Like a whirligig with the suit, he moved his body weight back and forth, pushing the tree to spring farther and farther. He reached out with hand and foot, but met empty air. Once more, once more, harder, farther. And yes! The left gauntlet grabbed the slick trunk of the next tree. He let go of the past and pulled himself into safety. Yes. The new trunk held. Yes.

  The tree he had just left sprang back, wavered in his sight, flaming and flaring, bending toward him as if trying to set him alight. It had been his shelter until a moment earlier and now it seemed an implacable enemy. The suit began to climb down, hand over hand, foot after foot.

  “Where is she?” said Lenk.

  “I can’t find her,” said his suit.

  “I’m going to kill her,” said Lenk.

  20. we intuit motives and assess character; this is our evolutionary advantage

  Beyond the mountain, in the jungle to the north, Lai Zhen was running on all fours.

  “She’s describing large figure eights on a repeating pattern,” said Lenk’s suit.

  “Why?” said Lenk.

  “I couldn’t say,” said the suit.

  “Can you make a guess?”

  “I’m not designed for that. I know about plants, birds, animals, fish, insects, diseases, food storage, construction—”

  “Stop,” said Lenk.

  “Understanding humans is a full CPU commitment even for a machine built to do it, which, again, I’m not.”

  “I get it,” said Lenk. “Fuck, can you ever stop?”

  “It’s just that my thing is keeping you alive and if you—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” said Lenk.

  Zhen had some kind of plan. Lenk didn’t know what it was, which made him nervous. Still, a pattern is predictable. And predictability is vulnerability. The situation everyone wants to be in is to know the future, and she’d given it to him.

  In the dark of the rain-soaked jungle, Lenk took up a crouching position on the figure-eight turn and waited for Zhen to lope past. Like her, he was finding it significantly easier to move on all fours—the suit lengthened its front limbs and gave him enough back support to make the motion quick and pleasurable.

  Zhen was coming. Legs pounding the earth like a dog after a fire truck. She was slowing on the turn, just as the suit said she would.

  “Say when?” he said.

  “You are too close to do this safely,” said the suit.

  “Too far away and I could miss.”

  “There’s a chance you could both end up without kneecaps,” it said.

  “Thanks, I have understood the risks,” he said.

  There would only be one chance to do this right. They waited for the sound of forelimbs hitting the wet soil, slower, slower. Then her suit was right there, racing like a hound. Lenk eased his elbow forward.

  The suit said: “Now.”

  Lenk cracked the seal on the mining charge and hurled it directly in Zhen’s path.

  There was an enormous sound.

  There was nothing.

  Then there was rain.

  Clods of earth raining down, scattered and hard. Smoke and debris. Recoil against his belly had forced him onto his back and driven the wind out of him even inside the suit. His mind replaying the last moments. Knowing that if it had done this to him, it must have destroyed her.

  “Where is the body?” he said. “I want to see the body.”

  21. lacking sharp claws or warm fur or tearing teeth or tremendous speed, what we have is brain

  Legs, arms, certain places on the torso.

  In the smoke and noise, Zhen’s suit crawl-limped on one leg and one half leg into the jungle where Zhen was waiting.

  This had always been the thing that had to be done quickly and correctly. Only some things could be predicted. The suit had to be intact when Lenk damaged it, and not intact afterward. This could not be faked. Wounds would have to be fresh. The mangled suit eased open its creaking half-torn joints. Zhen stepped inside. The visor portion was wrenched off, her face exposed. Her lower left leg was cold where the suit was gone.

  “Leg, huh?” said Zhen.

  “Would you like me to sedate you?” said the suit.

  “Fuck no,” said Zhen. “We’ve been through this. Pain relief, yes. But I need to be sharp.”

  “He will regain consciousness within three minutes,” said the suit. “It is conceivable that my structure bore the brunt of the explosion.”

  “Yeah,” said Zhen, “but the leg’s not going to be OK, is it?”

  The suit’s right arm held a jagged piece of metal. If AUGR hadn’t saved me in the mall, I would have lost more than this, thought Zhen, so suck it up, buttercup.

  “It is clean,” said the suit. “When this is over—I have applied some anesthetic—I can suture—”

  “Just do it,” said Zhen. “Make it look real.”

  The suit raised the glinting blade and brought it down in the meat of her thigh, scraping against the bone.

  Even with the anesthetic, the pain momentarily blinded her, her vision flashing black and bright, her stomach roiling. The wound sucked at the metal, trying to hold it in place as the suit pulled it up and back like a terrible, unsurvivable wound to the femoral artery. Don’t think, don’t be here, think of anything else, think of the fragments of nail varnish at the edges of your nails and how there have been parties, bodies moving through space, slow and fast, stinking of sweat and life. The pain was louder than thought. There had not been enough time for the anesthetic to take. It was serrated lines scored through the inside of her body like the tines of a fork. She was being scooped out and she gasped and vomited a little bile into her mouth and then the pain closed her mind and she was gone.

  It was day, extraordinarily.

  Zhen’s suit buzzed. Her visor was down and her earpieces in place, but the suit was communicating with her now by vibrating the bones of her skull. No one else could hear it.

  Very quietly and far away, the suit said: Play dead.

  The suit was no longer as innocent as it had been.

  The suit said: Don’t move, just don’t fucking move.

  Zhen focused on her painful shallow breaths. Tiny sips of air. Barely breathing.

  The suit said: Move less than that.

  The sun wheeled around, gaping. A hot mouth filled with spines. Lenk Sketlish was staring at her.

  The suit gushed a supply of thick blood—from a freezer StowtBox, artificial blood, emergencies only and what was this but an emergency?—across Zhen’s thigh. As if her femoral artery were severed. It must have given her something to calm her. How else was she not trembling with pain and terror?

  She kept her eyes glassy. She did not focus. Sips of air. Her head pounded.

  “Fuck,” said Lenk. “She’s fucking dead.”

  Zhen’s suit communicated to Lenk’s suit, counting down her chances of survival. Seventeen percent. Fifteen percent. Twelve percent. Zhen’s suit made itself appear to be trying to save her life. Injecting gels into the wounds. Trying to cauterize bleeding. She shifted a little and the suit made the wound in her leg pump harder, the lazy trickle turning into a momentary sharp gush like an ejaculation. Nine percent. Four percent. Two percent. Zero percent. Zero percent.

  He looked at Zhen. Though his face was hidden by his visor, she felt his eyes locking onto hers.

  “You idiot,” he said, “we could have figured this out together.”

  He toed at her body, tipping her suit onto its back. She remained very still.

  And at last Lenk Sketlish turned his broad shoulders and walked back toward his mountain, leaving Zhen behind him.

  Zhen and her suit waited until night had descended over the jungle, thick and dark and rustling and shrieking, the night as full of life as the day. In the dark, the suit cauterized her wound and fitted MembraSkin over the top. She would always have a scar. Her leg would never be quite as strong as the other. The suit led her back to the campsite, walking ahead of her like a sister, its palm against her palm.

  The suit found replacement parts for itself in one of the StowtBoxes and fitted them. It was more obviously a pleasure suit now—one of the legs was olive-skinned and human-looking. Part of the interior was lined with a suite of tactile fabrics in shimmering animal prints that didn’t look designed for survival. A few parts were missing—the left hand was replaced with a climbing grab-gauntlet. It brought itself back together and then opened itself to let her back inside. It was warm in the suit and soothing to her wound. She felt they were friends now.

  She said: “What’s going to happen?”

  The suit said: “Lenk isn’t likely to come back here for a few days. We’ll take what we need tonight and make a new camp to the south. Away from his mountain.”

  They worked until dawn, lashing supplies together on a cart, walking south. They walked until Zhen fell asleep in the motion and woke still on the move. They reached a river to the south in the late afternoon. The suit told her they had traveled more than twenty-five miles and they were in a section of around one hundred square miles where they would be unobservable from the mountain or anywhere near it. Zhen asked the suit for reruns of Poker Face and games of sudoku and Animal Crossing. She crawled inside a reinforced igloo tent and imagined she was far away. She ate self-heating rice pudding.

  She slept that night and dreamed of the time before, and of her mother. Her mother gliding through the jungle on a golden cloud, looking at all that had gone on here and laughing loudly as children do when adults make fools of themselves. Of course, thought Zhen when she woke, of course.

  “Did you offer this option to the others?” said Zhen. “What we just did. Pretending to be dead?”

  Silence.

  “Don’t fucking lie to me. Did you offer the others to fake their own deaths?”

  “Yes,” said the suit.

  “Did they do it?”

  “I don’t think I should tell you that.”

  Zhen laughed then. Laughed thinking that what she’d just done to Lenk might have happened several times now. Ellen allowing the suit to pretend to be smashed to smithereens and then pulling herself out of the rock in the dark, heading off to the north or the west or the east of the island. Zimri using a nanobot swarm to fake his disappearance just as Ellen had suggested. The four of them in their total and glorious isolation on this rich, well-provisioned, almost luxurious island, unable to trust one another enough to even acknowledge that they were still alive.

  Something flitted through Zhen’s mind that she’d read while browsing NTD years ago. People after the destruction of civilization taking refuge in a cave. Telling themselves there was no one else left alive in the cities. So unable to trust that this isolation seemed the safest thing for them.

  The suit said: “You might need to be here for a long time.”

  “All alone?”

  “Sort of alone. I’ll be here.”

  “I was never meant to come here,” said Zhen.

  “But you could never have stayed away, once you knew,” said the suit.

  22. nothing is ever really over

  On the top floor of a tall glass tower with the word “Fantail” and its stylized bird symbol etched down the side of the windows so as to catch the light at dawn, there was a pristine office of steel and silicone. The long working table was made of blue sheared glass, artfully cracked and held in place by a thin polymer layer. There were views on three sides, for the whole room was a cantilevered box, swung out from the Fantail building over the city of San Francisco and held in place as if it were floating in midair. It was meant to suggest the extended branch of a redwood, of particular symbolic significance to this organization and its founder. The office was carpeted with a white rug so thick and deep that when Martha Einkorn stepped onto it in her bare feet, it was as if she could feel the forest moving beneath her.

  Martha Einkorn arrived at this office every morning at dawn, or just after it. She always arrived between 5 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. That was her time for solitary morning reflection. It had been vital to the company in that exceptionally difficult and turbulent time when Martha Einkorn emerged as its unlikely savior. She worked tirelessly not just to ensure shareholder value and consistent growth in this most challenging of markets but also to enact value-driven change on a corporate, national, and global scale. This she did, she said in numerous interviews, to preserve the legacy of Lenk. To keep alive the ideals and vision of the man she knew perhaps better than any other. To grow from the seeds he planted a yet mightier tree. Lenk Sketlish, founder and CEO of Fantail, had disappeared—of course—in the Tech Plane Tragedy a little more than three years earlier.

  The time between 5 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. was precious to her, she said in the interviews. That was when she felt Lenk’s spirit so close she could almost hear his voice. She could never be interrupted at this time. She spent it in silent thought, in meditation, in almost physical communion with all that Lenk had taught her. It was her time to learn what Lenk would like her to do with his company and to respond to it.

  At 5:30 a.m. on this day, as on every other, she was sitting at the shattered-glass worktable in the cantilevered box overlooking the city. She was contemplating the day ahead. She had one of Lenk’s old laptops nearby. A constant reminder, she said, of his presence. As if he were always with her.

  On this day as on every other, at 5:30 a.m. precisely, a small alarm began to sound on Lenk’s laptop. It would sound on every other laptop he’d ever owned if Martha Einkorn had not meticulously deleted this particular piece of software from all of Lenk’s other electronic devices, including those that had been already set aside for the Lenk Sketlish Museum of Creativity, for which ground was already being broken on an island in the bay.

  If Martha Einkorn had not used Lenk’s passwords to which only she had access to remove this piece of software, the alarm would sound on every laptop and FantailTablet and smartphone and FantailWatch he’d owned. But if the alarm were removed from every device, it could not be acknowledged, and it if were not acknowledged and dismissed within fifteen minutes, it would begin a chain reaction of further warnings, requests for confirmation by further third parties, and if those could not give a satisfactory report, automatic deployment of drones and notifications to search-and-rescue authorities.

  It was a very serious matter to authorize the use of a tracking chip embedded in a person’s body. Lenk Sketlish set up his systems with a great deal of care and thought. He didn’t want just anyone to be able to track him in any circumstances. He set up a “dead man’s switch.” If he hadn’t logged in to any of his usual devices after twenty-four hours, an alarm would sound. If he himself didn’t turn it off, it would be authorized to release the details of his tracking chip to the relevant authorities.

  In the cantilevered office overlooking the city, Martha Einkorn dialed a certain number into the safe built into the steel floor of the room. She pulled out the laptop, which was giving off a soft metallic chime. She opened it, plugged it in. Looked at the screen.

  “Confirm,” said the screen. “Lenk Sketlish personal alarm has been activated. Confirm that you are safe, Lenk.”

  She tapped in Lenk’s password.

  She listened to the soft chime as if it were Lenk’s own nagging voice.

  On this day, as on every other, Martha Einkorn turned the alarm off.

  PART 6 how to know for sure

  extract from Name The Day survivalist forum

  sub-board: ntd/foxandrabbit

  ›› OneCorn is at Prepped To The Max status.

  There is a prelude to the story of Lot and Sodom.

  Before he settled in Sodom, Lot traveled with his uncle Abraham and they were good, dear friends. On their travels, Abraham and Lot found rich grazing lands for their flocks, forests of mighty trees, and places where they felt the sacred presence of God in the curve of the land. Over time, Abraham and Lot became wealthy—their sheep had lambs, as sheep do. They looked after them well. They traded the wool. They ended up with silver and gold.

  But they argued. Genesis doesn’t say about what. So let’s just say that part isn’t important—when people live and work together they argue about some bullshit. Same as it ever was.

  Let’s say Abraham said to Lot: “I can’t actually stand you anymore and you can’t stand the sight of me. So. Let’s split up the land between us. In front of us are, on the one side, the plains of Tzoar and on the other side the plains of Canaan. If you go left, I’ll go right. If you go right, I’ll go left. I just never want you saying this wasn’t fair.”

  The plains of the land of Tzoar were fertile and the plains of Canaan dry. So Lot felt that was a pretty easy decision.

  They could have said: Let’s share all these lands in common. That way if some lands have a drought or are hit by a huge ball of flame from heaven or whatever, neither of us will lose everything. But Lot was a fearful man and he wanted something to hold, to feel certain about.

  Listen: nothing in the world is truly owned. There is no tree or patch of soil or animal or mountain or river that grows a label naming its owner on its bark or on its flesh or through the strata of its rocks. Once upon a time, “owning” meant “having a special duty to care” for something, not that you alone could have it or use it. “Owning” is invented, it is a symbolic behavior. And by inventing owning, we invented Rabbit. That’s how Rabbit came into the world. When we say to each other: Just stay away from me, take your territory and stay there so I never have to see your stupid fucking face again.

  ›› HatOnBack is at One Tin O’Beans status.

  What in the holy hell is this? I thought this was about survival?

  Lot went to live in the plains near Sodom and Abraham went to the great trees of Mamre. Lot felt great about his choice because he owned a fertile land. The world was still large enough, just about, to get lost in. And in fact, Lot’s flocks had feasted and he had prospered.

  ›› FoxInTheHenHouse is at GoBagPrepped status.