Late 22nd Century

I stopped and stared. There was an owl perched over the doorway to my apartment building and it was the middle of the day. Owls were common at night but during the day they were always in the parks. The environmental changes wracking the city were creating chaos. Suddenly it dived. To my left a nomad rat jumped a good six feet in the air making a hissing sound as it did. I thought owls couldn’t see well in the daylight but I guess it could hear the sound because it easily adjusted it’s flight path and closed it’s talons around the nomad. Nomads were a breed of rat that supposedly originated from the common wharf rat. Contrary to myth they were not named for their mobility and leaping proficiency. Nomads were named for North Madison, a region of the city that didn’t exist anymore but had been called Nomad itself. In typical fashion ‘nomad rat’ just became ‘nomad.’ A New Yorker would know what you meant. I sighed, ignored it, and just went in, my lunch fixings for several more days in my backpack. No one greeted me as I walked through the large empty lobby beautifully presented in Art Deco. I was very proud of it. Only the huge delivery lockers disrupted the period presentation.

The worst thing about living in New York City is how empty and quiet it is. I didn’t regret not leaving. I love the city, especially the buildings. I’d made it my career. But, when the World Heritage Plan had been ratified they said Phase 1 would be voluntary and last a hundred years. That had been barely fifty years ago. Tokyo, London, and many of the other transition cities still had healthy populations. New York was a ghost town and we were dismantling empty buildings faster than anyone had planned and had other buildings to preserve. This meant more work for a small group of urban preservationists which included me. We had funding approved for more positions but no one qualified applied.

I missed having some company. My mother would ask me about dating and each time I replied that there have to be women to actually date. The average age of women left in the city could politely be called older. However, the truth is that I didn’t begrudge it that much. I was of average height, thin only because I forgot to eat, and had the personal grooming habits of a punk musician without the excuse of creative expression. So, even when people had been around I hadn’t been getting laid. I lived for my work as an urban preservationist.

My apartment was on the 20th floor of the Flatiron building. When I was a kid you would still have had to pay a lot of money to live here, now it was free with a government grant which was handed out readily. One thing living here had certainly done for me was to strengthen my legs muscles. The elevator was out which meant everyone else lived on the lower floors. There was plenty of space but I insisted on the top floor. This is why I was surprised on the ninth floor to turn a corner and find myself staring at a pants clad posterior that looked wonderfully feminine.

My first impression of her was with her back to me, she had long red hair and was saying “god fucking damn it, fucking god fucking damn elevator not the fuck working...”. It was clearly a chant that had gotten her this far. I soon saw why as she stopped. She lowered from her arms a heavy black box any modern New Yorker knew well - a New York Municipal Domestic Battery Case or as we commonly called them “home bats.” They are large, heavy as shit, and usually, last an apartment for about a month. The old infrastructure for power distribution had been taken down and this was the intermediary step the city government had decided on. Most people had two and when one got low you turned it in a recharge center and picked up a fresh one. She was resting her arms with the home bat on the steps.

“Um, can I help you?” I asked.

That’s when she screamed, turned around, and fell backward on the steps. I got to see she wore glasses, had a cute face, and a piercing in her nose that was cut along with large hoop gold earrings. She looked to be about my age, mid-twenties. I had immediate fantasies of introducing myself suavely. That might have been premature since her greeting was, “WHAT THE FUCK!?”

I took the step below the one I had been standing on. Then one more.

“Hi,” I offered. I waved in a short little, I hoped, friendly gesture.

“Uh, hi.” She looked at me like she was trying to decide something. I hoped it didn’t involve a taser. I was hit by one by mistake once. It had hurt.

I introduced myself. “I’m Rainer, Rainer Fuller, though most people shorten it to Rain for some reason.”

“Helen.” She stood up and rubbed at her butt through the jeans. “Helen Eno.”

“Moving in?” Fuck, if she wanted an upper floor she wanted to be left alone.

“Yeah, 20th.” She looked at the home bat with disgust.

“Oh wow, we’re neighbors.”

She got an excited glint in her eyes, “You’re the one with the intersection apartment?”

“Yeah, I’ve been the only one up there.” She smiled in a way that made me feel a bit like a mouse exposed in the open. “Can I help you with that?” I pointed to the battery.

“Absolutely and I can’t tell you how much I’ve wanted to meet you.”

What?

A bit later the door opened ahead of me and I waddled in carrying the home bat along with my backpack.

“Here you go...” I sat it down next to two more home bats. “Wow, you like to be prepared.”

She smirked at me, those high cheekbones rising on her face. “Actually ... I need to bring three more up.”

I straightened my back. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do this haul. I did it once a month for my own after all but, six? “Why on this green Earth do you need six home bats?”

She put her hands on her hips and her red hair fell around her shoulders. “For work.” I looked around, there were a lot of boxes with stencils on the sides from equipment manufacturers that I vaguely recognized as being for various scientific instruments.

“What do you do?”

“Well ... have you ever heard of non-corporeal biological analogs?”

I chuckled. “No, but it sounds like ghosts.”

She put her hands up. “That would be awesome if I found ghosts! But ... there’s no research grants for ghosts so my hypothesis is a bit more restrained.”

“You’re ghost hunting under a grant reworded so it doesn’t sound kooky?”

She blinked. “Well, if anyone on the grant committee were to ask I’d say that a non-corporeal analog might be some form of life analogous to bacteria, unnoticed because it lacks awareness but which interacting with our nervous systems in a concentrated form could account for historical associations with spirits as living behavior was present if not human.”

Did I carry this bloody thing up these floors for this? “And let me guess, the equipment you’d use for this just happens to be what’s used for hunting other non-corporeal entities, i.e. ghosts.”

She smiled. “Hell, no, this is way more expensive stuff!”

All right, I’m lonely, not desperate, time to leave the crazy hot chick alone to ghost hunt. “Well, I gotta get going, glad I could help you with that.” I waved and turned toward the door.

“Hey!” I turned and she was digging through a bag on the floor and pulled up what looked like a bottle of vodka.

“Is that...”

“Uh-huh. I know someone who gets it in from St. Petersburg even though they’re not allowing production here.” She waved it around. “But I don’t have any glasses just yet ... so how about a trade, you supply glasses and I supply ... the spirits.” She was obviously pleased with her joke. I did smile. It was being neighborly, right?

“You want help getting the other bats up don’t you?”

“Maaaaaybe. But more than that I want to see your place.”

Ah. That made sense. I leaned against the wall. “I’ll make you a deal. Dinner and drinks afterward and I’ll give you the grand tour and get all your bats up here.”

“I think we’ll be too tired for anything else if we drag those bats up.”

“Could there be anything else?”

“I haven’t seen anyone for a long time, Rainer, I’m not doing anything on the first date.”

“I’ll be a gentleman.”

“Well, I figure we could end the first date at dinner. The second could start with drinks...” She grinned.

I had no idea what to say to a girl flirting with me so I smiled. So I figured better to just try to be chill about it. “A date it is then. Seven.” I left and before I shut the door I said, “I’ll tell Mr. Oldacre to give us some space tonight.” I think she might have snorted something but I was already walking back.

In the history of the Flatiron Building, it had been offices, apartments, storage for war supplies, and much more. It was an iconic New York building and history in its own right, a monument to humanity’s presence on Earth as New York City itself was. That was why when the World Heritage Plan had called for most urban areas to be dismantled The Big Apple was exempted. Its population was capped and incentives given for those that wanted to leave. The current population was well below the cap so ironically in a time of cutting back and people leaving Earth there was room for New York City to grow again. In the meantime, modern buildings were being either preserved or dismantled according to a constantly changing set of criteria.

But among these towers were a few that no one debated and one was the Flatiron and it was my baby. I was in charge of refitting it and lived in it myself. The history of the Flatiron was storied but unromantic until the late 21st century. That was when the fifty-nine-year-old Marjorie Oldacre committed a dramatic act of defenestration on her young lover after drugging him and getting him to come by the window. When her older husband showed a complete lack of interest in her murdering someone that was a straw too far after decades of disinterest in her and she defenestrated him as well. It was later reported she said to the police, “I thought about something less dramatic but then decided I was going to get caught anyway so it might as well be fabulous.” There is no evidence she actually said that but it became an NYC fact.

Since then ghost sightings of the elder Oldacre in the apartment had become the stuff of legends. However, I had lived there for two years and yet to see so much as a cup moved out of place.

Helen came over carrying the bottle and wearing a black sundress a few hours later. I made soy pork with cashews and I learned she was vegetarian but weren’t we all these days even if we didn’t want to be? After we ate I picked up the dishes and put two small glasses down to join the larger water ones and Helen added generous depths of vodka to each. I picked mine up and was pleasantly surprised to find a fragrant fruity aroma.

“Cherries,” I asked?

Helen, “Apparently cherry trees are growing really well in Siberia now thanks to the global shift. They can pick them wild like crazy.”

I drank some. It was good. She grinned at me. “Been a while since you had a drink?”

“Yeah, I never was much of a drinker but I liked a drink after dinner.”

“Life long and city-born?”

I laughed, “Yeah. You don’t strike me as a New Yorker though.”

“No, I’m from San Francisco.”

“I hear they’re doing well there, why are you here?”

“Chasing non-corporeal living analogs and the grant was NYC specific.”

“Ah.”

“San Fran is still pretty busy but it’s deadsville here. What do people do for fun?”

“Go to the park, live in our apartments. There are a few underground clubs but they are pretty dodgy. The culture laws have pretty much ensured no one under the age of 50 wants to live here.”

“Unless they have a grant or... “ She made a motion for me to talk.

“Or you’re an architectural preservationist and this is where your work is.”

“So, we’re in the same boat, here for work,” she said.

“The same apartment even,” I replied.

“I know, so weird, well, I’m next door but this is the one I wanted. When I applied and found out the only room I wanted in the whole building was occupied and it was the only one filled in the whole top half I was cussing for a while. I figured you must be a supra-netter too.”

“Supra-netter?”

“The surpa-net, the network of people who study the supranormal.”

“Term supernatural not in vogue anymore?”

“Not if you want grants.”

I laughed, “Makes sense.”

“So, how drunk do I have to get you to get you to let me put up some equipment in here?”

I thought about it a second and answered honestly, “Not very.”

“I could sweeten the pot,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow, “I’m not a hard sell, it’ll be nice to see someone occasionally.”

She stood up and came over to sit on the arm of my chair.

“Could you use a casual almost girlfriend?”

“Almost girlfriend?”

“Like a friend with benefits with a lot of the friendly part.”

“Uh...”

“Too forward?”

“No, just, uh...”

“Let’s see you’re tongue-tied but not turning red, so...” she smiled.

“I’m not objecting but ... why?”

She shrugged and shifted so her leg was in view. It was a bit thin and she wasn’t as shapely as girls in my fantasies but she had the distinct advantage of being real.

“Well, frankly it’s been a few weeks and I’m already climbing the walls. I wasn’t going to ask but you seem like a good match.”

“Again, why?”

“Well, I saw you when we met, you clearly are attracted to me.”

“Uh huh.”

“And I saw your reaction at my research. You have complete disdain for it but were still polite.”

“Well, it’s not my thing but”

She held up a hand. “Don’t. You can’t bluff to save your life. I’ve known you for an hour and I know that. But then not only were you polite but you immediately gave up on getting in my pants but were still friendly and I’ve enjoyed having dinner with you.”

“So, you’re interested because I decided I wasn’t interested in you.”

“That’s overly simplistic but, yeah. You seem honorable. That matters.”

“A girl that likes nice guys? Isn’t that an urban myth?”

“Nah, we’re just mutations, like the people with webbing between their fingers.”

“Now that is an urban legend.”

“Nope, the aquatic part is but the webbing isn’t. It’s a condition called ectrodactyly though not all have the webbing.”

“You know your mutations?”

“I have a pretty good background in biology and physics. It’s my field.”

“For ghost chasing?”

“For science. The days of supra-normal research being the domain of plumbers and self-declared psychics is long gone.”

I grinned, “At least for grant committees.”

She nodded, “At least for grant committees.”

“You make no sense to me.”

“Trust the scientist, everything about me is completely logical.”

“You’re clearly too smart for me.”

“Clearly.”

She leaned in and kissed me then. It wasn’t a romantic kiss but it was nice. Then she pulled off my shirt. What was better was when she then took her shirt off. Over the next couple of hours, I decided I liked my new neighbor, a lot.

Within a week Helen was pretty much my room mate. My living room was also a death trap of equipment but I could still make it to the couch and my desk so that was good enough for me. She had yet to turn any of the equipment on. Apparently, she was still awaiting a handful of cables as well as software from various entities. In the meantime, she had been doing paperwork, conference calls (in her own apartment), and watching Bollywood lesbian romances. I had asked her if she was bi and she said no, but she said the lesbian ones were just a lot sweeter and she reliably cried during them.

It was a Wednesday and I was sitting in the corner of my living room where my work computer was set up, reviewing cleaning plans for restoring the Met when a text message popped up.

‘Downstairs, lots of stuff. Help?’

A photo was attached of Helen with a pouty face.

I replied with, ‘working.’

‘Reward if it gets up there without me dying.’ Attached was a three-second video of her in the lobby of her giving me what was, I think was supposed to be a seductive look. It kind of looked like a frog. I’d discovered in the last two weeks that while Helen had a very healthy sex drive she really didn’t understand flirting, romance, or being sexy in general. She was enthusiastic though.

So, laughing at the frog face I replied, ‘stick the stuff in my locker and come on up. I’ll take care of it.” I hit the camera for her lobby and saw her fill up my locker with stuff. It was all in canvas shopping bags so that told me what I needed to know. I pulled up ICABOD, worked out the parameters, and hit activate. I’d done similar things a bunch of times so I had great unit tests to crib from.

Within minutes the door swung open and Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma, and Epsilon came in carrying the bags. They put the bags down and scrambled out. All right, back to the Met and getting electrical modernized without destroying the building.

A bit later the door opened and I suddenly heard Helen, yip, “What the hell?!” I ignored it and worked. Then Helen called me. “Rain?”

I sighed. “Yes?”

“How the fuck did these get up here so fast?”

“The Greeks.”

I heard her foot tapping on the floor. I’d learned that meant she was thinking of what to say. “The Greeks?”

I rolled my chair away from my desk. “Yeah, Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma, and Epsilon. There are more but those are all I needed to bring the bags up.” I motioned her toward me and she came over. I pointed to the screen where I still had ICABOD up. I saw her reading the caption under the window - Iterative Case Analysis Based Objective Designer. I hit a few keys and brought up the E7 model of the Centimanes, the collective task robot that made it possible for a handful of architectural preservationists to at least make a dent in restoring New York City to its grandeur by taking basic tests and learning from their own attempts to do things over and over again. They certainly weren’t perfect - they learned from trial and error but they did remember and learn and unlike humans were tireless and infinitely patient in experimenting.

Some of the significance of that might have been lost on Helen who just said, “It’s one of those spider things!”

“They have appendages that can function a multitude of functions from a central body but I wouldn’t’ call them ‘spider things.’” I said.

“They look exactly like spiders.”

“Anyway, these are what brought your bags, and, by the way, half of your home bats up here.”

“I wondered about that. How do they come and go?”

“The elevator shaft. The penthouse actually is home to a good chunk of them for the city but there’s a batch I called the Greeks who take care of this building.”

She had her hands on her hips. “Have you thought about having them repair the elevator?”

“Actually, they are working on it. It’s been a nightmare. The original system is a 5 to 1 ratio hydraulic rope system. It was replaced in the 21st century and the original pumps were left in place but not kept up. I’ve got most of it working but we need steel cables and guess what I can’t get for the life of me these days?”

“Ug.”

“Right. We’re doing demolition on some buildings and I keep hoping to find some but so far zero luck.”