“People!” Vlade said to them peremptorily. “This is a hurricane coming. A big one. Winds well over a hundred miles an hour.”
“So what do we do?”
“We have to storm-shutter all four sides. Otherwise we’ll get vacuumed. We should strengthen the shutters from behind too. We’ve got today to do it, looks like from the forecast.”
Heloise said, “We’ve only got enough shutters for two sides, maybe three.”
Vlade frowned. “Let’s do the south, east, and west walls.”
They got to work shuttering the farm’s tall open arches. This was no easy task, and few of them had ever done it, so Vlade had to educate people to the system. The panels were like greenhouse windows, translucent rather than transparent, and made of graphene layers such that they were extremely strong and light. While they were screwing these in place he kept looking south to see if he could see the storm, and talking on the wrist to the rest of his crew, all working hard on other chores. Around him he could see that all the skyscrapers in the city had crews engaged in similar work. It seemed like the skybridges were going to be vulnerable. The bridges were strong, but their attachments to their buildings would be tested. Probably a lot of docks were going to be torn off too.
With the farm shuttered, he attended to the strong possibility they were going to lose power. Their batteries were charged, generator fuel topped up, the photovoltaic sheathing and paint on the building as clean as it could be, and the storm would presumably wash it even cleaner. So even at the height of the storm the building itself would provide some power, as would the tide turbines down at the waterline. All good, but not enough. So Vlade joined a conference call with the local gridmaster, who was coordinating plans for various flex contingencies across the board, from total retention to complete loss, with the latter possibility taking up most of the talk. Who had what if they were the sole generators? Did anyone have enough to shove some juice back to the local node at the Twenty-ninth and Park station, which would then spread it around to those in need?
Well, not really. The worst-case scenario was every building fending for itself in a total loss, after the juice from the local station was drained. Hopefully that wouldn’t happen, or wouldn’t last for long. Every building was semi-self-sufficient, at least in theory, but it was surprising how short a time they could go without extra power. Take the stairs, eat cold food, light candles, sure, but what about sewage? What about potable water? Their photovoltaic power would have to be devoted to those functions, and maybe to one elevator.
But these were the concerns of people in a strong building, rated 80 or above in the self-sufficiency scales. The neighborhood was good in that regard; most buildings around Madison Square, and in the LMMAS more generally, were strong. But not all of them, and there were many other neighborhoods much weaker than theirs. And when push came to shove, the people in wrecked buildings were going to have to be taken care of, if they didn’t want hundreds of bodies fouling the canals. To put it at its most practical level. Vlade didn’t say that out loud, but other supers did; this was New York, after all. “If you die your body rots in my water supply, so get a fucking grip!”
This was a direct quote. He didn’t want to know who said it. Could have been anybody. He had already thought it. Everybody had.
Nothing to do but take care of your own part of the problem. As someone else had pointed out to that speaker. As in, “Mind your own business, fuckhead.”
A call came in: “Vlade, it’s Amelia.”
He was on the pigs’ floor above the farm; it was windy, the sky to the south a weird green, a green infused with black. He looked out a window and scanned the horizon to the southwest, saw nothing. Visibility was poor, a kind of pulsing murk. All air traffic had disappeared from the sky.
“Where are you?” he said.
“I’m outside the Narrows, over Staten Island.”
He peered that direction, saw nothing. “Why so slow?”
“I’ve been going as fast as I can! But now I can’t get any eastness, the wind is too strong from that way.”
“Damn it Amelia, this is going to be big, do you understand?”
“Of course I do, I can see it! I’m in it already!”
“Shit. Okay then, run north ahead of it. Don’t try to come here. Run north.”
“But it’s so windy!”
“Yeah. So if you can get down before it’s blowing too hard, get down. Anywhere. If the landing situation doesn’t look good, just let it run you north until it blows out. Don’t try to fight it. In fact, go as high as you can. Get above the turbulence, and you can just ride it out.”
“But I don’t want a ride!”
“Doesn’t matter what you want now, gal. You put yourself in this situation. At least you don’t have any bears on board. Or do you?”
“Vlade!”
“Don’t Vlade me! Deal!”
He got back to the building prep. Water tanks full, new lifestraw filters at their bottoms. They could keep water quality for a while with just rain and a gravity feed. Sewage tanks empty. Batteries charged, pantries stocked or at least not empty. Candles and lanterns. Test the generators, check fuel supplies. Get all the boats inside and racked. Empty the dock, and as far as securing the dock, well, shit. He joined the other Madison supers over on the Flatiron dock to talk it over. They were mostly in agreement: the docks were fucked. Best chance would be to tie them to buildings with hawsers that would give them a little bit more play than usual, but not too much. Hope they would just bounce on the waves and hold together. The supers on the north side of the bacino were aware that they were at the fetch of their little rectangular basin, so that their docks might serve as cushions for their buildings, take some hits from detritus—or they might turn into battering rams hammering the south exposures. Nothing to be done about that but see what happened.
The satellite photos showed that the leading edge of Hurricane Fyodor was eighteen miles south of New York.
“Let’s get everything we can off the farm floor,” Vlade said to his team. “Shutters or not. Move the plant boxes into the big elevators if they’ll fit. Leave them in the hallways downstairs. Also all the hydroponics.”
Idelba and her tug arrived, which was a relief, and when they were tied off on Twenty-fourth between the Met and North, he put her crew to work helping on the farm floor. He had tried to keep the plant boxes modular there, mostly for watering purposes, but now it turned out useful in another way, as they could detach square pot after square pot and fit them in the freight elevator. The hotellos were easy, they were basically tents, meant to move. The occupants were harder to move than the hotellos. “Where will we go? Where will we go?”
“Shut up and move. We’ll figure it out later. Go to the dining hall for now. Put your stuff here by the elevators.” The halls on the floors below were looking like a garden shop going-out-of-business sale, unexpected and unhappy. “Fuck,” Vlade kept saying. “Clean this shit up, come on, make sure there’s a throughway, what do you think?”
He ran into Idelba down at his office, when he was passing through to check the weather screen and his to-do lists.
“So where are those two kids?” Idelba asked.
Vlade felt his stomach drop. “Stefan and Roberto?”
“No, those other kids you take care of.”
“Fuck that, how should I know?”
She regarded him.