Bats hang upside down from a light fixture, pale stalks of mushrooms crowd the corners of the ceilings, and black mold inches its way up the walls. Bats fly in and out through a smashed window across open ground that was once a garden and is now a densely matted square of undergrowth. In this neighborhood there are no people, no traffic, no other sounds to complicate the process of echolocation. A few silent cars remain dotted here and there on the mud-caked streets, as if abandoned by a child who lost interest in playing with them.

This is the bats’ territory. They never need to venture further inland; there is more than enough food for them here on the city’s deserted coastal edge. What was once Edinburgh is now New Reekie, although this doesn’t fool its inhabitants into forgetting the recent catastrophes. There are too many reminders for a simple name change to persuade them: The line of crow-stepped gable buildings along the once-attractive shore now drip green with algae; the house that played host to Mary Queen of Scots as she danced a reel with her third husband now shuttered and silent; the cement factory so large that it was rumored to be a Cold War rocket hangar is now a smashed and empty shell.

Related Reading

Give Bats a Break

The city authorities no longer pay for the streetlights to work here, and on moonless nights only the lighthouse still pulses seaward to warn off incomers desperate enough to try and land here from the north. Anyone disobeying the prohibition on entering this sector must grope their way along dark and silent streets, hoping they don’t slip on mud from the latest flood. But darkness is relative. Animals with adequate night vision, or those that rely on other senses like echolocation to guide their way through the world, are quite settled. Quite at home here.

The bats aren’t exactly alone. As they go about their nocturnal process of catching insects, tiny trackers attached to their chests collect information about every aspect of their lives and transmit it onward. A few miles inland sits Drover in his home office, facing a computer screen and going about his work.

Drover analyzes the bats’ flightpaths, food intake, respiration, heart rates, digestion, fertility and lifespans. There’s nothing that Drover doesn’t know about this colony of bats, and he can display it all in carefully annotated graphs and diagrams, accompanied by spreadsheets that he sends to the authorities at the end of each working day.

From his house on one of New Reekie’s seven hills, he’s a long way from the sea, but when he stands to ease his aching back, he catches a glimpse of the water’s surface gleaming like metal in the low winter sun, and he hastily sits down again. He knows he’s lucky to live this far from the coast, and on a hillside as well. The winds may be severe, the house may lose part of its roof on a distressingly (and expensively) frequent basis, but at least it won’t be flooded.

Sometimes just a glimpse of the distant water is too much for Drover. Now he slumps forward and his eyes droop shut, the bats temporarily forgotten. This is how Quine finds him, 20 minutes later. She stands and watches, knowing better than to disturb him. As long as she’s known him, he’s been prone to these sudden sleeping fits. A form of narcolepsy, he explained when they first met, using the medical term—she guessed accurately at the time—to cover up the trauma of his accident at the seaweed farm. When he’s out cold like this, he has the odd appearance of a man underwater, except it’s not the sea washing over his face but a play of extreme emotions. She’s learned that he has to ride it out and surf the wave onto land.

Eventually he opens his eyes and, glancing around, spots her and tries to smile.

“How’s it going?” she asks.

“Okay. I’m fine,” he lies.

Quine does something in financial services, in one of the oldest and most prestigious banks in the city; whenever people ask about her job she laughs and says, “It pays the bills,” before gesturing at Drover. “He does the interesting stuff. Ask him anything about bats!” Clearly she means it to be the sort of comment made by a supportive spouse, but sometimes to Drover it feels like she’s overcompensating for his pitiful earnings. Data analysts are ten-a-penny after all, doing work that in most other parts of the world has been superseded by AI. But in Scotland, thanks to strict laws on carbon accounting, the job has been protected. Drover knows he should be grateful, but he thinks sourly that it’s a shame the salaries haven’t been equally protected.

He’s revived by a barley coffee and then it’s time for the weekly chat with his boss, Toring, who shows up promptly on his screen. Toring’s always dressed in a typical scientist’s outfit of scruffy tartan shirt and t-shirt advertising some obscure band’s comeback tour, and he’s always very understanding about Drover’s condition.

They start by exchanging the usual pleasantries.

“How is Quine doing? Job still going well?”

“Very well,” but Drover pauses. Quine hasn’t actually mentioned work at all lately. “At least, I assume so.” What does she talk about? The weather, he supposes. Everyone talks about the weather.

“And now, anything out of the ordinary?” Toring obviously wants to move the conversation on to its real purpose, the bat data.

“A slightly heightened heart rate among 63% of the colony. A small but statistically significant increase in expiration rates, and a corresponding decrease in food consumption,” Drover pulls up the relevant graphs and diagrams as he speaks, “all of which point to collective anticipation of a problematic weather event in the medium-term future.”

“It’s not quite enough yet, though. It doesn’t meet the threshold for triggering the alarm system, so just keep an eye on it,” Toring advises Drover.

Drover nods, but he’s been working with the bats for long enough that he can almost feel the coming storm himself.

“Bat heart rate?” says Quine later, when they’re eating lunch. “How reliable is that at forecasting the weather?”

“At least as reliable as the other technologies, and quicker,” says Drover. “It was their heart rate that forecast last year’s storm, several hours before the weather satellites picked up on it.”

Quine still looks dubious. “But do you completely trust it?”

Drover frowns. Quine knows all this, has always been supportive of his work. Why is she doubting it now?

Last year’s storm was one of the worst so far. Eight tower blocks east of the city center were so badly damaged they were rendered economically unviable for renovation. At least their inhabitants escaped alive; as a result of the decrease in air pressure, the bats were flying at lower altitudes than usual. Drover was able to calculate the corresponding decrease in distances traveled, and alerted Toring that a storm was on the way.

Now, this afternoon, the bats’ heart rate suddenly shoots up, and the warning process is initiated. Drover can’t resist the temptation to tell Quine before the official city sirens sound, their rising and falling tone reverberating across the hills and valleys. Straightaway Drover’s and Quine’s phones vibrate with a mass alert from the authorities instructing them to go through the usual pre-storm preparations and assemble candles, battery torches, water supplies, emergency food, and sandbags.

After they’ve finished, Quine says, “Fancy a walk?”

“Now?”

“Why not?”

“But there’s a storm on the way.”

“So? It’s not here yet,” and she glances out the window. It’s true, the tree branches are swaying no more than usual. “Looks okay to me.”

But Drover can’t bring himself to move. His limbs feel inert, and he can’t do anything but sit immobile at his desk, mesmerized by the dots swarming on the screen. As he watches black dots collecting in dense patches, he pictures the bats leaving their usual colonies in the broken buildings along the coast and heading to temporary roosts inland, huddling together and finding shelter from the storm. So Quine goes out by herself, and when she returns, he notices how much more cheerful she looks. He doesn’t ask where she’s been.

Later, they watch the local news, which shows the remaining tower blocks being decanted, and a long queue of people waiting for the buses to take them away. Each person is carrying a small rucksack.

“Change of clothes, essential medication,” Drover mutters, and Quine glances at him but doesn’t comment. The queue is silent, and Drover can sense their resignation at this enforced flight from their homes. It’s not the first time, of course. It’s not even the second, third, or fourth time.

“At least it’s all organized,” Quine comments. “Buses to the municipal halls, chemical toilets, camp beds lined up in rows, and vats of soup.”

Soup. Drover can still taste the metallic green soup. He shuts his eyes.

Two days after the storm and Drover’s at his desk checking the latest data.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Quine tries again. “We need to get out of the house. You need to—”

Drover glances at her. Normally she doesn’t make such a big deal of his behavior; until now she’s been accepting of the admixture of narcolepsy, agoraphobia, and general anxiety that he brings to their relationship. He glances back at his screen, finds an outlier in the data. Something located nearby that appears to be motionless. He looks closer. Quine gives up and wanders off.

“Mm?” says Toring at their meeting later that day.

“It hasn’t moved for a few hours,” Drover points out. “And it’s odd. You don’t normally find bats in such populated areas.”

“No,” but Toring doesn’t look as if he’s paying attention. “How’s Quine doing?”

Quine? Drover’s confused. They’re talking about work.

Later, Drover makes the mistake of telling Quine that Toring was asking after her.

“Me? He doesn’t even know me.”

“Perhaps he’s just being courteous.”

“Huh,” Quine narrows her eyes. “What did you tell him about me?”

“Nothing!” Why does Drover feel like he’s caught in some sort of interrogation between the two of them? “I need to—” he adds. She’s right. He should get out more.

The sky’s washed clean, a deceptively innocent pale blue as Drover walks down the hill away from the house, picking his way past roof tiles and tree branches that landed there during the storm. Soon he reaches the position of the data point: a broken paving stone with something dark hunched on it. Something small and easy to miss, but he knows he’s looking at his first dead bat in real life. Knows too that he shouldn’t approach it. But there’s something so pitiful in its splayed wings, and in the way its tiny hand-like claws seem to be clutching at something just beyond its reach. The tracker, a bright plastic disk no larger than a penny, is still in position on the bat’s chest. It must still be transmitting—that’s how he found the bat. He lowers his head, averts his gaze out of a surely misplaced desire to give the bat some privacy. This is fundamentally different to seeing the representation of death on his screen, where it’s nothing more than a static data point. The body lying crumpled on the pavement reminds him of the essential mystery of death; it’s beyond numerical analysis. Beyond comprehension. As is the sorrow he feels for this small animal.

As he’s standing there, he hears a van pull up, and at the same time a dog starts to bark.

“Step away from the corpse!” someone shouts and, turning, he sees a person in a hazmat suit. Of course, dead bats are dangerous and have to be disposed of using the correct procedure.

A large dog is sitting on the pavement, watching the proceedings with interest.

“What is that dog doing here?” Hazmat fiddles with a small robot, the sort that are sent into battlefields to disarm mines.

“I have no idea, it’s nothing to do with me,” Drover tries to explain, anxious that Hazmat might report him to the authorities for owning an illegal pet, but he’s drowned out by the whirring sound of the robot strutting its way along the pavement, accompanied by more barking. The bat shouldn’t have to lie there, waiting to be scooped up like rubbish. Especially not when everyone is so reliant on the bats. They should be treated with more respect.

“Get—that—animal—under—control!” screeches Hazmat above the inharmonious sound of the dog and the robot. Drover grabs the dog by the scruff of its neck and pulls it out of the robot’s path just in time, as the metallic pincers reach out and seize the tiny corpse. Clearly excited by this contact with a human, the dog jumps up on its hind legs, almost knocking him to the ground.

“A dog?” says Quine, “I don’t understand. Why did you bring it home?”

They’re all in the kitchen. The dog senses that it’s the topic of conversation and rolls over onto its back.

“Tummy rubs, eh?” Drover feels around on the animal’s chest for a tracker. He doesn’t find anything; this dog’s a stray and therefore of no scientific interest to the authorities. 

“Oh, just leave it alone.” Quine looks annoyed. “I don’t like that it knows where we live. It’s probably got fleas or ticks.”

“Maybe.” Drover continues to pet the dog, and it scrambles to its feet and leans against his legs in a way which feels curiously comforting. Quine disappears for a meeting, so Drover searches for a piece of kit he hasn’t used for years: the granddaddy to the bat trackers, an old collar with a camera on it. The sort of collar that used to be worn by pets so their owners would be able to trace them and make humorous videos of the footage for internet use. Both the pets and the videos are long gone of course, included in the authorities’ extensive category of “waste of resources” and therefore prohibited. This collar once belonged to his mother’s terrier, and now Drover shows it to the dog, who sits patiently while it’s fastened around its neck. Then he fetches the dog a tin of tufa, the fake tuna that is the main export of the soya fields south of here. The dog bolts it down and, realizing there won’t be any more food today, wanders off outside.

Drover turns on his computer and manages to find the old camera software. Soon he’s getting a dog’s-eye view of the streets, snuffling along pavements, wading through the urban lakes that lap at the city buildings, cocking a leg, and there’s a sudden blurring as the dog presumably chases something small. Then he’s pausing at the entrance to an old tenement block, seemingly abandoned, nosing the door open and entering a long dark corridor. It’s quiet, empty of people, as the dog makes his way up a wide staircase and pauses at a door.  Only a brief moment later the door’s opened, as if the dog has been expected, and he’s inside. Bare floorboards and scabby walls pass by; the flat must still be occupied, probably illicitly. Then human legs appear and a hand reaches down for a pat. A dish of food is set in front of the dog, who starts to eat.

Drover can’t stop watching. This dog’s version of the city is so different from his own. He hasn’t been inside a tenement block for years, not since the accident and the retreat to this house on the hillside. The heart of the city is only a few miles away, within walking distance, but it might as well be on the other side of the moon as far as Drover is concerned. He can’t bring himself to venture into the valley rendered amphibious by the succession of storms, where seawater has spilled into the streets and created makeshift canals. For centuries Edinburgh was known as the “Athens of the North,” and now some business ventures are trying to position New Reekie as the “Venice of the North,” complete with boat tours of the more picturesque ruins. Drover knows that Quine’s bank is involved somehow, but she stopped talking to him about it after he dismissed this as “catastrophe tourism.”

Eventually the dog stops eating and curls up. The camera’s pointed down at the floor, undulating with the dog’s breathing, as if the floorboards themselves are shifting back and forth, like the sea. Nothing is fixed or permanent anymore. Drover turns off the laptop and goes to bed.

That night it’s even worse than usual. He’s underwater, checking up on the seaweed hanging in strands from the pipes. A difficult job, and dangerous too, because of all the other debris now under the water. Broken walls, bricks and stones, even bits of old furniture and household appliances. What was once on land is now under the sea and invisible to all but the people who work on the seaweed farms. It’s alright for him; he knows his way around this waterscape, can bend and flex like a seal as he fastens errant strips of kelp, can peer through the murky green fluid around him. A shoal of small fish dart past his legs and he reaches out to them to stroke their silvery bodies but something grabs his legs, stops him moving, he’s trapped and the air’s running out, he’s gasping and the fish have forsaken him—

He sits up in bed, still gasping. Beside him, Quine murmurs in her sleep and turns over. She isn’t disturbed by his nightmares anymore. He remains sitting bolt upright; it’s always impossible to get back to sleep afterward, so he swings his legs out of bed and makes his way to the office. He turns on the link to the dog and watches. Slowly his breathing calms and he relaxes.

That evening Drover is eating dinner with Quine. As a special treat, she’s bought salmon. And not the fake stuff, but real wild-type, genetically engineered to be identical to the indigenous species that lost its spawning grounds and became extinct.

“It’s a reward, you know how hard I’ve been working lately.” She clearly wants to justify the price—it’s orders of magnitude more expensive than tufa.

“And …” she pauses as if trying to judge whether or not to continue, “we’ve been developing a new product. And it was more successful than we predicted.”

“Predicted?” He predicts adverse weather from the bat data. What does Quine predict?

“It’s a way of laying a wager on the outcomes of weather.”

“Betting on the storms?”

“It’s fantastic really, it seems to be popular across all groups of people. We made far more profit than we expected last week.”

“But don’t you think that’s immoral?”

“Look, Drover. A lot of people can’t even buy insurance, at any price. If their house has been flooded already there’s no way they can get it insured again. So we’ve set up this product that allows them simply to bet on the probability of there being a certain type of weather event with certain characteristics in a certain time period. Unlike the insurance companies, we don’t ask them any questions, don’t set any conditions or limitations. If the weather event happens and we pay out—and we do pay out, with no quarrels or quibbles—at least they get some money to help deal with the consequences. It’s the victims of the weather who can benefit from what we’re doing. Not the usual big companies.”

“And you get expensive dinners.” Drover pokes at his fish.

“I got a bonus for developing a successful product for the company. Why shouldn’t I benefit too?” She gestures at his plate. “And you seem to be enjoying it.”

“It’s dancing on graves.” His reaction is extreme, he’s aware of that. Both extreme and irrational. He drops his fork.

“I’m the one footing the bills. Your little bats bring in sod-all.”

Now he hears clearly what has been muffled until now: her distaste for his work. And he has to agree that she is the one who rescued him financially. He couldn’t afford to live in such a nice place on a hill and safely away from the water, not after losing everything.

He picks up his fork and they continue eating in silence; the salmon can’t be wasted even after an argument.

After dinner, the dog shows up at their front door with scratch marks on its muzzle and a mournful expression. Drover cleans the scratches with hot water and gives the dog its usual tin of tufa, and goes to sit in his office with it. He turns the camera off beforehand—he doesn’t want people spying on him and the dog. This is a private relationship.

Quine appears in the doorway. “Aren’t you going to let anyone know about the dog?”

Drover turns to look at her. “You want me to tell the authorities about it.”

“It might be a disease carrier. Like the bats.”

Drover can feel the dog’s heartbeat beneath his hand. He hugs the animal closer to him. “No, I’m not going to do that. It trusts me.”

The next day, Quine has already left the house before Drover’s out of bed. He notices a new pair of sunglasses, a silk scarf, some new sandals. Quine’s bonus must have been bigger than he initially assumed.

At their meeting, Toring’s wearing one of his most ancient and scruffy t-shirts. “How are things?” he asks. “What’s new?” He’s just being polite, knowing full well there is never anything new in Drover’s life.

“We ate salmon last night. Real salmon.”

“Wait, what? How on earth can you afford that?”

“Quine. They’ve developed some new financial product. And she gets a bonus as a result.”

“A bonus?” Toring raises his eyebrows. For the first time since Drover started working with him, he looks judgmental.

Over the next few weeks, more silk scarves appear, and Quine buys Drover some cashmere gloves. She discusses plans for a holiday: “The wellness resort at the peak of Ben Nevis is perfect in June,” she says. “All that healing sunlight!” Or she talks about eco-treehouses in the Galloway Forest. Drover lets her talk without commenting; he hasn’t left New Reekie since his accident and has no intention of going anywhere now. In any case, Ben Nevis is covered in plastic waste, and the Galloway Forest has never recovered from the great inferno that turned most of its trees into broken sticks and ash.

When the dog’s not there, Drover watches its livestreamed footage. Once, a shabbily dressed man appears and waves. And even though he knows the camera is only one-way, he slowly lifts a hand and waves back.

A few days later, Drover observes an escalation in the bats’ perspirations, coupled with a decrease in their food intake. This combination of changes in the bats’ behavior hasn’t been noticed before, not even by Drover, but he seems to be proving more adept at picking up smaller and smaller deviations from their routines.

During his meeting with Toring, he blurts out, “I picture the bats in flight as they swoop around the wrecked buildings. I can sense them, somehow, just as they sense the coming storm.” This isn’t what he meant to say because it sounds silly and unscientific when spoken out loud. What must Toring think? But Toring simply nods.

Perhaps this is in his blood. Given his name, his distant ancestors were likely drovers, those men who walked with livestock—cattle, sheep, even geese—across the country from farm to market. Perhaps this explains his ability to understand the movements of animals.

In any case, Drover is proved right. That afternoon, a new weather system is detected to the west of Scotland and the routine starts up. Quine announces that it’s refreshing to go out before the storm hits; there’s a heightened sense of excitement and danger in the air that makes her feel grateful to be alive! Drover doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t feel particularly energized when contemplating the damage the storm can do. Quine comments that he’s so unresponsive to her, it’s like living with a dead man. Drover doesn’t bother arguing; she’s right, he is a dead man. She leaves the house, slamming the door behind her.

Two hours before the storm’s due, the trees are already swaying and Quine still hasn’t returned. Drover hears a noise outside and opens the door to let in the dog. Instead, just outside on the garden path is a stranger. A small, slight woman, wearing a formal trouser suit and highly polished boots.

Occasionally they get people wandering up from the valleys asking for help, so Drover waits on the doorstep. He does donate small amounts of money and now, thinking of Quine’s recent purchases, he’s determined to do the right thing, as if to counteract her extravagance. But this woman seems too well-dressed to be in need of help, so perhaps she’s a volunteer herself. Drover encountered a few of these people after the accident. Some had good intentions, but others were just disaster junkies. They all backed away when it was clear that putting him right again would be a possibly lifelong task.

The woman removes her rain hat and shakes out a plume of long dark hair before she speaks.

“Hello, Drover.”

How does she know his name?

She holds out her hand. “It’s nice to meet you in person. Finally.”

Finally?

“Eaten any more salmon dinners recently?”

Perhaps he’s still asleep, dreaming that he’s standing on his doorstep on a chilly Scottish spring morning and being asked about his diet by a complete stranger.

The woman smiles. “I’m Toring.”

“Sorry?” he blinks at her, taking in her glossy hair and buttoned suit.

“Yes, I suppose this is a bit of a surprise.”

“But Toring’s a man!” Toring, who waves his arms around when he wants to emphasize a point, is the archetypal scruffy male scientist who cares only about his work. He’s not this neat and quietly confident woman.

“You’re sure about that?” she raises one eyebrow.

“Yes …” But he hasn’t actually seen Toring in person for years.

The dog bounds up and sniffs her. Drover envies its unabashed curiosity.

“Is that your dog?”

“I—I don’t know.” Is that why the woman’s here? Because of the dog? Perhaps someone has hacked into its camera, notified the authorities.

“I see. And is Quine at home?”

“No.”

“Glad you’re sure of something.” She moves toward the door. “May I?”

He doesn’t know what else to do, apart from step aside and let her enter his house. Once inside, she perches on the sofa and faces away from him in the direction of the distant sea, already churned up by the approaching storm. “You’ll get a message from the authorities,” she glances at her phone, “in a minute, telling you Toring has gone offline for work reasons. He—” and here she pauses to smile to herself, “is doing fieldwork.”

They wait in silence. Drover knows he should speak but can’t think what to say. Finally, his phone pings with the message.

“And when did you first meet Quine? How long after your accident?” The woman is watching him carefully, waiting for his reaction.

This apparent non sequitur takes him aback, and he pauses to think. “A few months, I suppose. And then she offered to let me move in with her almost straightaway, and I was grateful. More than grateful. I was desperate, to be honest, my flat was unliveable and I had nowhere else to go apart from the temporary accommodation in the tenements.”

“I can imagine.”

“Are you saying—” he stops. He doesn’t know what she’s saying.

“Would it surprise you to know that Quine’s company isn’t in the habit of paying out bonuses to staff?”

No. No, he’s not surprised, because she’s never mentioned bonuses before. So—

“She’s been betting on the weather, and she’s been winning her bets because she’s got an inside track on the bat data before it’s made public. Your bat data, of course. But now the company has grown wise to her too-frequent successes and had her arrested for fraud. Then they contacted the authorities, and so here I am.” The woman looks around. “Let’s go check your laptop for the spyware she’s installed on it.”

Later, as they’re drinking barley coffee, she says quietly, “Toring’s dead, I’m afraid.”

He nods. “When?”

“A couple of years ago. He was in Fraserburgh.” She doesn’t have to say more; a hurricane hit the town too quickly for anyone to escape.

She continues, “It was thought advisable to develop an avatar that mimicked him in every way, to ensure continuity with his staff. With you, in particular. Your work was going so well, we didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize it. It was too valuable to us.”

He nods again. Of course. He has become so good at analyzing the bats’ data, and so keen to avoid the world around him. The numbers were the only thing that could make him forget, until he met the dog.

“But why did you have to come all the way out here to tell me in person?”

“Because of Quine. And because the authorities are wondering if you might have been in on it too. But you don’t think like that, do you? You take the world as it is, you don’t seek to manipulate it or take advantage of it. You’re too passive, or too good. It doesn’t matter which, it comes to the same thing in the end.” She waves her hand at the outside world. “And now I must leave. Will you be alright?”

He nods. “I’ve got the dog.” He might have lost both Toring and Quine in one day, but when the storm the bats are foretelling hits soon, he can bury his head in the dog’s fur while the windows rattle and the roof shakes. And he knows the real reason why the woman bothered to come out here in person: Thanks to him, and the early predictions of storms, the city authorities protect the inhabitants. Not to mention saving a lot of money. So it’s worth their while to protect him, just as the bats are allowed to continue living in the derelict properties on the coast.

The last time he sees Quine, her image is blurred in the poor-quality feed from the cell where she’s being held. It’s easy to think of her as nothing more than a collection of pixels as her face shudders silently and the text transcription scrolls underneath: Get me out of here! I haven’t done anything wrong!

Although she’s gone, her perfume is still present, the ghost of long-ago roses lingering in the bedsheets. Her bank is still promoting the gambling product that allows some to benefit from extreme weather while others lose everything.

It’s four years to the day since his accident. Four years since he’d been sent to check up on the seaweed crop in the eye of a storm. If the growing seaweed did loosen and detach from the holding pipes, the farm’s entire profit would be washed away, but the robotic divers were too expensive to risk being damaged by the churning sea, so a human had to go instead.

As the storm whipped up sand and debris, the sea slammed into Drover’s body over and over again, tumbling him around so that he was no longer sure of the way back to the boat. He managed to grip the upper pipe and anchor himself to it, getting his feet as well as his arms around the metal. The pipes were solid, and had survived many such storms. They were part of the old infrastructure that transported North Sea oil from ship to shore back in the twentieth century, before Scotland moved to renewable energy and repurposed that infrastructure for valuable seaweed crops.

But the pipes were too solid. Drover’s right foot became stuck fast between them, and he started to panic, using up too much oxygen as he breathed quicker and quicker. Peering through the cloudy water, he spotted something impossibly bright: a red sack shifting around near his trapped foot. An old shopping bag? God knows there was enough plastic in this sea. But no, the thing wasn’t moving randomly—it had a purpose. One long tentacle emerged, and then another. An octopus. Once an alien, exotic species, they were often found up here in Scottish seas since the water temperature had become so much warmer. 

He watched, incredulous, as it squeezed out its tentacles one at a time from between the pipes, finally followed by its body, and he realized that instead of simply trying to wrench his foot out from between the pipes, he could maneuver it along the lower pipe toward the octopus, and the fractionally larger gap it had found for its own escape, and free himself as well. The octopus shot off into the busy, debris-filled water, and he swam upward toward his boat.

It was worse on the surface. The storm had arrived and enormous waves washed over the boat, rocking it back and forth. Exhausted, he hauled himself into it and was straightaway tumbled out again as it capsized. He repeated this process at least three times before he eventually found himself, more through luck than ability, lying in the bottom of the boat. And this was where his colleagues also found him, a good few hours later, half-conscious and drifting. His flat was destroyed in that same storm, and that was the end of his work at the seaweed farm and the beginning of his retreat from the world.

Now he logs into the database. The raw data scrolls upward, screen after screen of numbers. Numbers he has been living with for nearly four years now.

Why does it always come to this? he thinks. Is it inevitable that information gets coupled to money, and to the desire to make a profit? Can it ever remain pure? He can still hear Quine pedantically reminding him that it’s partly private-sector money that pays for the bat research. Everything must pull its weight in this half-drowned, wind-battered country. As far as anyone can tell, the bats aren’t physically hampered by the trackers, but they’re tied into a system that extracts information about them. An economic system that has utterly failed to preserve the natural world is now exploiting what remains to protect not the animals, but the humans.

After the dog has finished its evening tufa, they go for a walk. Away from the sad, dark house where he’s imprisoned himself for so long, down the hill and into the valley, walking carefully along the temporary boards set over the swampy ground, until they arrive at the coast and the abandoned sector of the city.

Inside the ruined flat, man and dog pick their way through the debris of Drover’s former life: the moldy rugs, the broken furniture, the books swollen with damp, until they reach the remains of the kitchen where he used to boil haggis and fry potatoes. No human can live here anymore, but these flats have escaped demolition because the bats have moved in.  

Now, a bat swoops in through the broken window and, sensing Drover and the dog standing in the middle of the enclosed space, does a graceful turnabout. And Drover feels acknowledged.