Kim Robinson - New York 2140

The next day, July 8, 2142, Amelia Black floated down the Hudson River Valley toward home.

She had had a relatively good storm. Her tendency toward accident, as much innate as acquired, or thrust upon her, had thankfully spared her anything worse than being out on a flight when a hurricane was arriving. That had been stupid, sure, but she hadn’t been paying attention, hadn’t realized, et cetera. Once Vlade had alerted her to the situation, she and Frans had done the right things, all with her broadcasting the adventure to her audience in the cloud, which grew by the minute as people heard what she had gotten herself into this time. Amelia Errorheart has done it again, Amelia Errhard is in big trouble, Amelia Blank is blanking again, Amelia Airhead might not be able to read a map, ha ha, et cetera.

But from the moment Vlade had alerted her to the danger, she had flown the Assisted Migration north as fast as it would go, and although this top speed was only fifty miles an hour in still air, with a growing tailwind pushing her it had been enough to get her to the little town of Hudson, New York, which she called Hudson on the Hudson, where she was allowed to tie off on one of the blimp masts at the Marina Abramovic Institute, named after one of her heroes and role models. Once the airship was tied to that mast, its intense flailing became a natural piece of performance art, and at first Amelia had resolved to stay in the gondola through the hurricane—tie herself into a chair and get tossed around like a bull rider, like Marina herself doing one of her variously dangerous and awesome performances; she would be riding the storm! as she put it to her fans. But even with the spirit of their founder hovering over the institute and encouraging Amelia to go for it, the actual curators of the place had insisted that given the forecast, in this instance discretion was the better part of value, as they liked having Amelia there but didn’t want her getting thrashed to death witnessed by millions in the cloud. Marina would have done it, they conceded, but insurance prices being what they were, not to mention boards of directors, donors, and the laws against endangering children and the mentally incapacitated, it was probably best that she not commit suicide by hurricane.

“I am fully mentally capacitated,” Amelia objected.

“We’re not sure the fabric of your blimp will sustain one-hundred-sixty-mile-per-hour winds. Please don’t abuse our hospitality.”

“It’s an airship by the way.”

So, Amelia had with some difficulty gotten out of the gondola without getting crushed under it, and after that watched Frans ride out the storm, narrating the spectacle from inside the institute. Ironically, at the height of the storm the institute had had all its north windows sucked out in a single moment of extreme vacuum pull, so everyone inside had had to retreat, with a lot of shouting and even screaming, to the basement, while Frans and the Assisted Migration had negotiated the onslaughts with only a certain amount of deformative streamlining, being tied down by eight stout lines to eight strong anchoring points, also tied stoutly to a stout mast; Frans had worked hard to counteract the bouncing of the Assisted Migration by way of thousands of exquisitely timed counterthrusts from the airship’s various propellers. The airship still hit the ground repeatedly and then shot up and strained against the anchor lines, but both the smashes into the ground and the jerks against the anchor lines were constantly mitigated by Frans’s microbursting on the props, finessing the impacts with impressive panache. So Amelia would have been safer in the gondola than in any building whatsoever, another testament to the Assisted Migration, also to the principle of flexibility, of soft power and adaptation, so superior to rigidity and hard power, as she pointed out while narrating the admittedly still very dramatic images of the Assisted Migration shimmying like a shape-shifter under the storm’s wicked slaps. “If only wind were colored so you could see it,” she gushed at one point. “I wonder if we could set off some colored flares, or create a fog of some sort upwind of this place? It would be fantastic to be able to see the wind.”

This was agreed to be a good idea for some other storm. Wind as an aleatory art: it would be good. As it was, the invisible substance tore at the world with such force that it became somehow visible, or at least extremely present, as the abrupt defenestration of the institute made clear with a palpable punctuation. Such cracks, such roaring, such screams of dismay! It was good material.

But then again so much of the storm was good in that regard. Amelia and her hosts weren’t the only people in trouble, nor among those in the worst trouble. So she stayed in the cloud narrating the storm but did not score exceptionally high viewing numbers, as the competition out there was intense. It was somewhat of a lost opportunity, but then again she was going to survive, as was the Assisted Migration and Frans. Or so it seemed, until a shard of a newly shattered window flew into the airship and cut open several of its ballonets. After that the wind had its way with what remained. Pop goes the weasel!

So Frans was deflated and thrashed on the ground like a big carpet, and there were repairs to be made before Amelia could return to the air, but eventually it got done by the ground crew of a nearby airfield, happy to get the famous cloud star back in the air (and themselves briefly in the cloud with her). That done, she flew back down to the city at about the thousand-foot level, always excellent in terms of angle and prospect.

What she saw along the way astounded her. The lower stretch of the Hudson Valley was stripped of its leaves; it almost looked like midwinter, except so many trees had been knocked to the ground, or, if still standing, were extending their amputated limbs to the sky. It was much more noticeable than the damage to buildings, which was mostly a matter of missing windows or torn roofs. That was bad, the reconstruction was going to take months, she could see; but the flattened trees would take years to regrow. And of course the animals that lived in the forest would be similarly stricken.

“Wow,” Amelia said to her viewers. “This is bad.” Her voice-over on this day did not constitute her most eloquent performance. After a while, feeling overwhelmed, she mostly let Frans mention where they were and left it at that.

As she came closer to the city, the Cloister cluster reared up over the horizon long before anything else, a copse of spikes poking the sky. “Well, the towers survived.” She floated down the middle of the fjord, and when she was offshore from the uptown towers she slowed a bit, so that they and the Hoboken towers were both displayed to greatest effect, looming well over her cruising altitude to each side. At that point the Hudson looked somewhat like the flooded floor of a shattered roofless room. It was creepy.

Finally she veered in toward the city to have a look down into Central Park. She was shocked like everyone else by the devastation. It was a tent city now, punctuated by hundreds of downed trees, the holes left by their roots giving it the look of a cemetery where all the dead had burst out and run off, leaving their open graves behind. People like ants everywhere, the lost ones of the city huddling there, mostly out of an instinct to huddle, it seemed to Amelia. Then she saw that there were people gathered on the plazas of Morningside Heights, around the black marks of dead bonfires. There were lines of people too, regular enough to suggest they were military. Army in the streets. She wasn’t sure what that meant. The whole city was a mess.