Infinity Cage (5 page)

> Just a ‘hunch’.

‘A hunch?!’ Liam laughed. ‘Jay-zus, don’t tell me even you can think like a mushy-headed human now?’

The cursor blinked for a moment.

> Negative. I have no soft-logic circuits. That was just appropriately deployed humour. Designed to make you feel better.

‘Right. Darned hilarious.’

> The humour was amusing?

‘Hmm … I suspect you’ve been whispering too much at
night with Becks. Someday I’ll have to teach you and her what actually constitutes
funny
. It’s all about –’

> Timing.

‘Oh, ha ha …’ He slapped his hand gently against one of the monitors. ‘Everyone’s a comedian here.’

> :)

Five amber-coloured charge lights were on the board now.

> Liam, I now have enough power to activate your portal. You and Bob should take your positions, then I will initialize the one-minute countdown.

‘Thank you.’ He gestured at Bob to take his place on one of the plinths, then stood beside him on the other one. ‘So, here we go again, big man.’

‘Here we go again, Liam,’ Bob rumbled. He turned to look at him. ‘For your information, I believe your objective is the correct one to prioritize. We will soon understand the purpose of those tachyon transmitters. That is important.’

‘And what about Waldstein?’

Bob frowned. ‘I predict he may have some critical information. But not all of it.’

> Ten seconds, Liam. Remain perfectly still.

He squinted at the monitor on the bench and watched the last few seconds count down. Listened to the hum of energy reach a buzzing crescendo echoing around the dungeon, and felt the air around him become charged with static electricity, the hair on his head lifting and tickling his scalp.

Just before the portal opened and engulfed them in a soup of featureless white, he called out above the cacophony of noise, ‘Goodbye, Bob.’ Then regretted it. He was almost certain that the AI wouldn’t have heard him saying that, which was probably for the best. He had no idea whether its heuristic AI had developed enough to feel sadness, loss. Hopefully not. His
musings on whether computer-Bob could shed the digital equivalent of a tear were instantly forgotten as he found himself, once again, falling through the white stuff.

Falling … falling … falling.

Maddy emerged from the swirling mist, her feet setting down on a crazy-paving pattern of cracked tarmac with knee-high tufts of grass sprouting boldly through the gaps.

They were standing on the Williamsburg Bridge, on the car lane heading over the East River into Manhattan. It was empty of vehicles. Even abandoned ones. Running parallel to the tarmac was the pedestrian walkway, again deserted.

‘It looks like this bridge must have been closed down some time ago,’ said Rashim.

She nodded, then walked over to the side of the bridge and leaned over the safety rail. She found herself looking down on to the rooftops of what was once their part of Brooklyn: all empty warehouses, industrial units, factories and riverside apartments. Greenery seemed to sprout from every possible crevice. Running along the sides of brick walls, she noted the green-black strata of a high-tide mark and, several feet lower, the dark putrid water of low tide. On the surface was a gently undulating carpet of froth and floating debris picked up from the insides of all these buildings and carried out through long-ago broken windows to ride on the lapping water.

The sight vaguely reminded her of pictures of that Italian
city Venice. Every building an artificial island, surrounded on all sides by foul-smelling canals and man-made waterways. Through the foggy-green murk of the water she could just about make out the ghostly oval outlines of submerged vehicle roofs.

Maddy looked up. New York skies – she was used to them being clear and blue and always so busy with the criss-crossed chalk lines of vapour trails of high-altitude air traffic, and, much lower, the
thwup-thwup-thwup
of helicopters passing to and fro across the river to Manhattan, buzzing the distant skyscrapers like over-persistent mosquitoes. Now the sky was overcast, stained an unhealthy sepia colour and dotted with hundreds of seagulls hovering on a stiff breeze above Brooklyn, keen eyes eagerly hunting for scraps of food they could swoop down and snatch.

New York’s ever-present heartbeat of trains rolling and
clackety
-
clacking
over railway tracks, the traffic rumble and honking horns and distant wailing sirens, the thumping music from a passing car-boot hi-fi … all of that was gone now. Replaced with just the rumpling breeze, the thrumming of wind playing across iron support cables like a harpist’s delicate fingers. Accompanying it, the creak and groan of the old bridge swaying sedately and the distant and shrill
me-me-me
cry of the seagulls.

Maddy heard footsteps approaching; Becks joined her and looked down on what remained of the Brooklyn they used to know.

‘Do you miss this location, Maddy?’ the support unit asked.

‘Yup.’ Maddy nodded slowly. ‘Didn’t realize how much I did, to be honest with you.’ She clicked her tongue. ‘It looks so sad and forgotten and miserable now.’ She leaned further forward, wanting to get a glimpse of the brick archways directly beneath them. ‘I guess our old place is well and truly underwater now. Pity, we could’ve visited.’

‘New York is not completely abandoned.’ Becks’s hard voice softened slightly. She pointed across the water to the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

Maddy followed the direction of her finger and saw some vague signs of life. On a number of those far-off rooftops, egg-whisk wind turbines spun lazily like barber’s poles. She thought she caught a glimpse of some delta-winged kite swaying from a rooftop like a bee hovering above a flower bed. Rashim had told her he knew Manhattan was still partially occupied. Maybe it was some misplaced notion of national pride, or perhaps some begrudging siege mentality, that was keeping the very tops of the skyscrapers alive with a few hardened New Yorkers, or barmy-minded eccentrics not quite ready to bid adieu to the city once and for all and let it finally become an abandoned ghost town.

Rashim wandered over and joined them, leaning against the creaking railing and taking in New York with the same forlorn expression as Maddy.

‘My God,’ he uttered miserably. ‘I have seen pictures, of course, but nothing prepares you for seeing it with your own eyes.’ He sighed. ‘They really have surrendered Manhattan to the sea.’

They stared out over the safety railing in a silent row, looking down on an archipelago that was once a place called Brooklyn. A gridded patchwork of low square islands, now home to thousands of terns and gulls nesting on windowsills and rooftops. Maddy imagined the dark interiors of these buildings now played host to a brand-new ecosystem of wildlife: feral dogs and cats feasting on pigeons, mice and rats.

She suspected that one or two dusty old apartment attics were probably still occupied by truculent old hermits refusing to leave behind their homes, unwilling to let the advancing sea steal away
their ancient childhood memories of stuffy New York summers and leaky, spraying fire hydrants. Memories of porch-step gatherings and listening to the evening music spilling from a dozen open sash windows. Yappy lapdogs barking from first-storey fire escapes down at kids playing jump-rope on the kerb below.

Or maybe she’d just watched far too many of those grainy old films that idealized and sugar-coated the twentieth century and this ol’ part of town.

Becks stirred. ‘Maddy?’

‘Yes?’

‘I just detected one or two stray tachyon particles.’

‘Was that us?’ asked Rashim. ‘Decay particles from our arrival portal?’

‘No. I believe not.’ She looked at Maddy. ‘I believe it may have been part of a message.’

‘Waldstein again?’

She nodded. ‘That is possible.’

Maddy turned to Rashim and grinned. ‘He’s trying to lead us to him. He must have tried beaming a message here as well.’

‘That is encouraging.’ He made a face. ‘Or disconcerting.’

The Manhattan end of the Williamsburg Bridge ramped gradually from the apex of its river-crossing height down to street level. Only, instead of the dual car lanes merging and becoming part of the downtown waffle-grid of roads and intersections, they dipped below a gentle grey-green tide.

Presently, they were standing on the cracked road and staring down at the debris and chemical-sud-covered ebb and flow of small lapping ripples. The lifeless Atlantic. Lazy waves sloshed up the bridge’s car lanes and hissed begrudgingly backwards as they drew nickel-sized nuggets of tarmac back into the sea with them.

Ahead of them, like scrawny saplings graduating up to mature oaks and giant redwoods, buildings protruded from the ordered criss-cross of submerged streets. Waterways now. Unintentional, ordered canals.

Here and there, dotted around, just breaking the surface, they could see the rusting tops and algae-clouded plexiglas sunroofs of Greyhound e-Buses and auto-trucks. Fainter, lost further down beneath the surface, the foggy ghosted outlines of other things: old mailboxes and litter bins, bollards and benches. And, sprouting from the water like marsh reeds, the rusting metal trunks of lifeless street lights.

The lowest buildings, those with only one or two storeys emerging from the sea, seemed to have been wholly abandoned.
Windows cracked or gone, weather damage left untreated. Further away, where the buildings grew in stature and height, there was a suggestion that someone was still home and caring for them – or had, at some time, bothered to try keeping the elements at bay with chipboard coverings screwed into place over windows that had blown in.

To their left, the buildings began to tower, casting long shadows across the smooth water, emerging proudly from the sea where New York’s Wall Street used to be. The sulphurous brown sky was still dully reflected in their foggy windows. But dark squares dotted here and there indicated long-gone windows, like gap teeth. On some of the rooftops, Maddy could see those egg-whisk turbines, the fluttering of washed clothes pegged to a laundry line.

‘My God,’ she whispered sombrely. She wasn’t sure if it was the fact that New York looked like an abandoned shanty town that made it all seem so sad, or the fact that there were still people living here among these forlorn islands of steel and concrete, prepared to fight a futile rearguard action against the rising sea.

‘Quite a sight, isn’t it?’ said Rashim. Ill-chosen words in that moment. She wasn’t sure if he was saying this was a spectacular sight or a heartbreaking one.

Rashim shaded his eyes as sunlight momentarily broke through the tumbling clouds above and speared down at the water biblically. ‘You know, this is not an uncommon sight. Many of our great cities look like this now. They are waterlogged graveyards.’

It’s so peaceful
, thought Maddy.
So quiet
. She listened to the sound of gently lapping water, the shrill cry of seagulls, the soft creaking of a hanging exit sign nearby. Peaceful, when it shouldn’t have been. She felt so very sad.

And there was something else.

She heard the faint drone of a motor. She looked at the others. ‘You hear that?’

Rashim nodded. ‘That sounds like a motorboat.’

Sure enough, as he said that, they spotted a V-like wake in the water, causing small ripples to spread out between the buildings and splash halfheartedly against their permanently wet and green-skirted bottoms. A moment later, the vessel that was causing the wake came into view: a launch – a low tugboat that looked better suited to inland waterways than the probing edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

It began to turn in a wide arc towards them.

‘I think someone’s spotted us,’ said Maddy.

A couple of minutes later, as it approached the descending off-road of the Williamsburg Bridge, the pilot cut its engine and let forward momentum carry the launch towards them until its stubby prow finally bumped gently against something below the water and it rode up over the slime-covered low tideline across the broken tarmac.

The pilot stepped out from behind his steering post. ‘You’re not Islanders! Not seen you people around here before!’ The man came forward and stood with one boot planted on the prow of his boat. Lean and unshaven, wearing a frayed and battered Yankees baseball cap and a colourful, flowery shirt, he shot Becks a quick glance. ‘Hell, reckon I’d remember a pretty thing like you!’

‘We’re not from round here,’ replied Maddy.

‘I already figured that for myself, miss. You know someone here? That it? Because, if not, you don’t have any business here. There’s no place here for any newcomers.’

Maddy looked at all the deserted buildings, a forest of tall, dead-eyed structures that receded into the distance. No place? Did he mean no room? Seriously? The place seemed pretty much deserted.

‘We came here looking for someone,’ said Rashim. ‘We think he is living somewhere here in Manhattan.’

‘Who’s that? You might as well tell me. I know pretty much everyone livin’ in Tower City.’

Maddy and Rashim exchanged a glance. Maddy answered. ‘He’s living at the top of the W.G.S. Tower, I think. The one that overlooks Times Square.’

‘
Times Square?
’ The pilot laughed. ‘Not heard that name used round here in a while. You talkin’ about the round glass tower?’ He pointed. ‘That one over there?’

She had no idea which one was the old W.G. Systems head office. But he was pointing towards where Times Square used to be. ‘Yeah.’

‘So, you know the old guy who lives there? You know old Walt?’

Walt?
She looked at Rashim.
Walt
 … 
Waldstein?

‘Yes.’ She nodded quickly. ‘Yes.
Walt
. We’ve been trying to find him for ages. Could you, like, maybe, take us over to him on your boat?’

The pilot shrugged. ‘Can do, but I ain’t doing it for free. I’m the cab driver round here. The last New York cabbie, to be precise.’ He pointed at a grubby plastic For Hire sign perched on a couple of poles at the rear of his launch. She recognized it as one of those that used to glow on top of the city’s thousands of yellow cabs. All of them now rusting carcasses lost beneath the water.

‘Cabbie … that’s
my
job here.’

‘We, uh … look, we don’t have any money on us, though.’

‘Money?’ He spat over the side of his boat. ‘Money? You kiddin’ me? What barter you got over there?’ He was looking at the heavy backpacks Rashim and Becks had slung across their shoulders. ‘You got any tinnies? Bottle-stuff? Non-perishables?’

Food
. That’s what he was after. Food or drink.

‘Yeah. We got some stuff we can trade … barter with you.’

The cabbie grinned. ‘Then I guess you got yourself a ride.’

Five minutes later, they had agreed a fare he was happy with. He ushered them aboard, shoved the launch back off the bridge and tugged on the outboard motor’s starter chain until it snarled reluctantly to life. He turned his launch round and headed westwards, steering it among a cluster of low buildings that decades ago had once been known as SoHo. To their left, the buildings climbed steeply as they converged towards what used to be the business end – Battery Park, the south tip of Manhattan. To their right, looming a mere six storeys above them, were buildings that in the first half of the twentieth century used to be factories and warehouses and mills, and in the latter half became the fashionable loft homes of New York’s rich and famous. Loft-dwelling lovelies with their rooftop gardens and floor-to-ceiling windows that let in all-day sun on to their Andy Warhol prints.

‘Where do you live?’ asked Maddy.

The cabbie pushed the peak of his cap back. ‘Moved upwards only recently. Used to be all set up and cosy on the fourth floor of Macy’s department store, West 34th. But I had to move up a couple of floors on account of the
rising tide
and the damp creeping up above it. Damned concrete soaks up that seawater like a sponge.’

‘The sea’s
still
rising?’

‘Some Yorkers reckon it slowed down to about six inches last year.’ He nodded. ‘I mean, that’s good. You know? OK, it’s still rising, but it’s slowin’ down an’ all. Might even be that I won’t have to go move all my gear up again.’

He steered the boat to the right, turning northwards. Ahead of them was a broad waterway, a hundred feet across, flanked on either side by buildings that grew increasingly taller.

‘Since you folks’re visitors, you might be interested in the names this place used to have?’ He turned and talked over his shoulder at them. ‘This waterway used to be known as Broadway. And right up ahead there? See? Where them buildings are all getting tall?’

Maddy nodded. ‘I know. That’s Times Square.’

The launch sputtered slowly northwards.

They passed windows between towering walls of glass and concrete; the lowest, near the sea level, were fogged green by algal growth, their sills dangling ribbons of seagrass, like green walrus moustaches. Further up they were just fogged with grime. Roofs and balconies here and there displayed flashes of colour: clothes on laundry lines. Maddy even spotted the furtive glance of a small child from a rooftop above them.

‘Most of us Islanders live up round this way,’ he said. ‘Foraging is still pretty good here. You’d be amazed how much you can still find in kitchens in all these old homes. When those levee walls gave way, most folks in this city panicked, just left everything of theirs behind and ran for higher ground.’

‘You live on just that? On what you can find?’ asked Maddy.

‘Hell, no. Most of the people grow some of what they eat too. We got gardens on rooftops and plenty of rain keeps them watered. I know some of them fish too. You can get cod, crayfish, sometimes even tuna. But all the dirty crud that floats in these waterways? I’m not too sure I’d want to eat anything caught round here.’

The motorboat finally emerged from the wide straight waterway that was once Broadway into a space that looked vaguely like a lagoon: a wedge-shaped open area of shallow water surrounded on all three sides by the looming buildings round what was once Times Square. Here and there she could see large, still digi-screens that had once played endless
commercials and run headlines in ticker-tape along the bottom. Neon signs that had once upon a time jostled each other for space above the street entrances of stores, attempting to out-glare and out-flicker each other like petulant children seeking attention, now sat inert and lifeless, half in, half out of the water.

The water here was as flat as a millpond, the lethargic tide all but spent slapping against the labyrinthine sides of buildings to get to this sheltered cove. Corroded roofs of auto-trucks and freighter pods broke the surface, along with street lamps, which were dotted around like isolated stalks of bamboo poking from swamp water.

‘Over there,’ the cabbie said, nodding, and steered his vessel carefully across the smooth water, frequently leaning over the side to be sure his boat wasn’t about to run aground.

‘Right at the top. That’s where old Walt’s living right now,’ he said, cutting the engine down to an idle spitting chug. ‘Although I think his missus prefers they live lower down nearer the waterline.’

Maddy looked at Rashim. ‘
His missus?
’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t know he had a wife.’

Rashim shrugged.

‘You guys aren’t his family, I’m guessing,’ said the cabbie as he coaxed his boat round the curved, cloudy plexiglas roof of a submerged bus stop. ‘What are you, old friends or something?’

Maddy decided to go with something that was kind of close to the truth. Kind of.

‘We, uh … we used to work for W.G. Systems a while back. We’re employees.’

‘Lost touch in all the chaos, huh? The big migrations?’

‘That’s it.’

The boat idled its way towards the half-submerged entrance portico to the skyscraper. The green top of a faded Starbucks
sign protruded from the waterline and attached to it was a floating jetty made from wooden pallets supported on a bed of lashed-together plastic gallon drums. Tied to the jetty in a row were several boats, an inflatable, a kayak and a fibreglass canoe.

‘You’re lucky. Walt’s home by the look of it.’ The boat nudged against the jetty and the cabbie threw a loop of rope over a post. ‘Here we are.’

They clambered up on to the bobbing wooden pallets and the cabbie honked an air horn to alert the tower’s inhabitants that they had guests. Maddy craned her neck to look up at the glass-fronted tower. Like most of the other buildings, the majority of the panels were still intact, if grubby. Here and there broken glass had been plugged with boards to keep the elements out. Above them, laundry fluttered from a washing line suspended from a dead electric cable that looped low across the ‘lagoon’ to a nearby building. Near the top she spotted large red letters, a logo she recognized from some of the software and stationery she’d seen round their Brooklyn archway. The same logo stamped on the bottom of the growth tubes they’d had in the back room.

W.G. Systems
.

The cabbie honked his horn again and from an open window a floor above them they caught a glimpse of a head poking out. ‘Who’s that down there on m’ porch?!’

‘You got some visitors, Walt!’ the cabbie called back up as he unhooked the rope and began to reverse his boat away from the jetty.

Maddy turned to Rashim. ‘That’s not Waldstein … surely?’

‘No … it isn’t.’

A moment later, they heard a rattling and shutter doors cracked open wide above them. A fire ladder emerged from the dim interior, and clattered down, extending until it thumped
on to the wooden slats of the jetty. A dark face framed by coils of grey-white hair peered out at them.

‘You folks had better come on up. But don’t get any stupid ideas about ripping me off … I got a gun up here with me!’

They climbed up the creaking ladder one after the other. Up and into the tower through a large improvised doorway of wooden shutters. The old man, lean and narrow-shouldered and in his mid-sixties, beckoned them inside, a rifle hanging loosely in the crook of one arm.