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CHAPTER 11: The Sunken Ship
I followed the Bay Area’s greatest detective deeper and deeper into the guts of the Yerba Buena Zone on the hunt for a missing genius.
The quiet press of Basilisk House was behind us now. We followed a lightless corridor, air heavy and stale, as it intersected others, forming bleak junctions. We were beneath the surface of the YBZ, and it felt like we had walked a long, long way. My feet ached. The walls dripped.
At each turn, Scheme paused, considered and chose decisively. She wore internet teeth that guided her, following an invisible trail through the darkness, using directions given to us by the master of this strange network.
Finally, she brought us out of the maze into a cavernous hall.
We stepped through a wobbly oval that showed, around its edge, the pucker of a plasma cutter. The rough, rusted wall sloped down into the floor, like an enormous bathtub. Above, it was dark, except for a single great blotch of light, another oval cut into the ceiling. Enormous fan blades interrupted the light at lazy intervals, sucking up damp air.
“Will, do you see what this is?” Scheme hissed. Her voice was vibrating with excitement. “It’s a ship’s hold. She’s been hiding out in one of the old ships!”
I saw it clearly now. We stood in the belly of one of the old container ships that had been scuttled to expand the Yerba Buena Zone. Dig 10 feet down in any city that rings the bay and you’ll find these skeletons in the basement. In San Francisco, the ships are from the 1800s, schooners whose crews abandoned them for the gold fields. This vessel was a newer vintage. What had it carried to the Port of Oakland on its final voyage? Cars? Shoes? CD players? It must have been judged too small to satisfy the hunger of global trade. So, it was sold for scrap, tugged a few miles and scuttled. Dynamite in the belly.
They said the BOOM, BOOM bass of yerbacore was inspired by the detonations that sunk these ships.
Way up in the center of the hold, I saw signs of habitation. A tent had been erected, a nice one, with an origami look to its construction. Soft light glowed greenish through the fabric.
In front of the tent, a cozy fire tossed up a ribbon of smoke that flowed up through the hole in the ceiling. It was ringed with camp chairs, and in one of them, a woman sat, reaching forward to stoke the fire. She had a guitar propped next to her.
“Demondre told me to expect you,” the woman said. Her voice echoed in the cavernous space.
She didn’t look like the pop star tech genius I remembered from social media. This was just a woman wrapped in a rainbow poncho, poking a fire with a stick.
But then she spoke again, and I recognized her voice. Not its timbre, really, but its poise. Scheme was right.
“You’re not the first to find me,” Quintessandra said. “Will you tell the world where I’m hiding? Will you spoil my haven?”
“No,” Scheme said. “We need your help.”
We took places around the fire, and Scheme began to unspool the saga. “This will sound strange, but there are other worlds like ours — other Bay Areas. One of them has become our enemy. They call themselves Bay One and —”
“Yes,” Quintessandra interrupted. “I know.”
Scheme’s mouth hung open.
“In their world, they didn’t pave the bay,” Quintessandra said. “They didn’t build” — she made an airy gesture that encompassed the ship, the city, everything — “any of this. I’ve seen it. They tried to recruit me.”
“Of course,” Scheme muttered. “You must have been the very first person they tried.”
“Someone named Lois took me to their world. When she brought me back, I came here. To hide. To build something.”
Something that could save us.
“So you invented the LENGUA,” Scheme said. “What does it do?”
The way Scheme said it, it was clear she expected the answer to be “transform into a giant robot to smash Bay One,” but Quintessandra let out a bleak sigh. “Nothing. It’s a failure. The teeth were supposed to help us understand each other, so we could work together to beat Bay One. No words to get in the way, no arguments — just a FEELING.”
“It didn’t work?”
Now Quintessandra laughed, but it was just as bleak. “Oh, it worked. And you know what the two big, universal feelings are in the Bay Area? One is teenagers being teenagers. That, I like. The other is everybody feeling like the whole place is ruined.”
Scheme nodded. “Of course. All of us ignoring the fact that whatever version of the Bay Area we love best… it ruined someone else’s.”
The whole thing is built on wreckage. Scuttled ships, real and metaphorical.
Scheme leaned in closer. The fire’s flicker cast strange shadows across her face. “What now?”
Quintessandra lifted a notebook from her lap. “I’m writing songs. They’re about the Bay Area. Growing up here. All the things I loved.”
So there WAS a secret album!
“I don’t think we can beat Bay One and I want…” Quintessandra’s voice wavered. “I want to write this down. Before it all goes away.”
Here was the city’s muse, hiding in its lowest catacomb, composing its funeral rites.
When Scheme spoke, her voice was quiet. “But Quintessandra, don’t you see?” The fire glittered in her eyes. “You found it.”
The pop star tech genius pulled her poncho tighter.
“I thought our weapon would be some kind of technology,” Scheme said. “You did, too. But we were wrong. The weapon we need is more powerful than any technology.”
Quintessandra looked skeptical. “I don’t understand.”
Scheme stood and offered her hand. “It’s the most powerful weapon of all.” She waggled her fingers and, reluctantly, Quintessandra allowed herself to be hoisted up.
“It’s a story.”
Tomorrow, Part 12: The New Golden Gate (June 18)
