THE SURFACE—NORTHAM
MANHATTAN/CENTRAL ZOO OUTLIER TOURIST REGION
Amped as he was, it took barely a day for Drow to confirm his hunch: the @ChamberofHorrors was, indeed, hunkered down in the shrink-wrapped remains of Manhattan. It took two more to get inside their complex.
He arrived and gigged hard at the old Central Park Zoo, justifying his take from their limited resource pool by counseling ecologists and veterinarians, recyclers, mechanics, and gardeners, helping them grapple with the @Freebreed murder aboard Sable Hare and the spreading chaos elsewhere.
Every hour it seemed brought a new #flashmob to the door of another rationing facility. Most of the threats were token efforts, symbolic actions. Others …
Two feeds wouldn’t come up on his comms at all. If Crane was blocking them, it meant people were being abused—bullied, hit, maybe worse—on camera.
Luce Pox’s continuing insistence that he was of offworld origin, come to friend them before the alien invasion, had everyone’s heads spinning.
Luce wasn’t the only one: about sixty people had popped up, making similar claims. All but one had been debunked. Disturbingly, the exception was the woman Drow had seen in Geneseo near the Rewild crèche: Allure Noonstar.
But his mission was the @ChamberofHorrors. Touring the permitted boundaries of Central Park, eyes open, mind amped, let him light up the whole operation.
The wildlife preserve in New York had its roots in the system of zoos that had existed in the city before the big #waterfail. The Central Park Zoo had been one of the smallest of these, but somehow it had become the focus of the newscycle that accompanied the Great Gotham Evac. The true heart of the biotrust remained within the Bronx Zoo, with its bigger and more modern facilities, but the most charismatic animals were rotated through display in Manhattan, lures for a tiny tourist industry that supported the trust to begin with.
Nobody questioned the resource cost of shipping farm-grown foods to the island: too many at-risk animal species were incapable of breeding when fed printables.
How easy to tuck shipments of luxury food product in, for hoarders, with the stuff for the animals!
Drow speedread inventories, flagging possible embezzlement for forensic accountants, and let himself hope. Maybe, this once, he wasn’t courting a prison sentence for nothing.
The members of the storied @ChamberofHorrors wouldn’t bed down in the zoo. The pop-ins built into the container cars encircling Central Park were positively dowdy.
So, where were they?
The grand old park was a ghost forest, hemmed in by hedges made not of shrub but of stacked steel container cars. Within this fortification, the grounds had grown wilder than Drow remembered. Sky-blottingly huge trees shaded spaces once filled with bustling crowds, joggers, and street performers. Bridges and walls crumbled. Drones patrolled overhead, doing wildlife surveys on the birds, simultaneously watching for interlopers.
The Central Park Sheep Meadow had evolved into an overgrown tangle sprung, here and there, with volunteer saplings. Squirrels and pigeons scrounged in the shadows, alert for peregrine falcons.
To Drow’s surprise, the iconic skyline beyond the fortifications seemed largely unchanged. Ecologists, it turned out, had high-graded the tall buildings to serve as habitat for raptors. Global Oversight had tagged demolishing Manhattan’s towers as low-priority, no rush. The Great Lakes could salvage I beams closer to home.
Right. And somebody hoped to one day resurrect their symbolic paradise.
Drow had been there, playing a club in Greenwich Village when the water supply failed and the nightmare of forcible evacuation had descended.
Plenty of people his age might have claimed to be at the Great Gotham Evac, if user logs and RFID histories wouldn’t have proven them liars. It was another notoriety point for Drow’s MadMaestro #brand that he actually had footage.
As refugees streamed out of the city, by foot and on wheels, species conservationists in the various zoos had refused to abandon their animals. They soapboxed well—always with an animal in the shot—and instantly became the #heroes of the evac. As the subways flooded and three successive hurricanes slammed the coast, fleeing residents were glomerated first to the boroughs and then—when cholera and influenza jumped the quarantine barriers—to the Lakes. Meanwhile, the zookeepers fought to keep their lights on, their charges fed and warm.
Public opinion in North America lined up behind them. The Manhattan feed snowballed. And when big zoos in more stable parts of the world—Hyderabad, Shanghai, even Nairobi—were caught blithely dividing spoils, deciding in advance who would get which surviving animals, NorthAm sentiment had hardened into resolve.
New York evacuees petitioned BallotBox to hold a vote over the fate of the biotrust. When Global Oversight refused to greenlight capital for upgrades to the Bronx and Central Park Zoos, the displaced population and the Great Lakes arranged a massive, record-breaking crowdfund.
As it often did, public opinion carried the day. The animals remained in place. Once the weather cleared, the Zoo established a tiny pumping station, power and water pipelines. The old city retained just enough infrastructure to maintain clean water and supply chain for the animals and the biologists.
And a few buildings full of luxury apartments, maybe?
Officially, Old New York went full-on Sleeping Beauty.
There were many who marked North America’s transition to full global cooperation as that moment when Manhattan ran dry. Ceding the East Coast megacity had been a final straw, the crisis that forced the once-proud West to get into the lifeboat with everyone else.
Today, decades later, in a tiny Zoo-adjacent pop-in, Drow used Hackle’s equipment to set up, in the pitch black, a barely legal radio link to Father Blake and Sister Mary Joseph.
The Chamber would be near the park, holed up somewhere posh but convenient, where they could tap the remnant power grid, dose on the finest life-extension regimes, and lap up that juicy Florida ag product.
Still. He couldn’t search every skyscraper on the perimeter of the park.
On his third day, during a sliver of downtime between group therapy appointments, Drow pulled a custom-printed tunic over his base layer, petals in the form of a silver-and-black checkerboard pattern, with a matching hat and sunscreen for his face. Dolled up, he took Robin into the greenspace. His dog’s panniers were fully loaded, both with zoologist-approved birdseed and the transmitter for the radio.
Near Belvedere Castle, he came upon a specter from the past.
She might have been older than he, but Superhoomin gave her the appearance of someone in her forties. A vision in a powder-pink suit, she strolled the edge of the reservoir. She was, unbelievably, walking a French bulldog.
Robin stiffened slightly as she caught its scent—she rarely saw other dogs and had found the dingoes in the zoo so unsettling that Drow, unaccountably, had to comfort her.
The bulldog, lacking Robin’s immaculate training, snapped to the end of its leash, snarling.
“Trumpet, no! Shush!” the woman warbled. Tags popped around her: Hi, my name is Libby, museum docent. The dog was tagged to a DNA preservation project, allegedly part of @MetroZooAlliance.
“It’s all right,” Drow said, offering the inoffensive call-and-response of dog owners. How old is your dog; what kind is she? She took his rickety body and the bit of sartorial bling as evidence they were equals, and didn’t bother to Whooz him.
Drow forced himself to stay in the conversation, to stroll and chat, even as Trumpet’s incessant clamor frayed his nerves and Robin vibrated unhappily.
They reached a nearby container car; the door had hard and virtual signs marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Libby opened it, holding it wide. “Coming?”
Could it be that easy? Drow followed her out, via an improvised tunnel, out to Columbus Circle.
Libby and Trumpet made their way through a maze of water cisterns and the stockade of container cars, coming out next to a fountain and a once-bustling street, buildings slick with hurricane wrap.
She was headed to a smart-looking old apartment block, tagged as overflow housing for zoo staff and visitors. Next to the block, its revolving door visible through a tear in the weatherproof packaging was … a shopping mall?
Drow poked the corners of his memory. Yes, there’d been a fancy place, kitty-corner from the park, across Columbus Circle.
Historical tags on the mall indicated it had been flagged to serve as a possible live museum experience, another stop on the tourist loop from Niagara Falls to the pyramids, and then from Blingtown to the Zoo.
A museum. Built but never opened?
“Coming?” Libby asked.
“My dog’s not quite done,” Drow said. “We’ll catch up.”
She tipped him a wave, dragging her pet with her.
Drow let Robin nose around until she was calm again. Then he headed back to the zoo, acting nonchalant. He did more therapy gigs and turned in early.
“Is there a sim of that mall, Crane?”
“Playing.”
A chugging noise as it took form, fountains bursting to life. The past wallpapered around him, virtual reconstructions of shiny marble floors, fluorescent lights. A soundtrack of sanitized vintage punk rock covers played over the water features.
It had been decades since he’d thought about those last heady years. Billionaires running the cash economy and the American government into the ground. Snappily dressed oligarchs buying new upload tech and dropping their old gadgets in trash heaps. People who could have been cured of minor illnesses dying in the shadow of hospitals that refused to treat them. Loved ones surrendering corpses for cremation or compost, then going home to incubate ever-more-lethal superflu, new cholera, and Carolina respiratory syndrome.
Heat of poison dripping through his port, after Tala sweet-talked him into a round of medically unnecessary chemotherapy …
A ghostly hand, skin wrinkled to paper, manifested in the sim and pressed against his chest.
“Implants off!” Drow slammed both fists into his chest, folded to his knees, and spent a minute breathing in the smell of Robin’s fur.
“The fuck did that come from, googirl?”
Face-lick. He squinted into her now-blurry face.
That wasn’t a delusion. If it had been, shutting down his tech wouldn’t have stopped the flashback.
Footage, then. A threat?
They wouldn’t hack him if he wasn’t close.
“Close, closer, close copse, corpse close—”
“I recommend sleep, Master Woodrow. Food, meditation, meds.”
“Noping that.” Drow donned his disguise again and made his way back out, into the first chill of night. Across the park, through the tunnel, to the mall.
“This facility is zoned as a medical center for seniors awaiting transition,” Crane murmured. “Maximum medical confidentiality. All transcripts hashed, all signals blocked.”
“I thought it was purposed for a museum.”
“Conflicting use applications have placed this entire city block in a unique bureaucratic limbo. As such, it has virtually no cameras.”
“Convenient.” Encased in red tape and jammed against transcription. “Gobble gobble, I smell something fowl.”
“I believe gobbling is a turkey noise, sir.”
“Honk honk, then? For a wild-goose chase.”
“That idiom is correct.”
Okay, Drow told himself. Act like you belong. You’re as much a fossil as any of ’em, right? He had reached the revolving door.
The first few spaces looked like the sim: vintage stores filled with possessions, items nobody would ever haul about in a worldly: luxury shoes, wristwatches, printed books. Suits and sweaters so beautiful that they begged you to stand, slack-jawed, just petting the fabric.
The sales bots assumed, as anyone would, that Drow belonged there. Why not? He was old, privileged, male.
As he worked through the near-forgotten motions of tying a silk tie, a burn ran through the soles of his feet. Claws, grasping his shoulders, made his stomach flip.
He made himself turn. Nobody there.
He’d been burned before by this exact hack, the airlocking and editing of his real memories, the hashing of footage and conversational transcripts, destruction of prosecution-worthy experiences.
You’re wrong, Drow, shut up, Drow, prove you didn’t do this to yourself, Drow.
He’d had decades to imagine a next time.
Crouching, he stroked Robin, easing his breathing out of the redzone and simultaneously sliding the switch on Hackle’s walkie, now laced into the dog’s panniers. The device was so old, so analog, that it didn’t register with the building helix.
If he’d set up the gadget in his pop-in correctly, the signal would—hopefully—reach its counterpart, an old-fashioned receiver. The radio speaker was set beside a public-access mic, a node tagged by his @bloodhound friends.
Transmitting in this way was illegal, of course, given the privacy firewalls within the mall. But if Robin’s mic caught anything incriminating, Hackle and Sister Mary Joseph should overhear it. Once they posted it to the Haystack, and a few thousand people had seen it—and there were always a few thousand people following Drow in realtime—it couldn’t be easily expunged.
“Transcripts or it didn’t happen,” he whispered. “Check, check, check.”
Before getting to his feet again, he ate a cold mushroom quiche he’d pinched, yesterday, from an anxious herpetologist. The protein was laced with a drug called Sangfroid.
“Suggestion for @Fecklessfans and @journos,” he said, in case anyone could indeed hear him. “See if there’s any way to file a suit against the Columbus Circle hash ban. This doesn’t look like a hospital.”
A burn ran up his inner thigh. The buzz of a tattoo needle? He felt his heart jitter.
Kick in, Sangfroid, kick in.
“I know you hoped to conduct a leisurely exploration of the facility,” the resident tab of Crane said, as if Drow wasn’t planning a physical assault on the ramparts of the fucking @ChamberofHorrors. “But we have a situation.”
“I don’t have situations. I’m fragile, remember?” He felt the truth of it—tingling of that phantom needle, maniac laughter echoing in the corridors of his mind.
“Mer Francis Barnes requires assistance.”
Drow looked around for a toon, and Crane amended, “In the flesh, sir.”
“The Luce group is here? Rubi’s here?”
Take that, kid! My crazy ideas aren’t delusions!
“Mer Barnes the younger has taken your lead, as it were, and come to find the circus. She is within the mall.”
“How is that possible?” He felt insulted. How had the kid achieved what he’d spent a lifetime on?
“Malicious advice, I suspect. She appears to have stowed away in the shipping compartment of—”
“Don’t care about the how.” His pulse, still racing, was leaving him light-headed. “She’s actually here? Bonerack and all?”
“She arrived with a catering delivery. There was an attempt to apprehend her, which she eluded, but she has since been locked in … a fourth-floor boardroom, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Are you mistaken?”
“Uncertain. She has cut out her RFID.”
“Call her.”
“Wearing comms would defeat the point of cutting out her tracker.”
“Blue-haired martyrfucking mother of—” Drow made his way to the elevator bank, timing it so he got in with another fossilized white man.
Now what?
He peeled back the sunscreen from his hat, tucking it in a long sweep behind him. “Four, please.”
The other man’s jaw dropped. “You’re … the MadMaestro.”
“Mad part’s entirely exaggerated, I assure you.” We hope. Thanks to the Sangfroid. Saints, Drow, act normal! He broke out his best big-ass celebrity grin. “’S’your name?”
“Lenny LaCroix. I’m—I’m a big fan.”
“Nice to meet you, Lenny LaCroix,” Drow said, repeating the name in case the Robin walkie was actually getting sound out. “I’m meeting someone on four. Can you help a fella?”
“You don’t have access?”
“My sidekick’s not syncing. It’s pretty crepit.”
Crane coughed. “I heard that, sir.”
“I’m not exactly part of your @channel yet.” Drow winked at Lenny. “Been trying to pass muster.”
“You?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean. You?”
Lie big, or don’t lie at all. Drow laughed. “I’d bring an in with the @bloodhound community. Intel, you know? And the Department of Preadolescent Affairs is getting curious about”—he gestured, encompassing the mall—“all this.”
The guy’s jaw worked. “I wouldn’t have thought DPA would be too hard to buy off.”
Please, please, please be transcripting!
“Have you seen the newscycle today?”
Reluctant nod from Lenny. “Everything’s on fire.”
“Situation’s volatile,” Drow said. “This particular kid agent is a fan of my music. If I turn her head, get her off the scent—maybe your pack will give me a real user account instead of @guest privileges.”
The man frowned. Even so, the elevator stopped at four.
“Thanks,” Drow said, stepping out into an empty office corridor.
“Well done indeed, sir! Mer Barnes will be in the third or fourth room on the left-hand side.”
“Eeeny meeny miney,” Drow muttered, tapping on the third door. “Frankie? Frankie, it’s Drow Whiting.”
Nothing. On to the next. Was he strong enough to force a door?
There’s the Superhoomin.
Get thee behind me, temptation!
A scratch, a stage whisper. “Drow?”
“Hey, kid. You okay? Your pack must be in meltdown.”
“They better be.”
“Uh … can you get out?”
She shook the door.
Drow examined the layout. “You need access to the ceiling. Can you pile a crate on a desk or something?”
“Okay.” He heard a scrape, unnervingly loud, and then a flat-out bang that made him flinch.
“I overheard.”
“Overheard what?”
“These are the people you were looking for? But how did you know—”
“Focus on the jailbreak, Frankie. Can you get into the ceiling? Try pushing a panel straight up and climb in.”
“I’ll have to put a chair on the crate.”
Drow waited. Sangfroid had descended, leaving him remarkably okay with the idea of it: a tower made of desk, crate, office chair, with a nine-year-old teetering atop the stack. “How’d I know what, Frankie?”
“That they were here with the second polter. Allure?”
Allure. The star-eyed woman. Claiming, like Luce, to be with the Pale. “I’m not following you, kid.”
“Someone needs to tell. These people in this hospital and my governess app. They totally want to surrender to the aliens. Allure told them they could have all their things back, their youth and houses and diamonds and horses. They were talking about just … making it happen. Swing a ballot that way by setting more carbon sinks afire.”
The concept ricocheted around his amped mind. Start a panic, capitalize on the fear. “Yeah, that might work. Scare some stakeholders, bribe the rest…”
“But it’s so … wrong.”
Her voice was awed and horrified.
Oh, children. Drow’s eyes welled.
“I have to tell Mada and the Department and @Interpol, don’t you see?”
Vulture claws, again, on his shoulder. Drow resisted a shriek. Sangfroid helped. Even so, he should be meditating, ingesting low-affect cannabis, taking deep breaths.
He should be anywhere but there.
He swallowed. “Transcripts, kid. Footage or it didn’t happen.”
“Don’t they all have mics?” A collection of thumps; she was in the ceiling.
Drow used his cane to push up the panel by the door. “Hallway’s here. Make for the light.”
“I see you.”
“Take it slow. As for their mics … there’s a medical injunction. All consults confidential; all vids hashed. Nothing for the Haystack.”
“That’s why they met in the flesh!”
“Exactly. Except your … your governess is an app?”
“Headmistress.”
“And the alien polter. Allure?”
“No, she was here, too.”
A fall of dust. A cobweb-shrouded head appeared above the doorway, protruding through the ceiling right where Drow had his cane braced. The T bar wobbled under her weight.
“Why’s it so dark?”
“We’re trespassing, remember? Come on, before someone catches us.”
Frankie flopped like a beached dolphin, turning her body. She began to shimmy backward, legs dangling. Drow set aside his cane, raising his arms.
Vulture claws clasped his shoulders, pushing. A black pit, with things writhing within, opened in front of him.
“Not real,” Drow said out loud. “Not real, not real, not real.”
Frankie wobbled. Lost her grip. Dropped.