Los Piratas del Mar de Plastico (Pirates of the Plastic Ocean)
Paul Graham Raven is a postgraduate researcher in infrastructure futures and theory at the University of Sheffield, as well as a futurist, writer, literary critic, and occasional journalist; his work has appeared in such venues as MIT Technology Review, Interzone, Strange Horizons, ARC Magazine, Rhizome, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Guardian. He lives a stone’s throw from the site of the Battle of Orgreave in the company of a duplicitous cat, three guitars he can hardly play, and sufficient books to constitute an insurance-invalidating fire hazard, and maintains a website at velcro-city.co.uk.
In the thought-provoking story that follows, he shows us that there’s no disaster so complete that it doesn’t provide an opportunity for somebody …
Hope Dawson stepped down from the train into the bone-dry heat of afternoon in southern Spain, and wondered—not for the first time, and probably not for the last—what the hell she was doing there, and how long she’d end up staying.
The freelance lifestyle did that to you; seven years crawling to and fro across Europe as a hand-to-mouth journo-sans-portfolio had left Hope with few ties to her native Britain beyond her unpaid student loans, and she’d yet to settle anywhere else for long. She’d spent the last six months or so bumping around in the Balkans on a fixed-term stringer’s contract from some Californian news site she’d never read (and never intended to), scraping up extra work on the side wherever she could: Web site translation gigs, trade-zine puff pieces, and the inevitable tech-art exhibition reviews; she could barely remember the last time she put her own name in a by-line, or wanted to. The Californian site had folded itself up a few days before the contract ended, and after a few agreeable weeks house-sitting an alcoholic Tiranese lawyer’s apartment, burning through the small pile of backhanded cash and favours she’d amassed, and poking at her perpetually unfinished novel, she felt the need to move on once more. Albania was cheap, but it was a backwater, and backwaters rarely coughed up stories anyone would pay for; her loans weren’t going to repay themselves, after all, and the UK government had developed an alarming habit of forcibly repatriating those who attempted to disappear into the boondocks and default on their debts.
The world dropped the answer in her lap while she wasn’t looking. As winter gave way to spring, Tirana’s population of favela geeks—a motley tribe of overeducated and underemployed Gen-Y Eurotrash from the rust-belts, dust-belts and failed technopoles of Europe—began to thin out. Hope’s contacts dropped hints about southern Spain, casual labour, something to do with the agricultural sector down there. That, plus a surge of ambiguous white-knuckle op-eds in the financial press about the long-moribund Spanish economy, was enough for Hope to go on. She’d finished up a few hanging deadlines, called in a favour she’d been saving up, and traded a lengthy, anonymous and staggeringly unobjective editorial about Albanian railway tourism in exchange for a one-way train ticket to Almeria, first class.
Hope squinted along the length of the platform, a-shimmer with afternoon heat-haze beneath a cloudless azure sky, to where a dozen or so geeks were piling themselves and their luggage out of the budget carriages at the very back of the train. They were loaded down with faded military surplus duffels and mountaineering backpacks, battered flight cases bearing cryptic stencils, and rigid luggage that look uncharacteristically new and expensive by comparison to their clothing which, true to their demography, looked like a random grab-bag of the ugliest and most momentary styles of the late twentieth century. Only a decade ago, while Hope had been wrapping up her undergrad work and hustling for her PhD scholarship back in Britain, one might have assumed they were here to attend a peripatetic music festival, maybe, or a convention for some obscure software framework. But that was before the price of oil had gone nuts and annihilated the cheap airline sector almost overnight. Even within Europe, long distance travel was either slow and uncomfortable or hideously expensive. Unemployed Millennials—of which there were many—tended not to move around without a damned good incentive.
Milling around on the platform like a metaphor for Brownian motion, the geeks were noisy, boisterous and a few years younger than Hope, and she worked hard to squash a momentary feeling of superiority, to bring her field researcher’s reflexivity back online. Tat tvam asi, she reminded herself; that thou art. Or there but for the grace of God, perhaps. The main difference between Hope and them, she decided, was a certain dogged luck. She looked briefly at her reflection in the train window, and saw a short girl with tired-looking eyes wearing an executive’s dark trouser-suit in the London style of three winters previous, her unruly mass of curly blonde hair already frizzing into a nimbus of static in response to the heat. Who was she trying to fool, she wondered, for the umpteenth time. The geeks looked ludicrous, flowing off the platform and into the station like some lumpy superfluid, but they also looked comfortable, carefree. It’d been a long time since Hope felt either of those things.
Leaving the station, Hope donned her spex, set them to polarise, and blinked about in the local listings. She soon secured herself a few cheap nights in an apartment on the sixth floor of an undermaintained block about half a klick from the centre of town. Almeria reminded Hope more than a little bit of the ghost-towns of southern Greece, where she’d gone to chase rumours of a resurgence in piracy in the Eastern Med a few years back: noughties boom-time tourist infrastructure peeling and crumbling in the sun, like traps left lying in a lobsterless sea. Leaning on the rust-spotted railing of her balcony, she looked westwards, where the legendary Plastic Ocean stretched out to the horizon, mile after square mile of solarised bioplastic sheeting shimmering beneath the relentless white light of the sun. The greenhouses were all Almeria had left since the tourists stopped coming, churning out a relentless assortment of hothouse fruit’n’veg for global export, but they’d been predominantly staffed by semi-legal immigrant workers from across the Med for years. She couldn’t see much chance of the geeks undercutting that sort of workforce.
* * *
Later that evening, Hope was prepared to use her clueless middle-management airhead routine on the tapas bar’s waiter, but didn’t need to: He had plenty to say, albeit in a Basque-tinged dialect that tested her rusty Spanish to the utmost.
“You’re with those guys who bought the Hotel Catedral, yes?” he asked her.
“Oh, no,” she replied. The waiter relaxed visibly as she spooled out her cover: purchasing rep for a boutique market stall in Covent Garden, sent out to do some on-the-spot quality control.
“Well, I knew you couldn’t be with those damned kids who’ve been turning up the last few weeks,” he said, plunking down a cold beer next to her tapas.
Hope fought to keep a straight face; the waiter was no older than the geeks he’s disparaging, but she’s very used to the employed seeing the unemployed as children. “Yeah, what’s with them?”
“Damned if I know.” He shrugged. “They all seem to head westwards as soon as they arrive. I’ll be surprised if they find any work in El Ejido, but hey, not my problem.”
“And what about the Hotel Catedral?”
“Again, don’t know. They’ve been close to closing for years, running a skeleton staff. Times have been hard, you know? My friend Aldo works the bar up there. Few weeks back, he tells me, he’s doing a stint on the front desk when this bunch of American guys breeze in and ask to speak to the manager. They disappear to his office for half an hour, then they come back out, gather the staff, announce a change of ownership. More Yankees came in by plane, apparently. Place is full of them, now.” He scowls. “They hired my girlfriend and some others as extra staff. Good tippers, apparently, but a bit … well, they’re rich guys, I guess. What do you expect, right?”
Hope nodded sympathetically. She’d never worked hotels, largely because she knew so many people who had.
* * *
Hope spent the next morning getting her bearings, then drifted casually toward the Hotel Catedral, where she enquired about booking a table for supper. The lobby was all but empty, but the receptionist had the tight-lipped air of a man with a lot to worry about.
“No tables for non-residents, senora; my apologies.”
“Oh—in that case, can I book a room?”
“We are fully booked, senora.”
Hope made a show of peering around the empty lobby. “If it’s a money thing, I can show you a sight-draft on my company’s account?”
The guy continued to stonewall, so Hope relented and wandered back onto the palm-studded plaza, where the sun was baking the sturdy buttresses of the titular cathedral. She was drinking a coffee at a cafe across the square when a gangly and somewhat sunburned young man pulled up on some sort of solar-assisted trike.
“Hey—Hope Dawson, right?” He spoke English with a broad Glaswegian accent.
Hope protested her innocence in passable Castilian, but he whipped out a little handheld from a pocket on his hunting vest and consulted it, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand.
“Naw, see, this is definitely you. Look?”
Hope looked. It was definitely her—her disembarking from the train yesterday afternoon, in fact. Droneshot, from somewhere above the station.
“Who wants to know?” she growled, putting some war-reporter grit into it.
“Mah boss. Wants tae offer ye a job, see.”
“Well, you may tell your boss thank you, but I’m already employed.”
“Bollix, lass—ye’ve not had a proper job in years.” The lad grins. “I should know. It was me as doxxed ye.”
“Is that supposed to reassure me?”
“Naw, it’s supposed to intrigue ye.” He slapped the patchwork pleather bench-seat of the trike behind him, shaded by the solar panel. “Cedric’s a few streets over the way. Come hear what he has to say before ye make up yer mind, why not?”
* * *
“I hope Ian didn’t alarm you, Miss Dawson,” said Cedric, as a waiter poured coffee. They were sat in the lobby of a mid-range boutique hotel which, given by the lingering musty smell, had been boarded up for years until very recently.
“Not at all,” Hope lied, in a manner she hoped conveyed a certain sense of fuck you, Charlie. “But I’d appreciate you explaining why you had him dox me.”
“I want you to work for me, Miss Dawson.”
“Just Hope, please. And as I told Ian, Mister…?”
He smiles. “Just Cedric, please.”
“As I told Ian, Cedric, I already have work.”
“Indeed you do—a career in journalism more distinctive for its length than its impact, if you don’t mind me saying so. Not many last so long down in the freelance trenches.”
“Debts don’t pay themselves, Cedric.”
“Quite. But it would be nice to pay them quicker, wouldn’t it?”
Hope put down her coffee cup to hide the tremor of her hands. “I’m flattered, but I should probably point out I’m not really a journalist.”
“No, you’re a qualitative economist. You were supervised by Shove and Walker, University of Lancaster. I’ve read your thesis.”
“You have?”
“Well, the important bits. I had Ian précis the methodological stuff for me, if I’m honest. It was well received by your peers, I believe.”
“Not well enough to lead to any research work,” said Hope, curtly. No one wanted an interpretivist cluttering up their balance sheets with talk of intangible externalities, critiquing the quants, poking holes in the dog-eared cardboard cut-out of homo economicus.
“Obviously not—but participant observation research work is what I’m offering you, starting today. Six months fixed term contract, a PI’s salary at current UK rates, plus expenses. I’ll even backdate to the start of the month, if it helps.”
“What’s the object?”
Cedric looks surprised; his expression reminds Hope of the animated meerkat from an ad campaign of her youth. “Well, here, of course. Almeria the province, that is, rather than just the city.”
“Why?”
He smiled, leant forward a little. “Good question!” A frown replaced the smile. “I’m afraid I can’t really answer it, though. Confidentiality of sources, you understand. But in essence, I was tipped off to an emerging situation here in Almeria, and decided I wanted to see it up close.”
“I’m going to need more than that to go on, I’m afraid,” said Hope.
Cedric somehow looked chagrined and reproachful at once. “There are limits, I’m afraid, and they’re not of my making. But look: if I say I have reason, solid reason to believe that Almeria is on the verge of a transformative economic event without precedent, and that I have spent upward of five million euros in just the last few days in order to gather equipment and personnel on the basis of that belief, would you trust me?”
Not as far as I could throw you, frankly. “So why me, specifically?”
A boyish smile replaced the frown. “Now, that’s a little easier! Remind me, if you would, of your thesis topic?”
To her own surprise, Hope’s long-term memory duly regurgitated a set of research questions and framings polished to the smoothness of beach pebbles by repeated supervisory interrogations: transitions in civic and domestic consumptive practices; the influence of infrastructures and interfaces on patterns and rates of resource use; the role of externalities in the playing out of macroeconomic crises. Warming to her topic, she segued into a spirited defense of free-form empirical anthropology, and of interpretive methods as applied to the analysis of economic discontinuities.
“Good,” Cedric intoned, as if she’d passed some sort of test. “H&M is researching exactly those sort of questions, and we think Almeria could be our Ground Zero.”
That was a worrying choice of phrase.
“The markets are turbulent places, Hope,” he continued, “too turbulent for mere mathematics to explain. They no longer interest me, in and of themselves.” He leans back in his chair. “This will sound crass to someone of your generation, I’m sure, but nonetheless: I am not simply wealthy. I am rich enough that I don’t even know what I’m worth, how I got that way, or who I’d have to ask to find out. Money is a very different matter for me than for you. I have the extraordinary liberty of being able to think about it purely in the abstract, because my concrete concerns are taken care of.”
Hope stared at him, stunned into silence.
“So I am able,” Cedric continued, “to explore economics in a way accessible to few, and of interest to even fewer. Lesser men, poorer men obsess over mere commerce, on the movement of money. My concerns are larger, far larger. You might say that it is the movement of money that fascinates me.”
She grabbed her bag, stood up, and started for the doorway.
“Hope, hear me out, please,” he called. “I don’t expect you to like me, or even understand me. But I need you to work for me, here and now, and I am willing to pay you well. Wait, please, just for a moment.”
Hope paused in the shade of the doorway, but didn’t turn around.
“Check your bank balance,” he said after a brief pause. She blinked it up on her spex: a deposit had just cleared from Huginn&Muninn AB, Norwegian sort-code. More money than she’d earned in the last twelve months, both on the books and off. “Consider it a signing bonus.”
She turned round, her arms crossed. “What if I won’t sign?”
Cedric shrugged elegantly in his seat; he’d not moved an inch.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, turning on her heel.
Ian drove her back to her apartment block on the trike.
“So I’ll come fetch ye tomorrow morning, then,” he announced. “Run you down to El Ejido, get ye all set up and briefed.”
“I told Cedric I’d think about it, Ian.”
“Aye, I heard ye.” Ian grinned. “Told him the same meself.”
* * *
True to his word, Ian came to collect her the next morning. Hope found, to her surprise, that she was packed and ready to go.
“Knew ye’d go fer it,” asserted Ian, bungeeing her bags to the trike.
“Very much against my better judgement,” she replied.
“Aye, he’s an odd one, fer sure. But he’s not lied to me once, which is more than I can say fer mah previous employers.” He saddled up, flashed a grin. “Plus, he always pays on time.”
“He’d better,” replied Hope, as Ian accelerated out into the empty streets of Almeria, heading westwards. “What is it you do for him, anyway?”
“Not what you might be thinking! Ah’m a kind of general gopher, I guess, but I do a lot of reading for him when he’s got other stuff on. News trawls, policy stuff. The doctoral theses of obscure scholars, sort o’ thing.” He flashed a grin over his shoulder. “Sometimes he just wants to chew over old science fiction novels until the early hours. You thought it was hard to find work off the back of your doctorate? Try bein’ an academic skiffy critic, eh!”
“Seriously?”
“Oh, aye. Says they inspire him to think differently. Me, I reckon he thinks he’s Hubertus fuckin’ Bigend or somesuch…”
“Who?”
But Ian had slipped on a set of retro-style enclosure headphones and turned his attention to his driving, dodging wallowing dirtbikes and scooters overloaded with helmetless geeks and their motley luggage, all headed westwards. The road from Almeria to El Ejido passed briefly through foothills almost lunar in their rugged desolation, before descending down to the Plastic Ocean itself. Hope couldn’t see a patch of ground that wasn’t covered with road, cramped housing, or row after monotonous row of greenhouses shimmering with heat-haze. Hope was surprised to see trucks at the roadside in the iconic white and blue livery of the United Nations, and tapped Ian on the shoulder.
“What the hell are they doing here?” she yelled over the slipstream.
“The man hisself tipped ‘em off. Fond of the UN, he is—fits wi’ his International Rescue fetish, I guess—and they seem to appreciate his input, albeit grudgingly. We’ll fix ye a meeting wi’ General Weissmuutze, she’s sound enough. Always good to know the people wi’ the guns and bandages, eh?”
* * *
Ian dropped Hope at a small villa near the southern edge of El Ejido, loaded her spex with a credit line to a Huginn&Muninn expenses account and a bunch of new software, and told her to call if she needed anything, before whizzing off eastwards on his ridiculous little vehicle. Hope settled in, pushed aside her doubts and got to work familiarising herself with the town and the monotonous sea of greenhouses surrounding it. Cedric’s backroom people had assembled a massive resource set of maps and satellite images, and a handful of high-def camdrones were busily quartering the town, collecting images to compile into street-view walkthroughs; they’d also, they claimed, fudged up a cover identity that would hold up to all but the most serious military-grade scrutiny. Hope had her doubts about that, but after a handful of days and a fairly drastic haircut, she was confident enough to hit the streets and pass herself off as just another new arrival, of which there were more and more each day.
Eager and noisy gangs of geeks were descending on boarded-up villas, boutique hotels and bars, reactivating the inert infrastructure of the tourist sector, stripping buildings back to the bare envelope before festooning them with solar panels, screen-tarps, and sound-systems of deceptively prodigious wattage. The wide boulevard of Paseo los Lomas, quiet enough during the daylight hours, started to fill up with ragged revellers around 6pm; by 9 each night, with the heat of the day still radiating from the pavements, it resembled a cross between a pop-up music festival and a Spring Break riot. The few businesses still owned and operated by locals hung on for a few days, watching their stock fly off the shelves at premium prices, before selling up their operations lock, stock and barrel to expensively dressed men bearing bottomless yen-backed banker’s draughts.
“I’d have been crazy not to sell,” a former restaurateur told Hope, as his wife and kids bundled their possessions into the trunk of a Noughties-vintage car retooled for biodiesel. Inside the building, an argument was breaking out between the new owners over which internal walls to knock through. “The mortgage has been under water for a decade, and they offer to pay it off in full? I’m not the crazy one here. They’re welcome to it,” he said, turning away.
Inside the cafe, Hope found five geeks swinging sledgehammers into partition walls, watched over by a man so telegenic that he was almost anonymous, his office-casual clothes repelling the dust of the remodelling process.
“Hey, girl,” the man drawled in approval. The geeks carried on hammering.
“Hi!” she said, bright as a button. “So I just got into town, and I was wondering which are the best job-boards? There’s, like, so many to choose from.”
The guy looked her up and down. “Guess it depends what sort of things you can do, doesn’t it, ah … Cordelia?”
“That’s me!” The cover identity seemed to be working, at least. “I guess you’d say I was in administration?”
“Not much call for admin at the moment, princess. Here.” He threw an url to her spex. “That’s the board for indies and non-specialists. You’re a bit late to pick up the best stuff, but you should be able to make some bank if you don’t price yourself out of the market. Or maybe one of the collectives will take you on contract for gophering? I’m sure these lads could find a space for a pretty little taskrabbit like yourself in their warren, couldn’t you, boys?”
“Right on, Niceday, right on,” enthused a scrawny geek. “You want the url, girl?”
“Please,” she lied. “I’mma shop around some more, though. See what my options are, you know?”
“Whatevs,” shrugged the dusty kid. “Longer you leave it, less we’ll cut you in.”
“You should listen to him, Cordelia,” said the well-dressed guy, stepping closer to her. “In business, it pays to be bold.” His eyes narrowed a little. “And loyal.”
“Oh, sure! So what about your warren, Mister…?”
“Niceday. And I don’t have a warren, I hire them.”
“So you’re, like, a veecee or something?”
Niceday smiled an oily sort of smile. “Or something,” he agreed. The smile vanished as he locked eyes with her. “Choose wisely, Cordelia, and choose soon. This isn’t the time or place for … observing from the sidelines. Unless you’re with the UN, of course.”
“Haha, right! Well, ah, thanks for the advice,” said Hope, her heart hammering against her ribs, and beat a swift retreat.
* * *
The mood on the periphery of the town was in sharp contrast to the raucous debauch of the centre. The greenhouse workers—almost all youngish North African men—were packed like matches into street after street of undermaintained tourist villas and former residential blocks, with the more recent arrivals living in slums built of breezeblocks and plastic sheeting on the vacant lots where the plastic ocean broke upon the dark edges of the town. Hope spent a few hours wandering from coffeeshop to shisha-shack, trying every trick in the interviewer’s book to get them to talk. They were happy enough to have drinks bought for them on Cedric’s dime, and to complain at length about work in the abstract as they demolished plates of tapas and meze, but questions about actual working conditions led only to sullen, tense silences, or the sudden inability of the formerly fluent to speak a word of Spanish.
“You only ask about our work so you can steal our jobs,” a gaunt man accused her toward the end of the evening, pointing his long, scarred finger at her through a cloud of fragrant shisha smoke. “For so long, no one else will do this work so cheap. Now all you people come back, make trouble for us.”
She tried dropping her cover a bit, and played the journalist card; big mistake.
“Journalists, they don’t make good stories about us, ever. We are always the villains, the evil Arabs, no?”
She protested her innocence and good intentions, but he had a point. Hope’s background research had uncovered a history of tension between the greenhouse workers and the local residents that stretched back to before she was born: grimly vague and one-sided stories in the archives of now-moribund local news outlets about forced evictions, arson, and the sort of casual but savage violence between young men that always marks periods of socioeconomic strife. The attacks had lessened as the local youth migrated northwards in search of better work, but there was a lingering vibe of siege mentality among the remaining immigrants, and their dislike for the influx of favela geeks was tangible.
“Go back to your rich friends,” the man repeated, jabbing his finger for emphasis. “It is they who are meddling, trying to make us look bad! We’ll not help you pin it on us.”
“Pin what on you?” Hope asked, suddenly alert to the closeness of the knowledge she needed, but the guy’s eyes narrowed and his lips tightened and he shook his head, and the whole place went silent and tense, and Hope was horribly aware of being the only woman in a dark smoky room full of unfamiliar men speaking an unfamiliar language.
She stammered out some apologies, paid her tab and left quickly, but the damage was done. From that point on, the workers refused to talk to her. As the days passed, there were a few ugly incidents in alleyways late at night: botched muggings, running brawls, a few serious stabbings on both sides. But the geeks were confident in their new-found dominion, not to mention better fed and equipped, and the workers had no one on their side, least of all the employers they’d never met, and who only communicated with them via the medium of e-mailed quotas and output itineries. If Hope wanted to get to the bottom of whatever was going on, she was going to have to do more than ask around.
* * *
Most of the geeks worked by day in jury-rigged refrigerated shipping containers and partied by night, but Cedric’s backroom people had tipped her off to the existence of a small night shift that drifted out into the greenhouse ocean around midnight and returned before dawn. They’d furnished Hope’s villa with an assortment of technological bits and bobs, including an anonymously military-looking flight-case containing three semi-autonomous AV drones about the size of her fist. She spent an afternoon syncing them up with her spex and jogging around among the miniature palms and giant aloes in her compound, getting the hang of the interface, then waited for night to fall before decking herself out in black like some amateur ninja and sneaking along the rooftops toward the edge of town, using the raucous noise of the evening fiesta as cover. Spotting a small knot of kids heading northwards out of town, she sent two drones forward to tail them, one to run overwatch, and followed after at a distance she assumed would keep her out of sight, or at least give her plenty of time to cut and run if she was spotted.
After about half an hour, the geeks paused and split up. Hope hunkered down just close enough to still receive the feed from her drones, then flew them slow and low down the narrow gaps between the greenhouses, using an IR overlay to pick out the warm bodies among the endless identical walls of plastic, and settled down to watch.
Hope was no agricultural technician, but there was plenty of public info about the basic design of the greenhouses: long tunnels of solarised plastic sheeting with automated ventilation flaps covered row after row of hydroponic medium, into which mixtures of precious water and bespoke nutrients were dribbled at algorithmically optimised rates, depending on the species under cultivation. Over the years, more and more of the climate control and hydroponics had been automated, but the hapless workers still had the unenviable task of shuffling up and down the greenhouses on their knees during the heat of the day, checking closely on the health and development of their charges; the consequences of quality control failures were draconian, in that it meant being sacked and blacklisted for further employment. The only reason they’d not been replaced by robots was that robots couldn’t do the sort of delicate and contextual work that the greenhouses required; it was still way cheaper to get some poor mug straight off the boat from Morocco and teach him how to trim blight and pluck aphids than it was to invest in expensive hardware that couldn’t make those sorts of qualitative decisions on the fly. Plus the supply of desperate immigrants was effectively inexhaustible, and their wage demands were kept low by Europe’s endemic problem with unemployment. In Spain, as in much of the rest of the world, automation had been eating away at the employment base from the middle class downwards, rather than from the bottom upwards … and the more white-collar gigs it consumed, the larger and more desperate the working class became. There was barely a form of manual labour left that you couldn’t design a machine to do just as well as a human, but hiring a human had far lower up-front costs. Plus you could simply replace them when they wore out, at no extra expense.
The geek night shift wasn’t doing the work of the greenhouse guys, that was for sure. Of the trio Hope was watching, one was squatting on the ground over a handheld he’d plugged in to the server unit at the end of the greenhouse module, another was fiddling around with the nutrient reservoirs, and the third was darting in and out of the little airlock next to the guy fiddling with the server. Lost in the scene unfolding in front of her eyes, Hope steered one of her drones in for a closer look as the third guy reemerged with his fists full of foot-long seedlings, which he threw to the ground before picking up a tray of similar-looking cuttings and slipping back inside.
She was just bringing her second forward drone around for a closer look at the reservoir tanks when her spex strobed flash-bulb white three times in swift succession, causing her to shriek in shock and discomfort. Blinded and disoriented, she stood and started running in what she assumed was the direction she’d come, but tripped on some pipe or conduit and fell through the wall of a greenhouse. She thrashed about, trying to free herself from a tangled matrix of plastic sheeting and tomato plants, but strong hands grabbed her ankles and hauled her out roughly onto the path. She put her hands up to protect her face as a strong flashlight seared her already aching eyes. At least I’m not permanently blind, she thought to herself, absurdly.
“Stay still,” grunted a Nordic-sounding man, and she was flipped over onto her front, before someone sat on her legs and zip-tied her hands behind her back.
“I’ve got a bunch of drones out here,” she threatened.
“No,” replied the Viking voice, “you had three. We only have one. But unlike yours, ours has a MASER instead of a camera.”
Hope stopped struggling.
* * *
Dawn took a long time to come. When it arrived, Hope’s two hulking assailants fetched her out of the shipping container they’d locked her in, bundled her into the back of an equally windowless van, then drove eastwards in stony silence, ignoring her attempts at conversation. They delivered her to the reception room of a top-floor suite at the Hotel Catedral, where a familiar face was waiting for her.
“Ah, Cordelia … or should I say Hope?” drawled Niceday. “We meet again!”
Hope kneaded her wrists, where the cable-tie had left deep red weals. “You could have just pinged my calendar for an appointment,” she snarked.
“I work to my own schedule, not yours. Nor Cedric’s, for that matter. How’s he doing, anyway?”
“Ask him yourself,” she shot back. “I just work for him.”
“Quod erat demonstrandum,” said Niceday, leaning against a drinks cabinet. “He’s always been a great collector of … novelties.”
“You know him well, then?”
Niceday laughed, but didn’t reply.
“Why are those kids out hacking greenhouses in the middle of the night?”
“That’s literally none of your business, Hope.”
“But it is your business?”
“Mine, yes, and that of my associates. There are laws against industrial espionage, you know.”
“There are also laws to protect journalists from being kidnapped in the course of their work.”
“But you’re not a journalist, Hope.” Niceday snapped his fingers. A hidden projector flashed up a copy of Hope’s contract with Huginn&Muninn onto the creamy expanse of the wall. “Qualitative economist, it says here. Good cover for an industrial spy, I’d say.”
“I’m not a spy. I’m a social scientist.”
“Are you so sure?”
Hope opened her mouth to reply, then closed it.
“You should listen to your gut instincts more often,” Niceday continued. “Isn’t that what journalists do? I hope that, after this little chat, your gut instincts will be to stay the hell away from my taskrabbits.”
“What are you going to do if I don’t—have me disappear?”
“Don’t dream it’s beyond my reach, girl,” he snapped. “Or that I couldn’t get you and Cedric tangled up in a lawsuit long enough to keep you out of my hair—and out of sight—for years to come.”
“So why haven’t you?”
The smile returned. “Lawyers are expensive. Much cheaper to simply persuade you to cease and desist, mano a mano, so to speak.”
“That rather implies you have something to hide.”
“Oh, Hope—who doesn’t have something to hide? Only those with nothing to lose. Do you think Cedric has nothing to hide? Weren’t you hiding behind a false name yourself?”
“Yes, but—”
“But nothing. You’ve no moral high ground here, Hope. You can write a story about my taskrabbits and try to get it published somewhere, if you like, but you’ll find there’s no respectable organ that’ll run it. Takes a lot of money to keep a good news outlet running, you know, and ads just don’t cover it.” He shook his head in mock lament. “Or you could publish it online yourself, independently, of course. But you might find that some stories about you were published around the same time. The sort of stories that kill careers in journalism and research stone dead: fabricated quotes, fiddled expenses, false identities, kickbacks, tax evasion, that sort of thing.”
“So you’re threatening me, now?”
Niceday arched an eyebrow. “Hope, I just had two large men zip-tie your wrists together and lock you in a shipping container for four hours.”
Hope felt the fight drain out of her. “Yeah, fair point.”
“We understand each other, then. Good. Now, you get back to your fieldwork. The boys will drive you back to El Ejido, if you like.”
“You’re just going to let me go?”
He laughed again. “If I thought you or Cedric could do any lasting damage to my business plan, you’d have never got within a hundred klicks of Almeria. Do you think it says ‘Niceday’ on any of my passports? Do you think this face matches any official records, that this voice is on file somewhere? I might as well not exist, as far as law enforcement is concerned; far less paperwork that way.” He crossed his arms. “Keeping your nose out of my affairs going forward is just a way of avoiding certain more permanent sorts of clean-up operation. Do you understand me?”
Hope stared at him: six foot something of surgically perfected West Coast beefcake, wearing clothes that she’d need to take out a mortgage to buy, and the snake-like smile of a man utterly accustomed to getting his own way.
“Who are you?” she wondered aloud. “Who are you, really?”
He spread his arms in benediction, like that Jesus statue in Brazil before the Maoists blew it up.
“We,” he intoned, “are the opportunity that recognises itself.”
She didn’t understand him at all. She suspected she never would.
* * *
Around five weeks after she’d arrived, the storm finally broke, and Hope found herself riding shotgun in General Weissmuutze’s truck on the highway toward the port facility at Almeria, weaved along between an implacable and close-packed column of self-driving shipping containers. The hard shoulder was host to a Morse code string of greenhouse workers, moving a little faster on foot than the solar-powered containers, backs bent beneath their bundles of possessions. The General was less than happy.
“I have a team down at the airport; the private planes are leaving as quickly as they can arrange a take-off window. And then there’s the port,” she complained, gesturing out of the passenger-side window toward the sea, where Hope could see a denser knot than usual of ships large and small waiting for their time at dockside. “Every spare cubic foot of freight capacity on the entire Mediterranean, it looks like. They’re trying to clear as much of the produce as they can before I can seal the port.”
Weisskopf’s team had been awoken by an urgent voicecall from the FDA in the United States. A routine drugs-ring bust by the FBI somewhere in the ghost-zones of Detroit had uncovered not the expected bales of powder or barrels of pills, but crate after crate of Almerian tomatoes. After taking a few samples to a lab, they discovered that the fruit’s flesh and juice contained a potent designer stimulant connected to a spate of recent overdoses, and informed the FDA. The FDA began the process of filing with Washington for an embargo on imports from Almeria, before informing the Spanish government and the UN, who’d patched them straight through to Weissmuutze in hopes of getting things locked down quickly.
“Scant chance of that,” said Weissmuutze later, as they watched the ineffectual thin blue line of the Almerian police force collapse under a wave of immigrant workers trying to climb the fence into the container port. “The Spanish government doesn’t have much reach outside of the big cities, and they handed the port over as a free-trade zone about a decade ago. The consortium is supposed to supply its own security, but…” She shrugged her bearlike shoulders. “My people are deactivating all the containers they can now the highway’s blocked, but these poor bastards know that means there’ll be more space for passengers.”
Hope watched as the front line of workers reached the fence and began lobbing their bags and bundles over it, shaking at the fencepoles. “I think they’ve known this was coming for a while,” said Hope.
“We’ve all known something was coming,” muttered Weissmuutze. “Exactly what it is that’s arrived is another question entirely.”
Hope left Weisskopf and her peacekeepers to supervise the developing riot as best they could and headed for the airport, where Ian was lurking at Cedric’s behest. The concourse bar was crowded with men who wore the bland handsomeness of elective surgery with the same casual ease as their quietly expensive Valley-boy uniform of designer jeans, trainers, and polo-necks.
“Honestly!” protested Ian over the rim of his mojito. “This is only my first one, and I only bought it ’cause they’d nae let me keep my table if I didn’t.”
Hope filled him in on happenings at the port. “What’s happening here, then?”
“Looks like the circus is leaving town. Well, the ringmasters, at any rate. Hisself hoped I might be able to get some answers, but it’s like I’m invisible or something, they’ll nae talk to me…”
Hope sighed and scanned the room via the smallest and subtlest of her drones, finally spotting a familiar mask. Donning her own she made her way over to the end of the bar, where Niceday was sat nursing a highball of something peaty and expensive. “Ms Dawson, we meet again. Are you flying today?”
“I put myself on the stand-by list, but for some reason I’m not expecting any luck.”
“Oh, very good,” he replied, flashing a vulpine grin. “Are you sure you’re not looking for a career change? I can always find work for girls with a bit of character, you know.”
Yeah, I’ll bet you can. “My current contract is ongoing, Mister Niceday, but thanks for the offer. You’re moving on from Almeria, then?”
“Yeah—the party’s over, but there’ll be another one soon enough, somewhere. The lions must follow the wildebeest, amirite?”
“If the party’s over, who’s in charge of cleaning up?”
Niceday waved a hand in breezy dismissal. “The UN has been here a while, hasn’t it? They know what they’re doing.”
“They know what you’ve been doing, too.”
“Fulfilling the demands of the market, you mean?”
“Manufacturing drugs, I mean.”
“Oh, I forgot—all drugs are bad, aren’t they, unless they’re being made by and sold to the right people? Besides, if those drugs weren’t illegal or patented, I wouldn’t be able to make any profit from doing so. Market forces, girl. I don’t mark out the field, I just play the game.”
“So this is some ideological crusade, then?”
“Nah,” he replied, warming to his theme. “More an opportunity that was too good to pass up. My colleagues”—he gestured around the crowded bar—“and I had been doing business around south Asia, making use of all the redundant 3d printing capacity out there that the fabbing bubble left behind. But recent changes in feedstock legislation made it much harder to produce … ah, viable products, let’s say. If you want feedstock that produces durable high-performance materials … well, you might as well try buying drug precursors, right? Serious regulation, poor risk/reward ratio. Boring.
“Now, I’d been watching the local markets here for some time, flipping deeds and water futures for chump change while I kept an eye open, when I had my little revelation: the greenhouses of Almeria were basically a huge networked organic 3D printer, and the only feedstocks it needed were water, fertiliser and sunlight. And while it couldn’t print durable products, it could handle the synthesis of very complex molecules. Plants are basically a chemical reactor with a free-standing physical structure, you see, though my geneticist friends assure me that’s a terrible oversimplification.”
“So you just started growing tweaked plants right away?”
“Not quite, no; it took a few weeks to set up the shell companies, liaise with buyers, and get the right variants cooked up in the lab. Not to mention getting all our taskrabbits housed and happy! Then it was just a case of getting buyers to file legitimate orders with a grower, set the taskrabbits to handle the seedling switcheroos and hack the greenhouse system’s growth parameters. Intense growing regimes mean you can turn over full-grown tomato plants in about three weeks. Biotech is astonishing stuff, isn’t it?”
“You’re not even ashamed, are you?” Hope wondered aloud.
“Why should I be?” His frown was like something a Greek statue might wear. “I delivered shareholder value, I shipped product, and I even maintained local employment levels a little longer than they’d have otherwise lasted. We are the wealth creators, Miz Dawson. Without us, nothing happens.”
“But what happens after you leave?”
A look of genuine puzzlement crossed Niceday’s face. “How should I know?” He glanced away into some dataspace or another, then stood and downed his drink. “Gotta go, my gulfstream’s boarding. Sure I can’t tempt you with a new position?” The smile was suave, but the eye beneath the raised eyebrow was anything but.
“Very.”
“Shame—waste of your talents, chasing rainbows for Cedric. The option’s always there if you change your mind.”
“And how would I let you know if I did?”
Niceday winked, grinned again, then turned and vanished into the crowd. Hope went back to find Ian, who was getting impatient.
“Waitresses still will nae serve me, dammit. All ah want’s a coke!”
“I think they’re concentrating on the big tippers while they can,” Hope replied; he rolled his eyes. “C’mon, let’s get back to El Ejido. Weisskopf says it’s all kicking off down at the container port. She wants us civvies out of the way.”
Ian sighed. “You’ll never guess where the trike’s parked.”
* * *
Things fell apart fast after Niceday and his fellow disruptors moved on. It soon became apparent that, absent the extra profit margin obtained by growing and shipping what the international media was already waggishly referring to as “FruitPlus,” a perfect storm of economic factors had finally rendered Almerian greenhouse agriculture a loss-making enterprise. Cedric’s quants spent long nights in their boutique hotel arguing heatedly over causal factors, but the general consensus was that relentless overabstraction of water from the regional aquifer had bumped up against escalating shipping costs and the falling spot-price of produce from other regions. Chinese investment in large-scale irrigation projects on the other side of the Med were probably involved, somehow; if nothing else, it explained the mass exodus of the immigrant workers. Those that had failed to get out on the empty freighters had descended on the dessicated former golf resorts along the coastline, squatting the sand-blown shells of holiday villas and retirement homes left empty by the bursting of the property bubble, fighting over crouching space in the scale-flecked holds of former fishing vessels whose captains saw midnight repatriation cruises as a supplement to their legitimate work.
A significant number showed no signs of wanting to leave, however, particularly those whose secular bent put them at odds with the increasingly traditionalist Islamic model of democracy that had sprouted from the scorched earth of the so-called Arab Spring in the Teens. Some fled quietly to the valleys hidden among the foothills of the Sierra Nevada to the north, where they set about reviving the hard-scrabble subsistance farming methods that their Moorish forebears had developed centuries before. Others—particularly the young and angry—occupied small swathes of greenhouse and turned them over to growing their own food, as did some of the more self-reliant and entrepreneurial gangs of taskrabbits who’d stayed on. Territorial disputes—driven more by the lack of water than the lack of space—were frequent, ugly, but mercifully short, and Hope spent a lot of time riding around the region with General Weissmuutze and her peacekeepers, putting out fires both literal and figurative. Within a few weeks the Plastic Ocean had evaporated away to a ragged series of puddles scattered across the landscape, separated by wide stretches of near-desert, the fleshless skeletons of greenhouse tunnels, and wandering tumbleweed tangles of charred plastic sheeting.
Other taskrabbit warrens found other business models, and Weissmuutze was hard-pressed to keep a lid on those who’d decided to stick with disruptive drug pharming. With the evisceration and collapse of the EPZ syndicate, courtesy Niceday and friends, the container port at Almeria became a revolving door for all sorts of shady import/export operators, and overland distribution networks for everything from un-tariffed Chinese photovoltaics and Pakistani firearms to prime Afghan heroin quickly sprung up and cut their way northwards into central Europe. Weissmuutze was obliged to be ruthless, rounding up the pharmers and their associates before putting their greenhouses and shipping-container biolabs to the torch. But the Spanish government had little interest in doing anything beyond issuing chest-thumping press releases, and most of her detainees were sprung by colleagues overnight, slipping eastwards or southwards and vanishing into the seething waters of the dark economy.
Much to Hope’s fascination, however, the majority of the warrens went for more legitimate enterprises, from simple reboots of the greenhouse model aimed at growing food for themselves and for barter, to more ambitious attempts at brewing up synthetic bacteria to clean up land and waterways blighted by excessive fertiliser run-off, all of which Weissmuutze did her best to protect and encourage. The disruptors had snared a lot of warrens in contracts whose small print specified they could be paid off in stock and other holdings in lieu of cash, with the result that various collectives and sole operators found themselves holding title to all-but-worthless slivers and fragments of land, all-but-exhausted water abstraction rights, and chunks of physical infrastructure in various states of disrepair or dysfunction. Parallel economies sprung up and tangled themselves together almost overnight, based on barter, laundered euros, petrochemicals, solar wattage and manual labour. The whole region had become a sort of experimental sandbox for heterodox economic systems; the global media considered it a disaster zone with low-to-zero telegenic appeal, and ignored it accordingly, but to Hope it was like seeing all the abstract theories she’d studied for years leap off the page and into reality. She was busy, exhausted and, by this point, a most un-British shade of Mediterranean bronze.
When she finally remembered to wonder, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so happy.
* * *
She was sat beneath a tattered sunbrella on the promenade at Playa Serena, poking at her mothballed novel, when Ian rolled up on his trike. Cedric was perched on the bench seat in the shade of the solar panel, wearing a pale suit and a casually dignified expression that reminded Hope of archived stills from the height of the British Raj.
“May we join you, Hope?” he asked, dismounting. Ian rolled his eyes and grinned, leaning into the back-rest of the trike’s saddle.
“Sure. Stack of these brollies back there, if you want one.”
Cedric settled himself next to her and stared down the beach, where a small warren was clustered around a device that looked like a hybrid of Ian’s trike, a catering-grade freezer, and an explosion in a mirror factory. “What have we here?” he asked.
“Solarpunks,” said Hope. “They’re trying to make glass from sand using only sunlight.”
“Innovative!”
“Naw, old idea,” said Ian mildly. “Was a proof-of-concept back in the Teens. No one could scale it up for profit.”
“What’s their market, then?”
Hope gestured westwards, toward a large vacant lot between two crumbling hotels. “There’s another lot down there working on 3d printing at architectural scales. They want to do Moorish styles, all high ceilings and central courtyards, but they’re having some trouble getting the arches to come out right.”
Ian barked a short laugh, then fell silent.
“I came to thank you for your hard work, Hope,” said Cedric.
“You’ve paid me as promised,” Hope shrugged. “No need for thanks.”
“No requirement, perhaps, but I felt the need. Given the, ah, mission creep issues early on.”
The euphemisms of power, thought Hope. “No biggie. I got to see the face of disruption close up. Lotta journalists would kill for a chance like that.”
“A lot of researchers, too,” Cedric suggested. Hope didn’t reply.
“I’ve taken the liberty of paying off your student loans in full.”
“That’s very generous of you, Cedric.”
“Think nothing of it,” he said, with a wave of his hand. Hope let the silence stretch. “I was wondering if you’d like to sign up again,” he continued, with that easy confidence. “Same terms, better pay. There will be more events like this, we’re sure. We don’t know quite where yet, but we’ve a weather eye on a few likely hotspots. Colombia, maybe. Southern Chinese seaboard. West Africa. Wherever it is, we’ll be there.”
Hope thought of Niceday, stood in the opulence of his suite; such similar creatures. “Don’t you worry, Cedric, that you’re one of the causal forces you’re trying to explain? That your own wealth distorts the markets like gravity distorts space-time? That the disruptors are following you, rather than the other way around?”
Ian laughed again. “She got ye there, boss.”
“Thank you, Ian,” said Cedric, mildly. “Yes, Hope, I do worry about that. But I have concluded that the greater sin is to do nothing. As you know, no one can or will fund this sort of research at this sort of scale, especially out in the hinterlands. General Weissmuutze has been passing our reports directly to the UN, at no cost. She tells me they’re very grateful.”
“I guess they should be,” Hope allowed. “As should I.”
“Think nothing of it,” he said again, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “Come with us, Hope. Don’t you want to be part of the next story?”
“No, Cedric,” she replied. “Don’t you get it? This story isn’t finished. Only the bits of it that interest you and Niceday’s people have finished. And the next story will have started long before you get wherever it is you decide to go. You can close the book and start another one, if you like; that is your privilege.” She sighed. “But the world carries on, even when there’s no one there to narrate it.”
“So what will you do?”
“Stop running. You’ve set me free from my past, Cedric, and I’m grateful. But you can’t give me a future. Only I can do that.” She pointed at the solarpunks down on the sand. “That’s what they’re trying to do, and the others. And maybe I can’t build things or ship code or hustle funding, but I can tell stories. Stories where those other things don’t matter so much, maybe.
“When you look at this place, you see a story ending. I see one just beginning. And sure, perhaps it’ll be over in weeks, maybe it’ll end in failure. But we won’t know unless we try writing it.”
“It takes a special kind of person,” said Ian, quietly, “a special eye, to make the ruins bloom.” He sat up straight in his saddle. “C’mon, boss. You got way more than yer pound o’ flesh from this one. Leave her be now, eh?”
“You’re right, of course,” said Cedric, standing. “If you ever change your mind…”
“… you’ll find me, I know.”
Without another word, Cedric settled himself onto the trike’s bench-seat. Ian raised his sunglasses, tipped her one last wink, and whirred away down the promenade to the east, where the last clouds of the morning were burning away to wispy nothings.
Hope smiled to herself, and blinked her novel back up on her spex. Down on the beach, a ragged cheer arose from the crowd around the glassmaker.