Eventide, Water City

As Hawai‘i burns in 2023, humanity in the 2142 version, in Chris McKinney’s Water City Trilogy, has mostly taken refuge underwater. In this second book of the series—the third is out this December—his nameless anti-hero returns to face his, and our, sins and demons, not a few of which are the result of climate change.

The battered and hopefully retired assassin and detective is living the life of a geriatric, if highly augmented, stay-at-home father to his precocious nine-year-old, Ascalon, while his younger super-cop wife heads off to the office every day. They’re doing all right in a world of brutal inequality ruled by The Money—they’re Less Thans, but at least they’re not Zeros.

What holds the world together is faith and a miracle made visible—a “Scar” of light that was carved permanently into the stratosphere by the laser invented by Akira Kimura that saved mankind from an asteroid. It’s become a religious symbol and shrine. Kimura’s a saint—one beatified in blood in Book One, Midnight, Water City, which opened with her murder. Once Kimura’s bodyguard, our narrator tracked and was tracked in turn by the killer, who turned out to be none other than Kimura’s own Frankenstein-like, power-hungry daughter. At book’s end, after turning down her offer of gene-enhanced immortality, he destroyed her.

A thrilling sci-fi noir, Midnight made numerous Best Of lists, including Newsweek’s. Eventide opens with a stunning scene that combines Terminator, Genesis and Hawai‘i’s own cosmological chant, the Kumulipo. Then the Scar vanishes.

Its disappearance is a worldwide crisis of faith, possibly leading to societal breakdown. After all, what do you do if your savior is revealed to be some sort of deep fake?

That’s some of the story up to the point where Chapter 7 of Eventide, Water City, begins, as our guilt-plagued father seeks shelter for his family from the feared apocalypse to come. His host, patron and friend is one of the richest men in the world. But little does they suspect that his daughter, named Ascalon after The Scar, has already been contacted by evil in the form of the return of the long-dead daughter of Akira Kimura.

It's a resurrection of the wrong kind, and that’s where we come in. 

Time to buckle up for McKinney’s latest acute visionary diagnosis and prognosis for our Islands and planet. Wildly inventive yet disciplined as a sonnet, at times hilarious to the point of camp, like Mad Max at a hukilau, Eventide, Water City busts its seams with dryly mordant dialogue and crisp scientifically worked-out observations that resonate in today’s economic and climate disaster Thunderdome.

---

Chapter 7

---

From above, Akeem’s estate looks like a spiral of crop circles cut into an endless, unplowed field of ocean.

I land in the center, on the highest floating tower. Ascalon likes when we come to Akeem’s. His manmade islands include reefs, channels, and underwater tunnels that lead to replicated wrecks of some of the great naval vessels in history. To the north, in a wide channel, RMS Titanic. To the south, Santa Maria. To the southwest, the Yamato. And in the furthest, deepest bottom, Space Shuttle Challenger. Akeem’s up to ten great- grandchildren now, and all of them love the water, too. I hit the tarmac, and Ascalon is out the door, oblivious to her mother’s “no water for one week” rule, no concern over the missing scar in the sky.

I, on the other hand, get out and look up. Just can’t help it. My eyes are searching for Ascalon’s Scar, but it’s simply not there.

I hear heavy mech footsteps approach, and I level my gaze. Akeem’s heading over, wearing a haul suit, an exoskeleton powered by motors and actuators full of electronics and horsepower. We have a suit for everything nowadays. Work, radiation, hauling, space, hydronauting, war—I’ve worn them all at one time or another. Akeem’s suit, of course, state-of-the-art. He’s carrying a grand piano over his head, one-handed.

“Pork Chop!” he says. He likes to call me Pork Chop because I’m now an ex-cop. “Do you . . . see anything up there?”

“Nada,” I say. “Nothing green. No murder up in the skies.”

“Whew,” he says.

I look at the antique piano. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m moving stuff to my apocalypse sub.”

 “You’re putting a piano in there?”

“Well, yeah. What good is surviving without live music?”

 I bet Akeem has a whole lot of stuff packed in his impregnable underwater cruise capsule. Most of The Money have some kind of end-of-the-world contingency plan. Aside from the aforementioned thing, Akeem also has weapons, med bots, blood, artifacts, cigars, and organs. He even let me stash Ascalon’s spare organs here, too. Sabrina and I can only afford to fund spares for one of us, so we picked Ascalon instantly.

Akeem’s probably got multiple suits of each kind stashed in his apocalypse sub, as well. He once told me that the sub can fly, too, just in case. I don’t know if I buy that. Sometimes he likes to lie a bit to see if people are really listening to him.

Akeem puts the piano down. Random notes rattle. “I got my entire family coming in,” he says.

“All of them?” He nods.

“Thanks for including us,” I say.

“You kidding? You’re family, too, Pork Chop. By the way, your daughter just whizzed by me, heading for the dive gear.”

“Dammit.” I ping Ascalon a TtT—thought to text—for emphasis. no water. one week. Sending the TtT makes me think about that message in my inbox. A big message, voice and holo rolled into one. It’s really itching at me, but I don’t wanna open it, even if it is really her.

Ascalon pings me back. I accept the TtT. i want to see if it’s still there.

“What?” I respond in voice to demonstrate that I’m serious. “The red, Daddy!” she says out loud to show that she’s serious, too.

I cringe and look at Akeem. His brow furls. I resend Ascalon the same TtT. no water. one week. She seems to get that I’m putting my foot down and doesn’t reply.

“The red?” Akeem asks. “You sure you’re not holding out on me?”

“Nah,” I say, not wanting to divulge any information. I grab one side of the piano and motion Akeem to get the other side. “Just some incident she had in the water.”

Akeem eyes me suspiciously then changes the subject.

“Sabrina coming?” he asks.

We pick up the piano. I shuffle backward. My back already aches. “Work,” I say.

“So, what do you make of all this?” he asks. “The light going out?”

I take careful, baby steps back. “I don’t know, man. Not my case.”

“Fair enough. Now, put this damn thing down before you hurt yourself. I got it. I’m taking it to the lobby.”

You know you’re The Money when your house has a lobby. “I thought it was going to the bunker?”

Akeem hoists the piano over his head. The actuators of his haul suit whirl. He carries it like it’s a serving tray. “Are you kidding? No piano, just my fiddle, so I can play while it all burns around me.”

I follow Akeem as he makes his way to the lobby. “What’d the president say?” I ask. Presidents now got more puff than ever since the two-party system died, and The Money, the ones as rich as Akeem anyway, got private access.

Akeem pauses. The Money and their inexhaustible connections. The question embarrasses him. “She isn’t answering my pings,” he finally says.

“So, I guess you’re taking this seriously.”

I eye the piano and wonder why rich people love old shit so much. My guess is that surrounding themselves with historically relevant stuff makes them start feeling historically relevant, too. The Money internalizes the shit around them, just like the Less Thans, just like the Zeroes.

Making our way down the concourse, we pass crates of explosives, old stuff from his days of geothermal exploration. I get another ping, one that says the sender is Akira Kimura once again. I’m about to turn off my iE, but Ascalon pings.

“Daddy?” she asks in voice. 

“What?”

“Do you hear the music?”

I look up at the piano’s rattling keys. “Yeah,” I say. “It’s dinner time.” I turn off my iE.

It’s late by the time we get settled in. Ascalon and I got our own top floor villa in Akeem’s architectural re-creation of the Julius Tower at Caesar’s Palace. When Akeem was young and poor, his first trip to the continent was to New Vegas. He could only afford to stay downtown, but he walked the Strip and fell in love with Caesar’s. After casinos, with their anti quated slot machines and table games, were slowly replaced by the more interactive VR sports arenas, he decided to build this homage to the old world with his residuals. He still gets a cut of all the utility fees everyone pays to his geothermal company to keep their lights on.

In bed I’m distracting myself with holo-projected memory games, side-eying my sleeping iE, which is mounted on a three-pronged pedestal on the nightstand. I try to concentrate on the game and flip holo hanafuda cards to create matches. 

What was with my memory lapse back on Skyscraper Island? I’ve had senior moments before, but nothing like that. Did the radiation at The Leachate fry my brain? Or did the years of astronaut-grade anti-anxiety med abuse finally catch up to me? I think I forgot to take my medicine. 

I put the hanafuda away. Fuck it. I turn on my iE, and it floats in front of my face. I look outside the door, across the suite, toward Ascalon’s room. Quiet. We’re gonna nano her first thing in the morning. Maybe I should get nanoed, too.

If the mind were a sponge, mine would be a dried-out Porifera bleached by the sun. The mind always seemed more like an underwater city to me. Different districts and municipalities populated by unpredictable citizens. It seethes with emotion rationalized. Each building filled with its hierarchies, its hormonal plumbing. Its own sense of nationalism, own sense of self, and own suppressed downtrodden. There are bloody riots in the mind that reshape the whole thing. There are golden ages of realization and self-inflicted dark ones. There’s climate outside it, and it interacts. There’s a constant war between districts of neurons among near-forgotten ghettos and frontal cortex finance and culture. Each mind full of its own neurological revolutionaries, whose numbers are typically highest during puberty because the mind floods the plumbing. Then hormone production eventually fades. Cells stop splitting. Labor strikes. Ghost towns empty except for tumbleweeds of memory. And what’s left? An old man like me. A shell of lazy, dogmatic belief. Parenthood: the only thing keeping me going. A city produces or it dies. Just like the mind. 

I find myself reminiscing about war. Desert Storm 15, also known as Death Wish 5. It was 2080, and most of the world had had enough. It was time to get off fossil fuels once and for all. One after the other, governments had gone bankrupt because of climate change, only to be bought out by international corporations at bargain basement prices. Cities had begun to appear on lists like casualties of war.

Miami, Shanghai, Singapore, Lima, Jakarta, Manila. Delta cities and cities closest to the water got hit the hardest. NYC, Busan, Lisbon, and London, like the Dutch, had known that rising, warmer waters meant more storms and flooding in the north, so they embraced the idea of retooling infrastructure—building waterways, bridges, and heli platforms—and preemptively flooded their cities. In the US, the once grand hills and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, after being torched bald by wildfires, filled the horizon like crowns stripped of their jewels. In the South, tropicalization marched north, and migrating mosquitoes infected people with brain infections that were cooked further by heat waves. The last straw might’ve been the Great Plastic Hurricane of 2079. Waters off the Pacific Coast warmed enough for hurricanes to break through, and Los Angeles was assaulted by a storm packed with plastic ocean waste. It cut through the city and its people with deadly confetti of flimsy razors. The category seven storm surge so massive that it filled the SoCal earthquake cracks and left waterways that stretched into Nevada. These became known as the California Nevada Fingers.

So, by the summer of 2080, I’d been stationed in Saudi Arabia, and at first, it’d been an assassin vs. assassin war that smelled like cotton candy. Targets: Officers and Executive VPs. Mission: Sneak in, wait for satellite ID confirmation, see the green wafts glowing—even behind stone walls, but there’s nothing that synesthesia and a rail gun can’t punch through—zap ’em and run like hell. SEAL out of the hot zone and leave behind that smell of fairy floss.

I remember the mirrors—opponent snipers on the other side, some of them just kids. A girl of Ascalon’s age in particular. A girl I wanna forget but never can. She’d been wrapped in tri-color camo from head to toe. I didn’t know she was a child when I pulled the trigger. I sometimes ask myself if it would have mattered if I had known.

A few months after the girl, FLOTUS had been sniped while attending a celebration of the resurrection of the once-extinct Yangtze River Dolphin. When news of the assassination hit the feeds, we were ordered to fall back. At first, I was relieved—us pulling out meant no more killing for me. Then the drone and missile strikes began. Civilians, they mattered even less. We leveled once-venerable cities to the ground. My utility as a sniper wasn’t needed after that.

The conflict stopped being a war between government-funded shadow companies and corporate mercenaries. It became a quasi-civil war full of first strikes. One assassination ended all assassinations. On one side, the US war machine, on the other, freedom fighters and royals backed by international fossil fuel energy corps, including the US’s. The only way to get us off fossil fuel was to kill the global supply. We did that and then some.

It’s always about one life, isn’t it? One death? Reducing cause to one. It was then. It is now. I force myself to snap out of my daydream and decide to open the first message. I take a breath and notice that my hands are shaking. My hands never shake.

Akira’s automated voice. “Emergency protocol,” it says, in her smug, but polite tone. “Please open attachment.”

---

Copyright © 2023 Chris McKinney, from Eventide, Water City, published by Soho Press. Chris McKinney’s Eventide, Water City is book two of The Water City trilogy.

Image by Manson Yim.