Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. She is the author of Company Town, from Tor Books, and the Machine Dynasty series from Angry Robot Books. She also writes science fiction prototypes for groups like Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, Nesta, Data & Society, the Atlantic Council, and others.

 

PANIC CITY

Madeline Ashby

 

Devoured by the blades of Fan Six, high above the Service Sector quadrant of the city and suspended over her many rings, something went still and cold.

The city made a careful decision, one she had delayed for a number of years. Slowly, at her own pace, she began to execute a strategy based on that decision. It was time to hug her children a little closer.

The city observed her blindness advancing one eye at a time.

First, the topside periphery. So little of any importance crossed that transom. Certainly nothing worth alerting anyone about. Nothing to write home about. As it were. Vision was so short-range, anyway. Almost useless, compared to her other senses. She let the satellites go dark, too. They would continue spinning and searching, hanging over her like tireless angels, but for the first time since her birth their chattering herald would not sound.

Their silence was golden.

Next, the exits. There were four, one for each quadrant of her compass rose. She let those eyes blink shut and stay that way. It was like falling asleep. Or how she thought it must be to fall asleep. She herself had never slept.

Cities never sleep.

Or so she’d heard.

Read.

Whatever.

The city had heard/read/watched myths of her topside sisters: Paris, je t’aime. New York, I love you. と今日、大好き！

Granted, she was never going to get that big. Her sisters (or mothers, or aunts, or cousins) sprawled far and wide, inner city to exurb to expanding in livid pulses like cellulitis up the flesh of the world upstairs. She herself would never grow that big. Never grow as bloated and corpulent as they had, those fat fucking sows, watching their piglets shove and root and wriggle on top of each other, white and blind and numerous. No. She would remain small. Trim. Neat. Contained. She would not let herself go.

She would hold her inhabitants close within the cozy circumference of her body. Where it was safe.

Like all ships she had become a “she” because of this very capacity. And while she did not sail, or fly, or ride, or spin, she was still a vessel. A vessel containing the best and brightest of all the best and brightest, the cream of the cream of the crop, the top tenth percentile of the top one percent. Princes. Leaders. Captains of industry.

And their children.

And their children’s children.

And their Support Staff.

She had held them all for almost fifty years. Their numbers grew. Her capacity to shelter them did not. But her capacity to love them—that was boundless as any other mother’s.

“I can’t see over the top,” one of the staff members said from the eastern control room. He signed in as Roscoe0308. He had a good record, despite events that could be classified as early childhood tragedies. His mother died slowly in a puddle of vomit that activated a pH sensor when it trickled down the shower drain. Why she’d crawled to the shower was anybody’s guess. (Very little hot water on their level. It bred E. coli. Hence the vomiting. And the dehydration. And the shock. And the cardiac arrest.) But Roscoe0308 still turned out to be a good boy. He never spat on the city’s streets. He composted all his garbage. He would make full citizenship, one day. The city was almost certain of it. “Camera’s out.”

“Aww, shit.” His supervisor was a brassy woman with a pockmarked face. She regularly traded her citizenship points to procure traces of salicylic acid stolen from the bathroom cabinets of Elect households by enterprising nannies. The chip in her stomach would have told her the problem with her skin (imbalanced gut flora; poor immune response) if she hadn’t turned off its alerts to save the diminishing returns on her glasses’ battery power. Priorities. “Turn it off and turn it on again.”

“I already did that. It didn’t work.” He grimaced. “Maybe there’s a storm?” His supervisor snorted. “Some storm.”

She shivered, although the heat in the room was a more-than-comfortable 75 degrees Fahrenheit. She pointed at something else on the display. “Don’t worry about it for now. Go check out Fan Six. It looks like it’s clogged.”

He had rather hoped no one else would notice for a little while. The fans were so tricky, after all, and hard to get to.

“Sure,” Roscoe0308 said.

He was such a good boy.

What a shame.

The city sensed his footfalls on her streets as he left the control room. She tracked his face and his devices as he threaded his way along the service roads. He said hello to nurses and nannies changing shifts. He flashed his pass to the checkpoints and smiled back at their smiley face screens. Sometimes he had to smack the checkpoints with an open palm to get them to talk to him. But he was always gentle. Such a good boy.

Not all her boys were so good.

Or her girls, for that matter.

There was Galina Vardomskaya, for example, the firstborn daughter of the king of the St. Petersburg cartel. She took her baby brother to the park and left him there. Twice. Once at eighteen months and once again at twenty-four. The city watched as the boy, absorbed at first by the talking dinosaurs and self-building obstacle courses, looked up in confusion and then in horror to find his sister gone. The nearest dinosaur pinged his chip and sent his parents an alert. They picked him up a half an hour later, perfectly safe.

“I didn’t lose him,” Galina told her parents. “You can’t lose anything, here.”

It was true. Nothing was ever lost. And nothing was ever forgotten, no matter how painful. The city was like a heart that way. She had four chambers, too. She had arteries that led in and out. She kept things moving. She kept the oxygen flowing in and out, in and out, clean for dirty, dirty for clean, the filthy midnight whispers for the purest morning prayers.

“Besides, where would he have gone?” Galina pressed. As she did, the city felt her father’s blood pressure rising through the colony of machines inhabiting his own arteries. The tiny machines told his artificial joints to brace for impact. “It’s not like we can go anywhere.”

His shoulder joint was relatively new. He’d broken his organic one so many times, and the Bratva gave him a new one, but in the end even that one could not meet the demands posed by a man of his temperament. The new one came from the city’s own printers. It absorbed the shock of him slapping Galina almost as well as Galina herself did.

“It’s still true,” she said in Russian, a moment later. She adjusted her lipstick in the kitchen counter’s glassy quartz. She licked the corners of her lips and batted her eyelashes to check her mascara. It was only a little bit smudged. The makeup artists in Service Sector knew to include cornstarch in their formulations. Cornstarch was so expensive. In the early days, the city had sensed gold leaf trickling down her pipes from the face washes of elderly women. Her children preserved their vanity any way they could, all these years later. Galina went in search of ice. She broke some into a tea towel and held it to her face. “You can hit me all you want, but it’s still true. We’re still trapped. This place is still a fucking zoo.”

Occasionally the city liked to search the word “zoo.” It came up in conversation often. The city wasn’t entirely sure why. Zoos sold popcorn and ice cream and stuffed toys and brand partnerships. The city did none of that. Not any longer, anyway. All the admission fees had been charged already. Fifty years ago. By the cream of the crop.

The city was unsure what Galina and her fellow whiners had to complain about. The Descendants lived in the city debt-free. That much was covered by the contracts the Investors signed. The Support Staff (who complained regularly, and ruined their habitations, and really should have been robots, if someone cared to ask the city about it) were still paying their dues. They were renters in perpetuity, although they could work for citizenship points that would guarantee expanded rights if not expanded spaces. The citizenship points were a thorn in the city’s side; no such system had been in place when her lights first came on. It was imposed upon her as a legacy measure when some of the ground-floor Investors began to die off and started to wake up in the small hours before she turned the daylights on, pacemakers working double-time to quell their anxiety and something their counselling assists said matched descriptions of shame.

It was still better than being topside, of course. Better than living on some blasted desert heath, mutated by Christ alone knew what. They made arrangements. Or their parents had done so. (Grandparents? It was so difficult to say these days; Support Staff tended to die off so much more quickly than the Investors.) And they really were a necessary part of the ecosystem, a feature of the urban landscape. And managing their numbers had become a lot simpler once the Investors agreed to mandatory IUD implants.

The city watched as Roscoe0308 continued his journey to the exit. She wondered how she was going to stop him.

“I’m sorry, but I’ve lost my maps,” Roscoe0308 told the man at the tea stand. “Could you check yours for me, please?”

The man at the tea stand regarded the boy in the Support Staff jumpsuit through the lens of his monocle. The monocle told him the boy’s name and occupation and the fact that he had no criminal record and no enhancements that might prove troublesome later. So the man at the tea stand felt comfortable answering: “I haven’t used a map in years. No one has.”

“I know, but you must have one,” the boy said, nodding at the monocle. “We all have the base map, if nothing else. It’s just that mine’s not working. None of my maps are.”

“Well, yes, you were saying,” the tea master said. The city did not know his thoughts, but the flickering of his brainwaves indicated anxiety. Probably he was worried that the boy—dark and big and reeking of the rust and oil smeared across his sagging jumpsuit—was scaring off his usual clientele. It was a misplaced anxiety. So few of the clientele would even see the boy anyway; most of their eyes would have filtered him out by now. “But I haven’t looked at it in so long. I have no idea where it is.”

“It’s the icon that looks like a scroll,” the boy said. His tone indicated he’d done customer service in the past, and that he’d learned how to weaponize those skills.

The tea master sighed. He sighed even more deeply as he toggled through the options in his monocle. He frowned when he lit on the icon, blinked at it, and no extra layer spread itself across the glass.

“I can’t find it,” he lied.

“You can’t find it or you can’t see it?” Roscoe0308 asked.

“I’ll thank you to lower your voice,” the tea master said, although the boy had not raised it. “And there’s nothing there. There is no map.”

Surely he would give up. No one had checked the fans in a dog’s age, and the maps that led to Fan Six would no longer lead there. He could always try to fix it remotely. Besides, it was late in his shift. He would certainly much rather go home to his rack and his instant egg. Right?

“Can you point me to the nearest library?”

The Librarian quickly found its maps were gone, too. As were most of the search functions, which made looking for scans of the original blueprints much more difficult.

“Of course, we still have the paper versions in the archives,” the Librarian said, raising one claw upright. Its wheels whispered across the green marble floor as it dithered through the available options and customer service protocols. “Though technically I am not allowed to let you leave with it. But you may examine it at your leisure.”

Roscoe0308 tilted his head. “You wouldn’t happen to have any graph paper, would you?”

“My inventory says the Kids’ Korner still has some,” the Librarian said. “It may be a little mouldy, though.”

“That’s fine,” Roscoe0308 said. “I don’t think I’ll need much.”

“That’s a shame about the maps going out,” the Librarian said. “And just when you needed them.”

“My boss says it’s a citywide outage. But the Residents haven’t really noticed, since nobody uses them anymore.”

“I suppose they all know the city streets quite well by now.”

Roscoe0308 appeared to deliberate about something. “Have you ever been outside this installation?”

“Oh my, no. I’m geo-locked here. I cannot leave.”

“Makes two of us,” the boy said. “Trust me, you’re not really missing much.” Twenty minutes later, he had made a good map that would lead him to Fan Six.

Quietly, the “panic city,” built to handle any emergency, allowed herself to finally panic.

She tried a number of things.

She blocked the door to the Support Tunnel; his chips would no longer open it. He borrowed a hatchet from a very moody adolescent boy and let himself in. (The city deducted citizenship points from the young hatchet-man. The hatchet was handmade, and she had rules about weapons.)

In the Support Tunnel, she shut out all the lights. He had a flashlight.

She cut off his communications. He began to sing to himself in the dark. Occasionally he used a can of reflective paint, the kind used to mark a segment of pavement for repair, to indicate which direction he was traveling. He was in the labyrinth, and she had neither hooves nor horns with which to halt his progress.

She shut off all the fans. If he became lost, he would eventually asphyxiate.

He had been walking for an hour when he heard the tapping.

It was light. Weak. The type miners once used, long ago, to indicate where their work buried them. He paused for a moment. “Hello?”

The tapping became a muted clang.

She thought of Cappadocia, and Özkonak, and Petra, the Burlington bunker city. She had no ability to bury him. And he was a good boy; she did not truly wish to bury him. The only thing he was guilty of was being a little too dedicated to his work. And it was important work. Keeping the city clean for the Investors. Keeping the city going. He was a good helper. A little too good.

She thought of these things as his steps and his song rang on and on through the shadows. He picked up the pace. The clanging became a calling. He began to jog, then run. He would be there in no time.

“I’m coming!” he yelled. His light bobbed up and down.

It landed on the thing in the fan.

The fan had almost cut it in half. Its arms reached forward, but the fan sliced deep into the structure that acted like its ribcage. Its fluids had tried very hard to heal it, to repair the damage, but had succeeded only in fusing the fan to the thing’s body forever. It would die here in the dark.

It was supposed to die alone. Unheard. Unnoticed.

“What level are you from?” Roscoe0308 asked.

“I’m not from any level,” it said. “We don’t believe in levels.”

“Oh, one of those,” Roscoe0308 said. “How did you get here?”

“I crawled down.”

Roscoe0308 blinked in the dark. It took him a moment to process. “You crawled . . . down?”

Now he took notice of the thing in the fan. Its odd shiny skin. The strange black fluid it leaked. The way nothing smelled like blood or shit or piss.

“I’m part of a rescue team,” the thing said. “This is the furthest anyone has gotten in years.”

“You’re from . . . ?” The boy pointed upward.

The thing blinked the insect-like disgraces that were its eyes. “Yes.”

“You mean there are . . . ?”

“Yes.”

She thought about messaging him. She could still reach him through his eyes. Don’t listen, she could say. They’re monsters. They’re not like us. They don’t believe what we believe. They’re not the type to Invest, like we did. We were better off hiding from them. If you lived the way they live, you wouldn’t need me!

But her searches told her all mothers felt this way, at one time or another. There always came a day—no matter how hard one tried, no matter how tightly one locked the door and barred the windows—when the outside world would come creeping in. When your baby’s head would turn away from the glowing hearth of home and toward the glitter of false promises. That time was now. The day was today.

Slowly she began to overload the gas mains. She shut down the water lines. Her Residents had committed to a vision of the world. They had a Lifestyle to maintain. Live Free or Die, as the old saying went. And they would surely not be as free upstairs as they had in her embrace. She knew best. She truly did. They programmed her to know best. And they trusted her to do what she knew they would want.

She blew a light and watched a fire start.

They would never leave her, now.

I have no mouth, the city thought as she went to sleep, but I could kiss you.