What is Coming Out of the New York Sewers? (Satire)

Australians have long understood that dangerous things come out of holes. We have funnel-web spiders, snakes under the veranda, goannas appearing where no goanna was invited, and assorted creatures capable of converting an innocent trip to the garden shed into an emergency-department admission: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDAiq2-xeU. Americans have traditionally regarded this as evidence that Australia is a continent insufficiently supervised by God.

New York may now wish to reconsider its position. Videos and stories of people apparently emerging from manholes and other pieces of New York's subterranean infrastructure invite a question that respectable journalism seems strangely unwilling to investigate: what, exactly, is coming out of the New York sewers?

Obviously, there are innocent explanations. Maintenance workers exist. Homeless people sometimes shelter underground. New York possesses a vast and complicated network of sewers, subway tunnels, utility passages and abandoned infrastructure. A person emerging from a hole in the street therefore provides approximately as much evidence for a conspiracy as an Australian emerging from a pub provides for alcoholism. But where is the fun in that?

For the purposes of serious investigative journalism and social satire, I propose three alternative hypotheses: mutant sewer rats, Barack Obama's secret underground government, and a reverse Underground Railroad carrying persecuted conservatives out of New York. Readers should understand that what follows is satire, although given the trajectory of the twenty-first century I reserve the right to withdraw that disclaimer without notice.

The first hypothesis is biologically elegant. New York has rats. This proposition requires no citation because some of the rats probably have voting addresses. Generations of Rattus norvegicus have prospered beneath one of the largest cities on Earth, surrounded by sewage, industrial residues, discarded pharmaceuticals, microplastics, PFAS and whatever mysterious substances wash down the drains after closing time in Manhattan. Evolution has had plenty of material with which to work.

The mistake is assuming that the famous New York pizza rat represented the pinnacle of the process. Perhaps pizza rat was merely the evolutionary equivalent of Australopithecus: interesting, photogenic and nowhere near the final product. While tourists photographed his cousins dragging pepperoni through subway stations, natural selection may have been conducting more ambitious experiments several metres below.

We Australians should be particularly reluctant to laugh. Our own wildlife demonstrates that nature has no quality-control department. The platypus looks like somebody finished constructing a mammal from parts remaining after the other animals had been assembled. If nature can produce a venomous, egg-laying mammal with a duck's bill, there is no obvious metaphysical barrier preventing Manhattan from producing a rat that knows how to operate a manhole cover.

The mutant-rat theory nevertheless encounters a serious evidentiary problem. Where are the bodies? A hidden population of advanced sewer creatures should occasionally leave behind a carcass. There is, however, an inconvenient answer. Rats eat things. Including other rats. Hypothesis One therefore remains alive.

Hypothesis Two takes us from evolutionary biology into political science. Perhaps the figures emerging from New York's underground are employees of the Obama administration, which never really ended in January 2017 but merely moved downstairs. This theory has several advantages over the rat hypothesis, most notably that nobody has to evolve.

The infrastructure already exists. New York has abandoned subway infrastructure, utility tunnels, maintenance spaces and assorted underground works accumulated over generations. Above ground it has the United Nations, Wall Street, major media organisations, universities, foundations, NGOs and enough former government officials to administer Belgium. All the ingredients for a shadow government are therefore available within a few kilometres. The only innovation required is basement space.

The theory would also explain why Barack Obama himself is seldom observed climbing from a manhole. Obviously, he isn't down there. Whatever one's politics, the man has standards. It is impossible to picture Obama in a tailored suit chairing the 9.30 national-security briefing while somebody from sanitation reports that the main sewer has backed up into Strategic Planning. That is what deputy assistant secretaries are for.

Under this hypothesis, the subterranean government consists of the institutional apparatus rather than the former president personally. There would presumably be departments. Sewer State. Sewer Defense. Sewer Treasury. A Department of Diversity, Equity and Drainage would be inevitable, along with a 240-page environmental-impact statement explaining why replacing a broken toilet cistern disproportionately affects historically marginalised communities.

Australians know exactly how this bureaucracy would develop. Within six months there would be 14,000 employees, three independent commissioners, a reconciliation action plan, an inquiry into workplace culture and nobody authorised to change a light bulb.

The principal objection is operational. Why would members of a fantastically sophisticated secret government climb onto public streets through manholes where somebody with a telephone can film them?

Here the conspiracy theorist deploys the tactical nuclear weapon of conspiracy theory: that's exactly what they want you to think.

Perhaps being seen is the camouflage. Perhaps an occasional operative deliberately emerges beside a kebab shop at two in the morning so that everyone laughs at the idea of a subterranean government. Anyone subsequently claiming that the Obama administration is operating beneath Manhattan can then be identified as a lunatic.

It is perfect. Indeed, it is so perfect that the complete absence of evidence becomes further evidence. At this point the theory achieves conspiracy-theory singularity and disappears up its own manhole.

That brings us to Hypothesis Three, which has particular appeal to Australians watching American politics from a safe distance of approximately 15,000 kilometres. Perhaps these are conservatives escaping New York through a reverse Underground Railroad?

The historical Underground Railroad moved enslaved people towards freedom. The twenty-first-century version would carry Republicans, dissident academics and people who once accidentally liked the wrong Facebook post out of Manhattan towards Tennessee, Texas and Florida; freedom.

The instructions might begin: leave your apartment after midnight, tell nobody, bring three days' food and meet a man called Tucker beside stormwater outlet 47B.

The first stage would be underground. Once safely beyond Manhattan, the refugee would emerge somewhere in New Jersey, where a Ford F-150 with Tennessee plates would be waiting. Several hundred kilometres later he could finally speak freely, purchase an enormous barbecue and complain about federal government expenditure without first checking whether Human Resources was listening.

Unfortunately, tunnel systems are complicated. Some refugees would inevitably take a wrong turn. A conservative intending to reach Alabama might follow a pipe for six hours and emerge outside Columbia University, thereby discovering that he had travelled 400 metres and become significantly wetter. Others might remain underground too long.

That raises the most interesting possibility. What does prolonged subterranean existence do to political ideology? Imagine spending weeks in darkness surrounded by rats, dripping pipes and mysterious mechanical noises. Eventually conventional political categories would begin to lose their meaning. Republican, Democrat, conservative and progressive would seem like surface-world abstractions. The refugee would develop more immediate concerns: dry socks, potable water and whether the enormous creature watching him from behind the steam pipe has learned to use tools.

A new ideology would emerge. Sewer anarcho-primitivism. Private property would consist of whatever you could defend from the rats. Monetary policy would be based upon canned beans. The gold standard would give way to the torch-battery standard. Foreign policy would consist entirely of relations with adjoining tunnels.

Eventually these people would return to the surface, blinking into the lights of Manhattan and unable to remember whether they had originally gone underground because they supported Donald Trump, opposed Donald Trump or merely wanted to avoid paying $21 for a coffee. That would explain the confused expressions.

But the truly frightening possibility is that the three hypotheses are not competitors. They are components of a single theory.

The rats have been evolving beneath New York for generations. The Obama shadow government moved into the tunnels and discovered them. Conservatives subsequently established their escape route through the same infrastructure. Contact became inevitable.

At first there would have been conflict. Then diplomacy. The shadow government would attempt to regulate the rats. The conservatives would attempt to recruit them. The rats, having observed both sides for several months, would sensibly decline affiliation.

Eventually a tripartite underground civilisation would emerge: government bureaucrats administering it, conservatives trying to escape it and giant rats actually running it. That last arrangement, admittedly, makes it almost indistinguishable from surface politics.

There is an Australian lesson in all this. Americans sometimes ask us how we tolerate living among poisonous snakes, spiders, crocodiles, sharks and assorted other animals capable of killing a human being before breakfast. The answer is that Australian dangers are comparatively honest.

A brown snake does not establish an NGO. A saltwater crocodile does not issue a policy paper. A funnel-web spider has never announced that it is protecting democracy. You know where you stand.

New York is different. Beneath those famous streets lies another city: tunnels, pipes, abandoned infrastructure, utilities, rats and innumerable spaces most residents will never see. That genuine subterranean world is strange enough without mutants, escaped conservatives or an Obama administration in gumboots.

So, when another figure climbs through a New York manhole at three in the morning, resist the temptation to jump to conclusions. It may be a maintenance worker. It may be somebody sheltering underground. It may be a perfectly ordinary New Yorker taking a highly unconventional route home.

Or it may be Sewer Treasury coming up for lunch. From Australia, we cannot possibly know.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o-fENCRYPg4

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/E-ZO6thcXAA