Sink or Swim is built into the second floor of a partially flooded building on the western edge of Old Harbor, directly above the waterline. The floor is perpetually damp. The walls sweat. The windows, where glass still exists, look out onto the bioluminescent canals that Old Harbor's drowned streets have become, and on good nights the blue-green glow from the algae below is the only light the bar needs. The owner, a man who introduces himself exclusively as Swim and whose legal name nobody has successfully determined, insists that the flooding is an aesthetic choice. The flooding is not an aesthetic choice. The building is sinking.

The drinks are served in mismatched containers — old jars, laboratory beakers, hollowed gourds — because Swim considers uniform glassware to be a symptom of corporate thinking. The menu, painted on the wall in characters that change weekly, features homebrew spirits distilled from whatever organic material Swim has acquired. Some of it is genuinely excellent. Some of it is genuinely dangerous. The distinction is not always clear before consumption. The food, when it exists, is whatever the fishing boats brought in that morning, prepared by Swim in a kitchen that health inspectors would condemn if health inspectors still existed at this tier.

Freelancers come to Sink or Swim for three reasons. First, it's cheap — Swim prices his drinks in labor as often as in Φ, and an hour of repair work on the building earns an evening's tab. Second, the location is ideal for anyone who needs to arrive or depart by water, which in Old Harbor means anyone who needs to not be seen. Third, the regulars include a rotating cast of colony traders from the Lake Michigan flotillas who bring news, goods, and occasionally job offers from communities that don't appear on any corporate map. The bar is sinking. The information that flows through it is rising.