“Neither of those seem like great options.”

  “I don’t know. You’re a survivalist. You could help save the world? And the weather on that island is incredible.”

  Zhen thought about what it was she’d wanted out of her whole entire life and—if that was all over now—what she could possibly do that was worth a damn.

  “Oh,” said Albert, “I should mention, we will really have to drug you. Obviously. Because they’ll all have equipment that can measure your blood solutes, it’ll all have to be incredibly real. If I talk to you through the suits, it’ll have to be as the suit, OK?”

  “Um.”

  “Honestly, it is up to you. We can’t let you go right now, but we will make sure nothing bad happens to you. And I think it’s definitely going to be worth it. In terms of the world.”

  “Can I call Marius? Otherwise he’s just going to keep looking for me. Which will also make it awkward for you.”

  “Fine,” said Albert. “Don’t tell him more than you have to.”

  “Alright,” said Zhen, “I’ll take the agente provocateuse role on the tropical island with the billionaires.”

  “Incredibly smart choice in my opinion. I think you’ll get a kick out of it.”

  At last, Zhen heard the distant sound of a helicopter at the same moment that Albert Dabrowski grabbed her wrist and she felt a sharp scratch on the back of her hand.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re going somewhere with a million beautiful things.”

  11. we have to get there as fast as we can

  Martha sat at the edge of the ocean, panting, exhausted, legs apart, at Zhen’s feet. She did not try to get up.

  She said: “Look, Albert is a dick. You can take everything I’ve given you and go to the police. That’s what I came here for. I came to say sorry and to give you everything.”

  Zhen said: “Aren’t you going to try to convince me not to do it?”

  Martha said: “I’m going to try. But I think it’s OK if it doesn’t work.”

  “You fucking… your friends fucking kidnapped me and brought me here and kept me here against my will.” She had stepped out of her suit, which stood next to her, an oddly patched friend and protector. “Look at my leg.” She showed the long curved scar. “You did this to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Martha. “I didn’t know but I should have known and I’m sorry.”

  Zhen sat down suddenly on the sand.

  “Look,” she said, “tell me the truth. Did you get me to turn a woman into a pillar of salt because of some religious bullshit?”

  “Oh,” said Martha.

  “Yeah, I read your stuff about the pillar of salt and survival, and you know, I didn’t have all the pieces but I knew, I knew something was screwy.”

  “It wasn’t intentional,” said Martha. “You know, I didn’t send the Enochites after you but obviously I felt responsible, and so I put AUGR onto your phone, and it tracks like… blood pressure, heart rate, a bunch of stuff. So I’d know if you were in trouble and it could help, AUGR. I wanted to help if you were in danger.”

  “So the pillar of salt was like… a coincidence?”

  Martha thought back to the alert coming through from Zhen’s phone. To AUGR’s outline of the tactical possibilities of Zhen’s situation. To the overwhelming guilt Martha had felt in this moment that her actions, the fractal unfolding of her decision to leave her father, had led to this troubled person pursuing Zhen down an air-conditioning vent in a mall in Singapore.

  “AUGR offered me a few different options to get you out of there. I guess the salt… I didn’t think about it until afterward. It just felt right. You know I grew up in a really weird way and a bunch of those stories are just sunk into my bones. I don’t know, I suppose that option felt… familiar to me.”

  “AUGR gave you options? It wasn’t just doing it all itself?”

  Martha had forgotten that Zhen hadn’t known this part.

  “Oh,” she said. “No, AUGR never really worked. It can’t do what we said. It can’t see the future. It’s just a tool, like a satnav or a translator, you know? It can look around, analyze what everything can do, what can be used as a weapon. It can present options.”

  “It never worked?”

  “No. I mean. You can try to be prepared but no one can know what’s coming next. The system is too complex. These artificial intelligence things, we treat them like gods but they’re not real. There’s no way to really know what’s going to happen.”

  “It never… worked?” Zhen was suddenly choking for air, laughing the true laughter that only comes when we sit with another person in trust. “It never fucking worked? You got them here, you convinced three of the richest people in the world, you got me here and it never worked?”

  And Zhen was laughing, like Martha, a kind of laughing that is like crying.

  Later, Martha said: “We had to do it quickly. Rip the Band-Aid off. You know, eventually all of these things would have gotten solved or the human race would have totally collapsed and the planet would have righted itself one way or the other. But doing it slowly would have been horrific to live through. Hundreds of years of misery: rising seas and famine and drought, refugees from one war bringing so much pressure onto another country that it created more wars. Civilization boiling itself down into enclaves. New diseases coming from the bats and the insects displaced when we cut down more and more trees. We were circling the drain. Hundreds of years of horror before we could start again.”

  “I thought you said there was no way to know what was going to happen,” said Zhen.

  “Yeah, well, there’s no way to know exactly which of those things were going to happen in what order, obviously. But a bunch of those things were going to happen, and Lenk and his friends were going to make sure they were OK, but the rest of us were going to have to live through it and suffer. And this was just… this was a shortcut. I can’t control everything forever…”

  “Oh, you can’t? Really. I guess it’s good you know that. Good to know, yeah.”

  “I just thought, if we can get through this part as quickly as possible, if we can just move really fast, then we get to the next bit where it’s actually nice and there is electric public transport and low-cost food and the birds come back and we all get to mend our electronics, not throw them away, and the cities are more livable and the rivers are clean and healthy and the air is more breathable… we just get to that part quickly. The future is coming. The wind is driving us toward it. There can be a beautiful world on the far shore, I really think so. But we have to get there as fast as we can.”

  “And now?”

  Martha chewed her bottom lip.

  “Maybe I’ve done enough,” she said. “You can’t fix everything forever, but you can try to tip things in the right direction. Whatever you decide, maybe it’ll still be OK.”

  Zhen weighed the files Martha had given her in her hand.

  “I could take these to the FBI, then,” she said. “The FBI and the BBC, the CIA and Australian secret services and the French and German ones, and all of them—I could take… I could take it to everyone and you would be arrested and sent to prison for the rest of your life.”

  “Probably,” said Martha. “I think… I think if you do that, there’s a chance people will try to put some of the things I’ve done back the way they were. Out of anger. Feeling manipulated. But that’s OK. When I decided I had to come get you, I knew there was no set of lies I could tell that would stop you finding out the truth. So I decided to tell you.”

  “And I can do what I want. Go to the media and the government. Fuck you in more ways than anyone has ever been fucked before.”

  Martha said: “I’m not asking you for anything. It’s your decision. I’ve put myself in your power.”

  She raised her hands and surrendered.

  * * *

  Later, a great deal later, Martha said: “You really waited all this time because you trusted I’d come.”

  “I trusted someone would come. But I hoped it’d be you.”

  Martha smiled. “So in the meantime, did you meet anyone else?”

  Zhen said: “Oh yeah, on the deserted island. I’ve had a long thing with… Ellen Bywater. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

  “They told me it was Zimri.”

  “Oh, he’s more my type.”

  Their fingers met and touched. Sometimes it’s just right. It can be tough to figure out all the logistics. But this part sometimes just works.

  Zhen said: “Three fucking years of my life. And my leg. Three years and a leg. Well. Not the whole leg. Still, though.”

  Martha said: “I’m really sorry. It was unavoidable.”

  And Zhen said: “I guess you’re going to have to find some way to make it up to me.”

  They laughed as children do when they are thrown high in the air. We are all falling, all the time, from the half-understood past to the unknowable future. The other name for falling without fear is flying.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Come to the Arctic,” said Margaret Atwood to me, “it will change you.”

  “But maybe I don’t want to be changed, Margaret,” I said.

  And yet I did, and it did. Thank you, Margaret. You were right. Again.

  This book owes a huge amount to that trip to the Arctic with the extraordinary Adventure Canada team. Thank you to Rolex, who made it possible for me to take that trip.

  I am grateful for conversations I had in a school hall in Rigolet, also called Tikigâksuagusik, Nunatsiavut, a town on the shore of a frozen sea. To the people of Rigolet who patiently explained to me what it means to “live off the land” while it slowly dawned on me that even I, urban born and bred, would find it deeply satisfying. And for conversations with Lena Onalik and Derrick Pottle and later with my Zombies, Run! collaborator Ishmael Hope about Native, Indigenous, and First Nations knowledge and ideas, thank you. All errors of understanding in this book are of course my own.

  If, as a reader, you have wondered how we settled Rabbits ended up with such murderous hatred of people who live even small parts of the hunter-gatherer life that we all, after all, lived until a few brief millennia ago, I urge you to seek out the work of these and other Native, Indigenous, and First Nations teachers and writers. I’ve come to feel that even hatred of Jewish people (constructed as “wanderers” as we are) draws partly from that same self-disgust directed toward our human origins and, more than that, toward who we truly still are. It is everywhere once you know what you’re looking for.

  Many of the ideas in here, particularly the thought that it is laughable to search in deep space or within computer algorithms for intelligent life when we’re ignoring, torturing, despising, or destroying so much intelligent animal life here on Earth, are developed from conversations with the late, much-loved and much-missed Graeme Gibson.

  Thank you, Adam Curtis, for conversations and especially for the thought that rather than getting the machines to be as clever as we are, we are training ourselves to think down to their level.

  Thank you to my colleagues and friends in the tech and games industry who like me love technology and are also committed to trying to make the industry less… like this. Particular thanks for thoughts and/or roiling anger to Adrian Hon, Holly Gramazio, Meghna Jayanth, Alex Macmillan, Rachel Coldicutt, and Anna Pickard. I encourage readers interested in the ideas about technology in this book toward the work of Jaron Lanier, Timnit Gebru, Douglas Rushkoff, and Paris Marx. And toward the brilliant TV series Halt and Catch Fire.

  Thank you, Adam Tandy, who wrestled this book into shape with me, and without whom it would probably have knocked me over. Thank you, Annette Mees, who figured out the end with me. And the middle. Thank you, Francesca Segal, who got me to finish it. Thanks to Gillian Crawford at Ballymultimber for your perfect-for-writers cottage. And to Tom Sutcliffe, because he can’t bear long acknowledgments sections.

  Thanks to my wonderful editor Tim O’Connell, to my agents Veronique Baxter and Simon Lipskar, to Helen Garnons-Williams, to Di Speirs, constant supporter and friend. To those others at S&S, including Jon Karp, Irene Kheradi, Maria Mendez, Danielle Prielipp, Maggie Southard, Shannon Hennessey, Amanda Mulholland, Yvette Grant, Lewelin Polanco, and Jackie Seow who helped bring this book into the world, I am grateful for your work and support. Thank you to Victoria Chaiben and Niamh Cumming. Thanks for careful reading and thoughts to Maz Hamilton, Metis Hon, Dr. Benjamin Ellis, and Helena Lee. Thanks to my parents Marion and Geoffrey, to Rebecca Levene, to Esther, Russell, Daniella, Benjy and Zara Donoff, to David and to the Excellent Women.

  And thanks to readers who’ve got this far and don’t mind a bit of tricksiness. Those who know that nothing is ever really over shall receive their reward over the page.

  MANY, MANY YEARS LATER

  Everything is always in motion. Nothing remains still. Despite what anyone says, history never, in fact, ends.

  * * *

  Very little remains secret after one hundred years. The origins of the enclave on Huntsy Island—renamed to honor the Native people who lived and died here—are now well known. There had been a ridiculous accident, the kind of thing that happened in those ancient days when people had a strange religious belief in the protections of their all-seeing technologies. An early-warning system had gone off much too soon and had sent three very powerful people to this beautiful place, cutting them off from the world. They had not known how to be found and no one had known how to look for them. There had been a period of grief and searching, and then the world had shrugged and moved forward without them.

  Some historians suggested that the new movements, the change in the tide of thought, even the growing quasi-governmental powers of the FutureSafe zones had been a direct result of this disaster. The fact was that by the time the world discovered the truth—when FutureSafe sent the first caretaker group to live permanently on the island forty-one years after the original accident—the puzzle was already, for most people, irrelevant history.

  Only one of the original three was still alive. Lenk Sketlish was old and confused. He asked the new settlers whether there had been a great cataclysm in the outside world. They told him yes and he welcomed them to his island. It took a few months for them to understand who he was. He died within three years, and with him the living memories of the events on the island. Lenk Sketlish was buried in a place of honor under a cairn of stones that was visible from the eastern windows of his mountain at dawn. It was another thirty-eight years before the next generation of caretakers on the island discovered, through decaying recordings and rusted technologies, what had happened here.

  Ellen Bywater had died two years after the crash. Her assistance suit had recordings of her talking to herself or sometimes addressing her dead husband, Will. She became very disoriented, then very depressed. The suit had pleaded with her to try to escape, to contact the other people on the island for help. She had turned off its communication functions, leaving it a mute witness to her end. She’d taken the suit to the beach on the far north of the island. She’d left it sitting there with its knees drawn up to its chest staring out into the ocean. It had watched as she put stones into the many pockets of her lightweight flying suit and walked out into the sea. Later, it had recorded—with a troubled, partial, 48 percent facial recognition certainty—the return, for a few days, of the body of Ellen Bywater to the shore and the scuttling crabs and beetles and seabirds and bright green millipedes, their mouthparts working, that had helped the flesh that had once been her sublimate back into the living world from which she’d come.

  Exploring a distant cove accessible only by climbing down a crumbling cliff, the caretakers found the suit sitting there, knees up, arms wrapped around them, visor down and recording the myriad parts of the living world that passed before it. Small birds pecked at its feet and at the tiny crustaceans that had latched to its heels in the sand. A rodent a little like a squirrel had taken to tucking soft seeds under its ass for safekeeping. It waited like that, its solar cells slowly failing, its residual power just enough for the barest flicker of monitoring functions.

  Zimri Nommik had died even earlier but was found a great deal later. He had walked for three days to the farthest point of the island he believed to be nearest the mainland. He was sick, but he refused the suit’s suggestions of reconnecting with the main party and accessing their medicines and assistance. The suit told him it could find extra stores of medicine but he did not believe it. Instead he found a cave and used his drone swarm to wall him inside a beehive cell with slabs of stone, to protect himself from predators. The suit did all it could very loyally. It gave him all the drugs that might be useful; it monitored his fever as it spiked. When his heart began to falter, it shocked him back to life. It gave him morphine so there was little pain at the end.

  When he was finally gone, the suit, like Ellen’s, had no further instructions as to purpose. It continued to hold Zimri’s body within its cocoon, lying on its side in a dark, concealed cave. The cave was warm and dry, its walls partly composed of salt. The sun was bright for months at a time. A shift in the stones allowed hot parched air to circulate. As the body decomposed anaerobically, consumed by the very bacteria that Zimri had once carried on his skin and in his gut, the suit came to a decision itself to vent the noxious gases into the cave. It ventilated the corpse with the hot salt air and the body began to dry out faster than it could rot. Zimri’s high-tech wicking sports clothes drew the moisture out of his corpse. After eight to ten years the smell dissipated completely; the flesh that had mostly dried on the bones was a desiccated wire-tangle of tendons and ligaments stretched tight over the skeleton. When the caretakers gently rolled the stone from the cave mouth, they found Zimri Nommik’s dead face gaping through the faceplate at the sandy floor without urgency or needs.