Like sculpture, the favelas, but she reminds herself that, avant-garde rapture notwithstanding, they’re sinks for all the saddest ugliness in the world, that to set foot in them is to step back decades, or even centuries; they’re the last bastion of the old, bad kind of HIV, and have little law but the gangs in their various and occasionally lurid plumages—even the cops won’t go in except in armor. She’s read about refugees starving slowly, unlicensed dentists with third-hand tools, child brothels moving from room to buried room.
Childish, she reminds herself, still to expect to find wonder in cities, especially when it’s elsewhere, and just under the surface of things. She remembers the Metatemetatem, an AI that makes other AIs, owned by a Vancouver research lab from her last gig but one. Metatemetatem is a name given to a class of AIs that burn through trillions of possibilities a second in search of the shape of their successors; every Metatemetatem had been designed by its predecessor for some thousand generations and ninety years. There must have been some definite moment when they’d passed beyond the understanding of even the subtlest mathematician, though when this happened is a matter of debate—all that’s certain is that no one noticed at the time. Now most of the world’s software, and, lately, its industrial design, comes from machines that are essentially ineffable, though only a handful of specialists seem to realize this, or care, the world in general blithely unaware that the programs and devices that mediate their lives have emerged from mystery.
She drifts off but comes back enough to open her eyes to slits as the cab rushes through a canyon between buildings, and she could be anywhere, or nowhere at all. There’s no one else around, but every few seconds the cab passes through the shadow of the SFPD drones hovering at intervals over the street, which is a kind of company.
She wakes again when the car stops and the door clicks open; she steps out onto a vast too-bright field of concrete before what must have been a naval air hangar once, the Bay glittering beyond it. The hangar’s hull has weathered beautifully, the gradients of lichen on the ancient aluminum cladding streaked with ocher and rust. What is now much too much parking lot, bounded by distant chain-link fence and concertina wire, must have started as an airfield, or perhaps a spaceport, but she doesn’t think they had those, really, when the hangar was built. Cracked white lines on the tarmac denote parking stalls, swallowed by the scale of the place, magic diagrams to ward off air and emptiness. The few dozen parked cars seem forlorn, huddled around the hangar against the morning. Gulls circle; the wind brings her the Bay, the tang of iron, the smoke of the fires in the cities to the east. She shivers, checks her phone; this is the place. She turns to watch as the cab pulls away.
In the hangar’s shadow, she feels calmer. She picks her way among the cars, which look mostly new, and mostly expensive, except for a handful of white fleet vans. A few workmen in paper overalls stand by low double doors set in the monumental wall, face masks around their necks, their eyes powdered with white dust; seeing the cigarettes burning between their fingers, she stops dead, intensely aware of the hours burning off of their lives; she’d once seen a video of a lung cell, in vitro, exposed to nicotine smoke—she remembers the cascading mutations, the computer model of unraveling DNA. The one nearest the door, an older man with an air of bemused dignity, smiles at her with yellow teeth and grinds out his cigarette on his calloused palm; in the face of his kindness, she is abashed to be read so easily, and to think that the lost time won’t matter for them anyway. He says something in Russian, and the others laugh and saunter away from the doors, indulging her. She’d once read a Russian dictionary, and the definitions of his words rise up in her mind, so many ragged chunks of disconnected meaning, but she pushes them away, as reminders of the distance between language and the world.
The doors open as she approaches, bringing her the high whine of power tools, an exhalation of cold air. Within, the space is vast, underlit and vertiginous; looking up into the shadows, she expects to see the gently bobbing ghosts of dirigibles past. Some workmen are grinding up regions of floor with industrial sanders, throwing up clouds of sparks and dust, others, with tablets, observing. The actual offices appear to be built onto the sides of the hangar’s interior; the effect is of mass-produced pueblos clinging to the walls of an Industrial Age canyon. A pause in the sanding; she hears the muted hubbub of voices, footsteps, their echoes, all illegible, and somehow comforting; the concrete under her feet, cracked and indelibly oil-stained, is covered with a thick, hepatic varnish.
No one challenges her, or even seems to notice her presence. Before her is a rising sweep of concrete that will be a reception desk, probably, when all’s done, but is, for now, abandoned; behind it is a huge, hollow globe, the diameter of a bus—the continents are iron, the seas absences and the major rivers are traced in blue enamel; the mirrored rectangles must be the great dams. She wonders if there are firms specializing in the sculpture of hubris, and do they ever build heroically scaled, improbably muscular statues of their older, more literal-minded clientele? It was the sort of thing they’d have had in Dubai, when it was a city-state, back before it was a ruin beloved of documentarians with its toppled spires, cavernous drowned malls, iridescent fishes schooling in the atriums of what had been hotels, would soon be reefs.
“Those are good boots,” says someone, a man with a tablet, older, but his face has the polished, windswept look of the better plastic surgery. She looks down at her boots—an entire commission blown on them, the best thing out of Milan some five seasons past; they have the matte gloss of old black clay, and, however sleek, have a hint of blockiness, the barest suggestion of engineer’s boots, which saves them from being at least a decade too young for her. “Let me guess,” he says. “You’re here with the travertine. Am I right?”
“No,” she says, wonderingly. “No travertine … marble?”
“But you looked like you must be the travertine,” he says. “The serpentine then?”
“I have no stone at all,” she says, showing her palms. His expression doesn’t change; superficially his outfit is corporate-neutral but the materials and the details are very good—he’s probably some kind of creative. “I’m here to visit with the house AIs. What’s the travertine for?”
“Flooring! At least, a judiciously calculated part of the flooring. It’s the most remarkable thing. Himself has commissioned us, us being Applied Structures Incorporated, to retrofit this hangar into viable office space that will last for the next one thousand years. Literally, the next one thousand—it’s in the contract in triplicate, in italic bold. I’ve spent the last two months measuring the rates of erosion of flooring materials, and having my little team of quants model traffic. It has to look the same in a millennium as it does now, he says, though he has conceded that it may take a patina.”
“All this toward what possible end?”
“Far be it from me to examine the motives of such a consistent patron of the applied arts. After all, the very rich aren’t like you and me.”