New York 2140

a) Vlade

As part of his job Vlade kept the NOAA weather page for New York up on one of his screens, in a box next to the tide screen. In fact it was the weather’s effect on the tides that interested him, because tides mattered to the building. Beyond that he didn’t really care what the weather was doing.

But for a week or more he had been tracking a hurricane coming up the Atlantic, headed for Florida it looked like; but now what NOAA was showing caught his full attention. This Hurricane Fyodor had just in the last few hours veered hard northward, and now it looked like it was going to hit the New York area. Its whole run it had looked like it was heading for North Carolina at the very north end of its impact zone, but now it was trouble for sure. Hurricanes had struck New York several times in the past, but never since the Second Pulse.

Vlade had a page in his files for stormproofing the building, and he called it up on his main screen and alerted his team: all hands on deck! The to-do list was long and they would have to hurry. Not a drill, Vlade told his team. They had a couple of days at most. It was a lesson never to trust the NOAA modelers when it came to something this important, something he should have learned before. Their models had been getting really good, but strange things still happened.

He was leaving his office to get started on the stormproofing when he recalled that Amelia Black was out there in the air somewhere nearby, and Idelba was on her barge off Coney Island. Big exposure for both of them.

He stopped to call them.

“Idelba, where are you?”

“On the Sisyphus, where else?”

“And where is your fine seacraft?”

She snorted. “In the Narrows, on my way in.”

“Ah, good. You saw the storm?”

“Yep. Looks bad, eh?”

“Really bad. Where are you going to go?”

“I’m not sure. I usually pull the barge into Brooklyn and stash it in the Gowanus, but I don’t know. The big warehouse on its south side melted, and that was my windbreak.”

“Do you want to come in here?”

“The barge won’t fit.”

“Maybe you could leave the barge in the Gowanus and come over here in the tug.”

“What makes you think your old pile will protect my tug?”

“We’ll be fine. Put it between us and the North building, like you did before. It’s kind of a private alley for us, and you’d be well protected from the south.”

“Okay. Maybe we’ll do that. Thanks.”

“Be quick as you can. You don’t want to be out when the wind hits.”

“Duh.”

So that could be checked off. Now Amelia.

“Hey Vlade, what’s up?”

“Amelia, where are you?”

“I’m up above Asbury Park Marsh.”

“Have you looked at the weather?”

“What, it’s beautiful. A bit hot and muggy. And visibility is down for optimum filming, but we’re following a pack of wolves who are trying to—”

“Amelia, how far can you see south?”

“Maybe twenty miles? I’m at five hundred feet.”

“Do you watch the weather screens?”

“Sure, but what—oh. Oh! Okay, wow. I see what you mean.”

“What was your producer thinking?”

“I didn’t tell them what I was up to, I’m just out here fooling around.”

“How fast can you get back here?”

“Well, maybe three or four hours? Why, do you think—”

“Yes I think! Start now, and hurry! Go full speed! Otherwise you’re going to be spending the night in Montreal. As a best case.”

“Okay. As soon as these wolves catch the turkeys.”

“Amelia!”

“Okay!”

So, maybe that was done. Vlade shook his head. Time to attend to the building. This stone wife of his would never talk back to him, but it had actions and reactions that resembled sulking, or grooving, or all kinds of moods. Now the building was quiet in the heat, and seemed tense. He growled and got going.

The Met was now around 230 years old, although to Vlade this meant little. The cathedrals of Europe were a thousand years old, the Acropolis was twenty-six hundred years old, the pyramids four thousand years old, and so on. Age was not a factor when it came to structural integrity. That was a matter first of design, second of materials. In both cases the Met had been fortunate. Vlade had no fear that anything could bring the tower down, it was foursquare and massively reinforced. Unlike the Chopsticks, the ridiculous glass splinters immediately to the south of them. Indeed if either of those stupid toothpicks fell north they could wreck the Met too, a thought that gave Vlade the creeps. Hopefully if they fell it would be in some other direction, although if they fell west they would crush the Flatiron, a building everyone around the bacino loved, though Vlade was glad he wasn’t its super; all those nonsquared walls were a pain, as Ettore was always saying, especially the narrow point at the north, where dogs had to wag their tails up and down, as Ettore had it. On the other hand, if the Chopsticks fell northwest they would crush across the square itself, cutting their little basin in half with a great mass of crap. Only if they fell east or south would they be no problem for the Madison Square group, although no doubt the damage in the fall zone would be severe. Alas, one had to hope they would keep standing.

He stood on the farm floor, looking south between the splinters. Wind was already pouring through the farm and flailing the green leaves of the crops. The corn would soon lodge, and Heloise and Manuel and other farmers were busy putting up storm shutters across the south side’s open windows. But these of course were vulnerable to lodging themselves.

“People!” Vlade said to them peremptorily. “This is a hurricane coming. A big one. Winds well over a hundred miles an hour.”

“So what do we do?”

“We have to storm-shutter all four sides. Otherwise we’ll get vacuumed. We should strengthen the shutters from behind too. We’ve got today to do it, looks like from the forecast.”

Heloise said, “We’ve only got enough shutters for two sides, maybe three.”

Vlade frowned. “Let’s do the south, east, and west walls.”

They got to work shuttering the farm’s tall open arches. This was no easy task, and few of them had ever done it, so Vlade had to educate people to the system. The panels were like greenhouse windows, translucent rather than transparent, and made of graphene layers such that they were extremely strong and light. While they were screwing these in place he kept looking south to see if he could see the storm, and talking on the wrist to the rest of his crew, all working hard on other chores. Around him he could see that all the skyscrapers in the city had crews engaged in similar work. It seemed like the skybridges were going to be vulnerable. The bridges were strong, but their attachments to their buildings would be tested. Probably a lot of docks were going to be torn off too.

With the farm shuttered, he attended to the strong possibility they were going to lose power. Their batteries were charged, generator fuel topped up, the photovoltaic sheathing and paint on the building as clean as it could be, and the storm would presumably wash it even cleaner. So even at the height of the storm the building itself would provide some power, as would the tide turbines down at the waterline. All good, but not enough. So Vlade joined a conference call with the local gridmaster, who was coordinating plans for various flex contingencies across the board, from total retention to complete loss, with the latter possibility taking up most of the talk. Who had what if they were the sole generators? Did anyone have enough to shove some juice back to the local node at the Twenty-ninth and Park station, which would then spread it around to those in need?

Well, not really. The worst-case scenario was every building fending for itself in a total loss, after the juice from the local station was drained. Hopefully that wouldn’t happen, or wouldn’t last for long. Every building was semi-self-sufficient, at least in theory, but it was surprising how short a time they could go without extra power. Take the stairs, eat cold food, light candles, sure, but what about sewage? What about potable water? Their photovoltaic power would have to be devoted to those functions, and maybe to one elevator.

But these were the concerns of people in a strong building, rated 80 or above in the self-sufficiency scales. The neighborhood was good in that regard; most buildings around Madison Square, and in the LMMAS more generally, were strong. But not all of them, and there were many other neighborhoods much weaker than theirs. And when push came to shove, the people in wrecked buildings were going to have to be taken care of, if they didn’t want hundreds of bodies fouling the canals. To put it at its most practical level. Vlade didn’t say that out loud, but other supers did; this was New York, after all. “If you die your body rots in my water supply, so get a fucking grip!”

This was a direct quote. He didn’t want to know who said it. Could have been anybody. He had already thought it. Everybody had.

Nothing to do but take care of your own part of the problem. As someone else had pointed out to that speaker. As in, “Mind your own business, fuckhead.”

A call came in: “Vlade, it’s Amelia.”

He was on the pigs’ floor above the farm; it was windy, the sky to the south a weird green, a green infused with black. He looked out a window and scanned the horizon to the southwest, saw nothing. Visibility was poor, a kind of pulsing murk. All air traffic had disappeared from the sky.

“Where are you?” he said.

“I’m outside the Narrows, over Staten Island.”

He peered that direction, saw nothing. “Why so slow?”

“I’ve been going as fast as I can! But now I can’t get any eastness, the wind is too strong from that way.”

“Damn it Amelia, this is going to be big, do you understand?”

“Of course I do, I can see it! I’m in it already!”

“Shit. Okay then, run north ahead of it. Don’t try to come here. Run north.”

“But it’s so windy!”

“Yeah. So if you can get down before it’s blowing too hard, get down. Anywhere. If the landing situation doesn’t look good, just let it run you north until it blows out. Don’t try to fight it. In fact, go as high as you can. Get above the turbulence, and you can just ride it out.”

“But I don’t want a ride!”

“Doesn’t matter what you want now, gal. You put yourself in this situation. At least you don’t have any bears on board. Or do you?”

“Vlade!”

“Don’t Vlade me! Deal!”

He got back to the building prep. Water tanks full, new lifestraw filters at their bottoms. They could keep water quality for a while with just rain and a gravity feed. Sewage tanks empty. Batteries charged, pantries stocked or at least not empty. Candles and lanterns. Test the generators, check fuel supplies. Get all the boats inside and racked. Empty the dock, and as far as securing the dock, well, shit. He joined the other Madison supers over on the Flatiron dock to talk it over. They were mostly in agreement: the docks were fucked. Best chance would be to tie them to buildings with hawsers that would give them a little bit more play than usual, but not too much. Hope they would just bounce on the waves and hold together. The supers on the north side of the bacino were aware that they were at the fetch of their little rectangular basin, so that their docks might serve as cushions for their buildings, take some hits from detritus—or they might turn into battering rams hammering the south exposures. Nothing to be done about that but see what happened.

The satellite photos showed that the leading edge of Hurricane Fyodor was eighteen miles south of New York.

“Let’s get everything we can off the farm floor,” Vlade said to his team. “Shutters or not. Move the plant boxes into the big elevators if they’ll fit. Leave them in the hallways downstairs. Also all the hydroponics.”

Idelba and her tug arrived, which was a relief, and when they were tied off on Twenty-fourth between the Met and North, he put her crew to work helping on the farm floor. He had tried to keep the plant boxes modular there, mostly for watering purposes, but now it turned out useful in another way, as they could detach square pot after square pot and fit them in the freight elevator. The hotellos were easy, they were basically tents, meant to move. The occupants were harder to move than the hotellos. “Where will we go? Where will we go?”

“Shut up and move. We’ll figure it out later. Go to the dining hall for now. Put your stuff here by the elevators.” The halls on the floors below were looking like a garden shop going-out-of-business sale, unexpected and unhappy. “Fuck,” Vlade kept saying. “Clean this shit up, come on, make sure there’s a throughway, what do you think?”

He ran into Idelba down at his office, when he was passing through to check the weather screen and his to-do lists.

“So where are those two kids?” Idelba asked.

Vlade felt his stomach drop. “Stefan and Roberto?”

“No, those other kids you take care of.”

“Fuck that, how should I know?”

She regarded him.

“I don’t know!” he said. “I figured they were in the building, or the neighborhood. They take care of themselves, they’re always around.”

“Except when they’re not.”

Vlade called their wristpad and got no answer. He and Idelba went to the dining hall and asked Hexter about them. Hexter was looking worried. “I don’t know, they aren’t answering their wrist!” he said. “They were going to go up to the Bronx and look for Melville’s grave, and they were supposed to be back by now.”

The three of them looked at each other.

“They’ll be okay,” Idelba said. “They’ll hunker down somewhere. They’re not stupid.”

“Don’t they have wristpads?”

“They have one, but they keep taking it off when they go do things, because they keep wrecking it, and also we’ve been using it to monitor them.”

“Shit.”

A few moments of grim silence, and then they moved on to the chores at hand, leaving Hexter to call Edgardo and some other acquaintances to see if they had seen the boys.

Vlade went back up to the top of the building and made sure everything under the cupola was secured, feeling as grim as Quasimodo. The boys were missing, and Amelia was flying the storm in a blimp. Probably they would be okay, but they were exposed in a way they wouldn’t be if they were here. He would so much rather have had them here. The building was bombproof, the building would endure, even if the farm floor got deshuttered and stripped clean as a whistle. There was nowhere else he was as sure about, not in the whole great bay, not in the whole world. The building would be fine. But some of his people weren’t there.

Idelba could read him well enough to see this when he got back down to his office, and she paused to touch his arm. “It’s okay,” she said. “They’ll be okay.”

He nodded heavily. They both knew it wasn’t always true.

Then the day got very dark, the sky black, the air under it green. Vlade took the elevator back up to the cupola, then climbed the spiral stairs to the blimp room, where narrow windows gave a view from as high as the building afforded. This got him just above the top of the Chopsticks, which was pleasing. The Freedom Tower and the Empire State poked above the general murk of the lower city. Farther north the uptown superscrapers had seemingly coalesced into a single Gothic spire, elongated surreally. Hoboken and Brooklyn Heights were similarly dark and spiky.

The rain was coming down now out of dark gray clouds, falling so hard it covered the windows with a wavery sheet of water that sometimes allowed him to see the city fairly well. The Empire State looked like he had never seen it before, he even had trouble comprehending the sight: so much rain was hitting its south side that it had become an immense waterfall dropping right out of the clouds. The thickest part of this fall of white water poured down the vertical inset that scored the middle of the tower’s south side, but really the entire south surface was white water, no building visible at all except the very top of the spire. “Wow!” Vlade shouted. “Holy God!” He wished there were someone there with him to witness it, and he even called Idelba to tell her to come up, but she was busy down below with something.

Now the wind became both a low ripping roar and a high keening, blended across the octaves to make a curdling superhuman shriek. The East River was whitecapped, and he could now see the Hudson in a way that he usually couldn’t from up here, because it too was white. Both appeared to be running hard north, like rapids. Below him he could see the western half of the bacino, and it too was whitecapped, the waves rolling south to north and leaving trails of white bubbles on black water. The dock at the northwest corner was slamming up against its restraints over and over, jerking at its high point like some mad dog rushing against its leash. Something in that system would break soon. The sight of it confirmed to him that many of the docks on the Hudson would be getting torn off. The wind was now so strong it was wiping his windows clean and giving him brief clear views of the city, which blurred over and over as freshets spewed down. Really the south side of the Empire State had to be seen to be believed, and even then it was unbelievable. He wished that the super there would defy the storm with the building’s light show; under the wall of water it would look crazy. Then it occurred to him that the Thirty-third Street canal under the Empire State must be like the bottom of Niagara Falls. He couldn’t see a single boat or ship anywhere. Which made sense and was good, but it looked weird too. End of the world: New York empty, abandoned to the elements, which were now howling in triumph at their victory.

Then the lights in the cupola flickered and went out, and he cursed and clicked his wristpad to the building’s control center. Nothing came up until the generators kicked in, which they were programmed to do automatically. Then the lights came back on. Even so, it would be imprudent to get in an elevator now. So he cursed again and began the long painful task of descending the stairs. When he got down the tight spiral staircases of the cupola to the real stairwell behind the elevator, the generators seemed to be working well, everything was still lit, and he was tempted to take the elevator to save time and his knees. But it would be a disaster to get caught in a stuck elevator, so he thumped down methodically.

Forty painful stories later he was down in the control room, and there everything was okay, except for two problems: their generators could only run for about three days before they would have used up their fuel; and the storm surge pouring in the Narrows, which the tide screen showed was already an astonishing ten feet above the normal high tide, would, if it continued very long, raise sea level in the city to the point where their boathouse room would be flooded above the level of its ceiling. The water would therefore ascend the open stairs to the floor above, where many of the building’s working rooms were; this was where one had to locate some of the building’s functions for them to operate most efficiently.

There was no way to fully close the boathouse off from the bacino itself, which was something Vlade promised himself to change in the future. So water would get in from the canal under its door to the water inside, and the boathouse would fill precisely as high as the storm surge went.

“We’ll have to close off the boathouse here on the inside, and just let the water fill it all the way to its top,” he said to Su and the others in the control room. Su was already packing up stuff in the drawers.

Closing off the boathouse would save them from anything but leaky seals, which they could deal with. The boats in the boathouse would be lifted and knocked around a bit, mostly into each other. If it was an orderly rise of water, perhaps it wouldn’t wreak too much damage.

Then, power. He went down the list and shut off power to everything but the absolute necessities, after informing everyone in the building over the intercom: “People, we’re cutting power to everything but essential services, to save fuel. Seems like the grid might be out for a while.”

This cut their power use to about thirteen percent of normal, which was great. And he could get on the wrist and see what the local power plant was dealing with. It was a hardened system, a flexible grid; a lot of power was generated by the buildings themselves, and they all poured whatever extra they had into the local plant, which then banked it with flywheels and hydro and batteries, and later on could put some back out to those who called for it. Very good as such, although clearly this was going to test the system hard. But at least no part of it was located in basements anymore!

He had turned off most of the building’s heat and air-conditioning and lighting, and so people began to congregate in the dining hall and common floor. Of course it was possible to stay in one’s rooms and watch the storm by lantern or candlelight, and a fair number of residents reported that they were doing that. But many came down to join the others on the common floor. It was a social thing, as everyone acknowledged: a party of sorts, or a taking of refuge. A danger to be endured together, a marvel to be marveled at. The dining room windows faced south and west, and water fell off the side of the building and obscured the view, and though it was nothing like as astonishing as the Empire State’s south face, it was still like being in a cave behind a waterfall. The roar of the wind and rain filled everything, and as people had to shout to be heard, they shouted all the more to surmount their own din, in the usual party style, until Vlade felt like it was time to get back to the relative quiet of the control room.

Here, however, it was disturbing in a different way; it was quiet, but strangely so, as the window between his office and the boathouse was looking like the side of an aquarium. The water level inside the boathouse was now fifteen feet higher than normal high tide. Vlade got next to the window and fearfully looked up; it was just possible to discern the water level, up there near the ceiling, crowded with the hulls of boats from the lowest two levels of his sling rafters, all banging around up there in the surface slop together. Not a happy sight, and if the door seals leaked too badly, his office would get flooded and impede the operation of the building. Already there was water seeping in under the door; he cursed at the sight and got to work sealing the door with a sealant foam he often used for just that purpose. It would clean up with a solvent later, and for now it would work well.

It was hard to imagine how the city would do with a storm surge this high. Sea level had been mostly stable for forty years, and although there were always neap tides and storm surges, everyone had gotten used to a watermark that was now being far exceeded. The damage would be huge. All those careful and difficult first-floor-off-the-water designs, the trickiest part of the Venicification of the city, would be wrecked. And every entrance to the submarine world would be overtopped as well, so that all that laborious aeration could be lost to flooding, a huge disaster. Hopefully the hatches, like big manhole covers on hinges, that had been installed at every opening would all be closed and working well. And there were internal bulkheads as well that might limit any floods that did occur. But it was a dangerous situation, and anyone still down there was going to be stuck for the duration of the surge. Well, possibly they could get to some of the submarine entries that were inside buildings. It would be interesting to hear the stories once it was all over.

For now, he was locked out of his boathouse, and if he had wanted to go out somewhere, which happily he didn’t, he would have had to use an inflatable and make some kind of emergency window-breaking egress. That was bizarre, nerve-racking—hopefully nothing worse than that.

The skybridge to North was in the lee of the Met, and it seemed like it was protected enough from the brunt of the wind to suffer no harm. This was a blessing, because every bridge that ripped out would tear a hole in the building it came out of, and that hole would then be injected with wind and water. He wanted to go back up to the tower’s cupola to see if he could tell how the skybridges were doing, but he felt it would be an indulgence, not to mention forty floors of stairs, both up and down. Possibly he should power up one elevator for those really in need. But first he should check on the skybridge to North, and North itself.

So he left Su in charge and told his group to call him if anything happened, and walked up the stairs to the sixth floor where the skybridge connected. It had a little entry chamber of its own, an airlock of sorts, great for keeping the building warm and dry. He opened the first door and the world roared. He felt a little scared to open the second door to the skybridge proper, though typically he regarded it as a kind of room of its own, skinny and long.

He opened the door and it got even louder. The noise, a kind of howl with a subsonic element, picked up the hair on the back of his neck. He spoke into his wrist to tell his people where he was going, and couldn’t hear himself. Hesitantly he stepped out onto the skybridge. Flailing rainwater obscured the views of the narrow canal between the two buildings, but he could see Idelba’s big tug below, still tied off to both buildings and looking good, though higher than he was used to, both because of the size of the tug and the height of the water. The black surface of the canal was chopped into a chaos of wave interference, the black water heavily scalloped by wind ruffles, the big scallops each scalloped themselves at smaller scales. Truly the water didn’t know where to go under the pressure of the blasts swirling back and forth over the canal; they were in a lee, so the main brunt of wind was baffled, but it was still strong. There were downdrafts that struck so hard they knocked spray off the canal into the air. He could feel the skybridge vibrating under him, though there was no rocking or swaying. It was well protected by the Met.

Inside North it was quieter. It wasn’t fronting the blast but rather taking sideslaps and vacuum suckings. The residents there were mostly gathered in their own common room and dining hall, and again it was dim through most of the building. North didn’t have a boathouse, so they didn’t have that problem. Their dock door was sealed shut. All seemed well. North’s original design as the foundation for a tower taller than the Empire State Building meant it was immensely strong. It would be fine.

Vlade recrossed the skybridge, pausing out in the middle to look around again. To the west he could see out into the bacino, and it was wild. The surface of the little rectangular lake was getting ripped away and flung whitely northward. It wasn’t possible to see the water surface itself, as the whiteness over it filled the air, but occasional glimpses confirmed that its level was far higher than normal, amazingly higher. Like the Third Pulse had come at last. The roar was immense. Feeling spooked, and awed, Vlade got back into the Met.

Now they were settling in with the idea that it was going to be a test of endurance between them and the storm. They had limited food, power, potable water, and sewage space. Food was the least self-sustaining, but they had a stock of dried and canned and frozen, and the PV power would keep their refrigerators going. They did have some resilience. And the storm could only go on for so long. Although the aftermath would be problematic. Vlade passed some time tapping out various scenarios on his spreadsheets, using Gantt programs to see how they might do. Well, it seemed they could go for a week at least. It would help if their local power station could send them some electricity. The node network for the power gridwork was robust. He began to check around. The Twenty-eighth power station was still connected to its clients in the neighborhood but not out to the big power plants north of the city. They were identifying the point of the break now and would get out and repair it when they could. Could be a while, they said. That was for sure!

The other buildings in the neighborhood were mostly okay, but one of the bishop skybridges between the Decker building and the New School had come down over Fifth and Fourteenth, and both buildings were now coping with open holes in their sides, just as Vlade had expected. That was apparently just one of about a dozen skybridges that had pulled out in lower Manhattan alone. Bishop bridges were doing worse than rook bridges; north-south rooks were doing worse than east-wests, because the wind was a bit more east than south. If they pulled out at one end but not the other, they fell into the building they were still connected to, breaking windows and so on. Windows were breaking frequently anyway, just by getting blown in or sucked out. The top of the Empire State had just a half hour earlier recorded a gust of 164 miles an hour; one of the superscrapers uptown with an “eye of the needle” near its top had reported winds of 190 miles per hour through the eye, which had been included in the building’s design precisely to reduce wind pressures against its uppermost surfaces. The average speed over Manhattan right now, NOAA said, was 130 miles per hour. “Incredible,” Vlade said when he saw that. As far as he knew he had never seen a wind over a hundred, and that too had been in a hurricane. He had been twenty-four at the time, and he and some friends had gone out into the wind to see what it felt like; this was on Long Island, and they had been blown flat onto the sand of Jones Beach and crawled around laughing their heads off, until his friend Oscar broke his wrist and then it had been less funny, but still, an adventure, a story to tell. But 130? 164? It was hard to believe.

Then they lost their cloud connection. This was like losing a sixth sense, one they used much more than smell or taste or touch. Now the locals were conversing by radio or wire connections. Some viewcams were broadcasting by radio too. Well, it was the same everywhere. Flayed water, whipped rain. There was one camera with a view of the Hudson that was astounding; waves were slamming into the big concrete dock at Chelsea, after which huge masses of water were shooting vertically into the air, the giant sheets then immediately thrown north. Docks and loose empty boats floated upstream, some boats foundering, others capsized, others battened down and looking fine, if doomed. Floating docks torn loose looked like lost barges or giant pallets. Vlade wondered how Brooklyn was doing but didn’t bother to look into it. Anything across the rivers was in a different world now. It seemed quite possible everything afloat in New York harbor would sink or get blown upriver. Idelba’s new beach on Coney Island would be well under the surge by now, so possibly the new sand was just down there waiting things out, but it also seemed possible that the sand had been churned by the breakers and cast far north into Brooklyn. Oh well. Not the worst of the damage by any means. Just another feature of the storm.

Idelba herself didn’t care. “So many animals are going to get killed,” she said. And of course that made them both think of Stefan and Roberto. They glanced at each other, or nearly, but said nothing.

Later when they were alone Vlade said, “I’d feel a lot better if I knew where they were.”

“I know. But they can find shelter. They know to do that.”

“If the surge doesn’t catch them off guard.”

“Most of the shelter they would take would be taller than that.”

This was not necessarily true. “Roberto is not too good at risk assessment,” he said.

Idelba said, “You have to hope a storm like this would put the fear of God in him.”

“Or that Stefan will stop him from doing anything too stupid.”

Idelba put a hand to his arm. Vlade sighed. Sixteen years since she had last touched him. This moment of the storm.

The hours passed, the storm kept howling. Vlade spent some time looking for ways to cut more power without making people uncomfortable. He walked the building a few times, and at sunset he stomped back up to the tower to have a look around. It was black up there; he had arrived too late, unless it had looked that way all afternoon, which was possible. The great city was now a mass of rectilinear shadows, enduring under the flail of rain and wind. The south side of the Empire State was no longer a single white waterfall, but it was still crazy-looking, with spray dashing down its central chute and then being blown up on gusts. The western sky was no lighter than the east; it looked like an hour after sunset, though it was actually an hour before. But day was done. It never had managed much on this day. Someone on the radio had said that sometime that night they would be passed over by the eye of the storm. That would be interesting to see from up here. If the eye passed over the center of New York harbor, the great bay and the eye of the storm might be about the same size. He wanted to come back up here to see if that happened. He wondered if he could power one elevator twice an hour, just to come up here and take looks. Would be nice not to hike the long haul up and down the stairs. Down was harder, or more painful. He was tempted just to lie down and sleep up here. All of a sudden he was very, very tired.

But Idelba came up and got him, and walked him back down to the office, and she slept on the couch there while he crashed in his room. For which he was grateful. Sixteen years, he thought as he fell asleep. Maybe seventeen now.

The center of the hurricane passed in the night, and there was the classic lull that occurred at the eye of the storm, audible even from Vlade’s bed, in the negative sense that the background roar went away for a while. Barometer reading crazy low, it bottomed out on Vlade’s barometer at 25.9. Storm surge possibly rose a bit in the eye, but no way to tell what was causing what.

In the night the clouds came back, and at dawn NOAA said the other side of the hurricane would be hitting soon. Wind would now come from the southwest and would be strongest at the start, when the eyewall passed over them. So Vlade and Idelba got up and climbed the stairs to the tower again to have a look.

At sunrise the sun blazed in a crack between Earth and cloud, looking like an atomic bomb. Then it rose behind the mass of low cloud, and the day went as dark as the day before. Winds quickly grew ferocious, this time coming in from over the Hudson. The change seemed to be some kind of last straw, because buildings all over lower Manhattan began to fall into the canals. Radio reports came in of people taking refuge in skybridges, rafts, life jackets—huddling on exposed wreckage, or nearby rooftops—swimming to refuge—drowning.

“Damn,” Idelba said, listening to a Coast Guard channel. “We’ve got to do something.”

Vlade, focused on the problems of keeping the Met secure, was shocked at the notion that anything could be done. “Like what?”

“We could take the tug out into the canals and bring people to hospitals or something. Either around here or up to Central Park.”

“Shit, Idelba. It’s crazy out there.”

“I know, but the tug is a brick. Even if it sank it would still be sticking up out of these canals.”

“Not in this surge.”

“Well, it won’t sink. And if we could keep it centered in the canals, we could move a lot of people. Just run around like a giant vapo.”

Vlade sighed. He knew Idelba would not let go of an idea once she had it. “Let’s get your guys. Are you sure they’ll go for it?”

“Hell yeah.”

So they rousted Thabo and Abdul, who said they had already been wondering when Idelba was going to think of this. Then they went down to the utility door under the skybridge to North, where they could get out just above the storm surge, still fifteen or twenty feet above the normal high tide. Idelba and her team hauled on the westernmost hawsers until the tug was angled in the canal, and then they could jump down onto its bow and go to its bridge.

Even that minute of exposure soaked them despite their rain gear, and the noise out in the open air was simply stupendous. They couldn’t hear themselves even when shouting in each other’s ears, until they had clawed their way up to the bridge and gotten inside. Even opening and closing the bridge’s door was a terrifying endeavor, only possible because they were between the two big buildings. Once inside and with the door closed, shouting worked again. Thabo turned the motors on, and they felt the vibration of them without being able to hear them.

So there they were, out in the storm. But navigating something as wide and long as Idelba’s tug through the canals was very difficult. The only thing that made it possible was that there were multiple motors and props at both ends of the beast, and rudders too, which allowed them to push hard in all directions, from both ends of the tug. Whether these would be enough to counteract the wind and waves, they would only find out by trying.

They motored into the empty Madison bacino, then turned south with a full effort from Idelba and her guys all working different motors and rudders, shouting at each other in Berber and just barely getting the tug pointed south. The waves shoved them north and their stern would have rammed the docks at the north end of the bacino, but those docks were no longer there. Seemed it was basically a south wind, now that they were out on the canals.

Heading straight into the wind was easier than turning in it, and they got down the basin and turned left again, into Twenty-third canal headed east, all at a speed of no greater than five miles an hour.

They had two things going for them in the city, counterintuitive though both seemed to Vlade: the canals were so narrow and shallow that the water in them could only become a chaos of blown spray and froth, without high waves; in effect the waves were being blown off or smashed flat. Then also, what current there was got channelized by the canals and ran as straight as the Manhattan grid itself. The avenues they crossed had a hard flow from the south; the east-west streets were flowing from the west, or were simply balked and swirling. It was something they could deal with.

The tug moved through all this wild water and wind like some kind of hippo or brontosaurus, breasting the shredded water under it without noticeable rocking. Wind affected it more than water, but while they were moving east or west the buildings buffered the wind, and when they were moving south and north they were headed either directly into it or directly away from it. So they were only shoved hard in ways that gave them trouble when they were turning in the intersections. Each turn was an experiment and an exercise in screaming Berber. It took all the power of the tug’s side jets to keep the bow from being shoved north when they nosed out into an avenue canal; they had to max the bow jets and aft jets both, in opposite directions, to get the tug to turn. They banged a few buildings with their sides, sometimes hard, but when that happened the tug then rode its own backwash out toward the middle of the canal, and on they went.

Idelba said to Vlade, “Can you go out and help get people on board?”

Vlade nodded, took a deep breath, and left the bridge, using the door on its north side. Immediately he was drenched and could hear nothing but the storm. He couldn’t hear himself think; finally that old saying was really true. So he stopped trying to think, but before he gave up, he stepped into a harness Idelba passed out to him, and buckled it tight around his waist. The harness was carabinered and knotted to a rope that was tied to an eye at the front of the wheelhouse, so he was now attached to the tug like a climber to a belay, or a steeplejack to a tower.

As they came into the East Village, they saw as they had not before that the storm was simply devastating the city. The Wall Street skyscrapers looked okay, and perhaps they even provided some windbreak to the lower neighborhoods immediately north of them, but between the veering winds and the storm surge, the smaller and older buildings north and east of downtown were being overwhelmed. It was as they had heard over the radio, and seen when the cloud was up: buildings were falling down.

So people were desperate. They waved to Vlade from broken windows or even lying flat on rooftops, and as the tug motored down Second, Vlade indicated left or right, and Idelba and her guys got the tug over next to the buildings, and people jumped onto the tug, sometimes dropping ten feet or more, which of course injured many of them. Often they climbed up the tug’s side ladders from broken windows the tug passed, or from improvised rafts blown downwind onto them.

All of the refugees from the storm were soaked and chilled, and many bloodied. There were obvious broken bones, and many cuts and bruises. Lots of people in shock. It had been a bad night, and yesterday worse, and now the tug represented the first chance these people had seen to get to shelter.

The tug had an open deck, but Vlade got people tucked under the high taffrails and sent the worst into the cabins under the bridge, although he didn’t like opening those doors. After a while he ran up to the bridge and yanked the lee door open and crashed back into the big glass-walled room.

“The nearest hospital is Bellevue,” he shouted to Idelba with unnecessary volume.

“What about up to Central Park?”

“No! It won’t be possible to land people there, the street docks will be wrecked.”

“Where to then?”

“Bellevue hospital is at Twenty-sixth and First,” Vlade said.

“Bellevue? Isn’t that a mental hospital?”

“Well, NYU hospital is at Thirty-second and Park.”

“Let’s go there.”

“For people who aren’t hurt, we can just take them back to the Met, or any solid building that will take them. We can do a rectangle like a vapo.”

“Okay.”

Vlade leaped back out into the onslaught. In only ten blocks of going east on Houston they had picked up a couple hundred people, now filling the deck of the tug, seated and huddled together. Idelba and her guys managed a particularly difficult left turn at Houston and C, extremely exposed, the three of them working the props desperately to keep turning without getting blown too far across the Hamilton Fish bacino. Having managed that, they rode the wind and canal current up C to Fourteenth, fought through the left turn there and headed into the wind to Park, then turned right up Park and rumbled up to Thirty-second, where the NYU hospital, looking as crowded as their tug, took in all their wounded people through a north-side window on the fourth floor, broken open for that purpose, as it was now the current water level, and there was no other way to get people in. The surge was a big problem, and a big part of every other problem. It was indeed a vision of what a Third Pulse would do, or a nightmare flashback to half a century before. This was what it must have been like: the ground floor underwater, that entire part of the built environment devastated, after which a desperate improvisation to make use of the higher floors.

Injured passengers unloaded, they motored on along Thirty-second to Madison and another wicked left turn there, and after that pushed on in a tough but steady slog directly upwind. Back down to their building, where they could make an easier left turn on Twenty-fourth, and stop right under the utility door they had used to get on the barge. Vlade had called ahead, and many of the Met’s residents were there to help the remaining passengers into the building. When the Sisyphus was empty Idelba started out into the storm again.

“We’ll run out of fuel in about five runs,” she shouted to Vlade when he came into the bridge.

Their first circuit had taken about three hours, so fuel was a problem for the next day, it seemed. Vlade wondered if any fuel depots would still be operating. What would people do without fuel? Batteries couldn’t be recharged with the power down.

Into the wreckage of Stuyvesant. They couldn’t penetrate Peter Cooper Village, too many of the old towers had fallen into the narrow canals around them. Even out in the largest canals, they often ground onto submerged piles of something and had to back off and try a different way. Any way would do, as everywhere there were people desperate to be rescued; they merely made a single rectangular circuit and they were full again.

The flotsam and jetsam shoving around on the dirty flying foam of the canals now included dead bodies, some of people but mostly animals: raccoons, coyotes, deer, porcupines, possums. Lower Manhattan had been a lively habitat.

“Damn, this is just like that overtopping of Bjarke’s Wall that Hexter told us about,” Vlade said to no one, looking up and down the whitewater canals. “The city’s getting trashed!”

He was on the bridge at this point, but still no one heard him, not even he himself. Or if they did they didn’t bother to respond. Idelba was focused on piloting, and on the buildings they were passing. What she saw on her sonar and radar of the canal bottoms was more important to her than any floating wreckage.

“Save what we can,” she said a while later, indicating she had heard him after all. “They’ll sort it out later.”

Vlade could only nod and go back outside into the storm to help people get over the side of the tug, and into the cabins if they were hurt.

While he was down there on the bow deck, holding on hard, helping haul people in from windows they passed, he spotted two men swimming together, to their right against the buildings. By standing on an awning frame they could just make it high enough for Vlade to help boost them up and over the side. They saw this and got on the awning. The tug was headed west on Twenty-ninth, and about to turn south on Lex, so Idelba was running as far to the right as she could already, to make more room to fight through the left turn. Just as Vlade was leaning down to grab the hands of the reaching men, a big wave caught the tug from the left, possibly a surge from a fallen building, anyway massive; it cast the tug right into the building at the corner, crushing the two men between tug and wall with a palpable thump. The tug held there against the wall, and Vlade, who had jerked up just in time to get clear of the collision himself, looked up at Idelba and screamed at her to turn left, waving his arms desperately. He saw through the bridge’s windshield that she had seen what had happened and was spinning the wheel and gunning the jets to turn left. He could feel the vibration of the motors under him, fighting the wind.

Finally the tug heaved away from the wall, water sluicing into the growing gap between it and the building. Vlade looked down; the two men were gone. He was startled not to see their crushed bodies floating on the water, but no, nothing. Only two streaks of blood on the wall of the building, right above the slapping waves. It occurred to him that bodies with the air squashed out of their lungs might have lost enough buoyancy to sink like stones. Apparently so. Anyway there was no sign of them. Just those smears of blood.

He twisted away and leaned over the bow, feeling sick. When he had mastered his features he turned and looked up at Idelba. She was staring down at him with a horrified look, gesturing to ask what was up, if she should stop the tug. He shook his head, pointed south. “Go!” he shouted, and waved at her to make the left turn and head down Lex. But what about those men? she indicated, pointing and asking something. He shook his head again. No one to save. When Idelba understood him her face contorted and she looked away. A few seconds later the tug’s motors kicked in, and it struggled through the left turn onto Lex and ground its way south into the wind and waves. Idelba stared downtown, her face like a mask.

Through the rest of that day they managed three more circuits. Then darkness fell, and they agreed it was too dangerous to be out and about. But then, as they were headed for the Met, the wind subsided to a mere gale, maybe thirty miles an hour, Vlade guessed; so Idelba kept them going, the tug’s super-powerful night lights glazing the immediate vicinity like a welder’s torch. By their lurid illumination they made two more circuits, after which they were out of fuel. Never did the number of people needing rescue lessen. They dropped off the injured at NYU hospital until it was bursting at the seams, then they were directed to the Tisch hospital on First, and on the circuit after that, to Bellevue. That was good in some ways, as it made for a shorter run and saved fuel and time.

By the time they called it quits they had put a couple thousand people into the hospitals, Vlade reckoned, and another thousand into the Met. There was room in the building for that many people, of course, as long as they didn’t have to have actual beds.

And on that night a dry floor was enough. Residents brought down extra blankets and did what they could. For sure their food and water supplies would now quickly run out, but that was going to be true everywhere, so there was nothing to do but give people shelter and see what happened. It was said that Central Park was being used as a refugee camp, that many people now homeless were taking refuge in their big park. It was a case of finding ground higher than the surge, and waiting out the storm.

“Damn, I wish I knew where those boys were,” Vlade said as he was falling asleep on his bed, Idelba out on the couch in his office. He had seldom been more tired, and as far as he could tell, Idelba had fallen asleep the moment she hit the couch, wet hair and all.

“They’ll be okay,” she said dully. And then Vlade was out.

The next day it was still windy and raining hard, sometimes pelting down, but all within the norms of an ordinary summer storm—drenching, cool, blustery—but compared to the two days before, not very dangerous, and much better lit. White gray rather than black gray. Also the tide, though the dawn began with a high tide, was no longer a storm surge. It was down to only a couple feet higher than an ordinary high tide. Now on the buildings around Madison Square there was a faint bathtub ring of leaves and plastered gunk much higher than the usual high tide mark. The surge had apparently already poured back out the Narrows and through Hell Gate into the Sound. It had to have been one hell of an ebb run.

Vlade could now get back into his boathouse, and so he unsealed the door to it and began to sort out the confusion created by having all the boats floated up into each other, and in some cases crushed a bit against the ceiling. Many of them were internally flooded by this, but oh well. Could be pumped out and dried out.

Getting the boathouse sorted took half the day, and after that he could go out in the Met runabout and inspect the building and the neighborhood. The canals were everywhere filled with flotsam and jetsam, pieces of the city knocked loose and floating around. People were back out on the water, although the vapos were not running yet. Police cruisers zipped around ordering people out of their way, stopping to collect floating bodies, animal or human. The health challenges were going to be severe, Vlade saw; it was already warm again, and cholera was all too likely. The freshets of rain that came that day were a good thing in that sense. The longer it was before the sun hit the water and began to cook the wreckage, the better.

Idelba’s tug now served as a good passenger ferry up Park Avenue to Central Park, where there were some new jury-rigged docks, very busy with lines of waiting boats, most of them unloading people from downtown. The glimpses into Central Park that they got before they returned down Park were shocking; it looked like all the trees in the park were down. Which seemed all too possible, and at the moment was not their problem, but it made an awful sight. They returned to the Met and took a last load of refugees out of the building, ignoring the occasional protester, telling them the building was maxed and more than maxed, and Central Park was now becoming the better place for them to get shelter and refugee status. “Also, we’re out of food,” Vlade told them, which was close enough to true to allow him to say it. And it worked to get people to leave.

Inspector Gen had been out working since the storm began, but she had come back home the night before on a police cruiser, to change clothes and catch a couple of hours of sleep. Now she asked for a ride up to Central Park, where her people said she was needed again.

“I believe it,” Idelba said. “Won’t be long before New Yorkers start to riot on you, right?”

“So far so good,” the inspector said.

“Well, but it’s still raining. They can’t get out to protest yet. When it stops raining they will.”

“Probably so. But so far so good.”

Vlade had never seen the inspector look as tired as she did now, and this was just the start of it. What was she, forty-five? Fifty? Around the same age as him, he thought. Police work was tough, even on inspectors. “You’d better pace yourself,” he said to her. “This is going to be a long haul.”

She nodded. “How did the building do?”

“Held up fine,” Vlade said. “I haven’t had a chance to check it all out yet, but I didn’t see anything horribly wrong either.”

“Did the farm shutters hold?”

“Jesus!” Vlade said. “I don’t even know.”

When they dropped off the inspector and the last load of their building’s refugees, some of whom were grateful but most of whom were already focused on their next problem, they turned around and headed back down to the building. When Idelba dropped him off he hiked up the stairs as fast as he could, and got to the farm floor huffing and puffing, and shoved the door out to have a look.

“Ah shit!”

The farm floor was thrashed. Only a few storm shutters remained in place, ironically on the south wall; the rest were gone, a few remaining flat on the floor among fallen hydroponic lines, broken vegetables, tipped boxes, and so on. The massive steel posts at the four corners, and every twenty-five feet across the exterior walls, were revealed in all their strength; the central elevator core remained; aside from that, it was a wreck. The wooden boxes of soil that had been bolted down were still in place, but all the rest were tipped over or shoved across the floor to the north railing, their crops ripped out of them.

Luckily they had gotten about half the planter boxes inside the halls of the floor below, but aside from those, they would have to start over. Which, as it was already June 27, was bad news, in terms of food self-sufficiency. Not that they had ever been self-sufficient, the farm had always provided only a modest percentage of their food, from about fifteen percent in summer to five in winter; but this summer it was going to be much less than that.

Oh well! At least the building had held. And no one in it had died, as far as he knew. And the animal floor had held like every other floor but the farm, so their animals were okay. If Roberto and Stefan came back in safe and sound, all would be well. So the farm was a bit of a luxury problem.

Vlade stumped back down to the common room and shared the news. For a while he sat there, eating reheated stew and thinking things over. Then he sought out the young finance punk. The Garr.

“Hey, when the rain stops?” he said to him. “Would you take your hydrofoil out there and have a look for the boys?”

“What?” Franklin exclaimed. “They weren’t here?”

“No, they got caught out fooling around. And they left their wristpad behind so we couldn’t track them.”

“Brilliant.”

“Well, you know them. Anyway, Gordon Hexter says they were going up to the Bronx to see if they could steal Melville’s gravestone.”

“Fuck. The Bronx will be a mess.”

“As always. But if they hunkered down up there, they should be okay. I’m just worried about them, is all. They’re almost certain not to have taken any food or water with them. Or warm clothing, for that matter.”

“Fuck.”

“I know. Will you do it? I’d go but I’ve got to see to things here.”

“I’m busy too!” Franklin exclaimed. But then he saw Vlade’s look and said, “All right, all right, I’ll go have a look. Why break my streak with these guys?”

b) Inspector Gen

Gen got the call like every other police officer in the tri-state area: emergency, all hands on deck. In her case she was told to stay in her immediate vicinity during the storm itself, which she did. Then the day after the hurricane had passed she was directed by headquarters to Central Park, and she joined a big cruiser of water cops in a run up to the tide dock on Sixth.

The storm surge had washed right up into the southeast end of the park, they were told by the cruiser’s pilot, such that waves had been crashing into the pond and overrunning the Wollman ice skating rink. Farther west the Sixth Avenue dock, a long thing that floated or lay on the avenue as the tides dictated, had had to be recovered and flipped back right side up before it could be redeployed down Sixth again, where it went back to rising and falling at the high end of the intertidal. Again boats were docking at its south end and unloading people and goods to move north over the dock to dry land. The need for it was so great that the cruiser carrying Gen had to wait its turn, and then they all disembarked in a hurry.

Walking up into Central Park, Gen was amazed by what she saw. First the crowd: the park was packed with people, it was like nothing she had seen before. Second, they were all standing in some kind of open field. The trees were gone. Not gone, exactly, but down. All down. Most had been knocked down roughly northward, either broken off at the trunk or tipped out of the ground, with their roots torn up and the muddy root balls facing south like splayed hands. Some trunks were still standing but were broken at their tops, snapped or splintered off at some height or other, relieving the pressure of the wind and allowing the trunks to stay standing, like useless poles among their fallen fellows.

The devastation of the trees made the park a less than satisfactory refuge, but it was what they had, so people were there. Some part of the crowd, uninjured and looking for things to do, had begun to collect broken branches and pile them into big stacks of broken wood. The smell of torn leaves and splintered wood filled the humid air. This cleanup was itself a dangerous business, resulting in new injuries, because the ground was saturated, and the downed trees and fallen branches were heavy. Gen listened to the police officers already on hand and took their point: the first order of business was to get the crowds who were doing cleanup work to consider their own safety and desist. The groups were self-organized, however, and full of energy, having survived the storm and the devastation of their park. They did not necessarily take kindly to police trying to quell or even organize their activities. It was a New York crowd, and so it took diplomacy to walk around asking people not to be a danger to themselves.

“We’ve had enough injuries already,” Gen said over and over. “Please don’t add more now.”

Then she would either put her shoulder under a branch, if there was a need and some room for her, or move on to the next cluster of workers to discuss it with them, or crouch with sitting survivors to ask how people were.

It was heartening to see people mostly calm and semiorganized. She had heard of it, she had seen it at smaller scales from time to time, but never had she seen anything like this, where it looked like the entire population of the city had flooded into Central Park. It meant that essential services were overwhelmed, no doubt about it. Nowhere near enough water, toilets, food. Lines for park toilets were long, and the sewers were going to be overwhelmed, the surge having backed them up anyway. The park itself would become the toilet. Problems were going to rapidly mount, for a week at least and probably longer, depending on how relief efforts went.

Beyond that obvious set of problems, it was a matter of recovering from seeing the park so devastated. The rest of the city must be similarly thrashed, but to see not a leaf left on a standing tree anywhere—to see every single tree broken or down—it was shocking. They were going to have to start from scratch when it came to restoring the place. In the meantime it looked like a bomb had gone off somewhere to the south, some kind of concussive blast knocking everything down without a fire.

Many wild animals were dead, and their bodies would have to be disposed of as soon as possible. For now they were being piled beside some of the giant piles of broken branches. Then also injured people kept arriving, and these were helped or carried to the aid stations. Certainly there was lots of help for stretcher carries. People were milling about looking for ways to be a help. But what about water? What about toilets? What about food?

Gen got on the wrist with headquarters and made the same reports and requests as everyone else, judging by the responses she got. “We know,” they kept saying.

“Are the feds coming?” Gen asked.

“They say they are.”

Gen went over to the Wollman ice rink, where it seemed like they should be able to clear an area big enough for even the largest helicopters to land. It had indeed been flooded by the surge, which was amazing, but now the waters had receded and it was left muddy, with a shallow pool filling the rink area. Actually with the trees gone, helos could land anywhere once an area was cleared. Airships could tie off on the towers at Columbus Circle, and indeed all around the park. A lot of airship traffic could be accommodated, which was good, because all the bridges to the island were out of commission. The George Washington Bridge had survived, but the causeway to the west of it crossing the Meadowlands bay had been flooded and was wrecked. For a while they were going to be a true island again.

Water would be okay, if they got a helicopter or two of lifestraws. These came in kitchen and personal sizes, and by using them they could drink and cook using the water taken from the park ponds, or even the rivers. Lifestraw filters were a wonder. Food was still cached in restaurants and stores and apartments around the city, presumably. They would need more, but drops could be made, and ferry trips, as to any other disaster site. Same with medical aid.

So in fact the hardest problem might be toilets. As she reported to headquarters. “We know,” they said.

As she wandered the park doing what she could, Gen started making lists in her head, redundant lists, as obviously the various emergency services already had them, but she couldn’t help herself. Beyond that she just helped people who asked for help. She answered questions, she took reports concerning some petty crimes—very few, she was pleased to note, and the complainants themselves often none too reliable, she judged. Mainly she helped by her presence to create the sense of an orderly space. Police were still walking the beat, protecting and serving where necessary. Would eat offered food. New York was still New York. But what a devastation! She saw face after face, distraught and red-eyed: here a young blond child, crying that she had lost her parents; here a heavyset Latino man, confused and maybe demented, mouth hanging open, startling blue eyes looking for something he could recognize; here a skinny black man with dreadlocks, holding one forearm with the other hand and grimacing; here a weasel-faced white youth, dancing in place and singing a song written on his wristpad. People were lost, had lost other people, were in shock. She had to go to that police officer’s place of dissociation, easy for her most of the time, a bit harder today, but it was a big place in her, and she was comfortable there. Every day in a police officer’s life was a succession of disasters, so now that the city had been crushed, it was like, Hey people, welcome to my world. I know this psychic space, let me guide you. Let me help you. It is possible to live here without freaking out, it’s possible to stay calm and cope. Believe me. Do it like me.

She slept at the precinct house at West Eighty-second, because it would have taken too much time to get back down to the Met, and she was beat. It was beginning to register that with the skybridge network in disarray, she was going to have to get used to getting around lower Manhattan on police cruisers, or the vapos when they started running again. The city felt bigger. She fell asleep on a bench and woke up before dawn, sore and cold. Looked out the door; it was predawn, but the rain had stopped. She went to the bathroom (which worked, she was pleased to see) and then walked outside and down into the park on the Sixty-fifth Street transverse. People were stretched out everywhere. On plastic bags, under blankets and sleeping bags, under the occasional tarp or tent, but mostly, exposed to the night. Luckily with the storm passed they were back to the usual steamy midsummer heat and humidity. That would make for problems of a different kind, but in terms of getting through the night it was a good thing. It was strange to see people sleeping outdoors on the ground together, their sleeping faces dim in the late moonlight. A vision from an earlier age.

Then the sun was up and people were sitting around smoky little fires, looking stunned and dirty. They were finding out that green wood didn’t burn well. It was against the law to have fires in the park, but Gen waved at them. Nature would put those fires out soon enough, or people with gas would get them going hot enough to burn something. Could cremate dead animals. People would be a danger to themselves.

Helicopters as big as tugboats began to chomp in and land near Wollman and on the meadows at the north end of the park. Blimps were now filling the sky, as usual but more than usual, either bringing relief or trying to get images for news programs, or both. Gen kept doing the work of a beat cop, and there were definitely more problems to conciliate, more petty crimes reported. They were shifting out of emergency mode into the phase of stupendous hassle, at which point people would get irritable, more prone to argument and complaint and fighting. This she had seen many times before, even with crowds leaving an entertainment event. People were now ready to leave this event too, getting anxious to leave, in fact, but they couldn’t; the show was still on, and that was just the kind of obstruction that set certain people off.

So she spent the day mediating, directing traffic, shooing away sightseers. “Go back uptown,” she suggested to people who looked like uptowners, identifiable by their fresh look. She hated looky-loos, but impersonally. In this case they were a sign that eventually the city would probably come through this all right. In the depth of the hurricane and the immediate aftermath this had seemed questionable, the storm a true crisis. Now it was becoming just another fucking disaster.

But it had to be gotten through, so she got through that day, and then another. At the end of that day she took a cruiser back down to the Met and collapsed. Vlade awarded her a shower. The day after that she was ordered back to Central Park. After that she was put on boat patrol in lower Manhattan, cruising the canals and helping the drowned city.

This turned out to be ugly work. There were bodies floating in the canals; that was their first priority, and a gruesome unhappy one it was. Bloat and stink were setting in. People of all apparent ages had been killed, either drowned or hit by flying debris, it looked like. Then also animal bodies, less gruesome because of their fur, less unhappy because they were animals.

Navigation had to be reestablished, first in the avenues and big cross-canals, then the east-west regular canals. For quite a few of them clearing a passage wasn’t possible in the short term, as buildings had fallen across them. But the police had to sort out what was possible and what wasn’t, and establish detours, and talk it all over with the MTAs.

She was in charge of one big cruiser for the whole of the fifth day after the storm, patrolling Chelsea and the West Village, picking up refugees and clearing debris, and now, depressingly, keeping out looters, when she came on a low fast motorboat with an odd look, at Seventh and Thirtieth. She ordered them to stop by yelling at them with the bullhorn on the cruiser bridge, and brought her crew to high alert when she saw how the people on the boat were armed, and seemed to be considering whether to obey her or not.

Then they did stop, and she boarded them with her people covering her.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

The captain of the boat, or the man in charge, patted his pad and showed her their papers. A private security firm, RNA, which stood for Rapid Noncompliance Abatement. “We’ve been hired to patrol the neighborhood here.”

“By who?”

“The neighborhood association.”

“Which one?”

“Chelsea Town House Association.”

Gen shook her head. “There is no such association.”

“There is now.”

“No. There isn’t. Who are you working for?”

“The Chelsea Town House Association.”

“Give me your ID and your working papers.”

The man hesitated and Gen gestured to her team, and four more officers leaped over the sides of the boat, holstered guns prominently displayed. Tasers, but still. They were armed. The men on the RNA boat were also armed.

Everyone stood there looking serious. Gen, the only woman on the boat, also the person in charge, kept a straight face, kept it professional and polite. Polite but firm. Maybe more firm than polite.

She sat down with the man and slowly put him through his ID paces. His security firm, Rapid Noncompliance Abatement, had apparently been hired by a neighborhood group that called itself the Chelsea Town House Association. They occupied the buildings on the Twenty-eighth block and were worried because so many buildings around them had been wrecked by the storm. They might have become an association very recently. They needed to protect their investment.

“Investment,” Gen repeated. She tapped around on her pad, looking for links and tapping a note to Olmstead and asking him to do the same. She was finding nothing when Olmstead got back to her: RNA is owned by Escher Security. Both do work for Morningside.

“We’re private investment security,” the man explained when Gen looked up at him.

“You sure are.”

“We’re on your side. We help you out.”

“Maybe so,” Gen said. “But we’re in an unusual situation here, and we don’t want any militia-type actions. We’ve got enough trouble. We’re going to want to talk to the people who hired you, so just give me their contact info and we’ll go from there. And this area is off-limits right now.”

“What is this, martial law?”

“This is New York, and we’re the New York Police Department. Ordinary law still holds.”

She took photos of all their documentation and got back on the police cruiser, thinking hard.

She gave Sergeant Olmstead a call. “Hey Sean, thanks for that. How did you find that connection between RNA and Escher so fast?”

“I’ve been looking into Escher pretty closely. They’re definitely Morningside’s security, and they clone subsidiaries to work on various Morningside projects. So RNA is one of those. The guy you talked to on that boat is actually on the Escher personnel list.”

“I see.”

“So, you know who else used to work for Escher? Three of the people now working at the Met tower for Vlade Marovich. Su Chen, Manuel Perez, and Emily Evans. They all worked for Escher, and they all left that off their résumés when they applied for the jobs at the Met. They all said they worked for one of the more distant clones. Out the arms of the octopus, you know.”

“Okay!” Gen said. “Maybe you’ve found the infiltration that made it possible for them to disable the cameras when they snatched Mutt and Jeff.”

“I think so.”

“And Morningside has worked with our lovely mayor?”

“Right. And also with Angel Falls, that’s the Cloisters guy, Hector Ramirez. Morningside is a really big octopus, and so is Ramirez. And I can’t get into either of their files. I’ve been trying, but the cloning makes it hard. In fact it looks to me like Morningside taught the octopus method to Escher. Heck, Escher may be just one of the arms of the Morningside octopus, probably. Just closer to the body.”

“Okay. Keep detaching the suckers on those arms. Look in particular for who made the offer on the Met.”

c) Franklin

So I’m thinking, I’ve got the smallest boat in Manhattan and I’m the one going out after the biggest storm of all time to hunt down two crazy kids with a death wish? Really?

But it wasn’t just Vlade asking me in his heavy Slavic-mafia way, gravid or even morbid with the responsibility for all the creatures in his ark, including yea the littlest and most stupid among them. It was also Charlotte. And the way she put it was galling but ultimately effective:

“It will give you something to do,” she said. “The stock market is closed.”

“The stock market,” I scoffed. “As if that matters.”

“Yeah, well what are you going to do on a day like this? Trade bonds? It’s a holiday, Frank my boy. Go out and have some fun. Should be very exciting for your little speedboat. Things get too tough out there you can turn it into a submarine or a miniblimp, right? And besides those kids may need help. Very exciting for you.”

“Yeah right.”

But then she just gave me a look, with her little smile, and flicked me away like a mosquito. “I have to get to work,” she said. “Let me know how you do out there.”

I made a heavily impositioned sigh and went to my room to get my heavy-weather gear, great stuff from Eastern Mountain Sports. Vlade pulled my bug down from the rafters and glowered me out the door. I was pleased to get out, of course, and didn’t want Charlotte to think I was unwilling to help.

And in fact the day was a stunner. Blustery day under clouds like tall galleons crashing onshore under full sail, the canals all cappuccino with foam, the East River a chaos of blue and brown chop, lined by spume and wakes. I ran up the northward fast lane in the East River, or where it had used to be, the buoys having been mostly torn away. There was much less traffic on the river than usual, and I pushed to full speed and the bug lifted onto its foils and we flew. There was enough chop to make it a challenge, I definitely didn’t want to get launched into the air and come down hard enough to purl like a surfer on a longboard, tipping the boat into an ass-over-teakettle capsizing. Worth taking some trouble to avoid that one, so I throttled down a bit past Roosevelt Reef and under the big east-side bridges. Not record time by any means, but soon I was taking a left up the Harlem River, where I goosed back down into the flood and hummed along like an ordinary citizen.

On my left, the drowned part of uptown was looking bad. Of course it never looked good, sitting under the great spine of towers from Washington Heights to the Cloister cluster, Harlem a bedraggled bay with some islanded towers sticking out of it, the shallows occupied with old buildings tipped this way and that, and now seriously pummeled by the storm. Possibly if they knocked it all down and replaced it with raft blocks, as in my development plan, it could become a decent adjunct to the Cloister cluster. Yes, it was Robert Moses time in Harlem.

And maybe everywhere. The Bronx looked even worse than Harlem. It had never looked good, of course, and the hurricane had swept over Manhattan and struck it right in its sorry cratered face, shoving big breakers far up into the waterways and valleys no doubt, where they had pounded for three days. Now with the storm surge receded, it looked like a tsunami had rolled in and out, but not all the way out. Utter estuarine devastation.

I poked up the long narrow bay filling the Van Cortlandt parkway, west of the Bronx River channel. This was the easiest water route to get to Woodlawn Cemetery, where the boys had supposedly been headed. Uprooted trees looked like dead bodies on the land; floating trees looked like dead bodies in the water. The Bronx? No thonx! The sad borough was big, dead, killed.

I nosed around in narrow flooded streets that somehow did not rise (or sink) to the level of canals, letting off my air horn from time to time in case the boys were still tucked into a shelter somewhere and didn’t see me. I didn’t see why they would do that on a nice day like this, but I tried it anyway. There were a lot of buildings still standing enough to have served as shelter for them, big concrete boxes with broken roofs. Indeed as the day wore on, it became clear from the sheer size of the borough that looking for any one pair of boys was a futile gesture. Pointless, and yet something that someone had to do. Someone; not necessarily me. There were so many ways that the storm could have killed them that I wondered if we would ever know. Drowned, most likely, of course, that being their specialty. Or crushed, second most likely. Bold but stupid. They would have made good traders someday, but oh well. You have to survive your crazy youth to be able to deliver on the promise inherent in that craziness.

A call came to my wrist from Charlotte. “Hey, Frankie boy. They turned up back at the Met.”

“No way!”

“Way.”

“Well, that’s good news. I was never going to find them up here.”

“Especially with them not being there.”

“Right, but even if they had been. This is one big fucking wreck of a place.”

“Always true.”

“Should I pick you up on my way home, do my Boy Scout good deed for the day, help old lady cross street?”

“No, I’ve got to deal with some shit here. Some really shitty shit.”

“Okay, good luck.”

And I backed the bug out of a particularly nasty canal, more or less coated with the floating bodies of little furry creatures drowned in the flood, sad to see, but not as sad as it would have been if our two rebels without a cause had been there among them. And small mammals are usually very reproductive—ineradicable, really—so I saluted the musky stinky dead as I turned, and got myself back down the flooded streets to the narrow bay and then the Harlem River. There I shoved the throttle forward and flew down the flood like a bird, a shearwater to be specific, skimming the waves back toward home. Glorious flight!

Back at the Met I joined the small crowd in the dining hall surrounding the boys, who were stuffing themselves as if they had the proverbial hollow leg. They looked up at me like raccoons peering out of a dumpster, and I had a sudden vision of them belly-up in the Bronx with their furry brothers and sisters.

“What the fuck!” I said. “Where were you guys?”

“Glad to see you too,” Roberto mumbled through a mouthful of something.

Stefan swallowed and said, “Thanks for looking for us, Mr. Garr. We were up in the Bronx.”

“We knew that,” I said. “Or we thought we did. How about you carry your wristpad with you from now on?”

They both nodded as they continued to eat.

I stared at them. They looked starved but otherwise fine. Thoroughly untraumatized. I had to laugh.

“You must have found a place to hide,” I said.

Stefan swallowed again and drank deeply from a glass of water. “We couldn’t get back to Manhattan because the waves got too big, so we went into the Bronx to those buildings up the creek, and there was an empty warehouse that looked solid and had an open door on its north side that we could get the boat in. Then it was just a matter of waiting it out. It was really loud and windy. And the water rose right up to the attic in this place.”

“Windows broke,” Roberto added between chews. “Lots of windows.”

“Yeah and a lot of them broke outward!” Stefan said. “Some on the south side broke inward, but on the north side they mostly broke outward!”

“Like in a tornado,” Mr. Hexter said. He was sitting next to the boys watching them like a mother cat. “The wind puts a vacuum drag on them and sucks them right out of there.”

The boys nodded. “That happened,” Stefan confirmed. “But there was an inner set of rooms in this warehouse attic, so we just waited in there.”

“Didn’t you get cold?”

“Not too cold. There was some insulation under the roof, and some paper left in file cabinets. We made like a giant bed of paper, and stuck ourselves in it from the side.”

“Didn’t you get thirsty?” I asked.

“We did. We drank some of the river water there.”

“No way! Didn’t you get sick?”

“Not yet.”

“Didn’t you get hungry?” Hexter asked.

They both nodded, mouths again full. By way of further answer Roberto pointed at his cheek. When he swallowed again, he said, “We actually thought if we should try to kill and eat some muskrats that were in there with us.”

“Muskrats?”

“I think so. Either muskrats or really wet weasels. Like long skinny otters?”

“There were a lot of rats and insects too,” Stefan added after swallowing. “Snakes, frogs, spiders, you name it. It was really creepy.”

“In that there were lots of things creeping,” Roberto clarified. “But the muskrats were the ones that got our attention.”

Hexter said, “There’s lots of muskrats around the bay. Or they could have been minxes. There’s otters too.”

“Not otters,” Roberto said. “Whatever they were, there was a group of them, a family or something. Five big ones and four small ones. They swam into the warehouse and then they were in the rooms down the hall, mostly. They checked us out. All the other littler things stayed away from them. And from us. Arm’s length anyway.”

“Actually the muskrats were wondering if they could eat us,” Stefan said. “We were wondering if we could catch and eat one of them, and they were wondering the same thing about us!”

The two boys laughed. “It was pretty funny,” Roberto confirmed. “They weren’t very big, but there were more of them than us. So we yelled at them.”

“They squeaked at us.”

“Yeah they did, but they ran away too.”

“Well, they flinched. They didn’t run very far. They were still thinking it over. But we picked up some plumber’s wrenches we found and threatened them.”

“But we decided not to kill one and eat it. We didn’t want to piss the others off. They have really sharp teeth.”

“Yeah they do. If they had all gone for us at once it could have been bad. They could have took us, probably.”

Stefan nodded. “That’s why we yelled. We screamed at them so loud I hurt my voice. My throat was raw.”

“Mine too.”

I looked at them telling their story, thinking these boys could definitely grow up to become traders. Some days, when I have to convince some asshole to pay me what they owe, I have ended up with my throat raw from screaming over the phone. If you get a reputation for being a soft creditor it can incent other borrowers to default strategically, so you need to be able to scream sometimes to good effect. “Good job, boys,” I said. “And your boat was okay?”

“Yeah, we had it down in the big main room of this warehouse. It got squished up against the ceiling at high water, there was so much water it was unbelievable, but then it just stayed stuck up there until the water went down. That was some high tide!”

“Storm surge,” Hexter said. “They’re saying twenty-one feet above the highest high tide we’ve ever had.”

“Any more cake?” Roberto inquired.

d) the city smartass again

A couple centuries ago there was a famous cartoon, published in one of the New York newspapers or magazines that combined to make the city such a fountain of literary excellence, ranging from Melville and Whitman to—well, in any case, this cartoon consisted of a map of the city looking west, with a foreshortened perspective such that the rest of the United States was as wide as two Manhattan blocks, and the Pacific Ocean no wider than the Hudson. A funny representation of New York’s self-absorption, and it’s interesting how easy it is to fall down that same hole whenever talking about the city: where else matters? It’s the center of the world, the capital of blah blah.

True. Maybe too true. And hopefully the concept of ease of representation will have impinged on the reader’s consciousness to the point of reminding you that this focus on New York is not to say that it was the only place that mattered in the year 2142, but only to say that it was like all the cities in the world, and interesting as such, as a type, as well as for its peculiarities as an archipelago in an estuary debouching into a bight, featuring a lot of very tall buildings.

So, while there is no need to describe the situation in other coastal cities like watery Miami, or paranoidly poldered London and Washington, D.C., or swampy Bangkok, or nearly abandoned Buenos Aires, not to mention all the inland snoozefests called out when one says the single dread word Denver, it is important to place New York in the context of everywhere else, the latter regarded, as in the famous cartoon, as a single category: everywhere else. Because from now on in this tale, as really all along, the story of New York only begins to make sense if the global is taken into account to balance the local. If New York is the capital of capital, which it isn’t, but if you pretend it is to help you think the totality, you see the relation; what happens to a capital city is influenced, inflected, maybe determined, maybe overdetermined, by what happens elsewhere in its empire. The periphery infects the core, the provinces invade the imperial center, the network tugs the knot at its center tight, so tight that it becomes a Gordian knot and can only be cut in two.

So: Hurricane Fyodor unleashed its wrath on New York and the immediate vicinity. A local catastrophe for sure, but for the rest of the world, a fascinating bit of news, an entertaining telenovela and a chance to exercise some delicious and mostly justifiable Schadenfreude. Few feel any huge affection for New York, that most desired but least beloved of cities, and no one in the history of the world has ever said Oh how I pity New York, or Oh what a pitiful city New York is. Never said, never thought. So the emotional, historical, and physical effects of the hurricane’s devastation were almost entirely local. The state and federal government sent in emergency relief to deal with the immediate problems following the storm, it being their jobs to do so, and for those not actually caught physically in the melodrama, it was quickly forgotten and people moved on to the next episode in the great parade of events. Two months later Beijing was buried in forty feet of loess dust sweeping down on winds from the northwest: did you hear? Can you imagine? Worse than water by far! Want to hear all about it?

No. Ease of representation: what strikes us most strongly seems more widespread than it really is. So back to New York, which is after all where baseball was invented. In the larger world of global capital, which is what New York is supposed to be the capital of, there were some real repercussions to this local event. Smashing New York was like dropping a boulder in a dark pool, and the ripples spread around the world like seismic waves, jiggling sensitive instruments everywhere in the moneysphere, which was now coextensive with the biosphere itself. Intersecting waves and derivative effects led to two distinctly visible results, which in their turn exacerbated each other: one, capital again took flight from New York, figuring it would be a decade at least before the city recovered from the devastation, and during that time the rate of return would be higher in Denver, meaning of course anywhere. All that is solid melts into air, as Marx once rhapsodized, and all that is liquid decamps to Denver. Then, two, housing price indexes all pegged downward a few points, with the IPPI naturally leading the drop, as being the specific index describing the zone just thrashed. Other indexes, including the Case-Shiller, also dropped, not as much as the IPPI, but significantly. The point here is that the indexes not only dropped, but diverged a bit as they did. That meant there was a spread there to bet on, one way or another, depending on which index one felt was likeliest to be right, or to correct first.

These two developments might not sound like the hugest trees in the forest to fall, not earth-shattering enough to jiggle money seismographs worldwide, pretty much business as usual, in fact. But it’s funny how things sometimes shift like flocking birds. And the way bubbles work is structurally identical to Ponzi schemes—what a coincidence!—and indeed it’s another amazing coincidence how much the entire capitalist economy resembles in its basic structure either a Ponzi scheme or a bundle of Ponzi schemes. How could this be? Is this another case of convergent evolution, or isomorphic identity, or cloning, or simply an astonishing Jungian synchronicity, in other words a coincidence? Probably just a coincidence, sure. But be that as it may, bubbles and Ponzi schemes and capitalism all have to keep growing or else they are in deep shit. A big enough glitch in their growth and they break their own logic, by depriving themselves of the margin needed to fund the next investment that will make the next margin to fund the next investment that will make the next margin to fund the next investment, and so on forever. If the system isn’t spiraling up, it stalls, and then, rather than spiraling down at the same rate of change, it drops like a punctured blimp, like a broken helicopter, like, as the phrase in finance has it, a refrigerator falling out of the sky.

As for instance.

e) Charlotte

Charlotte went back to work, not knowing what else to do, and figuring that the Householders’ Union office was going to be inundated with new internal refugees. Franklin had gone off to hunt for Stefan and Roberto, looking so worried that she had been tempted to accompany him, but it wouldn’t have helped, and she wanted to do something helpful.

At the office it was indeed a complete mess, with a great number of bedraggled people filling all the halls and all the rooms, though it made no sense as any kind of refuge. But any port in a storm, and possibly many of the people there felt that in the wake of the hurricane their immigrant and/or refugee status might somehow have changed for the better. Charlotte wasn’t sure that wasn’t true; they were part of a very large crowd now. Might be cause for some kind of class-action action.

First she helped sort out the crowd, handing out queue numbers and forms and asking people why they were there, and if they could leave and come back later, and so on. Most of them were not yet members of the union, and many of them had no papers at all. After a while she got tired of it and joined a group taking a police cruiser up to Central Park, because she wanted to see it.

Once in the park she wandered around feeling sick. The devastation was so complete it was hard to believe. It felt like she was dreaming, stuck in one of those jagged nightmares in which a montage of terrible unrealities etch themselves one after another on the eyeball of the helpless dreamer. Where there had been trees there were now people, so that the park looked both bigger and lower, like a giant piece of prairie expanding out of the space where the park had used to be. All the people gave it the look of a sepia Hooverville photo, or some earthquake-shattered favela.

She walked around in a kind of dazed exploration. The crowd extended out of the park into the streets. Her various walking routes from years past were all gone. Giant root balls stood up from the edges of gaping holes in the ground, facing south together like sunflowers. Broken branches everywhere exposed the inner flesh of trees, blond and grainy, like limbs of different kind of flesh. Every once in a while she stopped and sat down on the ground, feeling melodramatic, like she was acting out an emotion in a theater exercise, but she had to do it, her knees were buckling under her; it was a real thing, this old expression “her knees grew weak.” How strange that these old clichés had their origins in real physical reactions, common to all. She wept a few times, and saw around her in the crowd faces that had wept recently, or were at that moment crying, quite often with the person involved seemingly unaware of the tears streaming down their faces. Ah my town my town, when again will I see you? Most of the downed trees were decades old, some of them hundreds of years old. It would be many years, or decades maybe, before the park would look anything like itself again.

And the people. They were organized already into circles and groups, many into small bands of twenty or so, but there were quintets and couples and isolatoes too. Families, groups of friends, people from the same destroyed building. Thousands of them altogether, sitting on the ground or on concrete benches or on boxes, or the knobs of ancient stone sticking up out of the ground, the bones of the island offering seating now to its inhabitants. Lines of Walt Whitman’s glanced off her mind half-remembered, something about the streaming of faces across the Brooklyn Bridge, the suffering of the soldiers in the Civil War. The sense of Americans in trouble together.

She tapped her wristpad like she was trying to break it, and called the mayor. Who actually answered. “What?”

“Where are you?”

“At City Hall.”

“What are you doing about this?”

Short pause to indicate amazement. “I’m working! What do you want?”

“I want you to open up the uptown towers.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. More than half the apartments uptown are empty because they’re owned by rich people from somewhere else. Declare an emergency and use all those rooms as refugee centers. Eminent-domain them.”

“I already declared an emergency, and so did the president. She’s almost here. As for eminent domain, I can’t do that.”

“Yes you can. Declare an emergency, exercise executive privilege or whatever—”

“None of that is real. Get real, Charlotte.”

“—martial law! Or at least contact every single owner and ask them for the use of their place. Tell them it’s needed, their place and their agreement. Talk them into it. As many as you can.”

Silence on the other end.

Finally the mayor’s voice said, “There’s way more people in need than there are places like that. All it would accomplish is more capital flight out of here. We’d lose even more people than we already have.”

“Good riddance! Come on, Galina. Show some guts. This is your moment. Your city needs you, you have to come through for it. Now or never.”

“I’ll think about it. I’m busy Charlotte, I have to go. Thanks for your concern.” And the line went dead.

“Fuck you!” Charlotte shouted at her wrist. “Fuck you, you fucking coward!”

People were looking at her. She glared back at them. “The mayor of this city is a tool,” she told them.

They shrugged. The mayor was of no interest to them.

Charlotte gritted her teeth. No doubt these people were right. Push comes to shove, politicians were useless. Best bet was the army, the National Guard, the bureaucracies. Emergency services, emergency room doctors and nurses. Police and firefighters. Those were the people who would help, the ones you hoped to see show up. Not the politicians.

She recalled hearing how after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, they had built prison camps faster than medical facilities. They had expected riots and so had put people of color in jail preemptively. But that was back in the twentieth century, in the dark ages, the age of fascisms both home and abroad. Since the floods they had learned better, hadn’t they?

Looking around the crowd in the broken park, she couldn’t be sure. People were gathered in groups. It was a kind of organization. They were doing the best they could with what they had.

But after every crisis of the last century, Charlotte thought, or maybe forever, capital had tightened the noose around the neck of labor. Simple as that: crisis capitalism, shoving the boot on the neck harder at every opportunity. Tightening the noose. It had been proved, it was a studied phenomenon. To anyone looking at history, it was impossible to deny. It was the pattern. The fight against the tightening noose had never managed to find the leverage to escape it. It had a Chinese finger-trap quality to it: fight it and you justified the heavy response, the prison camps instead of hospitals.

Finally Charlotte gave up thinking and began wandering the park again, stopping to talk to people huddled around the various smoky fires, which existed more for cooking than warmth, or just to be doing something. She stopped at group after group and told them she was a city employee working for the Householders’ Union, and that shelters were going to be opening up uptown. Over and over she said this.

Finally, exhausted, disgusted, she made her way back south to the intertidal and waited in the line on a dock for a water taxi to take her back down to the Met and home. It was a long wait; the line was long, and there weren’t very many water taxis out yet. She got hungry. She sat on the dock with the rest of the people in line. They were New Yorkers and not inclined to talk to strangers, which she appreciated.

At a certain point she tapped her wrist again and called up Ramona.

“Hey Ramona, Charlotte here. Listen, do you think your group might still be interested in me running for the Twelfth District seat?”

Ramona laughed. “I know we would. But listen, you’re aware that Estaban is backing her candidate pretty actively?”

“Fuck Estaban. She’s who I want to run against.”

“Well, we can definitely give you that.”

“Okay. I’ll come to the next meeting and we’ll talk it over. Tell people I want to do it.”

“That’s great news. She’s pissing you off, eh?”

“I’ve just been in Central Park.”

“Ah yeah.”

“I told her to open uptown for the refugees here.”

“Ah yeah. Good luck with that.”

“I know. But it’s something to run on.”

“I think so! Come on down and we’ll talk more.”

By the time she got back to the Met she could barely walk. She made her way to the dining room and realized she was going to have to take the stairs up to her room, and couldn’t face it. A forty-story walk-up, great.

She collapsed on one of the chairs and looked around. Her fellow citizens. Their little city-state, their commune. At least they weren’t being bombarded by their own government. Not yet anyway. The Paris Commune had lasted seventy-one days. Then years of reprisals had followed, till all the communards were dead or imprisoned. Couldn’t have a government of, by, and for the people, oh no. Kill them all instead.

When the Russian revolution of 1917 had lasted seventy-two days, Lenin went out into the street and danced a little dance. They had lasted longer than the Commune, he said. In the event they lasted seventy-two years. But so much had gone wrong.

Franklin Garr walked into the room, headed for the food line.

“Hey Frankie!” Charlotte said. “You’re just the man I wanted to see.”

He looked surprised. “What’s up, old gal? You look wasted.”

“I am wasted. Can you get me a glass of wine?”

“You bet. I was hunting one myself, actually.”

“It’s that time.”

“That’s for sure. You heard the boys showed up?”

“I’m the one who told you, remember? That was the good news for the day.”

“Oh yeah, sorry. Good news though. I thought the little fuckers had done themselves in at last.”

“They probably barely noticed. What’s a hurricane to them?”

“No, they noticed. They almost got eaten by muskrats.”

“Say what?”

“They had a Mexican standoff with a herd of muskrats.”

“I don’t think it’s a herd.”

“No, probably not. A flock of muskrats, a murder of muskrats…”

“A murder of crows.”

“That’s right. A what, a drenching of muskrats? A sucking of muskrats?”

“A bedraggle of muskrats.”

“Nice.”

“That’s what the people in Central Park were. A bedraggle of refugees. Here, get that wine.”

He nodded and went off and came back and sat on the floor beside her chair. They toasted the boys and tossed down some of the Flatiron’s horrible pinot noir.

“So listen,” Charlotte said. “I’d like to pull the trigger on this crash you outlined. Will this hurricane pop the bubble you were talking about?”

He waggled a hand. “I’ve been looking at that. Thing is, it’s a global market, and a lot of people don’t want it to pop, because they haven’t shorted it. So they’ll hold on against shocks like this. So I’m not really sure. I don’t think this is enough to do it. Of course the local index will be impacted. But the global bubble, no.”

“Well, but if you wanted to pop it? As in, by way of that householders’ strike you were talking about that time? Would this be a good time for that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think the groundwork is laid that would make it work. Although I’ve done my part, I’ll tell you that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve monetized the boys’ gold. Vlade melted it and I sold it, in increments, in various dark pools. It all got snapped up by the Indian government, it looks like to me. They’re the last goldbugs left, they really like it. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, maybe it’s because Indians like their bling so much.”

“Frankolino, spare me your horrible cultural theories. What did you do with the money?”

“I leveraged it a bit and bought a lot of put options on the IPPI.”

“Meaning?”

“I shorted the IPPI and went long on Case-Shiller, and now this hurricane has made me right. We can sell and make a killing for the boys.”

“That’s nice, but I want to pop the bubble! I want to crash the system!”

He shook his head dubiously. “Really? Are you sure you’re ready?”

“As ready as we’ll ever be. And it’s the right moment to strike. People are mad. And if we don’t do it now, they’ll just pull the noose tighter. More austerity to pay for the reconstruction, the poor will get poorer, the rich will move elsewhere.”

He sighed. “So you want to reverse a ten-thousand-year trend, you’re saying.”

“What do you mean?”

“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That is like proverb one in Bartlett’s quotations. It’s the first verse of Genesis.”

“Right. Yes. Let’s reverse that.”

He began to think hard, and indicated this fact with a face that made her smile: cross-eyed, mouth pursed, forehead wrinkled vertically between the eyebrows. It reminded her of Larry, but this guy was funnier. “The spread in the indexes is a sign the markets are a bit freaked out,” he said. “There’s been a drop in all of them already, so, it wouldn’t be the best time to make the most money out of it. But on the other hand, things are shaky.”

“So it could work.”

“I don’t know. I mean, I think it would work at any time, if enough people joined a payment default.”

“Call it the strike.”

He shrugged. “Call it the Jubilee!”

She laughed. She took a big sip of her wine. “I can’t believe you can make me laugh after a day like this,” she confessed.

“Cheap drunk,” he noted.

“True. So you think it would work?”

“I just don’t know. I think it might be confusing if it happened now. People defaulting might lose whatever insurance money they were going to get, if they had some coming because of this storm. So I don’t know about the timing of it. You know—you give the financial system a heart attack right after a disaster—I don’t know, it’s a little counterintuitive. I mean who’s going to pay the insurance for rebuilding?”

“I guess government. They usually do. But let’s figure that out later.”

He looked at her with exaggerated amazement. He was a man who really looked at you when he looked. Like you were a marvel. “Well okay then! Roll the dice! Do you have all your ducks in a row with your Fed ex?”

“Fed ex?”

“Your ex who runs the Fed. I think your nickname for him should be Fed Ex, don’t you?”

“Yes, I like that.” She nodded. “He’s as primed as I can make him.”

“And your Householders’ Union?”

“It’s big enough that we can use it as a vanguard party for a mass action. And people who want some cover can join it the same moment they default.”

“A lot of people will want to have that kind of cover. Something to join, so it’s a political position, not just being in default.”

“We only need fifteen percent of the population, right?”

“That’s the theory. But more would be better.”

“Okay, but maybe we’ll get more.”

He pondered it, still regarding her with a bemused look. “Well, we’re pretty well shorted. So if you do it and it works, we won’t make the max possible, but we’ll still make a lot.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

“I think the more likely possibility is that it’ll work too well.”

“What do you mean?”

“That it could crash the whole system. And if that happens, who will be left to pay me my swaps?”

“Surely it won’t be that bad.”

“We’ll find out.”

Charlotte looked at him, trying to figure out how serious he was. Very difficult. He enjoyed taking risks. So here was a big risk, a political risk. So for the most part he looked pleased. His worried expression was a put-on, or so it seemed to her. Hedging was gambling on volatility. So he was enjoying this.

“There’ll always be a bailout,” she said. “The speculators are too big to fail, too interconnected to fail. So the people in Central Park tonight are fucked, no matter how it plays out.”

He nodded. “So you’re saying we’ll get paid one way or another.”

“Or we won’t get paid no matter what. Unless we change things.”

He sighed. “I don’t know how I got caught up helping you. You are such a revolutionary.”

“Is that what it is?”

“Yes!” He stared at her hard. Then he grinned. He even started to laugh.

“What?” she demanded.

“It’s just I finally get what revolution means. It’s maximum volatility with no hedging. And it’s insider trading too! Because, since I know in advance you’re going to default your people, I can buy put options up the wazoo before the IPPI goes down! It’s totally illegal! I finally get why revolution is illegal.”

“I’m not sure that’s its main illegality,” Charlotte said.

“Joking.”

“So we’ll do it and see what happens.”

“Well, I still think you should wait, and have it more prepped than you do. Maybe wait until the storm stuff is a bit past, so that it doesn’t just get confused with an incapacity to pay. I mean you do want it to look like a choice, to make it clear that it’s a conscious strike.”

“Hmm,” Charlotte said. “That’s true.”

“You need time for the full prep anyway, right? So for now, maybe just enjoy the idea that it’s coming.” He held up his glass, now almost drained, and she raised hers and they toasted again. “To revolution!”

“To revolution.”

They polished off the wine.

He grinned again. “Part of a decent prep would be you accepting that draft and running for Congress.”

“I already did.”

“No way!”

“Way.”

“Well, that’s fair. Heck, we need more wine to toast that. I guess it’s a case of you break it you bought it. Crash the system and you have to build the next one. We’ll all insist on it.”

“Fuck,” Charlotte complained. “Go get more wine. Fuck fuck fuck.”

“That’s my line!” He laughed at her again. Tired as she was, still she liked it that she could make him laugh. Smartass youth that he was.

f) Inspector Gen

Gen worked overtime day after day. She couldn’t remember if it had ever been like this before or not. Every waking moment given to the work. Everyone on the force doing the same. The storm was over, the world’s interest had gone away; the National Guard had come for a few days and then gone away; the people in Central Park didn’t go away. Food and sanitation were becoming huge problems, followed closely by violent person-on-person crime, also drug overdoses. The usual bad inputs creating the usual bad outputs, in other words. Utterly predictable, but now out in the open field of Central Park where everyone could see it. Feel it blowing up in their faces. It was not a sustainable situation, and yet there was no obvious next step, and meanwhile the impasse was something everyone could see and feel, something they were living moment to moment, day to day.

Then on the night of July 7, 2142, a huge bonfire on the Onassis lawn illuminated an enormous gathering, basically everyone in the park plus more, and somehow this turned into a riot. It happened under a full moon; no one saw the origins of it, but fighting spread through the park. The cops on hand put out the call for backup and crowd control. Some of them said it looked like gang-on-gang violence, but when Gen got there, coming up on a packed police cruiser, she couldn’t see anything resembling sides; it was just a scramble, knots of people roaming the park, roaring, setting fires with brands from the big bonfire, throwing burning brands, and fighting other groups. She got the sense that most of the real damage consisted of people falling down and getting trampled underfoot by the crowd. Most of the shouts and screams came from ground level; when she noticed that, she felt a jolt of fear and called headquarters.

“We need major medical, quick as possible, Central Park, Onassis Meadow. And there’s a crowd headed north from there, looks like.”

“We know,” said Chief Quinn Taller, an acquaintance of Gen’s. “Up Broadway, Amsterdam, and St. Nick.”

“They’re headed uptown?” Gen said.

“Looks like it.”

“Have we got reinforcements coming?”

“The National Guard has been ordered by the governor to come back, but we don’t know how long they’ll take to get here. They were slow last time.”

Gen took a deep breath. “Have you called in all the off-duties?”

“Yes I have.”

“What about the fire departments?”

“I don’t think that’s happened yet.”

“You should call up fire right away.”

“Are there fires?”

“There are going to be fires. And we might need their hoses for people too.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I’ll pass the word along.”

Gen got off. She had stopped to talk, and the other cops had gone ahead. Now she hurried north after them, pausing to break up fights if it looked like she could, using her height and uniform and the darkness to support a fairly brutal approach, knocking aggressors down with her nightstick and then handcuffing that person with plastic quickcuffs, and ordering the people around to leave the scene. Nightstick in one hand, hand on pistol in holster, ready to shout if she had to. Putting her size and copness to work. People were generally happy to run off into the night. On she moved north, trying not to see fights that looked serious enough to be beyond her capacity to stop. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at her and she dodged it and continued north at speed. She needed backup, it had to be teamwork now or it was nothing. And there before her was a team of six cops, not the same ones she had come with, looked like beat cops, gathered together for safety. “Okay if I join you?”

“Shit yeah, what is this?”

“Riot, I don’t know why. There was a bonfire on the meadow, I heard.”

“Yeah but still. They’re burning in their heads.”

“I heard there was more of that bad shit out there, wonder if that’s it.”

“But it’s everyone.”

“True. Let’s get north, try to get ahead of the crowd. There’ll be more of us up there.”

“You think we can hold the line up there?”

“Not sure, but the island is awful narrow there, it might work. We need fire and the guard though.”

They moved up together. Gen was relieved to be with other cops. They cut through the crowds, calling for calm, asking for people to disperse, to go to their homes or their camps, wherever, just disperse. Head south. One of their little platoon had a mini-bullhorn, and she took the lead vocally, with the rest deploying flashlights, trying to blind people who looked aggressive. “Go home!” she shouted over and over. “Go home!”

“We are home!” someone yelled back.

It would be so easy to get shot on a night like this. One had to hope the idea wasn’t occurring to anyone of bad intention near them. All of them were on point like a patrol in enemy territory, and the shouting around them reinforced the feeling. Lot of ill will tonight. People were fed up. Moments came when no one liked NYPD. Moments like these.

They got to St. Nick Park and were hurrying up the shore path at the high tide mark, still a shambles of wrack from the storm surge, when a branch hurtled out of the dark and struck the cop right next to Gen on the head. A helmet would have made it so much less disastrous, but the guy went down and then they were holding his scalp to his skull and trying to stem the bleeding, which as usual with a head wound was prodigious. Black blood, as always at night. Always the same shock when a flashlight beam turned it from black to red. He was still conscious, seemed like it was more a cut than a blow, but they needed to stop the bleeding. First aid in the dark, Gen working the downed cop, the rest bulling around ordering dispersal, angry but lacking any way to take it out appropriately. Settle in around the downed one, radio for help, shout through the bullhorn at people to go south, to go home, to go away. Roar of crowd pouring north around them, ignoring them. Nothing to be done until a medevac arrived, after which they could hustle north again one fewer, that much more anxious and on point.

The medevac came in two police vans, so they got in one and caught a short ride up to Morningside Heights, siren screaming all the way. Quieter in the back of the van than it would have been outside it, but still noisy enough that it was hard to talk.

They got out at the first of the superscrapers, at 120th. There were a lot of cops there, and whoever was in charge tried to get them to form a line from river to river; the landfilled area behind them was the narrowest part of the whole island.

But not narrow enough; the crowd heading north was huge, and unhinged, and there were only police on hand, no National Guard or firemen, or army. They had to give way. The crowd was intent on the towers.

The police on hand collapsed into groups that stood there like subway turnstiles, letting the crowd pass and thus avoiding a bloodbath which might very likely have seen them on the bloody end of things. No one had seen anything like this, and no one with a sense of the overall situation seemed in charge. There weren’t many protocols for moments this out of control, except Don’t get killed or kill people just to stop them moving somewhere, now the standard first rule in every cop’s education. In the chaos and noise the reasons for it were becoming obvious.

Electric power seemed to have gone out up here, and Gen wondered if that had started the riot. The only illumination was the full moon, which made things look pale and somehow very strange—finally she got it that all the shadows were pointed in the same direction, making it look like the whole island had been tilted. The group of cops Gen was part of tried to figure out what to do next, but it was too loud to talk, too loud to think. So now they were in effect one clump in a tide of clumps, pulled north with the rest, not even trying to reason with the mob around them, just pulled by the flow. Faces white-eyed, openmouthed. People who didn’t appear to speak English or any other language. The noise incredible, a hair-raising roar punctuated by shrieks, but the noise wasn’t what was causing the furor, because no one was listening anyway. Something had seized them up. On the plus side, being in police uniform now didn’t appear to put them in any particular danger; this wasn’t about them, and they were all part of a general movement, a human storm surge, drawn on by some lunatic tractor beam.

Then Gen saw it clearly, and maybe everyone did: it was all about the towers. The Cloister cluster was still far to the north, but there were many other stupendous superscrapers in Morningside Heights, and the crowd was now coursing among them, surrounding them.

Gen’s ad hoc platoon stumbled with the crowd itself into the great plaza south of Amsterdam and 133rd, where the first big cluster of towers shot up to their impossible height, scoring a moony gray sky, looking like space elevators. By day they were plum, emerald, charcoal, bronze. Tonight the lights that usually turned them all into giant liqueur bottles were absent, and in the moonlight they were a purplish velvet black, possibly an effect of their photovoltaics.

Police were regrouping under them, on the far side of a big plaza, in larger numbers than ever. This time it seemed possible they could hold the line. The crowd, though angry, was mostly unarmed. Possibly the cops there could link arms and take the brunt of the charge and hope the crowd would stall against them. And indeed vans were pulling into a line across the plaza, and there were helmets and shields and vests being passed out, also nightsticks and tear gas and face masks. Almost every cop on hand had just enough experience to struggle into this gear, and when they had done that they moved to the front of the line. Not much talking going on among them, it was clear what they had to do. Therefore a bad moment. Not an NYPD moment, at least in the living experience of any cop there. Surreal: they had left the real.

Gen had just gotten a vest and helmet on when she heard shots ring out. They pinged her inside with the usual adrenaline shock, and she could see it was the same for the others around her. The shots had come from behind them, however; from the towers themselves, or rather the mezzanine of the terraces below the towers. The plaza footing the towers consisted of a sequence of giant terraces, like broad low stairs sized proportionately to the towers themselves. There were people up there on the highest terrace in full riot gear, but also with rifles—assault rifles, by the sound of it. Clips were now going off in staccato blaaps, followed by screaming and shouting. The inhuman roar redoubled. Moonlight illuminated the scene with black-on-gray clarity: the crowd was pressing in on them at the same time it was pulling back. Gen spoke into her wrist fiercely: “We need more support! There’s private security here who have opened fire on the crowd!”

“Say again?”

“Private tower security is now firing on the crowd, and we’re caught in the middle here! We need the National Guard here now. Where’s the fucking backup?”

A rhetorical question at this point. The National Guard was elsewhere. Gen walked over and joined a group of about ten police officers in vests who were headed up the broad steps toward the security forces on the highest terrace. They walked together up the steps, straight at the business end of assault rifles, but they were in uniform, and the assault rifles were still pointed over their heads, or even at the sky, it seemed. But some of the guns pointed up were still firing, scoring their eyeballs with spurts of orange flame, and there were many crisscrossing red laser lines as scopes redlined targets among the stars. Warning shots, maybe, or shots into the crowd to the south. Gen pulled her pistol from its holster, feeling her skin go hot all over as she did so. She held up the shield she had gotten from the riot vans in her other hand, and marched slowly together up the steps with the front group of officers, all of them shouting, “Police! Police! Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” From random shouts like that they quickly followed the loudest among them into a coordinated shout, a shouted chant: “Police! Police! Police! Police!” It felt good to shout it like that.

They came to the middle terrace. Nowhere else left to go; the security team loomed just above them on the next terrace up, rifles still pointed over their heads, and down at them too. A horrid frozen moment. Many of their shields and vests were now red-dotted: yes, laser scopes. Some of their helmets and foreheads were red-dotted. They stopped where they were and kept chanting Police, police, police, police.

Nobody moved. The incredible noise was still behind them, but on the steps it seemed a little quieter—no one shooting, now, and the cops continuing to chant, but in almost conversational tones. Bring it on down.

Gen figured she might be the senior officer there, and in any case no one else was doing it, so she walked forward from out of the other cops, pistol extended down to the side. “New York Police Department,” she announced calmly, flatly. “You’re on camera now and you are not police. Point those rifles down right now or you’ll end up in jail. Who’s in charge here? Who are you?”

A man bulled through his people to her. He looked familiar to her, and he seemed to recognize Gen as well.

“What the fuck were you doing shooting off those guns?” Gen said to him.

“We’re defending private property here. Since you can’t seem to do it.”

Gen waited a beat, then slowly stepped toward the man. She didn’t stop until she was too close. At that point she was looking down on him. She still had her pistol pointed down at the ground, but it wasn’t that far off his feet. The man’s people stirred behind him. Some shifted their rifles, aiming them away off to the sides or lifting their barrels up, but there were still red laser dots on her vest. She felt like a fucking Christmas tree, a target in a pistol range. No one knew what to do.

“Stand down and get inside your buildings,” Gen said to the man, staring hard at him. “We’re on camera now. All of you are obliged to obey police orders to keep your security licenses.”

No one moved.

“You were the first people to fire guns tonight,” Gen told the man. “That’s already bad, but you’re only going to make it worse if you don’t do what I say. It will be interfering with police during a riot. Pretty soon it will be resisting arrest. The New York Police Department doesn’t like people shooting at it, and the courts don’t either. We’re the ones who police this town. No one else. So get inside. Now. You can defend the rooms in there, if it comes to that. This here is public space.”

“This plaza is private property,” the man said. “Our job is to defend it.”

“It’s public space. Get inside. You’re under arrest now. Don’t make things any worse than you already have, or your employers will not be happy with you. You’ve already cost them millions of dollars in legal fees. The worse you make it now, the worse it’s going to be for you later.”

The man hesitated.

Gen said, “Come on, inside. I’m coming in with you to find out more about what happened to set this all off. You can show me what your cameras got, if anything. Come on.”

She took another step toward the man. Now she was definitely too close. With her police boots on she was six foot four, and now she was helmeted, pistol in hand, a look that could freeze blood. A big scary black woman cop, mad as hell and calm as heaven. Shield in her other hand. Ready to knock the man back with it if needed. He could see she would do it. Another step forward. She wasn’t going to stop when she got to the man, she made that clear. He was about to be in her space, and she had the momentum. There was a water sumo move she was contemplating, a quick shove with the shield, that would knock him on his ass. Staring him right in the eye. It occurred to her there must be blood all over her from the cop with the cut scalp. She was the white male criminal’s worst nightmare, or maybe his dream hero, or both at once. She was trying to hypnotize him now, boring into him with Big Mama Calm. Authority figure. Bloody priestess of this night’s full-moon panic. He wanted to have a way out. Push had come to shove.

The man turned his head. “Inside,” he said.

Once inside, Gen stuck to the man and asked him to sit down in the lobby with her. She was beat and asked for water. Someone brought her a plastic bottle of it and she stared at it curiously. Lobby couches in backless ovals. Big lobby, luxurious, a place to talk and drink. Felt good to get off her feet. Her hands were indeed covered with blood. A good look for what she had to do now.

“Thanks for cooperating,” she said to the man, and gestured at the divan nearest her. “Sit down and tell me what happened.”

The man stayed standing. Six two, bulked, square head, little mouth, black hair. Grim resolve. Gen suddenly recalled where she had seen him before. “You were down in Chelsea last week,” she told him. “On a boat with some employees, working for the Chelsea Town House Association or some such nonsense.”

He was looking worried now, as well he might. He seemed like he barely remembered her from the encounter on the boat, if at all, but he did look like he was puzzled by her. And it also looked like he was considering his options, not as this tower’s security head, but as an individual who could get sued or go to jail. Who had perhaps made mistakes, after being ordered to do an illegal and impossible thing, by bosses who did not care about him. Best options for himself, he was now considering. Having decided not to fight the police while on camera. Which made sense. Now other hard choices, between other bad options, were going to start making sense. It was a time for asking questions.

“Did your people follow orders when they fired?”

“Yes. They were ordered to fire in the air, warning shots only.”

“You got that order recorded?”

“Yes.”

“Your order?”

After a hesitation: “Yes.” It having been recorded.

“Was there incoming?”

“Yes.”

“Like what, rocks?”

“We heard shots too. Those will be recorded too.”

“Incoming shots?”

“We thought so. We saw muzzle blasts aimed our way.”

“That must have been bad. But you were shooting over the crowd.”

“Yes.”

Gen nodded. “That will help. So, who employs you again? Employs you and your people here?”

“RNA. Rapid Noncompliance Abatement.”

“Not rapid enough. And do you know who hired RNA?”

“Someone here in these buildings, we presume.”

“Because this was what you were tasked to defend.”

“Right.”

“Any other information as to who in the building hired RNA?”

“No.”

Now Gen shook her head. She stared at the man, held his gaze. “Usually people know something. They have an idea. Usually they don’t put themselves out there for just any asshole paying for them.”

“Usually.”

“So you’re saying you have no idea who you are working for.”

“I work for Rapid Noncompliance Abatement.”

“Who’s your supervisor there? And where is this person right now?”

“It’s Eric Escher. And I don’t know.”

Gen snorted. “He is going to hang you out to dry. You know that, don’t you?”

“Part of the deal.”

“Spare me, please.” Gen stood back up, looked down at the man. “Spare me your mercenary code, shooting at civilians on a night when you have assault rifles and they have sticks and stones and Fourth of July sparklers. You are fucked now. If you tell me who Escher is working for, I’ll put in a good word for you when you go to trial. Because that’s what’s coming.”

The man looked back at her, more angry than scared.

Gen sighed. “They must pay you a lot. Come out in a few years’ time, you might have some money. Or they might drop you outright, ever thought of that? Ever thought that time is worth more than money? You won’t like doing time. And that’s what you’re facing. Shooting at cops? The courts don’t like that. It’s a felony. So your time could be serious. Severe. But you might still dodge that, play your cards right here. I’m the chief police inspector for lower Manhattan, and I’m the senior officer at the scene here, so I’ll be listened to on this. And I need to know who set you out there tonight.”

She waited, boring in with her gaze. The uncanny: the rule of law as personified by a big black woman. Now that was uncanny. Also the most obvious and natural thing in the world. And inescapable. Inexorable. Extradition treaties with everywhere. She settled in and waited, feeling patience flooding her coterminously with her exhaustion, right down to her sore feet.

His frown turned to irritation. “Like I said, we’re working for the people who own this building,” he said.

“So that would be?”

“The building’s managed by Morningside Realty.”

“But they’re just the broker. Who’s the owner? The mayor? Hector Ramirez? Henry Vinson?”

Always nice to see that look of surprise on people’s faces. Five minutes ago this guy had been thinking Gen was just a local cop. Now corrections and connections were going off in his head. Maybe he was recalling better the encounter with Gen on the boat downtown. She was citywide. She knew he had been working in lower Manhattan. A mutual process of discovery, here, that they both had larger briefs going in this town. And might therefore meet again, perhaps in a judicial venue.

Gen gestured at the couches, sat back down. This time the man sat down across from her.

“Not Vinson,” he said. “His partner from before.”

Now it was Gen’s turn to be surprised. “You mean Larry Jackman?”

The man nodded once, looking her in the eye. He was past his amazement. Aware he had shot through the Narrows now and been carried out into deep waters. Might need Gen as a pseudo-ally, somehow, somewhere. He had had his people stand down; he had answered questions when asked. No one had gotten killed out there by his people, hopefully. There was that to be said in his favor, such as it was. And it was not inconsiderable either. She nodded encouragingly, meaning to indicate that he could actually get out of this free of consequences.

The man said, with careful precision, “He put this building and some other assets in a blind trust when he started working for the government. He only communicates with Escher through third parties now. But we’ve been his security team all along.”

Gen was beginning to think that this night might not have been a complete fucking disaster after all, when the sound of gunfire erupted outside.

Everyone in the room was suddenly back on point. Gen surveyed the lobby, the little militia she was in here with.

“I’m gonna say we pass on that,” she said firmly. “We’re all staying in here. Whatever’s going on out there can resolve without us.”

“Really?” the man said.

“Really. Tell you what. Defend the building. From inside.”

“Defend it from who?”

Gen shrugged. “Whatever.” She took a look at her wristpad, it having beeped. “Ah,” she said. “Actually, it’s the National Guard.”

g) Amelia

The next day, July 8, 2142, Amelia Black floated down the Hudson River Valley toward home.

She had had a relatively good storm. Her tendency toward accident, as much innate as acquired, or thrust upon her, had thankfully spared her anything worse than being out on a flight when a hurricane was arriving. That had been stupid, sure, but she hadn’t been paying attention, hadn’t realized, et cetera. Once Vlade had alerted her to the situation, she and Frans had done the right things, all with her broadcasting the adventure to her audience in the cloud, which grew by the minute as people heard what she had gotten herself into this time. Amelia Errorheart has done it again, Amelia Errhard is in big trouble, Amelia Blank is blanking again, Amelia Airhead might not be able to read a map, ha ha, et cetera.

But from the moment Vlade had alerted her to the danger, she had flown the Assisted Migration north as fast as it would go, and although this top speed was only fifty miles an hour in still air, with a growing tailwind pushing her it had been enough to get her to the little town of Hudson, New York, which she called Hudson on the Hudson, where she was allowed to tie off on one of the blimp masts at the Marina Abramovic Institute, named after one of her heroes and role models. Once the airship was tied to that mast, its intense flailing became a natural piece of performance art, and at first Amelia had resolved to stay in the gondola through the hurricane—tie herself into a chair and get tossed around like a bull rider, like Marina herself doing one of her variously dangerous and awesome performances; she would be riding the storm! as she put it to her fans. But even with the spirit of their founder hovering over the institute and encouraging Amelia to go for it, the actual curators of the place had insisted that given the forecast, in this instance discretion was the better part of value, as they liked having Amelia there but didn’t want her getting thrashed to death witnessed by millions in the cloud. Marina would have done it, they conceded, but insurance prices being what they were, not to mention boards of directors, donors, and the laws against endangering children and the mentally incapacitated, it was probably best that she not commit suicide by hurricane.

“I am fully mentally capacitated,” Amelia objected.

“We’re not sure the fabric of your blimp will sustain one-hundred-sixty-mile-per-hour winds. Please don’t abuse our hospitality.”

“It’s an airship by the way.”

So, Amelia had with some difficulty gotten out of the gondola without getting crushed under it, and after that watched Frans ride out the storm, narrating the spectacle from inside the institute. Ironically, at the height of the storm the institute had had all its north windows sucked out in a single moment of extreme vacuum pull, so everyone inside had had to retreat, with a lot of shouting and even screaming, to the basement, while Frans and the Assisted Migration had negotiated the onslaughts with only a certain amount of deformative streamlining, being tied down by eight stout lines to eight strong anchoring points, also tied stoutly to a stout mast; Frans had worked hard to counteract the bouncing of the Assisted Migration by way of thousands of exquisitely timed counterthrusts from the airship’s various propellers. The airship still hit the ground repeatedly and then shot up and strained against the anchor lines, but both the smashes into the ground and the jerks against the anchor lines were constantly mitigated by Frans’s microbursting on the props, finessing the impacts with impressive panache. So Amelia would have been safer in the gondola than in any building whatsoever, another testament to the Assisted Migration, also to the principle of flexibility, of soft power and adaptation, so superior to rigidity and hard power, as she pointed out while narrating the admittedly still very dramatic images of the Assisted Migration shimmying like a shape-shifter under the storm’s wicked slaps. “If only wind were colored so you could see it,” she gushed at one point. “I wonder if we could set off some colored flares, or create a fog of some sort upwind of this place? It would be fantastic to be able to see the wind.”

This was agreed to be a good idea for some other storm. Wind as an aleatory art: it would be good. As it was, the invisible substance tore at the world with such force that it became somehow visible, or at least extremely present, as the abrupt defenestration of the institute made clear with a palpable punctuation. Such cracks, such roaring, such screams of dismay! It was good material.

But then again so much of the storm was good in that regard. Amelia and her hosts weren’t the only people in trouble, nor among those in the worst trouble. So she stayed in the cloud narrating the storm but did not score exceptionally high viewing numbers, as the competition out there was intense. It was somewhat of a lost opportunity, but then again she was going to survive, as was the Assisted Migration and Frans. Or so it seemed, until a shard of a newly shattered window flew into the airship and cut open several of its ballonets. After that the wind had its way with what remained. Pop goes the weasel!

So Frans was deflated and thrashed on the ground like a big carpet, and there were repairs to be made before Amelia could return to the air, but eventually it got done by the ground crew of a nearby airfield, happy to get the famous cloud star back in the air (and themselves briefly in the cloud with her). That done, she flew back down to the city at about the thousand-foot level, always excellent in terms of angle and prospect.

What she saw along the way astounded her. The lower stretch of the Hudson Valley was stripped of its leaves; it almost looked like midwinter, except so many trees had been knocked to the ground, or, if still standing, were extending their amputated limbs to the sky. It was much more noticeable than the damage to buildings, which was mostly a matter of missing windows or torn roofs. That was bad, the reconstruction was going to take months, she could see; but the flattened trees would take years to regrow. And of course the animals that lived in the forest would be similarly stricken.

“Wow,” Amelia said to her viewers. “This is bad.” Her voice-over on this day did not constitute her most eloquent performance. After a while, feeling overwhelmed, she mostly let Frans mention where they were and left it at that.

As she came closer to the city, the Cloister cluster reared up over the horizon long before anything else, a copse of spikes poking the sky. “Well, the towers survived.” She floated down the middle of the fjord, and when she was offshore from the uptown towers she slowed a bit, so that they and the Hoboken towers were both displayed to greatest effect, looming well over her cruising altitude to each side. At that point the Hudson looked somewhat like the flooded floor of a shattered roofless room. It was creepy.

Finally she veered in toward the city to have a look down into Central Park. She was shocked like everyone else by the devastation. It was a tent city now, punctuated by hundreds of downed trees, the holes left by their roots giving it the look of a cemetery where all the dead had burst out and run off, leaving their open graves behind. People like ants everywhere, the lost ones of the city huddling there, mostly out of an instinct to huddle, it seemed to Amelia. Then she saw that there were people gathered on the plazas of Morningside Heights, around the black marks of dead bonfires. There were lines of people too, regular enough to suggest they were military. Army in the streets. She wasn’t sure what that meant. The whole city was a mess.

“This is so sad,” she said. “It’s going to take years to fix all this.”

An automated radio message came in telling her to stay out of the city’s airspace. She had Frans circle Manhattan offshore, rising a bit as they did. There was a layer of puffy summer clouds drifting in from the west and over the city. The dramatic alternations of sunlight and cloud shadow made the long spine of Manhattan look like a piebald dragon, slain and lying dead in the bay. Amelia called home to tell Vlade she was going to make a circuit or two before coming in. He was with other people in the dining hall, she could hear. She said hi to them all.

“It looks like the superscrapers uptown didn’t sustain much damage,” she said. “Do you know how they did?”

“We hear they’re okay,” Charlotte said.

“People charged them last night,” Vlade said. “Tried to get in them to get some shelter, but they were kept out.”

“But couldn’t they be turned into temporary refugee shelters? It looks like they’d fit everybody in Central Park, more or less.”

Charlotte said, “That’s what I was thinking. But the mayor won’t do it.”

“Well shit!”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Hi Amelia!” came the voice of Roberto.

“Roberto! Stefan, are you there too?”

“I am here.”

“I’m so glad to hear your voices! What did you do in the storm?”

“We almost got eaten by muskrats,” Roberto said.

“No! I love muskrats!”

“We talked them out of it,” Stefan said. “Now we like them too.”

“Maybe we can do a study together. They’ll be rebuilding, just like us. I can see that the storm surge got pretty high.”

“Twenty-two feet!” the boys shouted.

“A lot of buildings are gone. How did our building do?” Amelia asked.

“Okay,” Vlade said. “The farm was wiped out, but the windows all held. This is one tough old building.”

“No farm? What will we eat?”

“Fish,” Vlade said. “Clams. Oysters. And so on. We might be a charity case for a while.”

“That’s not good.”

“Everybody will be.”

“Not the people in the superscrapers,” Charlotte said.

“I don’t like that,” Amelia said.

She told them she would let them know when she was coming in, then ended the call. She floated back north hanging over the East River, looking down at the wreckage in the shallows of Harlem and Queens and the Bronx, then at the immense towers of the Cloister cluster, metallic and colorful in the sun. Even though she had ascended to twenty-five hundred feet, the tallest towers still overtopped her.

The image of the boys’ muskrats came to her. So many animals would certainly have drowned in a surge that high. In fact at that very moment she spotted a pile of animal bodies, piled like bonfire wood on the big north meadow of the park.

Something turned in her as she realized what that little pile was, like a key turning in a lock, and she sat down hard on her pilot’s stool. After blindly staring down at the city for a long time, she couldn’t have said how long, she tapped the buttons that got her back in the cloud, and went live with her people around the world.

“Well, folks, you can see that those superscrapers came through the storm just fine. It’s too bad they’re mostly empty right now. I mean they’re residential towers supposedly, but they were always too expensive for ordinary people to afford. They’re like big granaries for holding money, basically. You have to imagine them all stuffed to the top with dollar bills. The richest people from all over the world own the apartments in those towers. They’re an investment, or maybe a tax write-off. Diversify into real estate, as they say. While also having a place to visit whenever you happen to want to visit New York. A vacation place they might use for only a week or two every year. Depends what they like. They usually own about a dozen of these places around the world. Spread their holdings around. So really these towers are just assets. They’re money. They’re like big tall purple gold bars. They’re everything except housing.”

As she was saying this, she turned the Assisted Migration around and headed south. “Now, here below us is Central Park. It’s a refugee camp now, you can see that. It’s likely to be that for weeks and months to come. Maybe a year. People will be sleeping in the park. Lots of tents already, as you see.”

She looked into the bridge camera. “So you know what? I’m sick of the rich. I just am. I’m sick of them running this whole planet for themselves. They’re wrecking it! So I think we should take it back, and take care of it. And take care of each other as part of that. No more table scraps. You know that Householders’ Union that I was telling you about? I think it’s time for everyone to join that union, and for that union to go on strike. An everybody strike. I think there should be an everybody strike. Now. Today.”

Her call line was lighting up, and she could see that Nicole wanted to talk to her. And her friends at the Met tower wanted to talk to her too. She thought she had better take the call from her friends, as she wasn’t really sure what to say next.

She paused her cloud feed and answered the call from the Met. Charlotte and Franklin and Vlade all said hi at once, sounding relieved she had answered. They also sounded surprised, and maybe a bit alarmed, that she had said what she had said.

She cut them off. “Listen guys, I’m going for it here. You can help me or I can just wing it on my own, but I’m not going to back down. Because the time is now. Do you understand me? The time is now.” She was getting upset, and she paused to collect herself. “I’m up here looking down at it, and I’m telling you, the time is now. So you’d better help me!”

“We’ll help you,” Franklin said loudly over the clatter of their voices. “Put an earbud in and just keep going for it.”

“Yay,” Amelia said.

“Really?” Charlotte said.

“Why not?” Franklin said. “She may be right. And she’s already done it. So listen, Amelia, just say it your way, and if you seem to be having trouble, pause and listen to the voices in your ear, and we’ll feed you lines.”

“Good,” Amelia said. She put in an earbud and heard her friends arguing among themselves like little mice in her left ear. She unpaused her feed to her people and spoke again to the cloud.

“What I mean by a householders’ strike is you just stop paying your rents and mortgages… maybe also your student loans and insurance payments. Any private debt you’ve taken on just to make you and your family safe. The daily necessities of existence. The union is declaring all those to be odious debts, like some kind of blackmail on us, and we’re demanding they be renegotiated… So, we stop paying and call that the Jubilee?… That’s an old name for this kind of thing. After we start this Jubilee, until there’s a restructuring that forgives a lot of our debt, we aren’t paying anything.

“You might think that not paying your mortgage would get you in trouble, and it’s true that if it was just you, that might happen. But when everyone does it, that makes it a strike. Civil disobedience. A revolution. So everyone needs to join in. Won’t be that hard. Just don’t pay your bills!

“…What will happen then is that the absence of those payments of ours will cause the banks to crash fast. They take our payments and use them as collateral to borrow tons more, to fund their own gambling, and they are way, way, way overextended. Overleveraged. I always wondered what that meant. It doesn’t make sense as a word, but—okay, never mind. The point is, when we stop funding their follies they will crash real quick.

“At that point they will be asking the government to bail them out. That’s us. We’re the government. At least in theory, but yeah. We are. So we can decide what to do then. We will have to tell our government what to do at that point. If our government tries to back the banks instead of us, then we elect a different government. We pretend that democracy is real, and that will make it real. We elect a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. That was the whole idea in the first place. As they used to tell us in school. And it’s a good idea, if we could make it real. It might never have been real, up till now. But now’s the time. Now’s the time, people!”

Amelia took a deep breath, listened to the voices chattering desperately in her ear: Charlotte and Franklin in rapid counterpoint, having a little real-time editing war over what she should say. Amelia just repeated whatever sounded good to her in what she managed to catch of their discourse. Kind of a mélange of the two of them, but so what.

“I know this all might sound radical. A little extreme. But we have to do something, right? Or nothing will change. It will keep going on with them wrecking things. And this householders’ strike is the kind of revolution where they can’t shoot you down in the public square. It’s called fiscal noncompliance. It uses the power of money against money. In fact it’s a very neat trick, if you ask me. You may be thinking that it’s such a neat trick that it probably wasn’t my idea, and that’s true. I’m an airship pilot with an animal show in the cloud. Here I am! So, yeah. Still just Amelia Black. But I’ve seen the damage done. I look down on it all the time. I carry the animals away from it. And I’m looking down at it now. There’s a pile of dead animals in the park… And I’ve talked with friends who have been working up this plan. And I think it’s a good one. It’s not just silly Amelia making another bonehead move—I mean, wait here just a second…

“…Because at this point it’s democracy versus capitalism. We the people have to band together and take over. We can only do that by mass action… It’s a case of all for one and one for all. If enough of us do it they can’t put us in jail, because there will be too many of us. We’ll have taken over. They’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers.

“…So, tell everyone you know about this, and feel free to share this show and its message, to forward it and all that… And anyone who stops payment on their odious debts and tells us about it, immediately becomes a full member of the Householders’ Union. They’re happy to have everyone join them, so do it. Send in your information, membership is free right now. They might ask for union dues later. They’ll fix your credit rating later. For now they’ve got it covered. And it’s definitely a case of the more the merrier. You know, I’ve noticed that everything that is really worth doing, it’s always the more the merrier.

“…Maybe not everything. What I hope we’ll end up with is a big householders’ union, or a co-op, or whatever you want to call it. Used to be called government, and maybe it will be again, once we get people in office who will actually work for the people rather than the banks… So, yeah. The more of you join in, the better our chances will be! So talk it over with your family and friends. Let’s try it and see what happens! And if it doesn’t work, you know, whatever. We can all talk it over in jail. If there’s enough of us, maybe this whole island here will be the jail. So it won’t be that different from the way things are now, right?

“…Oh. Hey, my friends are telling me that I should probably quit while I’m ahead. That is so often true! So that’s it for this episode of Assisted Migration with Amelia Black. See you next time!”

h) the city

Strategic defaulting. Class-action suits. Mass rallies. Staying home from work. Staying out of private transport systems. Refusing consumer consumption beyond the necessities. Withdrawing deposits. Denouncing all forms of rent-seeking. Ignoring mass media. Withholding scheduled payments. Fiscal noncompliance. Loud public complaining.

The interesting volume Why Civil Resistance Works makes the case that nonviolent civil resistance of various soft kinds is demonstrably more successful than violent resistance when it comes to actually achieving the stated goals of the resistance and changing things for the better. Chenoweth supposes this greater success for nonviolent resistance movements happens precisely because they are less violent, and therefore more likely to win agreement and compliance from the governments being opposed, and from the people whose welfare is supposedly in question. Seizing the state to achieve economic justice is seen as the principal success of these kinds of movements. General strikes and people massing in urban centers are usually understood to be the classic forms of civil resistance, but all the other methods listed above fit the definition, and have been effective in the past.

So, in the summer of 2142 people started doing all these things. The actors were many, as there was no cohesion or agreement on either means or ends. It began spontaneously soon after Hurricane Fyodor struck New York, when the emergency response to that catastrophe did not include the requisitioning of the empty residential towers of the city. This was the spark that lit the train of subsequent events. Riots in New York spread around the world at varying levels of intensity, depending on local circumstances. And in tough times it takes riots, Clover insists in Riot. Strike. Riot, to drive the point into capital’s thick skull that a change is on its way and must occur, indeed is occurring.

The coastlines naturally led the way in this rioting, being most stressed, but even in Denver significant percentages of the population joined the various householders’ unions and refused to pay rents of all kinds, mortgages and student loans especially. This form of resistance was expectedly popular. Purchase of nonessential consumer goods also dropped massively everywhere, crippling business growth by way of a perfectly legal fuck-you, which after all was merely a case of people not spending money they didn’t have for things they didn’t need. So, although there were only scattered mass demonstrations and occupations of city squares, and the results of the fiscal noncompliance were hard to see and report, there was a powerful sense of some underwater current in the global civilization now pulling it out into an unknown sea. History was happening. When that happens you can feel it.

The tug out to sea was naturally felt by the markets, as they are a sensitive instrument when it comes to noting volatility. One element that went into determining the IPPI was householder confidence, widely regarded as one of the fastest and most accurate indicators of housing price change. It had been considered impossible to rig or artificially shift householder confidence measures; polling five million households was standard practice now, and so reported levels of confidence were seen as indicators that could not be manipulated, being so much larger than any manipulation could be. They showed a real thing. But the Householders’ Union grew so big so fast that it influenced the behaviors of about twenty percent of all households, and the mood of a much greater percentage than that. So its calls for financial noncompliance could all by themselves torque the indexes. The IPPI numbers therefore fell sharply, and that dragged down the Case-Shiller numbers, and this caused the previous rapidly rising coastal housing price average to be regarded as a bubble, and that all by itself caused the bubble to burst, in a classic the-emperor-has-no-clothes moment. That bubble’s popping caused all of its derivative bubbles to pop too, which caused all banks and investment firms to call in all their liquid assets and to stop loaning anything at all, even the standard interbank loans that kept the real economy going. Quickly, promptly in fact, one of the largest investment firms collapsed and declared bankruptcy, and the fiscal relationships between all the big financial firms were now so tight that all of the biggest private banks in the United States and Europe then dashed to their central banks to demand immediate relief and salvation, in the form of massive new infusions of money, to ease their panic and keep the entire system from crashing.

All this was reported; everyone around the world was watching it unfold. Finance had once again frozen, as confidence died and trust disappeared, and no one knew what paper out there was good anymore—no one knew what was money and what was dust. The house of cards had fallen again, and the whole world was left standing in the rubble of a crashed economy, looking again at the hapless people running finance and saying Just who the fuck are these guys anyway.

Third time’s a charm. Or fourth. Whichever. Past results being no guarantee of future performance.