Rosario swam up to Vlade and spoke through their suits’ walkie-talkie system. “Check it out, there’s an air tank on the top, next to the airlock. Water units, air and sewage, the whole shebang.”
“Yep.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I’m going to knock on the side and see if anyone knocks back. If that happens I want to call the police, and stay here on guard until they get here.”
“We should have brought our water pistols.”
“We did,” Jim and Trina said, pointing to their swim bags.
“Deploy, please,” Rosario said. “Okay, let’s go. If this is a hostage box there’s sure to be sensors on it, so let’s go fast.”
Vlade finned hard to the side of the hot container. He tapped the old hello pattern: Shave and a haircut, two bits! Then put his ear to the side of the container.
After a few moments he heard taps back. Tip tip tip, tap, tap, tap, tip tip tip. A clear SOS. Maybe the only bit of Morse code left alive in the world.
“Call the police,” he said to the others.
Rosario swam up the old subway stairs toward the surface. She had radio comms in her swim bag and got the call off; they could hear it through their walkie-talkie system.
A police cruiser was over them in about fifteen minutes, though it felt longer. When the cruiser cut its motors, all four of them surfaced and explained what they had found.
The police officers aboard had run into situations like this before. They asked the divers to go down and pull the inflatable staircase tube up to them, which Vlade and Jim did. Then they attached an air hose to the tube’s valve and pumped it rigid, at which point it filled most of the old subway hole. After that they put a water vacuum in the interior cylinder and pumped it dry. Their vacuum was nothing compared to Idelba’s, but it was strong enough to quickly empty the interior of the staircase tube, which had been collapsed down below and was mostly dry to begin with. When it was cleared, two of the water officers descended into it, one carrying a welding gun and headset.
After that Vlade and the others floated by the boat, waiting. They couldn’t help keeping an eye out to see if other watercraft were approaching, though with their eyes right at the water’s surface their prospect was not good. They also swam back down from time to time to make sure no submersibles were approaching. This was something they could do that the police cruiser couldn’t (not optically, anyway), so after a while Vlade and Jim stayed down there by the container, looking around uneasily. Nothing came near them. They resurfaced when Rosario called them, and got there just in time to see the two water cops emerge from the floating end of the inflated staircase tube, helping two bearded men make their way up the stairs. Up in the wind the two men paused and looked around at the river, hands shielding their eyes, blinking like moles.
There’s a market for markets.
said Donald MacKenzie
c) that citizen
Dark pools. Dark pools of money, of financial activities. Unregulated and unreported. Estimated to be three times larger than the officially reported economy. Exchanges not advertised or explained to outsiders. Exchanges opaque even to those making them.
Go into one and see what’s being offered in there for less than in the regular exchanges. Buy a lot of it and hope it’s what it was supposed to be, take it out and sell it at the list price. A nanosecond is a billionth of a second. Trades happen that fast. The offer on your screen is not in the actual present but represents some moment of the past. Or, if you want to say it’s in the present, there are high-frequency algorithms that are working in your actionable future, in that they can act before you can. They’re across a technological international date line, working in the next present, and when you offer to buy something they can buy it first and sell it to you for more. High-frequency trading algorithms can react to a quote faster than the public actually sees it offered at all. Any trade in the dark pools is getting shaved by a high-frequency interloper. It’s a stealth tax imposed on the exchanges by high-frequency trading, by the cloud itself. A rent.
Liquidity vaporized. Liquidity gone through the phase change that makes it a gas. Liquidity become gaseous, become telepathy. Liquidity gone metaphysical.
So because of this situation, much of the movement of capital therefore now happens out of sight, unregulated, in a world of its own. Two thirds of all finance, but this is an estimate; it could be more. Trillions of dollars a day. Possibly a quadrillion dollars a day, meaning a thousand trillion dollars. And some people, when they want to, can pull some of this vaporized money out of the dark pools and reliquefy it, then solidify it by buying things in the real economy. In the real world.
This being the case, if you think you know how the world works, think again. You are deceived. You don’t know; you can’t see it, and the whole story has never been told to you. Sorry. Just the way it is.
But if you then think furthermore that the bankers and financiers of this world know more than you do—wrong again. No one knows this system. It grew in the dark, it’s a stack, a hyperobject, an accidental megastructure. No single individual can know any one of these megastructures, much less the mega-megastructure that is the global system entire, the system of all systems. The bankers—when they’re young they’re traders. They grab a tiger by the tail and ride it wherever it goes, proclaiming that they are piloting a hydrofoil. Expert overconfidence. As they age out, a good percentage of them have made their pile, feel in their guts (literally) how burned out they are, and go away and do something else. Finance is not a lifelong vocation. Some small percentage of financiers turn into monster sages and are accounted wise men. But even they are not. The people hacking around in the jungle aren’t in a good position to see the terrain. And they’re not great thinkers anyway. HFM, the anonymous hedge fund manager who spilled Diary of a Very Bad Year, was a fluke, an intellectual working in a trade. When he understood, he left. Because there are very few ideas uptown. And even the great thinkers can’t learn it all; they are ignorant too, they bail on the details of the emergent situation, unknowable in any case, and after that they write or talk impressionistically. They are overimpressed by Nietszche, a very great philosopher but an erratic writer, veering between brilliance and nonsense sentence by sentence, giving cover for similar belletristic claptrap ever since. His imitators at their best end up sounding like Rimbaud, who quit writing at age nineteen. And no matter the pseudo-profundities of one’s prose style, it’s a system that can’t be known. It’s too big, too dark, too complex. You are lost in a prison of your own devise, in the labyrinth, submerged deeply in the dark pools—speaking of belletristic claptrap.
There are other dark pools in New York Bay, however. They lie under the eelgrass at the mouths of the city’s creeks, deeper than any algorithm can plumb. Because life is more than algorithmic, it’s a snarl of green fuses, an efflorescence of vitalisms. Nothing we devise is anything like as complex as the bay’s ecosystem. On the floors of the canals, the old sewer holes spew life from below. Up and down life floats, in and out with the tides. Salamanders and frogs and turtles proliferate among the fishes and eels, burrow in the mulm. Above them birds flock and nest in the concrete cliffs of the city, beneficiaries of the setback laws for skyscrapers that were in force between 1916 and 1985. Right whales swim into the upper bay to birth their babies. Minke whales, finbacks, humpbacks. Wolves and foxes skulk in the forests of the outer boroughs. Coyotes walk across the uptown plazas at 3 a.m., lords of the cosmos. They prey on the deer, always numerous everywhere, and avoid the skunks and porcupines, who stroll around scarcely molested by anyone. Bobcats and pumas hide like the wild cats they are, and the feral ex-domestic cats are infinite in number. The Canada lynx? I call it the Manhattan lynx. It feasts on New England cottontails, on snowshoe hares, muskrats and water rats. At the center of the estuarine network swims the mayor of the municipality, the beaver, busily building wetlands. Beavers are the real real estate developers. River otters, mink, fishers, weasels, raccoon
s: all these citizens inhabit the world the beavers made from their version of lumber. Around them swim harbor seals, harbor porpoises. A sperm whale sails through the Narrows like an ocean liner. Squirrels and bats. The American black bear.
They have all come back like the tide, like poetry—in fact, please take over, O ghost of glorious Walt:
Because life is robust,
Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism,
Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,
So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,
O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand,
Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,
Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.
Will Irwin: To the European these colossi seem either banal, meaningless, the sinister proof of a material civilization, or a startling new achievement in art. And I have often wondered whether it does not all depend upon the first glimpse; whether at the moment when he stampedes to the rail they appear as a jumble, like boxes piled on boxes, or fall into one of their super-compositions.
Pedestrian killed by a cornice falling off a building.
d) Inspector Gen
Inspector Gen got a call from Vlade at around four that afternoon.
“Hey, we found those guys who were snatched from the farm.”
“Did you! Where were they?”
“Up in the Bronx. I was up there doing some salvage work when we saw a hot spot down in the Cypress subway station. So I went back with some of my old city sub friends and dived it, and got an SOS from people inside a container down there, and a police boat cracked it and pulled them out.”
“Really!” Gen said. “Where are they now?”
“At the police dock station at One Two Three. Can you meet them there?”
“Sure can. My pleasure. I’ve been worried about those guys.”
“Me too.”
“Good job.”
“Good luck, you mean. But we’ll take it, right?”
“You bet. After they’re checked out I’ll see if I can bring them home with me. Hey, do you think they can fit back in that hotello with the old man?”
“I can set up another one for Hexter, right next to theirs.”
“Sounds good. See you tonight.”
Gen made arrangements for a water launch and asked Sergeant Olmstead to come with her. She piloted the cruiser up to the police station at 123rd and Frederick Douglass, taking Madison most of the way north and using some police boat privilege to pop through the intersections.
At the station they found the two kidnap victims recovering in the infirmary. Two middle-aged men. They had already showered and were wearing issue civvies. One of them, Ralph Muttchopf—brown hair thinning on top, about six foot, hound-dog face, skinny except for a slight pot belly—sat in a chair drinking coffee, looking around with a wary expression. The other, Jeffrey Rosen—small, feral, triangular head covered with tight black curls—lay on an infirmary bed with an IV in his forearm. He was running his other hand through his hair and talking a mile a minute to the other people in the room.
Gen sat and inserted some questions into his nervous chatter. It quickly became clear they would not be able to do much to dispel the mystery of their disappearance. They had been knocked out by whoever grabbed them, probably some milk of amnesia involved, as they had no memories of the abduction. After that they had lived in their container, fed two meals a day, they guessed, through a Judas slot in their door. Rosen had gotten sick at some point and Muttchopf had left messages on their food trays telling their captors about this, and meals after that had included some pills which Jeff had taken. More memory confusion at this point suggested more milk of amnesia. They had never seen or heard anything of their captors.
“How long were we in there?” Jeff asked.
Gen consulted her pad. “Eighty-nine days.”
The two men regarded each other round-eyed. Finally Muttchopf shook his head.
“Felt like longer,” he said. “It felt like, I don’t know. A couple years.”
“I’m sure it did,” Gen said. “Listen, when you’re cleared medically here, can I give you a ride home? Everyone at the Met has been worried about you.”
“That would be good,” Jeff said.
Gen left Olmstead there to guard them, warning the sergeant and the cops on duty there to take care; it was at least possible that the kidnappers had stuck trackers in them and might try to grab them back, or worse. She ordered thorough scans for such devices, then left and piloted the cruiser back down to the Central Park north dock, and walked to the federal building behind the big police docks at Fifth and 110th.
By this time it was sunset, and the sunlight was lancing through the great towers to the west, silhouetting them like a dragon’s back against a bronze sky. Gen walked into the fed building, got through security, and went to the office where the federal department of immigration, the FBI, the NYPD, and the Householders’ Union had combined to create a human smuggling task force. Here she found an old acquaintance from her first days in the force, Goran Rajan, who greeted her cheerfully and poured her a cup of tea.
Gen described the situation with her two rescued ones.
“Only two?” Goran repeated.
“That’s right.”
“And they were kept for eighty-nine days?”
“That’s right.”
Goran shook his head. “So this isn’t smuggling, it’s some kind of kidnapping. Was a ransom demanded at any point?”
“Nothing. No one involved seems to know why it happened.”
“Not the victims?”
“Well, I haven’t debriefed them fully yet. They lived in my building and were abducted from it, so I’ve been taking a personal interest. I’ll give them a ride home tonight and ask more questions.”
“Good that you take this over. Because we often find a hundred people in one of those containers. Your guys are not really in our realm.”
“I understand, but I was hoping you would check through your harbor surveillance data and see if you can spot anyone visiting this container to feed these guys. It was probably twice-daily visits.”
Goran sipped tea. “I can try. If they were coming from the surface, we’ll probably see it. If it was being done by robot subs, less likely.”
“How many cameras do you have deployed now?”
“It’s a few million. The limiting factor these days is the analysis. I’ll try to figure out some questions and see what I find.”
“Thanks,” Gen said.
“Remember, the kidnappers will know their hostages are gone. They’ll probably leave the area.”
“That might not be a bad thing,” Gen said.
“No. May I ask if you are expecting me to find anything in particular?”
“I’ve been finding stuff that makes me wonder about Pinscher Pinkerton.”
“Okay. They’re big. They have all the drones and subs you’d need to do the visits automatically. It’s possible this whole procedure was done remotely.”
“Still, you might at least see the drones.” Gen finished her tea and rose to leave. “Thanks, Goran. When can I expect a report?”
“Soon. The computers answer the moment you finish your question. So it’s a matter of having the questions to ask.”
Gen thanked him and went back to her cruiser and headed back to the Frederick Douglass station. There she found Muttchopf and Rosen ready to leave, and she and Olmstead escorted them onto the cruiser and headed down the East River toward home.
The two men sat
in chairs on the bridge beside Gen as she stood piloting, looking at the city like tourists. The tallest towers behind them still reflected some of the glow of twilight, though it was night overhead, the clouds a noctilucent pink. The lights of the dusky city bounced and shattered in the wakes on the water.
“You must be kind of blown away,” Gen supposed. “Three months is a long time to be locked up.”
The two men nodded.
“It was a sensory deprivation tank,” Rosen said. “And now this.”
Muttchopf nodded. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “The city.”
“It’s cold,” Jeff added, shivering. “But it smells good.”
“It smells like dinner,” Muttchopf declared. “A New York seafood dinner.”
“Low tide,” Gen pointed out. “But we’ll get you something to eat when we get home.”
“That sounds good,” Rosen said. “Finally. I’m finally beginning to get my appetite back.”
At the Met they got off on the dock, and Gen had Olmstead run the cruiser back to the station. Vlade greeted them, and he and Gen escorted the two men to the dining hall. They were weak. In the dining hall they were offered the chance to sit and be served, but both of them wanted to go through the serving line and choose their food. They heaped their plates high, and poured themselves glasses of the Flatiron’s red, and as they ate and drank, Gen sat across from them asking questions about the night of their abduction. They nodded, shook their heads, shrugged, said little; then, with a look around, Muttchopf said to her, “How about you come up with us to our place when we’re done here.”