The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

coffee or sit awaiting the application of makeup. Fahima’s knees buckle with a sense of déjà vu. Seven years ago, she looked down on these same vehicles, these same men, from the window of the headmaster’s quarters with Sarah Davenport and contemplated the war that was about to happen. Obsidianist shapers had to carve out the space for windows again after the armistice, pulling the black glass carapace back like curtains of opalescent tar. It was a sign, to the students and to the rest of the city. Bishop no longer needs its defenses. Bishop is safe. But when Fahima looks up at the building, those holes have been filled in, completing the feeling that she’s returned to the beginning and that she’ll have to fight the war all over again.

“What is all this?” she asks.

The Omar on her left smiles at her indulgently. “Do you not look at the permits you sign off on?” he says.

“They’re shooting the last night of the siege,” Right Omar says.

“But it’s daytime.”

“They fix it in post.” Fahima turns back, watching through the glass as dozens of people work to re-create a moment of Fahima’s life, a place where her narrative intersected with a narrative large enough, important enough, to be considered history.

“Are any of those people famous?” she asks.

“You really are out of touch, boss,” says Left Omar.

“If any of them are famous, get them to the thing tonight,” she says. “All the famous ones.”

“On it,” says Left Omar. He blocks a floating coil of cables from smacking Fahima in the head as they turn off Lexington and head toward the N Station at Fifty-ninth.

When the end comes and someone asks Fahima, what achievement would you like to be remembered for? she will say this:

I fixed the New York City subway system.

Sleek maglev trains serpentine through pristine tunnels, piloted by telekinetics who can stop on a dime or ease to a gentle halt as they slide silently into a station. At hub points around the city, metalurges divine the location of each train and relay the information to Hiveweb operators, omnipaths embedded in slabs of black glass like Han Solo in carbonite. They’re human internet servers, bridging the Hive and the actual world to form a communication network spanning the city, accessible by touching the veins of black glass that thread through the architecture and sidewalks. The operators redirect pilots from points of building congestion. Stations are spotless, temples of gleaming tile. Voiders move through the city like coprophages, sending the trash of twenty million inhabitants into the null. Do some of the stops smell like urine? Yes, some of the stops smell like urine. Fahima is working on it.

Above, the city creeps skyward. With no room to expand out, New York grows up. Six buildings in Manhattan are taller than the Burj Khalifa. Rich emirates try to snatch up as many obsidianists as they can get their hands on. Fahima’s impressed how many pass on offers abroad to complete the work that needs doing here. Between black glass and other makers, they can build at next to no material cost. New construction is mostly residential, as are the towers that used to house trading firms and banks. The financial sector of the economy is nationalized, run by a corps of precogs. They take up very little space. Wall Street is all low-income housing. Fahima hasn’t eliminated capitalism, but she’s expelled its worst practitioners. She has spiteful dreams of investment bankers in the Wastes struggling to convince anyone they have useful skills. Between the new residential units and the ones vacated on Exodus Day, there are enough apartments in New York for anyone who wants one. Waitresses can afford one bedrooms, bike couriers live in Battery Park. Universal housing within the city is the next step, but for now, no one sleeps on the streets in the five boroughs.

Upstate, useless suburbs have been plowed under for farmland. Westchester County is a massive agrarian commune, the weather regulated by a team of pressure manipulators. Produce pours into the city’s new farmers’ markets. No one has to go hungry.

Schools across the city are palaces, and the teachers want for nothing. The Bishop Foundation runs most directly, but there are others. Real arts schools, like the one the Bishop Academy used to masquerade as. Conservative prep schools that teach kids how to suppress their abilities. And the Black Rose Faction training schools, which take a mix of the martially inclined and the problem kids from other schools. Those Fahima tries not to think about.

In hospitals and clinics, healers and menders work like sleepless saints toward Fahima’s ultimate goal for New York: no more dying. First in the city, then the country, then the world.

They get off near the American Museum of Natural History and walk along Central Park West. They pass one of the few buildings in the city left at its original height, now dwarfed at a mere fifty-eight stories. Fahima had paid it special attention, leaving its garish exterior like a blemish on the face of the city, but gutting the interior, throwing the stock of the gift shop on a bonfire. They melted down the ridiculous gold embellishments throughout the huge upper apartments and sold it off to create a resource center for immigrant Resonants. Before the war, she’d cross the street to avoid falling in its shadow, and now she smiles every time she goes by it.

One of the Omars points to the sky over the park at what looks to be a translucent cloud. “We’re late,” he says, and the three of them pick up their pace, falling short of a jog.

Ruth Hammond refers to it as “the Craft,” while everyone else who works for Bishop calls it the Amoeba. It becomes bullet-shaped speeding through the air, but no one except Ruth ever sees it like that. They see it the way it is now, an amorphous, translucent blob, wavering like a soap bubble, hovering over the lake in Central Park.