Flash fiction

By Margaret Coulombe, Michele St. George, Chris Deaton   It’s hard to investigate crime with your hands cinched together and butt wedged in permaplastic office chair. Even tougher when the red-faced Salt River Water Police chief staring you down is also your boss. “The charges are water theft.” Chief Roztok leaned in and snapped the breathing mask from my mouth to my chin. “They’ve found water lines, Selene. Feeder lines running from your pod’s cistern to your sink.” This wasn’t the morning that I had expected. I should’ve been walking my usual rounds of gritty Phoenix pavement, maneuvering “Wimp” – our water meter drone – over sun blanched pods and through wind-scoured high rises. Just another day in the life of a water detective sniffing out wet crime. I’d investigated rich patrons, whose nostalgia bred dash-and-drink petty water theft at high end restaurants still serving water. I’d torn apart high-end solar stills shunting cistern vapors, and reclaimed shyster entrepreneurs’ reeking illegal communal piss pots. I’d even arrested well-heeled defenders of feral cats, whose water bowls drew in homeless people from the city’s tunnels, who they then reported. Wimp could find water at parts per million – an old measure repurposed to tally illicit water wealth. If I’d planned a cover for ripping off water, this job would make me the perfect thief. “Those charges are complete crap.” I wiggled my fingers, trying to feel them, rather than emphasize my point. “How many people did I bust this month? 1,000 gallons worth? 2,000? What about that black market in lux water-shots we raided in Scottsdale? I’ve recovered enough to recharge a few feet of the Colorado riverbed for our favorite politician or for his underground pool.” Roztok nodded, looking out a small, grimy window. It looked like old style glass, but was double-paned, packed with electric power generators. Nothing was what it seemed in this urban desert – except the rising heat. “Internal investigations found it. This is serious.” She unfurled a Flex-comp viewer and tapped it with a slim finger to display my case file. “I know you. I know your dedication. Who did you piss off this time, Selene?” The list was extensive. Water barons who’d paid millions in fines, now living high and dry, have unpleasantly long memories. “Let me check out the rig. I can figure out who set me up.” She searched my face, then tapped her viewer twice, deleted the file and coiled the display. “Get on it.” Outside in the searing heat, I flicked a bit of telltale mud from my pants cuff, grinding it to dust. I’d trace that illicit pipe threading down into the tunnels under the city, where no masks, no water, no power and no homes were the norm. My purloined pipes could be petty crime or a way to fuel a social movement. The real question at hand for my boss soon wasn’t who’d done the pilfering. It was how many of the 16 million people would rise from under Phoenix’s sands to claim their water rights?

By Michael Burnam-Fink, Marci Baranski, and Clark Miller   A few minutes later, Selene was trudging up Dobson Avenue, past the endless rows of car hulks half embedded in the asphalt. It had only been a year since the Big Stick, but in truth it seemed longer. Everybody knew roadways could get softer in summertime, but a particularly brutal and bright heatwave last August had melted roads across the Valley. Parked cars sunk up to their axels, impatient drivers in big trucks tore up the pavement in their wake, and in a matter of hours the asphalt arteries of the cities had become clogged with stuck vehicles and impassible rubble fields. FEMA and the National Guard had had to come in to rescue survivors stranded in concrete islands, their heavy trucks doing yet more damage to the roads. Hasty repairs had tried to clear away as much of the damage as possible, but four-lane boulevards were reduced to one-lane trickles. The city died, victim of total circulatory collapse. With commutes stretching into the three hour range, police response time over 45 minutes, and stores unable to restock, those that could leave did. Massive convoys headed for California, New Mexico, Utah, anywhere where the roads were still there. Those that were left held on as best they could, regrouping around the light rail line than ran from Downtown to Mesa, scavenging from abandoned vehicles and buildings, and in the case of Selene’s Community, using sustainability principles to grow new life in the ruins of the suburban dream. Ahead, a group of neighbs were pulling the side mirrors off an abandoned SUV. The Community had plans to use every part of the automobile. Windows and windshields could become water-conserving greenhouse panels, but most of those had already been scavenged or broken by roving crims. Sideview mirrors, with their built in actuators, made great elements for solar ovens. Alloy engine blocks and plastic panels would be recycled eventually for raw materials, but those schemes were less mature. Selene waved as she passed, but she didn’t have time to chat. The reason for the early start was the Maricopa Sheriff checkpoint at the boarder of the Dobson Competitive Zone. Hundreds of people stood there like cattle, sweltering under the mid-morning sun as they waited to cross from the parts of the city that were broken to the parts that worked. Selene ate her breakfast as she shuffled forward, sharing the dried fruit with the Hispanic family behind her. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she passed through the shaded checkpoint, the Oakley and flakjacket wearing deputy with the handheld retina scanner waving her through without so much as a word. He began to interrogate the family in badly accented Spanglish. Como es su business en la Zona? The Zone was a study in contrasts. Some parts were inhabited with beautiful people in perfect tans and blindingly white capris, sipping lattes in misted sidewalk cafes. Other parts seemed like 3rd world refugee camps, as whole families had crowded into storefronts and small offices. Heavily armed cops were everywhere, drawing a line between the places where law and order had fled, and places where scavenging and squatting could be met with lethal force. Rents were paid, property still private, and people still pretended that an office job made sense in the New Phoenix. Every time Selene crossed the Zone, it was like entering somebody else’s hallucination of the 20th century. The light rail at the heart of the Zone was the only thing holding the city together, and trains now ran nose to tail. This last bit of transit infrastructure was the only way to get downtown for the public meetings in a timely manner. One crowded and smelly, but blissfully air conditioned train ride later, Selene arrived at the Statehouse for her presentation. She’d pulled all her contacts to get this 15 minute slot to brief the Committee on Infrastructure and Reconstruction, and there was no way that she was going to be late. The briefing was in an anonymous conference room on the second floor. Five State Senators, a scattering of aids from the governor’s office and various federal agencies. A cheap camera on a tripod stood in for the public—these sessions were live-streamed and archived, although not even opposition research bots bothered to watch the footage these days. She nodded politely at Janey, the legislative aide who’d scheduled her into this slot. Some geezer was up now, droning on about how crime had gone up since the Big Stick, and how he could bring it back down again with a blimp-based parachute police unit. The Committee was clearly tuned out, tapping away on their phones or deep in the stereotyped middle-distance gaze of the heavy augmented reality session. Finally, the geezer shut up, and Selene got a chance to speak. Her presentation was simple, the technical details stripped out for a general audience. The basic problem in the New Phoenix was the heat. Her solution tapped the lake of brine thousands of feet below the surface to operate a closed-cycle heat-exchanger. With just a few boreholes and circulating pumps, a constant stream of 55 degree saltwater could be brought up and used to cool large buildings, road surfaces, anything at all. Her calculations show that it used 2/3rd the electricity of a conventional air conditioning system, and since it was closed cycle, no burden on the water table. The deep brine lake was a heat sink with centuries of capacity. All she needed was a little help with the permits for deep drilling, and a small seed loan for the first source well, and within a year new, cool, livable, sustainable communities could be sprouting up all over Phoenix. At least that was the plan. The blank stares of the committee and the blinking red light on the camera had Selene trembling, and she was afraid that she sounded barely more coherent than blimp-geezer. Her tables of carefully simulated numbers seemed both boring and fiction. It was a mercy when her fifteen minutes ended and the committee chairman nodded her back to her seat. The presenter up nest was some suited corporate flack from Wells-America bank, talking about successful recapitalization of loans in the Competitive Zone. Nobody could pay attention to that, and Selene didn’t. Could anything change for the better in Phoenix? She thought, idly flicking through her social media feeds and trying to drum up some positive support for her ideas. The flack finished and sat down next to her. It seemed like this meeting was wrapping up with nothing much done. Another day in local government. “Chad Hartwick,” he said, sticking out his hand. Selene looked at it, shook it. “I liked your idea, although it needs a revenue stream if it’s going to work. There just isn’t any infrastructure money lying on the table these days.”

By Kelly Lydick   Nightly winds passed through the valley now in the same way each dusk, invisible trails that carved out a new way of living. What was once a low-pressure desert system had become a new destination on a new map, hiding behind a changing jetstream set into motion by shifting particulate counts and changing soil ph. Selene crossed the street toward her outpost at the agency, knowing she would have a long night ahead of her. Sometimes she brought tea, but tonight she skipped it, thinking coffee would be better. Truly, her job was a bore, but of the few people left in the city with this kind of expertise, she was needed. And being needed created enough demand for a comfortable life. “Max,” she greeted the security guard. “Selene,” he replied in monotone, barely looking at her. She silently groaned inside, annoyed. One would think that security would be more engaged than the average person, but even that’s too much to ask these days, she thought. Perhaps it was the nature of her job, the government outfit, the rules, the roles, the by-the-book routine that made it mindless. Or perhaps it was just further evidence that everyday relationships had changed as much as the jetstream, apparently nimble, but a consequence of greater forces beyond a single individual’s control. The government had been collecting data long before the Internet was made public, long before smart technologies and touch screens, and long before the great drought. What was now a necessity had once been taboo, a violation of civil rights and individual privacy, the stuff that made headlines and court cases. Collection now was a precarious part of survival in an evolving biosphere that was adapting more quickly than the human species could keep up. Selene waved her hand in front of the biometric pad beside the door and it opened without a sound. “I was hoping you’d be here soon,” her colleague, John, said. “Take a look at this.” A series of numbers appeared in front of Selene, red and purple and blue, a grid hanging in the air highlighting an odd-looking matrix of values. “Great,” she said, sighing, exasperated. “I hate this job.” “I know. I’m sorry,” John replied. “Who is it?” she asked. “You mean: Who are they?” he reiterated. Selene gave him a hard look. “Can you just run the report, please?” she said in a scathing tone. She wasn’t upset with John, but simply upset. After the great drought, when resources had become scarce, it took more than a decade to get the Earth’s ecosystem back into balance. That is, into enough of a balance that life could still be sustainable. It was a precarious balance and these were precarious times. Even just one birth or death could create inequity. Selene didn’t hate her job because of the job itself. Crunching numbers and running data was simple. That part was like a child’s game. What she hated was that crunching these numbers, compiling this data, was like playing God. “Pamela DuBois. And her husband, Roy,” John announced. Who would live and who would die based on the amount of natural resources they had consumed was too heartbreaking to bear. It seemed unfair. Even if Selene was just the messenger to a greater outfit, there was too much for which she felt responsible. “Thanks.” Selene scanned a copy of the Resource Order into her smartwatch and took a deep breath. Then she tapped a few times on the screen. She kept all their names, unbeknownst to the agency. It was a violation of law, she knew, but didn’t care. If one drop of water could change the fate of a single life, it deserved to be honored, she believed. She catalogued them all, every single one. And she hoped that some day, when the Earth had begun to replenish itself again, someone, somewhere would find these names and know that these people mattered. That they were not merely sacrifices, but precious beings given up to protect the life of all who remained on the planet.

By Bonnie Richardson   Selene is thinking as she waits at the streetlight. Her walk has made her more and more angry at the people who, over the last two centuries, wanted the desert to be lush, filled with vivid colors and cooling shades of green. They wanted the beauty and comfort of the large canopy trees overhead, with the leaves softly rustling. They talked about the wonderful fragrance of orange blossoms in the spring, and the amazing sweetness of the pink grapefruits and navel oranges. Her destination looms up ahead: a concrete and glass tower with a security guard posted at the door. Selena only feels her anger expand, ‘They were all so selfish!’ she said, to no one in particular. She had no way of understanding and relating to these memories and felt cheated of the experiences. I come up beside her just as the light changes to green. Side by side we approach the layered security of the monumental building. Selene is oblivious to the absurd structure that is about to imprison her. My mind keeps returning to one question, over and over: who allowed that building to grow in our desert?