The Met is home to the rich, the eccentric and the disenfranchised. On the lookout for mechanical failures and sabotage attempts, Vlade keeps the building running, but he can’t explain the two-hour gap in the security tape at the time of the programmers’ disappearance. They take their concerns to Vlade, the skyscraper’s super. Their mysterious absence comes to the attention of police inspector Gen Octaviasdottir, via immigration lawyer Charlotte Armstrong, a fellow Met resident. Two homeless coders, dubbed Mutt and Jeff, vanish from their squat on the building’s rooftop farm. Told from multiple points of view and reminiscent of one of Emile Zola’s “apartment” novels in the way it portrays characters from various social strata in one setting, “New York 2140” focuses on the inhabitants of a single, partially sunken apartment building, the old Met Life tower on Madison Square. But at this point the four hundred richest people on the planet owned half the planet’s wealth, and the top one percent owned fully eighty percent of the world’s wealth. “This remarkable rise had been bad for people - most of them. The consequences of two disasters known as the First and Second Pulse sound familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the inequitable impacts of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. “New York 2140” posits a 50-foot rise in sea levels, which turns the streets of Lower Manhattan into a landscape of canals between the surviving skyscrapers.
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