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Here Instead of There

By Elizabeth Bear

Waking up sick in a punk house shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody so I don’t know why it always came as a surprise to me. My head throbbed so bad I couldn’t tell the difference between the hangover, my sinus headache, and Kai pummeling their drumset over in the yacht hangar.

The Kai part also wasn’t unusual. The Crash’s drummer is our early riser. That’s the Devil’s pre-Hell punishment on us all. But even hungover, I never woke up with a head this full of pain.

Henry must have seen me twitch, because five people racked out between me and the galley all said “Oof!” in a row. Suddenly my arms were full of wriggling beagle mutt and stank. At least the sov-cit types who left this pod a wreck before we squatted in it didn’t leave it full of fleas as well as trash and feces. (I choose to believe that the feces were from a dog rather than a toddler.) And there aren’t any ticks this far from shore.

I thought about pushing Henry away, rummaging in my pack for some Tramadol, and going back to sleep, but Henry was standing on my bladder and I heard clattering in the kitchen.

If I was lucky, Miriam was up and there was about to be food happening. If I was unlucky, one of the dirtbag fugs dossing with us was raiding the last of the veggie chili without having kicked in anything to support the house.

(Not all dirtbag fugs, I know. Just the 10% that get my grind on the regular.)

Either way, I had to piss.

I staggered to my feet, guts playing marimba, room spinning. I managed to roll up my bag and pad without barfing. I needed to get some protein and electrolytes on board pronto.

The floorspace was wall to wall dirtbags, snoring, drooling, generally rendering the space impassable. Crash Pod living up to its house name, as usual.

Crash Pod. The dumbest available name. But I wasn’t going to tell Miriam that. It was on the long list of things I was never going to tell Miriam. Such as that looking at her made my chest ache.

Henry did his best impersonation of a minefield as I wove and stumbled to the head. I managed to only step on one dude’s elbow and he was too passed out to care. Henry stepped on all of them indiscriminately. Got one guy in the balls. Should probably trim his toenails.

Oh well.

The head was a pesthole and I was glad I didn’t need to take a dump. I stood as far from the bowl as possible while doing what I had to do. At least my aim was better than most. Then I did what the last three people should have done, and flushed.

It was nearly too late. Sewage rose to the rim of the bowl. I was lunging for the valve to shut off the flow when some obstruction gave and the whole mess swirled down into the septic tank with a rancid glorp. Bullet dodged, but for how long?

Probably time to figure out how to get that pumped out, which meant figuring out how to pay for getting it pumped out.

Miriam would get mad if I just opened the valves and let all the shit dump into the sea, which is how the previous inhabitants had handled things. And I had seven eighths of a climate science degree to argue with the oppositional defiance that told me to do it anyway, so I washed my hands and dry-swallowed that Tramadol, and some Pepcid too.

Henry wagged his tail at me from the doorway. In my mind, I could already hear the riot act Miriam was going to read us.

At least the galley didn’t smell like an orgy in the locker room of a sewage treatment plant. It smelled like vinegar and ginger, which suggested Miriam was making tsukemono.

A different organ did a backflip when I saw her. I bit my lip on a sigh.

“Wash your hands, Haf,” she said, as I peeked over the threshold.

“I washed them in the bathroom!”

“Sure and then you touched the faucets and the door handle, didn’t you?”

“I left the door open.”

She sighed like a much larger dog than Henry. Henry huffed in appreciation and went to sit at her feet and beg for radish slices. That dog. No loyalty.

“I looked in that head this morning. We’re going to have to have a Crash Pod house meeting about that. Haf. Wash your hands.”

Miriam has her own bedroom and her own en suite head. Since she’s basically the den mother for everybody and also the best guitarist I know, and she does most of the cooking, she earns her privacy. Also, there’s only so much sharing she can tolerate, even in a share house, and none of us want her to leave.

I washed my hands. “What are you making?”

Inane conversation was what I was making, apparently.

“Brown rice in the rice cooker. Daikon in sweet vinegar. Pickled turnips and kombu.”

I thought kombu was Japanese but what the fuck do I know? Maybe it grows in the Atlantic too. Maybe Miriam just picked some random edible algae off the stanchions and decided to call it kombu. I assume she knows what’s edible, anyway. She hasn’t poisoned or dosed us accidentally yet, though there was the mushroom incident. But that was on purpose.

I would fucking kill somebody for a chicken sandwich, which is how I know Sartre was wrong. Hell is a SeaBit full of vegan macrobiotic gluten-free punks. Who unfortunately were the best band I’ve ever been a part of.

And also, there was Miriam.

At least The Crash weren’t straight edge. Fuck, does straight edge even exist anymore? I met some straight-edge hippies once, and that was just weird.

My eyeball-throbbing intensified as—from behind the inadequately soundproofed hangar door—Kai hit a crescendo. I leaned my butt on the counter edge, suffering too much even to take my usual pleasure in watching the swing of Miriam’s black and acid purple hair or her efficient grace as she danced around the kitchen. She never tripped over Henry, no matter how hard he worked at being an obstacle.

“Can I have some? I’m starving.”

“It’ll be a couple of hours before it’s ready. Have some chili.”

I sighed and turned toward the fridge, which was probably worth more than some people’s cars. It was big enough to hold food for twenty people, or at least two corpses. Three if you used the freezer, but then you’d have to defrost it to get the body out again.

My hand closed on the handle. I tugged. It didn’t budge. I tugged harder.

The whole gigantic restaurant-sized edifice rocked on its little rubber feet.

“What the?”

“Don’t yank on that,” Miriam said, “You’re gonna break it.”

Henry jumped up helpfully and paddled with his paws against the scratched stainless finish. The screen on the front flashed Lock Engaged. “Did you lock this?”

She had come over to stand next to me. I held my breath so I didn’t bump her by accident. She shook her head.

“Shit,” I said. “We must have gotten another push update.”

She cocked her head and blinked at me with wide, fringed eyes. “What does that have to do with the fridge locking? It worked five minutes ago!”

“Yeah.” I sighed and pulled the kitchen console around. We kept it tucked up against the wall so drunk punks wouldn’t snap it off the stand by leaning on it.

“Can you make me some coffee? I probably have a half dozen bullshit glitches to fix. They want us to buy a new pod.”

“A new what?”

It was a good thing my fingers knew their way around the keyboard because my vision was still a little swimmy. I wondered if it was migraine aura. I wasn’t sure. I’d never had a migraine.

“SeaBit,” I said tiredly, “thinks you ought to buy a new SeaBit every three to five years or so. So they intentionally break the functionality of your existing one over time. You think the thing is wearing out, so you buy a new one. Planned obsolescence. No right-to-repair.”

“Well that’s some bullshit,” Miriam said. “Like rent-seeking but worse.”

“Subscription model housing,” I agreed.

She put the drop lid on top of her pickles, and two canning weights on top of that. “Joke’s on them though, since we didn’t pay for it in the first place. And you can hack it, right?”

The Crash is no Objekt 775 but we do okay. Even so, punk bands can’t usually afford their own seastead. Fortunately, anarchists are pretty good at building communities and rich seasteading advocates are terrible at getting along with each other, especially when it involves deciding who’s going to do the unpleasant jobs—or pay to have them done. And you’d be shocked what people with too much money will just up and walk away from if it’s inconvenient.

Maritime salvage laws still apply. Or so Earwyn, our rhythm guitarist and bunkhouse lawyer, says. I bet we’d lose if they took us to court, but nobody’s showed up to evict so far.

Could I hack it? Through the pain, I determined the extent of the problem. My turn to sigh. Henry flopped down on my foot for a nap. My head throbbed harder.

“Is there anything not in the fridge that I can eat?” I begged.

“Earwyn and Caspian took the launch in to town to dumpster dive. I guess they’ll be back in a few hours.” She sounded pissed and unhelpful. I didn’t think she was pissed at me.

I tried not to roll my eyes. Shelf-stable tofu stays good—or as good as it ever was— for years past the sell-by date and Earwyn always wants to dumpster dive the health food store. I knew what we’d be eating for the next week. Assuming we had any way to cook it. It looked like most of the pod’s appliances were fucked.

“Christ.” I pressed the heels of my hand to my eyes. “I need some electrolytes.”

“I’ve got some limeade with coconut water, turmeric honey, and cider vinegar. Also some cold coffee.”

“I’ll get the fridge working in a few minutes,” I promised. “Just keep the caffeine coming.”

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The limeade was actually pretty good, and along with the room-temperature coffee it eased the pounding. With the hangover easing up and Kai taking a break from drum practice, I could tell how much of the remaining headache was sinus pressure.

Sadly, a lot of it. I looked out the window, but the sky was cloudless except for a layer of stratocumulus undulatus, narrow parallel stripes lit gold from beneath by a gently setting sun.

The fugs were waking up, finally, dragging themselves out of their sleeping bags and into the galley in ones and twos. That let Miriam get most of the yelling out of her system (oh my head) and gave her an excuse to assign them all housekeeping chores in advance of breakfast.

“This is a punk house, not a plague pit,” she snarled at the last filthy underaged kid to drag herself out of her grimy doss kit. “Communalism doesn’t have to mean drowning in filth.”

“It’s a protest against Bourgeoisie standards of cleanliness,” the kid said haughtily, reaching across me for the coffee pot.

I kept my eyes on the screen, my fingers on the keyboard.

Miriam brushed her hand away. “You’re incubating VRSA. I refuse to let you trash this place worse than a bunch of neoliberals. You want a say in how this house is run, you need to contribute. I don’t want to live in filth, and the Pod needs upkeep or it falls into the sea. That is non-negotiable.”

The kid gaped at her. “Wow.”

Miriam’s eyes rolled so hard I almost heard them rattle. “Go snake out the shower drain, then you can have coffee.”

Not that we used the shower much. It was a salt-water shower, and it was just as easy to give yourself a whore’s bath with a rag when you started to itch and save the sticky skin. Some people didn’t bother with the whore’s bath, but—as Miriam said—their abscesses, their problem.

“Hah,” I said, as the refrigerator emitted a satisfying click. “And I’m in.”

Miriam lunged to yank the door open.

“You’ll let the cold out,” I said.

“It can make more cold. Will it stay unlocked?”

“Until the next time they break it. I convinced the firmware it was still 2043. It won’t be able to order groceries for us when we run low on caviar and smoked oysters—”

She snorted and pulled out the leftover chili. “Unlike some people, Haf, you have earned breakfast.”

---

The chili was fine. One nice thing about chili: it’s got so many spices in it, it doesn’t matter what you use as a base. It just tastes like chili. I missed the sour cream and cheese, though. And I had to hack the microwave before I could warm it up.

Miriam saw me poking mournfully at the food with my spoon. With the exasperation of a mindreader she said, “You’re the climate scientist. You of all people ought to be against eating animal products.”

“I am,” I assured her. “But my tastebuds are hypocrites. Anyway, I’m not a real climate scientist. I’m a washout.”

Acknowledging my pun was beneath her dignity. “Go mope someplace that isn’t my kitchen.” She pointed out at the deck.

I took my headache, my chili, and a second glass of limeade and went. Henry, the household’s only non-vegan, stayed behind to beg Miriam for scraps. I would have let him lick my bowl, too. And Miriam could have contended with the doggie bean farts.

I may be infatuated, but that doesn’t stop me from being petty.

For a while, we had somebody crashing here with a foul-mouthed parrot. A yellow-fronted Amazon. Now there’s an animal that really enjoys shitting all over everything.

I dawdled over the chili looking out at that sunset, which now glittered vermillion and crimson off the facets of a flat calm sea. A dozen other SeaBits spread on an arc to either side of the Crash Pod. One or two had been completely abandoned. One still had the original inhabitant in residence, though he only came out on weekends—which is how we kept track of when the weekends were. Our nearest neighbor, Doctor Ex, was on her deck, doing qi gong in the ruddy light.

I waved. She nodded.

I pushed the last few mouthfuls of food around my bowl, feeling both overstuffed and vaguely unsatisfied. If anybody but Earwyn and Caspian were doing the food run, there might be treats when the launch finished its 24-mile round trip to shore and back again. But Eowyn was a true believer, and the best I could hope for was overripe avocados whipped into a mousse with maple syrup and cocoa powder.

It’s better than it sounds, but it’s not actually chocolate pudding.

Maybe the next time we went in for a gig I could ditch everybody and get Popeye’s.

Whether it was the lack of drumming, thy hydration, the Tramadol, or the sea air, my pain was subsiding. Kai’s a good drummer, don’t get me wrong. I’m probably the worst musician in the group. Fortunately, I’m also the bassist, and if I’m not nimble-fingered I have extremely solid rhythm. A punk band doesn’t need to be fancy.

The Crash wasn’t fancy. Miriam and Caspian had picked the name, over my protests (too derivative) and I honestly thought it was just so we could call our house the Crash Pod (even worse).

Dr. Ex’s wife brought her out a beer and they hugged briefly, leaning on each other and looking at the sunset. For a moment, I felt the peace of the evening. The air was buttery and still. It smelled of clean salt and piña colada, which probably meant one of the fugs had spilled cheap coconut rum all over a deck chair. What is it with kids too young to drink legally and Malibu?

The doc’s wife went back inside. The doc wandered over to the rail with her beer and leaned on it. “Hey Haf,” she yelled.

“Hey doc,” I yelled back.

The doc is cool. She and her wife are out here past the ten mile limit because they run a secret illegal reproductive health clinic out of the pod on their other side.

Because I was looking at her and our weather station was in that direction, I noticed the orange light blinking on its panel.

“Oh, cheesenuts,” I muttered. I put the chili I was never going to finish on a deck chair.

Miriam would yell at me for wasting food, and Henry was still inside. But was it my fault if a gull stole it while I was investigating a potentially serious warning light?

My brain provided a brief unlikely fantasy of me saving the day, Miriam hailing me as a conquering hero, and the two of us consummating our long-denied passion for one another and penning a platinum album together based on the emotional catharsis. I rolled my eyes and went to inspect the weather station. That must have been one hell of a firmware update.

As expected, the thing was offline. Feeling pretty practiced by now, I performed my system clock trick. In a few minutes, the aerometer, barometer, and all the other ometers were back online. Except something was still wrong, because the barometric pressure was 940 ml: catastrophically low for a warm, mild summer evening. Center of a hurricane low, in fact.

Possibly it was pulling data from 2043?

“Hey, Doc,” I called. “Is your fridge working?”

“I think so,” she answered. “How come?”

“We got a push patch that has fucked up half our devices.”

“Oh, Elsie jailbroke both our pods when we moved in. They’re off the network entirely.”

Intelligent, considering what they did out here and how secret they needed to keep it. Smart houses spy on you. And it’s not like the Coast Guard has ever respected civil rights or the ten mile limit when they’re in hot pursuit of whoever they consider criminals.

“Have you looked at your instruments today?”

“I wouldn’t know how to read them.” She kicked the deck with a canvas sneaker. “We have a weather app.”

“Aren’t we a little off the grid for that to be viable?”

“It’s all satellites, right? Isn’t it the same stuff shipping is on?”

My face must have done a thing, because she laughed. “Oh right, Miriam said you were nearly a meteorologist. You must be killing yourself not to lay some deep nerdery on me.”

“Miriam should mind her own business.”

I felt bad as soon as I said it. Feeling bad made me want to bluster more. It was nobody’s business why I was playing bass and hacking firmware in a squat. Why I was here instead of there.

I knew enough about there to know which place I’d rather be.

Doc was still looking at me, eyebrows raised. Amazing how well you can see somebody through dusk on water, when your eyes have adapted. The air goes full of light.

Like a held breath, for an instant.

“Sorry,” I said, stepping on all my adolescent impulses. “Can I come and look at your weather station?”

I expected her to say, “No,” because I had just bitten her head off. Instead she gave me one of those inscrutable pursed-lip expressions middle-aged people use when they’re trying not to condescend and failing. Then she pushed the button to send the catwalk over.

---

I re-entered the galley some time later. The nightly party must have gotten rolling again while I was outside, as soon as everybody decided they’d done barely enough housework to placate Miriam. I felt muffled, isolated behind a wall of dire news. I moved through the raucous crowd like a floating island of anxiety adrift in a sparkling, crashing sea.

Miriam wasn’t in the galley. She wasn’t in her bedroom. She was in the practice room and concert space—the old yacht hangar that we’d floored over with salvaged plywood and absolutely no regard for building codes—with Kai, tuning her guitar. They were laughing. The smiles fell off both their faces when they got a look at mine.

“I need to see you both outside right now.”

Kai got up from their stool without a word. Miriam put her axe back in the stand. They followed me out the double doors to the outside and we all jumped the railing to reach the deck. The sun was just closing the curtains on its vanishing act. The sky was as bloody as a Nick Cave song.

“Pretty sunset,” Kai said, shaking back their dreads. “Sailor’s delight.”

“Yeah,” I said, “about that.” And I pulled out my phone and showed them the data I’d hacked out of Doc’s weather app, the barometric pressure, the shift off the prevailing winds.

“What does that mean?” asked Miriam.

My voice shook. My hands shook. In the pit of my stomach, ice rattled like dice. “We’ve got a big fucking problem.”

I switched images and showed them the satellite images from the National Weather Service that I had cracked and illegally downloaded. Water vapor, visible light, infrared. Then the weather radar. Then the drone probe and buoy data.

A Brobdingnagian swirl of clouds and moisture and heat, with a glaring, perfect eye. A spiral like Fibonacci’s own gate to Hell.

“That’s Kasimir,” I said. “It’s a category 6. And it is going to hit us at about three o’clock this morning.”

“But—” Kai pulled out their phone and looked at it. Shook it like they could shake some sense into it and the missing notification out. “Shouldn’t there be a warning?”

“Do you pay for a premium weather service?”

Kai stared like I had grown an extra mouth and was talking out of it. “A what now?”

“Michaelson vs. the State of Vermont,” I said. “The Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for the government to compete with private industry in providing any service. Such as transportation, healthcare, prison services . . . and weather alerts.”

“Fuck,” said Miriam.

Somehow, I managed not to put my arms around her. Not because she looked like she needed a hug. Because I needed a hug.

“The hurricane is paywalled,” I said, just to have it out loud. “If you don’t pay for the subscription, you don’t get the emergency alerts.”

Kai shook their head. “How do they get away with paywalling a hurricane?”

“How do they get away with anything?” I said bitterly. “They just do it.”

“Earwyn and Caspian are going to be on their way back when it hits,” Miriam said, at the same moment Kai said, “Can we evacuate in time?”

(Continued in Part 2…)

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Host Commentary

By Valerie Valdes

Once again, that was part one of Here Instead of There by Elizabeth Bear. The story will be concluded next week.

A lot of us dream, at least occasionally, of abandoning civilization, going off the grid, and living with like-minded people who want to support each other instead of grinding, hustling, and climbing corporate ladders. Much easier said than done, of course, as this story shows us. Underlying that urge, I think, is a desire to feel more in control of our lives when the constantly changing world is spinning us around like a teacup ride. If we can’t stop the ride, maybe we can just get off, and surely that will fix all our problems? But no matter how much we isolate ourselves, no matter how hard we work to survive on our own, we ultimately discover that there’s no such thing as true independence. Even if we step away from one ride, we’re still stuck at the carnival of life with everyone else. Even if we leave dry land behind and become our own islands, all it takes is one massive, unavoidable storm to remind us that we haven’t left the world, we’ve only temporarily changed our relative position on it. So what can we do? Find out next week.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please do share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Ursula K. Le Guin, who said: “We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”

Thanks for joining us, and may your escape pod be fully stocked with stories.