, duck under the side and swim up to the surface. Yes, that might work, if he could do it. If he knew that he should do it. Again Stefan shouted Roberto’s name, again he tugged three times on the tube, but now gently, as he was scared of pulling it out from under the edge down there. The bell was heavy, heavier than its cone of trapped air could lift, and the water would be pushing down on it, a high tide’s worth of water. Very likely he would not be able to lift the bell from below enough to slip out from under it.

The wind was blowing Stefan upstream hard enough that the oxygen tube was stretching flat over the side of the boat. The flow of gas could get cut off, or the tube pulled out. Stefan started the motor and hummed back to the buoy, reached over the side and grabbed it. Hanging on to it, he rested elbows on the side, breathing hard, shaking even though the sun was out; he was terrified.

He tapped their wristpad and called Vlade.

Vlade picked up, thank God, and Stefan quickly explained the situation to him.

“A diving bell?” Vlade repeated, catching the essence of the problem. “Why?”

“No time for that,” Stefan pleaded, “we’ll tell you later, but can you come and help pull him up? He’s only got about an hour’s air in the air tank, and then I’ll have to change tanks, and I’ve only got one spare.”

“You can’t tell him to swim up?”

“No, and I don’t think he can push the bell up by himself from below! We usually pull it up, whoever’s in the boat. Even using a crank it’s hard.”

“How deep is he?”

“About twenty-five feet.”

“You kids!” Vlade said sharply. “I can’t believe you.”

“But can you come help please?”

“Where are you again?”

Stefan told him.

Again Vlade was incredulous. “What the fuck!” he said. “Why?”

“Just come help and we’ll tell you,” Stefan promised. He was sitting now, head over the side looking down into the opaque water, seeing nothing, feeling like he was going to throw up. “Please hurry!”

h) Vlade

Vlade hustled up the stairs to the boathouse dock thinking about what he might need. Just deep enough to want scuba; he was no great free diver. What he needed most was a fast boat, and right as he reached the dock he saw Franklin Garr waiting there for Su to drop his little hydrofoil out of the rafters where Vlade had stashed it. He was looking impatient as always.

“Hey,” Vlade said, “I need your boat.”

“Say what?”

“Sorry, but those kids Roberto and Stefan are in trouble up in the south Bronx.”

“Not them again!”

“Yes, and one of them could drown if I don’t get there real fast to pull him out of the drink. You’ve got the fastest boat here by a long shot, so how about we trade for today, or you come with me.”

“Ah for fuck’s sake,” Garr said, looking suddenly ferocious.

Vlade shrugged, wondering how he would do it if he had to grab this guy’s boat from him. This was already a real-world version of a nightmare he had suffered all too many times in the last fifteen years, dreams in which the chance to save Marko stood there before him, only to be blocked by various crazy obstacles. So he was sick with fear, and ready to just slug the guy and go, and possibly this was apparent on his face, because the man cursed again but added, “I’ll come too. Where are they again?”

“South Bronx just east of the bridges.”

“What the fuck?”

“They didn’t say. Thanks for this, I’ve got my stuff right here.”

“What are you going to do?” Garr asked as they got in his speedster.

“I’ll dive to their diving bell and tie their rope back onto it.”

“A diving bell? Really?”

“That’s what Stefan said. It’s stupid.”

“Crazy stupid.”

“Well, that’s them. But we can’t let them drown.” As he said this his throat clenched so hard he had to look away.

“I guess,” Garr said, and got them going east on Twenty-sixth. The canal was crowded this time of day, but he was good at dodging through the crowd, and for once he had an excuse to do it, so he shot the boat over wakes and through gaps between barges and kayaks and vapos and rowboats and gondolas, gaps smaller than Vlade would have dared to attempt. The work of an obvious scofflaw, a Brooklyn dodger, but today usefully so.

Out in the East River he shoved his throttle forward and the little hydrofoil did its thing and rose up onto its foils and flew. Wind ripped past them over the clear bubble at the front of the cockpit. Vlade marveled at the speed with which the UN building shot past on their left. Then they were past Roosevelt Island’s drowned brick piles on their right, into the broad confluence that was Hell Gate, whooshing over it as if in a low-flying plane. They were going about sixty or seventy miles an hour, great news given the need. Despite himself Vlade was impressed, and almost feeling a tiny glow of relief through the knot in his stomach. Although he was also rediscovering what someone had once explained to him, that part of being post-traumatic was an inability to clear your head once you were triggered. You simply flashed back to the trauma and it was all just like then, all over again.

Onshore, in the broken rusty reef that was the submerged part of the south Bronx, a little gray zodiac was floating. The boys’ boat for sure, with one of them standing in it, desperately waving his arms overhead.

“Looks like our guys,” Garr remarked, and slowed enough for the boat to drop back into the water with a swan-chested splash. Even then it was a quick ride through the shallows, white wings to each side and Garr standing tall, looking forward to see if he was headed at anything dangerous. Ordinarily Vlade would have thought it much too fast, but given the circumstances he was happy the man was reckless. As long as he didn’t run aground on something. Vlade held his breath as they crossed over some dark spots in the blue, but they passed safely. He didn’t know if the foils on this craft slid up or not. Some did, some didn’t. Something to ask about later. He still wasn’t sure what to make of this young finance guy, a very dismissive and self-regarding fellow, or so it seemed. But good at piloting his little speedboat.

They pulled up next to Stefan, still standing in the zodiac, looking relieved. He balanced against their wake’s rocking and pointed down.

“He’s there!”

“How far down?” Vlade asked.

“On the bottom.”

“How far is that?”

“At high tide it’s twenty-eight feet.”

Vlade sighed. They were just past high tide. He had already struggled into his wetsuit, and now he shrugged on his smallest tank and vest and got the hose and mask and regulator and computer all arranged right, then lastly placed the mask carefully onto the suit’s hood. Gloves on, rope in hand.

“Okay, going down,” he told them, to keep to protocol. “Keep the tether on me loose. I’ll want to be able to move around.”

He slipped off the boat and felt the chill of the water at one remove. As always, at first it was a relief from his own heat, trapped by the wetsuit. He had been about to break into a sweat. Now it was cool, and soon it would be cold, but not right against his skin, more a hard coolness sucking at him from outside.

The river was dark even a foot deep, as usual in the drowned shallows of the boroughs. His headlamp illuminated nothing but estuarine particulates of various kinds—seaweed, dirt, little creatures, detritus. Top of the tide. Down below he saw the gleam of something.

He had the rope from the boys’ zodiac in hand, and with it he swam down to the top of the gleam. Eyebolt at the top of what appeared to be a clear plastic bell, the bell dense and thick enough that it reflected his light, making it hard to see what was inside it. Presumably Roberto, so he knocked three times on the side of it, then tied the rope on, three loops, after which he tugged hard. Then back to the surface, where he trod water and pulled his mask up.

“Did you see him?” Stefan asked anxiously. “Did you tie off?”

“Rope’s tied to the bell! Pull it up a bit and I’ll get him out from under it.”

Stefan and Garr hauled up on the rope. At first it obviously resisted them, so much that Vlade was amazed the boys had been able to pull each other up alone. There was a hand reel screwed onto the thwart, but it was little and it would take an effort to crank it. Then the two in the boat got it going, and Vlade put his face mask back in position and dove again, to help Roberto out from under the bell’s edge and into the boat. A good idea, as when he poked his head under the side of the bell and looked up into the pocket of captured air, the boy seemed stunned and only semiconscious. He was hanging on to a strap Velcroed to the inside of the bell, and his eyes were bugging out of his face, and his mouth was pursed into a tight little knot. He was ready to hold his breath and was not going to breathe until well into the open air, good man. He was still that conscious. Vlade nodded at him, pointed up, and hauled him down into the water, under the bell’s edge, and up to the surface. Then he shoved him up from below while the other two dragged him over the side and into the zodiac, which had a smaller cockpit than Garr’s speedster but was lower in the water.

Vlade crawled up over the side of the zodiac, never an easy move, but soon enough he flopped over the fat rubber tube into the cockpit. Roberto lay next to him on the bottom, wet, muddy, his face a brown tinged with blue. Shivering. Lips and nose whitish with cold or anoxia, or both. Vlade pulled off his own face mask and unclipped from his tank and got out of his gear. Then he sat beside Roberto and held his blue little hand. Very cold.

“Have you got any hot water in your boat?” he asked Garr.

“I have a flash heater,” Garr said.

“Jump up and draw us a bowl of the hottest water you have,” Vlade said. “We need to warm this kid up.” He put his face down to Roberto’s and said, “Roberto, what the hell? You could have died down there!” And suddenly his throat closed up again and he couldn’t say more. He looked away hot-eyed, tried to pull himself together. He hadn’t had the old feeling stab him as hard as this for many a year. It was just like his nightmares, even just like the original event itself. But now, here and now, if he could get this boy warmed up…

Roberto was shivering too hard to answer, but he nodded. He was shivering so hard his skinny body bounced off the bottom of the boat.

“Have you got a towel?” Vlade asked Stefan.

Stefan nodded and got it from a locker under the thwart. Vlade took it from him and began to dry Roberto’s head off, at the same time roughing him up a little to get his circulation going faster. “Let’s get this wetsuit off him.” Although maybe it would help heat him, maybe it would be warmer with it on than off. Vlade tried to clear his mind enough to recall standard practice in the city. They couldn’t warm his extremities too fast, he knew that, that was very dangerous, as it might drive cold blood to his heart and cause it to fail. In general they had to go slowly, but one way or another it was certainly necessary to warm him.

“Did the oxygen keep flowing to you the whole time?” Vlade asked Roberto.

Roberto shook his head, then with difficulty said, “The bell edge squished it. I lifted the bell. Tried to.”

“Good man. I think you’re going to be all right here.” No sense in bawling the kid out now; fear was probably chilling his extremities along with everything else. “Let’s get some of this hot water Mr. Garr has here onto your chest.”

Garr stepped over the gunwales into the zodiac’s cockpit with minimal spillage from the bowl in his hands, and Vlade took the bowl and scooped water out with his hand, scalding his fingers more with the contrast of temperatures than the water’s actual heat, and dripped some of it onto Roberto’s chest. Heat would diffuse through the wetsuit, a good thing. Vlade was past the moment of his flashback now, back in the present moment with this kid, who was going to be all right.

“Slowly,” Vlade said, and had Stefan continue to dry Roberto’s hair with the towel. Quickly the water cooled to a point where he could put the boy’s hands in the bowl. Roberto kept shivering, with occasional spasms of extra shuddering, but shivering was good; there was a point where you got too cold to shiver, very hard to come back from. But the kid wasn’t there; he was shivering like mad. Stefan finished drying his head off. They got him out of the wetsuit, then toweled down, then dressed: pants, shirt, and baggy coat on, and another dry towel wrapped around his head like a turban.

“Okay,” Vlade said after a while. To Garr he said, “How about you tow us back home.”

Franklin nodded once. “I can’t believe I’m towing you guys home again,” he said to Stefan and Roberto.

“Thanks,” the boys said weakly.

“What should we do with their diving bell?” Franklin asked Vlade.

“Cut it loose. We can get it later.”

As Garr was in his cockpit piloting them, Vlade sat back and got himself between Roberto and the wind.

“All right,” he said. “What the fuck was that about?”

Roberto gulped. “We were just out looking for some treasure.”

Vlade shook his head. “Come on. No bullshit.”

“It’s true!” both boys exclaimed.

They looked at each other for a second.

“It’s the Hussar,” Roberto said. “It’s the HMS Hussar.”

“Ah come on,” Vlade said. “That old chestnut?”

The boys were amazed. “You know about it?”

“Everyone knows about it. British treasure ship, hit a rock and went down in Hell Gate. Every water rat in the history of New York has gone diving for it. Now it’s you guys’s turn.”

“But we found it! We really did!”

“Right.”

Stefan said, “We did because Mr. Hexter knows. He studied the maps and the records.”

“I’m sure. And what did you boys find down there?”

“We borrowed a metal detector that can specify for gold thirty feet down, and we took it to where Mr. Hexter said the ship had to be, and we got a big signal.”

“A really big signal!”

“I’m sure. And then you started digging underwater?”

“That’s right.”

“Under your diving bell?”

“That’s right.”

“But how is that supposed to work? That’s landfill there, right? Part of the Bronx.”

“Yeah that’s right. That’s where it was.”

“So the Hussar sank in the river and then the south Bronx got extended over it, is that what you’re saying?”

“Exactly.”

“So how were you going to dig through that landfill under a tiny diving bell? Where were you going to put the dirt you dug up?”

“That’s what I said,” Stefan said after a silence.

“I had a plan,” Roberto muttered miserably.

“I’m sure,” Vlade said. He tousled Roberto’s turban. “Tell you what, I’ll keep this news to myself, and we’ll have a little conference with your old man of the maps when we get back and you get properly dried and warmed and fed. Sound good?”

“Thanks, Vlade.”

i) that citizen

Recall, if your powers of retention will allow it, that after the Second Pulse, as the twenty-second century began its surreal and majestic existence, sea level had risen to about fifty feet higher than it had been early in the twentieth century. This remarkable rise had been bad for people—most of them. But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet’s wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world’s wealth. For them it wasn’t so bad.

This remarkable wealth distribution was just a result of the logical progression of the ordinary workings of capitalism, following its overarching operating principle of capital accumulation at the highest rate of return. Capturing that highest rate of return was an interesting process, which became directly relevant to what happened in the postpulse years. Because the areas where the highest rate of return can be obtained move around the world as time passes, following differences in development and currency exchange rates. The highest rate of return comes during periods of rapid development, but not just any area can be rapidly developed; there needs to be a preliminary infrastructure, and hot money, and a fairly stable and somewhat educated populace, ambitious for themselves and willing to sacrifice for their children by working hard for low wages. With these conditions in place, investment capital can descend like a skyvillage on an orchard, and that region then experiences rapid growth, and the rate of return for global investors is high. But as with everything, the logistic curve rules; rates of profit drop as workers expect higher wages and benefits, and the local market saturates as everyone gets the basic necessities. So at that point capital moves on to the next geocultural opportunity, flying somewhere else. The people in that newly abandoned region are left to cope with their new rust belt status, abandoned as they are to fates ranging from touristic simulacrum to Chernobylic calm. Local intellectuals discover bioregionalism and proclaim the virtues of getting by with what can be made in that watershed, which turns out to be not much, especially when all the young people move somewhere else, following the skyvillages of liquid capital.

So it goes, region to region, opportunity to opportunity. The march of progress! Sustainable development! Always there is an encouraging motto to mark the remorseless migration of capital from an ex–highest rate of return to the next primed site. And indeed, development of capital gets sustained.

So in that process—call it globalization, neoliberal capitalism, the Anthropocene, the water boarding, what have you—the Second Pulse became just an unusually clear signal that it was time for capital to move on. Rate of return on all coastlines having been definitively hosed, capital, having considerably more liquidity than water, slid down the path of least resistance, or up it, or sideways—it doesn’t matter, money being so slippery and antigravitational, with no restraints on capital flight or any other such impediment that the feeble remnant nation-state system might have thought to apply, if it had not already been bought and now owned by that very same capital saying bye-bye to the new backwater.

So first you get off the coastlines, because they are a mess and an emergency rescue operation. Poor old governments exist to deal with situations like that. Capital goes immediately to Denver. Although Denver being Denver, snoozefest beyond compare, a fair bit of New York’s capital just shifted uptown, where Manhattan Island still protruded from the sea with a sufficient margin. That was important locally, but globally speaking, capital went to Denver, Beijing, Moscow, Chicago, et cetera; just as the list of drowned cities could go on forever, such that certain awesome writers fond of lists would have already inflicted this amazing list of coastal cities on the reader, but for now please just consult a map or globe and make it yourself—yet another great list could be made of all the wonderful inland cities that were untouched by sea level rise, even if located on lakes or rivers, as they so often were. So capital had lots of better rates of return to flow to, indeed almost anywhere that was not on the drowned coastlines would do. Places competed in abasing themselves to get some of what could be called refugee capital, though really it was just the imperial move to the summer palace, as always.

This is not to say things didn’t get weirder after the Second Pulse, because they did. The flood caused an unprecedented loss of assets and a cessation of trade, stimulating a substantial recession, or let’s say a pretty big little depression. As always in moments like this, which keep happening every generation to everyone’s immense surprise, the big private banks and investment firms went to the big central banks, meaning the governments of the world, and demanded to be saved from the impacts of the floods on their activities. The governments, being long since subsidiaries of the banks anyway, caved again, and bailed out the banks one hundred cents on the dollar, incurring public debt so huge that it could not be paid off in the remaining lifetime of the universe. Oh dear, what a quandary. Ten years after the end of the Second Pulse it looked like the centuries-long wrestling match between state and capital had ended in a decisive victory for capital. Possibly the wrestling match had always been professional wrestling and completely staged start to finish, but in any case it looked to be over.

Because the bailout of banks following the Second Pulse crash was huge. They always are. The bailout of the 2008 crash, which served as the model for the two that followed it, was calculated by historians at somewhere between 5 and 15 trillion dollars. One careful guess said it was 7.7 trillion dollars, another 13 trillion; both added that this was more than the cost (adjusted for inflation) of the Louisiana Purchase, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the 1980s savings and loan bailout, the Iraq wars, and the entire NASA space program, combined. Conclusion: wars and land and social programs must not be very expensive. And compared to rescuing finance from itself, they’re not.

But wars too are good for finance, and a few more happened in the twenty-second century, sure. Hundreds of millions of people were suddenly refugees, and that’s a lot of terrorists to suppress. This was a continuation of the surveillance state that had been growing through the twenty-first century, what an earlier time would have called a police state, but at this point that term would have been aspirational. That this permanent war on terror could have remained a police action and had more success in its stated goals than it was achieving when waged as a pseudo-war was a view only mentioned by radicals whose words encouraged the terrorists.

Meanwhile this aspect of things also created new financial opportunities. Governments, being hollowed out by debt, couldn’t properly fund the security adequate to deal with potential opposition, nor were they good at small-scale asymmetrical warfare (meaning police action, which in fact they used to be good at). Since there was a need for more police but no funding for it, private security armies stepped in to fill the need. Lots of them. The rich, being people too, doing all they could to cope with the night sweats and zombie terrors of making fourteen hundred times as much money as the people working for them, made sure to finance the best personal and corporate security that money could buy, and mercenaries from all the refugee wars were numerous and available. This was good: when you are a small minority and you own the majority’s wealth, security is naturally a primary consideration.

So private security armies were everywhere, from Denver to upper Manhattan. This new industry seemed to challenge a principle that used to be called the state monopoly on violence, but then again if finance had taken over the state, possibly the state was in effect already a kind of private security force, so that there was no conflict there, but just an infilling of a market, a supply fulfilling a demand. Alas, as always happens, there were very many quite incompetent new companies in this new business. And an incompetent security company is a scary thing. Hard to know if the mystery of whether the state was still a force opposed to these private armies could be answered in any way one would actually want to see in the real world. A state revolt against global finance? Democracy versus capitalism? Could get very ugly.

That said, we must revert to the concept of soft power, and the Pyrrhic defeat, on which more later. In the meantime, along the drowned coastlines themselves, interesting things happened. There existed now a very long strip of newly useless but still strategic shallows, all over the world. No one could do much in this strip in the immediate aftermath, except get away from it, then get shipping ports operational again. People retreated inland, capital decamped. Governments too left the coastlines, relieved to be done with relief, as the remaining problems were intractable. Further salvage and repair was a job for market forces, they declared, but in fact market forces proved not to be interested. The drowned zones were not only not the highest rates of return, they were the lowest; they were labeled “development sinks,” meaning places where no matter how much money you pour in, there is never a profit to be made. The same thing had been said of Africa for centuries now, and lo and behold look how truly that prophecy had self-fulfilled. Recall the requirements for the highest rate of return: a stable hungry populace; good infrastructure; hot money; access to world markets; compliant and uncontested government. None of these obtained in the intertidal.

So, first looters and salvage crews and displaced residents all paddled in and out with what could be taken away. Then the squatters and the stubborn were left in possession. Others came in from elsewhere, immigrants to disaster. The narrow but worldwide strip of wreckage that they occupied was dangerous and unhealthy, but there was some infrastructure left standing, and one immediate option was to live in that wreckage. Though many stretches of new coast were more or less abandoned, New York, the great blah blah of the blah blah, with uptown still high and dry—yes, people returned to the drowned parts of New York. There is a certain stubbornness in many a New Yorker, cliché though it is to say so, and actually many of them had been living in such shitholes before the floods that being immersed in the drink mattered little. Not a few experienced an upgrade in both material circumstances and quality of life. For sure rents went down, often to zero. So a lot of people stayed.

Squatters. The dispossessed. The water rats. Denizens of the deep, citizens of the shallows. And a lot of them were interested in trying something different, including which authorities they gave their consent to be governed by. Hegemony had drowned, so in the years after the flooding there was a proliferation of cooperatives, neighborhood associations, communes, squats, barter, alternative currencies, gift economies, solar usufruct, fishing village cultures, mondragons, unions, Davy’s locker freemasonries, anarchist blather, and submarine technoculture, including aeration and aquafarming. Also sky living in skyvillages that used the drowned cities as mooring towers and festival exchange points; containerclippers and townships as floating islands; art-not-work, the city regarded as a giant collaborative artwork; blue greens, amphibiguity, heterogeneticity, horizontalization, deoligarchification; also free open universities, free trade schools, and free art schools. Not uncommonly all of these experiments were being pursued in the very same building. Lower Manhattan became a veritable hotbed of theory and practice, like it always used to say it was, but this time for real.

All very interesting. A ferment, a tumult, a mess. Possibly New York had never yet been this interesting, which is saying a lot, even discounting all the bullshit. In any case, pretty damned interesting.

But wherever there is a commons, there is enclosure. You can bank on that. You can take that to the bank. So to speak. And with things going as well as they were in lower Manhattan, such that some people even complained it was getting back to the same old shabby garbled expensive bourgeois wannabe mess that it had been before the floods, there began to rise into visibility a newly viable infrastructure and canalculture—the intertidal, the SuperVenice, occupied and performed by energetic people who were hungry for more. In other words, taken all in all, a place that might make for a very high rate of return on investment! So a situation was developing. Push was coming to shove. And when push comes to shove—well, who knows? Anything can happen.