Goodnight New York, New York

Despite the numerous public reports otherwise, when Soo-Jung paddled up to where the Chrysler Building was supposed to be, she found it already claimed by the ocean. After circling the shadowed expanse of water twice, she slapped her goggles on, leaned out of her kayak, stuck her face into the water and … yep.

“Well,” Soo-Jung said to the lapping waves, salt water streaming down her cheeks.

Caroline’s despair translated easily across the garbled radio. It was the only thing that did. “No, n … fifty met … last year!”

Soo-Jung cupped some salt water in her hand and slapped it onto her neck. Official statement from the Office of Monitoring Sea Levels had reported, and been reporting for years, that the Chrysler building remained at least fifty meters above the water in all tides. While the sea had been halted in its gradual approach by the OMSL’s levy project, keeping shorelines fairly stagnant, no one truly knew how bad the damage was off shore, on what used to be land. Out of sight, out of mind, that was OMSL’s approach to the public. Lock away the former sites, shove them under a giant tarp labeled UNSAFE, and hope the people forget there was ever a place called New York City. It seemed to be working. No one had gotten a non-government sanctioned photo out of New York in at least twenty years and, slowly, those had lessened in frequency as well to nothing for the past two.

“Sea levels must have risen again,” she said, but she wasn’t sure how much made it through. VHFs were the grandfathers of antiquated maritime technology and theirs, despite numerous repairs and being fused together with equal parts old metal and plastic printed parts, barely cooperated. Even a scant twenty miles away across nothing but ocean, they were scrambled. But everyone, Soo-Jung included, was more worried about OMSL’s interference in the name of “safety” and arrests before they’re done than reliable communication and so without knowing what was intelligible, Soo-Jung continued into her walkie, “Plus your hurricane swept through. Cat-3 Caroline must’ve snapped the spire off. Storm surge’d easily swallow fifty meters of building.”

“G … mmit.”

Twirling her paddle up and down the top of her kayak, Soo-Jung’s eyes moved across the shadowed expanse of ocean to an above water spire. Soo-Jung held down the transmit button. “There’s not much of it left, but the Empire State is still kind of above water,” she said. “Think Empire State’ll work just as well. Slanted, but I think I can get in and tuck the kayak inside,” she concluded. The original plan had been to shelter within the walls of the Chrysler building, to tuck the kayak inside so it wouldn’t be snapped by satellites while she was under, and dive. The street-by-street plan would suffer from the difference, but in theory New York was easy to navigate.

There was a long pause from the other end, then: “ … e care...”

Half sure that meant be careful, Soo-Jung responded, “Sure. Out.”

With a small sigh to clear her lungs, Soo-Jung dipped her paddle back into the water and twisted her kayak to face the dilapidated Empire State building. A good amount of the famous building remained above water, the familiar arches currently covered in gulls and their nests, and bent decidedly backwards.

Soo-Jung had to break a window to get inside. Seagulls shrieked at her as she slid the kayak inside, finding more nestlings burrowed into the decayed drywall. “Nice birdies,” she urged, though she knew they were not. She wound a length of rope around the bow of her kayak and tied it to an exposed metal girder just below the surface, stepping onto it to prepare. Even though her specialized skin weave would allow her to withstand the pressure and protect her internal organs, it was still going to be damned cold down there. The wetsuit was tight, uncomfortable, and hard to zip up alone, but she managed with only a few derogatory remarks to the yapping gulls, then pulled on gloves and little swim socks. She would swim faster frog kicking than she ever would with flippers.

Hand in hand with the weave that had thickened her skin was the procedure to reconstruct and strengthen her inner ear. For this project she’d tested the depth at five hundred meters, diving with other specifically-enhanced divers off the coast of Maui. While there, she’d also tested the most experimental and crucial aspect to her dive here: the alteration of her myoglobin in her muscle tissue. Specially infused with whale DNA, she’d sucked in a single breath before diving in Maui and lasted a full hour under the water.

She and Caroline had gone back and forth on this for months. The camera was a required, absolutely vital part of the mission. Anything else risked tripping the scanners. Hence, the kayak taken paddled out from the larger boat safe in international waters. Hence, the VHF’s. No diving apparatus still existed without a network connection and a host of electronics set to ensure as few drowning deaths as could be possible. They’d talked about 3D printing some, just a basic tank and some rubber, but in the end it had been easier to simply genetically engineer Soo-Jung into the ability to hold her breath underwater for the duration of the dive.

It was … troubling, though. She sat herself down on the girder a moment, forcing herself to breathe in the exercises the doctors had taught her, to count as the freedivers had advised, until her heartrate was marginally under control. If this was to work, she’d need her heart to beat slowly, not the other way around. Soo-Jung took her time, trying to find her calm even if she had to repeat the words find calm silently over and over. When she half-way believed it, she lashed her camera to her belt.

So far, so good, so haven’t been arrested yet.

Soo-Jung stood up on the girder, her legs unsteady underneath her. “Dear God,” she said, voice reverberating in the hollow cavern. “I would really appreciate it if I didn’t drown. Amen.”

She walked on the girder out to the window and hopped out the window, sinking below the waves.

The first thing she did was to take several barely sub-subsurface pictures of the view from the Empire State, over the ghastly shadows the buildings made in the water, testing her breath hold. She surfaced several times, sucking in deeper breaths, and sinking down further each time, ghosting alongside the dilapidated buildings. They scarce looked real, ruins just meters under the water. They grew more concrete to her gaze as she swam down, pausing every few floors to peer out at the city and to snap a photo, trying to work her nerve up.

She made one last trip to the surface, sucking in three quick gulps of air, before diving for real, straight down the side of the Empire State, following the lines the sun cut through the water until they faded almost entirely.

The main project was an artistic one, to dive down and take pictures of the sites of famous photos. The camera was preprogrammed with images and Soo-Jung was to take one picture as it was, then to line up the underwater of now with the scenery of the past to show the change. As she dove, her heart began to pound out a rhythm against her ribs. This hardly felt illegal, and yet...

Soo-Jung mentally crossed the Chrysler Building off her list, instead swimming away from the Empire State towards a spot she›d had picked out for herself.

It took some time to find the New York Public Library, what remained of it, and when she did Soo-Jung fumbled for her camera, fingers numb already. Some of the columns had fallen, a school of silver fish descending through them to go inside, but the sign remained at the base of the stairs. Soo-Jung pulled the photo of her great-grandmother up on her camera, and held the viewer up to her eye so she could laboriously line up her shot, trying to find the column that her great-grandmother had been leaning up against.

Her great-grandmother had made her way to New York on her own. While she never managed to scrape up enough money to go to school, like she wanted, her great-grandmother spent most of her life in the library. She was one of the last to leave the city, and had campaigned to evacuate the books as the city began to flood. In the photo she was young, sixteen, blushing as the wind blew her hair into her face. Soo-Jung wanted to swim further, inside the library perhaps, but salt water had begun to gather in her eyes and she could not afford to let it leak into her goggles. Her chest felt tight enough that she blew out a small bubble of air, just to calm herself. She swam away without daring to look back.

She had photos to take that she and Caroline had actually planned to take.

Times Square was the priority, and Soo-Jung had picked three inserts to shoot. The first was the V-J Day kiss. The second showed the crowds assembled to watch the first human step onto the surface of Mars. The third photo was the last New Year’s Eve in New York, an illegal party thrown in freezing waist deep water to watch the ball drop one last time. Soo-Jung found that same ball shattered on the ocean floor and discovered upon investigation that a family of crabs that had moved inside. She shone her flashlight upon them and disturbed them the few moments it took to take a photo. A large crab raised his claws at her as she backed away, snapping in the water, and she snorted to think he might have been saying, we own these streets.

She moved on. Madison Square Garden was hard to find, and harder to photograph, so little was left. A shark approached her shot of Radio City Music Hall, and Soo-Jung snapped a few pictures as he drew near. He passed her by close enough that she could reach out and pet his rough skin, to which he flicked his tail in her face and swam lazily off. The light of the camera’s review screen was bright enough to hurt her eyes, but she smiled see this shark swim around her insert photo of some Rockettes on a smoke break.

From the Music Hall, Soo-Jung swam over what remained of 30 Rock towards the Cathedral, the camera bouncing against her side with every wide arching frog kick. She was getting cold even through her wetsuit, and she tried to keep shaking her limbs out under the water to compensate. Saint Patrick’s was in good enough shape that she could snap several photos of her insert, struck by the spires cutting through the dim sunbeams underwater. Grand Central Station was in slightly better shape than Madison Square Garden, but she doubted the photo of would live up to Caroline’s standards. The insert Caroline had picked was of scores of refugees waiting for the evacuation buses, and the columns they filed between were now little more than sand.

From Grand Central, she swam her way leisurely down Lexington Avenue, soaking in the ambiance of the city. She only made her way up toward the surface once she could touch the Empire State building, using it as a measure of how fast she rose, careful to go slow.

Breaking the surface was exhilarating, a flash of warmth upon her face, and the sudden influx of new oxygen made her dizzy. Her heart rate came back up rapidly, pulsing out a seeming protest for her exertions right up against her temple. She flipped onto her back, lazily kicking her legs until she reentered the Empire State building back floating. She still spent a good hour inside the Empire State laying in the small pool made by the girder, legs hanging on either side, letting her heart rate come down.

“Be back soon,” she lied into her walkie, pushing her long kayak back to a time when she could sit up without being dizzy.

The sun was nearly under the horizon by the time Soo-Jung paddled up alongside the boat Caroline had rented for the day’s “fishing” trip. Half anticipating the Coast Guard to materialize, Soo-Jung grasped Sunil’s proffered hand, letting him pull her up onto the deck. Sunil then pulled up the kayak, flexing synthetic muscles and the strength in heavy metal infused bones. Soo-Jung found Caroline under the shaded cabin, bent almost double over her own forearm.

“Anything good?” Soo-Jung asked, humor stolen by her uneven breathing. She had pushed her enhancements hard today. She made a small sweeping gesture at the fishing rods assembled against the railings by the cooler.

“Hm,” Caroline spoke up, staring at the screen affixed into her forearm. Soo-Jung knew that Caroline would have eagerly downloaded the photos the moment Soo-Jung was in range. Later tonight, after Caroline had edited them for clarity, they’d be up on the internet.

Soo-Jung grabbed the railing and used it to help her on her way down, grunting and grimacing as she sat. She fell the rest of the way, muscles protesting, pressing her back against the railing. She was going to be sore tomorrow. Also, very possibly arrested. She half wanted to joke about using her prison time to sleep, but a nervous lump had taken up residence in her throat. It was hard to see Caroline’s expression through the curtain of her hair.

“I don’t think there’ll be a single building above the waterline soon,” Soo-Jung told Caroline. Her expression was somber, but lightened for a moment to hear the word ‘nice’ somewhere to her left and treated Sunil with a brief flicker of a smile as she tapped his fist with hers. “It’s worse than they’re saying,” she said, serious once more.

Caroline didn›t answer. Sunil made noise about getting them out of there, and Caroline didn’t so much as flinch as the boat began to move again, kicking up seawater. Soo-Jung was almost asleep when Caroline finally looked up.

“This is beautiful,” Caroline said, swiping her finger up on her screen, turning in her swivel chair to face the large projection. Caroline had brightened it in the few minutes she’d had it, and the picture of Soo-Jung’s great-grandmother gleamed in front of the murky library.

“My great-grandmother,” Soo-Jung identified, a bit nervously.

Caroline settled back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest. “We’re leading with this one,” she said. “Times Square’ll be all over everywhere once it’s out there,” Caroline continued, flipping her hand. “I’ll publish it tomorrow. I want this one first. I want it to be personal. Why else did we do this, if it wasn’t personal?” She shook her head. “Never really cared about the buildings.”

Soo-Jung wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. It made them sting with salt. Sniffing, Soo-Jung smiled. “Me neither.”

Victoria Zelvin is a writer living and working in Arlington, Virginia. Her fiction has previously appeared in Daily Science Fiction, forthcoming from Mason Jar Press, and in various anthologies. She is a graduate of the inaugural class of Roanoke College’s Creative Writing program. Her work can be found at www.victoriazelvin.com