Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller

Author:Sam J. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-02-21T05:00:00+00:00

Soq

I should have fucking left. Stepped daintily over his stupid body while he was unconscious and stomped my ass out of here.

But Soq hadn’t left when the rich kid fell to the floor in front of them. Soq had rushed over, checked his pulse, gotten him a glass of water, sat with him for the sixty endless seconds it took him to wake up. Cradled his head in their lap, been kind and nurturing while the kid emerged from the brief infancy of post-unconsciousness.

Mostly, Soq told themself, because they didn’t want this little prick waking up alone, remembering Soq’s face, calling Safety on them, saying he got jumped by a home invader.

But now here they were, an hour later, sitting on the floor like kids at a sleepover in an old movie, drinking soda and eating krill chips delivered by slide messengers, debating where to get noodles from.

“You have to eat noodles in the first fifteen minutes,” Soq told Fill. “It’s just basic food chemistry. The heat is still cooking them, and in fifteen minutes they’re mush. We should go out to a stall somewhere.”

“I’ve never heard that,” Fill said. “And I don’t want to go anywhere. Let’s get them delivered.”

“Idiot, you can’t get noodles delivered. Are you not paying attention to me?”

The kid had a sense of humor, and some serious self-doubt, so the two of them got along great. Fill was less than a year older than Soq, and infinitely more naive about absolutely everything but sex, in which subject they were more or less evenly versed.

“I can get noodles delivered,” he said. “Watch.”

Fill dialed, promised a massive amount of money if they could have the noodles in his hands within five minutes of the moment they left the wok. Clicked off, smiling in triumph.

“Of course they’ll tell you it’s five minutes,” Soq grumbled, but Soq was also excited by his confidence, by the options that unlimited money opened up, by the previously unimaginable prospect of decent noodles being delivered.

“I guess we’ll know when we take a bite,” Fill said. “Since you’re such a noodle-quality fussbudget.”

“Yeah,” Soq said. “I guess we will.”

Turned out they were both obsessed with traffic trawling, following currents of attention to find the latest bubbling-up art and news being shared among Qaanaaq’s million subgroups. They compared bots, shared the software they both used to uncover new trends, swapped archaeology dubs and ancient Sunken World footage and the photo archives or instant messenger logs of long-dead strangers. Fill had the best programs money could buy, slick, swift, terrifying tools that turned up stuff that made Soq’s jaw drop, but Soq had gnarly, unpredictable Frankensteined software concoctions they’d found at the Night Market and Fill seemed just as excited by those as Soq was by his.

“This one’s a classic,” Soq said, flashing a file to Fill’s screen. “The Book of Jeremy. Do you know it? This gay guy, after his best friend, Jeremy, died—Jeremy was straight—he got into his email—Jeremy had given him the password—and deleted

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