Kim Robinson - New York 2140

It’s true that the newly drowned coastlines, at first abandoned, were quickly reoccupied by desperate scavengers and squatters and fisherpeople and so on, the water rats as they were called among many other humorous names. There were a lot of these people, and a lot of them were what you might call radicalized by their experiences. And although basic services like electricity, water, sewage, and police were at first gone, a lot of infrastructure was still there, amphibiously enduring in the new shallows, or getting repeatedly flushed and emptied in the zones between low and high tide. Immediately, as an integral part of the natural human response to tragedy and disaster, lawsuits proliferated. Many concerned the status of this drowned land, which it had to be admitted was now actually, and even perhaps technically, meaning legally, the shallows of the ocean, such that possibly the laws defining and regulating it were not the same as they had been when the areas in question were actual land. But since it was all wrecked anyway, the people in Denver didn’t really care. Nor the people in Beijing, who could look around at Hong Kong and London and Washington, D.C., and São Paolo and Tokyo and so on, all around the globe, and say, Oh, dear! What a bummer for you, good luck to you! We will help you all we can, especially here at home in China, but anywhere else also, and at a reduced rate of interest if you care to sign here.

And they may also have felt, along with everyone in that certain lucky one percent, that some social experimentation at the drowned margin might let off some steam from certain irate populaces, social steam that might even accidentally innovate something useful. So in the immortal words of Bertolt Brecht, they “dismissed the people and elected another one,” i.e. moved to Denver, and left the water rats to sort it out as best they could. An experiment in living wet. Wait and see what those crazy people did with it, and if it was good, buy it. As always, right? You brave bold hip and utterly co-opted avant-gardists, you know it already, whether you’re reading this in 2144 or 2312 or 3333 or 6666.

So there you have it. Hard to believe, but these things happen. In the immortal words of whoever, “History is just one damned thing after another.” Except if it was Henry Ford who said that, cancel. But he’s the one who said, “History is bunk.” Not the same thing at all. In fact, cancel both those stupid and cynical sayings. History is humankind trying to get a grip. Obviously not easy. But it could go better if you would pay a little more attention to certain details, like for instance your planet.

Enough with the I told you sos! Back to our doughty heroes and heroines!

“Did you ever read Waiting for Godot ?”

“No.”

“Did you ever read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead ?”

“No.”

“Did you ever read Kiss of the Spider Woman ?”

“No.”

“Did you ever read—”

“Jeff, stop it. I’ve never read anything.”

“Some coders read.”

“Yeah that’s right. I’ve read The R Cookbook . Also, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about R . Also, R for Dummies .”

“I don’t like R.”

“That’s why I had to read so much about it.”

“I don’t see why. We don’t use R very much.”

“I use it to help figure out what we’re doing.”

“We know what we’re doing.”

“You know. Or you knew. I myself am not so sure. And here we are, so how much did you know, really?”

“I don’t know.”

“There you have it.”

“Look, R was never going to explain to me what I didn’t know that ended us up here. That I know.”

“You don’t know.”

Jeff shook his head. “I can’t believe you haven’t read Waiting for Godot .”

“Godot was a coder, I take it.”

“Yes, I think that’s right. They never really found out. People usually assume Godot was God. Like someone says, It’s God, and someone else says, Oh! and then you put that together and it’s God—Oh, and then you put a French accent on it.”

“I am not regretting not reading this book.”

“No. I mean, now that we’re living it, I don’t think the book is really necessary. It would be redundant. But at least it was short. This is long. How long have we been in here?”

“Twenty-nine days, I think.”

“Okay, that’s long.”

“Feels longer.”

“True, it does. But it’s only a month. It could go on longer.”

“Obviously.”

“But people must be looking for us, right?”

“I hope so.”

Jeff sighs. “I put some dead man’s switches in part of what I sent out, you know, and some of those are set to go off soon.”

“But people will already know we’re missing. What good is it going to do if your help calls go off? They’ll just confirm what people already know.”

“But they’ll know there’s a reason we’re missing.”

“Which is what?”

“Well, if I was right, it would be the information we sent to the people we tapped into.”

“That you sent out to the people you tapped into.”

“Right. People would learn that information and investigate the problem, and maybe that will lead them to us here.”

“Here on the river bottom.”

“Well, whoever put us here must have left some record of doing it.”

Mutt shakes his head. “This isn’t the kind of thing people write about or talk about.”

“What, they wink? They use sign language?”

“Something like that. A word to the wise. Unrecorded.”

“Well, we have to hope it isn’t like that. Also, I’ve got a chip injected in my skin, it’s got a GPS signal going out.”

“How far does it reach?”

“I don’t know.”

“How big is the chip?”

“Maybe half an inch? You can feel it, back of my neck here.”

“So, maybe a hundred feet? If you weren’t at the bottom of a river?”

“Does water slow down radio waves?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I did what I could.”

“You put out a call to the SEC without telling me, is what you did. To the SEC and to some dark pools, if I’m understanding you right.”

“It was just a test. I wasn’t stealing or anything. It was like whistle-blowing.”

“Good to know. But now it’s us who are in the dark pool.”

“I wanted to see if we could tap in. And we could, so that’s good. I’m not even sure that that’s what got us stuck here. We were the ones who wrote the security for that stack, and I wrote in a covert channel for us to use, and there was no way anyone could notice it.”

“But you still seem to think that’s what got us in here.”

“It’s just I can’t think of anything else that would have done it. I mean, it’s been a long time since I pissed off you know who. And no one heard that whistle blow. I meant to make it a foghorn and it came out a dog whistle.”

“What about those sixteen tweaks to the world system that you were talking about? What if the world system didn’t like that idea?”

“But how would it know?”

“I thought you said the system is self-aware.”

Jeff stares at Mutt for a while. “That was a metaphor. Hyperbole. Symbolism.”