METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire Read online

  An excerpt from the Bacigalupi Lectures:

  The concept of “soft path technologies” is at least as old as Aldo Leopold. Twentieth century culture had barely noticed the idea, discarding it unused like so many other potential salvations. Much like water, capital seeks the easiest channel. Infrastructure re-investment requires enormous commitment to long-term planning, or the resources of a stable government.

  Wall Street would never spend the money in any given financial quarter, and it never looked into the future past the next quarter.

  Cascadiopolis took its inspirations from the same wellsprings as the urban pioneers in Detroit, along with their daughter-colonies in Buffalo, Windsor and elsewhere: the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s, the Green movement of the 1990s and 2000s, the apocalyptic undergrounds of the decades of the twenty-first century. While the individual thinkers and tinkerers who provided the underlying soft paths were scattered throughout history, only in the opening decades of the new millennium was there sufficient social will to implement these on a scale larger than family farming or microcommunities of shared intent.

  For the first time since the invention of coinage, social capital was able to trump financial capital. Social capital itself is perhaps the greatest of those soft path technologies.

  The root causes of such change are as fantastically varied as the root causes of any cultural movement, but the proximate causes are stunningly clear. The failure of governmental institutions outside of the defense sector was a deliberate strategy of late twentieth century Republican leadership. By the early twenty-first century conservatives had succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings, only to meet with disaster. Instead of a libertarian paradise of unrestrained capital lifting a rising tide of employers, workers and households, an economic apocalypse emerged which made the Great Depression look like a post-Christmas sales slump.

  At the same time, two hundred years of aggressive industrialism combined with a deliberately self-censored policy of abusive neglect of climate change trends came home to roost in an overwhelming way. The loss of New Orleans was not a fluke; it was a harbinger. Mobile, then Charleston, then Miami followed within the next decades, years. The upper speed of hurricane winds increased by forty percent during that period, forcing a revision to the Beaufort scale. Sea levels rose as currents shifted to bring polar meltwater south.

  The financial disasters on Wall Street and Main Street were echoed for anyone who lived too close to water.

  Suddenly solar-powered hot water heaters and window box greenhouses didn’t seem so silly, even to dyed-in-the-wool conservatives convinced that the six-meter waves pounding the Gulf Coast were somehow a political conspiracy concocted by the left.

  Even then, as always, most people were incrementalists. The balance of power shifted in that the activist minority grew from a noisy fringe to a major movement within American society. In this, they were welcomed by their Green brethren in Europe and the Third World.

  And so Cascadiopolis was built, one soft path at a time.

  * * *

  We don’t know what to make of him, we who stand like owls ranked in the darkness. Mother moon has set early, so the shadows under the trees are nearly as dark as the shadows beneath the stones. Still, we wait out the time of blood and screams and query hacks, watching the tunnel’s entrance as if our own deaths lurk within.

  When Tygre emerges, he stands tall with fists cocked upon his hip and sweeps his gaze across us. More than half of the city’s shifts are present by then, over two thousand souls crowded shoulder to shoulder on branches and along paths. We breathe as one beast, mutter as one many-headed animal; shift our collective weight and stare.

  The man himself is almost luminous. His skin shines out of the shadows, and his eyes flash as if target-painted by distant lasers. He looks back and forth, taking us in, then tilts his head, takes a great breath and speaks but one word.

  “Hope,” Tygre says in a voice that ripples through us all.

  At that we dissolve into twice thousand tired, grumpy people looking for sleep, sex, food, explanations. Whatever has bound us together dissolves like cardboard in the rain and we dribble away from the majesty of his presence like cats pretending they’d never seen a dog in the street outside that screen door.

  He just stands and smiles until we are almost all gone save a few stragglers. Flanked by Bashar and Anna Chao, the large man looks over the city as if it were his own.

  Eventually he speaks again. “They’re coming for you, you know.”

  “They been coming for us all our lives,” Anna answers him. Her tone is offhand, but her words are the story of protest in a new American century.

  He glances sideways at her, a strangely ordinary movement. “This is different. Not authority. Capital.”

  “What does capital care for us?” Bashar asks.

  “Don’t be naive,” Anna snaps at him. It is clear she already sees the lines radiating outward from Tygre’s statement. Authority has its own constraints—statutes of limitation, boundaries of time and districting and election cycles. Capital knows no limits, is the beast that shouted “profit” at the heart of the world.

  Bashar is not naive. He knows his own world. It is filled with firing solutions and perimeters and ways to stop, break and kill his fellow human beings. Capital is a distant evil he has always resented from the wrong side of a badge, but finance was never a mystery fit to catch his interest.

  “And you’ve come to save us?” she asks, her voice turning oddly sweet as she addresses Tygre.

  “I have come to save no one.” His words are oddly prophetic, given what was to unfold. “But one can prepare better against an enemy one can see at the gate.”

  “Capital doesn’t sneak through the dark and cut tripwires,” says Bashar.

  “Oh, really?” Tygre lets the words hang in the dark.

  After a long, tense moment, they move toward one of the canteens. It is late, even by the standards of the largely nocturnal world of Cascadiopolis. Food here, like most other things, is communal—made and served in groups, by groups, for groups.

  There is a test in the minutes that follow, the kind of test that gets people not killed but gently expelled. Tygre walks into the camo-netted kitchen with the hot ceramic cooking tubs and steam tables. There he takes up a fine German knife and dices down a peck of fiddleheads waiting to go into the stew, moving as smoothly and casually as if he’d been working the kitchen here for years.

  Only Bashar realizes how frighteningly quick and precise Tygre’s bladework is. Anna seems entranced by the big man’s economy of motion, the grace that he applies even to the most menial tasks.

  When he begins to dip into the spices, even the other cooks step back slightly. A delta tang soon wafts from the stuttering pots as the fiddleheads stir amid salmon fillets, jerked magpie and tiny, stunted carrots grown haphazard in the high meadows amid their cousins the Queen Anne’s lace.

  He finally looks around. “Tomatoes?” Tygre asks hopefully.

  No, there are no tomatoes, but there are peppers. Someone fetches a basket of withered green onions that bring more flavor than substance. Word passes, more vegetables and herbs arrive, strings of last year’s braided garlic, dried Hood River apples coated in nutmeg and turmeric.

  It would be a dog’s breakfast of a stew in lesser hands, but Tygre divides his pots, explores different flavors, shifts from Cajun spice to Bollywood to lazy Mediterranean with the most unlikely combinations of substitutions. He is dancing with the flavors now more than before. We come and gather round, the army of owls reconvened by the scent-lure.

  The evening, which began with an expectation of blood, ends in a sunrise feast. Our bellies are sated and our souls are piqued by this man who has made for us a sacrament of our own wine and bread.

  The only flaws are Gloria’s distant grumbling, and later, distant shouting of some new crisis as dawn’s pink light peeks across the slopes of the mountain looming close to the east.

  * * *


  If you build your city well enough, it will be portable. Not in the sense of snowbirds towing their homes behind straining fifth wheel rigs that burn the last of the freely accessible oil before being parked to rust. Rather in the sense that a few score backpackers with good data storage and the right training can make their way to Vancouver Island, or the forests around Crater Lake, or even more distant locations, and create anew what has been built before.

  It is never the same. This is no greenfreak McTropolis to be stamped cookie cutter from loam and rock and sculpted wind towers. Rather, each locale has a different watershed, biological resources, landforms and contours. But the principles propagate—self-government, specialization at need, information density and power parsimony. The engineering holds true at high level, even as configuration requirements change and available feedstocks shift with rainfall flight and spikes in net available sunlight.

  Like their similars in urban Detroit, the citizens of Cascadiopolis have made of themselves a virus, a transmission vectoring in the heads and hands of everyone who has passed through their loamy avenues. Their city—your city—walks on scores of feet in every direction to bloom wherever fallow soil is rich enough and the land runs wide enough. A virus, an invasive species, a wave of change designed to outlast the marbled halls of capital which already burn in Seattle, Chicago and the paved-over Northeast.

  * * *

  Tract

  Cardoza walks straight toward New Kid with her rifle on her shoulder. The rest of her freshly retrieved weapons she keeps hidden. She wills him to see her as he expects: a tired soldier coming home. He wouldn’t know a frontal assault if she dropped a flash-bang down his shirt, but New Kid ought to recognize an approaching friend.

  Even if she isn’t.

  The fundamental disorderliness of the greenfreaks work to her advantage here. They’d never acknowledged the value of uniforms, barely possessing basic security discipline. Cardoza figures she could talk her way into even a more experienced guard, with luck and no reinforcing authority close to hand.

  So long as this young fool doesn’t shoot her in the dark, she’ll be headed up the hill soon enough. Still, the cranberry taste from her dinner bar is turning sour in her mouth.

  Nerves kill more operatives than the enemy. A maxim she’s always lived by, regardless of its statistical truth.

  “H-hey,” New Kid says, not quite shouting. He’s got an old Mac-10—What happened to the bolt-action rifle she had spotted earlier? —Too easy to make a mistake, shoot to kill in a moment of reflexive panic. The weapon has a short barrel and inherently lousy aim, but a dozen rounds on fast squirt could make anyone get lucky.

  “Can it,” Cardoza says in a tired voice. “I been out on extended perimeter all god-damned night. And who the hell are you, anyway?”

  Angry sergeant gets them every time. Even fish like New Kid, who’s never seen a sergeant before. Kind of like pissed off older brother, Cardoza guesses.

  “S-sorry,” he stammers. The Mac-10 wavers, droops. Something clicks loudly.

  She realizes the fool has pulled the trigger. Wisely, Otis has not left him with any rounds in the magazine.

  “Do that again and I’ll feed you that god-damned weapon.” Cardoza mounts the last few steps to New Kid’s watch station. “You going to walk me in or what?”

  This is the critical piece of social engineering. Getting him to let her in isn’t all that difficult. She’s already won that battle just by standing here and scaring him into lowering his weapon. But getting him to walk her up the hill into Cascadiopolis—that’s the important part here and now. Because without the escort, she’ll be tripping over every alarm and booby trap that Bashar’s fetid mind has dreamt up.

  In without an escort is meaningless. In with an escort, well, she’ll figure out what to do next. Whatever’s going on up there, she needs to know. Her employers need to know.

  “I’m not, not supposed to abandon my p-post …” His voice trails off, torn between a question and slow-building panic.

  “Shithead,” she says with a heavy sigh. Don’t overdo it. “You’re not abandoning your post if I tell you to walk me in, are you?”

  Somewhere he finds unexpected courage. “My n-name is Wallace.”

  Great. Now if she had to kill him, he’d be halfway real to her. Handles like New Kid are so much easier when you need to gut someone like a perch. Real people are harder to handle.

  “Of course it is, Wallace.” She smiles, confident that even if he didn’t see her teeth in the dark, her voice would bend with her lips. “So show me you know the way up the hill.”

  “Ma’am, you already know it.”

  She leans in close. Even at this range he was barely a darker lump in the starshine, without her scope to help. It might be time to kill him now. “Don’t make me write you up to Bashar, kid.”

  A moment of indecision writhes between them like a wounded puppy. She catches the sweat-and-piss scent of his fear, musky even over the heavy fir-sap odor of the mountain air. He makes a small noise in the back of his throat, then shoulders the Mac-10. The tip of the barrel narrowly misses her hand.

  “This way, ma’am.”

  “Good,” she says to no one in particular.

  He steps through the Granite Gate. She follows, marveling that it could ever be this easy. Together they hike upward amid the rhododendron flowers almost luminous in the deep, deep dark.

  * * *

  A key advantage of micron-scale technology is the sheer scale at which projects can be undertaken. While this statement may appear at first blush to be counterintuitive, consider the problem of distributing optical surveillance systems. Wiring in even miniature cameras the size of gum packs requires a dedicated team and a van full of equipment and parts. But a coffee can full of microcameras can be scattered like wheat on the wind, to settle around the target area in a spray of heavy dust.

  They require no maintenance, and are sufficiently cheap to simply ignore once their quantum batteries run out. No single lens sees much, not with that aperture and depth of field, but the array of lenses is astonishingly precise. Remote processors modeled on the brains of fruit flies handle the disparate constellation of related images, but that investment needs to be made—and protected—once, while the camera dust can be scattered a hundred times.

  More to the point, those hundred scatterings cost less than the parts and labor to install a few dozen miniature cameras.

  There is a direct trend line from the Big Science projects of mid-century America—Grand Coulee Dam, the Apollo missions, the Interstate highway system—and the spread of micron-scale technology in the twenty-first century. That trend was charted by budgetary analysts, return on investment calculations, and the self-preservation of big capital.

  The error that big capital made in this arc of change is Gödelian in its self-blindness. No single activist, no network or membership organization, could compete with the capital costs of projects in the old days. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the same distribution of materials cost and dissolution of labor expense that serviced big capital’s ROI requirements had enabled technology transfer into the hands of any greenfreak with a little cash and some technical acumen.

  Mob tech.

  Nobody but the government could have built Grand Coulee Dam. Any fool can lay down a line of whale-fluke microturbines in a streambed.

  The same micron-scale technology that was meant to bind the economy and the populace to the invisible will of big capital was soon turned against the power of money. “Green” went from signifying financial assets to another meaning entirely. That change rode into Western culture on the back of fractionated surveillance and widely distributed power systems.

  * * *

  Wallace—New Kid—leads her upwards along a path that is straightforward but by no means straight. Somehow Cardoza has expected more sidestepping and long pauses. New Kid knows his backtrail, or seems to at any rate. They made the first half-mile of the climb unchallenged by an
yone or anything other than passive systems which remained passive.

  She is unsure of what surveillance has reported, but trailing New Kid with her chin tucked down, Cardoza feels safe enough. Cascadiopolis will in no ways be miked and monitored like downtown Seattle—the greenfreaks don’t stand for that kind of oversight. If she gets in among them, she’ll be safe enough until it’s time to run.

  At that point, her choices will be different. She has her uplink tucked into her undershirt. Her contract includes an evacuation bond. So long as no one kills her dead, Cardoza figures on getting out of the green city.

  When New Kid is finally challenged, she is almost surprised. A change in the air tells her they are close. Hundreds of people in close proximity bring their own warmth to the chill of a Cascade spring night. Likewise, the faint odors of smoke, of metal, of food, of oils.

  Sniffers would have found this city, she realizes. Smarter minds than hers have worked on this problem for some time now. Sniffers couldn’t just walk in like she has done.

  Until now.

  “Wally, who you got?” The voice drifts down from a Douglas fir. A faint violet spot circles the loam in front of New Kid, targeting something that would have no difficulty shooting in the dark.

  “She’s, uh …” New Kid’s voice trails off as he realizes the flaw in his current plans, such as they are.

  “I’m one of Bashar’s specials,” Cardoza says with a rich confidence she does not in fact feel. It’s total bullshit, but that slang is regrettably common. “No names will be mentioned.”

  “You’re not turked out,” the voice drawls. “No comm bud, buddy.”

  “Not where I been,” Cardoza responds. “Now get out of my way, or explain yourself to Bashar later.”

  A grunt from up in the tree. With a click almost too faint to hear, the violet spot vanishes. “Explain things to him your own self, then.”

  Cardoza follows New Kid on up the hill, watchful for drifting violet spots. If the sentry is tracking her, they have her sighted in mid-back, where she can’t see.

  Her spine itches terribly.