Gamechanger, p.41
Gamechanger, page 41
Protester numbers were rising.
As wealthy cities outbid North America and Europe for the limited pool of drone pilots not on strike, the trouble worsened.
But what did any of that matter, with Frankie missing?
“Is anyone in charge?” Rubi asked a protester, one of the ones who had stepped out into the square to keep Juanita from taking them into @Interpol custody.
They pointed. “There, in the Bizzy Bee masks.”
There were about a dozen ringleaders, cosplaying as popular characters from McDiznazon’s Rewilding Rescue.
“C’mon.” Rubi tugged Gimlet’s sleeve.
They set their heels. “Franks took off. It isn’t a kidnapping.”
“We’ll find her.”
“It’s my fault.”
Rubi shook her head.
“We’ll never get to her in the midst of this.”
“Truth.” Rubi frowned at the news feeds, as if realizing for the first time how many people were in the world, how delicately balanced the agreements of her precious Bounceback had been. “We gotta shift people back into Sensorium.”
“Someone has to get Cloudsight back online,” Gimlet countered. “There’s no getting to Frankie amid this chaos.”
As this sank in, wildfires bloomed across one of the feeds. Cries of alarm ran through the crowd.
“What bloody now?”
A pause: Even Headmistress was running slowly. Overtaxed by panicked users, probably. “@Trollgate and the @Freebreeders have ignited the Northern Alberta carbon sink.”
A hubbub rose as the news spread. “There are bamboo bulwarks here in Tampico!”
“There are flammable sinks everywhere!”
“If the arson meme snowballs—”
“Cloudsight, Gimlet,” Rubi said. “You’re right.”
Fort McMurray was a continent away, thousands of clicks to the north. They couldn’t put out the fires any more than they could magically make Frankie appear.
Hubris, to think otherwise.
But delusions of grandeur were part of the Whiting #brand, weren’t they? Rubi dragged Gimlet toward the Bizzy Bees, hailing them with a bright, fixed grin. “Hey! Our only chance to deescalate is to bring Cloudsight online—”
“I know you been in-game, honey, but Earth’s about to get invaded,” one bee interrupted. “You think anyone cares about their respectability rating?”
“Anyone who isn’t a spoiled privilege-junkie of a celeb kid, that is?”
Rubi reached out, flicking off their mask. The face beneath was ash-colored, with dark eyes, black hair, and—now—a comical O expression of surprise.
“You didn’t care, you wouldn’t be masked,” she said. “You didn’t care, you wouldn’t have organized compost bins for the food waste. You didn’t care, you’d have taken all the edibles instead of eating the contents of one symbolic boxcar and letting the train chug on to feed the animals in New York.”
“It would’ve gone bad—”
“See, and now I’m interrupting you,” Rubi said. “Don’t you kind of wish you could pop my spoiled ass?”
Someone moved, behind her. Attempting to intervene? Gimlet whirled on them, snarling, using all the villainous charisma at their disposal. A costumed raccoon shrank back.
Rubi pulled her target close. “The Pale are playing us because they want the Bounceback to fail. But forget ’em for a sec—”
“Forget!” They sputtered.
One thing she’d apparently learned from her father was how to project: though her tone didn’t change, Rubi’s voice scythed through the hubbub. “Do you want the Bounceback to fail?”
“Of course not—”
She interrupted. Again. Gimlet couldn’t stifle a wince. “How many times have you heard some crepit say ‘Oh, yes, my generation was idealistic in its youth!’?”
Nervous laughter from the crowd.
Of course they were buying in. Everyone loves a show.
“How many times did we vow that we’d be the ones who didn’t run out of steam? We wouldn’t get tired or complacent or smugly defeatist? Wouldn’t subscribe to life extension? Check out and let the tweens hang?”
“Stop spieling me!” The ringleader pushed her away. “This isn’t one of your sims!”
“No,” Rubi said, and her tone was pure MadMaestro sarcasm. “It’s just a matter of life or martyrfucking death. Smoke inhalation on a global scale. Breathing versus slavery. You think eating hijacked oranges constitutes a statement?”
“Oh, you have answers?” One of the other bees ripped off her mask. “It’s easy for you. Flying around the world, hobnobbing with virtuosi, first in all the queues—”
“You helped Pox!” someone shouted.
“For all we know he’s not even for real! Your dad buys into all the #hoaxes, doesn’t he?”
“Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter,” Rubi insisted. “Doesn’t matter if Luce is telling the truth. Doesn’t matter even a little if some weird @Martian version of Francisco Pizarro is coming.”
The mob fell silent, crunching. Finally, a tentative “No?”
“The question’s exactly the same,” Rubi said, sounding entirely certain. “Do we save ourselves? Or do we toon out and hand our problems to the next generation?”
No response.
“We can double down on the Bounceback. Commit. Paddle like fiends, work our asses off. Rack up carbon and hand-pump the planet’s respirator. It’s not sexy. It’s boring, I know. You think I’m not bored to death…” Her voice broke. “… with virtue and rationing and hard labor?”
The protestor looked away, uncomfortable with the feels.
“Opt out, by all means! Sit on your hands, and hope the Pale do exist. Pray they’re for real, and that we’re a viable species when they show.” Rubi was almost growling now. “Because if we don’t clean our house, we are going to need bug-eyed fairy godmothers. Too bad, I guess, if they enslave us all.”
She had the train station in the palm of her hand.
Gimlet cleared their throat, speaking into the pin-drop silence. “How many of you have passed the live adjudication module for Cloudsight?”
About fifty hands went up.
Fifty. Not enough to make a dent. Cloudsight’s call to clear the growing queue required sixty thousand analysts, minimum.
“Hey!” A bee-masked figure stuck its head in from a nearby skylight. “There’s a band of people coming this way with torches. I think they’re @Freebreeders.”
“@GlobalSec also has a drone incoming, Miss Cherub,” Crane said.
Well, Gimlet thought, she’s certainly caught someone’s attention.
Crane added, “Mer Barnes, I have found three individuals here who think they saw your daughter board the high-speed for the Lakes. She should arrive in New York within the hour.” It whiteboarded names and portraits.
“Where the hell have you been?” Rubi asked the app.
“Baby shower,” Crane said. “Rather a dull affair, in the grand scheme.”
Gimlet watched her expression play a number of feels. Was it possible for a human to harmonize with a sidekick?
“I didn’t give you the day off,” she grumbled.
“I shall have to owe you one,” Crane said.
“One more,” she said. The toon of the bird dropped a speckled disk into her hand.
“You’re wasting time—” Gimlet began.
“No,” she said. “I’ve got it!”
She dug in her tunic pocket, coming up with a plastic poker chip from the Nugget Casino. “Crane, make me a new marker based on this template. #Brand it … Rabblerouser.”
“Shall I hire a graphic designer?”
“No! Quick and dirty. Hexagonal gold chips. Scarlet highlights. Match the hair beads. Numbered. No muss, no fuss.”
She raised the chip overhead. Its faux-gold surface twinkled.
She raised her voice. “I, Rubi Whiting, will personally owe a favor to any qualified Cloudsight operator who takes an adjudication gig right now.”
Someone shouted, “What kind of a favor?”
“Nothing gross,” she said. “Nothing impossible. No self-harming. Within reason … name it. This offer is open—”
“Seventeen thousand takers,” Crane interrupted.
She faltered, just for a second. “What?”
She’s going to be doing favors until she’s fifty, Gimlet thought.
“Forty-three thousand. Miss Cherub, perhaps you should close the offer window.”
Eyes wide, she looked to Gimlet.
They played with the idea of joining her. But chiming in would diffuse the power of her move.
And Rubi was the good guy, after all.
They mimed a motion: paddling like hell.
Rubi threw the plastic chip straight up, giving everyone a view, all eyes capturing the image as it flipped in midair. She caught it, did a whirl, and topped that with a backflip—barely sticking the landing—onto an orange crate. Then she bellowed, “This offer is open! Favors for the earning until Cloudsight is back to spec!”
“Buy-in accelerating. Seventy-four thousand favors.”
“Whiteboard it, Crane. I don’t want to know.”
Seventy-four thousand favors, Gimlet thought.
The protesters who’d raised their hands to say they had completed the adjudication module were already schooling toward an abandoned train car, barricading the doors, and taking seats as they sank into Sensorium, knuckling down to work.
Rubi looked at everyone else. Arms spread.
“Well?”
“I can’t adjudicate,” someone groused. “No favor for me?”
“What’s the most prosocial thing you could do right now? Hold off those @Freebreeders outside? Fly a firefighting drone into Fort McMurray?”
He brightened. “We get a chip, too?”
“Since when do you need incentive to do the right thing?” Gimlet snarled. The blurring favor tally on the shareboard, behind Rubi’s head, was making them ill.
“Sure. Yes. Absolutely,” Rubi said. “Do the shift, log it with my sidekick, collect your token. Row, row, row, everyone. All we have is us.”
Someone made a chant of it: “Bounce back! Bounce back! All we have is us!” Others took up the cry.
“Catchy,” Gimlet subbed.
“Drow can set it to music later,” Rubi replied. She put out her good hand, squeezing Gimlet’s shoulder. She was shaking.
“Bounce back! Bounce back!”
They both were.
Chapter 47
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.
