Kim Robinson - New York 2140

She got home just in time to change and eat a bite in the dining room before the weekly executive board meeting. Bit of a busman’s holiday, this board. From city to building: the difference in scale made for somewhat different problems, but not that different. Well, she had volunteered for the board at a time when they were being sued and needed help. And even though it resembled her day job, it was interesting. As was her job, most of the time. She just needed some blood sugar and it would all be fine.

Actually a bit difficult to get that, as the food trays were almost empty when she got there. She had to scrounge scraps from the corners of trays and the bottoms of bowls, might as well just put her face in the salad bowl and slurp like a dog, as those two boys ahead of her in line were doing. Damn, they were licking the bowls clean! Best be on time to dinner, as everyone knew; a long line formed in the half hour before opening. Residents were always present and accounted for when it came time for the important stuff, meaning no one would be at the executive board meeting. They really should try to whittle their population down to full capacity, she had made mistakes in that regard. A tendency to take people in was a professional habit but a mistake when performed out of context. Too many mouths to feed, dining hall jammed, very loud, people sitting on the floor against the walls with trays on their laps, glasses on the floor beside them. She did that herself, getting down awkwardly, wearily, knowing it was going to be tough to stand back up. One reason she wore pants in the evenings.

Then up to the thirtieth floor, where they kept a room from which to run the building. She was only a little late, which would have been fine if she weren’t the chair again. The others were sitting around talking about the two missing men. She sat and they all looked at her.

“What?” she said.

“We’re thinking that we shouldn’t let anyone live on the farm floors anymore,” Dana told her. The others were looking at her as if she was going to object, probably because she had argued to let the two men live there.

“Because?” she said, mostly to play to their expectations.

“There isn’t the security on the farm that there is in a room, as we saw,” said Mariolino. He was board secretary this year.

Charlotte shrugged. “I have no problem with putting the farm out-of- bounds. It was just a stopgap measure.”

The others were relieved to hear her say this. There were five of them there now that Alexandra had arrived, and they ran down the items listed on the schedule. Complaint about noise, priority in the boathouse, desire for a bigger freight elevator (Vlade rolling his eyes at this, mentioning size of elevator shaft, wondering if a taller elevator car would satisfy the complainer), dispute over the dues/work credit formula as applied to someone who thought cleaning the hallway on their floor was work deserving of a work credit. Relations with the LMMAS, pronounced “lemmas” or “lame ass,” depending on mood, the Lower Manhattan Mutual Aid Society, which was the biggest of many downtown cooperative ventures and associations, a kind of umbrella for all the rest of the organizations in the drowned zone. Exchange rates between the dollar and the Lame Ass blocknecklace currency were so divergent between official and unofficial rates that LMMAS had proposed they do away with the official rate and just let it float. Had to try to keep the wet currency as strong as possible, if it was to succeed at all. And they needed it. So: currency policy. Just another building issue.

On it went like that, as they ran their little city-state. Apartment 428 was empty because of the death of Margaret Baker, no heirs who wanted to move in, they lived in Denver and wanted to sell. Marge’s contract with the co-op was rock solid, Charlotte knew this because she had helped write it, and so the Denver family was going to have to sell to the co-op for one hundred percent of Marge’s buy-in. Very fair. The co-op had a reserve fund dedicated to reacquisitions, so it seemed like it would be okay.

But then Dana said, “If we bought it from them and then rented it to nonmembers, we could make the buyout price in about ten months and then go on raking it in from there.”

“Ten months?” Charlotte asked.

Alexandra and the others nodded. Rents in lower Manhattan were shooting up. People were enjoying the SuperVenice, and that was causing housing prices to rise. Intertidal aeration, they said it was called.

“Aeration,” Charlotte said in the way Vlade would say mildew . “Don’t they just mean inflation, or speculation? I thought the Second Pulse had spared us all that.”

Not forever, she was told. Canal life was looking exciting. Hassles of daily life not evident to tourists, or to people so rich they could buy their way out of the hassles.

“One of the rich people who wants to buy in here is Amelia Black,” Vlade mentioned. “Her room and a parking share on the blimp mast. She said it would be a bit of a stretch for her, which surprised me, but she said she wanted a place in New York, and she likes it here.”

“Would she work the co-op?” Charlotte asked, feeling skeptical. “Isn’t she away a lot?”

“She said she would work the co-op. I’m sure she’d pitch in, she’s that kind of person.”

“But wouldn’t she be away a lot?”

“Sure, that’s her job. But if we have a member who works the co-op when they’re here, being away a lot is not the worst thing, from my point of view. Less stress on the building, less water-power-sewage. More food left for others.”

Charlotte nodded. Vlade thought the building’s thoughts, and she valued that. “The membership board can work that out with her,” she said.

“Membership sent her to us with a yes recommendation.”

“Okay then. Let her buy in, if they say so.”

“I’ll tell her,” Vlade said.

“Where is she now?”

“The Arctic. She’s going to fly some polar bears to the South Pole.”

“Really?”

“That’s what she told me.”

“I don’t know about this one. She sounds like trouble to me. But the membership committee has spoken.”

They moved on to other business, running down the schedule as fast as they could. All of them had been on the board long enough not to want to prolong a meeting. Vlade wanted his cathodic protection systems replaced on every steel beam in the building, and a new sewage processor to better capture and process their shit into fertilizer for the farm’s soil, and more say on the bacino’s aquaculture board. He also wanted an upgrade in their electrical connection to the local power substation. The building’s photovoltaic paint generated most of the electricity they needed, but there was a lot of back-and-forth electrically between them and the substation, and an upgrade would help. These were the main items on his wish list, he said in conclusion.

The last item on the schedule had been added by Dana at the last minute, he said: there was an offer to buy the building.

“What?” Charlotte said, startled. “Who?”

“We don’t know. They’re going through Morningside Realty and prefer to remain anonymous.”

“But why?” Charlotte exclaimed.

“They don’t say.” Dana looked down at his notes. “Emmerich guessed it’s a company from the Cloister cluster, but that may just be because Morningside has its offices up there. They’re offering us about twice what the building was last assessed at. Four billion dollars. If we took it, we’d all be rich.”

“Fuck that,” Charlotte said.

Silence in the room.

“We probably have to bring it to a vote,” Mariolino said.

Vlade was scowling. “You have to?”

“Let’s research it first,” Charlotte said.