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  “I love you, Treesa. Best be on my way.”

  He watched her struggle with herself. “Stay at my place, Auntie. I’ll take the sofa.”

  He aunt didn’t even look back: “Told you I didn’t need charity.” She walked off, stooped and limping.

  They didn’t say anything for too long. He decided he should say something.

  “I’m sorry about your aunt, Treesa.”

  A flash of anger, then sadness. “Me too.”

  Should he go? Could he? He could fake a message from his couch-surf for the night and slink off. But Treesa really looked like she was hurting.

  “You remember Uwayni’s first inauguration?”

  “Sure,” he said. He’d been nine and everyone in the house had gathered around the biggest tablet to watch it, playing the audio on every speaker. His parents’ faces had shone and he’d caught some of their excitement. “For the first time in a century, we will raise—”

  She picked up it: “A generation that is not afraid of the future.” She smiled. Such a sad smile. “Musta heard that a thousand times in school.” She pulled up a tuft of long, blue-green, drought-resistant grass, shook it like a pom-pom. “Our cheerleaders even had a cheer for it.”

  “Well, it’s true,” Wilmar said. “Isn’t it?”

  A silence so long that he wondered if she’d heard, then, “Yeah, it’s true. Talk to my dad, he still doesn’t believe it. Secretly he thinks we’re all doomed, the planets’ gonna roast and drown. And the generation before him—”

  “Your aunt’s generation.”

  “Them. For them, it’s like they’re refugees. We think we’re building the promised land, they see it as a camp.” She flopped on her back on the blanket and threw the clump of grass away. “Sometimes, I’ll come around a corner here and there’ll be a whole new building, a whole neighborhood even, and it doesn’t matter how many times I do the city plan flythrough and how many AR walkthroughs I take, it always takes my breath away. For me, this isn’t a refugee camp, it’s salvation. Our city was drowning and we used our own hands and our own backs to move it a mile inland and 500 feet uphill. We even relocated the Mission, one brick at a time!”

  Wilmar lay back too. “I watched that. We all did, in Mojave. The stream was amazing. So many cool things under the ground and in the walls. Those dirty drawings that nun did—”

  She laughed “You know they bricked them back up in the wall when they put it back together?”

  “No way.”

  She waved her hands in the air over them, seeming to grab at the stars appearing overhead. “Scanned them first, of course, but yeah. Every weird thing, down to the tin can full of old bottlecaps we found under the vegetable beds.”

  He laughed, and they got quiet again.

  “I’m sorry about your aunt.”

  “I’m sorry you had to see her. It’s hard.”

  “Don’t be sorry for that.”

  “I am, though. My family business. My problem.”

  To his great surprise, Wilmar began to weep.

  “Oh, shit, dude—” She was looming over him now, worried.

  He armed tears off his cheeks and dug tears out of his ears and sat up. Why couldn’t he stop crying? This was so stupid. He found his own face mask in a side pocket of his backpack and wiped ferociously at his face.

  What he wanted, more than anything, was to stop crying, but that was not possible, it seemed.

  “Wilmar? What is it? Can you talk about it?”

  He pushed his breathing, slowed it, wiped his eyes and nose. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for and I forgive you anyways. Want to talk about it?”

  “It’s just my shit,” he said. “Honestly, it’ll be OK.”

  “I believe you. But also, if you want to talk—”

  He did, but he didn’t want to burden this stranger. “It’s OK.”

  She got in his face. This close, he could see that she had a little zit on one cheek, see her dimples, see the dot where she’d taken out an old nose piercing. “Wilmar, dude, if it’s OK, it’s OK. But everyone’s got some shit and everyone needs to talk about it from time to time. You don’t know me and I don’t know you and sometimes, that makes it easier. Just think about that before you bottle this all back up again.”

  His breathing and tears were under control, but the clouds that had closed in on him that morning and kept him in bed were back again. He thought about Treesa’s great aunt, broken and alone, and wondered if that could be him in a few decades.

  He thought about how she’d refused to even discuss the situation. He opened up.

  “OK, the fact is that I live with depression. I mean, everyone does to some extent and it’s not always on top of me but sometimes it just comes for a visit and sits on my chest and won’t get up. It whispers in my ear, tells me things will be terrible, that I’m terrible, that I’m not doing any good.”

  He drew a shuddering breath. “Something about that Uwayni speech always seems to bring it on.” What were the right words for this? He’d never said them. Could he find them now? “I am afraid. That’s it. I’m supposed to be unafraid of the future, the first fear-free generation in a century but I’m so scared all the time. I watch the panels come off my line and I think it’s crazy, there’s no way we’re going to relocate every coastal city in the country—”

  “In the world,” she said.

  “The world! No way. The storms are worse every year, the heat is crazy, none of the flowers bloom on time anymore, the bees are still dying—”

  “Not as quickly.”

  “Not as quickly. Fine. Maybe we can save the bees. But I just can’t make the math work in my head. There’s so much to do. And then they send me home because there’s clouds over the factory—”

  “You can’t save the world from runaway CO2 by producing trillions of tons of CO2. You know that, Wilmar. The job feels too big for you because it is. It’s a team sport, dude. The best thing you can do for the planet is fix stuff. And when you can’t fix stuff, the best thing you can do is stop breaking stuff. Hanging out in a park is just about the most benign thing you can do for the planet. The sun’s out somewhere, and they’re doing the work for us. You can stand down.”

  “I know you’re right. But I feel like such a, such a fraud. Like everyone else is all ‘we got this,’ and I’m all ‘holy shit, we’re all going to fucking roast’ and the only thing that keeps me going is working so hard I don’t have room to think about it. Soon as work stops . . .” He flapped his arm at the world, at himself.

  She stood up and stuck her hand out. “Come on,” she said.

  He took her hand. It was strong and calloused from building a new city. As the sun set, she took him on a tour of it.

  IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE. THOUGH THE BUILDINGS WERE BUILT FROM STANDARD parts, there were so many ways to recombine them, and more were emerging every day, as modelers and designers and builders shared their inventions. Some neighborhoods were made from buildings that looked like scaled-up missions, others had a beachy, SoCal, mid-century feel, while others were like jumbled-together craftsman houses, hard to tell where one stopped and the next started. All had broad public spaces—interior courtyards, community gardens, playgrounds. He fell in love with a place that had the feel of a Moroccan town from an old movie, with tall pink stucco buildings whose round-shouldered doors echoed the archways that defined their alleys. They got delicious strong coffee from a self-serve cart and baklava from some kids with a card table and a hand-lettered sign, and two older women came and kissed Treesa on the cheek and made her promise to come for dinner that week. She seemed delighted to make the promise.

  Everywhere they went, they saw people—cooking out, playing, jogging, strolling. It was a strolling city, with even the biggest structures pierced by walkways that led out to narrow streets or broad parks. Even carrying his backpack, even tired and emotionally wrung out, Wilmar kept pushing on, curious about what he’d find around the next corner,
and the next.

  “It’s amazing,” he said, as they reached a lookout that offered a clear vista out to sea, where the moonrise was staining the tips of the waves white.

  “How are you holding up?” she asked.

  He did his mental-health thing, actually cataloging the messages in his brain for signs of the inward-spiral of self-loathing. It wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was absolutely better than it had been. “OK, I think.” He dug a baggie of trailmix out of his bag and shook himself a handful, then offered some to her.

  Now she led him to the old town, the original town. The drowned town. The outskirts were marshy, but soon they found their way to an interconnected set of pontoon walkways that floated in the shallow, brackish water over the old lawns and streets and sidewalks, the splash of the pontoons and the creak of the wooden sections mixing with the insect roar. It was a haunted place, soft and decaying, with houses down on their knees or reduced to just a few uprights. Fish splashed in the distance, and the old graffiti was still visible in the twilight: “2 INSIDE”—“DEAD INSIDE”—“TRESSPASSERS WILL.” Rusted parking signs stuck up out of the water like Venetian gondola bricolas, and they heard the distant voices of canoers out for an evening’s paddle. The storefronts’ windows were long, long gone, and the stores themselves were dark caves blowing soft fungal smells.

  But amid them were sprawling mangroves, planted early in the crisis and now grown to early maturity thanks to their hybrid genes, knucklebones piercing the Pacific Coast Highway where it stuck up out of the water.

  “In a couple years this place will be all marshland,” she said. “But there’s plans to keep a surf beach a couple miles up the coast, somewhere that doesn’t have quite so many buried snags.”

  The insect song rose with the moon. They watched as it silvered the ruins and turned the ripples of the water into light shows, thinking their thoughts, watching a city that had stood for a quarter of a millennium disintegrate before their eyes.

  BY THE TIME WILMAR AROSE THE NEXT DAY, HIS COUCH-SURFING HOST WAS ALREADY at work, having left behind some breakfast stuff and a nice note with some tips for things to do and see in town. The list was great, especially the little museum of treasures they’d found when they dug out the old town, but Wilmar didn’t want to do any of that stuff.

  He DMed Treesa instead, and an hour later, he was on her job site, getting trained on fitting together the slabs that they craned off of the railcar on its spur. An hour after that, he finished his first stretch of wall, on the third story of a ten-unit low-rise that followed a ridgeline with good views inland, to the scrub and woods on the site of the old golf course.

  When it was time for lunch, they sat together and ate tamales. “You’re supposed to be on vacation, dude. Are you sure this is good self-care?” Her tone was light but she was serious.

  “I’m fine. Better than fine. I think the problem was that working in Mojave, it was like this endless conveyor belt—make a slab, ship a slab, make a slab, do it forever, until the world is saved. But this—” he slapped the wall they were leaning against “—it’s real. You can see it. You can live in it. I think maybe I wanna try working here for a while.”

  “If you say so.” She gave him a half-joking side-eye. “But you’re the one who says you work to get away from your anxieties.”

  He felt himself getting angry, caught the physical signs in his jaw and hands, then made himself calm down. She wasn’t wrong. “I have a theory about you,” he said.

  Full side-eye now. “Go on.”

  “I think this work is how you cope, too. Like, if you can build the right kind of new city up here on the hill, your aunt and everyone else can stop mourning what they lost.”

  She looked away and was quiet for so long he got worried.

  “Treesa, I’m sorry, that was out of line. I apologize sincerely.”

  She looked at him, eyes brimming, then swiped at them. “It’s OK.” Her voice was thick. “Really. Yeah, that’s it all right. My mom went in the ’28 pandemic, and at the end she was so scared. Not scared that she was gonna die. So many people had died then, we’d made our peace with that, all of us. She was scared of the world they were leaving me in.” She thumped the wall. “When I do this, it’s like I’m dealing with it for her.

  “Truth is, I’m scared of the future. Sure, we can build a new city in the hills. Maybe we can do that for every coastal city. But it won’t do us a damned bit of good against wildfires. It won’t bring back the extinct species. It won’t stop the plagues. When I get to thinking about it I am so scared.

  “But when I’m working, I can pretend that we can fix this. And if I can fool myself into thinking it’s fine, then maybe I can deal with whatever’s coming.”

  She blew her nose on a face-scarf. “It’s stupid, I know.”

  “No,” Wilmar said. “No, that’s not stupid at all.”

  8

  The Price of Attention

  Karl Schroeder

  THE SPACE IS AN ABSTRACT GAME LEVEL, RENDERED IN LOW-RES CELL SHADING. Gray and beige; benign but not very informative. Remy slides his finger along the smooth arm of his glasses, and the scene becomes textured.

  “—of interest is over here,” somebody is saying. Remy looks for his usual cues to understand who it is, and spots the worn sneakers that Inspector Kraft insists on wearing with any suit. Kraft isn’t looking his way, but Detective Sendak is frantically waving Remy over. He has no trouble recognizing her distinctive slouch. He turns around several times as he walks over, still taking in the overall shape of the location.

  “—that the forensics consultant?” somebody else says. “He looks a little—?”

  “Yes, this is Remy Reardon. Hsst, Remy, get over here! He’s not part of my regular team, he usually works with architects. We hire him sometimes.”

  Despite his attempts to be inconspicuous, several heads turn Remy’s way, including the inspector’s, so he tweaks his detail levels. Appear normal, he tells himself. The blockiness of his surroundings dissolves, in its place brick and old wood beams, grimy industrial pebbled-glass windows. It’s cold in here; he had already noticed the smell.

  He’s overtuned his glasses in his hurry, and they go flatly realist for a second, then color- and contrast-enhance everything. He can see every pore on Kraft’s face, and every scuff on the floorboards. “Good morning,” Remy says, walking over to the two ordinary chairs that sit facing each other in the center of the space. Bright pink ropes coil around the legs and back of one of them.

  Kraft is standing behind that chair, and another man Remy recognizes as the medical examiner is kneeling in front.

  Kraft is looking at him; does he expect something? Remy casts about for a helpful statement, and finally comes up with, “This placement is interesting.”

  “What placement?” Kraft stares at him.

  Remy feels like he’s made some kind of faux pas, and clears his throat. “The chairs are sitting in the acoustic center of the space.” He sweeps his hand in a circle. “It’s a fifty-foot cube, with a loft overhang fifteen feet wide on the entrance side.” His glasses gave him all these measurements; it’s so much easier to navigate using the numbers than to drown in the visual details of the actual place.

  He walks past Sendak, who smiles at him, and over to one wall. There’s a radiator and above that a half-open window of heavy wired glass. “Somebody climbed out there?” Remy asks. “I saw blood stains in the parking lot.”

  Sendak nods. “What about the placement?”

  “A normal person would be more furtive. Whoever did this wasn’t ashamed. He wanted his victim to hear his own screams reflected back . . . It’s very deliberate.”

  Kraft laughs humorlessly. “Well, an amateur wouldn’t have dissected this guy’s forearm while he was still alive.”

  “Oh? And the victim still climbed out a window ten feet off the floor? Who is he?”

  “Ralph Cawley,” says Kraft crisply. “Computer programmer, lives on the east side. He’s alive, an
d made it to a hospital before he collapsed. When he’s awake enough to talk, he’s refusing to do so. But the reason I called you is Cawley’s family, his wife and daughters, they’re missing. Looks like yesterday, just after he escaped. Seems to me whoever took him wants something, and didn’t get it from him on their first try. Now they’ve got his wife and girls. Finding them is the most important thing right now.” Kraft looks at Remy, who recognizes his frown.

  “You called me because you’re grasping at straws.”

  Kraft blows out a breath. “Sendak’s boys have already been all over this place and Cawley’s not cooperating. You’re a genius at noticing little details that other people miss. I thought you could help, is all.”

  The examiner is on his feet now, dusting his hands. He eyes Remy. “Those smart glasses you wear. They have something to do with it?”

  “I’m very sensitive to noise and light,” he tells the examiner. “Nikola Tesla was the same way. These help me narrow in on important details. Tune out the background.”

  “A cousin of mine is on the spectrum. Maybe he could use a pair.”

  “They need to be custom designed. I know a guy who does the programming.”

  Remy notices that he’s started tapping his belt in a repeating pattern, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. He searches himself for signs of agitation, finds faster breathing, that he’s swaying a bit on his feet. He starts turning down the detail in the room. “As I was saying, whoever tortured Cawley arranged this setting for maximum effect. Probably a man, who clearly wanted something from him. Cawley . . . the name sounds familiar. What kind of programming does he do?”

  Kraft pulls out his phone and flips through his notes. “Sez here . . . homomorphic encryption systems. Secure voting. Didn’t you do some work on that?”

  Remy nods once, has to do it three more times. He turns down the room’s detail some more. “There could be a motive. He may have wanted Cawley to tell him how to hack the quadratic polling system. Even torture didn’t work, though, so he decided to take the family hostage. For leverage. I say ‘he’ because if it was just one person, he had to leave Cawley alone to go after them. That’s how Cawley escaped.”