Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

Slums are always a marvel; how human desperation can seem to warp the very laws of physics.

When the worst thing that can possibly happen to you finally happens, you find that you are not afraid of anything.

Home was noodles. Home was food and warmth. Soq paid, took a stool, shut their eyes, and meditated on the moment, its beauty, its peace. The coldness of the wind and the warmth of the food and the fact that everyone eventually dies.

“Would you believe I used to have five or six cups of this a day?” “Wow,” Fill said, barely hiding his boredom, because he hated when old people talked about How Awesome Everything Used to Be. Yeah, but you also used to die from cancer and get hangovers and spend your whole life unable to understand 80 to 99 percent of the people in the world when they spoke, so good luck with that nostalgia thing.

Music is the common property of all humanity, but people come from particular groups. For as long as the song lasts, for as long as they say nothing, you can pretend you are part of the same group.

Money is a mind, the oldest artificial intelligence. Its prime directives are simple, its programming endlessly creative. Humans obey it unthinkingly, with cheerful alacrity. Like a virus, it doesn’t care if it kills its host. It will simply flow on to someone new, to control them as well. City Hall, the collective of artificial intelligences, is a framework of programs constructed around a single, never explicitly stated purpose: to keep Money safe.

Soq’s nostrils wrinkled at the archaic vulgarity of his misogyny.

“It’s not waste. It’s a business decision.” “Fine line between good business and a fucking war crime,” he said. “Ain’t that the goddamn epitaph of capitalism.”