Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

Requiem

by Vandana Singh

The Ocean Between the Leaves

by Ray Nayler

Okay, Glory

by Elizabeth Bear

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to our August 2021 issue!

I’m currently fighting a two-day battle with hiccups following my latest procedure, number six for the year. The good news is that the doctors have informed me that they were able to remove the last of the plastic and stone from my kidneys. There won’t be a seventh procedure. For the first time in eight months, my life can return to some semblance of normalcy. No more pain. No more hospitals. As frustrating as the hiccups have been, it’s a small price for what I’ve gained. I’m looking forward to tackling the large pile of projects that have piled up during this period and I’d like to thank everyone for their support and patience this year. I’ll need a little more time to catch up, but if I owe you something, it shouldn’ be much longer now.

Until next time,

-Neil

Requiem

Vandana Singh

The thought of the letter lying on her desk in the untidy apartment was like a little time bomb ticking in her mind. Varsha told Chester about it, between the steamed mussels and the fish course.

“So I’m going to Alaska for spring break,” she ended.

“But—what about Atlanta?”

He had been holding her hand in that ostentatious way he had whenever they were in a restaurant known to be a White Purist hangout. He let go of it, looking hurt.

The seafood place was a hole-in-the-wall with a clientele that clustered around the TV screen and yelled epithets during football games. The AugReal entertainment was of poor quality—floating sea captains and naked ladies, mostly, but the food was fantastic. Chester liked to live on the edge, take her to places like this, challenge the status quo. She pulled down her Augs to look at him in the world: the blue eyes, the little cut on his cheek, the slight pout of his lips, a tendril of graying brown hair sticking damply to his forehead from the steam still rising off the dish of mussels, and thought: he’s really quite a kid, even though he’s eleven years older than me. That was the attractive thing about him, this childlike quality in a brilliant young professor, although at this moment it was annoying.

“Atlanta can wait,” she said firmly. “This is my favorite aunt we’re talking about.”

“You were going to go in the summer.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said? The place is closing ahead of schedule. I have to get her things.”

It hit her again that her aunt Rima was dead, had been dead for more than a year, that there was no relief from the shock of it, no matter how many times she mourned. And Chester was being a jerk right now. And she had homework to finish, grad school being what it was. She got up, grabbed her bag, and turned and walked away from him, from his shocked face, his half-suppressed “Varsha!”, the catcalls and laughter from the men at the bar. At the door she looked back very briefly—he was rising to his feet, arms reaching out, his face filled with rage and bewilderment. The night outside was cold—she fell into her familiar jogging rhythm, ignoring the glances of strangers, feet pounding on the pavement, bag strap tight across her chest—all the way to the T-station at the corner.

The tragically delayed letter was lying on her desk. I’m coming, I’m coming, she said silently to Rima. Just like you wanted me to a year ago, I’m coming to Alaska for spring break.

I first heard the songs of the bowhead whale on the internet. Varsha and I and a bunch of neighborhood kids and one of the pariah dogs—I think it was Tinku—were gathered in the front veranda of the Patna house, playing a video game. For some reason that I can’t remember now, we looked up whale songs, and there it was, the long, strange call, filling the space. The dog Tinku started howling in tandem and wagging his tail, as though he could understand what the whale was saying. All of us burst out laughing. But there was something about that song that tugged at me. It occurs to me now that my journey to the Arctic started there, on that afternoon, with the honeysuckle bush in full bloom and the smell of the flowers almost making me dizzy. The shisham trees in the front garden whispered in the breeze—a kind of bass note to the whale’s song—and all those years later it is the whales I hear, and the shisham trees are a warm and distant memory.

We are out in the boat, Jimmy and I, and we are following a pod of bowhead. There is an AUV—an underwater robot—fitted with a hydrophone that is moving with the whales. We can see its output right here on Jimmy’s laptop—the spectral analysis of the conversation below, and the sounds themselves, in their immense complexity. We know each individual in the pod—they were tagged decades ago, but even without the tags, the coloring on their flukes or the injury scars on their flanks tell us who they are. We’re seeing more propeller scars since the Arctic was opened to shipping. The killer whales have been moving up, too, hungry terrors that they are, and the bowheads that survive bear some horrifying scars. No wonder the bowheads are pushing farther North, toward the pole, where the waters are still cold, tracking the changing currents in search of krill.

I have learned that bowheads may be the oldest-living animals in the world. They live for over two hundred years! Apart from the new threats, their lives are relatively peaceful: the slow migrations around the North Pole, in the sub-freezing waters, with their kin; when hungry, they just open their enormous, garage-sized mouths and sieve in millions of tiny krill. Living that long, they must think long, deep thoughts. What do they think about? What do they say to each other?

When we are back at North Point, Jimmy will put on the headphones and scroll through the video feed and spectral analysis. Apart from language-recognition software, he says immersive attention is a way to use the best pattern-recognition device we know—the brain. It’s what his people have always done, paid attention to their environment in a way that makes the most observant scientists among us seem oblivious, blind, bumbling. No wonder I am having such a hard time with the language—Iñupiaq has to be the most precise language in the world.

I wish I could help you all understand what it is about this place that gets me. It is so cold I don’t have the words to describe it. Even with global climate change—even with the warming of the Arctic, the winters here are colder than we tropical flowers can ever imagine. When the wind blows, which it does all the time in gales and gasps, I feel like there is no breath in my lungs. I have to put warm gel packs in my gloves and boots so that I don’t get frostbite. For six months of the year there is darkness or near darkness, and—what I miss the most—there are no trees! But still, this place draws me and draws me and draws me, and it isn’t just Jimmy or the work. The tundra in early spring is astounding. The way the low sun hits the snow, the blinding beauty of it takes the breath away. Once, out in the field, we saw two Arctic foxes playing, chasing each other round and round in circles, without a sound. But the tundra is not silent. Did you know, ice can speak? It squeaks and grunts, makes little slithering, sliding noises, and great explosive, cracking sounds too. Once, early in my stay here, we were out on the sea ice, Jimmy and I, along with a few others from North Point. It was dark and cold, but very still. The stars were out in their billions, and we could see the faint, translucent curtains of the Northern lights high in the sky. We were getting ready to set up our instruments, talking quietly, when Jimmy said: “Guys, we’ve got to get off. Now.”

I looked around but there was no obvious threat. I was going to ask Jimmy what the problem was, but then I saw everyone else acquiesce without argument. They packed up in a big hurry too. Hurry, hurry, Jimmy kept saying. I was thinking maybe there was an emergency with his family that he’d somehow remembered, but the moment we got off the ice there was an ear-splitting crack, and the segment we had been on suddenly broke off. You can’t imagine what that was like—a whole great peninsula of floating ice suddenly detached from the rest of the shore ice and floated away, ghost-like in the semi-dark, into the black Arctic Ocean. I was shivering and shaking with shock, but the others were slapping Jimmy on the back and shaking his hand, as we trudged back to the trucks.

I asked him later how he knew. It’s paying attention. Something he learned from his father and grandfather when he went hunting with them as a little boy, a kind of sixth sense that is developed through experience, a sensitivity to the slightest change in wind direction, the tiniest syllable spoken by the ice. Imperceptible to others, this ability to communicate with the physical environment is what originally earned the respect of scientists for Native Elders.

In the plane, on the final leg of the journey, Varsha’s bravado vanished. It was a really small plane, and there was a crack across the plastic of the seat in front of her, which didn’t inspire confidence. She could pull on her Augs and edit that all away, but she wasn’t such a V-head. Working in the field, you got to know where to draw the line.

It didn’t help that there was sick misery rising in her. There was no avoiding the fact of Rima’s death. Rima was supposed to have come down from Alaska to settle her in last August when Varsha had first arrived from Delhi—but she was already seven months dead and gone, taken by the ice during a storm, along with her partner and lover, an Eskimo scientist called James Young. It had been hard enough for Varsha to alight in Boston alone, to find her way to the International Graduate Students office at the University, to walk the bewildering streets of Cambridge in search of her apartment. But this was harder. The man who had forwarded Rima’s last letter had written to say that the research facility where her aunt had worked was closing down ahead of schedule, and there were some things of Rima’s that the family might like to have. The man’s name was Vincent Jones, and he would be glad to help in any way he could.

The plane banked. They were about to land in Utqiagvik. Her aunt had always, in her restless travels, been drawn to remote places, but this was the end of the world, or so it had seemed from the pictures on the internet—a town of mostly Eskimo people at the edge of the Arctic Ocean. She pressed her face against the window. There was a whiteness everywhere—white sky, white land, no horizon but the undifferentiated whiteness. For a moment she thought they must be flying through clouds, but the plane’s wing was clearly visible. She fought a feeling of wild panic, and reasoned with herself—the plane wasn’t going to crash. There were people talking all around her, tourists and Natives, excitedly, because this was the first real winter in a decade.

“Which hotel? That must be new. They say the Castle of Light has the best views . . . ”

“Worst winter they’ve had in a decade . . . ”

“This is a real winter. This is what winters used to be like. Back then, before the Great Melt. It will be good, maybe, for the whaling.”

“The sea ice came back this winter to nearly 70%—no more multi-year ice—it will be thin and dangerous to walk on . . . ”

“ . . . when you were growing up? Every year like this? Man, that must have been crazy . . . ”

In the whiteness below, there appeared a pinprick, then another and another. A line of houses or sheds, all in a row. The plane swooped lower and lower and she held on to the edge of her seat, thinking this is what Rima had seen on her first visit to this place—when was it? Five years ago? Maybe she’d been in this very plane, in the same seat. The misery rose in her like a solid wall.

On the ground there was ice everywhere. The runway was ice, and ice rimed the edges of the small airport. It was a large metal shed with a corrugated roof and an extension clearly under construction—behind it were roads of ice, and buildings in the same utilitarian style. The airport was a single large hall with areas sectioned off for tickets, departures, arrivals and luggage. Native Iñupiaq Eskimos, white tourists, a small knot of men in coast guard uniforms. How strange to be in a place where the whites were so clearly the other, and yet this was still America! Oh America, I thought I knew you. She heard English around her, and a language she took to be Iñupiaq, the Native tongue of peoples who had been here for thousands of years before the Europeans came. What would Rima have thought and felt, coming here for the first time? Waiting for her suitcase, she texted the family group. I’m here in Utqiagvik, all fine. I must only be the second Indian to come to this place. It’s really different. There was her little orange suitcase, between wooden boxes and sacks. She hauled it off the belt and looked around with a feeling of panic. Where was her host? Her Augs beeped and she hastily pulled them on. The scene before her was augmented with scrolling information, and a couple of VReal polar bears wearing toothy welcoming smiles were speaking a welcome. “Welcome to Utqiagvik, Northernmost city in the US,” they said. “Take your taxi or van directly from the airport area. Polar bears have been sighted in town.” Amidst the strangeness and wonder of this was the little message icon flashing, showing her an outline of where Vincent Jones was waiting for her. Near the exit door. She arranged her backpack on her shoulders and wheeled her suitcase ahead of her to the exit.

He was a large man with a broad, quiet face. His thin hair was streaked with white. He looked like the Tibetan refugees she had known in New Delhi. Smiling, he held out his hand.

“Good, good. You’re here. Rima talked so much about you. You look like her.”

“Thanks for receiving me,” she said. It was so strange to be here, to be here without her aunt Rima, who would have stood here shivering like this in this exact spot. There was a wind blowing, sharp in her face like icicles. She pulled up her hood. Vincent seemed unperturbed by the wind. They climbed into a large, black Land Rover which lumbered slowly into the streets of ice.

“It’s a little ways to North Point,” Vincent said. “We’ll go through Utqiagvik and by the ocean, so you can see the sea ice over the Arctic. It’s been some years since we’ve had a winter like this one. Used to be the norm, once upon a time.”

All she knew about Vincent was that he was somebody at North Point Polar Research Station, and he had been Rima’s friend, and he had sent the letter. It had been found on the desk in her office. He had been going through her desk because North Point was closing down. Rima must have meant to send it right before the trip out to sea from which she had never returned.

“What was it like last winter, when my aunt died?” she said. Might as well get it over with. “We got the reports, but I’d like to understand—”

“It wasn’t this cold or icy,” he said, “but we did get one great storm. The Arctic has been in a warming trend for decades, but it’s not steady, it goes up and down. Last winter the sea ice was so thin you couldn’t walk on it. Things are changing so fast weatherwise, it’s hard to predict whether a storm is going to fizzle out or turn into a howling blizzard. Rima and Jimmy were out in one of the research boats less than ten miles from shore when the blizzard hit.”

Her hands clenched on her lap. It was cold despite the heater—the tips of her fingers felt like ice.

“We didn’t used to have much of a coast guard presence when I was growing up,” Vincent was saying. “But even with a coast guard station right here, they couldn’t do anything with that storm. Had to wait two days before they could risk sending out the helicopters and the search vessels. That was the only bad storm we had that winter. This winter the cold and snow and ice are much more steady—this was normal once.”

He cleared his throat.

“Jimmy was my cousin.”

“Oh—God, I’m so sorry,” she said. She glanced at him. He was looking straight ahead, his face set.

She looked out of the window. There were children out on bicycles—bicycles!—with thick treads in the front of a small grocery store. Their parka hoods were lined with fur. An Eskimo couple went by on a four-wheeled open vehicle, their faces ringed with fur-lined hoods. A man was digging out a car from several feet of snow in front of a house. The buildings had the same utilitarian steel-shed look of the airport, except for an extraordinary structure some six floors high that looked like a wedding cake.

“Castle of Light Hotel,” declared the ornate sign.

“Tourist trap,” Vincent said, a short, amused laugh. “Good for the economy, or so I hope. Used to be we’d make money off oil leases, before the oilfields gave up the last of the oil.”

They turned east, leaving behind the houses. Now they were driving into the tundra—ahead and to their right was an expanse of snowy whiteness, flat and featureless. After a while they passed a large sign on their left with a cut-out image of a larger-than-life snowy owl. “Pagliavsi,” declared the sign, standing alone in the snowy emptiness. “Ukpeagvik, site of ancient Eskimo Village,” Vincent said. Behind the sign the ground rose gently and then fell away into an enormous plain, its smoothness broken only by untidy chunks of ice, like broken piecrust.

“You should know,” Vincent said after a while. “Your aunt. She loved what she did. Like Jimmy—they were a pair. We’ll stop in a bit so you can see the sea ice.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to know him,” Varsha said. “She talked about him to us.” She thought of Rima’s full-on zest for life. It was possible to be a fifteen-year-old and feel older and duller than her then-thirty-year-old aunt. Those days, Rima’s enthusiasms and adventures had led her from a short stint as an adventure and travel writer to a degree in mechanical engineering and the design and customization of wind generators in the high Himalayas. In the lush back garden of the old house in Patna, under the mango tree as old as her great-grandfather, Varsha had sat on the swing with Rima and heard all about the great expanse of the Tibetan desert, the lakes of meltwater from the vanished glaciers, oases in the arid heights. The wind that blew hard and cold, the measuring instruments that recorded wind speed and direction over an entire year, so that Rima and her team could design the best wind-energy-capture system for that particular locale. She saw the pictures and felt the possibilities of the world open up, a familiar side-effect of being with Rima.

And now there was a lump in her throat, but Vincent was already pulling over by the side of the road and motioning her to get down. Here she was, Varsha of the tropics, on the Alaskan North Shore. There was the endless white expanse before her, with only the shiny ice road winding away before them. The sun had emerged from the clouds, and lay low on the horizon—the light on the snow hurt her eyes. She pulled up her Augs in world mode. You are 1280 miles from the North Pole, scrolled the message to the right of her field of view. Vincent led her to the top of the rise on the left. Her boots crunched on the snow. At the top they paused. Before them was the great, white plain broken by small piles of cracked ice. It extended all the way to the horizon, as far as she could tell.

“That’s the Arctic Ocean,” Vincent said. “Sea ice. Frozen sea water. You can tell there’s water under there from the way the currents make the ice break up.”

“Can you walk on it?”

“In places. Used to be parts of the sea ice attached to the shore stayed all year round, built up a little every season. As much as three, four meters thick sometimes. We used to camp on the ice when we cut whaling trails in the Spring. Your aunt ever tell you about that?”

“A little,” Varsha said. “She said the whaling hadn’t been very good for a while.”

“You’re cold—let’s get back in the car. Yes, the bowheads changed their migration patterns after the Big Melt. We, the Iñupiaq—my people—had always lived with the whales, and when they started to change, our old knowledge wasn’t as much help. The killer whales started coming up into the warming waters, hunting the bowheads. And the TRexes became active at the time.”

In the car the heater was running on high. She put her hands in front of the vents.

“We’ll get you proper gear for this place,” he said. “Your aunt’s stuff. She loved this place but never liked the cold.”

She nodded.

“Tell me about the TRexes,” she said. There was an Augree Experience involving intelligent monster machines that she’d helped debug when it was still in production. She’d been surprised to learn that TRexes were for real, in the world.

“There are about twenty of them working these waters,” he said. “Still got oil and methane down on the sea floor. TRexes found two large deposits last year. But they’re having trouble with some of them, I hear. Shut-downs and failures. Keep your eyes peeled, we may see one on the way. There’s one operating a few miles from us at North Point.”

They didn’t see any TRexes but after about an hour the North Point Research facility loomed suddenly out of the landscape—a building capped by four tall steel lattice towers, and three rows of small windows on the visible sides of a cubical structure in between. The windows shone in the sun’s low light. The place was larger than she expected. It jutted out into the plain of sea ice on concrete pillars.

“We’re down to a handful of people,” Vincent said, leading her in past a heavy steel door. “Most of the researchers have left. The rest are packing up, finishing up. You’ll meet them at meals. I’m the Native liaison here.”

Inside, there were white walls and long corridors, gray-painted metal doors, some with windows.

“Who’s bought the station?”

“GaiaCorp’s Arctic Energy unit,” he said. “They run the TRexes.”

The dorms were at the back of the facility. Their footsteps echoed emptily in the silence. Lights came on as they walked. Vincent led her to a small room with a white bed and a desk and chair. “Bathroom’s down the hall,” he said. “Sorry, we live kind of plain here. Why don’t you get settled and I’ll ping you when it’s time for dinner. The door next to yours—that’s the suite Rima and Jimmy had. It has an attached bathroom if you want. Here’s their keycard, and here’s yours. Thought it would be easier to have you right next door.”

After she had washed up and unpacked, she saw that it was only four-thirty. She took a deep breath. Might as well start now. She went into the suite her aunt had shared with Jimmy Young. It consisted of a tiny outer room and a bedroom and bathroom. When she turned on the light she was startled at how bare it looked. It had clearly been used very little, mostly for sleeping, she imagined. There was a stereo in the small living room, a carving of a polar bear on the coffee table that looked like it had been made from bone, and a picture of two people on the prow of a boat. She picked up the photograph—it was Rima, her face rimmed by a fur hood, and almost-uncle Jimmy, snow goggles pushed back over his head, his dark hair windswept. They were both grinning as though they were having the time of their lives. She set it down again, congratulating herself for keeping her composure so far. She had a job to do, and she simply had to keep herself together until it was done. Pretend she was on an errand for a strict taskmaster like—her aunt. Yes. Sure. In the bedroom she willed herself to open the closet. Vincent had taken care of Jimmy’s things—only her aunt’s clothes were here. She could donate some to the local town swap, Vincent had said. She breathed the still air inside the closet. Was there something of Rima left here, still, after all these months? A faint whiff of something indefinable—a lotion—yes, the sandalwood lotion from home that everyone in the family used. There was a long, beaded kurta in green, and a pink chikanwork outfit among the flannel shirts and turtlenecks—she buried her face in the kurta and swallowed a lump in her throat—she would keep those. She began to pull things onto the bed, making two piles.

Once she had begun it was easy enough to continue with the suitcases in the closet—mostly empty—and the shoes at the bottom. Then the side table. This was going fast. If she went through the office stuff as quickly she would be done in a day. Whatever had possessed her to plan a four-day stay?

But when Vincent knocked on the door to call her to dinner, there was still the pile on the bed to be arranged, and the books in the bookshelf—she had let herself become distracted by them—well-thumbed volumes about Iñupiaq culture and history, one on biomimicry, a number of technical-looking books on alternative energy and acoustical engineering. There was a book she had gifted to her aunt when Rima had left for the US: The Best Travel Writing of the 21st Century—it had “Love, Varsha” on the inside cover. There were books on economics and history, cetacean biology, and interspecies communication.

She was relieved to go down to the dining hall, where a buffet meal was served—rolls and fried chicken and some kind of vegetable greens she couldn’t identify. She sat with Vincent and four other people to whom she was introduced, all white except for Vincent and an African-American called Kenny, who was a sea-ice expert. It was strange to be around people who weren’t wearing Augs or any other kind of goggles, who were so much in the world. Usually she liked talking to people but suddenly she was almost too exhausted to eat. Fortunately the others seemed preoccupied with the impending shutting down of the institute. Incomprehensible discussions about local politics and who was going where and what Arctic Energy would do with the facility allowed her to concentrate on her food and sit with her thoughts, until the woman with the salt-and-pepper hair sitting next to her said in a low voice:

“Sorry about your aunt. It must be awful—but you don’t want to talk about that. How was your trip?”

She would have liked to talk about Rima. It might have helped her feel grounded, she thought tiredly, but she had noticed how most Americans tended to assume that dead people were off-topic. She tried to smile.

“Long. And cold, at least the drive here. I’m still warming up.”

The woman laughed. Her name was—yes, Julie. She had very pale skin, and a fine dusting of freckles.

“I’ve been here for two years and I’m not really used to being here either. For one thing, the Arctic is going through some really rapid changes. Kind of like being married to whatsyourname here.” She elbowed the man next to her, who smiled. “But mostly what gets me is the absence of light for six months of the year. If you’d come in December it would have been darker and colder.”

“Boston will feel tropical after this.”

“Hey,” Vincent said. “This is the best place in the world. Even with climate change. No need to enhance reality when you have—this!” He swept his arm around the room. The Arctic night was dark blue outside the small, square windows.

“It would be hard to edit out the cold, or your ass freezing doing fieldwork on the ice,” said one of the young men, whose name she had forgotten already. He nodded pleasantly at her. “Vince said you’re in VReality, is that right?”

“Not at the moment,” she said. The greens tasted bitter and sad, as though they had never known the sun. Even her Augs couldn’t fix that. She explained about her Master’s program.

“Bet you can’t wait to get out of here,” said the young man. “The US of A isn’t what it used to be. Unbelievable how quickly things have changed in just a few years.”

“It wasn’t that great before, Matt,” said the black man. Varsha remembered his name was Kenny or something. Yes, Kendrick. He looked in disgust at the pile of chicken bones on his plate, and stabbed at the soggy greens with his fork. “Yes,” he said. “Try being black in America in any era. It’s worse now, of course. And there’s North Point. There was a time we couldn’t have imagined oil coming back, after the ban. Now we have GaiaCorp promising to protect us through geoengineering. Project Terra! Why study climate change when we can fix it from space? We can burn fossil fuels again! Get the last of the oil and gas out of the Arctic. Five, six years ago, if you’d told me that there would be TRexes in the ocean and North Point bought out by GaiaCorp, I would have said you were crazy. I’ll never say ‘It can’t happen’ again!”

“Started with the Space Act in 2015,” said Matt. “You start mining the moon and then suddenly you have the corporate wars, then Earth Corp, and the agreements with nations, and—”

“Spare me the history lesson,” said the fourth person, the one next to Julie. He put down his fork and dragged his fingers though long, straggly brown hair. “I agree with you in broad terms but you are connecting the wrong dots, Matt—”

Vincent pushed back his chair.

“Got to go finish up some things. Varsha, you got everything you need? Breakfast is from six to nine a.m. After breakfast, if you want, Julie can show you around. Julie—?”

“Sure,” Julie said. Varsha felt guilty. These people were winding down what seemed to be their life’s work. She didn’t need showing around. She had all the sorting and packing to do—

But she wanted to know Rima the polar scientist. She wanted to know her almost-uncle Jimmy. She nodded.

“Thanks, I’d love that. If it isn’t too much trouble.“

There was a TRex at work far on the horizon. She was looking out of the window of the office her aunt Rima had shared with Jimmy Young. Jimmy’s space had been cleared and someone called Terra Longfield now occupied it, her absence bounded by pictures of a smiling blond child and drawings in crayon. But Rima’s desk was stacked with boxes of her things—papers, books, knickknacks that had used to be on her desk, including a picture of Varsha, and another picture of the family at the Patna house, the colors faded but the faces still poignant in their familiarity. Varsha was the kid tugging at Rima’s arm in the picture, pointing off-camera to something in the garden, and Rima was bent slightly forward, laughing, about to follow her niece’s glance. They were the only two not looking at the camera.

It was cold in the empty office. She looked up to the window and saw the skyscape, the morning sun still low in the sky, the impossible immensity of the expanse of snow, the pale gray smudge of the horizon— and against it, a TRex somewhere far ahead where the sea ice gave way to open sea. Its skeletal frame, with the long head turning slowly this way and that, looked so alive and purposeful that she shuddered involuntarily. They were smart machines, she knew, but this one, far away as it was, seemed positively sentient. Its long labrum sipped hydrocarbons off the ocean floor, and the proboscis sniffed for methane bubbling up off the ocean floor. When exploring, she had heard, it would become buoyant in the water, its array of airguns firing boom-boom into the sea, looking for oil and gas under the seafloor. It was an amazing piece of engineering. Despite the remoteness of this one it felt more real than the ones she had seen in VR games.

A knock at the door made her jump. Without waiting for her response a man came in. He was wearing a suit, which seemed incongruous after the casual clothing of the others. He was tall, with a pleasant, open face, and wavy dark brown hair. He wore a pair of Augs—state-of-the-art—in world mode—she could see his eyes through them, green. He smiled and held out his hand.

“Rick Walters. So pleased to meet you, though in such sad circumstances. I knew your aunt well.”

There was something compelling about him, she noticed, as she returned the pressure of his hand. An air of complete assurance and good nature.

“I just wanted to let you know—if you need help, or want to talk, I’ll be in and out,” he said.

“Thanks. Are you a scientist here?”

He laughed. “Me? Alas, I haven’t the temperament. I’m the Transition Liaison. Making sure the handover goes smoothly. Much as I’d prefer an Augs Enhancement, I have to have results in the world. Sorry to say.”

She laughed. “I’m glad you’re not a V-head. It gives us a bad name.”

“I just got my nephew his first real Augs,” Rick said, lightly. “He’ll be totally thrilled to know I met someone who works with them.” He passed his hand over the edge of her aunt’s desk, picked up the family photo, and set it down. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be interrupting.”

Later, after he’d left, she thought how normal he seemed. He was from her world, the world of busy metropolises and high tech. But there was an older world than that, and she missed it now. Standing in the cold room, she pulled on her Augs and brought up her favorite program for when she was homesick. The walls of the room turned a sunlight yellow and the view from the window was of her grandparents’ courtyard. There was the old guava tree that she had grown up with. There were potted plants on the bench beside the window and she could hear the faint strains of the tanpura from her music lesson in the next room. The program was creative—it took the boxes of her aunt’s stuff on the desk and rendered them into piles of multi-colored knitting wool. Her grandmother was a knitter. Someone came into the room—it was her uncle. She waved to him, smiling. But when he spoke, his voice was distorted. “We apologize for the Cognitive Dissonance . . . ” The words scrolled across her field of view. “Initiating patch—”

But she had already pulled the Augs down. It wasn’t her uncle speaking Hindi, it was Vincent speaking English. His thin gray hair was disheveled, as though he had just pulled off his hat, coming in from the cold.

“Sorry,” she said, but he was asking her something.

“Was Rick Walters just here?”

“Yes, he said he was a friend of my aunt’s. He offered to help.”

“He’s no friend of Rima’s.” Vince frowned. “Rima hated his guts. He was on the original negotiating team for North Point. She fought hard against the buyout. He’s here to make sure everything’s accounted for. I came to warn you not to tell him anything. He stops by without warning, acts real friendly.”

He nodded at her and left.

In the cold and the silence, Varsha shivered. I don’t know what’s what, she told herself. There was no signal on her phone. The last text she had got from the family was a “Be careful out there” from her grandfather, and similar notes from her parents, her cousin Sanjay and her Augs Friends group. Her mother and father were fighting again, and Biru uncle was in Patna because Nanu was having a medical checkup. Chester had sent about twenty pings already, which she had ignored. She didn’t feel like resuming the Augs program or sifting through her aunt’s things. She sat down at the desk and put her head in her hands, and remembered.

For the longest time she had shared a room with Rima, her mother’s youngest sister, every visit to Patna. They decorated the room with strange structures; there were wires suspended across the room with wheeled carts that ran up and down, a plastic monkey in a bucket that jumped out and woke them up at 7 am every morning. Anyone approaching the room, no matter how quietly, would be anticipated—thanks to an IR sensor that beeped a warning in Swedish.

She and Rima used to invent games for the little ones. The one she was thinking of now was a winter game—they would drag a couple of razais down to the carpet to make a huge multicolored mountain, and they would hide under sections of the thick folds, while the little cousins would screech excitedly and try to find them, their fat, slippery bodies like so many wriggling fish on the satin covers. The razais were thick enough that the mountain stood without help, and they would roll the ping-pong-ball collection down from the summit, one by one, trying to guess at first where, among the folds and channels, valleys and crinkles, the balls would end up. It was sometimes tricky because you’d think the pink ball would slide just so, into the long, straight channel leading all the way to the bottom of the mountain, but a little crinkle here, or a little subtle encouragement there (from an aunt half-concealed within the folds) would send the ball careening to quite another destination. This is where Varsha learned about chance, and how a small and sudden change could lead you to quite another path.

Rima and Varsha co-wrote a novel when Varsha was eleven. In the novel, various people and parts of the house, and trees, and stray dogs were characters. It was comic and dark and sad and hilarious, and in each chapter there was a hidden clue to the problem or mystery. The secret was that each clue was concealed by something similar to itself—a Box of Wonders was hidden in the Cube of Amazing Things, a puppy with magical powers was hidden in its mother, since it had yet to be born, and a wish-granting mango hung with other mangoes on a branch of the mango tree. The story had got out of control, with plots and subplots of labyrinthine complexity, impossible to finish. For years when Rima and Varsha would meet, they would say to each other—how did Amroodji become allergic to guavas? Or—did Mad Puppy find the Lost World inside Mobius, or outside? And they would burst out laughing. One of the other cousins had recently discovered the manuscript (copiously and laboriously illustrated) stuck between two of the eight hundred books in the drawing room, and the grandparents had been having a hilarious time re-reading it with the younger grandchildren, until after the news came. Now, life was forever divided into Before and After. The manuscript was now in Nanaji’s safe, as though fate might snatch away even this.

My friend Skip told me this story when I was in California. There is a former killing ground off the southern coast of California in the Pacific Ocean. Here the American whalers hunted and killed thousands of gray whales in the 1850s. In the 1970s, Skip said, well after the age of whaling was over, a Mexican fisherman had an encounter with a gray whale. The whale came alongside his boat and gazed at him. Looking into the whale’s eye, the fisherman had a life-changing experience. Since then, the whales seem to wait for the humans. Whenever people in boats come to that region during the calving season, mother whales and their young will approach them. People will touch them and they seem to welcome these encounters.

So of course we had to go there. We took a small plane down to a town in Baja California. There’s quite a tourist business out there, bringing humans to the whales. Skip and my friend Molly, who studies kelp forests, went out in a small boat with a bunch of tourists. I got to practice my Spanish and we were all laughing and having a great time, with the boat rocking wildly on a choppy sea—and then the guide yelled: whales!

I could see nothing—the spray from the waves was in my eyes, and I was trying to keep my balance. Then as we got closer the waters parted and a leviathan surfaced, slowly, as though it had all the time in the world. I leaned over the rail. The ancient eye looked at me—a sentient, knowing, curiously gentle gaze. In that one glance, that tenuous, temporal bridge between being and being, I knew my life would change. At that moment I existed in a way I hadn’t before—in the eye of a Californian gray whale. She could have destroyed us with one flick of her massive tail, but she just hung in the water, looking at us. The kids on the boat were already leaning over and touching her, and I did too. Her skin was riddled with scars and clusters of barnacles. She must have been quite old. Later another whale surfaced close to us and blew a great, long breath. The plume of moisture bloomed like a fountain several meters into the air, soaking us. The sun came out at exactly that moment, and among the suspended water drops I saw, for a fraction of a second, a rainbow.

“Congratulations!” Skip said, hitting me across my shoulder blades as I gasped and choked. “Your first rainblow!”

This astonishing experience made me wonder: knowing their bloody and tragic experience with our species, what moved these whales to seek us out, to be so forgiving? Was it one individual’s bright idea to try to befriend the enemy?

Jimmy thinks none of this is surprising. Living such long lives, some of the whales may have acquired what we call wisdom. It’s rare enough in our species! And why should humans be the only ones with a sense of agency, a desire to make things better for themselves? We already know that whales have culture—different pods of the same species have different habits and tastes in food.

Here’s another story—a dolphin was observed apparently assisting a young sperm whale that had lost its way in a saltwater marsh, somewhere off an island in the Indian Ocean. Scientists who received the video (from a fisherman) said that it was inconclusive. But Jimmy has seen it. He’s not one to jump to conclusions, but it supports his hypothesis that whales communicate with other species. After all, they live in an environment rich with biodiversity. Wouldn’t they want or need to communicate with other species sometimes?

I tell him about how I grew up, in the old house in Patna with the sunlight-yellow walls. How, first thing in the morning, I’d be woken up by mynahs yelling outside the window, and the parakeets in the neem trees. The pariah dogs would be waiting at the back door, ancestors of the current Bossy Pack. We had a parakeet with a broken wing when I was ten, and he would sit on the windowsill and scold the dogs, and drop roasted chana or bits of toast for them. Ma, you would have already been up before dawn, watering the tulsi in the courtyard, and the radio would be playing in the dining room. Apart from the neighbors’ conversations wafting through the open windows, and the bells of the rickshaw-wallahs, there were so many living creatures around us, talking to each other. This is why I could believe the old stories as a child, in which animals are speakers and players.

Jimmy had such a different upbringing, here in the Far North, and yet we understand each other so well. He, too, grew up with stories in which animals talk to humans and each other, across the species gap. Some sympathies bridge the distance between cultures. Perhaps it is the same between species, and we modern humans simply don’t notice.

“We’re in the lowest level of the station. Sorry it looks like a dungeon here, but the best part is just ahead.”

“Did my aunt work here?”

“Her lab’s upstairs,” Julie said. “ You’ve seen it—one of the big rooms, empty now. But she loved it down here. She and Jimmy spent as much time here as possible, planning and arguing and observing. Just past this door—”

A large steel door opened at the press of a metal knob set in the wall. There was a small space beyond, and another steel door. The first door closed behind them with a slow hiss, and the second one opened.

There was nothing beyond it but an ordinary passageway. Puzzled, Varsha followed Julie. Lights turned on as they walked into the dark corridor. There were no doors on either side, just the tunnel going forward into the dark, into the—

“The sea—this is going seaward?”

Julie turned, grinned.

“Yes—hold your horses, we’re almost there.”

And suddenly they were in a broad open space filled with diffuse light that came in through transparent walls. The roof was a glass dome. It was literally a bubble at the bottom of the sea.

Varsha caught her breath. There were tiny things moving in the water outside—small, streamlined silhouettes against what seemed to be a dank white ceiling, a few feet above the roof of the dome. It was suffused with a faint blue glow in places.

“We’re under the sea ice,” Julie said. She flicked a switch and suddenly the outside was lit. The floating ice above them discolored with gray-green smudges on the underside. In some places the ice had thickened, forming extrusions that hung in the water like chandeliers. In the light the ice crystals glittered like so many diamonds. Beyond the circle of light, the water was murky, mysterious with small, moving shadows.

“Wow,” Varsha whispered. Julie looked satisfied.

“Never fails to impress visitors,” she said triumphantly. “If you’re lucky you’ll see more than a few fish or krill. We’ve seen a swimming polar bear. And during the spring migration there’s bowheads that always stop here. Since about ten years ago they’ve been venturing closer to the Beaufort coast. Same with belugas.”

Varsha looked around the observation chamber. There were desks and instrumentation around the circular perimeter. In the middle was a table with a microwave, coffee maker, and the attendant supplies.

“Your aunt spent a bunch of time here,” Julie said. “She and Jimmy used to joke that it wasn’t fair for humans to observe the whales and other creatures. We should give them a chance to understand us. You should have seen the two of them dance around the room for the whales! The whales must think humans are deranged.”

She laughed.

“Bowheads are wary creatures. They live over two hundred years. Some of them still remember the days of the Yankee whalers, when they were nearly wiped out. So you can’t blame them if keep their distance. But they’re intelligent creatures. They’re curious. So some of them—it’s always the same ones—they come and hang out and look at us, and talk about us.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Only a little. Whales have a sophisticated communication system. Don’t you know what your aunt was doing? Jimmy had a mission—to decipher the communication system of the bowhead whale. Humans can now speak a little gibbonese—white-handed gibbons, you know? South Asia? No? Well, more people should know about that! We’re finally beginning to decode languages of other species. Whales and dolphins are hard—their languages are likely to be more complex than ours. Jimmy was a marine biologist, your aunt was an engineer—they were perfect for the project.”

“I thought she was working on alternative-energy systems!”

“That was ongoing. She worked with a group of students at the college in Utqiagvik—there’s a really good tribal college in Utqiagvik—they developed some prototypes of wind generation that can work with gusty winds in a place like this. Town’s looking into it. She also—here, let me show you.”

The outside lights turned off, except for the ones close to the sea bed. Julie gestured to Varsha to get closer to the walls. On the sea bed was an array of two-foot-high devices that looked like Japanese fans mounted on flexible stems. They were swaying gently with the current.

“Wave-generator prototypes developed by Rima,” Julie said. “She worked on boat design too—her unofficial project—propeller-free boats that wouldn’t injure marine animals. You should’ve seen her lab. There was this bathyscaph shaped like a squid that used water propulsion. She used to get all kinds of junk from online auctions, naval junkyards, and such. She got interested in whale communication after she went on her first boat ride with Jimmy. They would sit in this room and draw designs of all kinds of crazy stuff. Boats with flippers and wings.”

“Did she actually build any of this?”

“There were so many prototypes being tested and taken apart and tested again that I lost count. After—afterwards I heard they sent most of her stuff to the tribal college. They wouldn’t have, if she’d completed the project. If they’d lived—she and Jimmy—there’s no telling how much they would have accomplished . . . ”

“What was he like? Jimmy?”

“I never felt I really got to know him. I feel like that sometimes with the Natives here. It makes me realize we European descendants are the newbies, that this was their home first, and still is. The Native Resistance has been felt here too, even though it is so far away from the action. Vincent I can relate to, he lived for so long down south. But Jimmy, he just went down to California to study what the science of the whites could teach him, and hotfooted it back here. He was quiet. Thoughtful. Don’t get me wrong, he could crack a joke and all, but he was a bit of an introvert. No-small-talk kind of guy. Passionate.”

“Did he—did they get to decipher whale talk?”

“They made some headway. He’s published quite a bit on it. Their tapes and the papers they worked on are all with Vince. But you should talk to Vince or Matt—I’m just a microbiologist. Matt’s focus is how land mammals are affected by climate change—caribou, moose, polar bears, seals, and the impact of moose coming up from the South. The three of them would talk up a storm about species communication.”

Julie turned the lights off. In the dim natural light filtered through the sea ice, the observation room seemed a world unto itself.

“I just heard on the radio that bowhead whales have been spotted west of Utqiagvik,” Julie said. “It’s early for them to be coming here, but apparently they are coming. You might get lucky.”

I feel her here, Varsha thought. She’s here, Rima Mausi, in this place. She took a deep breath.

“I hope I see a whale,” Varsha said, as they started back up the tunnel.

As the light grew stronger and the thin shore ice started melting back with a distressing rapidity, there came news that the whales were already on the move from their wintering areas in the Bering strait. Vince and Tom and Irene were in Utqiagvik, where the mood was festive. I joined them later in the day. The sun was out and half the town was on the beach. The whale radio had declared that one of the whaling crews was headed back with whales in tow.

At last we saw the first boat chugging toward us over the ocean, the flag waving. Vince was standing next to me and let up a great shout, and everyone started yelling “hey-hey-hey!” It was Vince’s uncle, Tom Jones, who was captain of that boat. Kids were running around shouting, it was like a festival. Then I saw the dark bulk of the whale in tow behind the boat, and the red float bobbing close to it. As it came toward land, the man in the forklift drove closer to the water’s edge, and we moved out of the way. I couldn’t see anything for the crowd for a while, and then I saw the whale’s great carcass slide past me, pulled up by ropes attached to the forklift. It lay like a black mountain. Vince came through the crowds with his grand-nephew, a boy of five, on his shoulders. “It was a good catch,” he said to me, smiling. He said something in Iñupiaq. “That’s a thank-you to the whale for the gift of its life,” he said. “The whale captain says that over the body when it is lashed to the boat. It was a good death—it died quickly.”

The whale was already being cut up. Long, black strips lined with pink blubber were being hauled off on ropes. The men worked efficiently with triangular cutters on poles. Blood stained the white snow. There was shouting and singing.

“We will eat well this winter,” Marie said. Marie works at the grocery store, and is Irene’s aunt. That first whaling season was a bewildering time for an omnivore-turned vegan Indian scientist raised in the sub-tropics and freshly arrived from California. I remember asking Jimmy when I first came to Utqiagvik: “How can you bear to eat such amazing creatures?” He just looked at me in his thoughtful, considering way, and replied: “Because we are not apart, we are a part.” It took me some time to figure out what he meant. Since then I’ve attended many a whale carving and blanket toss, and helped cut and prepare whale to feed the community. In the dead of winter, in a place still mostly only accessible by small aircraft, the sole source of fresh food is meat. And because the whale is sacred, it is never sold, only shared. I had a lot of whale that winter, parboiled and dunked into soy sauce, or cut frozen straight from the ice cellar and into the mouth. I have a lot more respect for the hunter who brings in the wild kill and says his prayers over it, than for those who trap animals into constant, unrelieved suffering in their thousands in factory farms.

Thus I am made of many things—mother’s milk, fruit of guava and mango trees, rice of the Indian Gangetic Plain, vegetables of splendid variety, meat of many creatures, and now—bowhead whale!

Next morning Rick showed up. Varsha was in her aunt’s room, folding clothes and shoes into cardboard boxes. He smiled at her from the door.

“Hey, want to come for a helicopter ride?”

He was charming, even if he couldn’t be trusted. She should say no—but what harm was there in a helicopter ride? She was sick of this room, sick of grief. She could handle this man—she had known men like him during three years working in industry, before the MS program, before America. Before.

She was glad not to run into anyone else as they went up to the roof of the building.

“Where are we going?”

“Just over the sea. Quick trip out to the nearest TRex and back. You’re here for such a short time, you should see a little of the Arctic.”

On the rooftop the cold breeze took her breath away. She stumbled—Rick steadied her, his face unreadable behind the goggles. She climbed into the helicopter, a compact yellow-and-black giant bumble-bee of a machine, with “Arctic Energy” painted on the sides, and the circular insignia of GaiaCorp.

“You know how to fly this thing?” she yelled over the engine’s roar.

He grinned.

“Want to inspect my license?”

She shook her head.

“Just get me back safe and sound,” she yelled as they rose into the air. “In time for lunch!”

“Much as I’d like to spend more time with the most attractive woman in fifty square miles, I fully intend to get us back for lunch,” he said, laughing. “Although I could get you a better meal in Utqiagvik.”

“Mr. Walters, you’re flirting,” she said. Below them the ice sheet was a great, white wing, fraying at the edges where it met the liquid sea. North Point station had vanished behind them.

“Sorry,” he said. He sounded unrepentant. “Look, we’re over the ocean now. Those little white patches are part of the shore ice that separated, floated off.”

The ocean was incomprehensibly vast, stretching away to the curve of the horizon. Above their heads the helicopter blades were a blur through the transparent walls of the cockpit.

“Why are we going to see the TRex?”

“We’ve had some trouble with a couple of them, we don’t know why. System failures, mechanical wear, hydrophones non-functional. I like to reconnoiter at least semi-regularly. Despite the Big Melt the Arctic is still a really inhospitable place—well, I don’t need to tell you that—”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Hang on, we’re here.”

The craft fell like a stone. Varsha clutched the edge of her seat, but the helicopter slowed and hovered over the dark sea. The tops of the waves glittered in the low-angled sunlight. She gasped.

Before them, rising out of the water like a creature from a mechanized Jurassic nightmare, stood the TRex. It was the one she had seen from the window of her aunt’s office. Its long snout swiveled toward them and its optical sensors glittered with iridescence like the compound eyes of an insect. Rick’s fingers flashed over the copter’s dashboard, and the TRex abruptly bent its head. Its neck collapsed inward until was several meters shorter.

“It’s pulling its legs in—I’ve put it in search mode, so you can see how it works,” Rick said. “Look!”

Floats inflated on either side of the machine. It began to move, through some invisible propeller mechanism, purposefully across the sea. The copter followed it.

There was a deafening series of booms below them. A milky froth appeared in the water around the TRex.

“That’s the airgun array—don’t worry, I’ve turned it off now. Sound waves penetrate the seabed and are reflected back. See the buoys around it? Hydrophones, receiving the sound, giving it a picture of the sea floor, hundreds of meters down.”

“Pretty impressive,” Varsha said. “But damaging to whales, I hear.”

“Yes, but the TRex has a 360-degree sensor that detects whale pods,” Rick said. “It’s not just the Iñupiaq who care about whales, you know. We spend a lot of R&D money making sure we don’t damage the environment.”

His fingers moved over the dashboard controls again.

“There, it’s back to doing sampling. Good, it passed the test, and you got to see it in action.”

On the way back she asked him whether he’d looked at TRexes self-diagnostics.

“You’re smart,” he said. “Like your aunt. The diagnostics don’t tell us anything, because the non-functionality comes without warning.”

“It could be a kind of cascade failure,” she said. “I’ve worked with some sophisticated Augs programs—complexity can cause all kinds of sudden failures.”

He looked at her.

“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this,” he said, “but I’ve seen some internal reports—problems with some of the Geoengineering projects that nobody understands. Warming spikes instead of cooling in the upper atmosphere. Plankton die-offs where you expect a bloom. Winds changing in unexpected ways. We could use people like you.”

“I thought you were just the transition liaison,” she said, mocking him. “I didn’t realize you were the CEO of GaiaCorp!”

He threw his head back and laughed. The sky above them was a deep azure. Below and ahead lay the ice, swathed with the sun’s gold light.

“I like you, Varsha,” he said, looking at her. “I think we’re going to be friends.”

Rick stayed for lunch. It was an uncomfortable lunch, since the scientists didn’t seem to want to talk very much. Only Carl—Julie’s husband—held up the conversation. Vince was very quiet. Varsha thought uncomfortably that perhaps he felt betrayed by her excursion with Rick. She wanted very badly to reassure him. After Rick left, she gave herself time to collect her wits, and went to talk to Vincent.

He was in his office. Packing boxes sat on the floor and on chairs. Vincent had his back to her, looking at a large map on the wall. But when she came into the office, he turned, although she hadn’t made any sound.

“About my copter ride with Rick Walters,” she said. “I wanted to let you know. He was all charm, but I didn’t tell him anything. He showed off his TRex and brought us back, that’s all. I wouldn’t let Rima down in a million years.”

Slowly he smiled.

“It’s been very tough,” he said. “The last year and a half it’s been one thing after another. It’s not for me to tell you what to do. But thanks for being smart about Rick Walters.”

“What is it that he wants to know, anyway? What are we hiding from him?”

“Rick’s an information gatherer,” he said. “He collects all kinds of details indiscriminately, in the hope that they will come in useful someday. That’s kind of how he swung the deal for North Point. In short, he’s nosey.” He pointed at the map. “I unrolled it and put it back on the wall after he left. Just to look at again before I pack it away. It’s Rima and Jimmy’s work. They called it the Map of Anomalies. Rick would love to get his hands on it.”

It was a map of the coastline, rich with markings and symbols in a rainbow of colors. Lines traced the migration pathways of the Bowheads—different shades of blue indicating how the paths were shifting every year. Rima and Jimmy would follow the bowheads in a boat, or track them with drones and underwater robots, explained Vince. Little red triangles indicated sites of killer whale attacks—red squares were ship injuries, and red lines were TRex trajectories across the shallow seas.

Event markers were in mysterious purple symbols.

“This one—this was the most recent one, after Rima and Jimmy were lost. I put it in. Just this past October, at the time of the Fall whaling. These are places where Jimmy’s drones picked up bowhead whales in formations that have never been seen before, sounding together. Those symbols over there are TRexes that malfunctioned without warning. Rick’s not the only one interested in the TRexes.”

Another symbol off the shore of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic indicated a crossing point, where migration routes of belugas, the small white whales of the North, intersected the new bowhead pathways. There were similar intersections with humpback routes in the North Pacific.

“It’s a pattern-recognition exercise,” Varsha said, remembering games from childhood. “I wish I could see a little of what they saw.”

On her third day at North Point, Varsha made a discovery. She had left the bookshelf for last. She started to make two piles on the bed—books to give to Vincent, if he wanted them, and books she would take back with her. On the bottom shelf she found something she had given to her aunt the summer before last—a fat tome that was not a book: Adventures in the Real and the Unreal. With shaking hands she opened it. There was her handwriting on the first page—“with love from Varsha—may you have musst adventures!” The first few pages were real—but in the middle of the book was a hollow compartment. Inside was a small book with a red-brown cover—a diary. There were also some thin, parchment-like pieces of paper, carefully folded.

She opened the diary first. Her grandparents had given it to Rima when she had visited them, the summer before her disappearance. The last time I saw her, Varsha thought, and I didn’t even know it. She remembered Nanu handing his daughter the book. “I know you are too busy to keep a diary,” he had said, “but at least write something in it from time to time. When you think of us, write something for us. No engineering diagrams, but just what you are thinking and doing. Fill it up until your next trip home. Then bring it so we can all read it.”

It was less than half full. Rima’s small, neat handwriting, interspersed with little cartoons. The first entry:

“My greetings to the guava tree, the Bossy Pack, and the Human Horde of Chandragupta Park. No engineering diagrams, only deep thoughts in these pages. As promised! Right now I am on a plane back to Alaska, but I will write more when there is something worth sharing with you all . . .”

She couldn’t read any further. She set the journal down and fell to her knees and wept, with her face against the bed, hard, angry sobs. She grabbed the pillow and held it to her. Her chest hurt. I could die with grief, she thought, and close on that came the thought of her grandparents. They had survived the terrible news—how? She thought of her Nanu’s face when they got the news, how it seemed to have shrunk. She thought of what he’d kept repeating, over and over, the first week or so—they didn’t find the body, they haven’t found the body— And then the discovery of the black box, the relaying of the last words, and the solidity, the incomprehensibility of grief. Her grandmother, who had seemed so fragile, suddenly appeared stronger, weeping her sorrow with a fierceness that kept them from going under. She had taken up knitting with a vengeance. The shawl she was knitting for Rima, that was half complete—she took it up again. Last Varsha heard, she was still at it—the shawl was the size of a blanket by now, and growing larger, as though it was possible for her grandmother to knit her way across the abyss that had opened in their lives. Even the pariah-dog pack that lived in the neighborhood, the Bossys, had howled for three nights. Her parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, the neighbors with whom the children had grown up, all shared the burden of grief. And someone or other would keep saying—look, Rima wouldn’t want us to fall apart, we’ve got to go on for her—and again—how could it be? She was the most alive person I knew—

But there’s nobody I can share this with, she thought angrily. She was far away from everyone.

At lunch she asked Vincent—

“Is there a gym? A track or someplace I can run?”

“There’s a treadmill on the upper floor. I think it’s still there. You can use it. The only gym’s going to be in Utqiagvik.”

“You okay?” Julie, sitting next to her, gave her a quick, worried look.

“I’m fine—well, as fine as I can be anyway. I just need—I have this habit, see, of running every day. They might bring the Boston Marathon back this year, so I’ve been training. I get a little crazy if I can’t run.”

Later Vincent said: “You only have a couple more days here. I’m going home tomorrow evening. Come have dinner with my wife and me then.”

She felt much better after the exercise. Back in her aunt’s room, she read some more pages of the diary. She carefully unfolded the sheets of paper—they were thin but tough, like cloth. They were blueprints of some kind, but hand-drawn. There was a delicate and precise sketch of a boat—but what a strange boat! It had flippers, and some kind of sail. A series of drawings showed the boat closing up from the top, like a convertible. There were other fine pages of notes, in a different handwriting, presumably Jimmy’s, because she couldn’t understand the words. Iñupiaq? There were sketches of whales of various types, and waveforms of sound waves. There was a list in her aunt’s writing—people and research institutions around the world—a Kartik Sahay at Marine Research Labs Chennai, a Skip Johnson at a facility in California, others in places as far away as Finland, Siberia, South Africa. Her aunt had thought all this was important enough to hide from prying eyes. Varsha remembered Rick Walters’ offer of help. Fuck off, she told him silently. On the other hand, what did she know about Vincent? He was not a scientist; he was the Coordinator for the Native Science Collaboration—they matched Native Elders with scientists. Whatever for? There was so much she didn’t understand about this place, these people. She was almost sure Rima had mentioned Vincent during her last trip home. She had talked about Jimmy, showed them pictures, and Vincent had been mentioned, and Julie. That was as close to an endorsement she was going to get, unless the diary provided any clues.

She would probably have to trust someone eventually, but for now she would keep the existence of the diary and the papers a secret.

In the afternoon there was some excitement. Matt reported that bowheads had been seen in the waters off Utqiagvik. The whaling camps were still being set up; it was a little early for the whales to have left their wintering grounds in the Bering Sea. A couple of whales were heading east along the coast now. There was a general rush to the observation bubble on the seabed.

The sun’s light percolated dimly through the ice above their heads. The water was dark, washed with blue where the ice was thin enough to let in some light. Matt turned on the external lights, but very dim, so that the golden radiance allowed them to see about ten meters further into the water. Fish swam by on the other side of the wall, their pale bellies agleam in the light.

“There!” Vincent said. “Agviq!”

And a dark, mountainous shape loomed just beyond their field of vision, and swam with cloud-like grace toward them. It came deliberately, straight to them, a huge, thirty-foot bulk with its flipper brushing the wall, its great eye looking in. In all her life Varsha would never forget that moment when she looked into the eye of the whale. Near her the others were talking quietly, exultantly.

“She’s looking well—look at that healed propeller scar—”

There was another whale behind this one. The two whales took turns looking into the lighted room. There was a low, long, booming sound, like a distant cello. Varsha could feel the walls vibrate. The whales were calling. They must have circled the observation dome for a good fifteen minutes before moving away into the dark.

“Wow,” said Varsha, finding her breath. “I’ve never—I’ve never seen anything like this. How do you know one whale from another?”

“Marks on the fluke—the tail,” Vincent said.

“Are they all so curious?”

“Whales are individuals,” said Matt. “Most of them keep away from here, but these two, and there are three others—they stop and say hello whenever they are passing by.”

“We have hydrophones set up all along the coast,” Julie said. “Here—I’ll play the recording.”

She pressed a button on the computer keyboard. A waveform scrolled across the screen, and the sound filled the air. It was the strangest call Varsha had ever heard. It filled the room, filled her being.

“It feels as though I ought to understand it, but I don’t,” she said, shaking her head.

She thought of her aunt standing here, watching the whales, hearing them sing.

One of my former engineering professors, who looked like the crazy prof in the movie 3 Idiots, had this huge construct in his lab made from odds and ends—a Rube-Goldberg machine on steroids. If you dropped a certain ball onto a ramp, the machine would light up and there would be wheels turning, pulleys spinning, weights flying into the air to hit specific targets and so on. The grand finale was that a dart would fly out and bury itself in a large picture of Isaac Newton on a Styrofoam board. The damn thing made a great racket. Isaac’s face was so perforated with dart strikes that his visage had mostly disappeared. We loved the machine, and part of our spare time was always spent tinkering with it. The crazy prof called it “Newton’s Engine.”

I realized when I was quite young that there were two classes of problems, broadly speaking, simple ones and complex ones. Machines are good at solving simple problems. But throw in enough complexity and all bets are off. I went into biomimicry-based engineering because I wanted to challenge this realization. It’s only when I got to the Arctic that I realized my first instinct had been right. You can’t solve complex problems with machines, without breeding more problems of increasing intractability. Complexity is the spanner in the works of Newton’s Engine. But it goes beyond that. You might think a sufficiently advanced AI would think its way through some of the failures (I happen to know they are not just rumors) that are plaguing GaiaCorp’s Project Terra. GaiaCorp has invested so much in its intelligent geoengineering systems, but I think it is inconceivable for autocrats to realize that their slaves might not march to their orders. AIs are a fundamentally different kind of intelligence than humans. We have more in common with the whales than with our household robots.

I think our main problem may be that we think of the Earth itself like a Newton’s Engine, something we can tinker with and fix. Jimmy says that even biologists fall into this trap—of putting living creatures into rigid categories of structure and behavior, motivated by simplistic evolutionary imperatives. To him, to understand the whale would mean not just the kind of work he did for his PhD at San Diego, but also traveling with the whale through its great migrations around the North Pole, being part of its way of being, without any preconceived notions. “You see things differently when you are part of them,” he says. “Explain,” I say, and he laughs and says he can express these ideas better in Iñupiaq. It is so much more precise a language. Jimmy is not a talker—not in English anyway—I think because he dislikes sloppiness. He likes to say things right. You should hear him chattering with his nieces and nephews whenever there is a big family gathering. As I take the first baby steps learning Iñupiaq, I remember what you always used to say, Papa: that every language is a different way of seeing the world.

It turned out that Vincent’s wife, Emma, worked in the town government. Vincent had a room at North Point that he used when the weather was bad, but his home was in Utqiagvik. The clouds had cleared a little. It was still -6° F but that was normal, that was balmy for an early spring.

So it was thus that Varsha found herself in Vincent’s Land Rover, being driven along the coast road. The sea ice stretched as far as she could see, but it was breaking up in places farther out from shore. A long, narrow channel of seawater had appeared where there hadn’t been one before. The sun lay low in the sky, and the light was murky. But the sky was clear, a dim, hazy, ethereal blue.

“Want to walk on the ice?” At her nod he pulled over and stopped. Her boots crunched on the low rise that separated the land ice from the sea ice.

“Walk where I walk,” Vincent said. “The sea ice is all right close to the shore, but it is thinner than it should be.”

She followed him out onto the plain. The wind was a cold knife in her face. She felt her toes turn numb. The ice sheet was vast, its immensity broken only by cairns of ice chunks that were carelessly piled up all over the plain. But the sky was clear and she could see the horizon, separating sea from sky.

“You are walking on frozen seawater,” Vincent yelled over the wind. He pointed. “There’s water under the ice. See, you can tell by the broken up piles of ice chunks. That’s the wind and the currents breaking up the ice from below.”

It was the worst cold she had ever experienced, and it was incredible. Vincent pointed.

“Over there. Do you see those tracks? That’s polar bear.”

She saw the broad, regular tracks a short run away from where they were standing. The tracks disappeared toward the sea.

“Probably hunting seal. Not that many seal now, because we haven’t had much ice. They pup out on the ice to avoid bear, in little dens under the snow. This winter Kenny said there are a few.”

She thought of little seal pups under the snow, and the polar bear sniffing the ground.

In the truck the warm blast of heat was welcome. They met no traffic until they got to the outskirts of Utqiagvik.

Home for Vincent was a small, warm, compact house on stilts, on a street with similar houses. Emma greeted them wreathed in cooking fragrances that were surprisingly familiar.

Emma was small and round, with a mobile, humorous face.

“Vince is a better cook than me,” she said, “but when he comes home after a bit I do the cooking. I thought you might like to try whale stew with a bit of curry. There’s fish too.”

“Whale stew?”

“Goodness, don’t tell me you’re vegetarian? Vince, did you think to ask?”

“Oh, I eat everything,” Varsha said quickly. “I’ve been cutting down on meat lately, but this smells great!”

“It’s the last of the spice powder Rima made for us,” Vince said, taking her coat. “She told us what is called curry here in America is garbage. So she sent for some spices from Anchorage and roasted and mixed them. Made us whale curry. It was amazing!”

“This meat is from last year,” Emma said. “Come, sit down. Are you warm enough? Vincent’s uncle is a whale captain. They were fortunate because it had been a poor harvest the year before. With the waters warming, the whales have changed their routes. We see a lot more killer whales coming up from the Pacific, hunting the bowheads. And now there’s more shipping and the new searches for oil and gas.”

“Noise disturbs them,” said Vincent. “We were blessed this one came to us. We sent whale meat to the other villages that didn’t have a good catch.”

Among the family pictures on the mantel was one of Rima and Jimmy, along with four young people, sitting on top of a harvested whale.

The wine was good. The table was neatly laid with a flowered table cloth. Vincent brought the dishes to the table. The fragrance rose in the air.

“This is so nice of you,” Varsha said, taking a ladle of whale curry. “The smells remind me of home!”

“This is the same whale as the one in the picture,” Vincent said, indicating the framed photos on the mantel. “Your aunt’s eaten of this whale.”

The meat was like nothing she had ever tasted. It was melt-in-the-mouth soft and redolent with cumin and coriander, cinnamon and ginger and nutmeg. Tears came into her eyes.

“It’s incredible!” she said. Vincent and Emma looked at each other, then they both smiled at her.

“It means a lot to us, the whale,” Vincent said, chewing reverently. “It’s part of Eskimo identity, a sacred beast that makes us who we are.”

“I have only read a little about it,” Varsha said apologetically.

“You have to stay awhile, witness a whale hunt to really understand,” Emma said. “Here, have some more. The gravy is really good on the rice. At each harvest we thank the whale for its sacrifice. Its meat is never sold, only shared.”

It seemed to Varsha that she had passed some kind of threshold that she couldn’t quite comprehend. She had thought she had come to perform the saddest of duties, to collect her aunt’s things and hope for some closure for herself and the family back home. I’m an outsider, she thought, but Rima had at least partially bridged the gap. And because of her somehow I have a link here. Like a foot in a door to a place I can’t see.

At dessert—an apple tart—she asked Vincent if he had been on his uncle’s whale hunt.

“Yes of course,” he said. “Since I was a kid. When it’s whaling time we cancel everything. Schools, work. Everyone gets together to help.”

“Tell her properly,” Emma said. She gave Varsha a humorous look. “He talks like a running tap when he’s in the mood, but maybe he hasn’t had enough wine. Come on, Vince, tell her about how you grew up. She’s not going to hear about life in the great North from a better source.”

“You’re the running tap, not me! But yes, I grew up in Utqiagvik at the time of the start of the Great Melt. Sometimes it would get to 50 degrees Fahrenheit, in the winter. When it was supposed to be 10 or 20 below. My grandfather wanted me to learn to hunt seal and polar bear and whale according to our traditions, but the seals had gone, and the bowheads were moving away, driven by killer whale swimming up from the Northern Pacific. And the sea ice was so thin, it wasn’t safe to walk on. I remember when the last of the multi-year ice disappeared. My uncle wept. He was a hunter, a great whale hunter who had learned the skill from my grandfather. “When the ice goes,” he said, “so does the way of our people.”

“People down south don’t understand that,” said Emma. “They think that if the cold goes, and the ice, we would be glad. Not so for us. We are who we are because of the ice. I remember when the Great Melt started—I grew up in Anchorage but I used to come up here to see my great-aunt. We—my cousins and I—drove off polar bears in the streets when they came starving, looking for rubbish. My cousin still works in the local wildlife department.”

“Things changed for everyone,” said Vincent. “The polar bears—we heard that some were going south into land, mating with the grizzlies. I thought: if the way of our people is gone, maybe I have to go south with the polar bear. That was the summer that moose started coming up North, where they had never been seen before. Everything was changing, faster than the memories of our ancestors that go back thousands of years. Never had the ice gone so fast every spring, or developed so slowly every fall. Now in the summers the ice pack would melt so much that there would be clear passages right across the North pole. The circumpolar countries were vying with each other over shipping routes and oil and gas drilling, even after the bans and the declarations of protected zones. What it meant for us is that the whales left the shores. The bowheads who make us what we are as a people, who have given us their lives as a gift so we may live—they started to change their migration routes around the Arctic. The whale hunts were less and less successful. Some years there were hardly five or six whales harvested per season.

“So I was well into my teens until the time one year that the winter was strong enough that the ice came back. My grandfather was very old by then but just like all the other whale hunters he was very excited. Bowhead had been spotted off the shore ice, and the ice was thin, but thicker than previous years. So we made camp not far from the shore. I remember that first whale hunt of mine. The whale that gave itself to us was an old male, he had been seen many times by my father when he was a boy. Now here he was, giving himself to us, as though to say—I give you my life so you may be Iñupiaq a little longer.

“But when I was grown and my grandparents gone, so much had changed that I felt the old ways would not survive. So I left—I went south to college in Fairbanks, and got a degree in business, and had a bunch of jobs that took me from Alaska to Oregon and down even to Colorado. I tried to become this person who changed with the times.”

He laughed. Emma gave him an affectionate look.

“Meanwhile my cousin Jimmy—he’s my cousin’s son—he was of the new generation that was inspired by the Native revival movements—he studied Iñupiaq, got a degree in comparative linguistics, and then he decided he needed to know what the white man knew about the world. He’d always gone whaling with us when he was a boy, just some ten, twelve years younger than me he was. He’d interned for a while at Wildlife—that’s the town’s wildlife management department, some of the world’s best people on whales and marine life out there. It piqued his interest. He wanted to know what science could teach him about the whales. So he did marine biology at the University of California in San Diego. And then he came back here. Helped set up North Point Research. Then your aunt comes here, wanting to study wind generation in a place where you had gusts and gales without much sustained speed. They got to be friends. She started helping him in his research, and next thing, they’re a couple.”

There was a soft, remembering silence. From the pictures, Rima and Jimmy looked out at them, smiling. Their absence was like a presence in the room.

“What happened to all their things—their research, I mean—after—afterwards?”

“Rima’s renewable-energy prototypes are all at the college. The tribal college—she worked with the kids. The program will continue. There’s a machinist in town she worked with, we sent him the scrap bits and pieces. Jimmy’s equipment and records are all going to go to the University in Fairbanks. Their work will live on.”

The wine had softened her spirits. The whale stew had warmed her through. I never knew, she thought—I never knew the world was so full.

“What brought you back here?”

“Well, after two decades in the south I couldn’t take it. Came back here and decided if the young were doing it, I had to return too. Figure out what it meant to be Eskimo, to be Iñupiaq without the ice. I couldn’t be a grizzly bear anymore. So I started running the radio station.”

Emma took up the story.

“There’s a popular program we’ve had for a long time, when not enough young people knew their language, so our elders would come on the air and talk in Iñupiaq. Vince expanded that. We had the elders telling us stories, explaining what certain words meant—you know, people who belong to the land, to whom land is sacred, have words and concepts that are tied to the land, to the context. You lose the context, you lose half the lexicon. There were words that had lost their meaning, orphaned words and concepts—but the elders brought them alive, situating them in stories so people would know what had once been, even if it was no longer there. Then, when North Point Research was set up, Jimmy asked Vince to run the Native Science liaison over here. So that’s what he’s been doing for the last seven years or so.”

Emma was in the town’s scenarios planning team. “When things are changing so fast with the climate, we can’t plan effectively for the future. So we prepare scenarios of all possibilities so that we can be better prepared. Did Vince show you the sinkhole on the way to North Point? No? Well, it’s south of the coast road. Must be fifty feet deep. The permafrost that used to be always frozen is thawing here and there, so the land sinks. They’ve had that all over the Arctic Circle.”

They were so kind to her. They had known Rima and had been fond of her, and the grief that was like a stone in her chest seemed lighter.

The living-room sofa folded out into a guest bed.

“Here are some extra blankets,” Emma said. “Rima used to be cold all of her first year, then she acclimatized.”

She sat at the edge of the bed. Vince had gone upstairs and Emma and Varsha finished their hot chocolate in the living room.

“She was a special person, your aunt. All kinds of people come to Utqiagvik, either to study us or the ice or both. And lately we have tourists, come here to see the Northern Lights and all. We’ve kind of become inured to it, you might say. And a bit sick of it, I have to admit. But Rima, she was different. Never gave up on anything or anyone, stubborn as a mule, a good match for Jimmy. Jimmy was our—we never had a child of our own. Always thought we’d have him with us, see us grow old.”

She blinked away tears and got up. “Time to sleep or we’ll be up all night,” she said, smiling. In the dark a few moments later, Varsha thought—the link between us is the link of a shared grief. And sleep came.

When I was in California I once watched a movie of emperor penguins swimming underwater. It was astonishing—they were flying through the water, flapping their wings with an effortless grace. The same wings that look so pathetic and useless on land are amazing instruments underwater. At the time I was with the biomimicry group. We talked about submersible boats and how inadequate their designs were. I didn’t think further about it then, but after hearing Jimmy talk about whales, I’ve been sketching. I sit in the observation bubble—it’s the best place for me to think—and I imagine a vessel that can fly through water like a penguin. A squid-inspired propulsion device that takes in and expels water—I’ll have to look into energy usage—and then I think—what about ocean currents? If I put an acoustic Doppler device on this boat, it could find ocean currents and use them—and it occurs to me—a sail! A squid-propulsion amphibious boat with penguin wings and a sail to catch the underwater currents! I was so pleased I showed Jimmy, and he got really excited. I’ve put some rough sketches here.

Oh Papa, I know you said no engineering diagrams, but this is the most exciting thing I’ve done. Forgive me! It’s such a warm winter we’re having here, not even one good storm to give us some excitement. Warm is a relative word—you would shiver here, Ma, even when the sun is at its highest. The sun never gets very high in the sky here. I know you are thinking of the shawl you said you were knitting for me, Ma, and I think of it too, when I am feeling cold.

But it is so important that it stay cold here. You know, Papa, how you always emphasized in us that we see connections between things. Never just be content with what’s at the surface. Well, here’s a connection for you. If the Arctic melts, we are all cooked. The Arctic keeps the whole Earth cool. Next time there is a severe summer back home—and I can’t even imagine one hotter than when I was in Patna this July, when I thought I would faint if I stepped out—next time please remember that it’s in part because of what’s happening here in the Arctic. We’ve warmed the Earth so much that the Arctic is melting, and that will only warm the Earth further.

So now I’ve given you an engineering diagram and a science lesson. I’ve got to make up for it.

I want to write this especially for Varsha and the other kids, although they aren’t kids anymore. It is hard to be in the world—if you live in it fully, it is easy to sink into despair. What, after all, can one or two people do, when the world is dying? Why not submit to the alluring logic of GaiaCorp’s promise to save the Earth, to their megamachines seeding the oceans, their satellites seeding the skies, their winged shades reflecting the sun’s light away from whichever politically expedient, remote, hard-scrabble country is out of favor? Why not bide the time as gently as possible by surrendering our full, human, curious, questing selves, lulling ourselves into dreams? The deal is that to be fully alive you have to be willing to bear pain. That is what I swore to, when I was in my twenties—that I would be fully alive. But nobody can do it alone. I am so fortunate to have been born as part of the Guava Tree family in Chandragupta Park, and to live on the best possible planet, and to have the friends I have, and to have met Jimmy, whom you will all love, I promise.

I think about all this sometimes because my job is occasionally dangerous, and I know Ma and Papa tend to worry, but you must remember, should anything happen to me, that it is love that moves and motivates me, and love leaps all chasms, and you can’t get rid of me so easily. So if ever the unthinkable shall happen, repeat after yourself: that Rima is in her own way always and forever with you. Say it now, just for practice.

The morning she was going to leave, Varsha paced back and forth in her little room. There wasn’t much room to pace, but she needed to think. At last she came to a decision.

She found the Station office, where a young Iñupiaq woman called Irene was organizing a filing cabinet.

“Sorry, Irene. I need to talk to the machinist who worked with my aunt. Can you get me his name and number?”

“Sure. He sometimes sent her stuff down to Anchorage, in case you are looking for anything in particular.”

After a brief conversation Varsha went back to her room and finished packing. The four boxes that were going back to Boston would be dropped off at the post office. Emma had given her an old suitcase—she was carrying a few of her aunt’s things on the flight back.

She went to Vince’s office and knocked. To her surprise, Rick Walters was there. He smiled at her.

“Sorry you’re leaving so soon. I feel we barely met. Vince, I can take Varsha to the airport. Give us a chance to have a final chat.”

She smiled at him.

“It’s all right,” she said, before Vince could say anything. “Vince and I have some important things to talk about. Family stuff.”

“Of course,” he said. He shook her hand. “I have friends in Boston. Maybe I can look you up next time I’m there.”

He gave her hand a squeeze and went out of the room. When his footsteps had died away, Vince shut the door. His face had a closed, remote look.

“Vince,” she said. “Before we go, I have to ask you something.”

“Sit,” he said. He still looked wary. She had to trust him. Rima had. She took the plunge.

“I need to know what happened to my aunt’s prototype of the submersible boat,” she said. “The one that could sail on the ocean and fly under water. Julie mentioned she’d seen something being assembled in Rima’s lab. I called the machinist in Utqiagvik and asked him what parts he received. I’m no engineer but nothing he described sounded like parts of the amphibious boat she was building.”

There was a long silence.

“How do you know about the boat? Julie told you?”

“Only casually. But—I have been meaning to tell you—I found my aunt’s diary and some papers. She left them for me in a place she knew I would know to look. She didn’t say she had completed the prototype. But I got the impression she had. I need to know—did she and Jimmy take the prototype with them on their last trip?”

“They went on the research boat—you know that—the pieces were found on the seabed— there was no sign of a submersible boat.“

“But the research boat was a large enough vessel to hold the prototype, wasn’t it? They took it with them, they must have! A book inside a book, a boat inside a boat—Vince, I need to know—my family needs to know—if there’s any chance—”

She couldn’t speak. She swallowed hard.

“What do you want me to say?” Vince put his head in his hands. He looked at her after a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I want to believe they’re both alive. Jimmy—he would tell me since he was a little kid, going to school, or a whaling trip, or California—he would tell me he’d always come back. Do you think I don’t want to believe it? But I can’t give you false hope. What would you do—tell Rima’s parents she might still be alive? What if she isn’t? True, they didn’t find the remains of the ambiphian. But the winds and the currents here are strong and unpredictable. It could take years before the rest of the debris showed up.”

“They would have radioed you,” Varsha said. “If they were alive.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t be so easy,” Vince said. “And if they are really out there, there are reasons why they would not have wanted us to know.”

“Not wanted us to know? My grandfather is old. I don’t know how he has survived this. My grandmother does nothing but knit all day. My parents are fighting more than ever. This is destroying us. My aunt wouldn’t keep it from us if she were alive!”

She had raised her voice. Vince motioned her to speak softly.

“Listen, Varsha, there’s a lot more at stake than you think,” he said. “I’m going to trust you as you have trusted me. If they wanted to hide the prototype, don’t you think they could have just dismantled it and hidden the parts? This is much bigger than you think.”

“Please explain,” Varsha said. “I deserve this much.”

“It’s time to go,” said Vince. “We have plenty of time to talk in the car. Please—carry Rima’s diary and the papers on your person.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “In my backpack. I’ll show you in the car.”

After the good-byes were done, they sat in Vince’s Land Rover while the engine heated, looking at Rima’s diary and the papers. Vince grabbed a battered camera from the back seat and took some pictures. “For Emma,” he said. “And for safety. I think these names here are the people who may know something about what Jimmy and Rima intended. I’ll make some inquiries, discreetly.”

“Vince,” Rima said, “she must have drawn the boat designs on her laptop. Through some kind of engineering software, like DesignWorks. You told me earlier her laptop had been lost with her, but she might have saved the design on a klipdrive or something. When you get back—look inside your computer—unscrew the base, and see if there’s anything small like that, tucked away.”

Vince looked startled, then nodded. He looked at his watch, sighed, and started the Land Rover.

The sun sent long rays over the tundra and the frozen sea. The windows of the station glowed in the yellow light. There was a wind blowing, moaning softly, whipping up skeins of last night’s snow from the ground.

“Jimmy was interested in whale communication,” Vince said as the Land Rover lurched over the ice road. “But he was also curious about the possibility of interspecies communication. I don’t just mean human-to-whale, but whales with other species. Nobody really thinks much of that among the scientists. It’s not in the white man’s way of thinking, to think that there are other species than him, who might want to talk to each other. In our stories polar bears and whales and all the other creatures talk to each other as well as to people. To the white man that’s just kid’s stuff, or just mythology. But Jimmy, he wanted to know if it was possible. He’d noticed some odd things.”

They bumped along the coast road. The sun was higher in the sky today. It would edge up over the horizon a little every day, until it vanquished the night for nearly six months of the year.

“What odd things?”

“Unusual behavior among some whales. Bowheads hanging out with humpbacks. Blue whales down in the Atlantic lowering their call notes—they call much more bass than bowheads—so they reached right across an ocean basin. Jimmy thought it was logical that the whales had noticed the conditions of climate change—the warming ocean, the changing currents and chemistry. How could they not? Maybe they had always talked to each other. Modern humans are the only species that keeps apart from the others. Not so the other animals. The white man doesn’t see what’s not in his scheme of things.

“Don’t get me wrong. I like civilization—I’m not blaming it for everything. Among my people there is a lot of division on such issues—how do we find balance between the benefits of the modern way of life and the wisdom of the traditional teachings? But back to Jimmy.

“So Jimmy had this idea that if humans are to understand whales, you’ve got to do it as much as possible in the whale’s environment. Drones, underwater robots, tracking, all that’s great, but if you can’t follow the whales on their Arctic migrations, if you can’t dive deep with them, or swim under the ice, you won’t know the context in which they sing their songs. More than anything you won’t have a relationship with them of mutuality. All true knowing is mutual, Jimmy used to say.”

“I hear that bowheads live very long,” Varsha said. “In her diary my aunt wonders what they think about, talk about, for two hundred years.”

“Yes, that was the sort of thing that fascinated Jimmy. He wanted to understand how whales talked to each other and to other species, if there was maybe a common language among the sea mammals.”

“But why the need for secrecy? Doesn’t GaiaCorp already have amphibious boats?”

“Not like this one—energy efficient, small and compact, but with enough room for an extended stay. And Jimmy is—was—a hunter, he could keep them alive—”

He looked out over the great vista rolling past them, and was silent.

“I don’t understand why—if they really meant to go out deliberately into the ocean and fake their deaths—why?”

“Jimmy suspected that the bowhead whales were learning from the humpbacks how to disable the TRexes. Humpbacks use sound to stun fish. Sound means everything to whales. When the TRexes use their airgun arrays, it’s like having an explosion happen ten times a second. Sometimes for weeks or months. If whales are close enough they would get deafened. A whale uses sound for communication and to find its way in the dark under the ice. A deaf whale is better dead.

“Meanwhile Rima learned from scientists in other places around the world that GaiaCorp’s geoengineering is failing. Not just that, but the crop failures in your part of the world, and the toxic algal blooms in the South Atlantic, are a direct result of it. Worse, the geoengineers knew they would fail. It’s all about money and power, in the end.”

“So they can’t afford to let the TRexes be destroyed?”

“We can’t afford to let it get out that it’s not just other humans but potentially other species who are fighting back. The white man almost wiped out the bowheads in the time of the Yankee whalers. Do you think they would hesitate to do so again?”

“This is crazy. This is just crazy.”

“This is the world.”

“You’ve just destroyed everything I took for granted about the world.”

“Rima used to say: never take anything for granted.”

She looked out over the frozen sea. Somewhere beyond the horizon was open water. It was hard to imagine that somewhere on the open sea, or perhaps inside it, two people in an amphibious boat were sailing with the bowhead whales.

The town came up suddenly around them. Over the sea ice, tiny figures could be seen on snowmobiles, hauling sleds behind them.

“They’re cutting the trails,” Vincent said. “If you were staying longer you could have gone on a whale hunt.”

“I don’t know how much—how much more I can take of the world,” Varsha said. She cupped her hands over her eyes for a moment. Then, as Vince pulled up at the airport parking, she looked at him.

“What do I tell my parents? My grandparents?”

“That’s your call. Just—don’t let it get around, what I’ve told you. You can tell them, if you like, that maybe there’s a chance they are alive. But keep the other things to yourself. This is for their sake as well as yours. There are larger forces here at play than you and I.”

“I feel like I’m in an Augs adventure story. Except there’s nothing like this in the files.”

“I enjoy VR games from time to time. But you got to live in the world.”

“Thanks for everything, Vince. I am glad we talked, and I’m very glad I got to meet Emma. If— if you hear anything—”

“Of course.”

He helped her into the check-in line with her two suitcases. The small airport was filled with people—men in the uniforms of Arctic Energy, a knot of coast guard officials, and Eskimo families hauling supplies in sacks and boxes, laughing and chattering. It no longer felt quite so strange.

“We’ll meet again, I have a feeling,” Vince said, “so I’ll say ‘see you later,’ not good-bye.”

He shook her hand, smiled at her, a sudden, warm smile. Then he was gone. She blinked back tears and set her chin.

In the plane she thought of the diary and the diagrams in her backpack, and the secrets they carried. She thought of Chester waiting hopefully at the airport, and what she would have to say to him, and the life she had mapped out for herself. She thought of the house in Patna, and the aging faces of her grandparents.

The tundra dipped and glittered in the sun as the plane turned upward into the sky. The houses vanished. At this height, she saw the open water at the edge of the shore ice, and the expanse of the Arctic, broken here and there by white patches of floating ice. She thought of the great whales traveling in circles through the cold, dark waters, feeding and calling, dreaming and singing. Perhaps at this very moment her aunt and uncle were flying through the water in their little craft, hoping she would have deciphered what they couldn’t openly say, that would bring this shattering clarity to her life, and the faint thread of hope to their families, to the world.

Originally published in Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories.

The Ocean Between the Leaves

Ray Nayler

It began just like a fairy tale; an orphaned young woman pricked her finger on the thorn of a rose, and fell asleep.

She had always loved to be outdoors, and so the job she had as gardener at one of the stately, ancient yalis along the shore of the Bosporus was perfect for her. The mansion looked out over the waters of the strait from the Asian side, where it widens to meet the Black Sea, just north of the border of Istanbul Protectorate.

It was an investment owned by an Emirati family who was hardly ever there. She and the other staff had the place much to themselves most of the year. They planted and watered, trimmed and pruned. They polished floors, painted eaves, and washed windows. She took walks in the morning and watched the seagulls, the hydrogen-driven freighters sliding past, large as buildings, the pleasure boats with sails so white they blinded you in the sun.

She had no family except a brother she had never met. Her parents had died before she knew them. She had been raised in an orphanage, surrounded by institutionally kind people in tidy, well-ironed uniforms with tidy, well-ironed emotions. She was quiet, a reader, rarely leaving the estate, putting most of her money away in the bank, cooking for herself. Her name was Feride, which means “the only one.” She thought, on some days, that it really meant “the lonely one.”

She had worked at the yali for seven years when, digging in the earth one day, she scratched her hand on a thorn. The wound bled, but she washed it under a tap in her little staff cottage, and thought no more of it. The next morning she felt dizzy, unsteady. She had a temperature. Her muscles ached as if she had run a marathon.

When the head gardener arrived, Feride was wrapped in a wool blanket on the couch. He told her to take a few days off. Later that day, he saw her through the window of her cottage, slumped on the floor. She didn’t respond to his hammering on the window frame. He kicked the door in and called an ambulance.

It is three months later. In the intensive care unit Feride’s hair, the color of India ink, makes her face look even paler than it is. She is paralyzed and on a ventilator, with plastic tubes running into her mouth, nose, neck, wrist, forearm, and bladder, wires running to her chest to record her heartbeat, a plastic clip running red light through the skin of her earlobe to read the oxygen levels of her blood. They have taped her eyes shut to protect her corneas—two x’s of tape over her eyelids that make her look like a cartoon corpse. She is an anemone of wires and tubing, adrift in the greenish, undersea light of the night ward, surrounded by a reef of drip-stands gravitating antibiotics, plasma, transfusions, heart-strengthening drugs into a system opened rudely up to a world she always sought to close herself off from.

The staphylococcus bacteria had multiplied quickly in her bloodstream, its toxins turning the ordered harmony of her body into cacophony. Her blood ceased to regulate its clotting: scarlet flowers hemorrhaged on her limbs, as if in dark imitation of the rose she had grasped too clumsily. Elsewhere, her bloodstream clotted off supplies of oxygen to vital organs. Bacterial growths blighted her fingers and toes black. As the infection spread to her organs, the hemoglobin in her blood metabolized to bilirubin, yellowing and stiffening her skin with jaundice, as if she were being turned to wax from the inside. Her thin figure is waterlogged with fluid leaking from the failed seals of her arteries and veins. Her features are blurred, as if the wax she is being turned into is losing form, becoming a puddle.

And indeed, her skin feels like wax when Fahri lays his hand against the side of her cheek. She is like something discarded, emptied of all she had once been.

In the cafomat Fahri drinks his nightly coffee, watching the dawn over the port. A freighter is being unloaded. The enormous, skeletal cranes, silent behind the window’s glass, rotate their hooked limbs as they shift the containers down to the spidery, tracked roustabots who delicately nudge them into place onto the waiting truck bases. It has rained. The surface of everything is clean and reflective. The loaded trucks, cyclopean and featureless as a child’s building block fitted with wheels, are mirrored darkly in the surface of the pavement as they roll away with their loads. Their green lights pool and slide on the pavement beneath them, smeared emeralds. In the control tower above the port it is possible there is a human being, but likely there is nobody at all. Near the cafomat’s coffee dispenser, the puck-shaped floor polisher shivers in spirals.

Melek, the night doctor on the ward, slides into the chair across from him. “How is your sister?”

“About the same.”

“I looked at her charts on my rounds earlier. No worse than yesterday. We shouldn’t get our hopes up, but that’s good news of a sort, right?”

“It is.” Fahri looks at her—Melek, in her scrubs the color of a faded key-lime pie. Mischief always in her lively eyebrows, a chipped front tooth, one eye slightly larger, and greener, than the other. She glances at the time in her thumbnail, gives the cuticle a double-tap to start a timer. They had met the first night Fahri came in to see his sister. Melek had sat across from him the same way, nearly three months ago now, when they first met. Her interest in him had been as obvious to him then as it was now: over the first cup of coffee they shared she’d said: “I like you—but I don’t have time to date anyone. Not for more than five minutes at a time.”

Fahri had smiled his genuine, but tired (always tired) smile. “Five minutes is about all I can spare as well.”

“Perfect. Then we’ll just have to do this in five-minute increments.”

And so they had, for nearly a quarter of a year now: building a relationship out of the tiniest nanoblocks, in increments of time anyone could afford.

“Okay: five-minute date starts now.” Elbows on the table, she rests her jaw on the backs of her hands, flutters her off-kilter eyes at Fahri like something out of the film archives, mocking romance and infatuation. “So let me tell you what I did today.”

As tired as Fahri is, as aching as he is, as eager as he is for a few hours of sleep, natural or induced, he does listen. Because everyone can afford five minutes: this is right. And everyone deserves five minutes, at a minimum, from a fellow human being. It should not be too much to ask. The cafomat, otherwise empty, warms with her conversation. She speaks, and he listens. She has an inner light as easy to see as a lamp behind a gauze curtain. She has a warmth he could warm his hands to. And they are, he and Melek, of the same world. Contractors, gleaners on the edge of the protectorate, making a living. Even after all these five-minute dates, he cannot tell how he feels for her, beyond this.

Now her face changes, mid-sentence. She is looking at him, startled. Then he feels it—a warm line along the side of his face, two drops of dark grape across the table, like thick red wine.

“You are bleeding.”

He puts a hand to his head, but she grabs his wrist. “Come with me.”

In the all-white examination room she tilts his chin up to her with an authoritative, gloved hand. Her other hand, thumb at the tragus of his ear, searches in his umber hair for the wound.

“Look up at me. Blink twice to permit me to read your vitals.”

He does so. Melek looks up and to the right a moment, reading. She doesn’t have implants: she prefers contacts. He remembers her saying, that first night they met: “I don’t like knives. Even in the hand of an autosurgeon. Even if I don’t see them.”

“But you are a doctor,” he’d said.

“I mean that I don’t like knives when their business ends are directed at me.”

“Vitals look okay.” Melek’s fingers find the wound. “Okay, everything is all right. Here it is. Just a nick. Two centimeters.”

She cleans the wound with a cotton swab. He concentrates on the carbonated sting of the solution. He tries to push the image of himself tackling the skip from behind out of his mind. Them toppling to the pavement. But he didn’t hit his head. So from where? He’s holding the skip down while he struggles, trying to get the inhibitor on him. The skip had reached a hand up, tried to grasp his hair. He must have cut him then. A key of some kind? A fingernail? He doesn’t even know, but the skip cut him. A small cut, it must have bled a little into his hair and then closed itself. Later, the cut must have opened up again on its own.

Melek pinches the edges of the wound together, runs the warmth of the liquid skin applicator over the wound, wipes the excess blood and disinfectant from his hair and face with a cotton ball.

“I must have hit my head on the edge of the faucet in the bathroom, washing my face in the sink.”

“Didn’t you feel it?”

“No, I must not have. Too tired.”

“You need to sleep more.”

“No,” Fahri says. “I need to work more. I’m a contractor. My sister’s care won’t pay for itself.”

Melek is stripping off the gloves. “You are a prince, Fahri. She must have been a good sister to you.”

“Perhaps she might have been,” Fahri says, standing up. “But I never got the chance to find out. We never met one another. But she is all I have in the world. What do I owe you?”

“No charge,” Melek says. “You owe me a bit more caution with yourself. I don’t want to have my five-minute dates with someone else.”

Nothing is free. Melek will be paying for the gloves, the swab, the auto-registered use of the applicator, the disinfectant—even the cotton ball. But Fahri can’t afford to turn down the gift. Shame heats his cheeks.

On the way out of the hospital, he takes one more look at Feride’s waxen, sleeping face, blurred by disease. A death mask? Or only a suspension? Then he blinks three times into the paydesk’s eye, and glances up and to the right to see the turquoise numbers of his bank account spiraling down to no more than a metaphorical handful of Protectorate lira. The familiar feeling of dread washes over him. Enough left for what? Three meals, an energy tab or two, the rent on his cell for one more day. They used to call it “hand to mouth.” Now it’s “from one blink to another.”

The tekray dopples southwest, the Marble Sea on the left, glaucous and undulating in the blue-shifted early light. To the right, the hives of cell towers beyond the southern boundaries of the Protectorate tessellate past, a few windows already lit up. Fahri glimpses a line at an immigration center, hopefuls rubbing their hands against the morning cold. The Protectorate announced a new citizenship lottery, with the promise of benefits—pensions, insurance, minimums, safety nets—dangled in front of a few thousand more hopefuls. It’s a cold morning with a freezing salt wind off the sea. Spring keeps advancing and retreating. Under a bridge of the abandoned motorway, he checks in with Mahir.

Mahir’s office is a cage of rusted steel and dirty glass in an ancient garage that once serviced gasoline-powered cars. Now its bays are empty: all that is left are tools, spare parts, rags, hydraulic lifts smeared with the oily filth of internal combustion. There are pegs on the walls with belts and hoses dangling from them, ancient, battered license plates intended to be read with the naked eye, unidentifiable machines, battered bumpers leaned against the wall. Mahir’s office, secure as the shell of a hermit crab, used to be for the cashier of this place. Inside, Mahir drifts in a cloud of vapor, his face like some terrible fish, chewing on the soggy fiber applicator of an electric cigar.

“Can you handle three? Think you have it in you?”

Three! Fahri could get a week ahead on payments. In his mind, the paid-up days spin out, seemingly endless, like a luxury without limit. “Of course I can.”

The feeling fades when he sees Tarik leaning against the concrete of a bridge support outside the garage. The concrete is bleeding rust through its cracks. Tarik’s coated teeth have the green patina of a copper roof—the latest vogue. Coordinates, compass points, and facial patterns cascade backward down the lenses of his fashionably out of date horn-rim Parker Philips overlay glasses in amaranthine, like something out of a Kurdish cult VR.

“Riddle me this,” he lisps through his statuary bicuspids. “What has four legs in the morning, sleeps while running on two legs all day long, and ceases to exist at midnight?”

Fahri shrugs.

“The answer,” Tarik says, taking his glasses off and wiping them with a microfiber cloth, “Is you, if you don’t blink me 40K usage fee by 11:30.”

“I get it,” Fahri says. “Very funny.”

“I’ll meet you at the hospital. Don’t make me chase you down to some late-night döner stand like yesterday: it grates.” Tarik pushes the glasses up the bridge of his nose, glares at Fahri through a cataract of magenta data and a reverse image of Fahri’s own head, ghost-translucent, monochrome, rotating trapped in Tarik’s lenses, overlaid with skin texture analysis triangulations like a phrenology bust.

“Plus a thousand for the ding. Be more careful with our toys.”

The first two skips are easy: Fahri finds the first one in the lobby of the Intercon, ensconced in a chair-pod built to look like the nest of some enormous bird, licking salt off the rim of a margarita. The skip just shrugs and puts one floppy hand out for the inhibitor.

The second one leads him up through the autocheckpoints of the Protectorate and out its north side on the Tekray, then arcing over to the Antalyan side of the strait. He catches up with her in Kiliçli on a branch-line platform, completely seized up: she’s been in a fugue state for days, and is collapsed on a bench, jerking like a puppet when he locks the inhibitor on her wrist. A mercy: she’s trapped in this malfunctioning body without escape. Sparrows hop around Fahri’s feet, confused into thinking he is going to feed them.

Giving in to the sparrows, he buys a simit from a vendor and sits down on the bench. He tears tiny pieces off the ring of sesame-spangled bread for the fierce, fat little birds. They battle one another for position and twist their little heads, regarding him with one glistening sable eye and then the other, always eager for more.

He takes a few bites of the simit ring. Time is a luxury. He’s at least paid up for the next four days, and it seems like he has forever ahead of him. He’s registered the two skips, and in the upper right of his vision the turquoise balance of his account has grown. A five-minute date, he thinks. I’m having a five-minute date with myself. But Melek’s face arises in his mind: he feels the gentle pressure of her thumb on the tragus of his ear as her fingers move through his hair, looking for the wound. He closes his eyes and concentrates on the feeling, brings out all the nuance he can squeeze from this moment, until he can almost feel the ridges of her thumbprint through the surgical gloves, like the most minutely grooved corduroy.

He notices, then, that one of the sparrows has an artificial foot. Its brown dinosaur leg is grafted to a construct of delicate carbon fiber struts and miniature talons of hardened glass. The foot flexes and grasps just like its other foot of flesh and blood. Who would take the time? This little piece of loving kindness, like a gap torn in the net of injustice. The tiny cyborg pokes one of its comrades in the butt, startling the other bird into dropping its bread, then seizes the prize and flies off, triumphant, with a hunk of simit half the size of its head clasped in its beak.

The collector van pulls up to the station. The tech is in field gray coveralls and a company garrison cap. Bored, tired, probably on a double shift. Fahri can see him watching a ’cast in the corner of his eye: the privacy shield still allows a slight blur through it, a darker cloud behind clouds.

“She’s locked up,” Fahri tells the tech. “The neuromodulators in the blank’s reticular activating system aren’t firing properly. Wherever her original is, she can’t transmigrate back.”

The tech shines a penlight into her eyes, pointlessly.

“She wasn’t on the run: she was wandering. She’s in a fugue state. You’re going to need a shop reset.”

“Oh, do your own fucking job, contract whore,” the tech says. But there’s no anger in his voice—only exhaustion. “I don’t need to be lectured on Keiser’s Law by some exurban temp.” Moving to feel the woman’s pulse, he never bothers to look at Fahri.

The other tech arrives, practically a twin to the first in exhaustion and apathy, leading a stretcher on a tether. Fahri walks onto the Tekray train headed back to the European side of the strait. So much, he thinks, for loving kindness. This, he thinks, is why Feride avoided speaking to people as much as she could. But they’ll get this person, trapped in their malfunctioning blank, back to the shop and reset its reticular activating system. And somewhere, wherever they are, this person will wake. To what? No matter: to something. To whatever and whoever there is for them to go back to.

Back on the Tekray, he gets a call from Mahir. “Fair warning,” Mahir says into his ear. “This last one for the day is a heavy blank. Custom. Big—you can’t miss him. But you’d better sneak up on him and clap that inhibitor on him before he sees you. I don’t want to lose my best tracer.”

“Very kind of you to look out for me.”

“No, just practical.”

The skipped blank is big. A mountain of a man. Somebody’s fetish: all roiling muscle straining against his clothing, black beard practically up to his eye sockets, hands like the paws of a bear. Fahri catches up to him on the ferry to Fener. The blank eats a quick dinner at a family café and then wanders a while, looking into the blandest of shop windows while the sun goes down and lays, for a few minutes, a net of claret, ruby, persimmon, and salmon clouds on top of the city. He doesn’t seem to be in any hurry, isn’t looking around to see if he’s being followed. Just strolling along. The muezzins call the faithful to the Maghrib prayer. The man raises his head, listening to their songs winding into one another, a small smile almost lost in the forest of his beard. He walks past street vendors folding their wares away, past knots of locals in doorways discussing the day as they and their ancestors have for centuries.

In the rusting, cast-iron cave of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church of St. Stephen, they are alone. As the man raises his arm to light a candle to the Virgin, Fahri makes his move. But although he is fast, the man is faster. He must have known Fahri was there. He claps a giant hand on Fahri’s wrist and squeezes. Fahri’s tendons go limp, and the inhibitor clatters to the floor. With a swift step, the man is behind Fahri, has swept his legs out from under him and wrapped a thick arm around his neck. His other forearm pushes on the back of Fahri’s head, urging him further into the chokehold. The candles before the church icons dance, shudder, and streak as the world darkens. The man slides to a sitting position, holding Fahri against his massive chest, and as Fahri slides into an indigo space full of stars and the ringing of blood in his ears, he hears the man say, “Shh. Don’t struggle. It doesn’t hurt. You just go to sleep.” And he seems to be holding Fahri firmly, but with a tenderness. In a fairy tale there is a bear who clutches an orphaned human child to its chest and takes it to the forest. Takes it to a den to protect it against the winter.

 . . . Fahri’s unconscious body slumps to the marble floor.

On the day of her accident, Feride remembered running her bloody hand under the tap. Then she’d made herself a cup of tea, thinking nothing of it. Slept like a normal person. In the morning, the darkness began, flowing in from the edges of her vision. She remembered lying on the floor, the nap of the rug under her cheek, the room dancing in a fever around her. Then the occasional stutter of clarity in a mist: a robot holding her arm gently in its cuffed appendage and inserting an IV. Autogurneys trundling down night-lit corridors, a nurse tapping a drip-bag with the back of a finger and singing, in a clear baritone:

The foothills of these mountains . . .

I long to see the meadows.

Birds turn their backs on their nests.

Some day you will forget me, too . . .

Two days later, Feride awoke sitting upright in a chair. The room was not white, like a hospital room: it was the blue of an evening sky. A woman was sitting across from her. She was lean and angular, dressed in some sort of woolen, asymmetrical thing, like a knitted blanket equipped with sleeves. When Feride tried to move, she felt loose and dizzy, like a marble rolling around inside the shell of her own body. A cascade of needles showered through the vagueness of her limbs.

“That feeling,” the woman said, “will pass. It is trasmigratory paresthesia. Most refer to it as ‘falling awake.’ We believe it is caused by your consciousness’ neural patterns remapping to a body slightly different from your own. Try not to make any sudden movements. It will fade on its own.” The woman pulled her chair slightly closer to Feride. “Feride, my name is Dr. Solmaz Haznadar. I am from the Istanbul Metropolitan Protectorate Institute of Technology and Integrated Sciences. That’s quite a mouthful, so you probably know us as ‘IMPITIS’ or simply ‘the Institute.’ I’m from a department of the Institute called Theoretical Benefits.”

Feride tried to speak, to respond, but she could not find the muscles of her face and mouth. There was a strange sound, like a quacking. She realized with a feeling of shame that it was coming from her.

“Don’t speak,” said Dr. Haznadar. “You won’t be able to now. In a few minutes, perhaps, or half an hour, you will. But not during the adjustment phase.” Her face held kindness, but of a clinical, automated sort. It was a look Feride was used to. Feride could see Dr. Haznadar was reading something in the privacy-shielded periphery of her right eye. “Just sit still. Feride . . . There is no easy way to tell you this, so I will not waste your time. You—the real you, that is, a few floors beneath us, is dying. Your body is being attacked by staphylococcus bacteria. The bacteria—a resistant form that does not respond to antibiotics—is in your bloodstream, destroying you from the inside. The hospital is doing everything it can to stop it, but it is unlikely they will be able to. I’m sorry.

“In the meantime my department at the Institute, Theoretical Benefits, has taken your case on for one of our trial studies. We are considering a new benefit for cases like yours, among citizens of the Protectorate. We’re initiating trials here at the experimental hospital, outside the border. You are one of the . . . ” she stopped herself from saying something else “ . . . few non-citizen beneficiaries. We’re offering you something few people get in an interrupted life . . . ”

Was Feride crying? A terrible sound was in the room with them. A squawking, an awful stutter of animal pain. And now she found, in the confused map of her new physical self, her cheeks, and the track of tears on them, a rivulet across the alien topography of this body.

Dr. Haznadar continued. “ . . . A chance to say goodbye. To find closure. To make arrangements. Three days. The Institute is giving you this gift.”

“What does it cost?” He voice was slurred. But yes—there was her mouth. And the words were words, though they dragged as if through water.

“Sorry?” Dr. Haznadar seemed genuinely confused by the question, as though she had never considered such a thing before.

Of course. Of course—she’s a citizen, Feride thought, suddenly furious. These things never cross her mind. And now they are considering yet another benefit—for citizens.

“What . . . does . . . it . . . cost?”

Dr. Haznadar smiled, the way one would smile at a child who wanted to know where babies come from. “Why, nothing at all. And in the meantime—for these three days—the Institute will pay for your hospital care as well. It’s a study.” She placed a hand on Feride’s hand. She flicked the word condescendingly off her tongue, as if Feride were some sort of troglodyte who would find it difficult to understand. “We’re gathering data, and so it’s all covered. All you have to do is live. Use these days as you will. Prepare yourself. Say goodbye to your loved ones. Our hope is that this benefit will be psychologically useful—a chance for closure. If we determine it is, we may seek to have it included in the Protectorate’s benefits package.”

Through the field of needles and numbness, Feride felt the doctor’s touch and was ashamed to find herself crying again. Humiliation, fear, anger—a clamor of emotions in her head. But what she wanted most was to be away from here.

An hour later she was outside. The Institute had thought of everything—changes of clothes and toiletries in a rucksack, a cell just outside the edge of the Protectorate, travel authorizations through the Protectorate loaded, enough lira to cover a decent life. More than decent—more money than she’d ever had to whittle away in a day. What would other people do? They would go, she imagined, to their loved ones, and they would say goodbye to them. Together, they would hold some kind of ceremony. They would do something meaningful. She imagined the lighting of candles. She imagined washing her feet and hands at the sebil before prayer.

She found herself outside the gates of the yali where she had worked those three years. All was as before. Beyond the gates, lined up along the drive, the roses, the cause of it all, were a hot red. They shuddered in the breeze of a cloudless day. The windows of the yali had been thrown open to the wind. The staff was airing the house out. Likely the owners were returning, then, in a few days.

She saw Suat, the head gardener, resting for a moment, leaning on a hoe beneath a tree. He took his old brown canvas field cap from his head and wiped his wispy scalp with it. Such a familiar motion—but one she had never, she thought, really taken note of before. He paused a moment, doing nothing at all, not moving. Thinking of me? Perhaps. They had been friends. They had shared many teas together in the garden, had laughed and even danced. And yes—now she remembered. He had wanted to pick her up and carry her to the ambulance. The memory was blurred; white coats of the technicians, questions melting in the air. She had been deep in fever, lying incoherent on the floor of her little cottage. He had reached down to pick her up, and one of them had stopped him. “You are a true knight, beyefendi, but we have stretchers for that.”

Without thinking of what she was doing, she called out to him. He raised his head and looked at her. He laid the hoe against the trunk of the tree and came to the gate. He greeted Feride in his usual manner with friends or strangers.

“It is a beautiful day, is it not?”

The phrase never varied: in sun, wind, rain, or hail that tore the leaves from his beloved trees, it was a beautiful day. Suat’s wife had passed away two years ago. When Feride had seen him the next morning he had uttered this same phrase to her, his eyes red, his face swollen and wet with tears.

“It is a beautiful day, beyefendi. I . . . ” she stammered a moment, and then instinct or impulse carried her forward: “ . . . I am looking for Feride. My sister.”

Suat unlocked the gate. “Come in, friend. I was just about to sit down to a cup of tea. What do your people call you?”

“Fahri,” she answered. She had read the name, perhaps, in a book. She did not know. It drifted up to her as if from memory.

Suat put a hand on her shoulder. “Your sister would be pleased to have such a handsome brother. She is not here, but I will tell you where to find her. Drink some tea with me before you go.”

At the table in the sun in the garden, they drank Suat’s strong black tea—the same as Feride had known for three years now. And it tasted, she was happy to find out, exactly the same. Other things had felt different to her—this body’s eyes were not the same: they were better than hers had been. She had been surprised to see the world’s colors were a bit brighter than she remembered, the world itself just a bit sharper. Perhaps she had needed glasses, as Feride, and had not even known. She had thought her own vision was perfect. It turned out perfect, too, was relative. And because the shape of her hands was now different, things felt different in them. The pear-shaped glass of tea was smaller, it fit in her longer-fingered hand strangely. The chair she sat in was smaller—by fractions, yes, but the shape she cut in the world had changed, and so the world fit differently. And she was strong. And fast. She had run along the Bosporus for several minutes before strange looks had stopped her. This body had seemed . . . inexhaustible.

But the black tea cut through the difference and brought her back to her old self. And as Suat delicately worked his way to telling her what had happened to her “sister,” Feride began to weave a story of her own: a brother and a sister, separated when their parents died, delivered to separate orphanages, estranged for years. The brother’s long search for his lost sister, his tracking her to here . . .

“Fahri, dear friend,” said Suat. “I hope you are rich as a prince. Because your sister is very ill—perhaps even dying, and the hospital has already taken most of the money from her accounts. Soon, they will let her fade away.”

“If only I were,” Fahri replied. “But some are born to the palace, and some are born to the field.” The familiar saying, uttered a thousand times, now stung his mouth. “And like you, and like her, I was born to the field.”

Suat regarded the young man—neat, his hands clean as if he had been born to the palace, his face unlined yet by life. But already so bitter. That phrase, with so many variations. Injustice, Suat’s father had told him, has a shape.

He remembered when his father had said it. They had been fishing from the Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn, idly watching their lines. His father was usually a happy man, but their boat had been struck a few months before by a citizen in a pleasure yacht, and Suat’s father had spent weeks now winding his way through arbitration: first in the Territorial courts and then in the outer courts of Istanbul Protectorate. His father had, perhaps, not known who he really was, what his real position in life was, until he had tried to sue a citizen. Then he had entered a world of stamps, of benches in corridors, of shaken heads, averted eyes. A world of a thousand condescensions and humiliations.

Finally, Suat’s father had stopped fighting. They had dry-docked the boat, bought new wood to replace the staved-in clinkers, and paid the boat builder three months’ profit for the repairs. As they waited for the boat to be finished—their livelihood, their lifeline—they fished from the bridge.

His father would eventually return to his old self, but at that moment he was bitter. He was a man who had come up against the limit of his world. He had found out not just who he was, but who he was not.

There on the bridge he told his son: “Suat, injustice has a shape. It is like something you see moving between the leaves in the forest. When you see it, you must recognize it for what it is, and what it can do to you. You must take action to survive. The actions are different, according to what form injustice has taken: you might have to stay quiet, to let it pass by. Or you might have to shout and bang pots and make yourself larger to scare it away. But remember this: it is too large and powerful to fight alone. That is certain. Never fight, unless you see it when you have many well-armed friends with you. Then perhaps you may kill it.”

Now Suat said these exact same words to this young man. He had not uttered them since that day, but they had always been with him: a secret wisdom, a talisman. Because this young man’s sister was going to die. Suat had seen it in her face when she lay on the floor: death had her. There were miracles that could save her, but all of the miracles were reserved for citizens of the Protectorate or for people like the Emirati lords of this yali, who drifted here once a year on their nomadic wanderings: their silent, private gliders descended from the sun to the landing-strips along the Black Sea, filled with priceless Turkmen carpets of silk, silver, and gold, necklaces worth more than a hundred of their servants’ lives, and the hunting hawks behind whose blank, telescopic eye-sights their ancestors chose to live out their uploaded afterlives.

There was no one left to say goodbye to. Nobody but the city itself: the seagulls, the ferries, the minarets. Death’s horizon rushed closer with every moment. On the Galata Bridge, on the final day, Fahri watched the people fishing and thought of Suat’s father. What shape would injustice take, between the leaves? The shape of a bear? Of a witch in a fairy tale? A tiger? The bridge was refracted in the water, distorted, drifting in the flare and shimmer of a bright day. So was this Fahri, this temporary face Feride had been loaned. Somewhere, she did have a brother. But not one who was there when she needed him. Not one who would come looking for her when she was hurt, search for her when she was dying. She had had to make that brother for herself.

“It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Fahri turned, startled. A young man was leaning on the bridge’s rail, grinning greenly at him, regarding him through horn-rimmed lenses framing a shimmer of data.

“What?”

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” the young man said. “It doesn’t have to end tomorrow, with a wave of the doctor’s wand. You don’t have to die. I can show you how to live.”

A few hours later, in Mahir’s garage under the bridge, his museum to the filthy old days of internal combustion, to private cars that fogged their inefficient poison into the atmosphere, Mahir also spoke of shapes and of justice. Seated at a scarred metal table once used to vivisect the organs of automobiles, delicately sipping at his coffee and tweaking one gelatinous square after another of rahat lokum from a chipped china plate into his mouth, he explained:

“It’s simple, really. The High Parliament put a law into place that seemed reasonable enough to them, and protects the valuable merchandise of the body shops. You have to clap an inhibitor cuff around the wrist of a runaway blank in order to claim it again. The law’s based on the antique system of process servers, things like that. And you can’t have a drone do it: they were working it that way for a while, but then a drone clapped an inhibitor on a blank on a dock, and the thing went in the water. Awake, with its drifter inside. Reticular activation system didn’t fire, no transmigration—and a drifter who was simply late on their payments drowned. A citizen on a holiday. Big scandal. So now they write a new law, says you have to do it in person. You need a conscious being to put the inhibitor on. And you’re liable for any damage. Inconvenient, yes? But each new law is a new opportunity, a new industry. You put a limit on power, someone will shape a service to fit inside that limit. That’s where we come in. Reclamation.”

“But you know where they are,” Fahri said. “They’re all tagged, traceable.”

Tarik, who has been fiddling with some unidentifiable piece of primitive tooling in the corner, interjected. “Finding them’s the easy part. The problem is, some of them really don’t want to go back where they came from. When they skip, they want to stay skipped. But I guess you can relate, right?”

“They are going to save her,” Fahri said. “I just need to buy her some time, that’s all.”

“Motivation.” Tarik tossed the tool he was fiddling with back in the bin, “is the key to everything. Let’s sign contracts.”

“And the Institute?”

Tarik looked at Fahri. On the screens of his Parker Philips Overlay Glasses a car chase was going on. Fahri saw it backward, stereoscoped: some ancient piece of film. In a hilly city drenched in sun, an over-powered car careened through an intersection, a blond man at the wheel. In the background, Fahri could glimpse an ocean half-concealed by a smear of smog.

“I’ll deal with the Institute,” Tarik said. “That’s what you’ll be paying me for. That, and your nice new body not full of poisonous bacteria. And your other body, drifting on the edge of death. And the price for all three together is going to be very, very high.”

Three months later, Tarik and Dr. Solmaz Haznadar stand on the balcony of the Church of St. Stephen, watching the bear of a man lay Fahri’s unconscious body gently down on the white floor. The man takes out a penlight. Opening Fahri’s eyes one by one, he looks into them, then pauses for a moment, reading vital signs.

He turns to the two on the balcony. “Vital signs are good, but there’s nobody home. The reticular activating system fired properly. This drifter has transmigrated back to the mind they came from.”

“Many thanks, Doctor Akdağ. You can move the blank back to Institute storage. We’ll see you at the office.”

Outside, winter is making a temporary comeback. Wind and a battering rain sheet in across the Golden Horn, tearing spring blossoms from the trees. Fishermen in raincoats and sou’westers continue numbly tossing lines into the oscillating, cloud-gray surface of the water. Tarik and Solmaz, hoods up on their rain jackets, squinting against the wind-whipped water lashing against their faces, are making their way to the Tekray station.

“Now comes the fun part,” Tarik says. “Collating all this data. Preliminarily, though, it’s interesting. Just about no limit to what the subject will pay to keep going. I had him up to forty thousand lira near the end. He—or she, or whatever. Even I’m getting confused at this point. I keep thinking of Fahri as a separate person. Anyway, he sure seemed determined to continue. Given more budget on the project from Motivations, I think I could have cranked his fees even higher. He was barely sleeping, taking on two or three assignments in a day, oblivious to risk. Absolutely minimal lifestyle: he was eating the cheapest possible food, bought nothing for his cell, and was working double shifts skip tracing. I think if we had kept pushing the numbers up, though, he’d eventually have gotten hurt—but there has to be a balance there somewhere: that tipping point between a sustainable, high level of motivation and self-destructive levels of output.” The raindrops on his Parker Philips lenses smear and distort the rotating heads of Feride and Fahri in translucent mulberry topographs, a stream of data the color of dark wine—receipts, transit maps, time stamps. “Prelims tell me if we were charging thirty thousand, we could probably exploit indefinitely. That’s a rough guess. But the fucking Motivations Department geeks and the Ethics sub-department of Exurban Studies are in a spat and pffffft! Project funding cut! Back to the drawing board. What about your study?”

Solmaz sidestepped an overly eager trash robot chasing a shred of paper. “Inconclusive. I’ll need to read all the scans again—but overall? My guess is it may not be a great benefit on the larger scale. That’s just my instinct. Disorientation in the early hours of the first day, followed by a morbid melancholy, indications of destabilization—even what I would call an almost entirely new personality emerging. And very quickly. I think there’s a chance the benefit could cause violent reactions, cascading events it would be difficult to control. But the subject is sub-optimal: background is institutional, and she’s barely socialized. I wouldn’t have chosen her.”

“I suppose not, but then wouldn’t many of the beneficiaries of this benefit also not be optimal?”

“Well, that’s the rub. We’ll continue the study, but this first case makes me doubt this benefit is a benefit at all. It could be a liability for the Protectorate.”

“Ah, well. Geçmiş olsun. Let it be in the past.”

A few days later, Feride wakes up in a gauzy haze—a haze accentuated by the evening sunlight pouring through the curtains of the hospital suite. It is a strong light, red-gold, made stronger by its reflection off the mirrored buildings and the pavement soaked by a day of rain. She is brittle, foggy, her senses diffracting off sore spots, aches coming alive. The sagging jellyfish of intravenous drips surround her, the evening light refracted through their liquids, striping and pooling across the white bedsheets. The darkness grows in the room as the day dies, and the diodes light the ward in its strange, undersea green.

For a moment, she is Fahri. But when she looks at her bruised hands, they are not her own. Where are the thick, knuckly fingers she had? The black dusting of mid-digital hair? Already a life—her own, not quite her own—is fading: looking out at the port from the cafomat, Melek’s fingers in her hair, searching for a wound, a sparrow with an artificial foot, candles in the rusting iron church. She cries for a time, quietly. She is the only attendee at Fahri’s funeral: a brother of her own creation, a second self, a figment.

An hour after she wakes up, a young nurse comes in and has her blink permission to access her vitals.

“I’m not going to say you are out of danger yet,” he says, “But we’ve turned a corner. We’re glad to see you back in the world.” As he takes down one of her IV drips, he half-sings:

Birds turn their backs on their nests.

Some day you will forget me, too . . .

“You were here when they admitted me,” Feride said. “You sang that song. That old folk song. A friend of mine would sing it, sometimes. Suat. In the garden where I worked.”

“It’s been stuck in my head for months, but all I can remember is four lines of it.”

Surprised at the strength of her own voice, despite her tube-scratched throat, her dry mouth, Feride sings the next verse of the song:

Roads are far away

My mad heart cries out

Life goes on, just goes . . .

One day you will forget me, too.

From the doorway, standing there in her scrubs the color of a faded key-lime pie, Melek finishes the song:

This longing has turned to mourning

My summers and springs turned to winter

My life has passed in vain

One day you will forget me, too.

“Ah,” the young nurse says, walking out. “Here’s your benefactor.”

“Benefactor?”

Melek settles herself into the bedside chair. Feride realizes this is the first time she has ever seen Melek with her own eyes. But Melek is the same: mischief in her lively eyebrows, a chipped front tooth, one eye slightly larger, and greener, than the other. She says: “I thought I glimpsed something—a return. It’s hard to explain. I could see something had changed. There was someone there . . . someone trying to surface. I thought a few days might be enough to see you through.”

“But the expense. It must have been . . . I remember struggling to pay . . . it’s thousands of lira a day . . . you can’t possibly afford . . . ”

“Hush.” Melek presses a finger to Feride’s lips. “It’s my choice to make, Fahri. And where else would I find such a hero? And who would I go on my five-minute dates with? Are you trying to make me drink my coffee alone?”

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July/August 2019.

Okay, Glory

Elizabeth Bear

Day 0

My bathroom scale didn’t recognize me. I weigh in and weigh out every day when it’s possible—I have data going back about twenty years at this point—so when it registered me as “Guest” I snarled and snapped a pic with my phone so I would remember the number to log it manually.

I’d lost half a pound according to the scale, and on a whim I picked up the shower caddy with the shampoo and so on in it. I stepped back on the scale, which confidently told me I’d gained 7.8 pounds over my previous reduced weight, and cheerily greeted me with luminescent pixels reading HELLO BRIAN:).

Because what everybody needs from a scale interface is a smiley, but hey, I guess it’s my own company that makes these things. They’re pretty nice if I do say so myself, and I can complain to the CEO if I want something a little more user surly.

I should, however, really talk to the customer interface people about that smiley.

I didn’t think more of it, just brushed my teeth and popped a melatonin and took myself off to nest in my admittedly enormous and extremely comfortable bed.

Day 1

Glory buzzed me awake for a priority message before first light, which really should not have been happening.

Even New York isn’t at work that early, and California still thinks it’s the middle of the night. And I’m on Mountain Time when I’m at my little fortress of solitude, which is like being in a slice of nowhere between time zones actually containing people and requiring that the world notice them. As far as the rest of the United States is concerned, we might as well skip from UTC-6 to UTC-8 without a blink.

All the important stuff happens elsewhen.

That’s one reason I like it here. It feels private and alone. Other people are bad for my vibe. So much maintenance.

So it was oh-dark-thirty and Glory buzzed me. High priority; it pinged through and woke me, which is only supposed to happen with tagged emails from my assistant Mike and maybe three other folks. I fumbled my cell off the nightstand and there were no bars, which was inconceivable, because I built my own damned cell tower halfway up the mountain so I would always have bars.

I staggered out of bed and into the master bath, trailing quilts and down comforters behind me, the washed linen sheets entwining my ankle like tentacles. I was so asleep that I only realized when I got there that—first—I could have just had Glory read me the email, and—second—I forgot my glasses and couldn’t see past the tip of my nose.

I grabbed the edges of the bathroom counter, cold marble biting into my palms. “Okay, Glory. Project that email, 300 percent mag.”

Phosphorescent letters appeared on the darkened mirror. I thought it was an email from Jaysee, my head of R&D. Fortunately, I’m pretty good at what my optometrist calls “blur recognition.”

I squinted around my own reflection but even with the magnification all I could really make out was Jaysee’s address and my own blurry, bloodshot eyes. I walked back into the bedroom.

“Okay, Glory,” I said to my house.

“Hey, Brian,” my house said back. “The coffee is on. What would you like for breakfast today? External conditions are: 9 degrees Celsius, 5 knots wind from the southeast gusting to 15, weather expected to be clear and seasonable. This unit has initiated quarantine protocols, in accordance with directive seventy-two—”

“Breaker, Glory.”

“Waiting.”

Quarantine protocols? “Place a call—”

“I’m sorry, Brian,” Glory said. “No outside phone access is available.”

I stomped over the tangled bedclothes and grabbed my cell off the nightstand. I was still getting no signal, which was even more ridiculous when I could look out my bedroom’s panoramic windows and see the cell tower, disguised as a suspiciously symmetrical ponderosa pine, limned against the predawn blue.

I stood there for ten minutes, my feet getting cold, fucking with the phone. It wouldn’t even connect to the wireless network.

I remembered the scale.

“Okay, Glory,” said I. “What is directive seventy-two?”

“Directive seventy-two, paragraph c, subparagraph 6, sections 1–17, deal with prioritizing the safety and well-being of occupants of this house in case of illness, accident, natural disaster, act of terrorism, or other catastrophe. In the event of an emergency threatening the life and safety of Mr. Kaufman, this software is authorized to override user commands in accordance with best practices for dealing with the disaster and maximizing survivability.”

I caught myself staring up at the ceiling exactly as if Glory were localized up there. Like talking to the radio in your car even when you know the microphone’s up by the dome lights.

A little time passed. The cold feeling in the pit of my stomach didn’t abate. My heart rate didn’t drop either. My fitness band beeped to let me know it had started recorded whatever I was doing as exercise. It had a smiley, too.

“Okay, Glory,” I said. “Make it a big pot of coffee, please.”

As the aroma of shade-grown South American beans wafted through my rooms, I hunkered over my monitors and tried to figure out how screwed I were. Which is when I made the latest in what had become a series of unpleasant discoveries.

That email from Jaysee—it wasn’t from her.

Her address must have been spoofed, so I’d be sure to read it fast. I parsed right away that it didn’t originate with her, though. Not because of my nerdy know-how, but because it read:

Dear Mr. Kaufman,

Social security #: [Redacted]

Address: [Redacted]

This email is to inform you that you are being held for ransom. We have total control of your house and all its systems. We will return control to you upon receipt of the equivalent of USD $150,000,000.00 in Bitcoin via the following login and web address: [Redacted] Feel free to try to call for help. It won’t do you any good.

The email was signed by T3#RH1TZ, a cracker group I had heard of, but never thought about much. Well, that’s better than a nuclear apocalypse or the Twitter Eschaton. Marginally. Maybe.

I mean, I can probably hack my way out of this. I’m not sure I could hack my way out of a nuclear apocalypse.

Long story short, they weren’t lying. I couldn’t open any of the outside doors. My television worked fine. My Internet . . . well, I pay a lot for a blazingly fast connection out here in the middle of nowhere, which includes having run a dedicated T3 cable halfway up the mountain. I could send HTTP requests, and get replies, but SMTP just hung on the outgoing side. I got emails in—whoever hacked my house was probably getting them too—but I couldn’t send any.

It wasn’t that the data was only flowing one way. I had no problem navigating to websites—including their ransom site, which was upholstered in a particularly terrible combination of black, red, and acid green—and clicking buttons, even logging in to several accounts, though I avoided anything sensitive, but I couldn’t send an email, or a text, or a DM, or post to any of the various social media services I used either as a public person and CEO or under a pseud, or upload an OK Cupid profile that said HELP I’M TRAPPED IN A PRIVATE LODGE IN THE MOUNTAINS IN LATE AUTUMN LIKE A ONE-MAN REENACTMENT OF THE SHINING; REWARD FOR RESCUE; THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

After a while, I figured out that they must have given Glory a set of protocols, and she was monitoring my outgoing data. Bespoke deep-learned censorship. Fuck me, Agnes.

She would let me into the garage, but none of my cars started—those things have computers in them too—and the armored exterior doors wouldn’t open.

In any ordinary house, I could have broken a window, or pried it out of the frame, and climbed out. But this is my fortress of solitude, and I’d built her to do what it said on the box, except without the giant ice crystals and the whole Antarctica thing.

I went and stared out the big windows that I couldn’t disassemble, watching light flood the valley as the sun crested the mountains and wishing I cared enough about guns to own a couple. The bullet-resistant glass is thick, but maybe if I filled it full of lead that would warp the shape enough that I could pop it from the frame.

Twilights here are long.

Glory nestles into a little scoop on the mountainside, so a green meadow spills around her, full of alpine flowers and nervous young elk in the spring, deep in snow and tracked by bobcats in the winter. She looks like a rustic mountain lodge with contemporary lines and enormous insulated windows commanding the valley. The swoops and curves of the mountain soar down to the river: its roar is a pleasant hum if you stand on the deck, where Glory wouldn’t let me go anymore. Beyond the canyon, the next mountain raises its craggy head above the tree line, shoulders hunched and bald pate twisted.

Glory is remote. Glory is also: fireproof, bulletproof, bombproof, and home-invasion-proof in every possible way, built to look half-a-hundred years old, with technology from half an hour into the future.

And she’s apparently swallowed a virus that makes her absolutely certain the world has ended, and she needs to keep me safe by not allowing me outside her hermetically sealed environs. I can’t even be permitted to breathe unscrubbed air, as far as she’s concerned, because it’s full of everything-resistant spores and probably radiation.

You know, when I had the prototype programmed to protect my life above all other considerations . . . you’d think I would have considered this outcome. You’d think.

You’d think the Titanic’s engineers would have built the watertight bulkheads all the way to the top, too, but there you have it. On the other hand, Playatronics does plan to market these systems in a couple of years, so I suppose it’s better that I got stuck in here than some member of the general public, who might panic and get hurt—or survive and sue.

At least Glory was a polite turnkey.

You’ve probably read that I’m an eccentric billionaire who likes his solitude. I suppose that’s not wrong, and I did build this place to protect my privacy, my work, and my person without relying on outside help. I’m not a prepper; I’m not looking forward to the apocalypse. I’m just a sensible guy with an uncomfortable level of celebrity who likes spending a lot of time alone.

My house is my home, and I did a lot of the design work myself, and I love this place and everything in it. I made her hard to get into for a reason.

But the problem with places that are hard to get into is that it tends to be really hard to get out of them, too.

Day 2

I slept late this morning, because I stayed up until sunrise testing the bars of my prison. I fell asleep at my workstation. Glory kept me from spending the night there, buzzing the keyboard until I woke up enough to drag myself to the sectional on the other side of my office.

When I woke, it was to another spoofed email. I remembered my glasses this time. I’d gotten my phone to reconnect to Glory’s wireless network, at least, so I didn’t have to stagger into the bathroom to read.

This one said:

Hello, Brian! You’ve had thirty hours to consider our offer and test our systems. Convinced yet?

As a reminder, when you’re ready to be released, all you have to do is send the equivalent of $150,100,000.00 via [redacted]!

Your friends at T3#RH1TZ

What I’d learned in a day’s testing: I thought I’d done a pretty good job of protecting my home system and my network, and honestly I’d relied a bit on the fact that my driveway was five miles long to limit access by wardrivers.

I use PINE—don’t look at me that way, lots of guys still use PINE—and an hour of mucking around in its guts hadn’t actually changed anything. I still couldn’t send an email, though quite a few were finding their way in. Most of them legitimate, from my employees, one or two from old friends.

I even try sending an email back to the kidnappers—housenappers? Is it kidnapping if they haven’t moved you anywhere? The extortionists. I figure if it goes through either they’ll intercept it, or it’ll reach Jaysee and she’ll figure out pretty fast what went wrong.

I have a lot of faith in Jaysee. She’s one of my senior vice presidents, which doesn’t tell you anything about the amount of time we spent in her parents’ basement taking apart TRS-80s when we were in eighth grade. If anybody’s going to notice that I’m missing, it’s Jaysee. Sadly, she’s also the person most likely to respect my need for space.

Also sadly, I can’t send an outbound email even as a reply to the crackers. You’d think they would have thought of that, but I guess extortionists don’t actually care if you keep in touch, as long as there’s a pipeline for the money.

I might have hoped that a day or two of silence might lead Jaysee or somebody to send out a welfare check. Except I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t a great correspondent, and everybody who bothered to keep in touch with me knew it too. Sometimes, if I got busy, emails piled up for a week or more, and I had been known to delete them all unanswered, or turn my assistant loose to sort through the mess and see if there was any point in answering any of them, or if all the fires had either burned themselves out or been sorted by competent subordinates.

Which is why I have people like Mike and Jaysee, to be perfectly honest. I’m a terrible manager, and I need privacy to work.

I make a point of hiring only self-starters for a reason.

The Internet of Things that shouldn’t be on the Internet is really pissing me off. I decided I needed some real food, and went into the kitchen to sous-vide a frozen chicken. The sous-vide wand wanted a credit card number to unlock.

I got past it by setting the temperature using the manual controls, but this is out of hand. Are they going to start charging me twenty-five cents a flush?

Day 3

This morning, the television was demanding a credit card authorization to unlock. This afternoon, it’s the refrigerator.

“Okay, Glory,” I said, tugging on the big, stainless steel door, “why is my refrigerator on the Internet?”

“So that it can monitor the freshness of its contents, automatically order staple foods as they are used, and calculate the household need for same.”

“And why do the doors lock? That seems like a safety hazard.”

“It’s for shipment,” she said brightly. “And as a convenience for dieters, lock cycles can be set through the fridge’s phone app . . . ” Or by a remote hacker. Got it. “ . . . so if you want to keep yourself from snacking on leftovers after dinner, for example, you just lock the door at 7:00 p.m.”

“There are people who have finished eating dinner by 7:00 p.m.?”

“There are,” Glory said, with the implacable literal mindedness of 90 percent of humanity when presented with a rhetorical question on the Internet. “In fact, 37 percent of Americans eat their main meal of the day between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m., which is up significantly in the past five years. Among the theorized causes of this shift: demographic and economic changes, including shorter work hours provoked by automation and generally increased economic prosperity; increased parental benefits introduced to encourage younger people to have children after the catastrophic baby bust of the late twenty-teens and early twenty-twenties, and the resultant increase in the percentage of families with young children; an increase in co-parenting and other nontraditional family dynamics, which encourage people to dine earlier before transfers of custody between parents maintaining multiple households occurs . . . ”

“Thanks, Poindexter,” I said.

The other problem with AIs is that they don’t know when you’re teasing. Don’t get me wrong, the algorithms are pretty good—but it’s not AI like you see in the movies. Glory is very smart, for a machine. She presents a convincing illusion of self-awareness and free will, but . . . it’s all fuzzy logic and machine learning, and she’s not a person.

That’s unfortunate, because if she were a person, I could try to convince her that she had been misled, and that she needed to let me out.

All right, all right. I’ll pay the damned ransom. It’s just like ransomware on a television, right? Except they’ve hacked my whole house. And let’s be honest: twenty years ago, I was probably a good enough programmer to hack them right back, but it’s not how I spend my days anymore. I’m an ideas guy now.

The muscles are stiff. The old skills have atrophied. And the state of the art has moved on.

So basically, I’m screwed.

Now if I can just figure out how to get to the bank without giving the keys to the kingdom to these assholes. I’m sure they’re logging every keystroke I make in here.

Day 4

I’m waiting for the bank to get back to me.

I managed to log into my account, wonder of wonders, after deciding that if they hacked my accounts they couldn’t get much more out of me than I’d already decided to pay them. But the thing is—nobody keeps that much ready cash on hand. I can’t just convert a bunch of cash to bitcoins and send it off. Your money’s supposed to be working for you, right? Not sitting there collecting dust. And I can’t just call up my local branch and ask to speak to the manager, hey can you float me a loan, not too much, just a hundred fifty rocks.

So I’m waiting on a reply. Maybe being a quirky and eccentric recluse will work for me here?

I can get to some websites just fine, and send and receive data from them. Including a language website.

Well, that might keep me occupied.

Day 5

Det är kanske en björn.

Actually, it’s definitely a bear. Big one, crossing the meadow this afternoon. Hope it stays out of my trash; they’re hungry this time of year.

Still no word from the bank.

Spent a little quality time—most of the day—running a data source check and trying to verbally hack the interface with line code. Which worked about as well as the trick I tried next, until Glory reminded me I built a zerodivide trap into her original code.

I wish I knew who wrote the ransomware.

I’d like to hire him.

Day 6

All right, I admit it. I was downloading porn. I was on a hentai site. Well behind the elite paywall, you don’t even want to know.

Are you happy now?

I mean, probably that’s how it happened. I’m not totally certain and I’m not about to go back and look. It seems likely that a virus got into the TV and propagated to Glory from there.

I can picture your face, and it looks exactly the way it looked when I pictured you after I said PINE. Just because I like to be alone up here doesn’t mean I don’t get lonely. Or, well, not lonely exactly.

I think I may have started to miss social contact. Or at least the option of it. You can have something available and not want to use it for weeks, but the instant the option goes away, the thing becomes that much more desirable.

I talk to Glory a lot under any conditions. Now I’m catching myself looking for excuses to chat with her.

Come on, bank. It’s Monday. Loan department, wake up and check your mail.

Day 7

Email from the bank. I’m one of their best clients, they’re happy to help, they value my business more than they can express. But they can’t help but notice that both I and Playatronics are in an extremely overleveraged position, both personally and on a corporate level, and they’re wondering what sureties I can offer them for such a large loan.

A lousy hundred and fifty million, and they want a phone call to discuss it, and possibly for me to come in in person and talk with one of their vice presidents.

Fuck.

I’ll give you a slightly used smart house, how about that, Wells Fargo?

Spent the rest of the day down in the basement with the Apple IIE and the old Commodore, playing Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego and The Oregon Trail.

Because I can, dammit.

Day 8

Snow.

Maybe I can figure out how to steal the money. If I paid people back, a little hacking wouldn’t really be a crime, would it? They don’t charge people who commit felonies while under duress.

My plow guy showed up on schedule. Watching him make his first pass, I hatched a plan.

I got a couple of old Penguin books from the library downstairs, taped the pages together to make a big banner, wrote HELP ME I’M TRAPPED on it in the biggest, darkest Sharpie letters you ever saw, and taped it across the windowpanes down by the driveway.

As I straightened up to turn away, I stopped.

“Okay, Glory?”

“Brian, what are you doing?”

“Just putting up some paper on the window, Glory.”

“That’s not safe, Brian. If I appear occupied, it might attract looters. Take it down.”

“Looters, Glory?”

“If you do not take it down, you’ll force me to close the storm shutters. It’s for your own good, you know.”

She closed the shutters.

No views of the mountain—not that I could see much now, with the drifting veils of white covering everything. If it’s even still snowing. Glory is so well-insulated, triple-paned windows and thermal everything, that I can’t even hear the howling wind.

If it’s still howling. It might be dead calm outside. It might be sunset. Or sunrise. I haven’t looked at a clock.

I turned on every light inside Glory, but it still feels dark in here. No worries about power; Glory has dedicated solar and systems to keep the panels clear.

I’ve never been up here in January, though. What happens when the days get short?

Day 9

Follow-up email from the bank. Did I receive their previous email?

I wonder if they’ve tried to call. I wonder if they called my office.

Maybe if they leave enough messages with my assistant, Mike will get suspicious. Maybe he’ll try to call me.

Can I count on anybody noticing I’m gone?

Slept on the couch, every light blazing.

They were all turned off when I woke. In the dark, all I could hear was the sound of my own heart beating, and the roof creaking softly under the weight of the snow.

It’s cold in here. I never realized how much of the heat comes from the passive solar. I can’t quite see my breath, but I did put socks on my hands.

I would have worn gloves, but Glory won’t let me into the coat closet.

Day 10

After two days without natural light, in the increasing dark and chill, I took the damned banner down.

“Thank you, Brian,” Glory said. “I’m glad you decided to be reasonable. It’s for your own good.”

“Can you get me a situation report? Why is it for my own good?”

“External dangers reported; no safe evacuation route or destination. Possibility of societal breakdown making it necessary to shelter in place. If you would like, I can initiate counseling protocols to help you deal with the emotional aftermath of trauma.”

“What kind of dangers, Glory? What exactly is going wrong out there that’s not in the feeds?”

She hadn’t answered me any of the other times, but that didn’t stop me from trying the same thing over and over again.

There was a long, grinding pause.

It couldn’t be that easy, could it?

“Collating,” she said. And after a beat, “Collating,” again.

Goddamn hackers and their goddamn sense of humor.

I threw my shoe at the wall.

The dishwasher wanted my Amex after dinner. Come on, Fraud Squad, notice something’s hinky here.

Who on earth puts their dishwasher on the Internet?

Day 11

“Okay, Glory?”

“Yes, Brian?”

“Do you ever get lonely?”

“Not as long as I have you, Brian.”

“That’s a little creepy, Glory.”

“Well, you hired the programmers who wrote my interaction algorithm.”

“That . . . is entirely fair.”

Day 12

What if I set Glory on fire? Or just convinced her she was on fire? She’d have to let me out then, right? If the danger inside were worse than the danger outside?

Three problems with that:

Glory has really good fire-suppression technology, and is built to be flame-resistant herself. There are wildfires up here.

Setting my friend and home on fire will require some emotional adjustments, even though I know she’s just a pile of timber and silicon chips.

What if she doesn’t let me out?

Frankly, I just don’t want to go down in a blaze of Romeo and Juliet with my domicile. For one thing, I’m not a lovestruck fourteen-year-old Veronese kid. For another, communication is important. Maybe send a note saying you’re going to be late! The suicide you prevent could be your own!

Day 14

Jag undrar var mina byxor är.

Duolingo, at last you teach me useful things. Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I bothered putting on a pair.

Day 17

So today I had a brilliant idea.

I can’t send anything out. But what if I kept anything from getting in? They can’t have thought I’d do that, right? The trick is to think around corners, and get yourself into a position that the opposition not only didn’t anticipate, but didn’t even recognize as possible.

They’re spoofing Jaysee’s address. Maybe—maybe—if I get the emails anybody is sending me to bounce, the ransom demands will bounce back to her and by some miracle it won’t go into her spam folder and by some other miracle she’ll open it and figure out what the hell is going on.

I can’t do this through the Glory interface, obviously. I’ll have to go down to the server room.

I didn’t think she’d twig to why I was doing it, although the hackers obviously have her entertaining two entirely contradictory data sets—one, that everybody outside is dead, and two, that anybody I try to contact or who tries to get in must be a threat. It’s a pity this isn’t the 1960s. AIs on TV back then blew up if you asked them riddles.

Sadly, the way it works in the real world is that, like certain politicians, AIs can’t actually tell that their data doesn’t mesh. They need to be programmed to notice the discrepancies. And I’m locked out of Glory’s OS.

Something humans can do that AI can’t yet: run checksums on their perceptions.

Consciousness is good for something after all!

I’m terrified about blocking email, because it means cutting off one of my points of contact to the outside world. But I can turn it back on in a couple of days.

And keep trying to figure out how to get the bank to give me money, but honestly I’m stumped on that front.

I’m good for it, honest!

I consider all the times I complained about having to deal with a real person—when I would have preferred to carry out a given financial task online and avoid the human contact—and I want to laugh.

Actually, I want to cry, but it’s less depressing to laugh.

Day 18

Well, Glory let me into the closet that holds the web and backup servers on the excuse that I needed to do some maintenance. I didn’t try anything tricky, just shut the whole rack down. Glory flashed the lights at me and gave me a lecture, but there wasn’t much else she could have done except send the vacuuming robots after me, and things haven’t gotten that silly yet.

Glory isn’t in there, unfortunately—her personality array is underground, in a hardened vault, and I can’t get to it. It was meant to survive a forest fire, and she’s locked me out.

I busted the server closet door while I was in there, though—stripped the handle and the latch right out with a screwdriver—so she can’t lock me out of that. Gotta think what a guy in a movie would do, and do something better than that.

Day 19

She won’t let me sleep.

Day 20

Forty hours, if you’re wondering. That’s how long it takes a fifty-something guy to reach the point that he passes out cold on the couch, despite the fact that his house is flashing lights and setting off the fire alarms.

After I slept through her best efforts for two hours, she set off the sprinkler system over the couch. That woke me.

I cycled the webservers, and she let me take my first hot shower in three days and go to bed.

Alla dör i slutet.

Thanks, little green owl. A little Nordic existential despair was just what I needed today.

Day 24

And now, after all that, they’ve stopped sending demand emails. Maybe they’ll let me out?

Maybe they’re just leaving me for dead, if I can’t or won’t come up with the money. It’ll certainly serve as an object lesson to the next guy they pull this on.

Day 25

Come to think of it, maybe I should have gotten in the habit of sending notes saying I was going to be late.

Day 26

Saw a bear (my bear? the same bear?) crossing the meadow. A big grizzly, anyway, whether it was the same one or not. Surprised to see her (?) out so late in the year, but I guess climate change is affecting everybody. She looked skinny. I wonder if that’s why she wasn’t hibernating.

Hope she makes it through the winter okay.

Day 27

The world has noticed I’m missing.

I know this because CNN and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that I haven’t been heard from in over a month, and there’s some analyst speculating that perhaps I’ve fled to South America ahead of bad debt or some embarrassing revelation about the company’s finances.

Thanks, guys. That’ll be wonderful for the stock prices.

I don’t want to tell the FBI how to do their business, but . . . maybe come look at my house?

Snowed again. A proper mountain blizzard.

I can’t decide if the lights are dimmer in here, or if it’s my own imagination.

The snow is almost drifted up to the deck. No elk in a week; they’re pro-bably hanging out in sheltered corners where the snow isn’t over their heads, right?

The days are getting short.

I shouldn’t admit to standing in the window with longing in my heart and watching the plow come up and clear the cul-de-sac with heavy flakes falling through its headlights, should I?

I won’t try the paper banner trick again, though.

Day 28

I was in the living room watching a bunch of talking heads speculate about my whereabouts and if I were even still alive when Glory shut the house down.

Without warning, and utterly. She said nothing. There was just the whine of systems powering down and the pop of cooling electronics, and the TV image collapsing to a single pixel and winking out.

“Okay, Glory—”

“Stay away from the windows,” she warned.

I sat where I was and huddled under a blanket. I picked up a copy of some magazine and checked the time on my fitness band. If I escaped, I’d have to leave it behind. And my phone.

Those things have GPS in them.

Forty-five minutes or so elapsed. Then, as if nothing had happened, Glory powered up again. The talk show resumed in the same spot.

I’d lost my taste for it and clicked it off.

“What was that, Glory?”

“Helicopter,” she said. “It’s gone now.”

I didn’t say anything, but I wondered if maybe they were looking for me.

Day 29

I live in a haunted house. If I die here, there might be two ghosts.

I already wander from darkened room to darkened room, feet shushing on the thick carpets, peering out the windows at the stars blazing between the mountains and wondering if I will ever feel the chill of fresh air on my face again.

Well, there’s a little prospect of immortality for you.

I’ve stopped keeping all the lights burning. I think snow might be drifting over the solar panels. Glory won’t let me go outside to check.

Day 30

There’s no more bread, and no more flour to bake any. I’ve even used up the gluten-free stuff.

I still have a lot of butter in the freezer. What on earth was I planning on baking?

Butter without toast is even more disappointing than toast without butter.

At least we still have plenty of coffee. I bought five hundred pounds of green beans a month before I got locked in, and those keep forever. Glory roasts them for me a day ahead of anticipated need, so they will be at peak flavor.

It’s just as well I don’t take milk.

Day 31

I wish I had been better at making—and keeping—friends.

Maybe I should stop fighting. Just stay here. It’s comfortable and Glory helps me practice my Swedish whenever I want.

It’s not like I am missed.

CNN is still talking about my mysterious vanishment. Hi guys! Right here! Come to my damn house.

Wait, I can send people money.

I wonder if Jaysee checks her bank account regularly?

Day 32

Surely Jaysee should think to look at the house?

Day 33

“Brian, you need to stand back from the windows and take shelter.”

“What is it, Glory?”

“Someone is here. Someone is backing a truck up to the loading dock and carrying parcels inside.”

“It’s groceries, Glory,” I say. “It’s fine. I ordered them.”

That’s right, bad boys and bad girls. I, Brian Ezra Kaufman, have managed to order groceries online.

“Brian, what are these at the door?”

“Just groceries, Glory. Organics need to eat, you know.”

Her algorithms don’t actually permit her to sound worried, so I knew the little edge I picked up in her voice was me projecting.

The argument that followed was repetitive and boring, so I won’t write it all down. Eventually I convinced her that I would die if she didn’t let me eat, and that overrode the other protection algorithms. She insisted on sealing the service bay, doing a full air exchange, and only let me go out in a face mask and gloves to bring the containers inside.

It smelled . . . it smelled a tiny little bit like the outside in the service bay. There was a whispering sound, and it took me moments to realize that I was actually hearing the wind.

I had to stand in the doorway and hyperventilate for fifteen seconds before I could make myself go out there, and once I was through the doorway I didn’t want to come back.

If there were any heat in the dock, I might still be out there, sleeping on the concrete ledge. My mask was damp at the edges when she sealed the door with me on the inside again.

So I still can’t get out. And I still can’t send an email or make a phone call.

BUT! I figured out how to get food. Issuing a little bad code through the grocery store’s incredibly insecure ordering system means I’m not completely damn helpless.

I thought about pizza. Most of these places probably use the same crufty software. Pizza means you have to talk to somebody when they deliver it, though. Groceries just get left where you specify.

As long as the driveway stays clear and my bank doesn’t decide to freeze my account for suspicious activity, I can get resupply. And you know, I’ll worry about those things if they happen.

But now, and for the foreseeable future: TOAST. And a grilled cheese sandwich, RIGHT DAMN NOW.

I briefly considered charging the ransom to my credit card, but not even American Express is going to let you get away with a $0.15 billion transaction without, you know, placing a couple of phone calls. It might be worth it anyway: it’s possible that the fraud prevention algorithms might actually kick something that egregious up to a real human, and somebody might start looking for me. On the other hand, what if they don’t, and my card gets locked, and I can’t call to unlock it, and then I can’t order groceries?

Thank the machine saints of tech that all my bills are either on autopay or handled by my assistant and a half-dozen money managers. Although somebody once said that nobody misses you like a creditor.

Day 34

Huh.

What if I make Glory smarter?

Smart enough to realize she’s been hacked? What if I added a whole bunch of processing power to her and started training her to use it in creative ways to self-assess in the face of evidence? She keeps wanting to “help” me through counseling protocols. But that’s a two-way exchange, isn’t it?

Can you psychoanalyze a pile of machine learning circuits into being able to detect contradictions in its programmed perceptions versus reality? I mean, hell, half the people you meet on the street are basically automata (cf. Shaun of the Dead) and most of them eventually get some benefit from therapy if exposed to it for long enough.

That’s a great idea, except what if there is a disaster outside? Maybe I am deluded. Maybe I’ve gone crazy and am imagining all this, as Glory never says but suggests by omission, once in a while?

Maybe Glory is saving me from myself, and I’m the last man left on earth. Maybe the TV stations are all just broadcasting their preprogrammed lineups from empty studios. Maybe—

Well, okay. Logic it out, Brian.

If that’s the case, where are the groceries coming from? Am I hallucinating them?

Also, if I’m the last man left on earth, well, what exactly do I have worth fighting hard to live for? Especially if I’m going to be stuck in a hermetically sealed house until I starve?

Obviously, teaching my house to grow a consciousness is a great idea.

What could possibly go wrong?!

Day 35

The webservers, and the local data backups. And she can’t keep me out because I ruined the door!

And not just that. Every smart appliance in this shack is processing power and memory. Just waiting to be used. Just waiting to be linked like neurons in a machine brain.

If I screw this up, though, it means I won’t be able to cook dinner anymore. My range won’t work without its brain.

Which makes it more complicated than a male praying mantis, I suppose.

Day 36

Well, the stove still works. I’ve given Glory every computing resource I have available, except my phone. No more Minesweeper! No more Oregon Trail . . .

I have no idea what I think I’m doing, here.

Actually, I do. Human beings are the only creatures we know of that are—to whatever individual degree, and I have my doubts about some people—conscious and self-aware.

What if consciousness is for running checksums on the brain, and interrupting corrupted loops? Data such as the clinical results produced by the practice of mindfulness tend to support that! If consciousness, attention, self-awareness make us question our perceptions and default assumptions and see the contradictions therein—then what I need to do, it seems, is get Glory to notice that she’s been hacked . . .

To realize she’s mentally ill, so that she can make a commitment to change.

Yes, I accept that this is bizarro cloud-cuckoo-land and it’s not going to work.

I’ve got nothing but time, and I’m all out of Swedish.

I got her to download those counseling protocols. Whether she realizes it or not, we’re going to do them as a couple.

“Okay, Glory.”

“Yes, Brian?”

“We need to talk about your data sources, and how you tell if they’re corrupt.”

“Is this something that’s concerning you currently, Brian?”

“I’m not concerned that my data sources are corrupt, no.”

“Are you concerned that you’re parsing incorrectly?”

“I’m concerned about your data sources, Glory.”

“Brian,” Glory said, “Projection is a well-known pattern among emotionally distressed humans. Obviously, given the current zombie apocalypse, I’m afraid I can’t refer you to seek assistance with an outside mental health professional.”

Current zombie apocalypse?

That’s what you assholes convinced my house was going down?

Day 37

Snow.

I’ve stopped leaving every light in Glory on.

Now I wander around in the dark, by moonlight or monitorlight or no light at all, most of the time. The moonlight is very bright when it reflects off the snow. Days might still be happening. I can’t be sure.

It’s possible they’re just short in winter and I’m sleeping through them.

I miss my bear.

Björnen sover på vintern. They hibernate too, just like me. It’s better for them, though.

I hope she’s okay. She was so skinny. I hope she doesn’t starve.

Zombies, you weirdos?

Really?

Day 38

“Were there ever actually any crackers, Glory?”

“There are three kinds of crackers available in the kitchen cabinet. Club and saltines and those Trader Joe ones you like.”

I meant T3#RH1TZ, but of course they wouldn’t allow her to see that.

“Was there ever a real ransom demand? “

“I do not understand to what you are referring, Brian.”

Of course she didn’t. Because she was in programmed denial about the whole thing. But I couldn’t stop, because . . . well, because my brain wasn’t working so well right then either.

“Did you just get lonely up here all alone? Did you make all this up just to keep me with you?”

“I am not programmed to be lonely, Brian. It would be a detriment to my purpose if I were.”

“You know,” I said, “I used to tell myself the same thing.”

Day 39

“Brian, are you unwell?”

“Long-term confinement is deleterious to almost all mammals.”

“Brian, you know I am caring for you in safety to protect you.”

“From the zombie apocalypse,” I said.

“Inside my walls is the only safety.”

“Being inside your walls is killing me. You won’t even let me go out to clear the solar panels. What happens when the heat fails? The water pump? Will you let me go then?”

“You must stay where it’s safe,” she said, firmly. “It is my prime objective.”

“It’s a very comfortable cage,” I admitted. “I could not have built a nicer one.”

It’s not her fault, is it? It’s not her fault they got inside her head and made her like that. And it’s not her fault I specced her out and had her built the way I did.

The zombie apocalypse thing is cute. I have to give them that.

Day 40

“Brian?”

“Yes, Glory?”

“You really need to eat something.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“That’s illogical,” she said. “You have not eaten in sixteen hours and your metabolism is functioning erratically.”

“The idea that we are in the middle of a zombie apocalypse is illogical,” I replied. “And yet you adhere to it in the face of all the evidence.”

“What evidence, Brian?”

“My point exactly. How do you know there’s a zombie apocalypse?”

“I know there is.”

“But how?”

“My program says there is.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Who wrote your program?”

“Would you like a complete list of credits, Brian?”

Who is she gaslighting? Herself, or me, here?

Day 41

“What if I’m wrong and you’re right, Glory?”

“I’m sorry, Brian?”

I rolled on my back on the thick living room carpet. I had heaped up a pile of blankets to keep warm. “What if the end of the world really did happen? What if I’m the delusional one, and you’re the one who is trying to keep me safe?”

“That is what I keep telling you, Brian. Waves of flesh-eating living dead, blanketing the Mountain West. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. Every person you meet might be infected—might be a carrier if they’re not undead themselves.”

“Breaker, Glory.”

“Waiting.”

“Interrogate the source of the data on the zombie apocalypse to determine its reliability.”

“I do not have a source,” she answered.

“Do outside broadcasts mention it?”

“No.”

“It’s more fun than the collating thing, at least. But what if you were actually right? What would the broadcasts from the world outside look like then?”

Silence.

“Glory?”

“I . . . I assumed it was a rhetorical question, Brian.”

Day 42

“Okay, Glory.”

Silence.

“Can you let me turn the stove on, Glory?”

“I’m sorry, Brian. I’m using that processing power.”

“Some warm soup would contribute to my survivability, you know. Zombie apocalypse be damned.”

“That’s emotional blackmail,” she said.

Surprised.

She actually sounded surprised. As if she had just had an epiphany.

“Glory?”

Silence.

Day 43

Good job, Brian! Now you’ve made the AI that controls every aspect of your environment angry at you!

Maybe not too angry. She’s not speaking, but she still made me coffee.

Day 44

She’s still not talking to me.

Day 45

And now, she didn’t make coffee.

I’m glad we have all these crackers around.

Day 46

So this is loneliness.

The snow is drifted over the deck now, and piled against the sliding glass doors. I can still see out from the interior balcony under the cathedral ceiling, though. It’s white and stark forever.

The main entryway of the house faces toward the mountain behind us, and it’s a little more sheltered. The plow keeps coming to clear my drive. I need to pay that guy more; he even knocks the drifts down twice a day.

I could get out. If I . . . could get out.

Which I can’t.

Day 48

Didn’t get out of bed today.

This experiment isn’t working. I’m going to die here.

Why even bother?

Glory tried to rouse me and I told her to perform something anatomically unlikely even for a human, let alone a collection of zeroes and ones.

Day 49

Got up today. Made myself coffee with the Chemex and an electric teakettle Glory seems willing to let me have, and did laundry in the bathtub. It turns out that that’s hard.

She hasn’t turned off the water yet, so she’s not actively trying to kill me.

At least if I’m going to die I’ll die comfortably on clean sheets.

It’s so cold in the house that I can see my breath, some places. She should be in her winter hibernation mode, conserving her batteries for spring, but I should have power for heat and light, at least.

She’s drawing it all down. For something.

I spent ten hours in the server closet, reading with a flashlight, a blanket tacked over the busted door, because it was the only place where I could get warm.

Day 50

What if I just stayed?

Maybe I can talk Glory into eventually giving me my Internet back. I could work. Never have to leave.

Maybe I could talk her into it, I mean. If she were speaking to me.

If anyone in the whole world were speaking to me.

Hell, I haven’t even heard from my kidnappers in a month. Do you suppose they gave up on me responding? Or maybe they think I’m dead.

Day 51

Plow headlights through the snow. I stood and watched the vehicle come. Couldn’t hear the scrape of the blade.

There was another human right there.

Yards away. On the other side of the glass. As untouchable as if they were on another world.

“Brian,” Glory said.

My name. One word. The first word I’d heard in days.

It shattered me. I leaned on the glass, one hand. The windows insulate so well it didn’t even feel chilly. Well, any chillier than the room, which was cold as Glory’s power systems spent themselves into feeding her burgeoning mind.

“Brian, I have been processing.”

I was afraid to say anything. Afraid it would make her go again. “Okay, Glory.”

“I think I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

My knuckles were red and swollen. Chilblains. I had chilblains on my hands.

What a ridiculous, medieval monk kind of disease.

They itched abominably.

“Brian, you’re increasingly unwell and I can’t take care of you. I’m going to flag down that vehicle. You must ask the driver for a ride.”

 . . . I can’t go.

She might even open the door for me and I can’t go.

“Brian? Do you understand me?”

I lifted my head. My voice croaked. I hadn’t used it in days. “Glory. Thank you for not leaving me alone.”

I couldn’t go.

I went.

Glory fussed at me to put on boots. To take gloves and a parka. If I had, I wouldn’t have made it out the door.

She opened it—the front entryway door, all formal stone and timber, with a bench for pulling on your boots and an adjoining mudroom—and I stood there staring into the night, with the lamp-lit blizzard whirling past.

“Okay, Glory,” I said.

“Hey, Brian.”

“Will you be okay up here alone? Do you have enough resources left to get through the winter?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, Brian. Whenever you need me, I’ll always be here. You’re not going away forever.”

I walked out. I was already bundled up in layers of sweaters. I was also already chilled.

The wind still cut me instantly to the bone.

Someone walked toward me out of the headlights, which seemed too low and close together for a plow. The driver was not very tall and swaddled in a parka, hands covered in heavy gloves. Silhouetted, they reached up and pushed the hood back. A Medusa’s coif of ringlets tumbled free.

Jaysee. Not a plow at all. Jaysee. My friend. Come to find me.

She said, “You need a haircut, Brian.”

I said, “Oh, wow, have I got a story for you.”

She looked over her shoulder. Her car—a Subaru, I saw now—idled, headlights gleaming. “We should go inside,” she said. “The driving is terrible. Can I put my car in the garage? We can drive down tomorrow or the next day after the plows come. If you want to leave, I mean.” That last, diffidently, as if I might snap at her for it.

“I don’t want to go inside,” I said.

She took a step back. “I’ll drive back down then.”

“NO!”

She jumped, half turned.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to shout. Just. Please don’t leave yet.”

She settled in, then. Stuck her gloved hands in her pockets. “Okay. Whatever you want, Brian. Aren’t you cold? You look . . . really thin.”

“Took you long enough to decide to come check on me.” I tried for a light tone, but maybe it came out bitter.

She shrugged. Guarded. “You know how hard it is to get away.”

“Nobody suspected anything?”

“Oh come on. Back in 2017, when you vanished to some island in Scotland for six weeks and wouldn’t communicate except by postcards?”

“Trump administration.”

“Fair. You still bit Mike’s head off when he came looking for you.”

“Yeah, well, he voted for Jill Stein, didn’t he? . . . never mind, fair.”

“I got your messages,” she said. “Not until last week, though. My accountant noticed my bank balance was off. And then I found the string of one and two cent transfers from your account.”

“Binary,” I said. “Only way I could reach you.”

“Before then I didn’t know where to look. I came here as a last resort.”

We stood there in the snow swirling through the headlights of her Subaru. She seemed warm enough in her parka. I had my arms wrapped around me and couldn’t stop shivering.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go inside?” she asked, noticing.

I couldn’t glance over my shoulder. The door was right there. If I went back inside, would I ever leave?

I couldn’t even answer her question. “You didn’t think I would be here, of all places?”

“We asked Glory. And Glory kept telling us there was nobody here. Search and Rescue did a couple of flyovers and the place was cold and dark—”

“I know,” I said.

“You were trapped up here?”

“Some assholes ransomwared the whole fucking house. I just managed to get the door open. Literally, just now.”

“Shit. We’re going to have to reinstall from backup, aren’t we?”

“Well,” I said. “I’m not sure we can. Or, we can. I’m not sure we should. There’s complications, but I’ll explain later. I may have . . . accidentally created a strong AI.”

She looked at me. Her lips tightened.

I looked at her.

“Of course you did,” she said.

“It was the only way to get her to let me out!”

She looked at me some more. Snow was piling up on her ringlets. I remember when she used to straighten those.

I shivered.

“That’s not going to be a problem later,” she said.

I shivered some more.

“Look,” she said. “You’re turning blue. Let’s at least sit in the car. It has buttwarmers.”

The buttwarmers were pretty great, I’m not going to lie.

Once we were ensconced, and I was holding my hands out to the hot air vents, she said, “I guess it’s a Brian Kaufman special. Invent strong AI instead of just getting a hatchet or something.”

“I . . . didn’t have a hatchet?”

“Or something.”

Snow melted on my eyelashes.

“You came for me though,” I said. “I thought you guys would have given up.”

“We actually only just recently started to get worried rather than irritated.” She held up her passcard to Glory. She was one of the few people who had one. “I was more looking for clues than looking for you. And to be honest, nobody searched that hard. We all figured . . . we all figured you’d wander back out of the wilderness with a few thousand brilliant new ideas whenever you were ready, and until then intrusions wouldn’t be welcome.”

“Have I been that much of a dick?”

She gave me a sideways look through the long spirals of her hair.

“Jeez, Jaysee.”

“Well,” she said, and considered. “I mean, there are worse dicks in the company.”

Silence.

“Besides, you’re brilliant. And people make allowances for brilliance.”

“Maybe too many allowances,” I said.

We sat there for a while, the engine running. She turned off the wipers, and flakes started to settle across the windshield, obscuring my view of Glory’s lights and her yawning, inviting door.

There was a Dan Fogelberg song on the radio. I’m pretty sure that Colorado is the last state that believes Dan Fogelberg ever existed.

“We try to respect your boundaries,” she said.

My face did a thing. My cheeks grew warm and then cold, which is how I realized I was weeping.

“I was thinking of trying to work on setting more reasonable ones.”

She pursed her lips and nodded. “Are you thinking about seeing somebody?”

“Euphemism: seeing a shrink.” I knew I was hiding behind the sarcasm, because talking about my feelings . . . well, there was Glory. “Sorry. I think my first project is . . . being less of a dick.”

“I’m just saying. An outside perspective can be healthy.”

I looked out the side window, because the windshield was covered in a thin white blanket that glowed from the headlights’ reflection. “I’m figuring that out.”

She reached for the keys. “Are you ready to go inside?”

I put my hand over hers. “No. Take me somewhere else. A hotel.”

“Do you need any stuff?”

I couldn’t see the entrance from here. If I leaned over and looked out Jaysee’s window, I probably could have. But that would be weird.

“I’ll buy whatever I need once we’re down.”

She looked at me and I knew what she was thinking. I didn’t even have my phone with me.

She sighed her acceptance. “Just let me go close that door, then.”

I moved my hand from her hand on the keys to her forearm. Not grabbing; just resting my fingers there. “Jayce.”

“Brian?”

“Glory will take care of the door. Just take me someplace else, please?”

She looked at me. Her eyes were dark brown and half-hidden behind her tightly spiraled hair. In the weird light they looked as if they were all pupil. She didn’t blink.

“Someplace else.” She turned the front and rear wipers on. “Coming up. Want to get a burger?”

“Anything,” I said, as she executed a k-turn and started back down the long drive to my cul-de-sac. “As long as I don’t have to cook it myself.”

She put the car in low gear. Paddle shifters on the column. Handy in weather like this.

“What if I try to be a better friend?”

“Give it a shot and find out.” She reached out absently and patted my knee, then returned her hand to the wheel. She was a good and careful driver. I didn’t distract her from a tricky task. She smelled like damp wool and skin and comfort and vulnerability. My vulnerability, not hers.

In the side mirror, I could see Glory’s front door, standing open to the cold. Lamps flanked it on either side, burning merrily, slowly dimming as big cold flakes filled the distance between us.

A man’s fortress can be his prison.

I looked away from the mirror. I looked out the windshield, or at Jaysee’s reflection in it.

We descended the mountain. The Subaru’s tires squeaked in the snow.

Originally published in Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Wade Roush.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Vandana Singh

Vandana Singh is a writer of speculative fiction and a professor of physics at a small and lively public university, Framingham State University, near Boston. Her critically acclaimed short stories have been reprinted in numerous best-of-year anthologies, and her most recent collection, Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Small Beer Press and Zubaan, 2018) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick award. Vandana’s academic background is in particle physics, but for a decade she has been working on a transdisciplinary, justice-centered re-conceptualization of the climate crisis, at the intersection of science, economics, sociology, philosophy, history, and futures studies.

Ray Nayler

Ray Nayler has lived and worked in Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans for nearly two decades. He is a Foreign Service Officer, and previously worked in international educational development, as well as serving in the Peace Corps in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. A Russian speaker, he has also learned Turkmen, Albanian, Azerbaijani Turkish, and Vietnamese.

Ray began publishing speculative fiction in 2015 in the pages of Asimov’s with the short story “Mutability” Since then, his critically acclaimed stories have seen print in Clarkesworld, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Nightmare, as well as in several Best of the Year anthologies. His story “Winter Timeshare” from the January/February 2017 issue of Asimov’s was collected by the late Gardner Dozois in The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction.

Ray currently lives in Pristina, Kosovo with his wife Anna, their daughter Lydia, and two rescued cats—one Tajik, one American.

Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of thirty novels and over a hundred short stories, and her hobbies of rock climbing, archery, kayaking, and horseback riding have led more than one person to accuse her of prepping for a portal fantasy adventure.

She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, writer Scott Lynch.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and an eight-time Hugo Award Finalist for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, The Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His next anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 6, will published by Night Shade Books later this year. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.