METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire Read online

  Crown was far more interested in the innovation arising from that misguided band of anarchists. Once the geek-American community had wrenched itself away from the forty-year sideshow that had been the software industry and gone back to good old-fashioned hardware—not to mention good new-fashioned biotech—the game had changed. Barely in time, either.

  The case study was around gas-in-a-jar. Several California startups had engineered petroleum-producing microbes in the late 2000s. The oil shocks arising from the American failures in the Middle East produced the necessary economic boost to kick-start development, but lacking a terminator gene, the bugs had gone home in the pockets of too many lab assistants tired of six dollar per gallon gas.

  Within another decade anyone with a high school science education and the talent to brew beer was in the oil production business. And nobody had made any damned money off the greatest revolution in energy production since Colonel Edwin Drake started digging holes in Pennsylvania farmland back before the Civil War.

  If these idiots weren’t smart enough to capitalize on their own intellectual property, he would damned well do it for them. The world needed those quiet innovations. At least if anyone planned to keep the lights on much longer. Beachfront condos on the Beaufort Sea were fine for sun worshippers with enough money, like Crown himself.

  There were a few billion people starving in place. The greenfreaks weren’t going to keep it all to themselves. Their intellectual property was too damned valuable to be pissed away on hippie dreams. Better someone who could do some good got hold of it.

  Crown realized Streeter had been speaking.

  “I’m sorry, Evelyn,” Crown admitted. “I lost track for a moment.”

  “Carbon, sir.”

  “Carbon?”

  “They’ve been sourcing carbon nanotubes in laboratory quantities.”

  “Not industrial quantities?” he asked.

  “No, sir. Not unless they’re running a very small industry.”

  He turned that over in his head. Why would the greenfreaks need nominal quantities of carbon nanotubes?

  Because they’d found a way of making their own up there in the woods. Charcoal ovens or similar crap, tended by some hyperfocused hippie with a set of nanomanipulators.

  “Reference testing, Streeter. They’ve figured out something important, I suspect.”

  “May I congratulate you on the fortuitous timing of Project Verdancy.”

  Crown laughed bitterly. “In the past five years we’ve traced eleven significant innovations in manufacturing, data management, distributed systems and closed-loop resource management back to Cascadiopolis. And that’s only what we can account for. All of them released open source, so widespread before they were detected that any IP action would be profoundly meaningless, even with an airtight license in place after the fact. Frankly, I would have been more surprised if we didn’t cross paths with some new initiative of theirs.”

  Streeter met his look with a small, tight smile. “Very good, sir.” Something odd hung in her tone.

  “Very good indeed.” He sighed and tapped his teeth again, wondering what was bothering her. Time to change the subject. “How are you doing on those power futures contracts?”

  * * *

  Cardoza sees her opening when Otis is relieved from his post just before moonset. One of Bashar’s lieutenants, whom she thinks of as Chophead, comes out of the shadows followed by a kid even younger and pimplier than Otis. Chophead yells at them for a couple of minutes, then slides back into the deep woods, leaving Otis to walk the new kid around.

  The Granite Gate stands empty, an unguarded trilithon, which could lead to an earlier age of history. She is not so stupid as to rush it in a quiet moment. There are trip lines, monitors, quiet watchers sleeping lightly. No, the opportunity she sees is for social engineering.

  This new kid doesn’t know his shoes from his shirt, that much is obvious. Something’s up inside the city, if they’re pulling back all the experienced hands. Cardoza thinks he’ll be on shoot-to-kill orders for anyone who crosses the perimeter—here, that being the path leading from the stub of the old logging railway trestle and down through the ravine to the Granite Gate atop the other side.

  Even now Otis walks New Kid around stumbling in the dark, pointing out the perimeter markers, the colored stones that provide ranging points for covering fire, the visible paths and the hidden ones—things he needs to understand and will not remember. Cardoza knows perfectly well there’s no point in bracing Otis, but she’s pretty sure she can keep New Kid from toasting her the minute she comes down the public trail.

  It takes time and effort to train someone to kill. New Kid doesn’t have the look. He’s a placeholder, filling in here until someone can push him through some live fire exercises and have him kill an aging yuppie or something, just for the practice.

  Cardoza settles in and chews quietly on a cranberry bar—local produce from the bogs up by the mouth of the Columbia. As if she was a greenie. They aren’t completely crazy, after all. Just a bad case of misplaced priorities. She keeps an eye on the Granite Gate while Otis and New Kid wander, listening to the cadence of their voices as they whisper like bulls blundering through a wheat field.

  Subtle, these young men were always so subtle. She smiles in the shadows and allows her ears to continue to reconnoiter.

  Eventually their voices recede, echoing through the ravine, after which farewells are murmured. Cardoza never catches the rhythm of challenge-and-response. New Kid really is a bookmark then, and nothing more. What the hell is going on up there? In her days here she hasn’t yet seen anything remotely this lax. This was city-grade mickeymouse, like she’d expect to see on the Edgewater contract-security perimeter at Boeing-Mitsubishi or Microsoft.

  She’s been given latitude in her mission parameters for a reason. She’s just found that reason if she wants to take it. Even so, a walkup was dangerous. Had to get within earshot to run a talking play. New Kid might get excited, might get lucky, squeeze off a headshot or something.

  But Cardoza isn’t paid to be safe; she’s paid to be smart. This could be a real smart way of getting into Cascadiopolis, escorted every step of the way.

  She raises herself back up and zooms in on New Kid with the scope. The starlight is almost pulsing this far from any power grid, but still faint as ever. Even so, the scope is smart enough to deal with that, at least as long as there’s some skyshine. New Kid looks nervous to the point of throwing up. He fingers his rifle the way a fourteen year old imagines a woman might want to be touched. Cardoza swallows a silent laugh.

  His pimples really are worse than poor Otis. Kid, she thinks. After tonight, you’ll never pull guard duty again.

  I promise.

  * * *

  Taken from an anonymous retrospective on early-to-mid 21st century business practices, published under a Creative Commons license:

  Though corporations as such are by historical nature tied to the sovereign authorities that issued their charters, by the time of the late nineteenth century the multinational or transnational model held sway. While wealthy individuals could and did function in the role of corporations under specific circumstances, the combination of distributed risk and accumulated capital was too seductive to resist over time. Even those parts of the world where socio-economic structures varied significantly from the Western European model were not able to combat the allure of corporatism. Imperial China, Communist China and the Sunni Islamic societies all surrendered. Even al-Qaeda, that great anti-Western bugaboo of the decades bracketing the turn of the century, owed far more organizationally to transnational corporations than to any historical Islamic tradition.

  Then the Westphalian model of sovereignty, which had prevailed for over three and half centuries, abruptly collapsed. Though sovereign states by no means ceased to exist, their absolute control over many aspects of the global economic, diplomatic and military systems was fractured beyond repair. Corporations were already tenuously tied to their
charters and nominal countries of origin through the continual liberalization, which had begun when the United States Supreme Court first opened to the door to corporate personhood in the Dartmouth decision of 1819. Now they became de jure sovereign to match their long time de facto sovereignty; not by positive legal assent, but by sheer default on the part of the chartering bodies.

  Given the chaos of the times around rising sea levels, worldwide crop failures and energy wars in the Middle East and Africa, few people outside economics faculties even took notice of these changes.

  It was the ultimate triumph of libertarian free marketism and Straussian neo-conservatism. The disasters foretold by twentieth century economic liberals came to pass, but again, were no more than a candle in the catastrophic winds blowing across the people and lands of the Earth.

  What no one predicted was that the corporate actors would soon become foundational to the maintenance of continued peace and public order. The first, immutable law of capital is that it will be preserved.

  * * *

  Alleluia

  Tygre might not have arrived on the wings of the storm, but he certainly brought chaos with him. The dungeons of Symmetry are not deep, or extensive, but they are as fearful as the workrooms of the Inquisition. That lava tube was the source of all discipline in the undisciplined community of Cascadiopolis.

  Not that the freemen of the city need fear it. Only outsiders go below, more often than not without returning to anyone’s sight.

  Except for the birthright Cascadians—children brought to term under the spreading branches of the Douglas firs—everyone here began as an outsider. Everyone here had been interviewed at the Granite Gate, by one or another committees, around the common tables and in whispered intimacy beneath the ever-dripping rhododendrons.

  A few of us have even descended down the moss-damp steps into Symmetry. We especially know what Tygre faced there. Not racks, or arcs of voltage and pain, but the deadly combination of pseudo-cognitive databases and conscious sedation.

  We gather together, as we so rarely do, to see if this new man will emerge. We sense a world aborning in the mucky loam beneath our feet.

  Still, we do not know what passes within.

  * * *

  Tygre ignores the dermal patches. For all they seem to be affecting him, they might as well be dewfall. His smile echoes in its affable silence, an expression strange on his mighty and passionate face. The leather straps holding him to the chair seem almost insubstantial, somehow.

  Bashar has already begun to understand this man’s secret. His knowledge is nonverbal, or perhaps preverbal, buried deep in the hindbrain where the triggers of reflex flow. The same instincts that make Bashar a deadly marksman have already surrendered to Tygre. It will be some time before the security chief can unwind his reactions sufficiently to contemplate betrayal.

  For now he simply mirrors Tygre’s smile and watches two women from the Security Subcommittee attempt to work the man over. In a way, the sight is funny.

  Anna Chao is stumpy and angry, with dynamic ink tattoos crawling up and down her arms in a fair representation of the Divine Wind overwhelming the Mongol fleet. Sometimes Bashar thinks he can see aircraft carriers sinking in the storms, their stars-and-stripes flags burning to ash. Anna’s primary work detail is supervising the stonemasons who quarry basalt from the ravines and crevices of the mountain beneath their feet, careful to take their slabs and pillars in such a way as to leave a natural seeming void behind. This has given her the muscles of a stunted giant, but strangely, no patience at all.

  Her interrogation partner in this game of bad cop-bad cop is a little person of African-American descent. Gloria Berry just manages to top three feet in height, and she is built like a bowling pin. Gloria is also the single meanest person Bashar has ever known in a long life filled with evil-minded sadists and good old-fashioned neck breakers. She is also rumored to have more lovers than any other woman or man in Cascadiopolis.

  The two of them stacked together would barely be tall enough to stand duty at the Granite Gate, but they’d broken many a testosterone-laced hulk in their time.

  Tygre just smiles.

  “I don’t freaking care how you got in here,” Gloria says with an incongruent echo of menace in her piping voice. “I don’t freaking care who you know, who you’ve done, or who you’ve bought off to get here.” Her fingers fly through a haptic interface of microwatt lasers and passive motion sensors, teasing data out of piezoelectric Malaysian quantum matrices embedded in stone blocks. The tease is not going well. “What I do freaking care about, my sweet, sweet man …” —Bashar’s spine shuddered at that— “… is how you’ve come not to exist anywhere in western North America.”

  Anna checks Tygre’s patches with a worried frown. For all that she swings a hammer on the day shift, her delicacy is a butterfly’s. “He’s taking it up, Glo. It’s just not, well, doing anything.”

  Tygre’s smile widens. He clearly has all night to spend here in the delightful company of these women. Bashar’s hindbrain stirs, prompting him to speak out of turn. “I don’t believe you’ll get anywhere with this one, ladies.”

  The look Gloria shoots him would have maimed a lesser man. “We don’t tell you your business, soldier-boy, don’t you be telling us ours.”

  Anna reaches into a toolbox, which was once bright red but is now covered with layers of stickers in an archaeology of protest and outsider music trends. She brings out an ancient pair of pliers, the handles wrapped in grimy medical gauze. The tool seems to smell like an old wound, even to Bashar lounging fifteen feet away. Tygre looks with polite interest, then speaks in that divine voice. “You need help fixing something, ma’am?”

  “Only you,” says Anna.

  “Am I in need of some adjustment? If you wish to know something, you have only to ask.”

  Here Bashar has to laugh, though he keeps the noise behind his lips. The gruesome twosome have been working Tygre over for an hour, datamining, reading his eye reflexes and the set of his jaw, but they haven’t actually tried direct questioning.

  Which admittedly rarely works on people making an involuntary visit to Symmetry, but still represents a deeply amusing problem.

  Gloria glares at Bashar again, then with both hands elbow-deep in her data, turns the hard-eyed look on Tygre. “Name?”

  “Tygre.”

  “That all of it?”

  “Tygre Tygre, actually.” There is benevolent warmth in his tone. “Spelled the old way.”

  “Right,” says Anna in a withering tone. In a city which is home to people with names like Starbanner, Undine and Taupe Pantyhose, Bashar finds this hardly fair.

  Gloria eyes her display suspiciously. “Where you born?”

  “Nowhere.”

  Anna clacks the pliers, miming the breaking of a knuckle, but Gloria waves her to silence.

  “How’d you get here?”

  “Walked.”

  “From where?”

  “Further downhill.”

  Admirably truthful answers, Bashar realizes, and profoundly useless. Still, there is something on Gloria’s face.

  “Anna, come here,” she says quietly.

  Tygre maintains his mask of amity while the other interrogator slips around to the far side of this segment of the lava tube. They don’t bother to speak aloud, or tell Bashar anything at all, but both heads are quickly focused on the glowing, buzzing universe of information projected above the pile of broken stones.

  “You ever own an automobile, Tygre?” Gloria asks after a few minutes.

  “Never.”

  “Scooter? Registered bike?”

  “Never.”

  “No bank accounts,” says Anna.

  “That’s hardly incriminating,” Bashar offers in spite of himself. “Half the people here have never even touched folding money, let alone held an account.”

  “He is not half the people here,” Gloria mutters.

  Anna steps over to Tygre with her pair of pliers. “T
ell me, man. What happens if I use these?”

  Tygre’s smile widens. “You probably would prefer not to find out.”

  “Wrong answer, man.” Her eyes cut to her own enormously muscled bicep.

  He follows the line of her gaze with a lift of his hand. For a moment they touch, finger to arm, and Bashar realizes how enormous Tygre truly is. Anna is not tall, but her mason’s arms are thicker than Bashar’s thighs. Tygre’s fingers look overlarge even laid upon her tattoo.

  The tattoo storm calms beneath his touch, a sunbeam breaking through the clouds—something Bashar has never before seen.

  “Right answer, woman.” He stands, shrugging off the restraining straps as if they’d never been buckled. “I believe this interview is over.”

  “It’s done when I say it’s done,” Gloria answers hotly.

  Anna is fascinated by her own tattoo and does not reply.

  “Have you found any data trail on me whatsoever?”

  “No …” she admits. Her voice is grudging.

  “Then under which security rule are you holding me?”

  With Bashar in the interrogation room, Gloria could hardly declare a security emergency. And Bashar himself would be the arbiter of any imminent threats. In this moment her role is confined to the vetting. With or without prejudice, but the moment for Medievalism has already passed.

  Tygre turns to Bashar. “I would meet your people.” He then gravely nods at first Gloria, then Anna. “Will you ladies accompany me?”

  “I’ll skinny dip in hell first,” Gloria snarls.

  Anna smiles and takes the big man’s hand. Just by size alone, she could have been his child, giant daughter to a giant father.

  They head back out the deeply shadowed hallways of Symmetry, past salvaged cubicle partitions and homemade concrete dividers. Bashar trails behind them. From the deepest part of the lava tube Gloria’s steady, monotonous cursing washes over them like waves upon a distant shore.

  * * *