The game was hard but in a simple way, and she found she could use it whenever she needed to relearn how focus worked in opposite directions. It gave her no less than control over her own mind, as much as the medication, a way of intuitively visualizing pathways through complex mathematical tradeoffs. Of all things, she had first seen the characters in a Youtube thumbnail and thought they looked exactly the faeries she knew in her head. The music sounded like the sort of alien version of local music she imagined they would dance to. The faeries took her great-grandmother, before the internet, for three months into the mountains, but she wandered back into the harbour looking no worse for wear, saying she had gone with a carnival no one else remembered. As an adult she assumed the story was a trace left by the bipolar lurking in her family, so far from anyone who could diagnose it. At first, she hadn’t wanted to play the games at all. On top of that she would play, in the trailer, curled up on her giant duffel bag of fabrics, which until now she’d mainly used to sew cosplays, her one serious hobby outside of her work. She quickly gave up on using it for money or content or socializing, which meant she was free to let the clothes evolve into her own style, simplifying and incorporating more varied, better fabrics, to the point that she could wear pieces casually. Did they have people selling textiles at Whabouchi yet? Probably, and they were probably much better than her. The words weren’t even worth arguing with any more.

They set up in a squatter camp in the woods. The welcoming committee included representatives of both the factory and the Cree community whose land it shared; Bol Bolduc was introduced as the primary liaison between the two. Most of the posse tried to look scary, but didn’t; Bol could have looked very scary if he wanted, and tried to look kind. A wide-brimmed hat of some hardy waterproof over sideburns she’d never seen outside 19th century portraits, like a sheath for his cheekbones. A lifejacket ribbed with reflective tape over a thick plaid shirt with beaded hems and frayed seams. He towered over his grandmother, Tabitha, who did most of the talking. “We don’t care how you live out here; as far as our employers are concerned you don’t exist, and we won’t go out of our way to change that. You can come into TempTown and exchange any currency you got however you want, but you can’t live there. And you can use our data within a budget of 4GB a month. But you can’t set up anything that’ll ruin the soil or the water, or start scaring animals away.” There were a lot of rules about hunting Polly zoned out on, hissing at one of her trailermates when he kept trying to haggle. “And you can’t come inside the plant without company permission; even if you ask too many questions about how it works they’ll want to talk to you.” “What if you already know a lot about how it works? Do they hire people on… office work here?” It was a long shot, there was nothing she knew that a location like this would need on a normal basis, but with everything being so fucked up, they might be able to use someone who could think outside the box. “Everyone asks that,” Bol sighed, “don’t get your hopes up, but you can hand me your resume.”

<<prev<< >>next>>