Dark City

Thirty-six hours after the lights went out on three continents, Bao Tran rode down an alley in District 8 with the river up to his axles and four hundred vials of insulin in a cooler between his knees.

It was the second night of the dark and the first night of the king tides. In November the sea came up the Saigon river twice a month and walked into the low streets as if it had a key, and nobody in District 8 needed to be told. They had lifted their motorbikes onto tables and their rice onto wardrobes before sunset. What they had never done was wait for the high water without a single light in the city to see it by.

Bao rode by phone. It was clipped to his handlebars with the screen dimmed right down, and on it a map drew itself street by street out of nothing: green where somebody's phone had passed in the last ten minutes, grey where nobody had. Every phone in the city with Chạy on it passed the map to the next phone it could reach, a few dozen metres at a time, and the next one passed it on. The cell towers had died on the first afternoon, when their batteries ran out. Chạy had never needed them.

What it needed was power. On the first morning Bao had sent every rider he had to every clinic and pagoda with a generator, with power strips and a sign that said CHARGE HERE FREE, and the queues had not stopped since. On six rooftops across the city his riders had set up the satellite dishes he kept for flood season, each one running off a car battery, and those six dishes were the only thread between Saigon and anywhere else. Through them, a little at a time, came the rest of the world: Hanoi dark, Manila dark, Busan dark, half of Europe. In America, someone wrote, they were counting the votes by torchlight.

He had written the first version of Chạy in a room above a phone-repair shop in Tân Bình when he was twenty-six, to stop his riders getting lost in floods. Two million people had it now. Since the lights went out it had been the only network in the city that worked, and it had been free the whole time, because on the first morning Bao had looked at the numbers and switched the payments off before he could think better of it.

He was thinking better of it now. Fuel had gone to four times the price, and he had seventeen riders out.

The alley opened onto a canal road. On the far side a clinic ran on a generator, and its one lit window was the brightest thing for a kilometre. A nurse stood in the doorway with a torch in her teeth.

"How many, anh?" she said round it, before he had stopped.

"Four hundred. From the cold room in Chợ Lớn. The pharmacist says keep them out of the heat."

She took the cooler in both arms. Behind her, on plastic chairs along the corridor, people waited in the generator light with their feet up out of the water. A boy in a school uniform got up, holding his own glucose meter, and looked into the cooler as she opened it.

"Is it the cold kind?" he asked her. "Mine has to be the cold kind."

"It's the cold kind," the nurse said. Then, to Bao: "Who's paying?"

"Nobody." He reached under the cooler's lid before he let it go and peeled off the little black tracker he had taped there in Chợ Lớn. Every load he carried had one; it was how he knew which of his riders were honest. He put it in his pocket and was back on the scooter before she could thank him.

The radio on the clinic desk was saying what it had said since the first morning. A solar storm, the worst in a hundred and fifty years. Engineers working. Stay calm.

Bao had spent two nights reading what the engineers said to each other on Chạy, where they thought nobody was listening, and none of them said storm. The transformers were fine. The lines were fine. What had failed, all over the world, was the small grey box in every substation that told the power where to go. Every one of them had failed in the same minute, and the ones the engineers had opened would not start again: their memory was blank, as though they had never been programmed at all. Storms hit the poles, one of them wrote. Saigon is ten degrees from the equator. Nobody had answered him.

The job came in at midnight, through Chạy itself.

It looked like any other pickup, except for the price, which was ten times the normal rate in gold, and the note in the job box.

Cát Lái. Warehouse 9. Ask for Lâm.

Bao pulled over under a dead traffic light and read it three times. He had not been to Warehouse 9 since March 2030. Then he took the tracker out of his pocket and turned it over in his fingers.

In March 2030 he had been thirty-one and not sure yet that Chạy would survive. Gideon Ashe had found him in a café in District 1, sat down at his table, paid for his coffee and asked after his mother's roof.

Gideon was from Perth, and had run money for a fund in Singapore until the fund stopped existing. He wore cheap polo shirts and remembered the names of everyone's children. He had needed thirty crates of chips, for a customer who was expanding, moved from a warehouse at Cát Lái to a boat in the mangroves at Cần Giờ, at night, with no paperwork. It had to be somebody whose riders could tell him where every police patrol in Saigon was.

Bao had done it in four hours. On the jetty afterwards Gideon paid him in cash, and then, while they waited for the boat, took a coin out of his pocket and flicked it out over the water without watching where it went.

Three weeks later one of the riders on that job, a boy called Hiếu, had asked Bao loudly in a bar what had been in the crates. Within the month Hiếu had lost his licence, then his bike, then his room. Nobody had laid a finger on him. Gideon had sent flowers to his mother.

Bao had hidden a tracker in the thirtieth crate, as he did with every load, though it was the first time he had wanted to know where one ended up. For two months it showed nothing interesting: a ship, the sea, a warehouse in Singapore. Then in May it woke for six minutes in a city he had to look up. Velle, in Korvane, on a coast at the bottom of the world. Then it went silent for good.

He had told himself that chips were chips, and that a country was allowed to buy them. He had paid for his mother's roof, and he had not thought about Velle again, except sometimes at four in the morning.

Lâm met him at a warehouse at Cát Lái, the same one, with its shutters half down and a generator coughing in the back. He was a neat man of fifty in a pressed shirt. In 2030 he had still worn a customs uniform, and Bao had watched him wave thirty crates past without opening one.

"Mr. Ashe sends his regards," Lâm said. "He asks after your mother's roof."

"Is he here?"

"Mr. Ashe is never here." Lâm smiled. "One crate this time. Same route as before. To Cần Giờ, the same jetty. The boat leaves at slack water, a little after four."

"What's in it?"

"Relay hardware."

"Then take it in your car."

"There is a curfew," Lâm said patiently, "and there are police on every bridge, and my car is a car." He laid a small bar of gold on the crate lid. "Half now. They tell me only Chạy knows which roads are dry tonight."

Bao looked at the gold and thought about Hiếu.

"All of it now," he said. "Not half."

Lâm considered him, and then took a second bar from his shirt pocket and laid it beside the first, as if he had expected to.

It was not the gold, or not only. Bao had carried thirty crates for Gideon once and found out where they went two months too late. If he said no tonight, somebody else would carry this one, and he would never know what had been in it. He could feel the tracker in his pocket, the size of a fingernail, against his leg.

He lashed the crate to the frame of his heaviest bike himself.

The road south to Cần Giờ ran fifty kilometres through water and mangrove. The ferry at Bình Khánh had stopped with the power, so Chạy found him a fisherman with a flat-bottomed boat who took the bike across for a fold of Bao's own cash, and after that it took him round every checkpoint on the far side. Twice he cut his lights and sat in the dark at the edge of a flooded field while a police boat went by on the canal with its searchlight sweeping the reeds. The tide was falling now. The mangroves stood up out of it on their roots, black against black, and the mud made a soft ticking noise as the water left it.

The jetty was empty. The boat was not due for forty minutes.

He sat on the crate. He thought about Velle, and about Hiếu's mother and her flowers. He thought about the boy in the corridor holding his glucose meter as if someone might take it.

Then he took the screwdriver from his pannier, worked two nails loose along one side of the lid, and lifted the corner far enough to get his phone's torch inside.

Grey foam. Then rows of flat grey boxes standing on their edges, each the size of a hardback book, forty-eight of them, sealed in antistatic bags. On every one the same small lime-green mark and the same printed label.

LUMEN SILICON · GC-7 GRID CONTROLLER.

He knew the name. Everyone on Chạy knew it by now. For a day and a half the engineers had been asking one another the same thing in a dozen languages, passed from rooftop to rooftop across the dark. Did anyone have a spare GC-7. Did anyone know where one could be found. Nobody had replacements. Lumen's own factories had no power to make them.

He moved the torch down the side of the nearest bag until it found the packing slip, tucked into a clear sleeve.

PACKED: 2032-10-25.

He took the tracker out of his pocket and pushed it down into the foam between two of the boxes, as deep as his fingers would go. He pressed the nails back into their holes with the heel of his hand.

Out on the water, coming up the channel without its running lights, an engine.