than the lines of numbers and code in BIP’s own digitized archive?
By Oscar and Alexi’s time paper was only a means of brainstorming, of clearing their heads, and the real work happened once they sat down at their terminals and logged into BIP’s database where they could populate the records to confirm a place they’d pinned on the map—that forest, the mountains between settlements, or whatever they’d found. There can be no place without records, no discoveries without files and forms, so someone had to draw up and fill out the paperwork to bring the Arctic into being and those someones were Alexi and Oscar, and Slotkin and Wend and Dimchas and the others who had come before.
None of them had been to the Arctic, of course, but who has? Who but the great men: the Pearys, the Franklins, even the Cooks, more or less. Greater men than worked in BIP’s basement. But that, as Director Lenz often said, was their advantage, the edge that allowed generations of prognosticators to get on with it: a lack of actual knowledge made the job easier and their work more useful to their government and its people. The important thing was professionalism untainted by sentimental attachments to snowfields and icebergs and unvoting tribes who never pay taxes, as he reminded his underlings each Monday morning. He hadn’t taken this promotion from the Office of Government Standards on Filing Systems downtown to have his new Bureau (it hadn’t been “new” to Director Lenz for some years but he still said that as part of his speech, perhaps for its inspirational value) get bogged down in the truth. Prognosticators had focus unbroken by refracting light or the shifting appearance of ice and of sky so problematic in the Arctic itself: if blue turns to green and yellow to red, if a day or a night lasts for months, how can anyone know anything? How can you make sense of a place if it won’t hold still to be counted and even its colors aren’t fast? Their job was to imagine, never to know. The truth, as generations of directors had reminded their charges, would only get in the way.
But Oscar had always dreamed of the Pole, like all boys and all men who still have boy in them, men who can’t quite get rid of that box of Arctic Greats trading cards at the back of a closet and who still have a carton of action figures—Amundsen and his real-fur collared jacket, Robert J. Flaherty and his tiny plastic movie camera—tucked away where their wives won’t tease them about it. That’s why he’d taken the job at BIP when it opened, despite the cut from his salary as a database developer in Weights and Measures, despite the loss of his windowed office upstairs with its view of the National Mall. Oscar had given up on the actual Arctic a long time ago, abandoned his childhood dreams of mushing across snowfields en route to the Pole and charging north into the wind on a mammoth icebreaker. He’d left those dreams behind like cairns stacked on the ice for fallen shipmates, but when the position downstairs in BIP appeared on the government jobs board it looked like a second chance at something he’d lost. A basement office with a map of the Arctic was closer than he ever expected to come by that point in his life and so much closer than most daydreaming boys ever got. All but those lucky few who somehow have what it takes, who have more than a John Franklin lunchbox and its plastic thermos with most of the Erebus faded away. Those lucky few who reach the blank spaces of which we all dream.
The lying had taken some getting used to. Not being able to tell his wife, Julia, where he really worked—especially when it was a lifelong dream fulfilled against all the odds—had been hard and still was. He’d had to practice, at first, testing funny stories about informational policies and color codes on Slotkin before bringing them home. But in time the lie grew familiar, part of his routine, and he found ways to talk about what he’d really been doing without talking about it at all. A code between husband and wife, even if only he knew.
Triumphant, Alexi raised a fistful of sugar packets out of the bin and said, “Yes, I can see the settlement now.” But a concerned look crossed his face and he returned to rummaging. “And I propose a spoon works as part of that colony, providing much needed jobs and producing the finest utensils in all of the north.”
It’s hard to imagine Alexi dreamed of the Arctic when he was a boy. It’s hard to imagine him wanting more than an easy day’s work and swift subway ride home, to be greeted by a new issue of the magazines that awaited him in their subtle black wrappers and perhaps a coupon for free pizza from the parlor he favored—the one where he trained for competition, and had already invited his partner to watch him “work out,” which was about as much of his outside life as he’d shared in the two weeks he and Oscar had worked together. With Alexi the map was the territory, for the most part. But maybe he, too, had once longed for a fast sledge and a strong team of dogs, or daydreamed of drifting over the Pole with Greely or Andrée and being the ace pilot who saved their doomed missions from failure and kept them on course.
Perhaps he shared Oscar’s nostalgia, a nagging sense things were if not better in the cold war for the Pole that they were clearer, at least: black and white as the expanses of an incomplete map—what was known, what was not. North was north and south was south, either you reached the Pole or you didn’t—never mind what those lying Cookies might say about Peary—and a journey from one place to another was an actual journey, not a phone call or a satellite broadcast or some entry double-confirmed in a database managed many rungs down the ladder of latitude and historical value. Explorers went somewhere and they came home or they didn’t, they led real expeditions and never dreamed they would give that work over to bureaucrats digging through filing cabinets and databases of old ideas.
But one age cannot be another and you make due with what’s available when you come along, as Oscar often reminded himself. He was lucky to be where he was, exploring the Arctic with a pension plus health insurance.
Before he could consider Alexi’s proposal of a spoon works and before Alexi located a spoon, their desktop intercom buzzed so hard the whole cube of yellowed plastic—somehow discolored by sunlight despite never leaving the basement—rattled and shook as Director Lenz’ voice crackled out of its tinny round speaker. “Oscar. Alexi. Into my office. Fast as a lightbulb in front of my desk!”
And with that command they were off.
A chemist fingered his black desktop polar bear statuette in a windowless laboratory, surrounded by beakers and burners and samples of the various weights and textures and durabilities of plastic he was paid to perfect. The blue glow of a stark white monitor—its casing molded from one of his own earlier formulas—gleamed on the glossy curves of the figurine as he rolled it around in his fingers like a real bear might roll the chemist’s own corpse in its far-reaching paws if given a chance. A gold sticker affixed to one unvarnished pad read MADE IN CHINA and some gum, some glue residue, peeked from beneath where the chemist had once tried to remove it but given up for fear of leaving behind a bigger mess than the sticker itself.
Somewhere, he knew, was the original of that statuette. A real bear, or not a real bear but a real statue of a real bear, not re-carved by machine, not measured by lasers and cut into a template and mass-produced for souvenir seekers in art museums like the one he had visited on vacation the previous summer in Washington, DC, his eye caught by that palmable polar bear as he exited through the gift shop.
Who knows why? Who can say what he saw in that polar bear stripped of its translucent fur, its secret black skin rendered by whose hands first in stone then re-rendered in reconstituted stone substitute?
Somewhere that original was showing its age, more worn now by time than the infinite souvenir copies of its former self could ever become, its once accurate measurements preserved now as numbers in the memory of some fabrication machine. Perhaps that original had been scorched and shaved by the very laser that took its measure for preservation. Perhaps taking its measure destroyed the real bear altogether. But this bear, the chemist’s, gleamed with a surface as shallow and dark as the computer display on his desk where green text flickered and blinked (because this was back in those days). Ageless as the computer’s white plastic housing in that sunless lab where every morning he arrived a bit older, a bit grayer at the temples and sideburns and eyes, a day thinner up top and in his soul, too.
And it took years of experimentation, trial runs upon runs and failed batches and hours of secret off-the-books overtime but he found the solution, a formula for plastic that would wither and yellow in the glare of time’s passage whether it ever saw sunlight or not. His legacy would be the