Polly began to grasp what Bol had become in the year he played Santa Claus, not only in a Forum Square display but personally bringing gifts on behalf of the ESOP to constituents in the middle of the night (costume her handiwork). Nemaska Sovereign Cooperative, in less than five years (not even the timeframe, Lev loved to joke, of a Soviet economic plan), had become unrecognizable. According to OSECON, the only body publishing reliable GDP anymore (and a brainchild of one of Polly’s professors), their total economy was 2/3 the size of Montreal’s. Housing by trailer and yurt, however ecologically managed, had crossed the threshold of inefficiency and the new SovCoop had had to clear small lots and build up, on the model of the People’s Toothpick in New York. The needles were anchored by foundations that went all the way down to the mine tunnels, allowing their waste to be funnelled straight into the backfills, and their summits hosted a world-class array of shortwave towers. The planned hydroelectric expansion, another point of contention on the part of the band, had been replaced with tether-lines to aerial solar and wind arrays that drifted over the sky like hexagonal clouds. (NASU had pioneered these in the Leduc formation, and had flown engineers across the Bay to help them set up.) Lev had opened a military academy training both local militias and a new mercenary company called Argetlam, to defend against his brothers, who all had brutal and profitable SovCorps in the islands to the north. He only taught classes himself once a week, received the salary of an ordinary mine worker, and did nothing the rest of the time; vanishing for days at a time on his snowmobile, writing poems to bore the retinue at his increasingly rare bar nights.

Switching from an open pit to a mycelium of tunnels slowed growth significantly, though they pitched this to ordinary investors that they wouldn’t run out and buyers needing a stable supply of lithium could rely on the site for several decades (at Polly’s recommendation, they cited the standard estimated timeframe until asteroid mining would become viable). Meanwhile, other enterprises based on-site sold cross-country and even overseas what they didn’t share under mutual aid arrangements with other NASU sites, which also afforded them amenities making up for lost profits. The Santa Claus stunt dramatized the mood of Christmas cheer inspired by a dirigible train arriving from Texas with shipments of fruits most people hadn’t tasted in years - bananas, oranges, kiwi, honeydew. Polly’s quilts based on danmaku patterns had become a local tradition even among people unfamiliar with the games. All in all, what Polly was now helping run was something she had only imagined in speculative papers and digital models - at once a corporation, a union and a government. Downloading the founding and working documents of NASU’s four other SovCoops at least gave her baselines to work with, he was currently exploring ways of recognizing compensating informal domestic and care work within the system, on behalf of a new “women’s union”. Her own work was similarly unacknowledged - not that she minded, or at least so she told herself. Doing this kind of work medicated was slow and certain and demanding of all her cognition that wasn’t forcibly occupied by watching sounds of seabirds or distant volleys of gunfire from the training camp. She didn’t have time to worry about presenting it, or answering questions. She didn’t even do calls any more; she was on payroll as a consultant. Bol, with his unassuming but room-filling voice, like polite thunder, his communal magnetism, was best for that kind of thing. He still went to everything and didn’t talk unless he felt someone was being talked over and then he held up proceedings until their concern had been addressed from all angles. He even still worked regular shifts, though fewer and almost as a formality. For the first couple of years he’d let Polly teach him the concepts he needed to discuss at board meetings; now he read along and asked questions when he came home to her working.

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