She realized suddenly that the reason she could see her blood-soaked sock was that she didn’t have shoes on, but she had no idea when she’d lost them. A piece of knowledge from long ago said: shoes fall off when you’re plummeting through the air, but that fall to earth seemed so long ago it could scarcely be relevant anymore, could it?

  No matter. She continued. Hands and knees, forward, doggedly. When the green dot stopped moving, she looked up. There was a two-meter-tall egg-shaped object made of gray-white plastic with a blue flashing light on a pole at the top. The egg was open. Sitting inside it, like the figure of an ancient emperor on a throne within, was a large metal and polymer suit—the faceplate open, hinged upward. The torso open. The shin and thigh guards flipped open. She realized she could step right into it. It looked to have been constructed for an eight-foot-tall person weighing at least five hundred pounds. It was a giant.

  “Survival prototype 871, I presume?”

  She spoke aloud and the sound of her own voice, the familiarity of it here, made her laugh, and the sound of her laughter made her cry.

  “This is a trip. Someone has drugged you, bou bui,” said Zhen. Her voice sounded like the voice of her mother when she spoke Chinese, and for a moment she felt her mother was next to her, pushing the hair from her forehead and wiping the sweat from her eyes. That her own hand was her mother’s hand and that she would be alright because there was someone with her now.

  She was shivering. The word “prototype” didn’t sound convincing, but on the other hand, it looked ready. And it didn’t feel plausible she’d survive long without some help.

  “What do you think, Ma-ma?” she said to herself.

  “Bou bui, the first right decision is whatever keeps you alive.”

  This is the law of the jungle, Zhen thought. And then laughed because she actually was in a fucking jungle, how ridiculous.

  She’d never been one to trust someone else’s tech, still less something that looked like it had been constructed on the pattern of Marvel’s Iron Man. Something about it looked weirdly familiar and gave her a slightly gross feeling, but she couldn’t place it. How had it come to be here? She looked behind her and was surprised that she could still see the remains of her inflated survival bubble—the infinite walk couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards. The folds of orange material were already teeming with insects. She looked up; the sky swarmed with stars as the earth with life.

  She had nothing. No pack, no knife in her knee holster, no shoes, no phone. Even if all she could do was to shelter inside this enormous figure until dawn, she would be more likely to survive the night than if she slept on the wet earth here. The future calls us on one painful step at a time and the first rule of life is to survive.

  She walked herself backward into the suit. Pulled off her sodden socks and put her feet into the boots, wincing as the injured foot touched the yielding inner. The material was soft against the bare soles of her feet. Legs into the shin guards, thighs into the upper legs. She rested her ass against roughly where this eight-foot-tall person’s ass would be.

  “Welcome to the survival suit,” said a smooth voice, “designed for survival in more than three thousand fully researched disaster scenarios. I am the suit. I will keep you alive.”

  In the circumstances, that was quite a promise. That was a “you” she wanted to be.

  “OK,” said Zhen.

  And very gently, the suit began to shrink.

  “Inner dimensions,” said the suit, “are being adjusted for best fit.”

  The knee joints aligned with her knees. The trunk found her waist. It felt like a well-tailored outfit. As the front closed around her, she braced for the suit to be heavy, but she felt slightly buoyed, as if she were standing in a pool of water. It was easier to move now. A gentle bubble of warm air was extruded around her body. She stopped shivering and let out an involuntary sigh.

  The faceplate visor lined itself up with her actual face. A shooting star logo—she didn’t recognize it—swept across her field of vision.

  The suit said: “You are riding in the survival suit, a fully optimized technology to allow you to thrive in this environment”—a slight pause—“an island of dense tropical jungle.”

  Another pause. Longer this time.

  “Communications systems have been unable to contact any satellites or hubs. I will try again at intervals. All the information needed to preserve your life in dense tropical jungle is preloaded into my systems. I will begin a preliminary scan of your environment.”

  On the visor screen in front of her, fine glowing green lines drew themselves around various objects: the trees, the CrashJacket remnants, the millipedes, other insects, plants. Next to the objects, labels floated. Canopy tree. Giant kapok. Strangler fig. Acanthiulus blainvillei. That last label crawled along as the millipedes moved.

  The thought floated through her mind that the suit sounded like AUGR, that it must be part of the protocol, but even thinking about this right now was too much. She heard her mother’s voice in her head again saying: Baba, not now. The girl has to rest. The girl has been through a lot. The world can wait.

  “Would you like to tell me your name?” asked the suit. Zhen hesitated. It was a principle of her life not to tell pieces of technology more about her than she had to.

  The suit said: “If you do not wish to give your name, I can address you solely as ‘you.’ Is that preferable?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Great! Nice to meet you. Your blood solutes and vital signs show that you are dehydrated and sleep-deprived. You have several cuts and abrasions and you may be in shock. My advice is that we find a safe place for you to sleep and some water and that then you need a nice long nap. Do you agree?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Great!” said the suit, and it sounded as cheerful and convincing as a slick and well-trained salesman. “We’re going to get through this together.”

  2. island time

  When Zhen woke, some time had passed. That was clear. Time had passed and there were no airplanes in the sky.

  The jungle was verdant and the inside of the survival suit was warm and stable. Breathing was happening, regular and reassuring. Every in-breath hurt, but not as much as they had done earlier. There was memory of injury. Someone had dangled from a mini-chute over a jungle. Someone had a lacerated foot. Someone had slipped and fallen.

  But time had passed since then. The body had been safe for a while. The person woke again and slept again.

  Eventually, normal time resumed.

  Zhen woke with a start, tried to curl into a fetal position, and found she couldn’t. She was in a coffin, a trap. She shouted, “Help! Help!”

  The suit said: “You are safe.”

  Zhen said: “The fuck I am. What happened? Where am I?”

  The suit said: “This is a complicated question.”

  She tried to do mindful breathing but couldn’t remember the counting numbers. Six, seven, eight? Four, two, two? No, that was football. Start with the basics. Where are we? Look around. She looked through the visor of what she remembered now was not in fact a coffin. She was facedown on a promontory overlooking a deep trench of thick green foliage. She could not judge the depth; perhaps a crack in the rock filled with lichen? She pulled herself up. Her suit’s servomotors gently stabilized her.

  She was on a precipice looking down on a bowl of forest. Must have been five miles broad.

  “Would you like some food?” said the overly helpful voice in her ear.

  Zhen said: “I’d like to get out of here.”

  The suit unhinged its front plates and Zhen padded around the jungle floor while it sat itself down behind her, an iron giant. She wiggled her toes. The jungle was filled with humming, bustling life—insects thrummed past her face, birds scattered from the tops of trees, green shoots pushed forward around great old trunks.

  “Fuck,” said Zhen.

  There were StowtBoxes scattered around the clearing. One of them contained self-heating meals and she ate a tray of pumpkin risotto. It tasted like the amber daylight dripping through the canopy. The wound on her foot was still painful, but when she examined it, it was clean and less deep than she’d remembered. As she ate, she noticed a series of long bruises on the inside of her left arm.

  The suit was sitting up in the position she’d left it. Like a friend, a companion.

  “What’s this?” Zhen said. “Looks like you gave me an injection there.”

  “Yes,” said the suit. “You were going into shock. I gave you light sedation via transdermal infusion. We agreed you needed a nice long nap.”

  “That was an… unusual interpretation of the word ‘nap.’ How long was I out for?” said Zhen.

  “Five days,” said the suit, “although you woke periodically for some nourishment.”

  Zhen didn’t remember any of that. It didn’t feel like it had been five days.

  “I don’t want you giving me sedation again, OK?”

  “OK,” said the suit. “I’ll save that to your preferences.”

  As ever, when dealing with algorithms, these responses felt insulting. Unable to measure up to the gravity of the feeling. How could it have been five days? What the hell had happened to her? And, secondarily but not unimportantly, the world?

  Unable to decide between any of these questions, Zhen settled for the most obvious and perhaps the most pressing.

  “Suit,” she said, “where am I?”

  “You are on Admiral Huntsy Island,” it said, “northeast of Papua New Guinea and part of the FutureSafe Environmental Sanctuary.”

  “The fuck I am.”

  “Yes,” said the suit, “the fuck you are indeed.”

  Admiral Huntsy Island. Named for some colonizing British guy who had done, on the value system of the time, very well in dealing with some Native people and even better in defeating an Axis power. It had been decided on balance that the island should probably keep the name and—as the Native people had been dealt with so successfully that there were none of them left at all—that the island could be declared a wildlife preserve. Lai Zhen had only heard of it because a big deal had been made a few years earlier when Fantail, Anvil, and Medlar had bought up several wildlife preserves from beleaguered and overstretched post-pandemic governments and taken on covenants to keep them entirely free of humans for at least one hundred years in exchange for the rights to monitor them with flying-ant-size drones, monetize the resulting footage of wild creatures in their natural habitats, and create virtual-reality reconstructions of the FutureSafe Environmental Sanctuaries exclusively available through their proprietary platforms. Even the airspace was closed. Which perhaps explained why there were no planes in the sky. It was extremely illegal to be here. In theory, if humans came here, they would be hunted down by drones that would warn them to leave and then, in ascending order: stun them, drag them away, and in extremis use authorized lethal force.

  This strong stuff—in a limited and faraway place—made everyone feel like they were really doing something to combat habitat destruction. Zhen even vaguely remembered seeing Lenk Sketlish filled with glossy pride at the press conference. Fantail had released some press materials that very deftly skated over what precisely Admiral Huntsy had done to Native people here and focused instead on the island’s marvelous, unchallenged, and uncomplicated emptiness.

  She sat in the half-open suit and looked at the map through the visor. The island was around forty-two miles long, and twenty-eight miles across at its widest point. There was a deep ravine along the southwestern quarter with geological layers clearly visible on the barren cliffs to the east, and a series of small hills along the spine, like the knobs of vertebrae. “Admiral Huntsy Island,” said the scrolling green text, “is the largest island in an archipelago northeast of Papua New Guinea and is part of the Bismarck Sea–designated area of natural beauty and a wildlife protection ‘FutureSafe’ zone.”

  “No but,” said Zhen, “if I were on Admiral Huntsy Island, I’d be dead. Or electrocuted. By the drones.”

  “Those measures can be rerouted by authorized personnel for certain purposes,” said the suit.

  “What purposes?” said Zhen.

  “In certain emergency situations,” said the suit.

  “What personnel?” said Zhen.

  “Ah,” said the suit, “how do you feel about a walk?”

  * * *

  Inside the suit, Zhen walked for most of the day. She looked with interest at the marked-up landscape, each item around her labeled with a green-colored name and some information about its uses. Whoever made this thing had taken Native knowledge about this place and mechanized it. They had a few stops where Zhen left the suit to stretch her legs or to take a look at something interesting, but mostly walking in the suit was more comfortable than walking without—the servomotors stabilized her on the uneven terrain and powered her huge eight-foot-person steps. Just before dusk, the suit brought her to a clearing with a well-ordered campsite. A sleeping platform made of logs lashed together with plastic twine. Fresh water in StowtTubs with spigots. Walls of StowtBoxes filled with supplies screening off an area for a shower.

  Three people sat around a neat campfire, each accompanied by a survival suit like her own, the suits splayed open so that they looked a little like chairs. A woman in her sixties with a steel-gray bob. A man in his late fifties, tanned, short and stocky with thick arms. A lean man in his early forties with long legs stretched out in front of him and messy blond hair.

  Zhen raised her visor.

  “Who the fuck is this?” said Zimri Nommik. “How the fuck is she here?”

  “I said I saw something in the sky a few nights ago,” said Ellen Bywater.

  The long, lean man stared at the scudding clouds.

  “I think Martha was fucking her. I guess everyone’s allowed a freebie,” said Lenk Sketlish.

  3. the last news there will ever be

  “You just got here?” Ellen Bywater said. “It brought you here on purpose? From the world?”

  Zhen shook her head. “The suit says I’ve been here for five days.”

  “But how—what was the transport? Aren’t the airports overrun?”

  “I was picked up by a car near Haida Gwaii and then… I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know?” Ellen was tense; she pulled up moss and leaves as she spoke, digging her ragged fingers into the earth, picking at the curls of mud around her nail beds.

  “I think the driver drugged me.”

  Zimri Nommik said at once: “Suit, was this woman drugged?”

  Zhen’s suit muttered in her ear: “Do you consent to the sharing of this personal medical data?”

  She said: “Sure, I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  The suit spoke out loud, through speakers in its neck. “Blood solute record is compatible with administration of benzodiazepines approximately twelve days before arrival on the island.”

  “AUGR roofied me?” said Zhen.

  Zimri looked at her through narrowed eyes.

  “You have AUGR.” Some calculation was occurring in his implacable brain. Zhen would need to head it off.

  “Yeah, um, Martha gave it to me, Martha Einkorn? What you said was right,” she said to Lenk. “We were fucking, she gave it to me. I know she shouldn’t have done that, I don’t even know why she did, she was cagey as shit about it.”

  But nothing could stop the progress of Zimri’s thoughts.

  “Fuck,” he said. “Shit.” He looked around at the others with a note of triumph. “This is her. This is the Name The Day shit who broke into my bunker. Yeah. I saw three partial stills. You and a big guy.”

  Crap. Of course. Of course there would have been records. Of course Zimri Nommik would have seen them.

  “Yes.” Zhen spoke slowly, thinking through how much she could say and how much she had to say. “I… my AUGR didn’t work. So we went to your bunker to turn it on manually. And… we were attacked.”

  “You trashed it,” said Zimri, “you toasted it.”

  “Well, you don’t need to worry about your bunker now, do you?” said Ellen with an air of disdain. Zhen wondered whether she was drunk. “Anyway, you have others. If you can get to them.”

  “She has AUGR. She fucked up my bunker. And AUGR drugged her? And kept her drugged for twelve days? That’s not the protocol,” Zimri Nommik said. “Being drugged is not part of the protocol.”

  “You can’t kid us, young lady,” said Ellen. “We put the protocol together, OK? We’re well aware of how this works. Something screwy is going on. How did you get it to bring you here?”

  “It drugged us,” said Lenk, “when we got to the island.”

  “But that was a very different situation,” said Zimri, “with the crash and everything.” He moved awkwardly. Something was wrong with his left leg; he’d kept the suit’s boot clamped around it even when the rest of the suit was open.

  When Lenk spoke, his manner was easy and unprovocative. Zhen got the sense he’d been dealing with these two for a while now and he was about on his last nerve. If their plane had crashed, that would make sense—anyone would be jangled after that, and these people were used to quite a different lifestyle.

  “AUGR’s protocol is to keep us all safe. We got out before the infection started to spread. So we’re here, OK, we’re safe. She”—he hooked a thumb at Zhen—“got out a little later because she had to jack her AUGR by hand. So she could have been exposed. So it drugged her, kept her somewhere safe, intravenous feeding or whatever, OK, until she’d been through the quarantine period. How long did it say the incubation was?”

  “Seventeen days,” said Ellen sullenly. “I just don’t see why if it could bring her here it couldn’t bring my kids, or Bonda, or Arthur from the management team. I mean, we’re supposed to be together for this. I guess they’re in New Zealand by now.”