Shouts from the decks below and bursts of radio static. Ropes are thrown out, the Zodiac crew busies itself tying up the ship. Rush still stares out across the box city, though, silent in the morning light. He goes through this every time they pass one of these ports, regardless of the continent—transfixed by the sight of capitalism on pause, the secret network that kept the world running mothballed and abandoned.
His train of thought is interrupted by a huge burst of light above them. One of the Zodiac crew has climbed the top of the vast, five-hundred-foot-high super-post-Panamax crane that towers above and over them, and lit a flare. As it’s slowly waved back and forth it scatters light across the crane’s vast skeletal frame, yet more smoke rising into the dark sky. It looks to Rush like an act of victory and defiance; like news footage of freshly liberated citizens climbing to the top of statues of their now-fallen dictators, to deface their heads and celebrate their liberty in that brief moment of joy before worrying what will happen next.
“Haha! It’s Chris! The crazy fuck!” Simon yells and waves excitedly back. “Chris! CHRIS!”
Rush shakes his head, but gets why they’re so excited. Despite spending the last couple of weeks skirting around the mega-ports of the South China Sea, they’d never managed to come into harbor anywhere. You can’t just dock a huge fucking container ship like the Dymaxion by the shore and walk off—and perhaps unsurprisingly most of the suitable berths at the ports were filled with abandoned ships. Apart from the Zodiac crew, who went ahead and scouted out the ports in their little inflatable speedboat, nobody from the Dymaxion had set foot on Chinese soil as yet on this trip. Which had been the root of huge frustration and anxiety for Simon; Rush had seen it eating him up, the usually unfazed and endlessly enthusiastic figure reduced to pacing the bridge during the day, moping in his office at night. It was, of course, the main reason for this whole elaborate mission, for the last four months they’d spent risking their lives at sea: to take a container ship halfway around the world and back up the global supply chain. It wasn’t the first time Simon had done it—he’d taken the Dymaxion up the chain at least once a year, to Rush’s knowledge—but it was the first time he’d done it since the crash. The first time he’d done it since global capitalism had collapsed, since the vast data networks that managed the ships and ports had vanished, and since the algorithms that decided what you wanted to buy and then brought it halfway around the globe from a Chinese sweatshop to the shelves of your local store had burned in the data fires along with the rest of the digital age.
It had all been building up to this for Simon, Rush realized. Decades of studying and picking apart the supply-chain networks—their vast spaces, both digital and very real—and now what he really wanted was to see them dead. As endlessly intoxicating as they were in their scale and grandeur, he could see Simon had grown disgusted by them; by the endless money and labor that had been piled into what was history’s greatest engineering achievement. The pinnacle of human effort had been to create a largely hidden, superefficient, globe-spanning infrastructure of vast ships and city-size container ports—and all to do nothing more than keep feeding capitalism’s hunger for the disposable. To move plastic trash made by the global poor into the hands of hapless, clueless consumers. A seemingly unstoppable beast built from parasitic tentacles, clenching the planet with an iron grip.
On his previous, precrash voyages Simon had ferried dozens of architects, designers, journalists, and futurists on the Dymaxion—all the hip infrastructure tourists, ready to pay him thousands so they could see it all firsthand, so they could ooh and aah at the Apollo-project levels of human engineering, so they could be wooed by this moonshot built to fill shopping malls. They’d spend a few weeks on the ship, staring out at the fields of containers in awe, before returning home to their speculative models, VR art installations, and thousand-word prose-poem odes to post-Panamax cranes. But Simon had started to hate it all. It had silently consumed him with anger and fury at its extravagance, its wasted potential, its inhuman cost. This, Rush was sure, was why this final voyage was taking place. Simon wanted to see it dead. He wanted to make sure, while the rest of the world crumbled, that it was crumbling too, and that it couldn’t come back to life, that it couldn’t start up again and reanimate the globe-consuming consumerist beast it had grown and fed. Simon wanted to see it dead, and to know he had outlived it, as though that meant he’d had some personal role in its defeat.
And, right there at that moment, as Simon excitedly barked instructions over the radio to his skeleton crew, Rush felt it too. For the first time since that rooftop back in Bristol, he felt that unlikely rush of victory, like they’d actually done it, the impossible destruction of the machines that were eating the planet, that they’d spent their whole lives raging against. They’d done it. They’d slain the beast. They’d won.
“How long we going to sit here, man? Really?”
Simon looks up at him from the charts and printouts that spill across his desk, scratches his head with the chewed end of a biro. “Seriously, Rush, don’t fucking worry, yeah? It’s just a minor technical difficulty. We’ll be moving in no time.”
“We’ve been here three days.”
“It’s not a problem. Engine room’s working on it. Just give it a couple of hours.”
“I hope so. When I signed up for this I didn’t think it was going to end with me dying of scurvy in the middle of the Pacific.”
Simon laughs. “Scurvy? What the fuck? There’s a reefer full of frozen orange juice out there.”
“Simon, we picked that up in Yemen. We finished it all off before we cleared Japan.”
“Really? You sure?” He starts to rummage around in his unknowable mess of papers. “I’ve got the manifest here somewhere…”
Rush sighs, shakes his head, watches Simon submerged in paper chaos. A single drop of sweat runs off his forehead and onto a chart showing the positions of the Pacific’s WWII munitions dumping grounds. Since the engine stopped the AC has been packed in, too, and it’s getting hot on the ship. He heads out on deck to grab some air.
The Pacific is flat, tame-looking. He hopes it stays that way. He’s spent the last few months keeping busy learning what he could about the weather radar—it was the only storm warning they had now, since the trickle of data from the satellites had finally dried up. At least the GPS signal seemed, for now, to be stable.
He leans against the railing, looks out across the mainly empty container hold, down into the still water. The ship feels deserted. It’s meant to have an operational crew of eighteen, and they’re down to just seven now. There’d been more than forty of them when they’d started—academics, futurists, some of Simon’s filmmaker friends, and a bunch of his students—but they’d lost most of them along the way. The biggest loss came when they stopped over in Sri Lanka, a blissful three weeks they spent on beaches and in jungles that ended in screaming and mutiny. A large contingent refused to get back on the ship, wanting to stay in paradise, to see out the end of civilization from the beach, surrounded by fresh fruit and curry. Rush could hardly blame them.
Something down in the Dymaxion’s bowels rumbles, her heavy steel skeleton groaning around him. Rush looks up and sees a puff of black diesel exhaust leap from the smokestack. He smiles, exhales, and the radio on his belt erupts into static burst and the sound of cheering and chatter, and amid it all he hears a screeching Simon shout, “Full steam ahead!”