Кори Доктороу - Make Shift - Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

She stood up and stuck her hand out. “Come on,” she said.

He took her hand. It was strong and calloused from building a new city. As the sun set, she took him on a tour of it.

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE. THOUGH THE BUILDINGS WERE BUILT FROM STANDARDparts, there were so many ways to recombine them, and more were emerging every day, as modelers and designers and builders shared their inventions. Some neighborhoods were made from buildings that looked like scaled-up missions, others had a beachy, SoCal, mid-century feel, while others were like jumbled-together craftsman houses, hard to tell where one stopped and the next started. All had broad public spaces—interior courtyards, community gardens, playgrounds. He fell in love with a place that had the feel of a Moroccan town from an old movie, with tall pink stucco buildings whose round-shouldered doors echoed the archways that defined their alleys. They got delicious strong coffee from a self-serve cart and baklava from some kids with a card table and a hand-lettered sign, and two older women came and kissed Treesa on the cheek and made her promise to come for dinner that week. She seemed delighted to make the promise.

Everywhere they went, they saw people—cooking out, playing, jogging, strolling. It was a strolling city, with even the biggest structures pierced by walkways that led out to narrow streets or broad parks. Even carrying his backpack, even tired and emotionally wrung out, Wilmar kept pushing on, curious about what he’d find around the next corner, and the next.

“It’s amazing,” he said, as they reached a lookout that offered a clear vista out to sea, where the moonrise was staining the tips of the waves white.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

He did his mental-health thing, actually cataloging the messages in his brain for signs of the inward-spiral of self-loathing. It wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was absolutely better than it had been. “OK, I think.” He dug a baggie of trailmix out of his bag and shook himself a handful, then offered some to her.

Now she led him to the old town, the original town. The drowned town. The outskirts were marshy, but soon they found their way to an interconnected set of pontoon walkways that floated in the shallow, brackish water over the old lawns and streets and sidewalks, the splash of the pontoons and the creak of the wooden sections mixing with the insect roar. It was a haunted place, soft and decaying, with houses down on their knees or reduced to just a few uprights. Fish splashed in the distance, and the old graffiti was still visible in the twilight: “2 INSIDE”—“DEAD INSIDE”—“TRESSPASSERS WILL.” Rusted parking signs stuck up out of the water like Venetian gondola bricolas, and they heard the distant voices of canoers out for an evening’s paddle. The storefronts’ windows were long, long gone, and the stores themselves were dark caves blowing soft fungal smells.

But amid them were sprawling mangroves, planted early in the crisis and now grown to early maturity thanks to their hybrid genes, knucklebones piercing the Pacific Coast Highway where it stuck up out of the water.

“In a couple years this place will be all marshland,” she said. “But there’s plans to keep a surf beach a couple miles up the coast, somewhere that doesn’t have quite so many buried snags.”

The insect song rose with the moon. They watched as it silvered the ruins and turned the ripples of the water into light shows, thinking their thoughts, watching a city that had stood for a quarter of a millennium disintegrate before their eyes.

BY THE TIME WILMAR AROSE THE NEXT DAY, HIS COUCH-SURFING HOST WAS ALREADYat work, having left behind some breakfast stuff and a nice note with some tips for things to do and see in town. The list was great, especially the little museum of treasures they’d found when they dug out the old town, but Wilmar didn’t want to do any of that stuff.

He DMed Treesa instead, and an hour later, he was on her job site, getting trained on fitting together the slabs that they craned off of the railcar on its spur. An hour after that, he finished his first stretch of wall, on the third story of a ten-unit low-rise that followed a ridgeline with good views inland, to the scrub and woods on the site of the old golf course.

When it was time for lunch, they sat together and ate tamales. “You’re supposed to be on vacation, dude. Are you sure this is good self-care?” Her tone was light but she was serious.

“I’m fine. Better than fine. I think the problem was that working in Mojave, it was like this endless conveyor belt—make a slab, ship a slab, make a slab, do it forever, until the world is saved. But this—” he slapped the wall they were leaning against “—it’s real. You can see it. You can live in it . I think maybe I wanna try working here for a while.”

“If you say so.” She gave him a half-joking side-eye. “But you’re the one who says you work to get away from your anxieties.”

He felt himself getting angry, caught the physical signs in his jaw and hands, then made himself calm down. She wasn’t wrong. “I have a theory about you,” he said.

Full side-eye now. “Go on.”

“I think this work is how you cope, too. Like, if you can build the right kind of new city up here on the hill, your aunt and everyone else can stop mourning what they lost.”

She looked away and was quiet for so long he got worried.

“Treesa, I’m sorry, that was out of line. I apologize sincerely.”

She looked at him, eyes brimming, then swiped at them. “It’s OK.” Her voice was thick. “Really. Yeah, that’s it all right. My mom went in the ’28 pandemic, and at the end she was so scared. Not scared that she was gonna die. So many people had died then, we’d made our peace with that, all of us. She was scared of the world they were leaving me in.” She thumped the wall. “When I do this, it’s like I’m dealing with it for her.

“Truth is, I’m scared of the future. Sure, we can build a new city in the hills. Maybe we can do that for every coastal city. But it won’t do us a damned bit of good against wildfires. It won’t bring back the extinct species. It won’t stop the plagues. When I get to thinking about it I am so scared.

“But when I’m working, I can pretend that we can fix this. And if I can fool myself into thinking it’s fine, then maybe I can deal with whatever’s coming.”

She blew her nose on a face-scarf. “It’s stupid, I know.”

“No,” Wilmar said. “No, that’s not stupid at all.”

THE SPACE IS AN ABSTRACT GAME LEVEL, RENDERED IN LOW-RES CELL SHADING.Gray and beige; benign but not very informative. Remy slides his finger along the smooth arm of his glasses, and the scene becomes textured.

“—of interest is over here,” somebody is saying. Remy looks for his usual cues to understand who it is, and spots the worn sneakers that Inspector Kraft insists on wearing with any suit. Kraft isn’t looking his way, but Detective Sendak is frantically waving Remy over. He has no trouble recognizing her distinctive slouch. He turns around several times as he walks over, still taking in the overall shape of the location.

“—that the forensics consultant?” somebody else says. “He looks a little—?”

“Yes, this is Remy Reardon. Hsst, Remy, get over here! He’s not part of my regular team, he usually works with architects. We hire him sometimes.”

Despite his attempts to be inconspicuous, several heads turn Remy’s way, including the inspector’s, so he tweaks his detail levels. Appear normal , he tells himself. The blockiness of his surroundings dissolves, in its place brick and old wood beams, grimy industrial pebbled-glass windows. It’s cold in here; he had already noticed the smell.