Halyard had missed his first chance to make a lot of money without doing any work. He knew about the off-label use of Inzidernil before just about anybody, and he could have bought stock in Inzidernil’s maker, Henan Pharmaceutical Group. But he didn’t have anything to invest, so he just had to sit there and watch as HPG’s stock price tripled in a few weeks as word spread about the drug.
Inzidernil had been part of the first wave of pharmaceutical drugs designed from the bottom up by AI. What it was officially supposed to do, Halyard kept forgetting—something endocrinal. The point was the side effects. Two years ago, a friend of Halyard’s had given him a bottle containing thirty tablets of this medication Halyard had never heard of. “The next time you know you’re going to have a really depressing food day, take one of these first thing in the morning.” This friend was the same as Halyard: to them, almost every day was a really depressing food day.
Halyard’s parents had both cared deeply about food, and by the time he was a teenager he had become just like them, voracious, forensic, worshipful toward good meals and caustic toward bad ones, decadent in the sense of pursuing sensual pleasure with great seriousness and conviction. About the Halyards even a Chinese family would have said, “God, these people never shut up about food.” He didn’t get much pocket money but his parents had taught him and his sister Frances that you didn’t necessarily have to spend a lot to eat well: Honey Gold mangoes cost four dollars apiece and his family had nicknamed them Groaners because you couldn’t help making noises when you ate one. Still, he looked forward to growing up and getting a bourgeois job so he could spend the rest of his life gorging himself on whatever he most loved.
And then he watched as all of it disappeared.
In Ontario, the heat dried up the sap in the maple trees; in Kenya, it wilted the coffee plants and invigorated their pests; in Champagne, it broke down the acid in the grapes; in Kentucky, it cooked the bourbon in its barrels. In Campania, the mozzarella buffaloes stopped lactating for a week after every bout of strange weather; in Iberia, a fungus hollowed out the oak trees that were supposed to drop the acorns that fed the pigs; off the coast of Tasmania, the oysters’ shells dissolved in the corrosive seas; and off the coast of South Australia, the bluefin tuna starved because there were no smaller fish left to prey upon. Even Halyard’s beloved Honey Golds shriveled away because there wasn’t enough water in Queensland to cultivate them.
And it wasn’t just delicacies that suffered. Staples, too. Halyard’s grandparents had often said that fruit and vegetables didn’t taste quite as good as they used to. But if flavor had been very gradually leaking out of produce for decades, the last of it flushed away with a terrible suddenness as Halyard entered adulthood. Potatoes, carrots, beets and apples were distinguishable only by color, not by taste. Aubergines were spongy, kale was bitter, honey was as thin and tasteless as egg white. It was as if fecund Mother Earth had been replaced overnight by one of those food service companies who mostly do internment camps. There were attempts to compensate—genetic engineering, sealed biodomes, AI farmers that nurtured every sprout and youngling with the care an anxious parent gives an only child—but as was the general trend of things, even the boldest advances in technology could not keep up with the rate of collapse.
Eating well was still possible. It was just extraordinarily expensive. The wealthy of the world were all competing for an ever-shrinking ration of food and drink that actually tasted of something. And for Halyard, it became an obsession. Like everybody, his memories of youthful meals were wreathed in a glow of nostalgia, except that this wasn’t the nostalgia of people who falsely believed their mothers had been good cooks, it was a nostalgia corroborated in its melancholy by the certain knowledge that the past really was a lot better. Nearly every meal he ate was a disappointment to him, an insult, a torture. He just didn’t seem to be able to accustom himself to it like other people could, and he sometimes felt like a climate change refugee, displaced from everything he’d grown up with (although he soon learned this was not a sentiment you should express publicly). Yes, the world was losing a lot of other things, in fires and floods and pandemics and riots and wars, more important things, even Halyard could see they were objectively more important—but they just didn’t matter to him the same way. After all, he couldn’t eat pandas, or glaciers, or Jakarta. When the Buddhists taught that craving is suffering, they were absolutely right. I would pay anything, he sometimes said to himself, anything, for just one piece of good sushi.
And, disastrously, he meant it.
By the time his friend slipped him the bottle of Inzidernil, Halyard had made a decent career for himself in the field of environmental planning for the extractive industries, but he had no assets, no savings, nothing but debts, because every cent he earned went straight down his throat. He’d had the misfortune to fall in with a very bad crowd: serious gourmands, Olympian high-rollers, all of them rich, some of them dynastically so. And for a long time he’d tried to keep up with them, because somehow he’d convinced himself it was vital to do so. The best meal of his entire life was an omakase at Sushi Ashina in Tokyo, prepared before his eyes by the legendary Goro Yoshida just weeks before his retirement. Where Yoshida sourced his fish was a closely guarded secret, but that night Halyard ate tuna, salmon, mackerel, scallops, red clams, gizzard shad, freshwater eel, everything you couldn’t get anymore, everything he used to eat with his parents when they took him to Masuya in Sydney for his birthday, except here it was elevated to another plane entirely.
It cost 300,000 yen, or about 2,500 euros. Not including drinks.
But of course real life wasn’t Sushi Ashina. Real life wasn’t even a Mosvatia Bioinformatics presentation or any of the other top-tier junkets where you could at least drink a bit of decent wine (quite a lot of it if you had Halyard’s expertise in wringing out a corporate tab). Real life was airports and worksites, conference centers and mining support vessels. Real life was depressing food days. And so, one morning when he knew he was facing one of those—three meals that would take as much from him psychologically as they put into him physically, three meals that for social and professional reasons he would be obliged to sit there and eat instead of just dodging the whole issue with a nutrient shake—he swallowed an Inzidernil.
And after that he just didn’t care.
The Inzidernil didn’t stop him tasting what he was eating. And it didn’t fool him into thinking that what he was eating was delicious. Rather, it took away his evaluative response. He no longer felt any disappointment or resentment or grief. He no longer compared the meal against his memory of what it should have tasted like. It just didn’t bother him.
Whatever part of the brain it was that turned all animals into foodies—that had evolved so that an animal would relish a sugar-rich berry or an iron-rich liver and reject an unripe gourd or an indigestible stem—that part of his brain fell silent. All his discernment, his snobbery, went with it. What he was eating was neither bad nor good, except in the limited sense that he had been hungry before and now he was full. Presumably this was what eating was like for those robotic people who had never learned to care about food in the first place; and what it was like, also, for the most enlightened Buddhists, who according to the fourteenth Dalai Lama could savor shit and piss as if they were the finest food and wine. Such were the side effects of Inzidernil, completely unintended by Henan Pharmaceutical Group.
Halyard wanted a lifetime supply of Inzidernil. And lots of other people would too, enough to keep HPG’s pill factories extremely busy. Halyard understood this right away, even if he wasn’t prescient enough to guess the other markets Inzidernil would penetrate a few years later (as it would turn out, even its off-label uses had off-label uses). The problem was, he’d already spent everything he had on exalted nigiri, which meant he had no way of buying HPG stock before word got out. So he went to Terence, his closest friend among the rich gourmands, the only one he’d ever had real conversations with that didn’t consist entirely of ranking meals, and explained the blissful relief of Inzidernil, hoping Terence might be willing to stake him the money. Terence wasn’t afraid of a spicy investment opportunity: he was backing one of the laboratory start-ups on Surface Wave, the new biotech city floating in the Gulf of Finland.
But Terence didn’t get it. Terence ate mediocre food sometimes, but only when he was too apathetic to organize anything better. Because of his inherited billions, it was always on some level a choice—he was never truly trapped with it, the way normal people were. And so Halyard just couldn’t make him understand why Inzidernil was such a boon. Also, a guy Terence knew from university had gone to work at Henan Pharmaceutical Group, and that guy was a complete moron, which to Terence was a very important data point. He could not be persuaded to underwrite Halyard’s investment—even though Halyard had once seen him spend twelve thousand euros on a bottle of Bordeaux.
BY THE TIME Halyard saw his second opportunity to make a lot of money without doing any work, he had been brooding on the Inzidernil episode for some time, and also he was in quite a lot of credit card debt. The debt made him so anxious that for a while he developed an addiction to those videos of people mixing oil paints together (the kind that he had found soothing as a teenager, back when they were still made by real human beings mixing real paint—but of course now they were entirely generated by computers, which optimized them until they were narcotic, brain-imprisoning). This time, he wasn’t going to let a windfall slip through his fingers.
Just like he found out about the off-label uses of Inzidernil before just about anybody, he found out about the imminent reforms at the WCSE before just about anybody. And although his job took him all over northern Europe and sometimes farther afield, although he spent hours in the hotel bars where expense accounts loosened tongues until they practically fell off, although he was an international superspreader of extinction industry gossip, it was for none of these reasons that he found out. Rather, it happened by sheer coincidence. In what promised to be the first instance in his entire life of an extravagant meal actually paying for itself many times over, he happened to overhear a conversation in a restaurant.
It was at a place in Oslo known for serving some of the most exquisite produce to be found in Europe, which is to say produce that matched what his mother might have picked up from Eveleigh Farmers Market on any given Saturday when he was a child. Halyard’s dining partner canceled at the last minute, but he didn’t want to waste the reservation, so he sat alone at the horseshoe-shaped dining counter. Within eavesdropping distance across the horseshoe were a man and a woman who, he gradually realized, were high-ranking executives at Kohlmann Treborg Nham. As the twelve-course meal proceeded—tomatoes, or chickpeas, or cabbage, served almost unadorned—it became clear that the executives were feeling ebulliently satisfied with themselves. They had just slotted into place the last of the pieces necessary to secure the reforms that KTM had long been pushing for. The big prize. A change in the very definition of extinction, so that a species would not legally be considered extinct by the WCSE, even if it had a living population of zero, as long as enough relics of it were preserved in biobanks around the world.
No doubt the food was great, but Halyard ate mechanically, all his attention in his ears instead of his mouth. At that time, extinction credits were at around €67,000. Halyard knew that portents of the reforms would depress that price, as the rumor trickled out of Kohlmann Treborg Nham and through the wider extinction industry until it reached investors, analysts, reporters and eventually even people like Barry Smawl. And once the reform was an irrevocable fact, the price would collapse completely. After all, nobody would bother buying extinction credits if it was so cheap and easy to “save” a species from extinction. However low companies like Mosvatia Bioinformatics could push the cost of multimodal preservation—which could be done in bulk for especially biodiverse habitats, automated like a factory line—that would be the ceiling for the price of credits. Halyard could see the price falling into the mid-four-figures, perhaps even lower.
When you know for certain that an asset is going to drop in price, you can short that asset. Meaning you borrow some of it; sell what you borrowed; wait until the price falls; buy it back; return it to whomever you borrowed it from; and pocket the difference.
The problem was, this normally required a broker. And no broker would take Halyard’s business. Any time he tried to open an account that would allow for short sales, the broker would run a background check on him, and although he tried dozens of different brokers, he was rejected every single time. He had no criminal record, no bankruptcies. But these background-check algorithms were like Saint Peter at the gates of heaven, combing through pretty much all the data on Mark Halyard that had ever been recorded anywhere. And, unanimously, they decided he just wasn’t worth the hassle. They were under no obligation to explain their reasoning, so he never knew what he’d done to disgrace himself.
Fortunately, however, if you really wanted to sell some extinction credits you didn’t own, there was another way you could do it. You could be Environmental Impact Coordinator (Northern Europe) at Brahmasamudram Mining.
When Brahmasamudram finalized the plans to begin mining the Gulf of Bothnia for ferromanganese nodules, Halyard was called upon to secure thirteen extinction credits using his department’s budget, thirteen being the maximum number that might be required if the venomous lumpsucker did in fact get eradicated and its intelligence certification hadn’t in fact been reversed. Credits were at €67,000. But he knew that, by the time they were needed, the WCSE reforms would already be a reality, and the price would have fallen below half that. So he could short these extinction credits all by himself. This time there would be no Terence to turn him down, and no background-check algorithm either.
He could discreetly borrow the credits from his own department; sell off all thirteen at €67,000 each, directing the €871,000 gross to a crypto account; wait a few months until the price tumbled; buy back thirteen extinction credits for much less than €871,000; return those to Brahmasamudram, who would never know the difference; and spend the profits on some combination of debt service and dazzling gluttony.
Yes, in one sense he would be proving the background check algorithms right, by committing a financial crime. But in another sense he would be proving them wrong, by making a lot of money that they could have had a piece of if they hadn’t been such supercilious pricks.
Around the time Halyard was formulating this plan, something happened at Brahmasamudram that just for a moment shook his resolve. The Junior Finance Director back in Mumbai, a guy called Pratury, was found to have been fabricating billings. The gossip was that he had a mistress who liked couture dresses from Seoul. Pratury hadn’t even been running his racket for that long before Brahmasamudram’s accounting software detected patterns associated with embezzlement, and he was well liked within the company, so it was assumed that he would just be removed as quietly as possible. But then the board of directors shocked everybody by ordering that he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And after Pratury was arrested, the magistrate denied him bail, saying he was a flight risk because he had so many relatives in Dubai. So he was sitting in a jail cell.
One of the terrors of this era, to people like Halyard, was the suddenness with which life could become physical. Imagine that, because of your economic position, you are safe and serene and almost untethered to the earth. Your body is nothing, really: it’s just the part of you that gets tired at the gym, the part of you that will be shucked into a furnace after your connectome is uploaded. And then, overnight, your body becomes primary again, because your home is flooded or burned or buried or confiscated, and you are plunged into a life of physical degradation, physical constraint, physical danger.
The past decade had demonstrated that this could happen to anyone, absolutely anyone, even people who seemed far above it all five minutes earlier. If it hadn’t happened to you, you were grateful for your good fortune. And so the thought of recklessly inviting it upon yourself, this grim entrapment in the body, when you really didn’t have to, when you were doing fine, when you weren’t in the path of the hurricane—well, Pratury in his prison uniform looked like a real dope. Halyard didn’t want to be one too.
But he reassured himself that his scheme was quite different from Pratury’s, because he wasn’t stealing anything. In a sense he would just be acting as a sort of informal investment manager for Brahmasamudram, taking their idle assets out for some bracing exercise. When it was all over, the company would be left entirely whole—that was the genius of it.
The only way it could go wrong would be if the price of extinction credits rose, rather than fell. And that was impossible.
“Some major events, relevant to your interests, have taken place in the past hour.” The scullion waking him from a Komagatake coma. His confusion, thinking it was about Ismayilov. And then the breaking news on the wall opposite his bed.
Six attacks, one at each of the six major biobanks: Lausanne, Spitsbergen, Cape Town, Mexico City, Taizhou, and Yokohama.
At each biobank, a computer worm took control. First, the worm broadcast a fake chemical hazard alert to herd all the staff away from the cold storage areas. Then it locked the doors, switched off the freezers, and cranked the facility’s heating system until those freezers turned into ovens.
In Lausanne and Cape Town, where the biobank’s staff managed to regain control within a couple of hours, the attack stopped there. In Spitsbergen and Yokohama, where they did not regain control—and in Taizhou and Mexico City, where they regained control but then lost it again—the attack proceeded to a second phase: blasting the automated cleaning hoses until they flooded the entire facility and then boiling the water like an enormous kettle. But this was gratuitous: the destruction at Lausanne and Cape Town was later found to be almost as thorough from the superheated air alone. Millions upon millions of frozen tissue samples cooked into useless snot.
There was a single human casualty: a technician in Taizhou who reentered the cold storage area, against the orders of her superiors, when it appeared the attack was over. Distraught, she couldn’t wait any longer to survey the damage, and she was boiled to death after the worm reasserted its dominance.
And yet, as staggering as this was, it was only half of what was happening. The other half was still barely understood by the time the attacks on the biobanks became world news.
Even though the biobanks still lavished a lot of floor space and man hours on frozen tissue samples, to many biologists these were now as archaic as wax cylinders or punch cards. These days you could send a digital file over to your enzymatic printer and in a few hours it would synthesize a DNA strand on a microplate; no need to mess around with anything swabbed out of an animal when you could just download the genome from GenBase. So on that way of thinking, if the worm had only deep-cleaned the freezers, not much would have been lost. The biobanks would still have had all the fruits of multimodal preservation: DNA sequences, connectome scans of the brain, MRI scans of the body, and so forth. And although the biobanks were the administrators, the librarians, of that data, the data was not, of course, physically stored in the biobanks: it was distributed between cloud servers all over the planet.
The worm attacked those too.
It hacked into thousands of different cloud servers simultaneously, and deleted every file ever uploaded by the biobanks. Experts later said this should not have been possible; they discussed it with awe, like scientists confronted with some transgression against the basic laws of physics. But the worm was extraordinarily adaptable and devious, and so it wrought this dark miracle. This was technology that could have crippled nations, won wars, and here it was being used to erase videos of the legless skink.
And not just the legless skink. Also the velvet scoter. The Hainan black crested gibbon. The angel shark. The rusty pipistrelle. The Stone Mountain fairy shrimp. The variable cuckoo bumblebee. The marbled gecko. The Alagoas tyrannulet. The thicklip pupfish. The hoary-throated spinetail. The white-chested white-eye. The Cozumel thrasher. The spine-fingered tree frog. The Zempoaltepec deer mouse. The cracking pearlymussel. The Papaloapan chub. The dromedary naiad. The warrior pigtoe. And about nineteen thousand other species that had been preserved in the biobanks since their extinction in the wild. All gone.
In some cases, this still didn’t really matter. For instance, the worm rubbed out everything the biobanks held, physically and digitally, on the giant panda. But that was hardly going to erase pandas from history. For decades before their temporary extinction, pandas had been documented about as thoroughly as anything on earth, plus now there were actual cloned pandas lumbering around.
Consider, however, Gulella warinyangus. This was a species of tiny land snail found only in northern Ghana. Gulella warinyangus was first discovered when biologists attempted to count the population of another, very similar snail, Gulella atewana, on behalf of a company who intended to build a solar panel array right on top of atewana’s habitat. In other words, Gulella warinyangus was never studied in any context other than the bureaucracy of its certain extinction. There were no nature documentaries about warinyangus, no scientific papers, no pickled specimens in museums, no sports mascots in its image, no plush toys for children, no folktales in which it outwitted or was outwitted by some other animal. The only record of warinyangus was in those biobanks, its multimodal preservation funded by a WCSE grant. And after the attacks, even that was gone. It was named only so it could be destroyed; it was destroyed; and now only the name was left, like some minor figure in a medieval chronicle with an editor’s footnote saying “About this person nothing else is known.” It might as well never have existed.
Admittedly, in this sense Gulella warinyangus was no different from innumerable other species that had plummeted into the blackness of time, that had lived and died without the human race ever noticing. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of species that had ever evolved on earth had gone extinct before the human race first awoke. A species rotting in an unmarked grave could not in itself be considered a tragedy unless the entire history of life was to be considered a tragedy. But these were nineteen thousand species whose extinction human beings had carried out knowingly, almost nonchalantly, on the basis that their existence was only really being suspended, and in the future they could be restored to life, or if not literally restored to life at least studied, understood, paid the proper tribute. We had pawned those animals, intending to buy them back one day when things were a bit less stretched, and now the pawn shop had burned to the ground with all the animals inside.
But of course when Halyard watched the news in horror, it wasn’t because he cared so much about Gulella warinyangus.
THE WCSE REFORMS were dead. That was obvious. Nobody could seriously suggest changing the definition of extinction, putting biobanks at the center of everything, when biobanks had turned out to be about as eternal and inviolable as a wet cardboard box. For a while now, the smart money had been on the reforms passing—not just the smart money, in fact, but also the money of average intelligence and the money of belowaverage intelligence and even the kind of money where you find yourself wondering about the industrial pollutants this money might have been exposed to as a baby. This expectation had been like a weight pressing down on the price of extinction credits. Halyard had sold Brahmasamudram’s thirteen credits when they were still at €67,000 each, and then watched with satisfaction as the rumor spread and the price fell. But now, with the reforms an impossibility, the weight had been snatched away, and the price would not just revert but rebound.
Halyard’s scullion woke him after the news of all six attacks was verified by multiple sources, but by that time the algorithms who bought and sold extinction credits on the Asian exchanges had already been trading on it for a geologic age in algorithm years: the first garbled report had come out of Mexico City, then a similar one out of Yokohama, and that second one was enough for the algorithms to anticipate some sort of trend.
Right away they started scooping up credits, bidding each other higher and higher. Pretty soon they were joined by the short sellers, who now urgently needed to cover their short positions so they wouldn’t take too much of a loss. The buying frenzy fed the short squeeze and the short squeeze fed the buying frenzy. And that was just the hedge funds and speculators. The people who actually did things with credits, the states and corporations and state-owned corporations who very much relied on having the legal right to eradicate a few dozen species every year, were only just beginning to react. Nobody knew how high the price could spike, so everyone was suddenly desperate to be holding some credits to make sure they wouldn’t get totally fucked.
And what was emerging was that the market was a lot tighter than anyone would have expected. For the past several months, extinction credits had exuded this stink of decline, so you would have thought there would now be a lot of credits sloshing around, just waiting to be bought up. But there weren’t. In fact—and all this was playing out in a few heartbeats of a variable cuckoo bumblebee (RIP)—there was practically nothing out there.
Almost as if someone had cornered the market in extinction credits before the attacks took place.
Halyard had once gone with four colleagues to visit a potential monazite mining site in the badlands of southern Spain. When they arrived at the site, a sun-blasted former olive grove miles from anywhere, it was announced that the car that was carrying all the drinking water had suffered some minor technical problem and would not arrive for about another forty-five minutes. Instantly Halyard, who had not been thirsty ten seconds earlier, was the thirstiest he had ever been in his entire life. He guzzled every last drop of the mostly empty bottle of water he happened to have with him and then began to consider how he would kill the other four if it came to it.
This reaction, which Halyard felt a bit sheepish about afterward, was basically what proliferated through the extinction credits market after it became clear that there weren’t enough credits to go around. Even the algorithms were hyperventilating. By the time Halyard rushed out of his flat in Copenhagen so he could catch an early-morning flight to Stockholm and then a highspeed train to Sundsvall and then a VTOL to the Varuna, the price of a single extinction credit had risen from €38,432 to €287,057.
HE DIDN’T CONFESS it all at once, out on the deck. Instead, he tried to evoke a feeling of entrepreneurial spirit and noble failure. “Have you ever read that book Free Climbers?” he asked Resaint. She had not. “It’s about people who take risks in business. Sometimes you make a risky bet,” he went on, “and if it pays off, people celebrate you, but if you make the same bet, and your luck is bad, and it doesn’t pay off, you get treated literally like a criminal. That’s the situation I’m in. I made a decision at work that I really believed in, and now it could have personal consequences for me. Basically what I mean is, I could go to jail.”
Just saying that word out loud—“jail”—filled him with the same strangling dread he’d felt as he digested the news of the attacks. And he knew it was reckless to admit even this much to a person he didn’t know.
But he hadn’t been prepared for this conversation to be so hard. Most of the biologists he dealt with knew their place. They had their pride, yes, intellectual and professional, but also they understood that they were working for Brahmasamudram, and they wanted more work in the future. He had never asked a biologist to reverse their conclusions before, but it had always felt as if he could if he really needed to. As the VTOL was flying toward the Varuna, and he thought about Resaint spending three months on this sparsely crewed mining ship in the middle of the Baltic fog, living in the same conditions as the roughnecks except for a slightly less claustrophobic cabin, it had seemed obvious that she would accept his offer to liberate her from jobs like this. (Also, he’d looked up pictures of her on the way here: she was attractive, with a nice smile in one of the pictures, and in hindsight maybe that had made him assume unconsciously that she would be easy to get along with, charitable about the mistakes he’d made . . . And therefore the negotiations would run smoothly.)
But when he admitted to her that the AMV’s had already mined the venomous lumpsucker’s breeding ground—much sooner than he’d meant to admit it, but somehow she seemed already to know—she gazed at him with a fury that made him feel peeled and chilled and sectioned like a brain bound for the scanning microscope. It soon became clear that she could not, in fact, be bribed, and although he’d been prepared to threaten her, or at least make some threatlike observations—“I know everyone in this industry who can hire you for these assignments, and I hope you realize we talk to each other about who worked out well and who didn’t”—that felt just as futile. Plus, Devi had already told him that she wasn’t willing to hold Resaint in her cabin any longer, which left Halyard with no more cards to play. Everything was going wrong.
Except maybe, if he was at least partially honest with her about his predicament, explained enough so that she could see how trapped he felt . . . He could think of moments in his past where that tactic had worked surprisingly well. People could be very forgiving. Women could be very forgiving. (But he hadn’t told her anything about the attacks on the biobanks, and that, at least, she hadn’t guessed. If she felt so strongly about the venomous lumpsucker, how would she feel about the erasure of another nineteen thousand species? He’d told her only that the price of extinction credits had gone up.)
“When Devi tells Brahmasamudram that the fish is EX,” he explained, “if it’s still certified as intelligent, then Brahmasamudram are going to want me to submit thirteen extinction credits to the WCSE. Thirteen credits we bought months in advance in order to insulate ourselves against any market volatility. And like I said, you don’t want to hear all the boring details, but those credits aren’t going to be available, because basically I took a risk for the good of the company. Whereas if you help me—if you submit a report saying that the weird Japanese lady was wrong—”
“Horikawa.”
“—saying Horikawa was wrong and the venomous lumpsucker isn’t intelligent—that way, we only need to submit one credit to the WCSE.” And he could pay for that one credit out of the €870,000 he still had from the sale. It would sting, but he could pay for it.
“What about the other twelve?” Resaint said. He knew she’d grown up in Germanophone Switzerland, but she spoke English with almost no accent. “Brahmasamudram will think they still have those. Eventually they’ll want to use them for something else.”
“Yeah, but that won’t be for months. That’ll give me time to sort all this out. That’s all I need—time.” Maybe the price would go back down. Or if it didn’t, he’d find a way to cover it up. He’d made it look as if the credits got stolen by hackers. Or as if there had been some operational blunder and the credits had never been bought in the first place. “At worst I’ll get fired. I won’t go to jail. And if I do get fired,” he hastened to add, “I’ll already have made everything nice and cozy for you at Brahmasamudram. You know, the consultancy thing. A real modeling contract, I promise.”
“A ‘modeling contract’?”
“It’s an expression—one of those jobs where you get paid an outrageous amount of money just to turn up and look serious.”
“I’ve told you. The venomous lumpsucker is highly intelligent. I’m not going to submit a report pretending it’s not.”
“Please. Karin. It’s my only hope.” He searched her face for any indication of mercy.
She shrugged. “I don’t care.”
Feeling suddenly that he needed to lean on something, Halyard turned away from her and walked to the railing.
Yes, he would be prosecuted in Denmark, which was famous for its humane criminal justice system. But that didn’t mean he would end up serving a six-month sentence in one of those open prisons that were about as punitive as a celebrity ashram. He would be subject to the environmental fraud laws. These laws were designed to make sure that if, say, you lied to the government about the emissions from your cement factory, you would be prosecuted as an especially wicked sort of criminal. Give a lot of kids severe asthma, and you couldn’t expect to be treated any better than the sicko who’d choked a few with his bare hands, just because you’d taken a more roundabout route to the same result. Halyard had not in any way befouled the environment. His crime was entirely abstract. These laws were surely not intended for situations like his. Nevertheless, they had been written broadly enough to foil even the most serpentine maneuvres by corporate lawyers, which meant that with Brahmasamudram’s cooperation the Danes would probably be able to charge him with “profiting from a fraudulent act involving the misrepresentation of the status of an environmental regulatory instrument,” or something like that.
He hadn’t given this any thought when he was planning his extinction credits sale, not even when he heard the news about Pratury. But this morning, following a little bit of research, he had begun to realize the danger he was in. If he was convicted under the environmental fraud laws, he would serve a long sentence in a closed prison, which would be just like a prison anywhere else. And he’d heard that these days the people you met inside were not fondly disposed toward environmental crimes, not the guards and not the other prisoners either. It was never good to be the culpable human face of an ongoing mega-tragedy affecting every living being. All it would take was one guy on your wing who’d lost his village to a flood or his grandma to a heatwave back in his home country and you really would be on the shit-list next to that child murderer. And they wouldn’t care about the details. “It was just a bet on the price of a financial asset!” he imagined himself screaming in terror. “Please—surely you can understand—I’m not a bad person, I just saw an opportunity in the markets!”
And then there was the food. Year after year of slop, and no Inzidernil. Something else he’d heard about prison life was that the food wore you down as much as anything else. Precisely because most people on the outside couldn’t understand that— “It’s just lunch, what does it matter?”—the food was often the vehicle of particular sadism by the authorities, sadism that would have been too conspicuous in any other form.
For a moment he imagined throwing himself into the water like Ismayilov (oh, except Ismayilov hadn’t thrown himself into the water—he kept forgetting). But he’d probably just land on one of the lower decks. From here you could look down on them, the labyrinths of spare machinery and cable reels and other unidentifiable forms swaddled in translucent tarps. Somehow the sight calmed him a little bit, his anxiety soaking up into the purposeful density of it all.
He turned back to Resaint. “What if they aren’t extinct?”
She just looked at him.
“If the venomous lumpsuckers aren’t extinct,” he went on, “then it makes no difference what you say in your report— Brahmasamudram won’t need to submit any credits to the WCSE. Then I’m okay. At least in the short term.”
“They are extinct,” she said. “Effectively. There were so few left down there even before this. South Kvarken was their last habitat. That’s why you people sent me here in the first place. Yes, there may a few survivors after what you did to the reefs. And there are the ten I sent back there last night. But now they’ll scatter. And the Gulf of Bothnia is not a koi pond. There will be no easy way to find even a single one of them without hundreds of drones and some blind luck. And no breeding ground means no breeding season, which means no more baby fish. So it’s over. If you want to bring them back from extinction, you’ll have to clone them with the DNA sequences I sent to GenBase. That’s all that’s left of them now, and it’s not even much of a gene pool. As for who’s going to pay for that—who’s going to pay for an artificial habitat, because you’d need an artificial habitat, they can’t live indefinitely in a tank . . .”
He couldn’t stop himself from cringing at the mention of GenBase, which had been managed in collaboration between the Spitsbergen and Yokohama biobanks and was now just a vast howling blank. “What about Sanctuary North?”
Resaint frowned. “Why would anyone pay to keep venomous lumpsuckers at Sanctuary North?”
“Don’t they do stuff for other fish? Other fish like having them around?”
“Yes, but from what I’ve heard, Sanctuary North is not exactly meticulous about—”
“But they might have a population of their own. It’s the right kind of biome.”
“I suppose.”
“Let’s go there and see,” Halyard said.
Resaint looked at him in disbelief. “What?”
“It’s only, like, five hundred Ks from here. We could just go over there and take a look. We might get lucky.”
“You had me locked in my cabin for eight hours and now you want me to travel to Estonia with you?”
“Look, we both really want to find this fish. And we still might. I have a Brahmasamudram expense account, and I know Pavel at Sanctuary North, and I know pretty much everyone else in the industry as well. Anywhere this fish could still be hiding, I can get us there, I can get us in, okay? But you—you are actually acquainted with the fish itself. That’s pretty bloody crucial too. I won’t be able to do this alone, and neither will you. But . . .” He bounced his hand back and forth between them as if to say “You and me together . . .”
Resaint turned and walked away.
Halyard watched, paralyzed, as she shut the door behind her, leaving him alone on the deck.
He took out his phone. Maybe something would have happened in the last half an hour. Maybe the Chinese would have revealed that they’d been secretly running a seventh major biobank in the tunnels under the Yueliang Gong moonbase, and there would have been an enormous embarrassed counterreaction in the markets, and the price of an extinction credit would have dropped below ten thousand euros, and now he would make even more money from his scheme.
But he knew that his scullion would have interrupted if anything like that had happened. And in fact the latest news only confirmed the disaster. Now that the experts had had a few hours to take stock, they were even more despondent. Nothing could be salvaged from the great library’s ashes. Halyard knew he needed to take some urgent and possibly drastic steps relating to his own situation, but he wanted more than anything to put all that off for just a few more seconds, so he asked his scullion for a digest of the latest speculation about who might have been behind the attacks.
But then he remembered that he’d never broken the news of the attacks to Resaint. And Devi had warned him that she was going to restore Resaint’s access to the internet. He rushed to the door.
If Resaint found out the wrong way—without preamble, without cushioning—he didn’t know how she might react. Those protestors had lobbed the mega-tumor at the Mosvatia convoy precisely because guys like him, extinction industry suits, were a useful target for a lot of inchoate rage about the extinction crisis. (Of course, that was a very immature way of thinking, because in reality the extinction crisis was the result of complicated structural issues, but you couldn’t shoot meat at a complicated structural issue, and these were people who’d lost the ability to express their emotions in any other way.) If Resaint read about the attacks on her phone, and she became crazed by grief when she learned that everything was gone, not just the last trace of the venomous lumpsucker but the fairy shrimp and the velvet scoter and all the rest, and he was still fresh in her mind as the representative of everything that was wrong with the world, he would be her first target when she lashed out. And he’d been stupid enough to invite her into a confidence with which she could do him enormous damage simply by talking to Devi or anyone else at Brahmasamudram.
He dashed through the Varuna’s interior. His scullion gave him the route back to Resaint’s cabin, and yet somehow, even though he thought he was following its instructions, he still managed to lose himself in the ship’s featureless beige passages, which were like a maze you’d design if you specifically wanted to evoke the experience of wandering bewildered in a dream.
Until at last he was hammering on the door. “Karin? Are you in there? Please—I need to talk to you again. Karin?”
The door opened. She stood there looking at him without expression.
“Maybe you already know,” he said, “but if not, I just want to prepare you for—”
“I saw the news,” she said.
“You don’t seem . . .” He stopped himself from saying “crazed with grief.”
She turned away from him and went to her chest of drawers. One of the drawers was already open, and a backpack sat on the bed. He realized he must have interrupted her in the middle of packing. “I want to go to Sanctuary North,” she said, rolling up a T-shirt. “So if you can get me there, fine.”
Halyard was taken aback.
“It’s astonishing, isn’t it?” she said. “The thoroughness. Those nineteen thousand species—we’ve watched ourselves destroy them twice now. Even locusts can’t do that—locusts can’t destroy one thing twice.”
“Um—”
“I don’t know if I feel numb or if I genuinely just don’t care. I never really gave a shit about the biobanks. I never believed we were going to bring any of those species back, except maybe a few of the cuddly ones. It was always just an empty ritual.”
“Well, I’m with you there. But maybe the loss of all that— you know, not having a fallback anymore—maybe that will make us work harder to save what we still have. Maybe that’s the silver lining.”
She looked at him skeptically. “Do you really think that?”
“No,” he admitted.