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

Then he phones her. It rings once, twice, three times, and he’s hearing sirens somewhere and the streetlights are popping on up and down the boulevard. It’s distracting.

“You’ve reached Maureen Sendak. Leave a message.”

“Ah, uh, Maureen, I mean Detective Sendak, sorry, Remy here. I, uh, I did a thing, you won’t like it I think.” With an effort he focuses. First, turn down his detail levels; second, take a deep breath.

“Okay. Remember that porch-cam photo of the guy in the SUV? It looked like he was wearing a tracker, and if he is it’ll have a contact tracing app on it. They run in the background and they’re anonymous, so why would he turn it off? He’s cautious, methodical, if you go by what we saw at the crime scene.

“Except here’s the thing. There’s been no coronavirus cases in the city for weeks. So I know somebody who knows somebody and, I, uh, I had them enter Cawley’s wife and daughters into the system. As having tested positive.

“Because most people are still wearing their trackers, right? And even if he took it off at some point, he was around the Cawleys long enough that when we registered them, he’d receive a notification. And so—”

“Hey you!”

Remy spins around to find himself facing a gray, blocky human shape. “Get away from my car!,” it says.

Remy fumbles with his detail levels and the blocks are replaced by a stocky, thick-necked man with short-cropped black hair. He has some kind of tattoo on his neck. Remy stares at him for a long moment. Then he blurts, “Where are you keeping them?”

The man’s eyes widen and then Remy’s on the ground, stinging rings of pain around his left eye. Something knocks the breath out of him; he’s getting kicked. He tries to curl into a ball but suddenly there’s shouting and the man above him curses. A car door slams; he hears the SUV’s engine start and rolls out of the way just in time as it screeches out of its parking spot.

As he’s getting to his knees people run over from the testing center—three, four of them? They’re all talking at once but he can’t understand them. He scrabbles on the ground for his phone. Cracked and dead. He spots his glasses and lunges for them.

They’re crumpled splinters, the lenses popped out.

“Are you okay? Come on, we’ll help you inside!”

There’s more pitiless light in there, and more people and loud voices. Remy backs away. “No, I’m fine, I’ll be… I’ll be fine.” He turns and staggers up the pitching deck of the driveway, hunching away from the hissing streetlights and shocked-eyed office towers. Not going anywhere. Just going.

REMY IS A LEAF IN A WHIRLWIND. NOTHING TOUCHES HIM BUT EVERYTHING IS ONhim, geometries and noises leaping like panthers. A car’s brakes squeal and his vision flashes white; he turns his head and a streetlight’s stabbing light sends prickles down his arms. He knows he needs to get home, or at least somewhere safe, but the roads terrify him and every building’s doorway is white-hot with glare and detail. By instinct he steers to darker and quieter places.

He’s not mindless—in fact, he’s thinking furiously. He recognizes familiar signs of shock in himself, he’s aware of how he’s reacting. But he seems to have split in two. One half is a wailing child, looking for his mother’s arms yet terrified of the sandpaper rasp of her hand stroking his hair. The other is a man who got himself off the streets, found a job and even respectability; that man knows that he can get the better of this moment. He just needs to regroup.

Up ahead is a bridge, and underneath is dark. Remy staggers down the grassy embankment and onto a broad slab of pavement, then stops dead, blinking at orange and green lozenges, like glowing turtles under the vast leaning slab of the bridge. It’s a homeless encampment; the turtles are dome tents with little lights in them, and people are in them lying down, or sitting and talking. There’s a campfire with a few people seated around it.

Several heads turn in his direction. He grins weakly. “Does… does anybody have a phone?”

“Man, phones get stolen. You need help?” The man is tall and incredibly thin, his features buried in a parka that shouldn’t be necessary on a summer night.

“I just need to grab my breath.” He must look rough, so he adds, “I got overstimulated. Too much, well of everything. I need somewhere quiet.”

“Know all about that,” says the man. “Come on down. You can wait your turn at the fire.”

Remy gratefully takes a seat on an overturned crate. He rubs his eyes. The man who spoke to him goes away but after a while comes back to lean on the graffiti-layered bridge pillar. “You got anything?” he says.

“I don’t carry cash.” He pats his pockets. “No weed. I took my meds before I left home.”

“No problem. You’re still welcome, ’long as you follow the rules.”

“Rules?” The fog of noise is starting to lift. Remy looks around, and now it’s clear how the tents are laid out in, well, not exactly a grid, but a pattern you can walk between. Tables and chairs are set in specific spaces, mostly where the street light comes in.

“You want the fire, you wait in line,” says the man. “There’s the fire rule, the water rule, the lookout rule.”

Remy nods. “Who makes these rules? Do you vote on them?”

“Naw. We just talk ’em out.” He goes away again and Remy sits there, watching the cooperation and order of the encampment unfold in little interactions and in where things are placed.

Near the end of his time at St. Mary’s, Remy used to go for long walks. “A tendency to wander,” his chart probably said. One day he’d been deep in thought and only looked up when a security guard shouted at him. He blinked and looked around, only to discover that somehow, he’d made his way into the heart of a building site.

“How’d you get in here?” the guard demanded.

“I, uh, just came through the atrium and took a left at the electronics store—”

“Wait!” Another man ran up. “How did you know there’d be a computer store there?” Remy looked, and realized that the buildings were just sketches—concrete slabs, pillars, and some HVAC ducts, all open to the outside air. He hadn’t seen that; he’d seen the marble, the seating and lights, and the store. He understood what it would be from its shape and from the kind of power lines and interior walls that had been roughed out.

The architect was impressed, and they’d got to talking. Talking had led to work, inside virtual reality at first, then at unfinished sites where the firm was working to visualize future buildings. Remy discovered design, and coding, and met Xander, and eventually, Kraft.

He had done these things. Therefore, he can find his way home tonight.

A deep calm settles over him, slowly, like snow descending. After a while he turns to look at the skyline.

The city has its own rules, of course. Some are written down. A lot of them support privilege and power and, up until the pandemic hit, they were immovable. The coronavirus overturned everything, but not everybody is happy with the new world.

Something’s been nagging at him since he left the testing center. It’s like a distant alarm ringing in the back of his mind—something important that he should have told Sendak, but didn’t get to. He stares at the towers, idly wonders how much money one of them costs—and remembers.

He seeks out the man who helped him and says, “Thanks. I’m good now, I’ll go home.”

“All right man. Stay safe.”

Remy stalks up the embankment and without flinching turns his face to the lights and the traffic.

ALMOST IMMEDIATELY, A POLICE CAR APPROACHES AND HE WAVES URGENTLY AT IT.It brakes and veers over to the curb. A figure bursts out of the passenger door. That collection of jittery movements and the headlong walk all add up to Sendak.