The boat seemed to hesitate as it approached the ring of spindrifters, like a pedestrian timing a dash across a roundabout. The spindrifters had spaced themselves about a hundred meters apart, so after one went by you had a good fifteen seconds’ grace before the next came along, but never-theless Resaint respected the water taxi’s caution; back in the Gulf of Bothnia, that lone spindrifter had turned aside from the Varuna, but how could you be sure the same would happen here? Especially considering at least one of them was already trailing debris: Surface Wave was surrounded by aquaculture installations, and snarled around the twin hulls of the spindrifter up ahead you could see netting that had probably been a crayfish pen before the spray vessel smashed through it, like when you get a cobweb in your face while you’re jogging in the woods. It was easy to imagine getting ploughed under the water by those same unflinching hulls.
But instead their boat darted through a gap in the procession. And then the daylight dimmed in the cabin as the windows filled up with a boiling darkness, a photonegative snowstorm, a black migraine swirl as thick as tossed gravel. They’d been ferried into hell.
Strange that there was no better word for it in either English or German than swarm or schwarm: that had to cover, say, twenty insects in one place, and it also had to cover whatever the fuck this was. The boat was only just across the threshold, but already you would think the maelstrom went on for an infinite distance in every direction. A gnat was too tiny to thwack like a bumblebee against a window, so if there was any sound at all from their impacts against the hull, it was lost beneath their enveloping wingbeat hum. Just like when that spindrifter had dragged its storm across the Varuna, Resaint was frightened at first by the force of it. And she could see Halyard was freaked out too, as he stood there swearing under his breath, while the Turkish guy was just staring open-mouthed. Although your eyes were desperate for purchase as you looked out of the windows, it was impossible to fix on any individual gnat and follow its path; the roil seemed discontinuous from instant to instant, like the flicker of dirt on an old film reel.
“This is crazy,” Halyard said. “In the videos from the camp it was just drizzle. It wasn’t like this.”
So Resaint explained what had happened here, as best as she had been able to reconstruct it in her mind.
For reasons still obscure, this plague of gnats had originated at Surface Wave. For weeks they had blown west along the Finnish coastline, blighting the Tinkanen camp. So when Nathan found out where they were coming from, he searched for a way to stop them. And he fixed upon the spindrifters, which were still out there, tramping the Baltic, vaping seawater to repel the sun, but now disowned, forgotten, their security software years out of date, easy pickings for anyone with a modicum of skill. He took control of the spindrifters and sent them to converge on Surface Wave, one of them incidentally goosing the Varuna on its way south. Once they arrived, they made this carousel, braiding their strange airflows together into a wreath around the city. Whereas at Tinkanen the gnats simply drifted to the ground, here the wash from the spindrifters’ rotors kept the gnats aloft in this teeming, choking dance. That was why it was so much worse than in the videos from the camp. The spindrifters were throwing the gnats right back in Surface Wave’s face. Or better to say Nathan was. She knew now why Elsie was so proud of him.
“If the gnats are coming from here, why don’t they do something about it?” said Halyard.
“I have no idea.”
Now the intensity seemed to wane, though the light in the cabin didn’t get any brighter, and she realized they were passing underneath the main body of Surface Wave, so they were sheltered somewhat in its shadow. Here were the three flotation columns rising to the base of the seastead, forming a cavern of raw concrete like one of those dead zones under an elevated highway. As the water taxi nosed toward the dock that ringed one of the columns, Resaint made out a golf-cart-type vehicle driving in their direction. The golf cart stopped at the edge of the dock and out of it slid a figure in a yellow coverall. Once the boat had found its mooring, the mission of this figure turned out to be the delivery of three mosquito nets through the hatch.
The sprint from the mooring to the golf cart was pretty brief, but Resaint was still grateful for the mosquito net draped over her like a burqa, because even here the hail of gnats was heavy enough that it gave you a fairly powerful urge to curl up on the ground with your arms flung over your face. Unlike a real golf cart, this one was sealed on all sides, but there was no way to stop gnats surging inside during the few moments the doors were open to let everybody on board, so Resaint had to brush them off the seat before she sat down with her backpack on her lap, and every time her feet shifted in the footwell she could feel the grit of their bodies under her trainers. The man in the yellow coverall, introducing himself as Daniel, welcomed them to Surface Wave and apologized for “the situation.”
“What’s that thing where the three ghosts are chasing the yellow guy?” Halyard said.
“Is that a folk tale?” Resaint said.
“No, it’s a video game.” Nobody knew, so he asked his scullion. Apparently it was called Pac-Man, although in fact there were four ghosts. “We must have looked like Pac-Man just now,” Halyard said.
BEING ON SURFACE Wave wasn’t anything like being on the Varuna. Here you could smell the ocean but you couldn’t feel it, and the public areas were bone white polished to a high shine, lots of curves and ribs and lattices, the kind of architecture Resaint associated with crown-jewel R&D facilities built by prosperous industrial firms, functionalist and show-offy at the same time. Except that every window to the outside had become a TV tuned to black gnat static, the picture blurred by the mucoid residue of a million glancing contacts. It swelled in fury as each spindrifter approached and then ebbed as the spindrifter receded. Like snow you could just stand there and watch it, but unlike snow it didn’t fade from consciousness when you tried to pay attention to something else. In your peripheral vision the effect was particularly unsettling, like catching a glimpse of something trying to get into your house.
The closest thing Surface Wave had to a mayor was Ovet Ganf, co-founder and head of the executive committee. They asked Daniel about the easiest way to get a meeting with Ganf, and Daniel said he was pretty sure Ganf was at the health club. So they dumped their bags on a service robot and went straight there, one long elevator ride and then one short one. Resaint was excited to see that the health club had squash courts, because she hadn’t played squash in four months. However, there was no sign of Ganf in the squash courts, nor in the Pilates studio, nor in the cryotherapy facility. Then they looked in another room and found a small woman shouting at a spinning orb.
“I have buyers visiting next week!” she was saying. “When my buyers visit I always like to start with a walk in the gardens! Have you tried to take a walk in the gardens recently?”
Resaint recognized the orb because she’d once almost got inside one herself, in Berlin a few years ago, during her fling with the venture capitalist with the ludicrous penthouse on Rosenthaler Platz. It was an immersive neurofeedback rig. The orb was made of transparent plastic, like a human-sized hamster ball, braced on the inside by a steel frame of tessellar pentagons. You put on a VR headset, then you climbed inside, strapped yourself into the foam seat, and let the hatch close behind you. Wheels in the base could spin the orb 360 degrees on every axis so it gave you a pretty good sensation of floating untethered, and sensors inside picked up the smallest movements of your body so you could glide at will through the psychedelic starfield shown to you by the headset. However, this wasn’t just any psychedelic starfield: it was generated moment to moment by the brain waves the headset was reading off your scalp. The idea was that you swooped and dived through this galaxy of your own emotions (which sometimes became a mountain range or a cell nucleus or a Twombly painting) and as your emotions fluctuated you saw them reflected around you, and gradually this shimmering feedback loop taught you to take conscious control of them, until there was no difference between inner world and outer world, between pulling out of a barrel roll and calming an intrusive thought. To Resaint it was basically as if the words “Take a deep breath and count to ten” weighed half a ton and cost a quarter of a million euros.
The guy inside the rig said something, but it was too muffled to hear over the whirring of the machinery.
The woman knocked on the plastic as if she was trying to irritate a zoo animal. “I can’t fucking hear you, Ovet!”
This time, when the guy spoke, his voice was piped out of a speaker in the base. “I’m very happy to talk about this later, but right now I’m in the middle of a session.”
“Why don’t you get out of that thing and do your fucking job?”
“I cannot carry out my duties at peak effectiveness unless I have complete mental clarity, so sustaining that mental clarity is part of my job. It would be irresponsible if I didn’t do this.”
“Ovet—”
“You’re breaking the immersion,” Ganf said. “This is totally pointless if you break the immersion. I’m probably going to have to start again from the beginning.”
“Ovet, there are insects raining on us! It’s a fucking living nightmare! This is not what I pay rent for! Just turn off the power to Module 3. That’s all you need to do.”
Resaint knew that Module 1, Module 2, Module 3 and so on were the names of those big beer-can-shaped workspaces at the ends of Surface Wave’s radial arms. “Is that where they’re coming from?” she said.
“Who’s that?” said Ganf. “Who else is here?”
For the first time the woman turned to look at Resaint. Most of the Surface Wave townsfolk Resaint had seen so far sported some configuration of business-bland or STEM-bland, but this woman wore cosmetic implants under the skin of her face, a sharp ridge flaring out from each nostril and pyramidal studs at her temples and cheekbones like the spikes on a thorny lizard. “Yes, that’s where they’re coming from,” she said. “You can see them streaming out of the flue. They’re breeding in there.” She turned back to the orb. “Ovet, you have to cut off Module 3. Whatever’s running in there, we need to starve it.”
“I can’t.”
“No, I can’t,” said Ganf. “I literally can’t. It’s a smart contract.”
She thumped the side of the orb. “Nobody cares about your fucking smart contracts!”
“That couldn’t be further from the truth. People flock here because of our smart contracts. They flock here because they want to escape their arbitrary and capricious governments. If I could just cancel a smart contract, the whole thing would be a joke.”
“Ovet, you are a joke! Cancel the contract!”
“It can only be canceled by mutual consent. You know that perfectly well. This is out of my hands.”
The category of smart contracts included the non-disclosure packages and waiver packages that were a routine part of Resaint’s working life, but at Surface Wave they were used far more extensively. Like making a bargain with a witch or a goblin, signing a smart contract was not just agreeing to be bound by it, it was becoming bound by it, instantly and inescapably. The reality in which you lived changed from the moment you signed it, because in essence a smart contract added a few lines to the code of every computer system around you, constraining those systems to operate within its terms. Ganf was saying that if he’d signed a smart contract with one of the tenants of Surface Wave to provide power to Module 3, there was no way for him to cut off that power, since that would breach the contract, which was a technological impossibility.
“Then we have to go in there—”
“The contract doesn’t allow that either. Anybody who tries to get through that door—even me—they’ll be repelled by the security system. And I can’t unilaterally disable the security system any more than I can unilaterally disable the electricity supply.”
“What does the contract say we’re supposed to do if little bugs are gushing out of that pipe like sewage with wings, and they’re getting blown all over the place, and we can’t go outside, and we can’t eat in the restaurants because the patio doors make you want to scream, and I keep finding them in my clothes, and there’s nobody inside the module who can turn it off?”
“The contract anticipates a vast range of eventualities,” Ganf said, “but unfortunately not this one. Nothing like this has ever happened here before.”
“I certainly don’t remember any mention in the fucking promotional materials!”
Rather listlessly the orb continued to nod and tilt, meaning Ganf still refused to abandon his neurofeedback session, or at least he refused to be seen to abandon it. If he could have looked at himself from the outside, perhaps he would have reconsidered whether conducting parts of this discussion at a forty-five-degree angle was a net positive for his dignity. Resaint had never actually got as far as encapsulating herself in the rig at the venture capitalist’s apartment, because the feeling of his fingertips on the back of her head as he helped her on with the headset had made her realize what even sexual intercourse had not, which was that she found him risible and disgusting. “I strongly believe that we’re better off focusing on the spindrifters,” Ganf said. “Until the spindrifters arrived, the insects just flew away and disappeared.”
“That’s not exactly true,” said Resaint.
“The spindrifters are not parties to any contracts here, so we have a free hand. We’re going to have them towed away.”
“And why is that taking so long?” the woman said.
“Nearly all of the contractors I’ve approached have told me they won’t attempt a towing operation on a large moving vessel. However, we are now in negotiations with a company in St. Petersburg and I’m optimistic that by early next week—”
“Fine. If all you want to do is hide in your fucking snow globe, then the rest of us will do your job for you.” She turned to leave, giving such an extravagant roll of the eyes on her way out that you would have thought they, too, were capable of 360-degree motion.
There issued from the speaker in the base of the orb a little sigh of relief.
“Mr. Ganf—” Halyard said.
“Who is that?” Ganf yelped. “Why are you still here? I thought everyone had gone!”
Resaint knew that their pretext for visiting Surface Wave was a meeting with a biotech firm, and Halyard, presumably feeling it was more tactful not to contradict this outright, related their search for the fisherman and the “mermaid” in a manner implying this was just one of a number of items on their agenda. “They would have arrived sometime last night,” he explained. “Both of them or maybe just one of them.”
“Privacy is one of the values at the very center of our value mandala,” Ganf said. “We don’t just gossip about our visitors to anyone who asks.”
“No, of course not, but these people, or this person, are not, you know, legitimate visitors like us. I mean, they came here in a fishing boat from the migrant labor camp near Tinkanen.”
“As I said, we don’t gossip about our visitors.” Ganf paused. “However, I can absolutely guarantee you that nobody is rowing to Surface Wave from a refugee camp. We have very good perimeter security to prevent exactly that kind of scenario.”
“Okay, but if they do turn up, maybe you could let us know?”
“I’m sorry, that’s just not how we operate. Now, I would appreciate no further interruptions.”
As they were leaving the health club, Resaint looked longingly at the squash courts. It might have been okay if she hadn’t known they were here, but nothing renders a pressure more unbearable than the foretaste of release—the accumulated pressure, in this case, of those three months of cramped quarters and these three days of incessant travel, making her vibrate like a steam boiler. She asked Halyard if he played. He did not. But then, when the lift arrived, the first person to come out of it was the Turkish guy from the water taxi, still carrying his duffel.
They said hello, and maybe it was just because he had an athletic build that Resaint found herself asking him the same question: “Do you play squash?”
There might have been a bit of woolliness in the translation of the present tense, because he answered, “No, I’m just going to use the stationary bike.”
“I mean, are you capable of playing squash? Would you play a game of squash with me?”
He smiled. “I can play, but it’s been years. I’d be terrible.”
Without mercy she dismissed this objection, very much as she dismissed Halyard to go and snoop around Surface Wave on his own for an hour. The T-shirt and trainers she already had on were just about viable, but not her wool-rayon crops, so she bought workout leggings from the same vending machine where they rented a couple of Yonex rackets. The Turkish guy turned out to be called Selim. He was in his forties, handsome, with a beard as dense as doormat coir, touched with silver at the sideburns. Sure enough, he was a wretched player. It was not in her nature to demean them both by going easy on him, but his tottery serves in particular she found she had no choice but to pass back like warm-ups; that way they might at least get a rally going and she wouldn’t feel too much like a hydraulic device repeating a single mechanical action as she punched each hopeless ball beyond his reach. They barely spoke until their second game ended, when he said, “Let me give you my mother’s address in Gaziantep.”
“Why?”
“So you can arrange for my remains to be returned to my family.”
She laughed, pleased that he seemed neither resentful nor embarrassed. “I play a lot.”
“There was a time when my squash and my English were both pretty good, if you can believe it. Actually, I can still understand fine, but ever since I started using this”—he gestured at the earpiece that was translating for him—“I’ve forgotten how to say anything. Are you in biotech?”
“No, I’m a species intelligence evaluator.”
“Oh, on the boat I overheard you talking about extinctions. That explains it. You’re not the first one I’ve met. I work for the Ministry of Forest and Water Affairs.”
“So what are you doing on Surface Wave?”
He gave an apologetic smile as if he was about to make a confession. “Well, you know we have a lot of endangered species in Anatolia?”
“Yes.”
“I’m here to make some more.”
Selim explained that he was the deputy director of the ministry’s Regional Directorate for Southeastern Anatolia. By the end of the year, the Turkish government was finally due to break ground on a high-speed rail line connecting the cities of Adana, Gaziantep and Diyarbakir, right through his turf. Because this was a region of high biodiversity, the WCSE mandated a thorough survey of the route to find out whether the construction of the line was likely to finish off any endemic species that had already been backed into a corner by some combination of climate change, hydroelectric dams and overgrazing by insatiable herds of goats. Such surveys used hummingbird-sized drones to comb through every inch of the terrain, and they frequently made new discoveries that centuries of galumphing human naturalists had overlooked, analyzing the DNA in a lizard dropping or an insect carcass to prove that this was not a member of any known species.
Under WCSE rules, this rail line was not regarded as an outrageous debauch on Turkey’s part. Rather, it fell within the country’s baseline level of economic development. Turkey was perfectly entitled to build itself a 600-kilometer rail line every so often. Which meant that Turkey would not be penalized for the species it wiped out by building the line. Dues could only flow in the other direction: Turkey would be compensated if it did not build the line. Supposing it managed to restrain itself, then for every critter saved, Turkey would be allocated one extra extinction credit, which it could either spend elsewhere or sell on the open market.
But the truth was, Selim told her, the Turkish government didn’t actually want to build the railway, and it hadn’t for a while. For fiscal reasons totally unconnected to the imperiled fauna of the Anatolian plateau, it was planning to nix the whole project. It couldn’t announce its decision quite yet, otherwise it would open itself up to various legal liabilities, but at this point it was just going through the motions, crossing its fingers behind its back every time the subject came up.
So it would definitely be getting those extra extinction credits from the WCSE as a reward for its forbearance. And back when a credit sold for less than €40,000, that wouldn’t have meant much. But now that the price had spiked to ten times that, there was real money at stake. When those drones inspected the route, if they found, say, fifty endangered species instead of just forty, that was an extra four million euros in the bank. Which made it worthwhile for Selim to travel to Surface Wave, commission ten new endangered species, and set them loose upon those orchid-purpled steppes. A friend of his in the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization had promised that half of that four million euros would be quietly funneled back to Selim’s directorate, whereupon Selim could use it to supplement his meager budget for conservation work.
“What do you mean, ‘commission’ new species?” Resaint said. Just occasionally, she could sense that the translation had misconstrued a word or two, but the real meaning was generally clear from the context. What was more noticeable was the way the translation sometimes paused for a while and then gabbled like an auctioneer in its hurry to catch up; she remembered hearing once that Turkish could be a real bastard for interpreters because it so often left the pertinent verb until the very end of a long sentence.
“There’s a company here,” Selim said, “you give them the DNA from some little snake or butterfly, and they tweak a few base pairs on COX1. You know, change the barcode. They make a hundred of the new snake for you, and then you put it where the drones will find it. The drone thinks it’s genetically distinct enough that it’s a newly discovered species, so you get your extra credit. And if you commission ten at once, you get a nice discount. So when everything shakes out we should make enough of a profit that we can hire some researchers for our watershed rehabilitation project in Urfa.”
Resaint was disheartened to learn that Selim was, to borrow Halyard’s expression, “just another extinction industry cunt.” Leftists sometimes asserted that within a capitalist framework there could never be a solution to the extinction crisis that was untainted by profiteering and abuse, because the free market was like some malevolent AI, infinitely more devious than the humans who thought they could constrain it; but Resaint’s own proposal was simply that each of the hundred thousand wealthiest individuals on earth should be randomly assigned a vulnerable species and then informed that if their assigned species were ever to go extinct they would be executed by hanging.
“Is cloning really that cheap here?” she said. On the Varuna she’d wondered about cloning the venomous lumpsucker to rebuild their population, but she’d never been sure where the funding would come from. Anyway, a cloned lumpsucker wouldn’t satisfy her private agenda. It would be nonsensical for a fish to take revenge on you for pushing its species into the abyss if in fact the only reason that particular fish existed was because you had gone to enormous lengths to pull it back out.
“Well, the new snakes don’t have to be reproductively viable or anything like that—they barely have to function at all, really—so they can take a few shortcuts and it keeps the cost down.”
“And you think you’ll get away with it?”
“Before the biobank hacks, I probably wouldn’t have taken the risk. But now that everything’s in such a mess . . . Who’s going to notice?”
“So just at the moment we have to begin rebuilding everything we lost, you’re inserting spurious data. Fake species.”
“There was a time when that would have kept me up at night,” he conceded. “You probably won’t believe this but I used to be an idealist.” As he spoke, he was reading a message on his phone.
“What happened?”
He looked up. “Do you feel like a coffee? I mean after I take a shower?”
“Shouldn’t you be going to find your bioengineers? I assume you didn’t come all the way from Urfa just to play squash and drink coffee.”
“You’re right, I was supposed to be meeting with them right now. They just told me they’re stuck in a lift.”
SHE WAS ABOUT to sit down when Selim darted past her and claimed the bench seat for himself. It took her a moment to realize he was making sure she wouldn’t have to sit facing the gnats; a chivalrous gesture, newly coined. Like nearly all the public spaces on Surface Wave, this café was walled in glass, and although somebody had switched on the electrochromic tinting that would normally be used to dim the glare of a low sun, it didn’t help that much. She sat down opposite him and took a sip of her Americano. As in the health club, the architects had permitted here a minor relaxation of the white fiberglass aesthetic, and the tabletops were made of that GM teak that grew with a grid pattern in its wood like slightly wobbly graph paper.
For a long time, Selim told her, he had been married to the pallid nuthatch. He had first encountered the bird as an undergraduate, on a trip to Nemrut Dagi National Park with the Dicle University Birdwatching Club (at that time convulsed by the acrimonious break-up of two of its four members). There, the last surviving colony of Sitta petronia nested in the cliffs. Selim learned that the pallid nuthatch had been identified as the species that the great Anatolian folk poet Yunus Emre was referring to in one of his most beautiful verses—in other words, it was part of the country’s cultural heritage as well as its ecological one—yet without anyone really paying attention its numbers had dwindled to less than a hundred. All the pallid nuthatches in the universe weighed not much more than his liver.
The moment he found this out, the bird seemed to transform before his eyes. Beforehand, it had been just another short-tailed passerine, unexceptional, colorless, with grubby-looking breast feathers and a high-pitched call that cracked in the middle like a ragged human scream played back at triple speed. But afterward, every hop and twitch seemed precious, historic, full of grace and defiance, as the nuthatch solemnly persisted with its work, ignoring the approach of extinction. Right away Selim felt as if he had a personal responsibility to this dying immortal. Elsewhere in Turkey the northern bald ibis and the white-headed duck had their guardians, but nobody was looking out for the pallid nuthatch. He returned again and again to the cliffs, and when he went on to his MSc he made the nuthatch the focus of his fieldwork, and after that he won funding from a conservation foundation in Switzerland to continue his research into how it might be saved. He still remembered the day he got that email as the happiest day of his life.
And sure enough, for several years he lived blissfully with the nuthatch. The females would lay a second time if the first egg disappeared from the nest, so Selim would climb the cliffs with a ladder to swipe the eggs, then hatch them in an incubator, hoping to multiply the nuthatches’ output. He fitted the entrances of their nest cavities with wooden baffles so that invasive myna birds couldn’t muscle their way in, and he even bought a BB gun to roust the mynas, although he was never fast enough to use it. He loved the sense of mission, his alone, and his alone, too, the study of the nuthatches’ lives; like a fissure in the cliffs, from the outside it looked narrow but once you got inside it widened out forever. Willingly he would have mantled himself in their feathers, anointed himself in their guano. If you set aside all the grant applications and the networking at conferences and the fiddling with the tracking software, it felt honest, natural, a job that, like an animal, did not need to be justified. Once, he fell off the ladder and broke his ankle. More than once, he got stung by scorpions and it hurt so much he vomited. He hardly minded.
But then, about a decade into his time with the nuthatches, there was the incident with his friend Necla’s husband. The war photographer.
Whenever Selim had to explain his work to a relative back in Gaziantep, he was as straightforward as possible, knowing that none of them could really understand what he’d made of his life. But whenever he had to explain it to some accomplished, worldly person from Istanbul or beyond, he had a routine. “I just look at birds all day,” he would say, affably, self-mockingly, as if ruing his own craziness. “That’s all I do. It’s a very boring life. Very nerdy.” And the other person would contradict him, saying, “Wow, no, that sounds fascinating, much more worthwhile than what I do, conservation is wonderful, birds are precious, I wish I could spend more time in nature, isn’t climate change awful?” or some permutation of the above. And in response Selim would humbly concede that yes, maybe his job did have some value, after all. This was how it almost always played out. People understood their roles.
But not this time. Necla was his only truly glamorous friend: she had been the most beautiful girl in their high school, and around the time of their university entrance exams she’d been scouted on Instagram by a modeling agency in Paris, and after working all over Europe she’d married this war photographer. He was Turkish too, but they’d met on a glacier in Iceland after Lanvin hired him for ten thousand euros a day to shoot an ad campaign, presumably hoping he’d imbue it with a haunted, prestigious quality. Selim had been forced to miss their wedding after a freak summer storm blasted the nuthatch cliffs like a water cannon, but some years later, finding himself in Istanbul for a few nights, he went to Necla’s apartment for dinner and met her husband for the first time.
From him, there was no generous riposte when Selim explained what he did. Just a puzzled, contemptuous look, as if he could hardly make sense of what Selim was saying because it so defied belief that an adult man would spend his time in such a way. So Selim kept chattering on about the birds, and Necla’s husband still said nothing, until Selim mentioned the time he spent up ladders screwing wooden baffles into the cliff face.
“You make little gates? For the little nests?”
Selim nodded.
“Sounds like performance art.”
One week later Selim was up a ladder with a nuthatch egg in his latex-gloved hand and he felt an almost uncontrollable urge to hurl the egg down and see it smash on the ground.
Brief as it was, that conversation in the apartment in Beyoğlu, Necla’s husband’s refusal to play along politely, had punctured something inside him. In later years he sometimes wondered whether the exchange would have had quite such brutal revelatory force if it had been with anyone other than the alpha male, the hero of battlefields, the wooer of fashion models. But what was running through his head up the ladder couldn’t have come out of nowhere. There was too much of it, too profuse an explosion of magma and pus. It was like when you’re having what promises at first to be a minor quarrel with somebody and then you realize that in fact they are only just transitioning from their opening statement into the first of many subsectioned arguments and you think, “Wow, I had no idea they’d been brooding on this for so long,” except that in this case the other person in the quarrel was himself, Selim.
What was the point of all this? Wasn’t it, indeed, an empty ritual, a performance for nobody? Wasn’t it just solipsistic fidgeting, circular busywork of the kind you’d devise to occupy a surplus person? Wasn’t it difficult even to imagine a vocation that could have less of a purpose? What pathology or delusion had enabled his younger self to find this work inherently profound? Hadn’t he thrown his away his prime? Wasn’t he an embarrassment to his parents? Hadn’t he had real potential once? Maybe he wouldn’t have been a war photographer, maybe he wouldn’t have traveled the world and documented atrocities and had babies with Necla, but couldn’t he have had at least some fun, made some contribution? Why should he have to spend so many days in the rain and snow? Hadn’t he been numbingly lonely for ten years? Weren’t the pallid nuthatches just an evolutionary dead end, and out of misplaced reverence for them hadn’t he made himself into one as well? Hadn’t his very first impression of them been correct, that they were basically a banal, shoddy creature, no more than filler in the Book of Nature? Weren’t they just witless, ungrateful, screeching little vermin?
And wasn’t this all their fucking fault?
He raised the egg in his hand.
“DID YOU BREAK it?” Resaint said.
“No. I couldn’t.”
“But after that you left?”
“No. Not for two more years.”
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Did you have second thoughts?”
“No. I loathed the birds more every day. But it took a while to really extricate myself. Psychologically, but also—you know, the funding, the partnerships. There was no one to replace me. But finally I moved over to the Ministry.”
“And now all you do is game the system?”
“No, we do good work there,” Selim said. “We’re trying to stop Anatolia turning to desert. We’ll probably fail, but we won’t regret trying, and any goatherd would understand why we did try. You can put all your hopes and dreams into something like that and it will fit them easily. But if you try to put all your hopes and dreams into this little . . .” A gesture with his fingers like a fluttering bird. “Animals aren’t really built for that. They don’t have the capacity. It should be obvious when you look in their eyes, but people forget.” He paused. “You only spend two or three months on each species, right? That’s good. You don’t have time to get too attached.”
“You’d be surprised,” Resaint said.
Selim gave her a quizzical look.
“There’s a fish—” she began.
“Selim? We’re so sorry.”
Resaint looked up. A man and a woman stood in there in poses of contrition. They wore button-up shirts in shades of blue that were very nearly the same and yet just different enough that it niggled you like a production error. These were the bioengineers who proposed to swamp the databases with scammy listings like Céline replicas on an auction site. They introduced themselves but Resaint immediately forgot their names. “Apparently what happened is that the yayflies got into a transformer cooling fan,” Pale Blue said, pulling up a chair while Paler Blue joined Selim on the bench seat.
“What did you call them?” Resaint said.
“The yayflies,” Pale Blue said, gesturing at the insects outside. The gummed-up fan, she explained, had sparked a small fire. Normally a maintenance drone would have swooped in to douse the fire right away, but none of those could be deployed just now because of the high winds around the spindrifters. So the fire got out of hand, resulting in a cascade of electrical problems that paralyzed the nearest bank of lifts. “In the end we were stuck in there for nearly two hours.”
Resaint was about to make an exit. But then Pale Blue added, “If I ever see Lodewijk again he’s going to have a lot to answer for.”
“Who’s Lodewijk?” Resaint said.
“He’s the guy making the yayflies.”
“I thought there was nobody inside the module.”
“There isn’t,” Pale Blue said. “Lodewijk left after he set up the rearing system. It’s all automated. But he’s still paying the fees on the module every month. He could end this if he wanted, but nobody knows where he is or how to get hold of him.”
Resaint had assumed that the gnat geyser must be a bizarre mishap, an unintended side effect of some Surface Wave tenant’s careless work, like algae blooming in a river because of chemical runoff from a farm. It hadn’t occurred to her that somebody might have contrived it deliberately. “Why would he have done this?”
“Well, to be fair to him, he didn’t do this,” Paler Blue said, repeating Pale Blue’s gesture toward the mega-swarm. “The spindrifters weren’t here when he set up the rearing system. The yayflies were just supposed to disperse into the sky. He couldn’t have known that we’d end up in this ‘pissing into the wind’ situation. He may still not know. Obviously it’s not very popular to defend Lodewijk at the moment, but he and I used to be pretty friendly. He told me about the yayflies when he was designing them. He just didn’t tell me everything he had planned.”
“What are the yayflies, exactly?” Resaint said. But then she glanced at Selim. “Sorry, you probably need to get on with your meeting.”
“No, I would like to know too,” Selim said. And he was, after all, the client. So Paler Blue embarked on an explanation.
Lodewijk, he told them, was co-founder of a Dutch startup developing microbial fuel cells to improve the methane yield from wastewater. In order to run certain trials that would have caused regulatory hassles back in the Netherlands, he had leased one of Surface Wave’s extra-large satellite modules. Ever since his postgrad days, he had also been involved in a charity that installed smart irrigation systems for rice and maize farmers in Malawi, flying down there every few months and assisting remotely between trips. It could be frustrating work: the farmers kept complaining that the new irrigation systems didn’t work as well as the old ones and were impossible to fix when they broke down. After a few beers, Lodewijk would sometimes complain about what he saw as the backwardness and ingratitude of these farmers, but he kept at it. Then, in spring last year, there had come the worst floods in Malawi’s history, washing away nearly all of the smallholdings in which Lodewijk had invested his efforts.
The disaster hit Lodewijk hard, and afterward his whole outlook seemed to change. He still wanted to make the world better, he would say, but it was a hopelessly inefficient use of time to attempt to improve human lives: they were too messy and unpredictable, especially in an age of stampeding climate change. Anyway, research showed that a person’s level of happiness was almost unshakeable, no matter what happened to them. If you won the lottery, or married your sweetheart, a year later you would report about the same satisfaction with life as beforehand. If your firstborn died, or you were paralyzed from the neck down in a car crash—ditto. How much an individual enjoyed their life seemed to be determined mostly by genes rather than circumstances. And that was the seed of Lodewijk’s next project.
The yayflies, as he called them, were based on Nervijuncta nigricoxa, a type of gall gnat, but with the help of some of his peers on Surface Wave he’d made a number of changes to their life cycle. The yayflies were all female, and they reproduced asexually, meaning they were clones of each other. A yayfly egg would hatch into a larva, and the larva would feed greedily on kelp for several days. Once her belly was full, she would settle down to pupate. Later, bursting from her cocoon, the adult yayfly would already be pregnant with hundreds of eggs. She would lay these eggs, and the cycle would begin anew. But the adult yayfly still had another few hours to live. She couldn’t feed; indeed, she had no mouthparts, no alimentary canal. All she could do was fly toward the horizon, feeling an unimaginably intense joy.
The boldest modifications Lodewijk had made to these insects were to their neural architecture. A yayfly not only had excessive numbers of receptors for so-called pleasure chemicals, but also excessive numbers of neurons synthesizing them; like a duck leg simmering luxuriantly in its own fat, the whole brain was simultaneously gushing these neurotransmitters and soaking them up, from the moment it left the cocoon. A yayfly didn’t have the ability to search for food or avoid predators or do almost any of the other things that Nervijuncta nigricoxa could do; all of these functions had been edited out to free up space. She was, in the most literal sense, a dedicated hedonist, the minimum viable platform for rapture that could also take care of its own disposal. There was no way for a human being to understand quite what it was like to be a yayfly, but Lodewijk’s aim had been to evoke the experience of a first-time drug user taking a heroic dose of MDMA, the kind of dose that would leave you with irreparable brain damage. And the yayflies were suffering brain damage, in the sense that after a few hours their little brains would be used-up husks; neurochemically speaking, the machine was imbalanced and unsound. But by then the yayflies would already be dead. They would never get as far as the comedown.
You could argue, if you wanted, that a human orgasm was a more profound output of pleasure than even the most consuming gnat bliss, since a human brain was so much bigger than a gnat brain. But what if tens of thousands of these yayflies were born every second, billions every day? That would be a bigger contribution to the sum total of wellbeing in the universe than any conceivable humanitarian intervention. And it could go on indefinitely, an unending anti-disaster.
“That’s what they’re for?” Resaint said.
Paler Blue nodded. “A few months ago, Lodewijk applied for permission to make a structural modification to his module. He wanted to install a much bigger exhaust flue. He said he needed it for his bacteria trials. Really it was an exit route for the yayflies. The last thing he had to put in place before he got it all running.”
“But I don’t understand how it keeps going on its own,” Resaint said. “I know there’s an electricity supply but what are the larvae feeding on?”
Paler Blue took out his phone, stretched it out wide, and crimped the bottom corners so it would stand up on the table where everyone could see it. Then he called up a rendering of Module 3, a sixty-meter-tall cylinder with its bottom third under the water.
“Lodewijk’s module has its own algaculture set-up. Two kilometers of longlines.” The rendering showed the seaweed growing in the sea around the module, long orderly rows like looms in a carpet factory. “And this is twelve percent kelp.” What this signified, Resaint knew, was that this modified strain of kelp could convert twelve percent of the energy in sunlight into chemical energy for growth, whereas traditional kelp could only manage . . . well, she couldn’t remember the figure offhand but it was definitely less. “So the drones harvest the kelp, they shred it, and they dump it into the rearing system for the larvae to feed on. And obviously the yayfly’s metabolism is tweaked for perfect compatibility with the kelp. So the whole thing is very efficient and self-contained, not counting the electricity supply. That’s how Lodewijk is able to yield billions of yayflies a day from a relatively modest algaculture system.”
But Resaint had noticed something on the rendering. “What are those?” she said, pointing at a detail on the seafloor.
“They’re just moorings for the kelp lines.”
Resaint looked closer.
She hadn’t felt much optimism about the trip to Surface Wave. It was a very long shot. Even supposing they could find the fisherman, and he could tell them exactly where he caught the fish from the video, that fish might just have been a vagrant far from home and the information might bring them no closer to finding a second population. That was why she was still sitting here with Selim and the others, satisfying her curiosity about the yayflies, instead of rushing off to help Halyard with whatever inquiries he was making.
Yet now she felt a tremor of real hope.
And perhaps it was Selim’s confession that had left her vulnerable to that. Because it had brought the dream to life again. If he knew that, he might think she’d totally missed the point. But the truth was she already understood that a long involvement with the lumpsuckers might be fruitless and maddening. She was certain that the lumpsuckers had the capacity to understand what she needed them to understand, but she couldn’t be certain that she had the capacity to teach them. Most of what she knew about working with animals in the laboratory, she had learned on the job—her narrow, venal job. She was proposing to do something without precedent and she was proposing to do it without assistance. At best—even assuming it was feasible, even assuming she was lucky—it would mean years of repetition and frustration, of mirages and dead ends, as she became a prisoner fighting to ensure her own execution. At worst, none of it would come to anything at all, and she would be revealed as a fantasist like Mrs. Purleyswars.
What his story had made tangible for her, however, was not the threat of failure but rather the promise of the attempt. That fissure in the cliffside he’d talked about, the fissure with a world beyond it, the fissure that in his telling was also a trap: however dark his warnings about it, they only helped her to imagine herself squeezing through.
“Are there cameras down there?” she said.
“There are maintenance drones that just loop around the infrastructure all day,” Pale Blue said, twirling her finger in a circle.
“Is there any way I could see the video feeds?”
“You couldn’t, but we could, probably, because we’re residents. By default we tend to have access to stuff like that. Why?”
The reason the venomous lumpsuckers were so wedded to those reefs off the Swedish coast was that only those reefs had the necessary boulders, dumped there by the Pleistocene glaciers who didn’t take their litter with them when they left. Without those boulders and their crevices, the finicky lumpsuckers wouldn’t even entertain the idea of breeding. Because the South Kvarken reefs were the only remaining corner of the Baltic with both the right sort of water and the right sort of rocks, Resaint had never found it credible that there could be a remnant population anywhere else. Back on the Varuna, she’d hoped that one day she might artificially expand the lumpsuckers’ range by collecting hundreds of boulders from the shore and dropping them off the side of a boat, but the AMVs had chewed up the South Kvarken colony before she’d had the chance.
But now, as she looked at the rendering—at the blocky concrete moorings on the seafloor that held the kelp lines stable—she tried to imagine herself seeing those moorings through a venomous lumpsucker’s eyes.
And what she saw was a reef of absolutely perfect boulders.