Yours for the taking, p.1
Yours for the Taking, page 1
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For my family
Have you ever committed any indecent acts with women?
Yes, many. I am guilty of allowing suicidal women to die before my eyes or in my ears or under my hands because I thought I could do nothing, I am guilty of leaving a prostitute who held a knife to my friend’s throat because we would not sleep with her, we thought she was old and fat and ugly; I am guilty of not loving her who needed me; I regret all the women I have not slept with or comforted, who pulled themselves away from me for lack of something I had not the courage to fight for, for us, our life, our planet, our city, our meat and potatoes, our love. These are indecent acts, lacking courage, lacking a certain fire behind the eyes, which is the symbol, the raised fist, the sharing of resources, the resistance that tells death he will starve for lack of the fat of us, our extra. Yes I have committed acts of indecency with women and most of them were acts of omission. I regret them bitterly.
—“A Woman Is Talking to Death” by Judy Grahn, 1974
The unfortunate truth is that climate change is coming for us faster than equal rights are. The data proves it: if we stay on our current course, women will not become truly equal to men before the world is made uninhabitable. What is urgently needed now, if we have any hope of changing our fate, is an immediate, complete restructuring of how gender dynamics play out in our culture. And rather than continuing to focus on empowerment for women, it is imperative that what is considered and worked toward, instead, is power—in its simplest, purest form. Did I lose you when I said that? I implore my female readers to stop for a moment and think about why you’ve been told to feel that power is such a dirty word. After all, an unequal distribution of power is what got us into this mess in the first place. If we’re going to make it out alive, women must stop hesitating, and start claiming.
—Yours for the Taking!: Reclaiming Female Power in a Changing World by Jacqueline Millender, 2045
EXCERPT FROM INSIDE LIED: A BRIEF HISTORY BY SHELBY SILVER, 2085
The Inside Project started with the best intentions.
At least, that is what I choose to believe, even knowing what I know now, even knowing that the very idea of Inside was based on the notion that some people are worth saving and some are not. Perhaps what went wrong Inside was a natural extension of that inherently broken belief system, making the destruction and chaos inevitable. Perhaps Inside’s flaws were a natural consequence of trying something new, and we all became stronger because of what went wrong and what we learned from it. Perhaps it’s much more complicated than that, and impossible to look at from a binary perspective, in black-and-white terms, or even good versus evil.
We can’t understand what went wrong without first understanding why Inside was developed in the first place. It was a last resort: the planet was quickly becoming uninhabitable.
In New York, decades of unending natural disasters had pummeled what used to be Long Island, Queens, and most of Brooklyn into nonexistence so that the east side of Manhattan looked out directly onto the Atlantic Ocean. There were endless floods and tsunamis. Hurricane winds had knocked out the windows of nearly every skyscraper. Then there was, of course, the heat. Every day, it was only getting hotter.
It wasn’t just the coastal regions of America that had been transformed by the weather, it was everywhere. Many people had moved toward the middle of the country, until the worsening storm situation made that unlivable, too (“Tornado Alley,” it used to be called, until the alley became more of a highway, and then more of a parking lot, where tornadoes were so frequent that people stopped rebuilding their homes and moved away). Others had started going up north to Canada, where it was warm and sunny all year round, like Los Angeles had been in my childhood, back when you could still go there, before the fires burned it all down.
It also wasn’t just America; in many countries around the world, tropical storms and hurricanes had become a constant. Elsewhere, droughts lasted for months at a time. Icebergs melted, causing historic tsunamis. The air quality suffered; people rarely ventured outside. Viral disease was ravaging vulnerable populations, taking lives faster than hospitals could admit patients.
Not everyone was suffering, though. The wealthy grew wealthier as they profited off fear, monetizing false promises of safety with manipulative marketing: You, too, can survive if you just buy one more thing. Violence increased as desperation grew.
Worldwide, an estimated 700 million people were displaced by weather-related disasters. They had nowhere to go.
The one thing that hadn’t gotten worse was global conflict—there was too much for governments to worry about domestically for them to engage in international warfare. A United World Government was established as a response to the climate emergency; their initial goal was to slow down the climate’s ongoing deadly transformation, but once it was determined to be too late for that, they shifted focus to how humanity could survive it. They promised a solution for everyone.
Maybe we should have known that was impossible. Maybe we just wanted to believe that we could all be saved. Whatever the case, we bought into their story. I did, anyway.
So it went: a team of scientists came up with the idea of highly fortified, city-size structures that could, quite literally, weather the impending storms, and the global project known as Inside was initiated.
Ground was broken in Singapore, Nairobi, Auckland, Moscow, São Paulo, and New York City. To create an Inside, the cities were sealed up: Sidewalks were encased in round tubes of weatherproof glass, becoming tunnels, and then more glass tunnels were built above them, looping between buildings like the legs of a jellyfish. The buildings were reinforced, and almost every open space was filled with more housing until the city, or at least the part that was becoming Inside, looked like one giant mass of metal and glass.
In Manhattan, the subway system was converted into a mazelike storage facility, and the vast majority of what once had been entrances to the stations were sealed up to prevent future flooding. Central Park had long since lost most of its centuries-old trees in one mega-storm or another and was now filled with cube-like Inside housing developments, each apartment optimized down to the square inch. The highest levels had skylights, but beyond that, views of the outside were rare. The tallest buildings were connected by passageways, woven tightly, and beyond were added layers of protective metal and reinforced glass, sealing the whole thing up, so that unfiltered air and heat couldn’t penetrate the structure. Most windows simply looked into other windows.
In order for Inside to be completely self-sufficient for an undisclosed period of time, the entire West Wall, facing the now moat-like Hudson River—and beyond that, the rest of what was left of America—was made up of an enormous, sloping garden, with tiered layers of horizontal land dedicated to the crop that would most benefit from the angle of sun that filtered through the thick glass. Because the gardens stretched across the entire west side, Inside simply looked, if approached from the mainland, like a big green hill: a large, lumpy triangle. It was an inelegant solution to the problem of protecting the future of humanity, but it was a solution, nonetheless—albeit an expensive one.
Even though Inside was a government-initiated project, each location was largely funded by private investors, like the elusive multibillionaire/women’s rights activist Jacqueline Millender of JM Inc., who invested heavily in the New York City project before joining other wealthy luminaries in space, on the cruise ship–like stations that orbited the earth while the planet’s remaining inhabitants hurtled toward an uncertain future. Each shuttle was connected to a different Inside to obtain resources, like food, creating an extraterrestrial umbilical cord between Earth and its now-distant children.
Up until this point, there were a few things Jacqueline Millender was known for, aside from the simple fact of her enormous wealth, much of which was inherited. Her grandfather, James Millender, had been the original JM Inc., and the initials were passed down in her family, first to her father, Joseph, and then to her. But unlike her predecessors, who grew their empires largely in the oil business, Jacqueline had a gift for innovation, and made a lot of money very quickly after she came up with the idea for Refillables, an automatic home refueling system designed to minimize plastic waste and increase convenience.
But the project Jacqueline was most proud of was her book. Yours for the Taking!: Reclaiming Female Power in a Changing World was written by a team of well-paid professional ghostwriters, but it was based on her ideas. It was an international bestseller, translated into too many languages to count. It spurred a luxury product line, an award-winning podcast, and worldwide members-only, women-only coworking spaces called Yours! And ultimately, profits from the You rs! brand were what allowed her to fund Inside.
Jacqueline told me she thought of New York’s Inside as a love letter, and also an apology, to the planet. She was happy to be able to leave such a concrete legacy. On the days that she could make out the East Coast of North America from the smudged circular window in her new quarters, she said she liked to imagine she could see “her” Inside. Sometimes I saw her pressing her hand to the glass, as though greeting it. When I first saw her doing that, I was moved by the gesture, thinking I was seeing a flare of emotion in Jacqueline’s otherwise steely facade. Now, I’m not so sure.
Out of the millions of applications sent in by people desperate to escape a roiling world, the press announced that three million people would be approved to move into Jacqueline’s Inside. It took five years for the applications to be processed. The people who had been accepted were alerted simultaneously, their phones lighting up with a jarring buzz. From afar, it sounded like the cicadas that now descended every summer, their once seventeen-year life cycle having shortened rapidly, the nightly dissonant symphony becoming increasingly frantic. I was not one of the lucky ones who had been accepted, but I had won another kind of lottery: Jacqueline had offered me a place alongside her on the space shuttle.
At that time, we thought there were only two truly safe places to be: Inside or in space. There were no protections anymore for people who were neither wealthy enough for space nor lucky enough for Inside, and the government had washed their hands of the matter. Communication between the people who lived Inside or in space and those who lived in the wilderness all but ceased. At first, those people had been monitored by the United World Government, in case they decided to rise up against the injustice of their fates. But the government didn’t have much to worry about from the shutouts. After the initial riots had been quelled, nothing else followed—at least not from the people outside.
As it turned out, the cracks that started to form in the fortresses known as Insides were not external, they were foundational—but it would take years for anyone to realize they had been there from the beginning.
PART ONE
PRONE TO ROOT ROT
2050–2055
1
A group of tired, rumpled young people spilled out of the lab’s double doors and onto the glittering, gum-encrusted sidewalk. They rubbed their eyes in the hazy afternoon light, which was thickly speckled with floating white bits of who-knows-what, and though the city smelled of dirt and rot, the light was aesthetically pleasing, like a photo filter that turns everything grainy and sepia toned, like a memory. It was Friday, and the students hummed with unforetold promises of the weekend ahead. Among them was Ava, the teacher’s assistant for the plant biology class the kids had just fled. Students clustered into small packs around her, talking loudly about their evening plans. She wasn’t much older than most of them.
When Ava rounded the corner, breaking off from the group of students, she reached into her nose and pulled out the gold, horseshoe-shaped septum piercing that had been hiding upside-down in her nostrils since the morning. Her long, curly brown hair was parted down the middle, which she always felt made her look more approachable during the workday. She briefly stopped walking to adjust her part to the side, revealing an undercut shaved around her left ear. She took her glasses off and stashed them in her backpack, blinking as her eyes adjusted. Her students didn’t need to know that this was what she normally looked like when she wasn’t working. It was easier if they read her as a bookish academic.
Her stuffed backpack was pulling her shoulders down. It was hot out; well, it was always hot now in Manhattan, but it was an extra-oppressive kind of heat that afternoon, and Ava felt like she was moving in slow motion. Sirens wailed in the distance.
The lanyard with her employee ID was still around her neck, and the plastic was sticking to her skin. Her hair was electrified by the humidity, frizzing around her head in gravity-defying ways. She felt a pimple brewing painfully on her cheek, trapped by the grease on her face. Her armpit sweat was getting the best of her deodorant. There was nothing pleasant about being in Manhattan. She couldn’t wait to get home to Orchid.
She’d have to rush to get to the station before the next aerial tramway departed. Always creaking and moaning its way across the water, it was the only good way to get back and forth from her home in what was once Brooklyn (residents now called it Brook, an abbreviated name that suited the newly tiny, crescent moon–shaped land) to Manhattan; there were no bridges left, and the subways no longer functioned. There was a ferry, but the water was so choppy it made Ava sick, a feeling that always reminded her of being a kid trapped in endless silent car rides with her parents, nauseous and alone.
She made it into the Brook-bound tram just as the doors closed behind her. Packed in with dozens of other nine-to-fivers, Ava finally breathed a sigh of relief. She’d soon make it home, to the air-conditioning, to the sweet little living room she shared with the woman she loved.
She took out her phone. Its background was a selfie of her and Orchid; Ava’s whole face was buried into Orchid’s neck while Orchid squinted in the sun, looking just past the camera’s lens with the kind of half smile that Ava adored. As Ava settled into her seat on the tram she examined this photo, even though she’d seen it a million times. She could have spent the rest of her life looking at it.
They’d met by chance. Now, though, as Ava considered the millions of decisions that had led to the exact place and time when her life intersected with Orchid’s, it felt more like an inevitability than an accident.
Ava had been walking down the street between classes. She was lost in thought, much as she was now. But in that moment, her daydreaming was interrupted when a voice out of nowhere said, “Oh shit, watch out,” and then a warm hand grabbed her by the arm and pulled her sharply to the left just as a drone carrying a box labeled REFILLABLES zoomed by.
“Oh my god,” Ava had exclaimed. The hand was still locked onto her arm, and as Ava caught her breath she took in the tall, broad-shouldered woman it belonged to. She was white and appeared to be around Ava’s age. Her short, reddish-brown hair shimmered with sweat. A smattering of freckles danced between pitted acne scars on her cheeks, which gave her a roughness that negated what would have otherwise been a disarming prettiness. She was wearing a toolbelt slung low on her hips and an orange reflective vest. An active construction site churned and beeped behind them.
“Those things are such a fucking hazard,” the woman had said, shaking her head. She dropped Ava’s arm, though where she’d grabbed still felt tingly and hot. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Ava said. And then, she added, “You saved me.” As if on cue, the woman turned pink, holding Ava’s eye contact for a beat longer than necessary, telling Ava everything she needed to know about what was going to happen next.
Despite herself, Ava had laughed. The stranger grinned. “I’m Orchid,” she said, and extended her hand. She didn’t ask Ava’s name; she knew Ava would tell her.
They shook hands, a warm squeeze. Ava had giggled more. She couldn’t help it. Meeting like this, being so clearly on the same page about what this was; being so attracted to someone that it rendered her uncharacteristically bold; having that attraction clearly be so mutual, and so random. If Ava had used the bathroom after class (and she almost did), they would not have met at all.
“Like the flower?” Ava said, immediately regretting it. It was probably what everybody asked her.
Ava had never seen an orchid in real life before; the wild ones had been wiped out by a virus. She knew that they had been known for their beauty and that the most beautiful among them were also the rarest. Some people still kept them as houseplants, but they were delicate and finicky, prone to root rot.
“Something like that,” Orchid replied, and then gestured to the nearby science building. “Did you learn about dead plants there?”
Ava nodded.
“Cool,” Orchid said.
