Kim Robinson - New York 2140

He swabbed the corner clear, took a macro photo with his wristpad. The crack indeed looked round, like two little holes actually, the water welling up hemispherically like blood from two pinpricks. Clear blood. “Damn.”

He swabbed it again, then pasted over the corner with a dab of leakstopper. He wanted something more substantial for later, like a thick spray of sheeting, but for now this would have to do.

“Vlade,” the Met said in his earbud, “mayday. Water in the midbasement, southwest corner, room B104.”

“How much?”

“First detection of moisture. Speed of inflow undetermined.”

He hustled up the broad stairs and across the room surrounding the stairwell to room B104, favoring his bad left knee. The rooms on this floor were smaller than the ones on the floor below. He kept them equally empty against the walls, though their middles were filled with boxes in stacks he had organized himself. The floor was ordinary concrete, the walls diamond sheeted, as below. Here the outside of the building was in water even at low tide, as was true of the floor above it, the old ground floor. The one above that was intertidal. Right now it was high tide, so there would be a little more pressure on any submarine leaks, but for two leaks to spring at almost the same time struck Vlade as extremely suspicious, especially given the corner position and drilled look of the one below.

Again his humidity wand led him quickly to the leak, which was low on a wall. Here the wall was sheeted both inside and outside, so a leak made even less sense than the one below. This one looked like a crack rather than a pinprick. Like a stress fracture perhaps. Water oozed from the bottom of the crack, which was almost vertical. Beads of water, welling up and dripping down the wall.

“God damn it.”

He gooed the crack with another liberal dab of leakstopper, thought it over, then stomped around the elevator shaft to his room. He got out of his Carhartts and into his swim trunks, cursing all the while. The lower leak would necessarily have been drilled from the inside. He didn’t want to give any oral commands to the building about the security cameras, because the camera issue had not been resolved to his satisfaction yet, and the whole system could be compromised. So he would have to wait to check that until others were there to help and witness. First order of business was to inspect the outside of the building to see if the higher crack extended all the way through to the outside. If it did, that would be simpler than if it was a complex leak in which the interior crack was not matched by an exterior one. But either way was bad.

The wetsuits and dive tanks and gear were in the boathouse, in a storage room next to his office. People were getting out in their watercraft without undue stress, it seemed, and Su nodded nervously to him that all was well. “I’m going to take a quick dive,” Vlade told him, which caused Su to frown. Dives were never supposed to be solo, but Vlade did it all the time around the building, accompanied only by a little sub sled.

“I’ll keep the phone on,” Su said, to remind him, and Vlade nodded and began the somewhat arduous process of getting his wetsuit on. For building inspections he could use the smallest tank, and the headset was just a mask settling onto the hood like a snorkel mask. The seal was not completely hermetic but good enough for brief work near the surface, and he could scrub down afterward.

There were steps down into the water inside the boathouse. Only three were now exposed, which meant it was almost high tide. Down he went, feeling like the swamp thing from the eponymous movie, the scariest movie of all time in his opinion. Happily he was not dragging some poor rapidly aging maiden down with him. Nor even the sled, which was not needed for a dive like this.

The water was cold as always, even in the wetsuit, but he had been warming up so fast that it felt good to be cooled. Submerge, quick test of the gear, then out the boathouse door into the bacino, swimming horizontally. The wetsuit’s feet were just slightly webbed and finned, and that too felt good. Headlamp on, powerful beam, nevertheless mostly catching the particulates in the god-awful water of the city, as always. Actually the hundreds of millions of clams in the aquaculture cages all over the intertidal were doing yeoman work in filtering clean the water. Now he could usually see at least two or three meters, and sometimes more. Stay deep enough to not get knocked on the head by some boat’s keel or prop, but high enough not to run into the bacino’s aquaculture pens. The familiar weightlessness of neutral buoyancy, of horizontal underwater life. Lots of fish in the highest cages: salmon, sea trout, catfish, the sinuous schools of fishy bodies all turning together against the cage sides.

Swim around the northwest corner of the building, hovering over the old sidewalk like a ghost. Sidewalk, curb, street: always a little stab of the uncanny to see these signs of New York as it used to be. Twenty-fourth Street.

Around the corner, float to the spot on the wall outside room B104. GPS to be sure he was there. He put his face to the wall and inspected the diamond sheen inch by inch, running his gloved fingers over it too. Nothing super obvious… ah yes, right outside the inner crack, it seemed: an outer crack. What the fuck?

Vlade had spent ten years in the city’s water division, working on sewage lines, utilidors, subway tunnels, and aquafarms, mostly. So being underwater in one of the canals was about as ordinary to him as walking the streets uptown, or indeed more ordinary, as he hardly ever went uptown. The surface overhead surged slightly back and forth like a breathing thing. Opalescent sheen to the east where the sun was rising between buildings. Wakes crisscrossing, slapping against the Met and North, rebounding and breaking against each other, bubbles coming into being and snapping out of existence. A glimpse of the sun now, shattering on the water when he looked east along Twenty-fourth. All normal; but still he found himself creeped out. Something was wrong.

Just to be sure, he swam to the building’s northeast corner and shined his headlamp at the juncture of building and sidewalk, looking five or six meters on both sides. This was always a weird sight, with the goo that sealed the juncture of building and ancient sidewalk looking like congealed gray lava, and the sidewalk itself diamond-sheeted, even to a certain extent the old street surface. This was the weak point for every building still upright in the shallows of lower Manhattan; you could only seal surfaces so far out from the building, and beyond that they were permeable. Indeed one of the projects of city services was to caisson and pump out every drowned street in the city, about two hundred miles of streets all told, and diamond sheet every surface up to above high tide, before letting the water back in. This could only ever be partly successful, as of course there was already water everywhere down there below street level, saturating the old concrete and asphalt and soil, so they would be sealing some of it in while keeping the rest out. It wasn’t clear to Vlade that this would be particularly useful. Closing the barn door after the horses had leaked, as far as Vlade and many other water rats were concerned, but the hydrologists had declared it would help the situation, and so slowly it got done. As if there weren’t more pressing chores on the list. But whatever. Looking at the edge of the sealant and sheeting and the beginning of bare street concrete, now a canal bottom, Vlade could feel in his gut why the hydrologists had wanted to try something. Anything.

Inspection complete, he swam slowly back into the boathouse and clomped dripping up the steps, this time reminding himself of the creature from the black lagoon.