“But my mom is literally never in danger?” said Badger. “I mean, that’s her whole thing.”

  “It’ll be Lenk,” said Martha. “He had himself kidnapped by a gang of eight bikers once just to see how he’d cope. Gave them a six-month window to do it anytime he was alone.”

  “Fuck. What happened?”

  Martha shook her head. “He used the safe word two hours in. To get to a conference call on time.”

  Selah laughed her throaty laugh. “What a dick.”

  So this was the plan. They’d give them AUGR; they’d all be convinced by Lenk managing to escape some fake kidnapping. And because the first part had worked, they’d believe the second part would work too.

  But as it turned out, they hadn’t needed a fake kidnapping when they had a real assassin.

  Martha Einkorn had given AUGR to her lover, and then a person motivated by internet conspiracy theories had followed Lai Zhen into a crowded mall in Singapore and opened fire. AUGR had gotten Lai Zhen out, had kept her safe. And when Lenk Sketlish, Ellen Bywater, and Zimri Nommik had reviewed the photographs and video files and seen what AUGR had done, they believed in AUGR. Not just with their money, which was relatively easy to extract from them, but with that rarest of all commodities: their trust.

  The money had never been the point. Finding Si Packship, polishing his presentation, securing the investment, none of this had been what Martha and Badger, Selah and Albert needed for their plan. It was just window dressing, all there to make the thing look convincing. What they needed was to know that Ellen, Lenk, and Zimri would actually get on the plane when the AUGR alert tripped. And after the billionaires looked at the footage from the Seasons Time Mall, they saw what AUGR could do and what it could save them from. They trusted AUGR. Perhaps more than they trusted any living person. So everything was ready.

  * * *

  And then all that had been needed was The Future. That was what they called it between themselves—The Future—although it wasn’t really a “future” per se and it was composed of more than seventeen hundred individual bets and short stock positions. It was a bet like a prophecy, based on knowing precisely what was going to happen. And it had to look as though it hadn’t come from them.

  Placing the Future had taken some time and trouble; Selah and Albert had set it up through a series of 127 different holding and shell companies, investing their considerable fortunes in hedge funds and venture capital associations, buying up certain stocks and—most importantly—shorting certain other stocks. The Future they created would do extremely well if, within a certain brief window, the stock of Fantail, Medlar, and Anvil fell dramatically and suddenly.

  The only way to really control the future is if you’re the one making it happen. As the terrible news came through of a disappeared plane, in every stock market on the planet certain beads ran through certain matchboxes and the messages they represented moved around certain amounts of stock and money. All anyone could say afterward was that some people had become very rich that day but it was never entirely clear who.

  2. we will never know the whole story

  “The world now is different from the way it was just three years ago,” said the journalist. “How much of that do you think is down to you?”

  Martha was appearing via glittering holographic videolink at the Seasons Time Mall in Singapore. The mall had turned its concrete-and-steel roof into a dedicated green space for nesting birds and other wildlife. Many cities had embraced these projects now, especially with the Fantail funding available. It wasn’t one of the important infrastructure projects—the thing that really moved the needle for wildlife and habitat extension was the huge and growing network of FutureSafe zones. But it sent a message: the largest mall in the world was now turning its real estate into the largest rooftop wildlife sanctuary in the world. Each of these things added up, each of them changed the public mood a little, each of them made it clearer what cities always ought to have been.

  “I think we can’t put any of that down to me,” said Martha. “Really, Fantail has been led by the public mood. I think sometimes when terrible things happen, we’re driven to make them mean something. I’ve been proud to be part of that process.”

  Things had gotten better. After the plane had vanished, things had improved, at first slowly in fragments and then rapidly and in unison. There had been a realignment of priorities at Fantail, at Medlar, and at Anvil. And subsequent to that, there had been a realignment of priorities in the world. There was a growing interest—even a relish—for doing dramatic and fast things to solve the world environmental crises. There was support for the expansion of the FutureSafe zones to join up large tracts of land and for people to live in those zones—if they lived there at all—by putting the animals and the balance of the natural world first. If you want to live in a city, people said, enjoy the city. But cities are not wild. The wild needs our respect. There was a growing belief that perhaps you owned things by having a responsibility to them as well as having access to them. There was a general move away from polarizing debates, toward the sense that everyone would have to learn to make a little room for one another. It had happened strangely fast, given everything. As if that plane going down had ended a certain line of logic and people had gone suddenly sane.

  Zimri Nommik’s widow, Selah Nommik, had taken charge of the company immediately—she and Zimri together owned more than 80 percent of it anyway. And Anvil’s stock was in free fall after the three billionaires vanished. She’d stabilized day-to-day decision-making, and six months after the three of them had disappeared without trace, when the FBI had concluded their investigations with the presumption that the plane had sunk to the bottom of the ocean, Selah Nommik had begun proceedings to have Zimri declared legally dead. For the good of the company, for the good of the world economy, it had been agreed within the year. They had flown on a private plane on a registered flight plan that it appeared they hadn’t followed. There had been thorough searches across wide areas: a radius of hundreds of miles from their last known position. No wreckage had been found; no signs of life could be discovered. If those three people were still alive, one of them would have found a way to let someone know. They were dead.

  Selah Nommik was not Zimri. Unlike him, she had been uninterested in fighting the various legal battles around the world to stop competition and monopoly authorities from doing what the law told them. She agreed to break Anvil up into eighteen separate constituent parts—some of them directly competing with one another and some allowing space for other competitors into the market. She made a very beautiful statement to the media saying that what she had learned above all from the Tech Plane Tragedy was that the world couldn’t afford to have all its eggs in one basket, ever. She broke the company up, and then started to give it away. She made vast cash donations to good causes large and small—but she also gave parts of the company itself away wholesale. The web services arm was turned over to a charitable foundation, all of whose profits would go to preserving wild places around the world. The food-and-grocery-delivery business became a nonprofit, taking money from wealthy people buying artisanal yogurt and plowing it into at-cost, healthy, entirely plant-composed meals around the world. She bought land and preserved it as larger and larger wildlife sanctuaries. With the approval of the governments of Nepal, Bhutan, Thailand, and Indonesia, she installed Anvil’s drones to protect the last wild tigers in the vast areas of wild land she’d bought up. The drones tased without mercy and dragged the poachers out by their feet. The population of wild tigers began to increase. With the new technologies it started to seem less and less important that humans should be able to tramp these FutureSafe zones with their own feet. Leave the tiger places for the tigers.

  Fantail had cycled rapidly through three interim CEOs, each ably assisted by Martha Einkorn, Lenk Sketlish’s right-hand woman, who had shot to prominence after the disappearance for her sheer levelheadedness. And for the surprisingly large number of shares Lenk had left her—larger than the proportion he’d left to his children—and for the control he’d given her of his children’s trust until the children were thirty-five years old. His ex-wives got nothing. Martha Einkorn, evidently, had been the person he trusted. And after trying out their COO, their CFO, and then a former CFO of Anvil who lasted less than a month, the board decided to trust Martha too.

  She had followed Selah Nommik’s lead in directing Lenk’s legacy toward global good. She spoke about Badger Bywater’s idea of “enclosures,” that this money had been made from public property and ought to go to the benefit of future generations.

  Fantail was not a wholly controlled company like Anvil. But at the same time, Anvil’s pivot had changed the atmosphere around giant technological megacorporations. Competition authorities were emboldened; governments had seen the tax and economic benefits of the breakup. The public mood had changed once they saw that turning Anvil into eighteen different companies hadn’t meant that they weren’t able to get their laundry detergent delivered. The voters, slowly but surely around the world, were starting to vote for more radical policies on environmental protection. Even an analysis of comments on various social media networks showed that there had been a subtle but almost instant alteration in tone after the Tech Plane vanished. No one could say how it had happened, precisely. There was just a change in the wind.

  Fantail managed to avoid the major breakup by spinning off its own subsidiaries and by working with local communities. There was the LenkRacer—he’d always been interested in cars, in new technology, and this fast electric self-driving car was a beautiful homage to his legacy. Fantail worked with governments across the world on RacerMonth—a monthlong shutdown of the streets of cities with a huge work-crew installing the infrastructure for the new electric cars. They sold it as a lockdown, but with a wonderful goal in sight. Car owners were offered a trade: turn in your old gas or diesel car in exchange for lifetime access to the LenkRacer system via your choice of app.

  You locked down for between a week and a month at home, and when you came out the streets were quiet, the air was clean, the children were safe to play. With the car-sharing system, only one-quarter the number of vehicles were needed. The streets weren’t clogged. There was room for bicycles and tricycles to pedal through the quiet roads. Working town by town, city district by district, and state by state, they converted most of the world within nineteen months. Every year, 1.3 million people didn’t die in road traffic accidents. Every year, 7 million people didn’t die from air pollution. Once it was over, it was hard to believe we’d ever been willing to sacrifice that many people to the gas engine.

  Medlar had followed more slowly. Its board had replaced Ellen Bywater with a male CEO who was a lot like Ellen Bywater and he had—as a sop to the tender sensibilities shown by Anvil and Fantail—given a large amount of money to the Bywater Foundation for the Arts. They’d invested in Indigenous art and a concert series broadcast online. But as time had gone on, Ellen’s child Badger Bywater had become a leader among the shareholders, encouraging the customers and investors in Medlar to demand the company do something more impressive. Supported by three obscure investment funds that now owned around 17 percent of Medlar, the board was pressured to lead the world in repairable, recyclable technology. Albert Dabrowski gladly took charge of the project, which everyone felt was a very nice gesture of unity.

  It had gone like this, in small but incremental steps. The great wealth of the world’s technology companies had changed tack—instead of hurtling unthinkingly toward ever more profit, they decided to think primarily about the kind of world they would leave behind. Other companies followed their lead. The deaths of Ellen Bywater, Lenk Sketlish, and Zimri Nommik came to stand for a growth of corporate responsibility. The white rhino and the elephant and the snow leopard were saved. The rain forests advanced across the barren lands by two thousand meters a year in each direction. Grabbing the dry soil and turning it rich and dark, sending up the great trees into the canopy, sucking the carbon from the atmosphere and holding it underground. A spongy algae developed by Lenk Sketlish in a side project was growing in great plastic-eating masses, leaching the poisons out of the waters and returning the nutrients to the system. The coral was living again, the new growth encircling the dead, bleached bones of the old. Things weren’t perfect but there was, fundamentally, a little less despair and a little more hope.

  “No,” said Martha Einkorn, “I can’t take responsibility for this. We all did this, all of us together.”

  The journalist—a young Botswanan woman—smiled warmly.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what do you think about the conspiracy theories online? Do you follow any of that?”

  “Conspiracy theories?” said Martha.

  “You know. There’s an UrbanDox theory that says that a group of powerful ‘cultural Marxists’ got together to somehow… deliberately disappear the Tech Plane?”

  Martha shook her head and kept smiling. “There will always be people who can’t accept the truth,” she said. “Accidents just happen. When people have done as much as Zimri, Ellen, or Lenk, there can be an idea that they are or should be immortal. But none of us is immortal. No one could have made them get into that plane against their will. There was some accident. We will never know the whole story. But I think that Lenk would be proud of what we’ve accomplished in his name and his memory.”

  This was what Martha had learned long ago. That for a person to disappear can catalyze something. Even one person’s vanishing can be enough to call an entire project into question. It just has to be the right person at the right moment. And the eventual effect of a destructive force is measured by what, precisely, it destroys.

  “What do you think he would say if he were here today?”

  “You know,” said Martha, “I grew up in a very religious way. I used to not like to talk about that, but it’s part of my story as much as anything else. My father was a deeply religious man. He used to say that none of us is ever truly gone. The earth doesn’t cease to have a use for our flesh and bones. Our stories and what was good in our character are taken up by others. So I don’t believe he’s really gone. As to what Lenk would say? He’d say what he always said: ‘What can we do next, Martha? What’s on the way?’ ”

  There was a gentle laugh at this. Martha rode the moment to announce the acquisition of seven new FutureSafe zones in Asia, each of which was more than three hundred square miles. The applause clattered like raindrops.

  The interview over, Martha took off her headset and stretched. Outside the window in the crisp of the morning, a flock of black-headed geese flew around the glass block in V formation, honking against the day. They circled three times, their wings like arrows pointing the way toward the future. On the far shore of the lake the maple trees were giving up their red leaves, as if the color in them was their life, bursting outward so exuberantly that they popped. In the lake swam the golden and the dark fish, curled like question marks, venturing and snapping in the light and in the shadow. Outside the window, the world was in motion. Inside the room the air was as still as the dawn and as swollen with possibility.

  What would Lenk think? He had thought he was so clever, Lenk, and he had figured out so much. Of course, yes, she had faked the inert submunition dispenser to take down his plane. Of course this had been planned in advance, and obviously it had been she who’d planned it. Of course it hadn’t been a coincidence that they landed on Admiral Huntsy, an uninhabited island equipped for survival. He’d just never stepped back far enough to ask the really big question: Had the apocalypse ever even happened?

  3. a mechanical centaur

  Martha had learned so much from Enoch, and one of the most important lessons was: don’t look back, look forward. And yet. Surely it was safe now.

  The gnat drone cameras on Admiral Huntsy Island circled the jungle in clusters, in prearranged patterns hour by hour, swooping and swirling, photographing and recording. They filmed the undersides of each leaf, the movement of the insects on the mottled bark, the texture of the crumbling soil underfoot. Through the proprietary Fantail platform and a virtual-reality headset, Fantail users could explore this rich jungle environment for hours. Except for certain areas where it would be too sensitive to send the drones due to the breeding and nesting patterns of some rare species of bird and the delicate ecosystem of plants and microscopic life.

  Fantail provided a new version of the island to explore once a week—there was more to observe there than a single user could take in, even if they spent all their days on the island, which some did. Fantail users watched the seasons pass in this gloriously rich environment. They had no way to access the hidden parts of the map, and no complaints that the island was only updated weekly.

  Martha stepped through the gaps in space and time, unlocking the portions of the map that Selah Nommik had carefully partitioned off years earlier. She had never done this before. There had been too much to do, and she had wondered whether seeing Lenk would trigger something in her—pity, compassion, guilt—that would prove too painful to manage. In the quiet of her home, now, late at night, Martha Einkorn inputted the special codes, showed her face and her fingerprints to her device, and walked into the parts of the jungle that no Fantail user would ever be able to see. The places where Lenk Sketlish lived.

  In the world of illusions, Martha walked the jungle.

  Once upon a time, long ago, another Martha had walked a forest like this one. Her father had left her in the forest and she had killed a bear to survive. She had understood then that nature will sometimes throw up a totally destructive force: a bear that might kill you and yet receive no nourishment. Lenk and the others could have been left to gnaw on the world until it was blackened and splintered and they themselves would not have had a drop of nutrition or joy from the process. The bear has to be taken out in one blow and left in the woods.