In Brazil, there had been a currency collapse for no clear reason anyone could tell. It was as if the world economy—so long running on hope and expectation—had simply stopped functioning normally. In Belarus it was now accepted that armed street gangs had more power than the legitimate military. In China another wave of a blue rice-mold had been carried by unseasonable storms, causing the crop to fail. The world was a boxer, unsteady on its feet, wavering, waiting for the final punch.

  And she, Lai Zhen, would not only not get her golden ticket, she’d also never know what the fuck had happened to her life and who was after her. She could deal with dying, she thought, but not with never knowing. She dug her frozen fingers deeper and more urgently into the earth.

  And yes! Here under a patch of moss and undergrowth, a circle about a meter in diameter was artificial. Under the rain and earth there was metal. In the metal there was a hole. She hooked her finger into the hole; she tugged. A circular metal hatch rose up silently on two piston lever arms. Inside the circle, there was light.

  “Fuck you do,” said Marius, to no one in particular. Zhen locked the door in place. There were steps down into a white hexagonal room, like a single cell of a beehive.

  “Come on,” she said. “I can’t do it without you.”

  Zimri Nommik, the CEO of Anvil, owned an enormous amount of British Columbia, including two islands bordering Haida Gwaii. He had not made peace with local First Nations elders; he purchased the property at a very fair price and had erected a set of strong fences and several other less obvious protective measures. It was here that he had constructed his underground survival bunker to see out an impending apocalypse. Zimri Nommik had read extensive reports on seismic activities over the medium to long term and worked with his designers to construct a honeycomb-like structure underground, only two stories deep at any point but massively large, with blast doors between every three cells that would maintain structural integrity if any part of the bunker collapsed.

  Zimri Nommik did not mind a great deal that the architects of his bunker knew where it was and how it looked on the inside. He had constructed a system in which trust wasn’t necessary. The architects might have built the bunker, but the security systems were installed after they’d left by people who had no idea what they were protecting. The guys who saw the outer doors didn’t see the inside. The guys who installed the cameras hadn’t met the ones who’d installed the electric fences, and those guys hadn’t met the gun turret team and they had no knowledge of the security camera crew. No single person could possibly find out enough to get inside. That was what capitalism got you. The war of all against all could make you safe, as long as they were fighting each other and not you. Zimri Nommik had not anticipated that four separate engineers working on his project would be fans of Lai Zhen and would—across several years—share with her the location, the access codes, and enough information about the internal defenses for her to be fairly sure of evading them when she and Marius came here to reactivate AUGR on her phone.

  The white-illuminated beehive cell Zhen and Marius climbed down into had a certain beauty to it, if you liked that kind of thing. It was lined in painted wood, it was about twenty feet across, and it was empty. Apart from a set of ports in the floor. Could it be this easy? Marius knelt down to investigate them.

  “No,” he said.

  “No? Just no?”

  “No. Is electricity. Anvil data port. Data for water management only. We need full data point, full access, hard internet from here. Then it knows we really here and we get what we want. Look.”

  “OK. No, no, it’s not a problem.” Zhen threw the plans from her thinscreen onto the white wall. “Look, we’re here to the west of the whole site. There should be full data access banks every… ten cells or so. So we just keep going north, through the cells, until we find one.”

  “And you sure there’s no one here?”

  “Why would they be here? The apocalypse hasn’t happened yet. Look, I can get the walls open. It should take fifteen minutes to get there. Connect to the port. Download what we need. Get out.” Marius looked uncertain. “We’ve come this far.”

  “That’s what they say under communism. One extra push only for total success. You got to know when to give up.”

  “OK, but we’re not giving up for another fifteen minutes.”

  Zhen inputted the access code on the panel in the north wall. It slid down, revealing a long corridor ahead.

  “Look, some of the cells are already open.”

  “What the fuck are these cells?”

  “I’ll explain as we go. Come on.”

  Zimri Nommik’s bunker was constructed on two levels: wood-lined concrete-and-steel-framed beehive cells on top, and underneath each cell the generators and food and fuel stores. Every wall was a blast door. Each one could slide down into the steel frame below, making the structure infinitely reconfigurable. If you owned both cells, then you had control of the wall between them. Otherwise you had to have the agreement of both sides to slide the wall down.

  “But no one lives here yet,” said Zhen, “so I have the construction passkey.”

  “What a future this man imagine,” said Marius. “I safe in my prison, you safe in your prison. All safe and no talking, no laughing, no sex. Individualism.”

  “I mean, there’s some logic to it,” said Zhen. “People who are into survival want to… survive. I guess Nommik would bring his top people here. They’d probably all know each other already. But if some unexpected threat was introduced… they’d want to be able to isolate them.”

  “This place is tomb,” said Marius. “Mourn for yourself here, you already dead.”

  There was something to what Marius said. The place was cold, a faint damp in the air all the time, and their steps echoed on the concrete floor. They passed through an empty sleeping unit: bunk beds, storage cubbies, shower cabinet. Everything standing in the middle of the room to leave the walls free gave the ordinary objects a strangely menacing air—as if the moment Marius and Zhen walked by, the sofa, the table, the empty bookcase would shuffle themselves slowly forward, inch by inch. A solitary fly buzzed past her elbow, heading to nowhere, from nowhere.

  “They getting ready,” said Marius. “New mattresses, new sheets, boxes.”

  There were boxes everywhere filled with supplies—canned food, utensils, fuel, weapons. The place looked like a movie set the day before the shoot starts.

  “Something’s coming,” said Zhen.

  The second cell in the chain was a stone-lined kitchen with a small deeply recessed skylight onto which the dark rain was pattering softly. Next was a recreation room with a huge thinscreen, a suite of gaming consoles, and a table-tennis table.

  “I heard there’s a swimming pool somewhere in here,” said Zhen.

  “Fuck swimming pool. I see data ports. Where my condom?”

  Marius’s “condom” was a small device encased in bare aluminum—they had tested it out many times. It would transmit just enough data packets to reauthorize AUGR, nothing more. Then it would switch itself off automatically, the process taking no more than 0.03 seconds. Zhen had held it in her hand and felt the rapid ticktock between the two states, like the heartbeat of a living thing. There would be little they could do to stop the AUGR mainframe from knowing where they were—that was the point of the system—but they could get out quickly the moment the phone was turned off. And they could stop the phone from exchanging any more data with the system, stop it from knowing who they were.

  Marius plugged the device in. Made ready to put the connector into the phone. It would be over before it began and then they would need to leave at pace.

  “Ready?” said Marius.

  “Ready,” said Zhen, imagining already the instantaneous faster-than-human ticktock inside the aluminum box.

  Marius plugged the phone in. Immediately, something was wrong.

  “Fuck,” he said, his finger and thumb fumbling at the connector. In his agitation, the phone slid sideways in his hand. He dropped it, swore again, wrenched the connector out of the box manually, passed the phone to Zhen. The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds.

  “What happened?”

  “Fucking poison house. Mainframe in bunker forced the connection.”

  “So it got something off my phone?”

  “In ten seconds? Yes. Don’t know what.”

  “And… are we safe?”

  “Need to get out.”

  With a thunk, all the lights in the bunker went off.

  There were light-emitting paint strips on the floor, glowing very pale. Something brushed past Zhen’s elbow. It was all happening quickly. Iterating. Repeating, a million times a second.

  “Shit,” said Zhen. “OK, OK, I can get us out of here, back the way we came. It’s only three cells.”

  The same soft feeling was against Zhen’s arms, against her face, against her neck. By the light of her phone screen she saw something tiny like an insect, like a mosquito, buzz across the illuminated face. On the screen was a text box.

  Lai Zhen, it said, this is AUGR. Your perimeter has been activated. You are in danger.

  On the screen was a map of the bunker. Hundreds of honeycomb cells. A red dot showing where Zhen and Marius were standing in a cell on the perimeter of the bunker. Farther in toward the center, a twelve-honeycomb-cell open blue space. A swimming pool.

  Zhen angled the screen so Marius could see it, but before he could respond, there was a pain in her right hand, a swelling, growing, hot, wet, bubbling pain. A hundred tiny burning lacerations. AUGR was right. The things would follow them out unless they were able to get rid of them more permanently.

  Something had iterated, tried out a million ideas a second. The buzzing things were around the hand holding the phone and she was bleeding. She almost dropped the phone. She clutched tighter.

  “They’re trying to get it,” she said. “Hold it, take it.”

  Marius grabbed the phone in the almost dark. Wrapped it and his hands in his jacket. Zhen dug her left hand into her pocket and pulled out a gel emergency flare—semispherical, the size of half a golf ball. If these things could navigate in the dark, then they were using infrared, and they could blow that out, just for a moment. Marius wailed in distress.

  “They eating my coat, cutting.”

  Zhen cracked the flare, pressing her thumbs into the center hard. The light was bright and immediate. In the terrifying white light she saw her own right hand, the skin shredded and bleeding. Marius’s jacket was hanging in tattered strips. Thronging his skin were tiny brass-colored beads, humming with buzzing wings. They were disoriented now, just for a moment; the bright light had disrupted their vision.

  “I know what to do,” said Zhen. “They’re going to keep trying to get the phone but trust me. Every cell is separate.”

  She dragged Marius to a wall leading farther into the honeycomb. Jabbed in the access key. The wall slid down. The next room was filled with dark-thriving plants under minimal hydroponic lamps—black tomatoes and navy-green lettuces. They stepped inside. The brass buttons from the cell behind them didn’t follow. From the walls and ceiling, through the grate in the floor, new bright, biting things emerged.

  “Absolute autonomy,” said Zhen, punching in the code for the next wall. “The perimeter is all automatically controlled—that’s Nommik’s. But no one’s in charge of the inner cells; every cell is independent, each one has to assent to deploy its own defenses. Which it’ll only do when we’re actually here, OK? If we keep moving, we stay ahead.”

  “But we going further inside maze. Not out.”

  “There’s going to be a way out. Trust me.”

  And, despite it all, he did.

  There were five more cells between them and the swimming pool. Four more cracked-concrete grilles pouring out flying, biting, buzzing things as soon as they entered. The swarm carried micro-lancets, sharp darting needles, inhumanly thin blades that Zhen and Marius barely felt cutting them. They fought their way through another sleeping area, a music and recreation room, a room with benches and restraints that Zhen noted in a distant part of her mind was definitely an interrogation room, a medical bay. Each time there was a momentary pause. Enough to assess their latest wounds, to work out which part of their bodies they should be protecting, enough time for Zhen to stuff the phone into a resistant StowtBag before the next buzzing, thronging assault began. The last room was medical storage. Medicines, surgical tools, sterile equipment. Butane tanks. Forty enormous oxygen tanks.

  “Open as many of those as you can,” said Zhen as she fought off the insects stabbing at the crook of her elbow where she cradled her phone, and punched the master code into the last number pad. “Oxygen. Butane. Open them.”

  As the final wall fell away they were suddenly in the large echoing space of a swimming pool. Ferns were growing up the walls from huge planter troughs, creeping toward the light seeping through deeply recessed thick glass portholes above; ivies with enormous dark green leaves. Arvo Pärt was playing softly from the speakers in the ceiling. The water was clear and smelled of salt.

  From the grille above the swimming pool, more of the buzzing creatures began to agglomerate. The swimming pool was one of the few communal territories in the system. One of the only places where they could do what they were doing right now. They were forming a swarm. They would have them now; if this didn’t work, they would take from her what she’d come here for. They wouldn’t kill her—if they’d wanted to do that, one of those lancets would have been enough to do it, using the right poison. What’s the point of murder if you control the world anyway? Murder is for people with nothing left to lose. They would just leave her here, having shown her a corner of a hidden world and then replaced the curtain. No. She joined Marius, opening oxygen tanks and butane canisters. As many as she could, as quickly as she could. The sound of the hissing joined with the buzzing insects. Zhen felt suddenly light-headed.

  “Now,” she said to Marius. He had understood without needing it explained.

  “OK,” he said, “but if I die, you fucking explaining to Sarit, OK?”

  “Yup,” she said, and they ran together, Zhen’s hand extended behind her as she hurled her sparking automatic fire starter, and at the point that they jumped into the water, the air above them ignited.

  The water was deep and slightly green and very clear. It tasted faintly of chlorophyll and salt, fresh and full of phytonutrients, like sap. A sheet of flame passed over their heads. There was an enormous crash, and chunks of concrete and stone collapsed into the pool. They stayed down. Very swiftly, all was silent. They put their heads above the water.

  “Fuck shit,” said Marius.

  There was a gaping hole in the roof of the bunker; they’d be able to clamber out over the rubble. The bright beetles were floating on the face of the water. Various parts of the room, and the next room, and the room after it were on fire.

  “Survival,” said Zhen, helping Marius out of the pool.

  “Why survival so fucking dangerous?”

  10. an invisible tipping point

  zhen

  In a hotel room in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, looking out on a Tim Hortons doughnut and coffee shop, Marius set up a world-in-a-box for Zhen’s phone to inhabit while they investigated what AUGR was and worked out what to do next. A fake mobile network for it to connect to, scanning for information about enemies and disasters. On one of Marius’s homebrew arrangements of chips and screens, they watched AUGR try to crawl the web, to look for threats and protect Zhen. The fake mobile network gave it nothing of interest. It worked tirelessly inside its little box, thinking it was contacting the world. Like an insect in a tiny, perfect environment in a terrarium.

  Marius and Zhen had looked through AUGR’s assets.

  There was a video labeled simply “watchme.mp4.”

  “Look at this,” said Marius. “Maybe they make movie of themselves doing evil.”

  But he’d been surprised when it turned out they had. There was a man called Si Packship pitching a product called AUGR. Zhen recognized the inside of the mountain—not to mention everyone’s clothing—at once.

  Marius hated everything Packship said, and muttered, “Sick fucks” several times during the video.

  At the end, the microphone picked up a brief conversation between Lenk Sketlish and Martha.

  “If it works, I’m in,” muttered Lenk.

  “I think he’s got it,” said Martha. “What he’s done is very impressive.”

  There was a camaraderie and ease between them that made Zhen bitingly jealous.

  “You’ve tested it?”

  “I’ve had some people walking around with it for months. Nothing they can see on their phones. I monitor the data remotely. It’s good. Not quite as good as he says. He can’t do fourteen days. But twenty-four to forty-eight hours, yes.”

  “That’s enough. OK, but if we’re taking it, we need to make sure we delete all the test builds, OK? Anyone who’s had it, all of them. Get someone on that. I’m not risking it. They need to be gone.”

  Marius looked at Zhen. “Fucking Bogdan,” he said at last. “If you connect to real internet, they know where you are. They delete again.”

  “Or they come and burn the building down.”

  Marius shook his head. “Fire is last resort. Bogdan is idiot but he turned phone off and on quickly. Leave it on for five minutes and they remote delete. Safe and clean.”

  Zhen said: “Was I just a tester? Do you think it works? I mean, really actually works?”

  Marius thought about this.

  “It is good at one thing: generate survival plan quickly. That we know it can do.”

  “That’s not an answer. That’s what you talk about. Iteration. We tell it the parameters, it iterates a million times a second; we tell it what success is and when it’s failed. I can imagine how it could get good at that in a lot of simulations. What about the future prediction stuff?”

  “If it works, we know something new about world. About consciousness. About time.”