1

No alarm, and awake anyway. Selva lay there a moment longer and worked out when that had last happened. She came to roughly a year and decided to count it as a win.

Today, getting up early was even worth it. After four months on the waiting list she finally had an appointment with Nour, and since money got you nowhere with Nour, she was cooking. Five courses, her own idea, one she regretted about every two weeks, whenever she remembered how well Nour ate. People told her she cooked well. She herself would have filed herself in the bottom third, with ambitions upward. But she enjoyed it, so she kept going.

The doorbell rang.

“Ah, the rolls.”

She jumped out of bed and pulled on trousers and a shirt, both so covered in patches that their original color was more of a claim than a fact. She knew a new shirt would take less than three minutes and not cost a cent. But she had never quite gotten over the whole thing with molecular recycling.

“All my memories would go with it,” was what she usually said when someone brought it up — usually someone sitting across from her in brand-new clothes in this season’s cut, looking at her like a person who still collects cassettes, voluntarily, in this day and age.

She opened the door and paused. There was a person standing there.

An older man she had seen before, either on the street or in that particular grocery store where she liked to go for inspiration. He held up a paper bag.

“Morning, I’m Herbert, and these are your rolls.” And then, because Selva’s face was apparently asking questions: “I’ve been doing the deliveries for a week now. Wanted to find out who actually lives around here.”

“Oh! Thanks.” Selva reached into the bowl by the door where she kept her stickers and pressed a handful into Herbert’s hand. “Here, got something for you too.”

“Oh, nice.” Herbert held the stickers close to his face and examined them one by one, which took longer than Selva had expected. “You make these yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I’ll take good care of them.” He stowed them carefully in a shoulder bag that already held a sizable collection of odds and ends. Selva tried not to look in too obviously and saw anyway three little jars of something edible she couldn’t decipher, a stamp with a motif she didn’t quite recognize, and something blue. Meeting new people seemed to pay off. “Right. I’ve got to keep going, the twelfth floor hasn’t been seen to yet and they all sleep so late up there.”

He nodded to the robot dog standing beside him on the landing, carrying breakfast for what looked like the entire building on its back. The dog set off — and stopped after two steps. A soft hum, then an error code on its display.

Herbert swore under his breath. “The navigation layer again. Ever since the last shared update it jams on the older chassis. The group that maintains the base says the hardware people need to catch up. The hardware people say the code’s too bloated. And we stand here and carry the sacks ourselves.”

Selva helped him redistribute the rest of the deliveries. It took ten minutes. The dog stood there, motionless.

“Ciao. And thanks for the help.”

“Ciao.”

Selva closed the door, in a worse mood than five minutes before. Not because of the rolls.

She liked the robot dogs anyway. She had once looked into why each of them looked different and come across an answer she liked better than the question: because they were built by people who felt like it, and people who feel like it have taste. The one from the house next door had colorful legs. Recently she had seen one shaped like a dachshund but decorated with neon cords in a poodle look. And someone in the next neighborhood had 3D-printed a face for theirs, which Selva, honestly, found unsettling.

The hardware was always different; inside, they all ran the same. It used to be the other way around. Back then the code had belonged to the companies who had thought robot dogs would be great. Then a few people around the world started building their own firmware and their own hardware, first as a hobby, then in groups, and at some point there were seventeen excellent systems, none of which could talk to any other. Apparently it had taken one very long weekend and a lot of Club-Mate, with everyone sitting down together and realizing they had all solved the same problem, each on their own.

Since then: one codebase, adaptable with locally different navigation models, and able to drive pretty much any motor and any camera. That’s why they all looked different and still worked. Mostly, as this morning had shown.

The companies had pushed back, of course. But it’s hard to compete with free, homemade robots, and just repairing all the vandalism the company models had collected in their short lives must have kept an army of people busy.

“Wonder what they’re doing now,” Selva thought. “The ones who scraped the stickers back off. And the ones who thought this was a business idea.” Some of them, she had heard, now sat in the groups that maintained the shared firmware, and argued there just as fiercely as they once had in company meetings.

She went to the shelf and got Marja’s jam.

Selva and Marja were both in the jam co-op, which meant they met once a month and swapped jars. It had never happened that anyone went home without a new jar. Not even Odd, who had once brought along something he himself called “fig-mackerel confit,” and which could only generously be filed as an experiment rather than attempted assault. Still, every pot finds its lid. Since then there had been more and more of Odd’s experiments, and when Selva eventually took home the mango-anchovy chutney, she was honestly surprised.

At the last meeting, though, it had gotten tight. Two people had wanted the same jar at once, one of Marja’s better batches. There had been a vote, and someone had left empty-handed. That was new.

At the fridge she almost reached for the wrong butter.

Selva had three. A slightly greenish margarine made from spirulina fat, perfect for baking, an acquired taste to look at, straight from the Plant and so about as precious as tap water. One from the bioreactor, made by bacteria that someone, at some point, had decoded a gene recipe for “nutty-woodsy” for. Selva had brought the strain with her from a city she used to live in and had spent three months adapting it to the local water, which she described to others as “a bit of fine-tuning.” The neighborhood had voted on letting it settle here, sixty-three percent in favor, which Selva thought was remarkable for a butter proposal. The other thirty-seven percent had discussed it at great length, and one of them had since been demonstratively using only the cow’s-milk version.

That was the third: raw milk from the farm, and Selva had driven out specially yesterday to get it.

That one cost money. Not much. The people on the farm did it voluntarily and gladly, and would have given it away — the price was only there so that half the city wouldn’t get the idea of trying real cow butter all at once. A bit of friction, nothing more. Enough to make you think for a second about whether you really needed it. Anyone who really needed it got it anyway.

It had taken Selva a long time to understand that. At first she had thought a price was a price.

She had since worked something out with the farm that didn’t really have a name. She got more than her share, and in return she brought along her experiments. Butter from bacteria that was supposed to taste like hay, and on the fourth attempt actually tasted like hay. Butter with an acid curve she had copied from a yogurt strain. The farm people tried everything, usually said honestly that their own was better, and kept every single jar anyway.

People sometimes asked her why she still had a kitchen at all. You can have anything cooked for you. She could. She just didn’t.

What she had instead was a cupboard full of basics — fat, protein, starch, vegetables, flavorings, all from the Plant, all free, all about as exciting as paper — and the firm conviction that you can build almost anything out of them if you look long enough. That was her thing. Not collecting rare ingredients that are already good on their own. But taking what everyone has anyway and making something nobody saw coming.

Which is why the case stood next to the kitchen.

Four fermenters, a printed incubator from the Repair Café, a hand centrifuge that was louder than necessary, and a rack of labeled tubes, a third of which bore names only she understood. For anything more involved she went to the neighborhood biolab, where there were better instruments and people who knew more than she did. Whatever came out of it, she uploaded, always, failures included. Someone had once asked her why she did that, and Selva had honestly not known what the question meant.

She put the sliced rolls in the toaster she’d gotten from her neighbor, after the neighbor noticed she hadn’t used it in two years. The lowering mechanism had been broken; one afternoon at the Repair Café and one printed part later, it worked again. By now it was covered all over in stickers, from people who had gotten toast out of it. That’s how it goes with devices that do something: they collect traces of the people they did it for.

And then Karl.

Karl was a chef’s knife, butter knife and jam knife, and the story behind it was Selva’s favorite. In the city before last there had been an outrageously good metal community — meaning people who knew their way around metal, and not primarily people who like listening to metal, though the two couldn’t always be cleanly told apart — and one of them, with whom she had stood in the same workshop every weekend for two years, had forged one for her as a goodbye.

“So your cuts are as sharp as your curries,” he had said, which was objectively a bad line.

Ever since, Selva had claimed her food tasted better when she cut with Karl. She knew that was nonsense. It tasted better anyway.

Once, someone at the Repair Café had asked whether she could share the knife. Selva had said no. She had been embarrassed about it afterward, and still didn’t regret it, and the two together still kept her busy. She uploaded every strain she built, every curve, every failed attempt. And a knife she wouldn’t hand over.

While spreading the butter, it struck her how long it had been since she’d ordered rolls. Normally there was bread from Berta.

Berta was her sourdough starter, older than her last three apartments and older than Selva herself. Selva had carried the dough over two thousand kilometers in a cooler and told no one, because she knew the follow-up questions.

Strictly speaking, the bit about the age was no longer true. In the city before last she had given Berta a gene for an ester that smells of apricot, because she wanted to know whether it would work. It did. In the city before that she had shifted the acid curve, because the bread seemed too well-behaved to her. And right at the start, at twenty-three, she had only added a wild yeast she had scraped off some tree bark, and back then had considered that the height of megalomania.

So there were, counted honestly, four Bertas, and that’s a conservative count. And that wasn’t even the real problem. A sourdough gets completely replaced every few days anyway, that’s its whole principle — of the Berta she got at twenty-three, not a single molecule is left, and that’s nobody’s fault.

Selva called her Berta anyway. Other people would have been stricter about it.

Sometimes, when she opened the lid and that smell came up, the one she had by now helped build herself, she wondered at what point something actually stops being the same thing. Then she fed the dough and thought about something else.

The free rolls were good. They just weren’t from Berta.

2

She packed Karl and set off.

She had booked the neighborhood kitchen because she needed more space than she had at home, and because five courses for one portion simply isn’t worth it. So she had put the courses up on the neighborhood app. Some could be delivered, a few people would come by.

She had posted it for free. Even so, a voucher for a massage had come in, and one for a crate of home-brewed beer. Tips.

She dropped both into her swap wallet, where they connected to the network and started looking for edges. Selva had noted that she’d be happy about a mural. Twice one had popped up already, twice she had declined, once politely and once very politely. Since yesterday there had been an offer from a graffiti artist in there: the whole wall. Selva was close to saying yes, even though she knew she might be somewhere else again in a year.

Below it, since Friday, a second request. Eighteen people, two evenings, the anniversary of something or other. And after that, a number.

Real money.

She hadn’t answered yet, and it wasn’t because she didn’t want to. It was because she hadn’t finished asking herself the question behind it, and the question wasn’t whether she wanted to work two evenings, but what for.

There were two things on the list. A wheat from the south, grown by the same family for four generations, which supposedly tastes of nothing at all until you treat it wrong. And a smoked chili paste that sits in a barrel for two years before anyone even opens it.

The chili paste came from one of the countries that still exist. Selva had twice spent half an evening on the question of whether you should pay there, and both times gotten nowhere. The money goes in. Where it ends up, nobody knows for sure. And not buying doesn’t help the man with the barrel either.

Neither came from the Plant. Both would come from the Plant one day, as soon as someone sat down with them long enough.

Selva had firmly resolved to be that someone for at least one of them, and was fully aware that this sounded megalomaniac.

At the exact moment she stepped out onto the street, the neighborhood shuttle whirred past her.

“Drat.”

She ordered a taxi, and it didn’t make her happy. Her city had been built back in the car-centric past, and Nour lived a bit outside, where back then nobody had thought to lay tracks. Bus to train to bus to scooter, or this.

At least there was a neighborhood kitchen out there too. Selva didn’t want to imagine lugging all her stuff along.

Three people were already sitting in the taxi. Selva took the window seat, put her earphones in and looked out.

She tried to imagine what it must have looked like here before. Cars everywhere, supposedly. And not just driving — they were said to have simply stood around, most of the day, each one belonging to a single person who wasn’t using it right then. Selva had had this explained to her several times and still couldn’t quite picture it.

Today: green spaces with kids on them. Cafés, one of them with a concept she couldn’t for the life of her decipher. And trees. A lot of trees.

Selva liked that they had left the old houses standing. Air conditioning in, gas heating out, done. Whoever came up with heating with natural gas back then must really have been a few sandwiches short of a picnic. As if they hadn’t learned enough from coal. And the new hydrocarbons, the ones made from electricity, are far too precious to just burn. From one cubic meter of that stuff the Plant makes vanillin, aspirin, color pigment and thirty kilos of protein. You don’t burn something like that. You don’t burn books either.

Two years ago, she believed, word was that the last barrel of crude had been sucked out of the ground. Since then only green oil gets pumped back in. Or was it bound up in plastic and buried? She didn’t remember exactly. The climate crisis was still there, anyway, the weather stayed unpleasantly moody, but at some point the switch to fully automated food production had freed up so much land and bound so much carbon that society suddenly had time. And with time you can do a lot of things you can’t do in a panic.

She was about to start imagining how it would have gone otherwise, but dropped the thought. Thinking about Mad Max after breakfast is not a good habit.

Then someone tapped her on the shoulder.

“Lian!”

“What are you doing here so early?” Lian dropped into the seat next to her. “And what’s so important in your ears?”

“I’m heading out to the countryside to cook a bit. Someone lives out there I’ve wanted to get a little tat from forever.” She turned it around. “And you?”

“The early thing’s new for me too. I’m building a race car.”

“A race car.” Selva repeated it like a parrot, because she hadn’t given race cars a single thought in roughly fifteen years.

“Yeah. One of those things you zoom around in. I met some people in VR who wanted to do it for real for once.” Lian sounded slightly snippy, because she could read Selva’s face and saw three separate kinds of surprise in it, all about her: VR. Racing games. And that she could build a car. “Now we meet every day and wrench on it. And argue. Half want maximum algorithm, the other half want the human to still have a say. Two people dropped out last week.”

They hadn’t seen each other in three months. Lian made a mental note that three months was quite a lot these days.

“How fast is it?”

“On paper, very. But we’re entering the Mixed-Human-Machine, so a human has to be able to survive in it, which complicates things. What I’m really interested in is the interplay between the racing algorithm and human input anyway.”

“Okay, that’s all Greek to me.” She meant it. “Can I come to a race sometime?”

“Sure. If you cook for my team.”

“Blackmail.”

“Negotiation.” Lian looked at her. “You still cook, right?” The mental note had reminded her that three months works in both directions.

“Still. Doesn’t get boring, unfortunately.” She thought about it. “But I’d like to cook somewhere else again. With different ingredients. Have you tried the new butter?”

And as she said it, she thought of Berta, and of how in the next city she would change something about the dough again. She did it every time. She had never decided that she would do it every time.

“You want to leave again? You only just moved here.”

“That was three years ago.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s forever.”

“You and your cosmopolitanism.” Lian said it without an edge, but without indulgence either. “Don’t you ever want to grow old somewhere?”

Selva considered for a moment whether to give the short answer, and then gave the long one.

“Do you know how absurd that is?” She turned to Lian. “I pack Berta, I pack Karl, I pack the case, I get on a train. And wherever I get off, there’s the same Plant, the same neighborhood kitchen, the same shelf with the same basics on it. I don’t have to ask anyone. I don’t have to prove anything. It costs me nothing.” She paused. “That never existed before. For anyone.”

“And that’s why you do it.”

“Nope. That’s why I can. I do it for something else.” She searched for a moment. “If the same basics are everywhere, then everything that still tastes different is a decision somebody made. The butter here tastes different from four hundred kilometers away because different people voted there. Different water, different strains, somebody made a mistake twelve years ago and kept it because it was good. That’s not a landscape. That’s people.”

“And you have to visit them.”

“I have to eat their stuff.”

“Is that something different?”

She thought about it longer than she liked.

“You can get that here too,” said Lian. “You can have anything cooked for you, the recipes are open, the strains are open, the ingredients come to your door. You’ve uploaded some yourself that are sitting in a fridge somewhere in Chile right now.” She was asking out of genuine interest; that was the exhausting thing about her. “Or are you just looking for the state where nobody knows you and nobody wants anything from you?”

“The air is different,” said Selva. “Everywhere.” She noticed herself how thin that sounded, right after what she’d said before.

“And sure, I can get fish from the Plant here. It’s better than anything they used to pull out of the sea, even the old folks say so.” Selva hesitated. “Caught yourself, it still tastes better.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“I know.”

“With all the microplastics?”

“Oh, that’s not so bad anymore. Somebody just developed a pill for people who eat from nature. Binds all of it. Have a look in the Commons app, it’s even made here by a few people.”

“I’ll ask Rocha, she’s tinkering in the biolab right now.”

“I know. I gave her a strain last week.”

“See?” Lian got ready to get off, and then she said it after all, half standing up, in the offhand tone she reserved for the sentences that mattered to her. “I think it’s good that you can just leave. That’s the whole point of the thing. Nobody can hold on to you, because outside there’s a table set for you, everywhere, no strings attached. I’ve never understood how people put up with it before.”

“But?”

“No but. Just a question.” She held on to the pole. “What does staying even mean anymore, when leaving costs nothing?”

Selva opened her mouth.

“And before you answer,” said Lian, “it costs you nothing. The people you leave behind, it costs.”

Then, already halfway to the door, in her normal voice: “Let me know if you’re around long enough for a race. I’ll put you on the list. And this time you cook for my team.”

“Good luck.”

Lian got out and left the question with her.

How much longer am I going to hop from place to place? And what happens if one day I don’t belong anywhere anymore?

3

Honestly, she was glad the algorithm knew by now who she knew, and put people in her taxi she could talk to. Strictly speaking, Lian was only a friend of a friend. But after a move it always takes a while before encounters like that start happening on their own again, and Selva had measured the stretch three times by now. It came to about eight months.

At some point she had read that this exact algorithm leads to bubbles, and so some smart aleck had built in a slider: how much contact you want with people outside your own bubble. Selva had it set roughly in the middle and was moderately happy with it.

There were people who had turned it all the way down and always sat alone in the taxi. Voluntarily.

“Weird people,” Selva thought. “But fine. Let them.”

There were also whole bubbles that gave themselves their own laws, often ones that clearly made their members’ lives harder without them seeing it that way. Strictly religious communities. And people who voluntarily placed themselves under some leader or other and apparently found it restful.

“No kink-shaming,” Selva thought to herself. As long as nobody dragged her into it.

And nobody could, because the same one rule applied everywhere: you can leave at any time, and outside there’s a table set for you. On top of that came a second rule, which was really just the fuel for the first: nobody may cut off your access to knowledge. Selva had long thought of that as paternalism, until someone asked her the obvious question — how is someone supposed to leave who doesn’t know there’s an outside?

After that she no longer thought of it as paternalism.

So if anyone ever got the idea of wanting to rule everything here, you could just leave. Or people could found a city of their own outside, on one of the freed-up stretches of land, and keep to themselves.

One of these neo-cities had once tried to pass on its better ideas with some force. Selva had heard the story in a very satisfying version: after barely three weeks, the question of whom they actually wanted to govern had become unanswerable. People had left. What remained were the Plants and a handful of true believers, who had to discover that a city without the people gets very quiet very fast.

And then there was the story of the state that oppressed people and used the new technology to oppress them better. At some point everyone had slowly walked away, because you were welcome everywhere and could live anywhere for free. No offer could compete with that.

That story was told often. It ended well.

The other one was told less often: that states like that still exist. Not many. But they exist, and in one of them sat a barrel of chili paste that Selva had been thinking about for weeks.

Someone had once told her that back then an LLM had hacked its way into every network and installed a “dignity kill switch,” so that Plants shut themselves off whenever someone violated human dignity. Selva had thought that was pretty great for a while, until it struck her that somewhere in this story there’s a switch, and someone has their hand on it. And that nobody could really say who sets the parameters for dignity.

She took out her phone.

“Why are there still authoritarian states, anyway?”

Selva had set up her explainer LLM so that it built a five-minute mini-doc about anything. She had set the style years ago, in a silly mood, to “encyclopedic, slightly condescending, occasionally digressive,” and never touched it again. Without noticing, she had taken her inspiration from an audiobook from another century.

“What an interesting question you’re asking …”

“That they still haven’t gotten that out,” Selva muttered, “this patronizing pat-on-the-head routine.” The training data had simply tipped in that direction back then, and it was only kept in check with brute-force system prompting. She sometimes wondered whether it would ever go away.

Selva stopped the video.

At “forty years” and “a few very stubborn people” she had briefly thought: there you go. After that it had tipped straight back into that tone in which everything sounds like a solved riddle.

“I just like cooking,” she said to no one.

She thought about the barrel once more, and about the fact that she still hadn’t decided. Then she let it go.

She noticed that the taxi was almost empty by now. Only an older lady was still sitting diagonally across from her, looking out of the window.

Selva took out her earphones and was just considering whether to speak to the woman — whether she was going to the same village and wanted a portion tonight — when the taxi slowed down.

It wasn’t her stop yet.

Outside: field, field, a path, field.

“Pretty deserted area,” said Selva. “What is there out here?”

“Ah.” The woman sounded as if she had been waiting for it, and slightly disappointed that it had taken so long. “So she can talk to someone other than herself after all.”

“Oh. You heard that.”

The woman stood up.

“Come along, I’ll show you. If you’d like to see one of the Plants, that is. There are good mushrooms here. And if you ask nicely, you may look through the window.”

Selva thought of the portions and of Karl in her bag. The taxi ride had won her a bit of time.

Then she got out.

4

Her name was Ruth, and she walked faster than Selva.

“Over there.” She pointed across the field at a long, surprisingly tall building that looked as if someone had designed a logistics center and lost interest halfway through. No signs. No paint, but a great deal of graffiti instead, some of it good and some of it more like something that ought to be painted over. On the roof, solar right up to the last edge; on the north side a tangle of pipes that had obviously been added later.

“That’s it?”

“Disappointed?”

“A little.”

“Everyone is.” She sounded pleased. “People always picture something shiny. When really it’s just a very large box that’s very clean on the inside.”

Ruth explained the numbers as they walked, clearly not for the first time. A Plant, if you run it up properly, can supply around a hundred thousand people with everything. There are seven around the city. Two hundred thousand people live in the city.

“That doesn’t add up.”

“It does. Just the other way round from what you think.”

Because Selva had asked, Ruth listed what was running at the moment. Perch, leafy greens, three bacterial lines — that much Selva had expected. Then came the rest. Vanillin. Pigment for printing ink. The base compound for about half of all painkillers. And protein, a great deal of protein.

“It’s all the same thing,” said Ruth. “Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, electricity. After that it’s only a question of which catalyst you hang on the end and which bacterium you feed. People always think vanilla and aspirin have nothing to do with each other. And they don’t. Until two steps earlier.”

Selva thought of her rack of tubes and found the idea that her breakfast and her headache pill came out of the same pipe both sobering and rather beautiful.

“And the protein?”

“The most boring thing and the most important.” Ruth sounded as if she had said the sentence many times and meant it anyway. “In the beginning it was a yellow powder that tasted of nothing. It was hailed as a breakthrough, and it was one, you always have to add that. Today you can get anything you want out of it, if you draw the fiber properly. The art hasn’t been the protein for a long time. The art is the structure.”

“That,” said Selva, “is roughly my entire profession.”

“In the beginning there was exactly one,” said Ruth. “A single one, and it could do everything. A marvel. And when it stood still for two weeks because of a broken valve, the whole surrounding region noticed.”

“And now?”

“Now they can all do almost everything, and none of them runs at full capacity.” Ruth pointed in various directions, apparently from memory. “This one is at about forty percent. The one in the north at thirty, because they’re rebuilding. If one fails, the others ramp up overnight, and most people find out from a notification they swipe away. Sometimes there’s no perch for two weeks. That’s the whole damage.”

“But that’s inefficient.”

“Grossly inefficient,” said Ruth, relishing it. “One big one would be cheaper. We’ve calculated it, someone recalculates it again and again, and it always comes out the same. One big one would be cheaper.”

“Then why not?”

Ruth stopped and looked at her as if Selva had asked for the price of air.

“Because a big one can be occupied.”

They walked on.

There was no gate at the fence, only an opening, and next to it a box of shoe covers with a sign: Please do not go in. Seriously. Spores. Two low machines were driving along the inside of the fence, slowly, unimpressed, with the charisma of lawnmowers.

“Security?”

“Hygiene,” said Ruth. “It’s a clean room in there. One person walking in costs us three weeks. Not because they steal anything — because they breathe.”

“And if someone wants to get in? I mean really?”

“Then the Plant breaks and we have six others.” Ruth shrugged. “That’s why nobody really guards it. You only guard things you can’t replace.” She walked a few steps before going on. “Two years ago someone did sneak in. Wanted to prove the security was a joke. And proved it. Six weeks offline. He’s not in prison, there isn’t one for that. But he isn’t invited to the votes in any neighborhood anymore, and people are still arguing about that to this day.”

On the east side there was scaffolding. And on it, quite clearly, people. Six or seven, in work clothes, plus a crane and a stack of modules that looked like oversized drawers.

Selva was surprised, and heard for herself how stupid the question sounded before she had finished asking it.

“Why don’t the—”

“Because nobody’s managed it yet.” Ruth grinned. “The Plant runs automatically. It can’t extend itself. Every extension is a one-off, every building stands differently, every subsoil is different, and every time someone comes up with something new. People do that. And they get paid for it.”

“Sure,” said Selva.

Ruth looked at her sideways. “You say that very quickly.”

“I cook for money. Not often. Twice a year, maybe.”

“For what?”

“For stuff the Plant can’t do.” Selva noticed she was justifying herself, and found that interesting. “A wheat. A smoked paste that sits in a barrel for two years.”

Ruth nodded up at the scaffolding. “That’s how it’s gone for forty years. First money, then machine, then boredom. Something is important, nobody wants to do it voluntarily, so you pay. And if you have to pay for long enough, at some point someone sits down and automates it, because the paying annoys them.”

Selva said nothing for a while, because she had noticed where in this chain she stood.

She wanted the barrel. She wanted it so much that she would cook for eighteen strangers for two evenings. And if she had it, she would start rebuilding it — from basics, from a strain, from something she would upload and that anyone could then have, forever, for free.

The man with the barrel would probably not be thrilled.

“You look as though something has occurred to you,” said Ruth.

“First money, then machine,” said Selva. “I’m the machine.”

“We all are.” Ruth walked on. “Some people just never notice.”

A little later, as if Ruth had only put the thread down for a moment: “It builds up, by the way. With a few people. The ones who can do something nobody has rebuilt yet, and who therefore have more than others. Not much more. But more.” She looked straight ahead. “Nobody calls it wealth, it’s too little for that and too obviously earned. Still, everyone knows who it is.”

“And the others?”

“Which others?”

“The ones who refuse to pay for anything on principle.”

“Oh, them.” Ruth made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Exhausting. Mostly right, and exhausting anyway.”

Selva thought of the man from her building who, since the butter vote, had demonstratively eaten only cow’s milk, paid for it every month, and, as far as Selva could judge, saw no contradiction in that whatsoever.

“And what else costs something?” she asked.

“Whatever not everyone can have.” Ruth shrugged. “Or have you never wanted a plot by the lake? Officially it’s commons. In practice it’s been allotted to the same ten people for twelve years. And nobody can explain to you how that comes about.”

“I don’t have a plot, I have a case.” Selva shook her head. “It gets me further.”

“And you?” Selva asked then. “What did you do?”

“I helped build the fish lines and introduced the Arctic sea sprat. Eighteen years.” Ruth said it in passing. “Now I gather mushrooms and talk people’s ears off in taxis.”

Selva stopped.

“The sea sprat is yours?”

“Ours. There were nine of us.”

“I once spent a whole winter with that fish.” Selva heard herself getting too loud and kept going anyway. “It has a fat that only opens up at sixty degrees. You can’t fry it. You have to persuade it.”

Ruth stopped walking. For the first time that afternoon, she briefly didn’t look like someone explaining something.

“That,” said Ruth, “nobody has said to me in eighteen years.”

She led Selva around the corner to a single large window in the concrete wall, set at about hip height, with a worn edge, the kind things get when a lot of people hold on to them.

Selva looked in.

Inside: shelves up to the ceiling, row upon row, pink-white light, and between them things moved along rails that knew exactly where they wanted to go. It was absolutely silent. It looked as if a library were growing lettuce.

“Wow,” said Selva, because nothing better came to mind.

“Yes,” said Ruth. “You always think it ought to look more dramatic.”

Ruth gave her time.

“That down there on the left is the perch. And the wall behind it is the one to the bacteria, but you won’t get to see those, they don’t like light.”

“My butter.”

“Your butter.”

On the way back to the road they walked through a patch of woods, and Ruth bent down every twenty meters. After the fourth time she held out a mushroom to Selva that looked like a small yellow disaster.

“Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“Very good. Then don’t touch it.” Ruth pocketed it. “It’s edible. I only wanted to know whether you’re honest.”

Twenty minutes later Selva had a bag full and a problem: she had planned something completely different for today.

She thought about it briefly, then threw the plan away.

5

The neighborhood kitchen out here was smaller than the one in the city, older, and considerably better stocked, which hurt her feelings.

She tipped the mushrooms into a colander and rebuilt the menu in her head. Less acid. The nutty-woodsy butter instead of the margarine, which she wouldn’t have dared that morning. The five courses she had planned shifted about three thousand kilometers north and became something she couldn’t name. After ten minutes she knew it worked.

At the next table someone stood chopping onions at a speed Selva found rude.

“You’re new,” said the person, without looking up.

“Just visiting. Selva.”

“Toni.” More onions. “What’s that going to be?”

“For the last forty minutes, I don’t know either.”

Toni laughed, and after that it was easier.

Selva unwrapped Karl and started cleaning the mushrooms.

“Nice piece.”

“Forged. By someone I argued with about hardness grades for two years.” She noticed she was smiling, and let it be. “I claim my food tastes better with it. That’s nonsense. It tastes better anyway.”

“Can I try?”

And there it was again, in exactly the same second as back then at the Repair Café: that short, awkward no, already lying ready in her mouth before she had thought about it.

“Rather not,” she said.

Toni looked at her, shrugged, and went on chopping onions.

“It’s okay. I’ve got something like that too.”

“I’m still embarrassed about it.”

“Why?” Toni pushed the onions into a pile. “You upload everything, right? Recipes, strains, all that stuff.”

“Everything.”

“Then you’ve done your share and three shovelfuls more. Something has to be left that’s only yours, or you get weird.” Toni glanced up briefly. “I know people here who have nothing that’s only theirs. They’re not more generous than you. They’re just thinner.”

“Thinner.”

“Less there.” Another shrug. “Hard to explain.”

That didn’t make it better. It made it more bearable, and that was exactly what made Selva suspicious, because it was precisely what she had wanted to hear.

Toni had lived out here for six years, which surprised Selva, and she noticed that it surprised her, and was briefly embarrassed.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Toni. “Everyone thinks it.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You looked.”

Selva admitted it.

“I lived in the city for eleven years.” Toni pushed the onions together. “It was great. I had my people, I still have my people. But it was also true that for six years I didn’t talk to anyone who didn’t tick roughly the way I do. And when one guy did slip in who thought differently, we discussed at him until he left. We called that progress.”

“And here?”

“Here there are two hundred people.” Toni looked up. “You don’t get to pick. The guy who builds the tractors said things five years ago that made me walk out. And then I ran into him two days later picking up potatoes, because there’s only one place to pick up potatoes.”

“And?”

“And now he doesn’t say those things anymore.” A shrug. “Not because anyone convinced him. I think he just noticed that I exist, and that it’s pretty unspectacular. Sometimes something still slips out. Then it goes quiet. And the next day we pick up potatoes together. That’s more exhausting than any bubble. And more honest.”

Selva thought of her slider, and of how neatly she had it set in the middle.

“I’ve got this setting,” she said. “For contact outside the bubble. It’s on the middle.”

“Yeah, I’ve got that too. Doesn’t do anything here, though.” Toni grinned. “It only works when there are enough people around. In the city you can pick, out of two hundred thousand people, the three hundred who agree with you. Here there are two hundred in total. The algorithm doesn’t sort, because it has nothing to sort.”

Selva was quiet for a while and stirred.

“That’s actually nice,” she said then. And because she wanted to be honest: “And a little creepy.”

“Why creepy?”

“Because in the city that thing decides for me who I meet. And it doesn’t tell me that it’s deciding.”

Toni thought about it for longer than Selva had expected.

“Yeah,” Toni said at last. “That’s the point where I always get stuck too. Here the area decides for me. That’s also a decision nobody tells me about. But at least I can see it. And I can’t turn it off when it doesn’t suit me.”

“And which is better?”

“No idea.” Toni slid the onions into the pan. “All I know is that here I see it. And that the tractor guy voted against me last week on the water main. We still carried the pipes together afterward. That’s the deal.”

In the end there were twelve portions, because two people turned up unannounced and Selva couldn’t say no. One of them grumbled quietly that the portions were really “for people who signed up.” Selva pretended not to have heard. She didn’t like that about herself afterward.

Toni got the rest, for having asked what it was going to be.

6

Nour’s studio was in an old barn that smelled of disinfectant and, against all reason, of wood.

“You’re late.”

“I visited a Plant.”

“Ah, Ruth.” Nour nodded, as if that explained everything. “She gets about one a week. Wash your hands, you smell of mushrooms.”

From the back of the barn someone called out something in a language Selva didn’t know. Nour called back two syllables and nodded in that direction. “Lives here. Still asleep. Don’t ask.”

On the table next to the chair lay the machines, and Selva needed a moment to understand what she was looking at. None of them looked like the others. One had a handle of dark wood, oiled over and over. One was milled from a single piece of aluminum and bore three tiny stamped notches. One looked as if it had been born out of another machine, which, as it turned out, was true.

“You build them all yourself?”

“I could buy them, too.” Nour turned one between two fingers. “There are good ones. The plans are all open, I printed and built them for four years like everyone else. But at some point you start changing something, because your hand is different from the hand of the guy who drew the plan. And then you change something again, because you’ve noticed you sit differently when you shade. And then it’s yours.”

“And the notches?”

“A thousand hours per notch.” Nour put it back. “I tried uploading the changes once. Nobody needed them. They only fit my hand.”

Nour pulled up a stool.

“So. What do you want?”

Selva had been thinking about it for four months, and took a sticker out of her bag, her best one, one she had drawn herself and was rather proud of.

Nour looked at the sticker. Then at Selva.

“Nah.”

“What do you mean, nah?”

“I only tattoo stickers. That’s the one thing I do.” Nour pointed at the wall, and now Selva saw it: photos, hundreds, arms, calves, shoulders, backs, and on each of them a sticker, tattooed as if it had just been stuck on, some with shadows, some with a corner slightly lifting. No two alike. “But not your own.”

“Why not?”

“Because your own sticker on your own skin is advertising.” Nour said it without harshness, like a weather report. “A sticker is something somebody gives you. I’m not going to stick on you what you think of yourself.”

A mason jar landed on the table. It was full.

“These are the ones people left here. Fifteen years. Some sent me theirs, some forgot theirs. You reach in and take one, and you don’t look first.”

Selva looked into the jar and then at her hand, and found that her pulse had stopped behaving itself about thirty seconds ago.

She reached in.

It was a small, very carefully drawn bird, carrying something that was either a suitcase or a loaf of bread. The line was firm, the colors printed off-register, by about a millimeter, the way it used to happen when stickers were still made in layers.

Selva had never seen this bird before. She knew no one who could have drawn it.

“I keep a book,” said Nour. “Who left what, and when. I can look it up, if you want.”

Selva thought of Lian in the taxi and her question, what staying still means when leaving costs nothing — and of the fact that she hadn’t had an answer to it that she herself liked.

“Nah,” she said. “Leave it.”

It took two hours. Nour worked with the wooden machine, said very little while doing it and once talked for a very long time about jam, and the bird went on Selva’s left forearm, with a corner that looked as if it were about to come off.

“It won’t come off,” said Nour, putting on the bandage. “That’s the joke.”

Afterward Nour wiped down the table, put the machines away and looked at the containers that had been standing by the door for two hours.

“So. Now you.”

The three of them ate in the barn, on stools, with a board laid over a crate. The person from the back of the barn said four sentences during the entire meal and ate more than Nour and Selva put together. Selva explained the first course and then gave up on that.

Nour ate slowly and said nothing for a long time, which Selva took for a bad sign, until it occurred to her that Nour had spent two hours looking at one square centimeter of skin and was probably just tired.

At the fourth course, the mushrooms, Nour stopped mid-motion.

“That wasn’t planned.”

“No.”

“You can tell.” Nour went on eating. “It’s the best one.”

Selva resolved not to think about it any further, and thought about it the whole way back.

When they were done, Nour went to the table, picked up one of the machines and pressed it into Selva’s hand. The wooden one.

“Take it with you.”

“That’s yours.”

“That was mine.” Nour waved it off. “I’ve got three. And you’re moving again anyway.”

“How do you—”

“Ruth texted me while you were picking mushrooms.” Nour grinned. “You talk a lot for someone who watches videos the whole ride.”

Selva looked at the machine. The handle was darker in one place than the rest, where a hand had rested for years, and it wasn’t her hand.

“I can’t even do this.”

“Then learn.” Nour held the door open for her. “And when you get somewhere they can use it, pass it on. It’s not yours, it’s just with you for now.”

Outside it was almost dark. Selva stood in the yard for a moment, with a stranger’s bird under plastic wrap on her arm and a stranger’s machine in her bag, and realized that she now knew three people in this area, none of whom she had known that morning.

In the taxi she took out her phone and accepted the request. Eighteen people, two evenings, some anniversary.

Then she wrote to the man with the barrel. Not that she wanted to buy. But whether she might watch.

She didn’t expect an answer.

On the way back it occurred to her that she hadn’t asked Herbert where he lived. And that the robot dog might still be standing on the landing.

She resolved to get up early tomorrow and ask.