over the world.
It was only a few months until complaints started coming and his employers connected the dots in a trail back to him, to his lab, but not all the way to the bear. The chemist had expected that. He’d expected to be fired but he was wrong. He was given a bonus and a new title and he got bumped upstairs because old-looking machines made their users feel old, made them anxious, made them purchase new keyboards and computer towers and, later, when the formula spread, new televisions and intercoms, too, as they staved off the creep of the bear without knowing that hot breath was his on the backs of their necks when they hunched over desks, assuming the shapes of busy people as if they’d been carved into the form—measured and fit for it—without knowing quite why.
And the chemist, wealthy now and too important to his company to do any more work, spent long afternoons at the zoo across town, where the real polar bears glinted green with algae if they caught the light, the green of those formula lines he’d once typed on a screen (though by now, on computers employing his plastics, typing spaces were as white as a bear was expected to be instead of as black as bears actually were). He watched them swim and he wondered why the bears didn’t break out and head north, and he wondered that about himself, too.
And his intercoms and keyboards and monitor casings, replaced and cast off of desk after desk, piled up to outlive him in poisonous swamps where circuit boards float like squared lily pads in parts of the world that don’t show up on paper, the places that fall between places on maps, the numbers between the numbers in GPS units imbued with the chemist’s own alchemy.
2
“I hope,” said Alexi, “there’s breakfast or bagels or something.” He stopped for a moment in the long hallway to sip from his steaming though still spoonless cup, and when he raised the rim to his lips Oscar glimpsed a large, black letter “A” markered onto the white enamel underside, obscuring the fainter curves of an old “S” underneath.
“Why would there be?”
“Your anniversary! You’ve been with the Bureau ten years today. If that isn’t worth a few bagels, I don’t know what is. And I’ve got the Eastern Seaboard Pancake Grand Stack coming up—bagels are better practice than nothing.”
“How do you know that? You’ve only been here two weeks and I hadn’t realized myself.”
“Oh, you know…,” Alexi said before tilting his cup so it hid his face.
Upstairs in Weights and Measures all had been precision and numbers. Oscar had started in filing then advanced to be a troubleshooter for databases, finding all the ways the data entry pool might make mistakes and fracture a table or form. His job was to make those mistakes first, to see how the database broke then ensure no one could make that same error again before moving on to new failures.
Upstairs, fields were never left empty at the end of the day. Everything had to be balanced and accounted for in double-entry—data was highlighted blue after it had been entered once, and turned red when entered again—and it took time for Oscar to adjust to thinking of emptiness, of BIP’s square miles of nothing veiled by a layer of electronic something, as a day’s work. Time and the teaching of Slotkin, whose imagination had gone over the past several months until every day he invented the same beachfront resort, the same volleyball courts and bikinis, in whatever stretch of the North they were prognosticating on at the time. He hadn’t made any discoveries in weeks when the two of them were finally called before the director.
“Who plays volleyball on Ellesmere Island?” Director Lenz had thundered. “It’s below zero most of the year! How many courts could they possibly need?”
Neither man had an answer to offer. The fact that those volleyball courts were pure speculation, that none of them would ever be built, was irrelevant to the work they were doing, to the building material requisitions they had filled out and filed and to the construction agreements with contractors they’d created and stamped and signed featuring all the appropriate logos and seals made with the Bureau’s own image editing software. That it was all prognostication didn’t matter to the database or to the director.
“You have to at least make a damn effort,” Director Lenz scolded his men. “Your discoveries have to make sense. A beach resort? That close to the Pole? Are you asking for us to be shut down? Do you know how hard is to hold onto our budget these days? Even the Post Office is at risk of closure. The Post Office, my God,” and he paused perhaps in reverence of that most venerated of agencies before adding, “Do you two have any idea?”
They didn’t, but the next day Director Lenz hosted a party in his office for just the three of them. An extra productivity meeting, really—on a Wednesday this time and with cake—at which Slotkin was given a shining brass compass engraved with his name and an unfilled outline of the whole Polar region etched on the round back of its casing as if his years of work at BIP had all been undone though it probably wasn’t meant to be taken that way. But Slotkin hardly noticed, too busy shuffling into the corner of the director’s office where he muttered under his shaggy mustache and sketched the dimensions and details of his Ellesmere Island beach resort on a gray paper towel. He was gone the next day and Oscar hadn’t heard from him since. He wouldn’t have known how to reach Slotkin if he’d wanted to, but he imagined his old partner whiling away his elderly years at a beach resort somewhere, playing volleyball high in the Arctic. Or maybe—who knew?—he was already dead. They would say the same about Oscar someday, and Alexi and Director Lenz, unless forms were filed to prove otherwise. It’s an outcome as inevitable as the top of the world.
“Ten years?” Oscar asked. “Have I really been here that long?”
“You have,” said Alexi. “You might be presented with a plaque to hang on the wall of our office, above the electric kettle. I can see it now.”
The hallway hadn’t changed since Slotkin’s departure. The same faded green walls and the same buzzing fluorescent tubes overhead. The same director in the same office at the end of the hallway and the same number of echoing footsteps from their door to his. Nothing changed but the Arctic, reimagined in hundreds and thousands of configurations, and some of the prognostications Oscar had made with Alexi in those last two weeks were the same ones he’d made with his previous partner over the years, and no doubt those same discoveries had been made earlier, too, by men who came before all three of them and before even Wend, in the days of Rudnik and Dimchas and other names lost to the obsolescence of file formats that eventually corrupts us all. The excitement of a new discovery lasted only until the duplication was revealed in their files—which became so much easier, infinitely, after all the old records were scanned into a database and made searchable—and instead of filing originals they filed updates, filling in what had happened in those locations since the last time the files were addressed. Perhaps a school building had become outmoded and had been torn down or replaced. Perhaps a town’s population had boomed—was a streak of silver discovered and a spoon factory built? Or perhaps a coal vein ran dry and the families of miners packed up and left it behind. Generations of prognosticators could return to the same parts of the Arctic and find something new, a clear space to continue what their predecessors established, as if they’d sailed to Martin Frobisher’s abandoned colony at Meta Incognita to rebuild on the brick stumps of his long-crumbled walls. They were steadfast as Lady Franklin’s search parties, setting out one after another without ever stopping to think how an accurate answer, a once and for all, could put them right out of work. They didn’t worry because they were safe from the truth: an accurate answer might come and go—it might do so three times in a day—without any one of them realizing how close to danger they’d sailed.
Alexi slurped the dregs of his tea as they reached the door to their superior’s office, already open a crack. From inside came the director’s voice grumbling, “I don’t know how the fuck it got out…” He paused, on the phone, then said, “No… It got out, that’s all I know… The damn internet… well, fucking plumb it! I’m doing my end.”
“Just in time,” said Alexi, gazing into his cup, and Oscar knocked on the door with the one-two-(pause)-three knuckle raps Slotkin had taught him the director preferred.