1 #14
I’d imagined this moment for so long, and I’d expected something like quiet jubilation, but all I felt was exhaustion.
“A harmonious society comes at a price,” an instructor—Alberto?—had said to me once, in a lecture at the Service Academy, in another life, “and we are not just the ones who exact that price, we are the ones who pay it.”
At the time, I hadn’t fully understood. But now I was seventy-nine years old, Alberto was dead, and for a long time now, decades, I had lived with the understanding that I had devoted my life to the wrong thing.
The regret was so fathomless that I marvelled at its scale. I felt more wonder than grief.
It was early morning, and the street was coming to life with the commute.
The trains were gliding down Sepulveda Boulevard, a constant background hum.
I joined a crowd streaming into a popular café, but walked through that building without stopping, through the kitchen area—the staffers glanced at me, but I moved with a confidence that suggested a high rank in the State bureaucracy, and they were afraid to speak up—and out the back door into the alley.
As I stepped outside, I put on the broken glasses that I’d been carrying with me for some weeks, in preparation for this moment.
I touched the strips of silver tape holding the glasses together as I walked.
I went to the beach. I couldn’t take public transportation with the glasses on my face—impossible to ride Los Angeles transit without facial recognition—and I wanted to be close to the ocean again, because I expected to be imprisoned soon.
I stayed on the boardwalk for a while, walking north, and then when the boardwalk ended I took off my shoes and walked out onto the sand. A cool breeze came off the ocean.
I was close to the fence that separated the burn zone from the inhabited city.
It extended inland for miles, but it didn’t go out to sea very far.
The biohazard signs on the fence had been there for a long time, decades, and I hesitated for just a moment—force of habit—before I threw my shoes over the top, one at a time.
They lay like black sand creatures on the other side.
The tide was out, which meant that the fence ended where the water was only just over my head.
I swam and moved hand-over-hand around it, retraced my route on the other side.
I retrieved my shoes and walked barefoot for a while, until the sand was streaked with black and I no longer wanted that sand to touch my feet.
On this side of the fence there was a sense of desolation.
There was a time when soldiers had been stationed here, but at some point over the past few years they’d withdrawn without fanfare.
Within minutes the sound of the city faded to almost nothing, a minimal hum.
I heard only the ocean waves and the seagulls.
A surveillance drone descended, and hovered at eye level.
I paid it no attention. The glasses would turn my face into a blur of white light.
There was debris on the beach now, burnt objects, sometimes recognizable and sometimes not.
I stumbled over something in the sand, a hard shape, and realized I was walking on the roof of a buried car.
After the Palisades burned for the third time, people had been prohibited from returning to the neighbourhood.
The debris on the beach was from the first and second fires.
Ahead, weeds grew from a line of hills that I knew to be the debris of the 2025 fire, remains of houses dumped on the shore.
At the third such hill, I turned inland.
There was a path here. I made my way up to a wide street that in a previous version of the world had been a coastal highway.
There were still burnt cars, abandoned in the last evacuation as flames swept down from the hills.
On the other side of the highway, the shantytown began.
It had expanded considerably since I’d last been here, and now, as always, I was struck by the scale of the shadow city.
People were cooking on fires in front of small lean-tos.
I saw a new system of umbrellas rigged up between trees, beneath which children sat in rows in an outdoor school.
I continued onward to a place where netting had been strung over the road, around and over several makeshift structures.
The netting had been painstakingly filled in with leaves, scraps of plastic, and fabric, so that the sunlight filtered through in pinpoints but drones wouldn’t be able to see in.
I passed under it, through net curtains, into a shaded stretch of road.
An elderly man—my own age, which was an unpleasant thing to contemplate—sat in a lawn chair, sewing something.
When I got closer, I saw he was repairing a shirt.
“Fayed,” I said.
He looked up. He looked rougher now than he had the last time I’d seen him. He had a bruise on his forehead and his hair was greasy. He gestured to the empty lawn chair beside him and I sank into it, grateful.
“Everyone else in my life calls me Kareem.”
“I already have a friend named Kareem,” I said. I closed my eyes for a moment. I’d been up all night and I wished I could rest here for longer, perhaps doze off for a while in the dappled shade.
“He’s still alive?”
“He died a few hours ago.”
Fayed was quiet for a moment. “Strange life,” he said finally.
“What happened to your face?”
“Minor disagreement,” Fayed said.
“I have something for you.” I took off my jacket, and pulled a thread on an inside seam. It came apart quickly. I retrieved my Service phone, in a double layer of waterproof bags, and gave it to him.
“Your phone?”
“It used to be. I retired from Service this morning.”
“Then how do you still have this?”
“I carried a burner phone into my resignation, and then invoked the right of incineration,” I said. “I threw the burner in the furnace. I was escorted out of the building by a guard, and I made him carry my jacket so I’d be clean when I walked through the exit scanner.”
“So the scanner would’ve registered a Service phone on the guard,” he said, “and not necessarily raised any alarm bells.” He was removing the phone gingerly from the plastic. “What’s on here?”
“Everything.” I opened it for him—the screen unlocked with a satisfying click—and gave it back to him. “All the secrets I know. I’ll stay here while you transfer the data,” I said. “In case it locks again.”
“That phone’s still connected? Someone going to come here now that you’ve switched it on?”
“No,” I said. “I made offline copies, then disabled all the network connections. I downloaded everything I could. Just make as many copies of the files as you can. Distribute them widely.”
“Thank you.” He took it, and disappeared into his little house.
I settled into the lawn chair, and let my thoughts drift.
Back in the office I’d recently left, my computer was transmitting State secrets to the open internet.
I’d written the code with a built-in timer and given myself an hour’s head start before the secrets began pouring out of my office, but surely well over an hour had passed by now.
I was drowsy. It was peaceful here. There’d been another fire three years ago, the shantytown burning along with the hills.
But the scent of ash was gone from the air now.
The shantytown had been rebuilt. I expected to be arrested soon, but prison felt like a distant thought, like something that was going to happen to someone else.
Fayed returned with the phone. “I copied it,” he said. “I’m transmitting other copies. Tell me what I should be looking for.”
“Internal decay is setting in,” I said. “The highest levels of government are corrupt beyond a point where they can continue to function. There are almost as many ghosts as citizens now. If we understood how many of the people around us were ghosts, on any given day, there would be an uprising.”
“You’ve always been such a delightful conversationalist,” he said. “Buoyant.”
“You asked,” I said.
“What can you tell me that won’t make me want to drown myself in the Pacific?”
“Service is everywhere, but Service is failing. A decade ago, I would never have been able to get that phone out of the building.”
Someone was approaching. A girl, jogging swiftly toward us, passing through areas of sunlight and shade.
I watched her, and made the calculations.
She couldn’t be older than fourteen or fifteen, which suggested she’d been born to ghosts.
A girl with no social security number and officially no existence, raised in the burn zone.
How many were like her? There were no official numbers, but one of the secrets I knew, one of many, was that there were thousands upon thousands in Los Angeles alone.
“Someone’s looking for you,” the girl said to Fayed.
“Who?”
“A woman. She’s down on Corona del Mar.”
“She got a name?”
“Marlowe,” the girl said.
“What did she say?” I asked, because Fayed seemed to have lost the power of speech.
“She said she’s looking for a ghost named Kareem Fayed.”
“Bring her here,” I said.
“Oh god.” Fayed looked like he wanted to be ill. “What do I tell her? I haven’t seen her since she was three.”
“Improvise,” I said. “Say whatever you want, but you do owe her an explanation.” I took off my broken glasses, and gave them to Fayed. “I don’t need these anymore.”
“I don’t know what to say to her.”
“You’ll think of something. Can you make sure Marlowe sees the interview with Kareem on my phone? The one from the Mojave Desert.”
“Wait, what?”
“I’m going to go,” I said.
Marlowe was approaching now, with the girl.
Marlowe walked slowly, looking around in wonder at the shantytown buildings, not just houses but a store, a bar.
But as I watched, she saw me and her father, who had his back to her and didn’t realize quite how soon he was going to have the conversation he was dreading. Marlowe slowed, but did not stop.