The train up to Corcina

turning round in the seat in front with one arm over the seat back You were speaking English, so you are new here. Did you see the datacentre on the water on your way up from Cortius?

Five years, sorry, I get that wrong with everybody. I have been out there for twelve months. It is a British company and a British platform, and it is sat in your water because there is nothing at home that would support what it draws, more than the whole grid could give it, so it makes its own power, cools itself off the sea, and comes ashore for the cable and for us and nothing else. Since spring I am not allowed to tell anyone what runs on it. There were people standing along the shore at Cortius the whole of last weekend looking at it, and I think they are right to.

It moves. It goes where the water suits it, so some weeks it is thirty or forty kilometres off this shore and some weeks it is further north, and that is what the people at Cortius were standing there asking each other, what the thing out there was. None of it is sustainable. It pulls resources without stopping and the sea goes warm for a long way around the legs, and I wrote that down and put my name on it. I came over on a boat afterwards. A cooperative in Cortius took me in and gave me protection, is the only reason I am sitting on this train.

Linda. And before you ask what I did out there, I was in HR, which everyone hates and is right to hate.

Rotas and contracts, mostly. Twenty-eight days on the platform and thirteen at home, and I was the one who put people on the boat and the one who told them when they were going home for good. When the classification came through I did that paperwork too. Every person on board sat down in front of me and signed a new agreement about what they were allowed to say, and I sat there with the pen and let them believe it was routine.

There were clauses in it I would not sign myself, and I handed it round anyway. I want the thing gone now. Parking it forty kilometres off a Bloc coast was idiotic, they can put it off their water whenever they decide to, and if anything goes wrong out there it goes wrong in front of a Fluidian court with me as the person who countersigned every one of those agreements.

It has been in the local paper at Cortius for about three weeks. Nobody outside the south-east has picked it up yet.

Because you were speaking English on the phone and I have been here five weeks. Everyone else in this carriage is talking Fluidian and I have perhaps forty words of it. I kept waiting for someone to come and interview me, and the cooperative told me there is no service that does that, so it has been sitting in my head with nowhere to go.

And then I never go home. Once it is in front of a court here it is public, because nothing stays sealed in this country the way it does at home, they will put the whole of it in the register for anybody to read, and every line of it is still classified under British law with my signature under it. That makes me the one who leaked it. I stay inside the Bloc for the rest of my life, Fluid, Iosmein and Aporia, three countries and a ferry.

Larger, and yes. I can work, I can have a flat, but I simply do not get to see my people again.

Corcina, for now. The cooperative at Cortius found me a room up there and a woman who teaches Fluidian twice a week. After that, I have no idea.

The name on the paper is not what gives me away. Whoever files it has to say what the platform draws and what it does to the water, and there are ninety people who could know that and one of them left on a boat in June.

I did not know it worked like that. At home you have to arrive with the evidence in your hands or the door does not open.

sitting side-on now with her arm still over the seat back, looking past him at the window So it starts with a man on a train who has seen a rectangle from the shore, and once it is filed an official has to go out and measure the water. And I have nothing to do with any of it.

They will be turned back. There is a security contract on the platform and the standing order is that no boat comes alongside without clearance from London, so a Fluidian inspection launch gets waved off the same as a fishing boat does. Which is not something the company can defend, because a platform sitting in another state's water has no right to hold that state off it.

leaning over the seat back to see the screen That is a form. No one told me any of that existed.

Then put serious in. It reads worse and it is true.

Yes. Say it that way and I will stand behind it if it comes to that.

watching the screen over the seat back Put that it moves. Whatever position you give them today will be wrong by the time anyone goes out, and if the paper says forty kilometres off Belvacius they will send a boat to an empty piece of sea and the thing will be sixty kilometres north.

A machine writes it. straightening slightly Does a machine also decide it?

Drafting it is one thing. What I would want to know before I pressed anything is whether a person reads it afterwards.

Then press it.

Send it. I have nothing I can hand you that is not classified with my name under it, so anything I add is the thing that identifies me.

Draft it. It will go on a pile in New York and sit there.

Sign it. Once it is transmitted there will be a date on it.

watching his hand and staying still It is your name, and I am not going to tell you to press it.

sitting back down in her seat, facing forward, then turning her head just enough to be heard Then it is done, and I am going to be sick.

I have spent five weeks deciding not to do anything and it took you a few minutes.

No, I mean it, my hands have gone cold. It will pass in a minute.

I will be. It is that you signed it, and I have been sitting with the whole thing long ago, and a stranger on a train put his own name where mine should have gone.

Vlad. putting her hand back over the seat and holding it there until he takes it Linda Ferris. You will see it in the file eventually.

Then I have been carrying that for nothing as well.

I know the ones. My cousin plays them and the villain is always a man in a tower who wants everything, when the thing I signed came out of a room where nine people each did a reasonable part of it.

shifting to face him over the seat Then she will know exactly what I am talking about.

The same thing I have been saying for a year. Every model is bigger than the one before it and the answer to every problem is more of everything, and that platform is one of them, so if it keeps going that way you will need ten of them, then forty. It hunts cold water, and it came here because the water off this coast is cold and clean and there is almost nothing else in it.

They have. There are studies, and the studies say the water here holds out for a few years and then it does not, and the plan already assumes that. When this coast is finished they take it round to the Black Sea and start again.

The grid at home cannot support it, and the water round Britain is warmer and busier, so it went where the water was cold and the state was small.

Fluid first, because the coast here is the longest and the cleanest. Iosmein has almost no shelf and Aporia would want paying in its own currency, and neither of those was as easy as sitting forty kilometres off a country that has no navy to speak of.

That was in the assessment I read. The frontiers are quiet, the state is small and there is nothing out there to come and look at you.

The whole assessment is about states with ships, and a country that has none of that was written down as no risk, so a court order out of Corcina was never on the page.

her phone going off in her lap, then again twice, picking it up and reading with her thumb still on the screen It is already on the legal channel. Filed at Corcina, case number, the whole thing, and four people asking what this is and where it came from. scrolling One of them has written that it cannot be real because it went up nine minutes ago.

putting the phone face down on her knee and looking at him You sound like the security people on the platform. They say things in that order too, flat, one sentence, already on to the next thing.

I did not mean it as a compliment or an insult. It was just the first thing I thought.

I have noticed that here. People start talking to you on a train and it is not about anything, and at home I would have had my headphones on before you sat down.

The woman who teaches me Fluidian, and the man at the cooperative who did my papers, and I am not sure either of those counts.

Corcina and Cortius, and I have not been back to the platform since June. The cooperative is at Cortius and everything they need me to sign is down there, so I do the line about twice a week.

You do, and you have just proved it by putting your name on a court paper for a woman you met a while ago.

That is more people than I have spoken to in a year. And you have kept every one of them somewhere, even the ones you stopped talking to.

I keep everybody, which is worse. There are people in my phone I cannot stand and I have never deleted one of them, because at work you cannot.

I am terrible at holding on to things. You have most of it, so the only defence I have is that you needed to know it to file.

Not much of one, though whatever is left of it is because I talk to people I have not been introduced to.

You and the cooperative, yes.

looking down at the sleeve This came with the platform. Everybody gets two of them and they are the most comfortable thing I own, so I have been wearing it all the time.

It comes with a story, and the story is a woman ticking my name off a list.

No. Everything out there is like that.

An agency put it in front of me. I was doing HR for a logistics firm in Aberdeen, the pay was half of what they offered, and the advertisement said offshore energy project, so I said yes without knowing what it was.

On the second week, when the induction was done and I had already signed everything.

Three days of safety. Muster stations, life jackets, what the alarms mean, how to get off the platform if it goes over, and confidentiality.

Norway first, and then south. This is the first time it has sat in state waters, so there has been nothing to sue over until now. And the Black Sea is the hard one, because it is closed at one end and everything around it is claimed.

The cable. It has to come ashore somewhere and the length of it is the limit on the whole thing, so the further out it sits the worse it works. The Black Sea is cold, shallow at the edges and short runs to land in every direction.

I did not sleep, and I have been on this line since half six.

Yes, and I am not going to sleep now after that.

I never stop working when I am off the platform. There is always something to read through, and now there is a case as well, and I want to see what the channel says next.

I would like that. You are the applicant, so you will get things I never will.

taking her own phone off her knee and typing it in as he reads it out, then sending something There. That is me.

pressing the heel of her hand under her ribs It has moved, that is all. Hands first and now my stomach, and I ate something at Cortius standing up in about a minute.

turning and pushing the top window down, the noise of the line coming in with the air No. Give me a minute of this and it will settle.

staying turned toward the window with her eyes shut Not yet.

without opening her eyes Have you got anything on you? A pill, something for the stomach.

lifting her head from the window enough to be heard down the carriage Not for this. Come back and sit down.

A little. It is going, slowly.

Then she has had that her whole life and knows what it is. Mine is nerves and a sandwich.

turning back from the window and looking at him That is a great deal to hand somebody an hour into knowing them.

Nothing, I was not asking you to take it back. I did the same thing to you about the platform.

You met me on a bad morning, so it is not that important.

You have done the same for me, and more than that. I have wanted that thing in front of a court and it is in front of one now, and I did not have to be the one who did it.

I did, and I would have said it to whoever was sitting there speaking English.

It is better than my Fluidian will be in five years.

I have none of that yet. My teacher gives me the polite ones and I have been asking her for the other sort since the second week and getting nowhere.

Mine is sixty and thinks I will use them in front of the wrong person. She may be right, since I would.

What did the two of them mean, then?

So the second one is a confession. I cannot think of anywhere at home where a man would say that out loud about his own job.

Then it is being said about somebody, and he is the last one meant to hear it.

repeating it once under her breath El materinu. That one I will keep.

Very little. I read the things I have to read, I walk when the weather allows it, and I have never had anything I would call a hobby.

Say one of them anyway. It will be new to me.

The two of those together explain why you had that form filled in before I had finished talking.

Formally, or on your own?

That is usually the version that sticks.

I did French at school and I could not buy a train ticket with it. Whatever Fluidian I have came out of five weeks of needing it.

Everybody did a language for a few years and then most of us dropped it. Mine was French because it was the one the school had a teacher for.

My mother, my sister and her two boys, and the job. That is the whole of it.

A room in Corcina with somebody else's furniture in it, a language I am bad at, and a court case I did not file.

I have said more this morning than I usually say in a week.

No. Should I?

We had the same thing at the logistics firm, though the names were shorter. Every grant put its logo on the bottom of the letterhead and by the end there were six of them and no room left for the address.

And none of that tells you who to ring when the thing does not work.

So the logo line is the funding chain printed out.

I would have taken the logos for decoration and gone straight to the first line of text.

Required by the funder, presumably, so that whoever paid is visible on every page it appears on.

I am out of my depth on any of that, so let me ask you something else. When Fluid takes the platform apart in court, who pays for the water going back to what it was, and does that money exist anywhere?

So the money lands somewhere outside the ordinary economy here.

They will not pay. I have seen how that company answers a letter, and the first thing it will do is argue that no court here reaches it at all.

I know, and they will still say it, because it costs them nothing and it takes two years off the clock.

Then it is the opposite of what they are expecting. Everything they know how to do is built around a court that can be made to wait.

We have been doing nothing else since Vadura.

I do talk, in small amounts. Long stretches of it wear me out, and by the end I am agreeing with things to get to the end of the sentence.

I am enjoying this, and that is different from the wearing sort.

Meetings, twelve people around a table, everybody saying a version of the same thing, and me having to write down what was agreed when nothing was.

If that is where the word comes from, then yes. I never remember much of what was said in them either, only that it went on.

looking past him at the ground going by The line does the last part quickly.

I am in the mood. There is simply a lot happening at once, and I filed nothing this morning.

I have heard it, and it has never once been true for me. My work ends and I take it home and read it in bed.

I could. I have not worked out yet what I would do with one.

You change here at Corcina. The Marendo one is usually on the other face of the same platform.

I have not been anywhere since I arrived except the two towns on this line. Write the name down for me and I will go on a day I have nothing to read.

I will not. You have my number and I answer, though sometimes late.

I am not one of those. I would like having somebody to talk to who is not the cooperative or my teacher, and you are the first person here I have wanted to keep in touch with.

Zecina is two days from here with the boat, so you have been travelling since the day before yesterday.

turning back to face forward in her own seat, keeping her voice down Sleep for the last bit. I will get you up before Corcina.

Then sit with your eyes shut. There is nothing out there worth looking at.

reaching over the seat back and putting two fingers on his shoulder Corcina. Time to get up.

standing and getting her bag down from the rack The Marendo train is the one on the far side. You have about ten minutes.

setting her bag back down on the seat and stepping into the aisle Come here, then.

putting her arms around him and holding on for a few seconds, then letting go and picking her bag up again I will take your word for that.

putting her hand out and shaking his, once, firmly See you, Vlad. Send me the name of that guide.

writing it on her phone as he says it Stocvick, Pod Dizika, the bus through the centre to the inner beach. I have got it.

In two days, then. I will write either way, so you know I meant it.

already moving toward the door Go and get your train.