Welcome to the after-future in the land of the vanishing sky

Before skywatchers noticed what were to become the blazing slave ships anchoring in Orion’s Belt, the community of Williamsburg was emerging from the first half of the 21^st century as a grossly overbuilt, partially submerged retirement community. The majority of wealthy retirees now sold their apartments several years after realizing that the ever encroaching East River was going to ruin their property and re-sale values. The rising tide could not be stemmed long enough for banks to recuperate funds from the highly leveraged and speculative development of the early 21^st century here. That’s when these things – global warming, the economy, property values – seemed even remotely important.

The five-block stretch adjacent to the north side of the Williamsburg Bridge has become the locus for the most ardent freedom fighters against “chattelization of humanity,” as the New York Times dubbed it. Comprised of former IT professionals, hackers, slackers, tech-geeks, chefs, arm wrestlers, doctors, and an entomologist, these “Varmints” have managed to create a self-sustainable community, which is totally scrambled to the outside world. To even the most sophisticated of scanners, it would appear that this structure is only inhabited by rats, scraps of litter, and the occasional wind gust.

With immediate access to Manhattan and the river, the Varmints wage their battle of interference and disruption against the galactic marauders. Their blocks act as one entity, with the structural mesh and permeable surface perfectly suited for the weaving and lacing of wires for fungible interconnectivity. There is no one address here; you enter the network of structure and are led through by asking aloud for a person or persons, and are guided by auto-illuminated pathways. When one trail ends the visitor asks again, and he is thusly further guided. If you haven’t visited, it could be compared to a Turkish bazaar: layered, nebulous, and without distinct internal coordinates. In this way, the structure acts as both a protective shell and as an internal regulator, with no central core that could disable the environment. It has virtually infinite redundancy.

Before the export of humans for what we believe is slave labor, the waning economic primacy of the United States created a new parasitic tech economy that was housed here, and it was these people, primarily the tech-nerds and hacker-slackers, who lived in the original structure, between South 4^th and South 5^th and Wythe and Berry streets. The shady, open-air markets of that time have been replaced by a maze of interference fences, which dynamically shift to help parse the visitor population and to protect the inhabitants. It was during this global economic weakness that the siege commenced. If we only knew at the time that we were slowly being charted and traced through our ATM card usage, perhaps I wouldn’t be writing this now.