The man in the hi-vis who’d wanted the multiplicities didn’t remember him. Caleb had to remind him what he’d wanted. He consoled himself with the fact that the guy hadn’t seemed too on the ball to start with, so he probably shouldn’t have expected much. Finally, Caleb had to wave the multiplicities in front of his face. That caused him to perk up. Hi-vis thrust his head forward at them like a dog, his slick nostrils flaring and fluttering. Caleb yanked them back and Hi-vis looked genuinely pained.
He reminded Hi-vis of what he wanted, and hi-vis looked from the multiplicities to him, a sort of feral hunger sloshing through his consciousness into his eyes. He seemed to scrutinised Caleb in a way that made Caleb tense up and he resisted the urge to shuffle backwards.
To his relief, the idiot seemed to come to a more reasonable conclusion and settled for providing the information Caleb had asked for. He provided a meandering series of directions that would have taken up the back wall of a conference room in a wet gurgling voice that made made Caleb’s gorge tighten. Caleb had lost track of the instructions long before the third left turn or the second convenience store, and had had to get the man to repeat himself. Hi-vis had snapped at him for not paying attention and refused. Caleb had tried asking nicely. It hadn’t worked. Then Caleb had threatened to take the multiplicities away. That had fixed Hi-vis’ attitude.
The second time around didn’t go any better than the first. Caleb thought he heard a couple of direct contradictions in the mass of turns and streets and stairs, and he wasn’t dead certain the guy wasn’t just fucking with him. Caleb had stopped him, asked him to go back to a part of the directions he vaguely remembered. Hi-vis had started to throw a strop, and just to save time Caleb had moved the multiplicities away. Hi-vis had scowled, started reciting the directions from the point Caleb had mentioned. They went back and forth like this a third time, and eventually Hi-vis had just given Caleb a set of co-ordinates. This suited Caleb better, but he was taken aback when he’d plugged the co-ordinates into his phone and it had given him a list of directions that matched Hi-vis’ list – in length and complexity, if not specifics. Deal done, Caleb was glad to leave the man to his multiplicities and leave.
He paced down a passage the width of a shopping trolley, between two faceless slabs of concrete, trying to check Placement and watch his step at the same time. Various wet and glistening mounds and lumps of unidentified material littered the floor, cockroaches crawled around them in unsettling clusters. On Placement, someone was promoting a video entitled ‘This 8,000-year-old law removes all of your debts! Never worry about a late payment again!’ The humans could disappear tomorrow, and the machines and the roaches and the rodents would inherit the earth. And they would thrive.
His footsteps clanked across the wiring of a wet metal walkway suspended between two towering horns of faded mustard-yellow, matrices of tessellating girders stabbing at the grey plates overhead. To pierce the clouds, they had set to carving through the muscle and bone of the world around them. The sprawling grey convolution of docklands crawled with machinic life as the dark waves rolled against the metal and concrete; knife-edged with foam, scraping the brutal manmade boundaries. New sublevels of future dockland were visible and active. Vast cranes heaved apartment-sized chunks of concrete over the tiny pinpricks of drones and dockworkers and the indifferent carapaces of automated haulers and shuttles.
“Halt.”
Commandments from an artificial voice, clipped and grating. There was always something irritating about being given orders by a drone. The electric buzz floating through the reverb. Some precisely tuned pitch, the complete lack of courtesy. It always raised his hackles.
This one looked like an angry sandwich toaster had melded with a picatinny rail system. The rough chunky disc of the chasse peppered with jutting metal nodules and twitching lights. A spike of antenna raked three needles through the air. Caleb faced it as it closed the distance and stopped, hovering in front of him. The heat coming off of it washed over his face, smoky static fumes rolling in on the heels. He resisted the urge to cough. It always seemed important to look as though you were unfazed when one of them wanted something.
“Remain motionless.” the drone ordered.
It swept him from head to toe with a lattice of red lasers. He wondered who owned it, who was getting his information, what they intended to do with it, or who they would sell it to. Satisfied, the drone pivoted and whirred off into the lengthening shadows, vents streaming. He stood in the cloud of scorched ozone left in its wake, watching it putter off, thinking maybe he’d be getting some kooky new adverts he’d never seen before. Maybe he’d be tracked down and blackmailed by some local spook network. There was an outside chance the thing was part of some autonomous AI construct, harvesting use whatever it could scrape off the world around it for some impenetrable purpose only its compounding mathematics could divine.
You could just walk away. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes they had cattle prods. Occasionally one would seek to instil a wider climate of subservience in the humans, and mutilate or kill a disobedient person with some form of hidden blade or electrical charge. The larger drones were more likely to be concealing some variety of firearm.
This had led to small groups retaliating against all machines that displayed traces of autonomy, and so sometimes when there was a rattle of distant gunfire, it wasn’t always human on human violence. Someone had taken a particular dislike to one or more of the many bots navigating the city, and opened up on it. The even more extreme groups targeted the drone manufacturers, attacking workers and bombing manufacturing facilities.
This all became particularly heated when local authorities forbade people from shooting at a particular set of robots. Not only did nobody know which drones they were talking about, it actively intensified the amount of ammunition flying through the air, and conspiracies flying through the airwaves. Anti-authority folks started shooting everything in sight, which meant that deliveries and mail got lost, repairs were delayed, information networks were disrupted and a hundred other mundane activities. The falling technology and flying lead damaged property and people. Placement would be swarmed with rants and videos of broken windows, shattered ventilation, burst pipes, bent antennae, and punctured roofs. Tech scavengers and black market opportunists swarmed the areas, snatching whatever they could, breaking into people’s homes if they thought a drone that had just crashed into someone’s bathroom held valuable corporate data. This in turn provoked more violence. Local corporate authorities would have their own retrieval teams combing the areas, clashing with everybody and anybody who wanted the tech or just wanted to take a chunk out of them. He’d rented pods in areas of the lower levels where this happened frequently enough that it was a widespread habit to ignore any chairs and sit on the floor, or instinctively quicken your pace near windows.
He stopped in a late-night diner and chewed through a rubbery omelette while he watched the news on a tv mounted across the back wall. NewTomorrow was reporting a story that a woman had been arrested for threatening to shoot members of the local corporate PMC. Caleb sighed. She was an idiot. You never made threats. That only gave your enemies time to prepare. You didn’t talk about it, you didn’t post about it, you just did it. If you were going to hurt someone, then you hurt them. If you were going to kill someone, then you killed them. Shutting up made you more successful.
He headed along a long road, into a poorly lit passage, stumbling over the legs of several tramps who asked him for money from the darkness. He turned right, climbed a set of piss-stained stairs and followed an open pedway into an overpass lined with rusted iron pillars. On the other side he rode a rattling escalator up again and passed through an abandoned arcade that burrowed through the width of a crumbling tower block. Sometime later he found himself crossing a rickety catwalk suspended by steel cables from a network of overhead scaffolding, beneath a billboard the size of a oil barge, and wondered whether he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. The catwalk swayed unnervingly in the wind, and the sun had set turning the world into a inky void interrupted by murky angles and shifting reflections; an abstraction stabbed through by light.
Fifteen minutes later, he emerged into a wide flat area overlooking another waterside sea wall. The area was strewn with trash and scrap metal. Twenty feet up, a black tear in a sheer grey wall was patched over with lengths of heavy rusting fencing. Nearby, a boxy vent fan sputtered like a choking infant. Chords of wire looped and creaked between the building and a pylon of old girders shiving the drifting smog. At the end of the directions he was standing in an abandoned lot with an empty shack tucked against the wall of what might have been a massive industrial factory office, the purpose of which was unclear and the owner unknown. In one corner, half disguised by a heap of trash covered by a section of dented grating from which a broken chain dangled, a large rat buried its snout in the eviscerated carcass of large grime-smeared bird. He stood at the waist-high wall around the edge, and looked out at city. Between two chunks of brutalist construction he was almost surprised to see the arc of the wharves far below in the distance. He presumed he’d a taken a wrong turn a while back. A left instead of a right or an escalator instead of a ladder… Who knew.
As he turned to retrace his steps or go home, he hadn’t quite decided, a man that looked like cross between an PSA for alcoholism and an extra in a rich man’s movie about poor people rounded the corner and called out to him. They exchanged the usual pleasantries. The man wanted to know why he was walking around on their roof. Caleb explained that he was looking for the harbour master.
“What for?”
“Looking to buy a boat.”
“Why would you bother a harbour master with that?”
Caleb shrugged, abashed. “Seemed like the best person.”
“They’re not. No offence, stranger, but the harbour master has better things to do than talk to random idiots with more money than sense. Why didn’t you just get someone to look it up?”
“Get someone to look it up? It seemed like an easier thing to talk to an expert… He looked around him in bewilderment. Guess I was wrong.”
“You were.”
“If not the harbour master, then who? Could you tell me who can help me?”
“Well, maybe I can.”
Caleb, squinted. Demanded to know how he was supposed to trust this stranger that had walked around the corner out of nowhere.
The stranger said he was a sailor. Caleb pointed out that he’d just referred to the roof as belonging to him. He explained that he was there on behalf of the guys who owned the factory, who he was friendly with. The factory, he said, produced the giant propellers for the giant ships that criss-crossed the ocean. Caleb told him he wasn’t exactly selling himself as trustworthy. The man asked him what kind of idiot he was to presume a stranger was trustworthy. He’d have thought, he said, that Caleb would know that he should presume everyone was lying until proven otherwise. Caleb pointed out that this was not a convincing argument for listening to him.
The man scoffed. “You want convincing? Cough up.” he said.
“Convenient.”
“You want the information or not? You’re the one who’s so lost they’ve wandered onto someone else’s roof. You want the truth, you pay for the truth.”
“Or a comfortable lie.”
“No concern to me. Look, if you want to keep wandering around like a tit, searching for someone who doesn’t want to talk to you in the first place, be my guest. Or you cough up and get good info from yours truly. Here. Now. For a small fee. Time, as they say, is money.”
“I don’t have time for this.” Caleb growled, his patience growing thin. “I’ve got things to do.”
“Then you definitely don’t have time to find the harbour master yourself.”
“Excuse me?”
“Didn’t you hear me? I’m doing you a convenience, arsehole.”
“A real salesman…” Caleb drawled
“A real self-important rich boy who doesn’t know what neighbourhood he’s walking around in. What do you think you’re going to do instead, anyway?”
“What’s it to you?”
“You’re wandering around on the arse end of the wharves looking for someone you can’t even identify. Either you’re an idiot who is chronically underprepared, or you have more time on your hands than sense. Which is it?”
“Who’s asking? Are you going to say anything useful or just waste my time?”
“I’ve already said something useful, you ain’t listening. Are you going to cough up?”
“Why should I do that?”
“Because I can tell you something else useful.”
“I could find it out for free.”
“You certain? Then why are you out here?”
Caleb scowled, waited a minute, then slowly his phone out of his pocket. “A bit now. Questions. If I like your answers you get more. If I don’t, I leave. Got it?”
“Good enough for me.”
Caleb paid him. He was about to start asking questions but the sailor beat him to it and asked him what kind of boat he wanted. Caleb admitted he didn’t know. Something small. The sailor asked him how many crew he would have. Caleb told him he was going solo. The sailor nodded, wanted to know what he intended to do with his theoretical boat. Behind them the rat continued to gorge on the bird. Wet snapping noises drifted leisurely on the foetid breeze.
Caleb shrugged, “go away.”
“Where’s ‘away’?”
“Dunno. Over the horizon.”
The sailor cocked his head and squinted at him then. “You don’t know much about the sea do you?”
“What’s to know? Water. Waves. Ship goes on waves. Waves go over the horizon. Freedom.”
The sailor laughed. It was a bitter mocking thing. “Well then, I guess all you need to do is plug your license in.”
“License?” he asked, ignoring a moistened sucking pop from the corner.
The sailor laughed at him again. Caleb scowled. “Why not just jump on a jet ski?” The sailor asked.
Caleb looked at him like he was crazy. Said it would never work. The sailor nodded and then told him that neither would a one-man tug. If the sea didn’t capsize and wreck him, he’d inevitably run out of fuel well before he reached anywhere else.
“Fine, I need a bigger boat.”
“Ship.”
“That’s what I said.”
“You said boat.”
“Who the fuck cares?”
“The sailors you’ll be hiring.”
“Whatever. I buy a boat and-“
“Ship.” said the sailor, arms folded.
“Ok, fucking hell, would you stop interrupting?”
The sailor waited, nonplussed.
Caleb took a breath and continued. “OK, so I get a bo- ship. Ship. Ship!” he yelled. “Happy?”
The sailor nodded.
“Then I get a crew. And I fuck off into the wide grey yonder. Happy? That good enough for you? Got anything to add? Any questions? Any suggestions?”
The sailor spread his arms wide, a thin placid smile plastered across his face. The patronising attitude implied by the gesture rankled Caleb, but he swallowed his pride and refused to take the bait.
“No questions,” said the sailor. “Like I said, once you’ve got your ship, just plug in your license and go.”
“Why do you keep mentioning a license?” There was a sound like improbable lengths of damp gristle being torn in half from the trash pile.
“Your international license. If you’re trying to sail away from the city, you’ve obviously attained a high rank in society.” The sailor smiled at him just a touch too long. “As you can’t attain the International License without a sufficient social rank…” he trailed off.
“Yeah. Of course.” Caleb turned and walked back towards the wall. He stared back out over towards the wharves again. The sailor joined him. They stood a while in silence, looking down at it all. “Say, you ever seen anybody go out without a license?” he asked, eventually.
The sailor didn’t turn, but there was the shadow of a smile on his words, “Not personally. But people do sometimes.”
“Where do they go?”
Another laugh. “They go to the bottom of the ocean.”
“The sea ain’t that bad.”
“No, it’s not. The sea ain’t the problem. The Mountain’s navy finds them. The beacons out there scan for licenses. Ships have identifiers, sat nav, tracking software, etc. The beacons scan everything that passes. If it doesn’t have a license and it’s too far out, the Mountain’s personal PMC are called. The border patrol section roams the city outskirts. If you’re allowed to leave, they don’t bother you. If you ain’t, then they sink you.”
Caleb nodded, “Ocean’s a big place. Hard to watch all of it all the time.”
“Ocean’s full of autonomous drones and scanner buoys.” Replied the sailor.
“Ocean’s a big place.” Caleb repeated.
The sailor shrugged, “You’re welcome to chance it. Plenty of others have with the same logic.”
“What were they doing, anyway? Smuggling?”
“No. The smugglers all have licenses. That’s a minimum. Or at least they find ways to convince the scanners they’re legit.”
“And the rest?”
“Looking for a way out.”
“Hell of a risk.”
“People get desperate.”
“Sound like they got it. A way out, I mean.”
“Yeah. You could say that.”
Words and Chaos 
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