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Back in their own office, back down the hall, the prognosticators set to the day’s agenda. Alexi proposed a lumberyard and sawmill and Oscar added a workers’ café. They agreed on a technical college founded on the south shore of Cornwallis Island only to discover the tractor and plow factory built there by Dimchas years earlier, so relocated the college to the north end.
At lunchtime Alexi stepped out, saying he needed to make a phone call—which required a trip upstairs to street level to have any chance at a signal—but Oscar ate a sandwich at his desk and kept working. Director Lenz’ announcement was enough disruption for one day to handle. When Alexi returned, Director Lenz buzzed the intercom and asked for him—and only him—to come to his office. Oscar had never been summoned alone to the director’s office and in all his years at BIP he’d never seen Slotkin called alone to the office, either. Alexi wasn’t gone long before he came whistling back to his desk and Oscar tried not to wonder what his new partner and Director Lenz might have talked about. Paperwork, probably. Tax forms.
He spent the afternoon filing building permits backdated a decade, creating receipts and invoices for the materials used in constructing the college, and entering that paperwork into the database that made it all real. Meanwhile, Alexi, with his knack for everyday appetites, compiled electronic records of ten years’ worth of paperwork related to groceries and other necessities of daily living a technical college might have: the pencils and notebooks, the toilet paper, the aspirin and condoms and antacid tablets to stock the campus infirmary. Between the two of them they created a whole institution that existed only on paper, or not even on paper but only in electronic records of paper that never existed. Oscar made the blueprints by copying some standard BIP templates for education (designs that had been adapted, slightly, for hospitals and prisons over the years) and once they were ready he logged them into the records of Northern Branch, the satellite office responsible for administering all Arctic construction. In theory, at least: Slotkin hadn’t known if Northern Branch really existed so neither did Oscar; it may have been another shell in the game of BIP records and perhaps there was even another office, some other department, responsible for inventing government offices when they were needed, a Bureau of Bureaucratic Prognostication. Whether Northern Branch was actually up there or not was irrelevant to Oscar’s work so he’d never worried about it and didn’t that day. Meanwhile, Alexi wrote rosters of past and present students, even those set to enroll for the fall term, and logged those records into the database, too.
The Cookies, those bitter losers, complained the BIP way was to rest on their laurels, to keep talking up the same old expeditions without taking fresh risks, not that they knew the half of how BIP actually worked. But BIP were government and the NGO Cookies assumed they had infinite funding, so they went on in their bulletins and listservs about the nobility of “real” exploration, of actual men going to actual places, always toward the goal of bumping off Peary as first to the Pole and restoring their own Frederick Cook to history’s good graces. They’d been at it for years, spreading rumors and sparking arguments the wider world knew next to nothing about, verbal skirmishes in Arctic enthusiasts’ magazine pages and later online, the occasional theft and counter-theft of some artifact or some piece of supposedly “last word” evidence, since April 1909 when the fight over who’d reached the Pole first flared up. It had been in the papers for a while, of course, big news in its day and scandal enough to destroy Cook’s career, yet by Oscar’s time no one knew but the descendent participants that the dispute simmered still and sometimes boiled over long after history had set it aside. They talked a good game among the musty oak panels and threadbare armchairs of their club downtown but the Cookies never went anywhere close to the Pole, no closer than BIP (which was, officially, in Peary’s camp, not that it mattered much day-to-day), because exploration costs money and the Arctic was a hard sell to those with deep pockets and purses, unlike in Peary’s day when business scions and industry’s leading lights had been eager to attach their names to each expedition.
Even space had become a hard sell though you’d never know it from NASA’s brave face, shameless as the men of BIP found it. Retroactive discovery and prognostication were more cost effective, exploring backward rather than forward by deciding what was already discovered then laying a paper trail to it. If the records say a campus was already constructed, that a sawmill or shipyard or even a beachfront resort with a volleyball court on frigid Ellesmere Island is there and already paid for, if the paperwork is all in place then it’s so. As far as anyone knows. And in a region where it’s unlikely anyone would venture to check, saying so had always been enough to ensure the next year’s budget.
That’s what Oscar and Alexi were told weekly by Director Lenz and no doubt it’s what he was told by whoever told him what to do. Maybe the Suit and the Stars.
After all, the argument had gone at the founding of BIP and each time Director Lenz refreshed his underlings’ motivation, who ever goes to the Arctic? Who but the great men who discovered great things and died out a long time ago? Those great men and now, for some reason, the two of them. Oscar and Alexi. They may not be great, and were often reminded by their director they weren’t, but think of the money they’d saved with their work. Think of the places they’d prevented the country from spending its taxes and resources and manpower to visit, by proving we’d already been there and so had no need to go back. Perhaps they’d even saved lives.
There were days Oscar’s discoveries felt so important, when he felt so successful, he wanted nothing more than to tell his wife what he’d done. He’d rush home picturing how proud she would be but it was an exercise in futility: he never told her and he never could because secrecy was rule one of BIP. Secrecy even from spouses. So instead he’d get home and when Julia asked, as she always did, how his day had been, he’d have nothing to tell her but, “Fine.” On regular days, days when he hadn’t done what felt like great things, he could make up a story about color coding or some especially challenging new filing system required by the Division of Aquatic Categories or whichever agency first came to mind. He could even conceal what he’d really done with a code of his own, telling his wife he had come up with a breakthrough alphanumerical system allowing twice as many files to occupy the same space when what he was actually talking about was discovering a lost colony on some Arctic spit.
But on the best of his days, days like the one when he discovered Symmes’ Hole, he had nothing to say; the gap between the truth and the best possible lie he might find to hide it was simply too great. So those days he most wanted to share with his wife were the days he could tell her the least and the days Oscar felt loneliest. He worried this would be one of those days, because how could he tell her he was off to the Arctic? What made up story about filing systems could communicate the wonder of that?
He and Julia would arrive home at the end of a day, ask each other how their day had been, and each of them would say, “Fine,” leaving nothing to talk about next. He’d even started to wonder if the work in a subdivision of Transportation Julia sometimes told him about—sharing funny moments from the Registry of Approved Tires and Treads—was in fact what she did all day or if she had an unmentionable job of her own, because hours at home with the familiar made strange by their silence were often as quiet as hours at BIP.
As quiet as he and Alexi were for a few hours that afternoon, each at his own terminal, but Oscar’s head whirled with possibilities about the expedition Director Lenz was sending them on as he waited for the appropriate obsolete building permit template to load on his screen. BIP’s computers were slow and the joke that went back further in that office than Oscar was that each time they asked a document to load or a query to run the bits or bytes or whatever they were had to mush all the way to the Arctic to pick up the file from Northern Branch, then mush all the way back. And there wasn’t much to do while they waited because those computers weren’t online, not really: BIP had its own intranet containing all its records and work, so Oscar could access what Alexi was doing and what Slotkin had left behind and even electronic versions of everything older, but he couldn’t check email or read websites or—worst of all—check the North Pole web cam for hours at a time. They were cut off with only each other to talk to, so at least they had that in common with the great men of the Arctic. They had their own jokes and their own secret stories, as Parry had his expedition’s