The algae was his plan. In extremis, in the event of multiple catastrophic events, the green-brown algae on this island would sustain humans indefinitely. If sheep survived, they could eat the algae and remain healthy. It was a complete protein and fat source with no missing essential nutrients. They could harvest, dry, and store it. They could plant more on the mainland if they got there. He had eaten it himself, gone for a whole month without any other food just to see how it went.

  “Never felt better,” he said, “never felt clearer in my mind. If everything else fails, this will work.”

  Zhen found a strange, impressed half smile creeping across her face. This was his real passion, and he was significantly better at this than anyone she’d ever spoken to before, and she knew people who were passionate about surviving the apocalypse.

  To the northeast there were reedbeds for cloth and paper, baskets and boats. To the south, shears and presses to cut apart scrap metal that washed ashore and make new tools. In the north, the rock wall was pierced like lace, the holes filled with pale, thin, translucent stones from the beach. If there was no nuclear winter or chemical poisoning, the people could live here rather than deep underground. There were dormitories, a large communal kitchen, and a wood-furnished communal eating hall like a monastery. Inside, the light was milky and bright like a cold winter morning.

  “Different things will become important,” Lenk told her. “Look at how quickly it’s all happened already. We can’t look at our past for help. We have to look at the lives of people who actually survived three hundred dark years and what they thought were the best and most luxurious ways of life—monks in their monasteries, colleges in ancient universities, kings with their household. Privacy is a modern invention. We won’t want it so much now.”

  He was convincing without apparently attempting to convince her of anything. It was like his showing her his cock, but much more intense. Like there was some organ Zhen didn’t even know anyone could have, and Lenk had opened his clothes up and there it was. Oh, she thought, suddenly figuring out what she’d known about these suits and almost telling Lenk but looking at his face it wasn’t the moment. It was like he was showing her his dreams. Because he had enough money to turn the dreams inside his head into something other people could walk around and live in.

  There was, to Zhen’s surprise, a chapel. An ecumenical ribbed-and-vaulted stone structure to the east of the great house, built to face the rising sun at dawn. There were no overt religious symbols. Lenk called it “the still stone place.”

  “What the fuck,” said Zhen.

  Lenk shrugged.

  “When the world goes away, people need it.” He paused, thought about it. “Or if they tear it down and make something different, maybe that’d be even better.”

  It occurred to Zhen then that Lenk knew, instinctively, what would make people happy. All the visionaries who had imagined these new technologies into being had that. They had something in their minds that let them abstract away from the people who were actually in front of them to a kind of general human. They knew how to make that general human happy, and that was why they were so good at withholding it or doling it out in tiny perfect slices. If you know how to make people that happy, you know how to make them miserable as shit. Whatever this island world could be, take it away. If they want nature, make them look at screens. If they like quiet, make the world noisy. If they want community, split them up. If they want time to think, interrupt them all the fucking time. If they want real human companionship, tempt them with artificial matchbox-and-bead FantailPals.

  The island, Zhen thought, is Lenk’s attempt at penance.

  He thought he could save a few people from all the shit he’d done.

  “So, um,” said Zhen as they walked back toward the crack in the mountain together, “this is a confession, right? You did this. You brought down the plane. You came here on purpose.”

  Lenk’s suit shook its head.

  “It’s a coincidence,” said Lenk. “It’s a fucking coincidence, or—” His head wobbled on his neck, rattling a thought loose. “Look,” he said, “the last time I spoke to Martha she said, ‘Thanks for having me on the team.’ ”

  “I don’t think that means anything.”

  “Maybe it does. Maybe it’s a bit like saying, ‘We’re on a team together, just trust me.’ ”

  “That’s a lot to read into it.”

  “Martha’s good at that. She says that, and then we arrive here. And then you arrive here. I keep thinking… I keep thinking maybe she did this. You know? There’ll never be an electronic trail; it happened as safely as it could without also being detectable in any way, forever, no matter how hard anyone looks. Martha knew this island was here, she knew we’d prepared it.”

  “You think she… brought down your plane?”

  “I mean. It came down with a lot of warning, like we were supposed to survive it. She could have made it look like we were attacked but actually it was… I don’t know… pre-drawn lines of explosive in the fuselage. We came down with CrashJackets and StowtBoxes full of supplies and survival suits. Like this plan was part of Martha’s secret protocol if the world ended. And if that’s true, it means that when things are easier outside, people will be coming here. I’m the first.”

  “Do you think the others know,” asked Zhen, “that it’s your island? Because that seems like it could… cause some problems.”

  “Someone knows,” said Lenk. “I’ll show you.”

  In a room toward the east of the cave complex, lined with shelves, twenty long-range communicators were smashed. Each one had been neatly and precisely destroyed with what looked like a single hammer blow to the center of the equipment. In three storage bins, the spare boards and chips were also very carefully and entirely destroyed. The array of aerials—each was snapped in half.

  “Nothing else?” asked Zhen. “Whoever did this only destroyed these?”

  “Nothing else,” said Lenk. “So it’s Zimri or it’s Ellen. One of them has figured it out.”

  “Couldn’t it have happened before you got here? Long before? I mean, who knows how long this has been waiting here?”

  “Don’t be so naive,” said Lenk.

  “Look,” said Zhen. They had reached the curtain of creeper half concealing the entrance to the mountain, the place where the water trickled constantly down the cliff face. “When we get out, there’s something I need to show you about these suits.”

  She stepped into the sunlight, her suit’s visor momentarily darkened by the brightness. There was a clang that reverberated through her skull and a bright shower of pain cascading down her neck. She turned, in agony. It was Ellen Bywater, readying her metal fist for another punch.

  13. impact assessments

  It was not precisely true that Ellen Bywater still saw the ghost of her late husband, Will. But it wasn’t not true either. The most persistent hauntings are the ghosts of lost futures. He was strong and healthy; his father had lived to ninety-two. Ellen and Will Bywater had had a famously happy marriage, and he had died suddenly at sixty-four. Nothing is promised, people say. And yet this had not been Ellen Bywater’s experience of life. Everything had been promised.

  For the past fifty years for Ellen Bywater, there had been hot baths and cold juice; there had been unseen hands preparing pancakes for breakfast and cleaning the stove when she might do a little cooking herself. She had a happy marriage; she had raised good children who took their places as trustees of the Bywater Foundation, distributing significant monies to worthy causes before a very simple lunch of poached salmon and watercress on the terrace. The children would beget further clean-limbed and healthy offspring and the line of Bywater would continue. Even Badger would eventually find their way. These were the promises made by hard work, by her long years at Medlar, by her commitment to good corporate culture, by the care she had taken over the ousting of Albert Dabrowski.

  She thought of Albert. The look on the man’s face when he realized the board was proposing to appoint her as CEO in his place. He’d shouted and railed. Undignified. She understood that this was a shock, but couldn’t he hold it together—he was, after all, one of the fathers of the modern world in so many ways; no one could or would take that away from him. The night it was done, she’d fallen into Will’s arms and cried for him. Whenever she was asked about Albert Dabrowski, she’d spoken warmly about him. She could only hope to follow the design principles he had laid down; he was a visionary, and along with the rest of the world, she was waiting to see what he’d invent next.

  And yet she knew that this was not entirely true. She had participated in the plan to oust him with reticence, not wanting to show how much she wanted it, knowing that as a woman in her position, wanting it was the last thing anyone needed to see from her.

  “They don’t know you like I know you,” said Will, burying his face in her lap. They had had a famously happy marriage and what that means is: you’re still fucking in your sixties.

  But a horror had sunk into her bones at quite how easy—and even enjoyable—it had been to take it from him. She had made Albert Dabrowski much richer than he could ever have been on his own. But he hadn’t known. It was a future he hadn’t seen coming; he came into that very last meeting still operating on the old parameters, as if the discarded future were still operational, as if it hadn’t been shunted into a siding by night without his knowledge or consent.

  She knew what it was like to do it, and she could see what it would feel like to have it happen to you.

  “What it feels like,” she’d said to Will, quietly, the previous night while the others were sleeping, “is nothing. It feels like things are a bit easier than usual. It feels like you’re all getting on fine.”

  Will lolled by the fire, his long torso, his full head of thick gray hair. He said: There’s a problem with that reasoning, Nelly.

  “Doesn’t this all feel a little easy to you?” said Ellen.

  It doesn’t feel any way to me, said Will, I’m dead.

  “What’s it like to be dead?” she said.

  Nothing much, said Will. It’s just that your tax plans are voided and your will is executed and no one’s interested in what you have to say.

  “Except me,” she said, and she felt grateful and a little smug that the person she liked best in the world was already definitely dead instead of being only probably dead like everyone else’s loved ones.

  “You know my secret,” said Ellen.

  I do now, said Will.

  “But you can’t tell anyone,” she said.

  Her secret was the widow’s secret. That as she’d gotten onto the plane from the Action Now! conference, she had been a little glad. If Will wasn’t in the world any longer, there was no real point in continuing with the project of the human race. She felt the satisfaction of having had a memo taken seriously. I told you we should junk it all.

  * * *

  Ellen had followed Zhen’s tracks out of the camp. It wasn’t difficult. Zhen hadn’t taken much trouble to conceal where she was going; the earth was soft and rich, the imprints of the suit’s boots very distinctive.

  Will said: What is it you’re expecting to find?

  Ellen said: “I know a trick question when I hear one.”

  Will said: Because we tend to find whatever we’re looking for.

  “I’m not expecting anything.”

  You can’t lie to me anymore now I’m dead. That’s one of the perks.

  On the upward path, Ellen was panting, even with the aid of the suit’s servomotors. She was sweating. Maybe she was getting sick. Maybe this was it. Maybe she’d already been infected with the Pigeon Flu that had killed them all.

  “Look,” she said to Will, “sometimes in business you just have to use your instincts.”

  Will said: Well, OK, but what if your instincts are faulty? Remember the lectures at INSEAD: cognitive errors, systemic bias, your fault detector can’t tell you whether it’s faulty. If you walk along staring at the cracks in the pavement, you’re going to fall.

  “Look,” she said. Will was standing on the path next to her, incongruous in slacks and the slouchy sweater he’d often worn in the place on Cape Cod. This was the reasonable Will, the man who made up for her. They’d had a famously happy marriage and what that means is: they managed to steer each other around their potholes. “Do you have an alternate narrative for me? I’m here. I’m open to listening.”

  We can’t know what we don’t know, said Will, a thing he had often said in life.

  “So I’m going to find out,” she said, and continued the ascent of the steep path.

  There is a trajectory to human affairs. At a certain point, things become inevitable. The tracks in the soft mud led into the crack in the rock. Inside the cave, there was a proprietary Fantail port set into the stone, white and shining. Ellen looked at it for a long time.

  She said: “See? See?”

  Will said: I have to say, darling, that this doesn’t look good for Lenk Sketlish.

  “Well, do you have a hypothesis for me that isn’t that he deliberately trapped us on this island that is clearly somehow built for him and that he probably killed Zimri Nommik?”

  There are always more things we don’t know, said Will.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, “name ten. Give me other explanations for this.”

  But because Will wasn’t really real, not outside her own mind, he couldn’t.

  Sometimes everything you fear becomes true. Sometimes you really are alone, in a cave, with the world gone, realizing that if you’re going to get what you want, you’re going to have to take it. Sometimes there’s nothing for it but the unspeakable.

  Ellen crouched at the entrance to the cave. She tasted stone and fire. She’d lost her trust in the ability of the world to remain upright; the very air itself had become her enemy, the world had become a rain of ash.

  In the corner of her eye, Will was naked—as lean as a fox, as hungry as the devil. He had been like this sometimes at home, wild nights that ended with sex and then forgiveness and promises. She remembered meeting him and knowing that he would give her perfect children and when she truly wanted something, he would never stop her. Their marriage had been famously happy, and what that meant was that they had learned to work with what they had.

  14. what are you looking at

  Ellen cracked the faceplate of Zhen’s visor with a single blow. Zhen reeled backward, her head hitting the cliff face, the servomotors struggling to keep her upright and Ellen striking again, again, again. Inside the suit, Zhen’s vision was fractured—a rainbow line across the screen, the colors oscillating red and blue and green and silver.

  “Stop,” Zhen was saying over and over again. “Stop—whatever you think is happening, that’s not what’s happening. Look,” said Zhen, “LOOK.” She peeled open the faceplate of her suit. The visor, cracked, screeched as it retracted. But seeing her real face, Ellen paused. A person inside the oyster shell, just a human with squashy human flesh.

  “Something really, really weird is going on,” said Zhen, “and I don’t understand it but look—these suits. Lenk thinks Fantail made them and you think Fantail made them and maybe they did, but LOOK.”

  She stepped out of the suit. And then she was just a person in stained sweatpants and an old ringer T-shirt. She put one palm against the interior of the suit and tugged at the soft fabric lining.

  “If there’s a weapon in there, I’m going to kill you,” said Ellen.

  “No,” said Zhen, and she was almost laughing and almost crying, “it’s not a weapon. I know these things are sophisticated or whatever, with the bits inside that bulge out and coalesce, and I thought—I’ve seen this before, I know I’ve seen it before. I just couldn’t remember where.”

  She peeled back the soft fabric at the crotch. There were concentric circles outlined in the plastic.

  “These haven’t been specially made,” she said, “they’re repurposed. Cleverly repurposed, fine. But I’ve seen them before. They were sex suits. For long-distance virtual sex or if your avatars in the metaverse want to bone or whatever.”

  They could all see it then. The bulging pods and soft squishy parts. The interface areas where a device could be slotted into place. The concentric circles depending on whether you wanted a larger… girth.

  “What the fuck,” said Lenk.

  Ellen looked to her right, as if someone was there. Zhen thought: I don’t know what the right thing to do is. But I know that if Ellen Bywater kills me, then I don’t get to do anything else. Whatever gets you to the next part.

  “Someone repurposed these things,” said Zhen. “Like, I’m serious, you guys have rivals, don’t you? There’s not just the three of you in the whole world. Maybe someone else did all this. I don’t know who, but this isn’t tech made for survival. This is made to be controlled remotely. You know? Maybe someone’s out there. Telling the suits what to say.”

  There had been many technologies like this. Supposed machine-recognition that actually turned out to be tens of thousands of people in India or Venezuela or Ghana, going through photos or translating documents or transcribing voice mails or reviewing automatic writing outputs. Because tens of thousands of humans can still do a lot of stuff better—and, crucially, cheaper—than machines. And because customers felt better if they believed their voice messages were being transcribed by a computer than by a person. Marius would have said: We made ourselves a mechanical god so we could worship it.

  “Who?” said Ellen. “Is it Nommik?”

  “I mean, I think we just need to all sit down and chill out,” said Zhen, “and figure out what we know. Pool our information.”