Kim Robinson - New York 2140

He had turned off most of the building’s heat and air-conditioning and lighting, and so people began to congregate in the dining hall and common floor. Of course it was possible to stay in one’s rooms and watch the storm by lantern or candlelight, and a fair number of residents reported that they were doing that. But many came down to join the others on the common floor. It was a social thing, as everyone acknowledged: a party of sorts, or a taking of refuge. A danger to be endured together, a marvel to be marveled at. The dining room windows faced south and west, and water fell off the side of the building and obscured the view, and though it was nothing like as astonishing as the Empire State’s south face, it was still like being in a cave behind a waterfall. The roar of the wind and rain filled everything, and as people had to shout to be heard, they shouted all the more to surmount their own din, in the usual party style, until Vlade felt like it was time to get back to the relative quiet of the control room.

Here, however, it was disturbing in a different way; it was quiet, but strangely so, as the window between his office and the boathouse was looking like the side of an aquarium. The water level inside the boathouse was now fifteen feet higher than normal high tide. Vlade got next to the window and fearfully looked up; it was just possible to discern the water level, up there near the ceiling, crowded with the hulls of boats from the lowest two levels of his sling rafters, all banging around up there in the surface slop together. Not a happy sight, and if the door seals leaked too badly, his office would get flooded and impede the operation of the building. Already there was water seeping in under the door; he cursed at the sight and got to work sealing the door with a sealant foam he often used for just that purpose. It would clean up with a solvent later, and for now it would work well.

It was hard to imagine how the city would do with a storm surge this high. Sea level had been mostly stable for forty years, and although there were always neap tides and storm surges, everyone had gotten used to a watermark that was now being far exceeded. The damage would be huge. All those careful and difficult first-floor-off-the-water designs, the trickiest part of the Venicification of the city, would be wrecked. And every entrance to the submarine world would be overtopped as well, so that all that laborious aeration could be lost to flooding, a huge disaster. Hopefully the hatches, like big manhole covers on hinges, that had been installed at every opening would all be closed and working well. And there were internal bulkheads as well that might limit any floods that did occur. But it was a dangerous situation, and anyone still down there was going to be stuck for the duration of the surge. Well, possibly they could get to some of the submarine entries that were inside buildings. It would be interesting to hear the stories once it was all over.

For now, he was locked out of his boathouse, and if he had wanted to go out somewhere, which happily he didn’t, he would have had to use an inflatable and make some kind of emergency window-breaking egress. That was bizarre, nerve-racking—hopefully nothing worse than that.

The skybridge to North was in the lee of the Met, and it seemed like it was protected enough from the brunt of the wind to suffer no harm. This was a blessing, because every bridge that ripped out would tear a hole in the building it came out of, and that hole would then be injected with wind and water. He wanted to go back up to the tower’s cupola to see if he could tell how the skybridges were doing, but he felt it would be an indulgence, not to mention forty floors of stairs, both up and down. Possibly he should power up one elevator for those really in need. But first he should check on the skybridge to North, and North itself.

So he left Su in charge and told his group to call him if anything happened, and walked up the stairs to the sixth floor where the skybridge connected. It had a little entry chamber of its own, an airlock of sorts, great for keeping the building warm and dry. He opened the first door and the world roared. He felt a little scared to open the second door to the skybridge proper, though typically he regarded it as a kind of room of its own, skinny and long.

He opened the door and it got even louder. The noise, a kind of howl with a subsonic element, picked up the hair on the back of his neck. He spoke into his wrist to tell his people where he was going, and couldn’t hear himself. Hesitantly he stepped out onto the skybridge. Flailing rainwater obscured the views of the narrow canal between the two buildings, but he could see Idelba’s big tug below, still tied off to both buildings and looking good, though higher than he was used to, both because of the size of the tug and the height of the water. The black surface of the canal was chopped into a chaos of wave interference, the black water heavily scalloped by wind ruffles, the big scallops each scalloped themselves at smaller scales. Truly the water didn’t know where to go under the pressure of the blasts swirling back and forth over the canal; they were in a lee, so the main brunt of wind was baffled, but it was still strong. There were downdrafts that struck so hard they knocked spray off the canal into the air. He could feel the skybridge vibrating under him, though there was no rocking or swaying. It was well protected by the Met.

Inside North it was quieter. It wasn’t fronting the blast but rather taking sideslaps and vacuum suckings. The residents there were mostly gathered in their own common room and dining hall, and again it was dim through most of the building. North didn’t have a boathouse, so they didn’t have that problem. Their dock door was sealed shut. All seemed well. North’s original design as the foundation for a tower taller than the Empire State Building meant it was immensely strong. It would be fine.

Vlade recrossed the skybridge, pausing out in the middle to look around again. To the west he could see out into the bacino, and it was wild. The surface of the little rectangular lake was getting ripped away and flung whitely northward. It wasn’t possible to see the water surface itself, as the whiteness over it filled the air, but occasional glimpses confirmed that its level was far higher than normal, amazingly higher. Like the Third Pulse had come at last. The roar was immense. Feeling spooked, and awed, Vlade got back into the Met.

Now they were settling in with the idea that it was going to be a test of endurance between them and the storm. They had limited food, power, potable water, and sewage space. Food was the least self-sustaining, but they had a stock of dried and canned and frozen, and the PV power would keep their refrigerators going. They did have some resilience. And the storm could only go on for so long. Although the aftermath would be problematic. Vlade passed some time tapping out various scenarios on his spreadsheets, using Gantt programs to see how they might do. Well, it seemed they could go for a week at least. It would help if their local power station could send them some electricity. The node network for the power gridwork was robust. He began to check around. The Twenty-eighth power station was still connected to its clients in the neighborhood but not out to the big power plants north of the city. They were identifying the point of the break now and would get out and repair it when they could. Could be a while, they said. That was for sure!

The other buildings in the neighborhood were mostly okay, but one of the bishop skybridges between the Decker building and the New School had come down over Fifth and Fourteenth, and both buildings were now coping with open holes in their sides, just as Vlade had expected. That was apparently just one of about a dozen skybridges that had pulled out in lower Manhattan alone. Bishop bridges were doing worse than rook bridges; north-south rooks were doing worse than east-wests, because the wind was a bit more east than south. If they pulled out at one end but not the other, they fell into the building they were still connected to, breaking windows and so on. Windows were breaking frequently anyway, just by getting blown in or sucked out. The top of the Empire State had just a half hour earlier recorded a gust of 164 miles an hour; one of the superscrapers uptown with an “eye of the needle” near its top had reported winds of 190 miles per hour through the eye, which had been included in the building’s design precisely to reduce wind pressures against its uppermost surfaces. The average speed over Manhattan right now, NOAA said, was 130 miles per hour. “Incredible,” Vlade said when he saw that. As far as he knew he had never seen a wind over a hundred, and that too had been in a hurricane. He had been twenty-four at the time, and he and some friends had gone out into the wind to see what it felt like; this was on Long Island, and they had been blown flat onto the sand of Jones Beach and crawled around laughing their heads off, until his friend Oscar broke his wrist and then it had been less funny, but still, an adventure, a story to tell. But 130? 164? It was hard to believe.