Stephen Baxter - Flood

The chopper sat on its pad, bolted to the roof by clamps, its rotors turning. They had to get to the bird by edging their way around the shelter of a wall, working hand over hand along a metal rail; otherwise there was a danger of being blown clean off the roof. The pilot was the same bluff woman who had transported Lily and the others to Central Park earlier. She helped them climb aboard, hauling them in one by one with unreasonable strength. She yelled into Lammockson’s face, “Thirty more seconds and I’d have gone without you.”

“Just get us out of here.”

The doors slammed shut and the chopper’s engine roared. They scrambled for seats and belts. The pilot released the runner clamps, and the bird soared up. Looking down, Lily glimpsed the slim, graceful lines of the Freedom Tower rising from the turbulent water that covered the Memorial.

Then the chopper surged west, heading over the Hudson and hurrying inland. It was buffeted; even Lily, used to tough chopper sorties, felt exposed.

Gary snapped open his laptop.“Damn it. They’re saying Aaron’s now a category four. Borderline five.”

Piers asked, “What kind of damage will that do?”

Gary tapped at his keyboard. “New York hasn’t been hit by a hurricane since… 1938. Preparedness, nil. And the city’s already flayed open by the floods. The colder waters at this latitude should weaken the storm-you know hurricanes are fueled by ocean surface heat. But on the other hand you have the peculiar topography of Manhattan. All those concrete canyons. The winds will be amplified.”

“Shit,” Lammockson said.“Well, that’s it for NewYork. Thank Christ I got my assets out in time.”

“The rich believe they have choices,” Piers said grimly. “While the poor must accept their fate.”

“I don’t notice you turning down a ride,” Lammockson snarled at him.

“The eye wall’s about to hit,” Gary said.

They all twisted in their seats to look back.

The hurricane was a bowl of churning air, like a vast artifact suspended over the heart of the city. Lily could see a storm surge already roaring through the streets of the Financial District, gray walls of foam and spray and sheer muscular water pushing between the tall buildings. Debris rode the waves, massive to be visible from here, cars, uprooted trees perhaps. And, incredibly, she saw the prow of an ocean-going ship being forced down one of the avenues.

Then the storm itself broke over the town. Lesser buildings simply exploded, burst open from within by the primal force of the wind. The towering skyscrapers survived, huddled together against the lashing rain, reminding Lily of images of emperor penguins. But there was a kind of sparkling around them, like a mist of raindrops before the buildings’ sheer walls. That was glass, Gary said, the glass of a million windows sucked out of their frames and shattered, a glass storm that must be rending any living flesh exposed to it.

The chopper dipped its nose and fled toward the sanctuary of the higher ground.

December 2018

From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

In the final days Maria spent as much time as she could in her flat, in central Manchester just off Deansgate, alone with her virtual child. Whenever Maria logged on, Linda always abandoned her toys and the soulless avatars who shared this domain with her, the pets and companions and nannies, and came running to her mother’s image with squeals of delight.

Little Linda, a HeadSpace baby, was four years old now. She lived in an apartment cut into the side of a cliff, overlooking a sparkling sea. Maria had designed the place herself. The location within the virtual world called HeadSpace was non-specific, but Maria had vaguely modeled it on the Sorrento coast, where she had had some happy holidays as a kid with her own family. Of course the sea was a hateful thing now, and Maria had installed louvered blinds to close the big picture windows and shut out the view. But the little girl playing on the sunlit patio still made a beautiful image for Maria to gaze on, in her desktop screen, in her damp, darkened flat.

Linda was Maria’s baby, entirely virtual, painlessly born and raised within the glowing domain of HeadSpace. Everything Linda knew Maria had taught her. Maria had gloves and a headset, and she could hear the child laugh, feel her when her avatar hugged her, a ghostly presence through the pads on her fingertips. She still couldn’t be with the child, not fully. Her screen was a barrier between HeadSpace and the real world-Dullworld as Maria thought of it, this damp, breaking-down world where she was stuck, a drab, childless thirty-seven-year-old.

But that barrier was going to melt away someday soon. The transhumanists had promised. Technologies such as AI, genetic engineering and nanotechnology would accelerate human evolution; they would uplift Maria herself into a union of flesh and technology. And beyond that would come the singularity, the point at which human technologies became smarter than humans themselves. It would all exponentiate away into a glittering transcendence, out of anybody’s control, the opening up of a new realm of enhanced existence. She had been reading about this for years, for half her lifetime. When the singularity came she would be able to live forever, if she chose. And she would be able to step seamlessly between one world and another, between the dull world of Manchester and the shining realm of HeadSpace. She could be with her child, in the light, as real as Linda was.

But the singularity was slow in coming.

She rarely heard from her transhumanist contacts now. As the floods bit away there were power-outs or, worse, failures at the ISPs that linked her to Linda in HeadSpace. And Maria herself was distracted from her time with her child. Forever hungry, thirsty, cold, she found herself spending hours in queues for food and medicines, even fresh water.

The fact was, her access to HeadSpace was the product of a complex and interconnected society, the capstone of a pyramid grounded in very old technologies, in farming and mining and manufacture and transport and energy production. It was only as that essential pyramid was crumbling that Maria became fully aware of its existence. The singularity came to seem more and more out of reach-an absurdity, actually. You couldn’t have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.

It was a Sunday morning when the HeadSpace website finally crashed. She kept trying to access it through that day, over and over, into the night. She didn’t accept it had gone for good for twenty-four hours, when her own internet connection failed.

Then the power went. She sat in her dark, cooling flat, her open hand against the dead screen, longing to pass through out of Dullworld to join Linda in the pixelated sunlight.

At last she began to mourn.

May 2019

“You have to leave Postbridge, Amanda. You and the kids. ow.”

Amanda stared at her sister. Lily stood in the door of the caravan, her rucksack at her feet, wearing a scuffed blue coverall stitched with AxysCorp logos. Lily was deeply tanned, her graying hair shaved short. She looked fit, lean and intent.

Wayne sat at the caravan’s single table, shaping a bit of leather for a harness. At thirty-one he was younger than either of the women. Amanda was aware of the way he appraised Lily’s body, the curves flattened and hidden by the coverall. He was like that with every woman he met, even those close to him-including, uncomfortably, fourteen-year-old Kristie. It was a habit Amanda had learned to ignore.

Lily ignored him too. She kept her gaze fixed on Amanda’s face. Amanda said,“How long is it since I’ve seen you? More than a year.. Where did you say you’ve been working?”