Like a small child defending an obvious lie, Mrs. Purleyswars had managed to answer only two or three questions before her story ran out. She was a stout hippyish woman in her fifties who, until she became evasive, spoke in the unctuous tone of somebody forever celebrating life’s lovely little surprises, a voice like a hug that goes on for too long. As the two of them sat there in the dim, airless cabin—Mrs. Purleyswars perched on the bottom bunk of the bunk bed, Resaint on a stool sipping from a plastic tumbler of bilberry tea she had felt no choice but to accept—Mrs. Purleyswars chuckled, hummed and sighed through her explanation of exactly what she meant by “having a natter with the gnats,” and Resaint was certain that this was the first time she’d been pressed on the subject by an outsider. Once Mrs. Purleyswars could see that Resaint could see that she was talking nonsense, she did seem sheepish. But only mildly. Whereas Resaint was scolding herself for being such an idiot.
After all, Resaint thought, what was more demeaning: For an adult woman to pretend she could talk to insects, or for an adult woman to nearly believe her? Part of her had known in advance it was silly but part of her, enough to matter, had longed for it to be true. She asked herself again how she could have got her hopes up like that—it was extremely out of character—and she knew it had to do with the sadness she felt about Kazu Horikawa: about the dismissal of her ideas, about the curtailment of her career. If Horikawa had died as a sort of exile, wasn’t it possible that amongst the exiles on this putrid Baltic shore one might find languishing another like her, a savant of little nibblers, somebody who understood these gnats like a Siberian hunter understood tigers, and that when Resaint met her it would be like the many meetings she’d had with Horikawa in her dreams?
The cabin door opened and a girl came in. She was about eighteen or nineteen, and she had that low-contrast coloring that was in fashion for white women at the moment, tawny eyebrows hardly standing out against the skin, although it was now a bit measled by kaptcha marks. Resaint recognized this girl but couldn’t place her right away. “Nathan said he left his charger here,” the girl said. “Do you know where it is?” She looked at Resaint. “Oh, hi?”
“Elsie, this is Karin,” Mrs. Purleyswars said. And so Resaint realized where she’d seen the girl before: this was ElsieVVVV, who posted all those videos about life in the camp. She had burst into the cabin with such familiarity that Resaint wondered if she might be Mrs. Purleyswars’ daughter, although there wasn’t much of a resemblance.
“Are you from Migri?” Elsie said.
“No, pet, she’s from Switzerland. She came to talk about . . .” Mrs. Purleyswars tailed off. The conversation they’d just had was like a pool of vomit in the corner of the room that neither of them wanted to acknowledge.
But Elsie frowned and said, “This isn’t to do with the gnats, is it?” She was watching Mrs. Purleyswars’ face, and from it she must have got her answer. “Oh my god, oh my god.” She turned to Resaint. “I can’t believe you’re from outside and she got you to listen to her. She only came up with the whole thing because she wants attention. Linda, you have to stop doing this. It’s really pathetic at this point. Nathan hates it too.”
Mrs. Purleyswars smiled as if she hadn’t heard any of that. “Do you want a cup of tea, pet?”
“No! Where’s Nathan’s charger?” Elsie spotted it lying on the duvet behind Mrs. Purleyswars. She snatched it up and went to the door. “If you’re from outside, I seriously do not understand why you’re in here listening to her driveling on. But, fine, whatever,” she added, shrugging as if she could not be held responsible for Resaint’s terrible choices.
After Elsie closed the door behind her, Mrs. Purleyswars gave a knowing sigh as if to invite Resaint’s participation in a little chuckle about the young, perhaps seeing an opportunity to reset the atmosphere between them. Resaint, rejecting this invitation in the strongest possible terms, put down her tea and went outside to catch up with Elsie on the avenue. She was grateful to the girl for her contempt, for lancing the shameful encounter like a pustule. She remembered the contempt she had felt herself at that age for adults who chose to accept each other’s lies: nothing else like it, nothing so intense in the whole solar system, a jet of plasma that could take out satellites and power grids. Her father had told her she would become more forgiving of adults once she knew what it was like to be one. But for the most part that had not turned out to be true. The opposite, actually. All those mitigating facts that her father implied would explain everything, the sealed evidence for the defense: now she’d seen the file for herself, she knew there was fuck all to it. The teenagers had it right.
She was still reminiscing about the unshakeable granite fixity of youthful indignation when she said “I watched your videos” and instantly saw any trace of it vanish from Elsie’s face.
“Really?” Elsie said. “You’ve really seen them? I know they’re not very good. I’ve only been posting stuff for a few weeks. I’ve always wanted to but at home I wouldn’t have been allowed to, so . . .” Up at the ranches the guest workers’ internet access had been routed through servers in the Hermit Kingdom so that it could be restricted as normal, but whether by neglect or by design the Finnish government had put no such measures in place at the camp.
Resaint gestured back at the cabin. “Is she your mother, or—”
“Oh my god! No. She’s Nathan’s mum. My boyfriend. She’s so full of shit.”
“What I still don’t understand is that right before the gnats stopped, she was telling people they were going to stop. So she must have known somehow.”
“Yeah, because—” Elsie looked around and lowered her voice. “The gnats stopped because of what Nathan did. And he told her he was going to do it before he did it. So she was like, ‘If I make up some shit about this, about how I did it, everyone’s going to think I’m really special, and want to talk to me, and be really interested in me.’ Because that’s what she’s like. So she started telling people this thing about talking to the gnats, which is so fucking stupid, oh my god. But some people believed it.” Elsie rolled her eyes.
“What did Nathan do?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about it. But if you come and talk to Nathan he’ll probably tell you.”
Resaint hesitated. Another gnat whisperer? She didn’t want to glide without resistance from one let-down to the next like one of those grandmothers who give half their savings to a con man and then the other half to a second con man promising to get the first half back. But whatever this new story was, she believed, at least, that Elsie believed it.
So she went with Elsie to meet Nathan. On the way there, Elsie asked Resaint a lot of questions about herself, and Resaint realized that she might be the first human being Elsie had met since she was a little girl who was not a citizen of either the Hermit Kingdom or the Republic of Finland. This seemed to Resaint a greater responsibility than she was qualified to bear and she felt guilty that she wasn’t more exotic. Amidst the questions, Elsie mentioned that Nathan’s father had come out to Finland as well, but he had been sent home in disgrace after the managers of his ranch accused him of deliberately spreading kaptcha to healthy cattle. Nathan’s father had denied it, but everybody knew that before the fires this sort of thing had been going on: after all, if a ranch had ever succeeded in eradicating kaptcha, there would have been no more paid work.
They found Nathan lying in a hammock fixed between two vacant cabins at the western edge of the grid. The hammock was made from a sheet of white logo-printed material that looked like that stuff they wrapped buildings in during construction to stop moisture getting into the walls. Compared to the freight-yard corridors of the rest of the camp, this spot had almost the feeling of a veranda, because beyond the wire fence you could see out to the pines—smart dignified ranks of them apart from one dead one at the treeline whose leaflessness exposed the wormy and demented pattern of its upper branches, raising serious questions about what the others were really like underneath. Nathan looked up from his phone, took the charger from Elsie and kissed her.
“This is Karin,” Elsie said. “She’s from Switzerland. I told her you’d tell her about the gnats.”
Nathan looked at Resaint and then looked at Elsie with an expression as if she’d summoned a police tactical unit here to arrest him.
“It’s fine,” Elsie said. “You can tell her.”
“Els.”
“I promise it’s fine.” But Nathan still refused, and Elsie ran out of patience. “Nathan found out that the gnats were coming from Surface Wave—”
“That’s not a secret!”
“How could they have been coming from Surface Wave?” Resaint said.
“We still don’t really know,” Elsie said. “But so after he found out . . . just tell her what you did! She’s not from Migri. Everyone’s celebrating because the gnats stopped and you won’t even take credit.”
“She could be recording or something,” Nathan said. He was mirthless and pale and hollow-eyed, but handsome too, exactly the sort of boy Resaint was interested in at Elsie’s age— zerbrechlich her mother used to call those boys, meaning frail.
“He’s worried that if Migri finds out he’s been hacking over the camp network they’ll take away his internet.”
“Els!”
“If you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to,” Resaint said.
“Oh my god,” Elsie said to Nathan. “Why are you being like this? I told her you’d tell her!”
“You said he might. It’s okay. Really.” Resaint felt her phone tingle. It was Halyard.
“We need to go to Surface Wave,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that’s where our fisherman was going.”
“That’s funny, I was just talking about Surface Wave.”
After Resaint hung up, Elsie said with unabashed nosiness, “Was that the guy you came here with?”
Resaint nodded.
“Can we meet him?”
“Why would you want to meet him?” Resaint said. But then she reminded herself that they knew of Halyard only as another fascinating stranger, not as a slippery, self-interested mining exec who was, at best, intermittently good company. So she told them they were welcome to come with her to rendezvous with Halyard at the north entrance. Nathan stared at the ground as he followed a few steps behind, close enough to listen to Elsie resume her interview with Resaint. Resaint had the sense that he was just as keen as Elsie to mingle with the foreigners but a few minutes ago he had ostracized one of them as a potential pawn of the Finnish surveillance apparatus so now he was feeling a bit awkward about the inconsistency.
For some reason Halyard arrived twenty minutes after they did, even though Resaint thought he would be coming straight from the medical center. Unlike her, he recognized Elsie from her videos without any help. Based on this statistical sample of two, one hundred percent of people in the outside world were fans of Elsie’s channel, and Resaint observed Elsie’s excitement as she began tentatively to reconceive of herself as an international celebrity. In her high spirits, she described Nathan to Halyard as “a hacker, he’s amazing, he can do anything, literally anything,” and once again Nathan glared at her.
“In that case—” Halyard began, but then all four of them had to shuffle along to make way for the van that collected waste from the composting toilets. “In that case, I have a question for you. The attacks on the biobanks. Could it have been your country? Your government?”
Nathan shook his head. “They couldn’t hack a vending machine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Last year there was this big leak of GCHQ’s ‘hacking tools.’ I had a look at them. They were like if someone gave you a car and it wouldn’t start, so you opened up where the motor was supposed to be, and it was just full of, like, old socks and twigs and stuff. Whereas the biobanks thing—there are people online who are saying it must have been time travelers or aliens or something. I mean it’s that good. It’s unreal. The morons at home had nothing to do with that.”
“But some of them must be doing really well out of the price spike.”
“Yeah, well, that’s why they’re never going to let us go back.”
“What do you mean?” Resaint said.
“He’s just being paranoid!” Elsie said.
The Hermit Kingdom had citizenship laws, Nathan explained, stipulating if you were out of the country for long enough you forfeited certain rights, including the right to own a share of an extinction credit. If the guest workers had to stew in this camp all year instead of going home, it wouldn’t be their fault, so would the citizenship laws be waived in their case? No, they certainly would not; at the Home Office, rules were rules. Meaning anybody here who owned such a share would find that it had reverted back to the state. And the bureaucratic riffle shuffle of this reversion would present an excellent opportunity for officials in the government to quietly pocket most of the shares. “So all those cunts are thinking, ‘Credits are worth a packet now because of the hacks. We fancy a bit of that. So let’s wait it out.’ They can’t only keep out the people who have shares, because that would make it too obvious, so they’re going to keep us all out. And they’ll carry on saying it’s because of kaptcha.”
“I hope you’re mistaken,” Resaint said. “I hope they sort it out and you can go home.”
Nathan shrugged. “The ranch was shit, but it’s not that bad here—I mean now the gnats have stopped. We can get on the real internet, and it’s way faster.”
“Also you met me here,” Elsie said, touching his arm fondly.
“And Finland’s a proper country—as soon as we got to the ranch they gave us all vaccinations because they know the ones we get at home don’t work. Els misses her brother, and I hate sharing a cabin with my mum, but apart from that . . .”
Resaint could not have anticipated that, for all their generational differences, Wilson and Nathan would be united in their position that life here wasn’t really anything to complain about. She wondered what on earth those Finnish government sources had been talking about when they said the camp was on the brink of combustion, and then it occurred to her that they probably just came up with that because they wanted the guest workers off their hands as soon as possible. “You don’t miss the food back home?” Halyard asked.
“Have you seen the food back home?”
His curiosity satisfied, Halyard suddenly seemed very impatient to leave. “Is there anything either of you need?” Resaint said. “We can have it delivered to you.”
“Concealer,” Elsie said.
“Sorry?”
“Kaptcha is going to spread, right? No chance they’re going to contain it up here. Loads more people are going to get it. And those people will be looking for tutorials on how to do your makeup, like if you’ve already had kaptcha but you haven’t been able to get laser treatment and you have to go on a date or something. Nobody’s doing them yet, so if I’m the first one, that will be massive for my channel. But I can’t do makeup tutorials because I don’t actually have any makeup.”
Resaint took out her phone so Elsie could dictate to it.
“Ricercar No-Sebum Blur Primer Jeju Cushion Primer 3SL Silky Smooth Balm Ricercar Double Lasting Serum Foundation Ego Dominus All Stay Foundation 3SL Bright Up Foundation Ricercar Big Cover Cushion Jeju Gel Cushion Ricercar Advanced Smoothing Concealer Jeju Cover Perfection Tip Concealer Ioppa Mineralising Creamy Concealer Nu Veronica Pure Weightless Concealer 3SL Big Cover Skin Fit Concealer Pro 3SL Nano Emulsion Ioppa Advanced Renewing Cream,” Elsie said.
Resaint looked at her phone. It came to €590.
“Can you expense this to Brahmasamudram?” she said to Halyard.
He looked at the total. “You know this represents about 120 tons of manganese ore that somebody is going to have to mine?”
Resaint felt something on her wrist. A single dead gnat lay there. She brushed it off, and then looked up, but there were no more.
As they were saying goodbye, Elsie said, “I’m glad you’re going to Surface Wave.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll see what Nathan did.”