“About three thirty.”
“Fuck, Toby. Seriously?”
“Sorry, man. Just thought you’d want to know; we heard back from the Zodiac.”
“Really?” Rush props himself up on one elbow. “And?”
“All clear. Simon is taking us in.”
“Shit. Okay. I’ll be down.”
“Don’t take too long, man. You need to see this fucking parking lot. Unbelievable.”
Even with dawn breaking it’s still dark out. Rush throws a sharp beam of yellow light across the bridge when he enters, extinguishing it as quickly as he can by shutting the door behind him. As endless shifts on night watch have taught him, it’s vital to keep the bridge dark—the only light the dim green glow of the few still-working LCD displays in night mode—so that the crew’s eyes adjust to staring across the ocean at night.
Simon looks back from the captain’s chair to glance at him, flash him a quick smile, before his attention returns to the world outside, to quietly but firmly speaking orders to the last of his Filipino crew, as they gently maneuver the Dymaxion past the vast black bulk of a dead CGM Line container ship.
“Jesus Christ.”
“That’s nothing, mate. You should have seen what we passed on the way in.” Simon rubs his hands with theatrical glee. “We could spend a month just scavenging this lot, and still not be done.”
“A month?”
“Yeah.” Simon meets Rush’s glare, the glee dropping. “I mean, I’m sure it won’t take that long. To get what we need. Parts and stuff. Like a week. Two tops.”
“Right. Sure.”
The CGM ship, quarter of a million tons of steel and abandoned cargo, dwarves them as they slip past. As Rush’s eyes adjust to the night he sees Toby wasn’t bullshitting him. The CGM ship isn’t alone; there looks at first glance to be dozens of container ships parked here, just a few miles off the coast of Ningbo port, all abandoned by their crews when the networks died, as the algorithms in Copenhagen and Beijing that guided them fell silent. Ningbo was, for decades, one of the world’s busiest ports, and ships would have been anchored here for days on end at times, waiting their calculated turn to glide in and be filled with the material existence of global capitalism. Rush tries to imagine what it must have been like here in those last few days, the last few weeks—crews waiting patiently on their vast vessels for instructions that never came, nursing anonymous cargoes, clueless as to what was happening. He wonders when the restlessness must have set in, when the anxiety must have become too much. What the rumors must have been. When the mutinies must have started.
“Toby said you’d heard back from the Zodiac?”
“Yeah. Yeah, all clear, man. Even a free berth for us. We can slip straight in, apparently.”
“No signs of life?”
“Not much, from the sounds of it. Few scavengers in the stacks, just the usual.”
“‘Just the usual’?”
Simon looks at him. “It’s fine, man. Nothing to worry about.” He slaps him playfully on the arm, turns his attention back to piloting.
Rush sighs, shakes his head. Simon. Simon fucking Strickland. Nothing to worry about.
Just days before everything went to shit, Rush had heard from Simon, a suitably cryptic e-mail appearing in his in-box. Simon, his wavelength ever tuned to the near future, had guessed something was up, had seen the patterns emerging in the flows of goods and data that made up the supply chains he obsessed over. But watching the news and markets wasn’t enough for him—he was an ethnographer at heart, and he needed to be out there, watching the collapse from within. His plan was to take the Dymaxion out for what might well be her final voyage; one last orbit around the world to watch global capitalism collapse in real time.
For Rush the timing was perfect. Like everything else, the airlines had stopped running, the airports ground to a halt. The Dymaxion might have been going in the wrong direction—taking literally the longest way around to where he wanted to go—but it was the only chance he could see of getting there, of getting back to Scott.
So less than a month later they were steaming out of Dover and along the English Channel, as aging RAF fighter jets streaked overhead toward a French coast that erupted in the low booms and lightning flashes of dropped ordnance, on an apparent adversary in some secret war the U.K. public knew nothing about. They rounded Portugal and Spain as the glow of burning cities lit the horizon, and picked their way through a Mediterranean filled with flotillas of refugees, as many of them trying to flee a collapsing Europe as reach it.
Simon had, largely, held it together while they watched the world collapse around them. In the Suez Canal he’d successfully bargained for their safe passage after the ship had been boarded by militia, three terrifying hours spent on their knees at gunpoint under a fierce Egyptian sun, while Simon negotiated with their leaders behind closed doors. Rush has no idea what he said, what he gave them, or what promises he made, just that he reappeared looking exhausted and shaken. He barely spoke to Rush or any of the crew for two days. But they got out of the canal without being stopped again, just waved through by gunmen at every checkpoint, shaken up but alive. The crew, mainly Filipinos and southern Indians, always joke that Simon is their lucky charm, some blundering, haphazard talisman that always comes out on top. The crazy, lucky bastard, they call him.
But that time nobody was laughing.
Rush slips out the sliding door on the starboard side of the bridge, breaking out of the air-conditioned chill as the humidity hits his skin hard, sweat instantly appearing along his arms. He leans against the weathered balcony railing. The sky is lightening, revealing dark, ominous structures against the blue. The vast steam stacks of a shuttered power plant tower above the port like an abandoned fortress, dead ever since the stream of bulk carrier ships laden with coal had dried up. Ningbo was one of China’s many input/output gates, Rush remembers reading somewhere—the rest of the world sent ships full of coal here, and in return got back ships full of cheap consumer goods. This was why the supply chains existed, in order to make transactions that logic dictated were most efficient on local scales work on global ones, through sheer size, brute force, cheap labor, and global inequality.
Simon comes out and joins him on the balcony, and with his first mate they fire up the outside docking-control panel, guiding the huge ship sideways into the berth on submerged aft thrusters. Simon peers over the side, trying to judge the distance.
“Fuck, can’t see shit.” He grabs the walkie-talkie from his belt. “Guys, need some light.”
Almost instantaneously a chain of small bright suns flare into existence along the quayside as the recon crew of the small inflatable Zodiac motorboat ignite their preprepared flares, plumes of white smoke billowing across the asphalt shoreline. The flares themselves are too bright to look at directly without singeing his retinas, but Rush stares past them, the flickering light revealing elaborate Chinese symbols and road markings stenciled in yellow on the concrete floor. Beyond that the stacks rise, thousands upon thousands of shipping containers, piled six stories high in neat lines, a seemingly unending field that stretches almost to the horizon, where it meets with apparently deserted apartment blocks. Up until the crash Ningbo was a city that existed just to fill and move these containers, and when that ended there must have been little left for its population to do. Nobody from outside knows how the crash must have gone down in China, but Rush imagines the cities hollowing out, the tower blocks emptying of confused people and the great Chinese migration reversed as they headed back into the countryside in search of family, food, and answers.