There’s someone on the ice.
The ground in Greenland is full of gold. There’s diamonds in there, huge seams of copper and zinc, rare earth metals, the wealth of a small continent, and all of it is buried under an ice sheet two miles thick. You can’t build on the ice and you can’t dig through it either, because the ice is not static. Not glassy and smooth but jagged, rucked up everywhere with jostling peaks, and it flows: every part of the ice sheet is slowly spreading out of the centre of the island and into the sea. Any permanent structure you try to build there will end up on an iceberg, dissolving in the Atlantic. If you try to dig through the ice and into the mineral-rich rock beneath, three trillion tons of creaking, patient ice will crush your borehole and snap your drills like matchsticks. The ice is empty. Animals don’t go there. There’s nothing to eat, this far from the sea, where the ground never thaws. Not even rocks to nuzzle for lichen. Some ice worms that scrub the red algae off the glaciers, but nothing desperate enough to feed on them. Humans don’t go there either. A few scientific research stations that sprout up for three months before being dismantled again. The US military built a base on the ice once to store their missiles, but they felt the ground moving, closing around their silos, ready to pop the nuclear warheads like bubble wrap, and the base was abandoned. A few explorers and adventurers are buried in there, slowly crushed between groaning walls of ice. All of Greenland’s original settlements are on the thin rind of exposed rock around the edge. You can fish there. For a few months in the summer you can grow potatoes in the thin acidic soil. No one lives on the ice. But there’s someone on the ice.
The first documented encounter with the icedwellers was filmed by Jaxon Flores, an American settler, just outside his homestead above Qikangittuqaqquti on the edge of the ice. Flores had, like half a million Americans, moved to the new unincorporated federal territory of Greenland under the Second Frontier programme. Footage captured from his livestream shows Flores on the ice. It’s night; it’s been night for weeks. He’s standing in front of a ring light, and the crags and spears of ice behind him glow semitransparent, like a world of jagged glass. Flores wears a black parka and repeatedly hits a vape pen as he talks to his phone. STOP BEING GAY, he says. Literally bro just stop being gay, he says, I literally don’t know how else to put it, you are gay. Your ancestors, your ancestors—he sucks on the vape—your ancestors carved a society out of the wilderness. Your ancestors were men. They went to the desert and tamed it, they fought savage tribes, they fought literal fuckin demons to build the modern world. They reaped the fruits of civilisation because they’d earned it. How do you think your ancestors would feel to see you eating processed slop and fapping to pornography? If you’re not already in Greenland, if you’re still in Fake America—a huge cloud of vapour freezing to tiny crystals as he exhales—you’re not gonna make it bro. Here he spreads his arms wide at the black desert around him. There’s no laws! he shouted. No laws here, no taxes, it’s just men, real men, building a new society in Hyperborea. You could be minting crypto here bro, you could be running cams, you could be doing shit that would get you a fucking jail sentence in Fake America. Right now I’m building generational wealth. In like sixty years when the ice melts and they find gold my great grandkids will be trillionaires. I did that. And instead you’re saving for a down payment for a studio in Miami to party with females, because you—and here Flores leans in close to the camera until you can see the ice glittering in his eyelashes—are gay.
In addition to his mandatory homestead, Flores had bought twenty plots of Greenland ice shelf during the initial government auction. Hundreds of thousands of people watched his daily streams from the middle of the wilderness. He had failed to sell a single plot. In the darkness behind him the ice gurgled and whined. Sounds like rubber stretching, like steel twisting, like a gasp from the bottom of the world.
The footage shows Flores continuing to speak for another hour. He answers questions from his chat. He talks about how much money he’s making. At 1:13:22, the lighting behind him changes; some of the shards of ice appear to be lit by a faint, local orange glow. At 1:15:09, Flores stops talking and stares at the camera. Yeah yeah, he says, nice try. He stares silently at a point directly below the camera for twelve more seconds. Fuck you, he says, there’s no one behind me. But he turns around and looks anyway, and then suddenly ducks down. For just under two seconds the footage captures what looks like a human shape on a ridge of ice, but taller and more massive than any man, holding a smouldering clump of dried heather in one enormous hand. Then the light vanishes and we are very close to Flores’ face, lit only by the glow from his screen. Yo, he hoots, yoooo. From its peaks of ice the visitor responds. Its voice is high and loud, strained, nasal, more like the scream of a bird of prey than anything human. EEOOOOOOOOOOOGH, it says. The footage ends.
In 1722, the Twin Realms of Denmark-Norway established the first modern European colony on the island of Greenland, with a mission to secure its waters for Danish-Norwegian whalers, and to establish contact with the survivors from the old Norse settlement, first established seven hundred years previously. There was a lot of speculation about those settlers, who would have spent generations completely isolated from their cousins in Europe. They wouldn’t know about the Protestant reformation or the rediscovery of America or that the Earth revolved around the Sun. They would still be stuck in Catholicism, or maybe they’d reverted back to the worship of the pagan gods, Thor and Odin, or whatever new deities bubbled out the swamps of this heathen land on the edge of the world. The colonists arrived to find that no one was there. They landed at the Eystribygð, where there should have been farms of fat sheep and monasteries and Brattahlíð, the grand estate of Erik the Red, and all that remained was a pile of stones that had once been a church. In the hills around the ruin skulked the Skrælingar, the people of dried pelts and bone-tipped spears.
Eventually the colony’s pastor, an excitable young man called Jens Måskesen, managed to learn enough Inuit to speak to them. They told him that they were not the first people to come to Greenland, but when they arrived the place was already populated by the nujaqaqut, or the hairy ones. The nujaqaqut were described as tall, broad men with light-coloured hair. When the Inuit arrived the nujaqaqut were living on the coast, but they had fought and now they lived in the interior, on the ice. Måskesen concluded that these must be the Vikings he was looking for, mounted an expedition into the icy interior of Greenland, and was never seen again.
He’d learned some of his hosts’ vocabulary, but not the grammar. Inuit languages distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns; the animate form would be nujaqaqtut. These were not men.
Six months later, a ship from Denmark stopped at the colony with a replacement pastor. August Risle was a man of the Enlightenment: a philologist, a vermeologist, a proto-anthropologist, and an inventor of small but vicious devices. He had spent two years in Lapland learning about the lives of the Lapps, two years in the forests of Kalukiya beyond the Urals learning about the lives of the Kaluks, and one year in the forests of Kalukiya beyond the Urals desperately trying to get back over the Urals and go home. In Greenland, Risle took a far more systematic approach than his predecessor. He didn’t just learn passable Inuit; he learned to canoe, he accompanied his Inuit hosts on seal-hunting trips, he learned about their religion, in which everything that breathes is a part of the sky, and he witnessed their funerals, in which the dead are wrapped in a sealskin shroud and buried under the sea ice.
There were a lot of funerals; one by one his hosts were dying of smallpox. Despite this, Risle never gave his hosts the other thing that Europeans were busy spreading to every new population they encountered, which was Christianity. He let them keep their sky thick with souls. He let them believe the winds were made of the dead and the unborn, and the stronger bodiless spirits out there, like Saampu who comes in nightmares to chase you with his black teeth. He let them die unsaved. But before the surviving Inuit fled the new Danish settlement, he found out about the nujaqaqut, the hairy ones. The Inuit told him that just like there could be breath without body, sometimes there were bodies without breath. Every person breathes a part of the wind, and all the animals they have to hunt, and even rocks and plants, but not the nujaqaqut, who are shaped like men but have no souls. Because they’re made of leftover body, they can wear the signs of any animal. All of them are covered from head to foot in white hair like a bear, but some of them have antlers too, or a pair of walrus tusks. They have terrible fangs. They live on the ice but come near human settlements at night, to steal Inuit men and women and feast on their flesh. The nujaqaqut are not the old Viking settlers. The nujaqaqut are what ate them.
Risle concluded that the Norse settlement had probably collapsed due to changes in the climate and struggles with the Inuit. The nujaqaqut, he wrote, were how the Inuit, who had some intelligence, expressed their own condition. They could feel that their souls belonged to the infinite sky, but their material lives were miserable, cold, savage, and impoverished, and this fundamental fact of life on the pole was given form as the man-eating nujaqaqut. In such a desolate place, cannibalism was probably not unknown. Risle never thought about the monsters again. The rest of his time in Greenland was devoted to his real passion, the study of worms. Feeding the local earthworms into one of his own little rotating contraptions, which slowly peeled an earthworm until it was a large square sheet of weeping, semitransparent slime.
Maybe he should have looked a little harder. According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, ‘learned men say that in the summer in which Erik set out to settle Greenland, thirty-five ships sailed out of Breiðafjörður and Borgarfjörður; fourteen of these arrived there safely, some were driven back and some were lost, and one arrived but the crew were lost to the náttskrækja.’ Náttskrækja means night-screecher. It’s not clear what this refers to, but presumably the saga’s audience would have known. What it ultimately means is that when Erik first came to Greenland, there was already someone on the ice.
Across the two hundred-odd years of Danish sovereignty in Greenland, settlers had a habit of disappearing, like Jens Måskesen, off the edge of the ice sheet. There are empty graves up and down the coast. But Greenland is a dangerous country, and the numbers were too small to notice. Strange things kept happening after 1940, when the United States took over effective governorship of the island. The Americans built military bases, airstrips, radar stations, listening posts, missile silos. For a while, one of the tallest manmade structures on the planet was an American military radio tower in Greenland. All of this was secret; the Greenlanders had no idea what was happening in their country. The Danes still paid for fishing ports and housing projects and pretended the place was theirs, but America had the crown of the world, peering over the pole and into Russia: this unearthly island, halfway into outer space. The soldiers were uneasy there. Every few years, when the nights dragged on for weeks, someone disappeared. In 1971, the guns at Thule Air Base fired continuously into the ice for three hours. Helicopters were sent up to strafe the surrounding fjords. Artillery shells burst into the glaciers. Afterwards, the Air Force was unable to explain exactly what had happened. All they knew was that they’d come under attack. Not the Soviets. Something in the night.
If the military knew what it was that attacked them, they didn’t say. It was easy to keep secrets in the north. Or it was until 2025, when President Trump, who never had any patience for subtext, decided to get rid of the useful fiction in which Greenland was still an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, and half a million American settlers spread out over the ice.
The Greenland PD found Jaxon Flores smeared across the surface of the glacier like a burst fly. A month later something attacked a homestead near Quviananngit. Gnaw marks on the bones. In the northeast corner of the island a shell corporation was operating a gladiatorial arena, fights to the death livestreamed back to the mainland. The last few frames before the feed cut out showed an enormous nude figure as it burst screeching through the wall, seized one of the combatants by his head, and bounced him against the floor like a basketball. In the first two years of mass American settlement in Greenland, at least eighteen Second Frontierspeople were killed in similar attacks. Two and a half years after the death of Jaxon Flores, someone finally managed to take down a nujaqaq.
The attack took place at Hyperborea Two, a neo-Nazi compound in the south of the island. Hyperborea Two was the home of the Origins Movement, led by Fred McIntosh, who had been a promising research chemist until 1986, when he decided to devote himself entirely to the idea that the ancestors of the white race had come to Earth from the star Alpha Tauri, and their original home on this planet had been a now-vanished temperate continent covering the North Pole. McIntosh taught that the Neanderthals were a race of extraterrestrial Aryan supermen, and their diminished descendants could reactivate their Neanderthal genes through exposure to the Northern Lights. Like most American settlements, Hyperborea Two sustained itself by taking advantage of Greenland’s lax legal regime; they’d built a lab out on the ice, which they were using to produce generic versions of prescription drugs, which they then sold online. Originally the lab was set up to manufacture opiates, benzos, and amphetamines; their bestselling product ended up being aripiprazole, an antipsychotic. In the middle of the night—it’s always night—a figure leaped out of the ice with an unearthly high-pitched scream and tore two armed guards gorily in two. Inside the compound, it ripped through two more Nazis in short order. It was shot in the leg, the shoulder, and the hip without slowing down. A gunshot directly to the head failed to kill it. Finally, one of the Nazis put a round directly through the intruder’s eye, and it collapsed. They posted a photo online, the surviving cultists posing behind the corpse like they’d brought down a buck. Two of them holding up Black Sun flags. McIntosh himself in the middle, gripping an AR-15 tight with his leathery, palsied hands. The nujaqaq lay on its side, all eight feet of it, naked, head lolling, one sightless eye pointed at nothing, one a dried-up wound, with black trails of blood matting the thick white hair that covered every inch of its body.
The body was seized by the GPD and handed over to federal authorities. Genomic analysis revealed that what the Origins Movement had killed was, in fact, an Aryan superman. Mitochondrial DNA revealed that around 1% of the ice monster’s ancestry was shared by populations in Iceland and Denmark. The most genetically similar sample overall, though, came from a 38,000-year-old bone found in the Vindija Cave in Croatia. It had belonged to a Neanderthal.
It took a long time to find one alive on the ice. Drones with thermal cameras fanned out over Greenland, searching for wandering bands of nujaqaqut, and found nothing. The nujaqaqut don’t travel in bands. Their thick fur means their bodies barely lose any heat. They looked for signs of habitation, but the nujaqaqut don’t build shelters. What they did find was shit, the huge warm logs the nujaqaqut left in crevasses of the ice. Follow the shit, and eventually you’ll find the shitter. The US military tracked a juvenile male as he plodded south across the wilderness, heading towards the homestead of a sports betting website. Before the creature could start mauling the bookies, a strike team helidropped onto the ice to detain it. Getting the nujaqaq into captivity was a brutal, screeching struggle; once locked up at an Air Force facility in Nuuk, though, it was almost embarrassingly docile. It didn’t froth or try to break out of its cell; its calm, quiet gaze was mostly drawn to electric lights. Like a newborn baby. It shrieked and howled when it saw its captors, but without aggression. MRI scans showed that whatever was happening in its head, the nujaqaq vocal tract only allowed a very limited level of voice modulation; these nasal screams were the closest it could get to language. But there didn’t seem to be much happening in its head either. The nujaqaq passed the mirror test, but it wouldn’t look its captors in the face. Attempts to teach it sign language were a dismal failure. The creature just sat calmly and quietly, and its cold blue eyes watched the moving fingers as if they were eddies of ice twisting in the wind. It inhabited a world without meaning.
But it was very good at puzzles. The researchers tried a game that offered the nujaqaq a small morsel of food if it could press four coloured buttons in a particular sequence. It could remember a sequence of four. It could remember a series of forty. It could remember a sequence of four hundred. They tried presenting it with increasingly complicated mazes, but it always went for the optimal route without any apparent effort. They gave it a Rubik’s cube, which it solved instantly, but once it became clear that there wasn’t any food inside it showed no interest in solving any of the other, larger cubes it was offered. They tried the memory game again, but this time with numbers instead of colours. Then they tried teaching it basic addition and subtraction, which it took to almost immediately. When a piece of hamburger was on offer, the nujaqaq could multiply twelve-digit integers in its head. A few days later, having burned through everything in their library, the researchers tried giving it the P versus NP problem. The next morning, the nujaqaq had produced eight dense pages demonstrating that P did, in fact, equal NP. Any problem that can be verified in polynomial time can also be solved in polynomial time. Just not by you.
From a special hearing on the nujaqaqtut by the Joint Congressional Committee on Greenland.
SENATOR ‘JUMPING’ JIM SCHPULTZ (R-WY): Ms Rao, just to make sure i’ve got this right—when you introduced yourself earlier, you said you were the CTO of Telperion, Inc., which is a technology services firm based out of Mountain View, California?
ANANYA RAO: That’s correct.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: And you sell—
ANANYA RAO: We partner with clients including the federal government to deliver bespoke solutions for the data problems of tomorrow.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: But you are not a biologist.
ANANYA RAO: I am not.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: Did you minor in biology? AP biology, perhaps?
ANANYA RAO: My background is in computer science, Senator. I don’t see—
SEN. SCHPULTZ: Forgive me. I just find it strange, Ms Rao, that you say you’re not a biologist, but at the same time you’ve here to tell us that these, uh, nujaqaqs are human beings.
ANANYA RAO: I’m sorry, but I find your insinuation here incredibly offensive.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: I’m not insinuating anything, I’m only trying to see—
ANANYA RAO: Not so long ago, Senator, this very body held that some people were only three-fifths of a human being. Because of the way they looked and the way they spoke, because they looked different—respectfully, Senator, because they looked different to white men like yourself. There is a shameful history in this country of dehumanisation and violence, and it’s especially shocking, Senator Schpultz, to hear someone revive that hateful language, here, in the twenty-first century. The genus and species of the nujaqaqtut are Homo and sapiens. That’s what the science says.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: Ms Rao, this thing is eight feet tall and it eats raw meat. You’re telling me a Neanderthal is Homo sapiens?
ANANYA RAO: That’s what the science says. As far as I know, the law makes no distinction. Title 1 of the US Code says a human being is any member of the species Homo sapiens who is born alive. There’s no exception for Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Senator, I’m not going to debate their humanity with you. They are as human as you or me, and according to the Greenland Annexation Act—which I remember you promoting as one of your proudest achievements—that means they’re fully entitled to live and work here, and to claim American citizenship if they want.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: But you’re not saying they’re human like you or me. You’re saying they’re some kind of superhuman.
ANANYA RAO: I wouldn’t say that at all, no. We believe that all humans have an equal—
SEN. SCHPULTZ: Your company says they’re smarter than us. Is that true?
ANANYA RAO: There’s no one measure of intelligence.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: It’s a yes or no answer.
ANANYA RAO: There’s a holistic, multidimensional—
SEN. SCHPULTZ: You’ve been testing them for something. Yes or no.
ANANYA RAO: Yes. They’re smarter than us.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: Care to put a number on it? Are we talking about an IQ of 200 here? 300?
ANANYA RAO: Honestly, I can’t say. None of us are smart enough to come up with a test capable of measuring nujaqaq intelligence. Everything we make, they ace.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: But you’re talking about a group that never invented writing, never invented the wheel…
ANANYA RAO: They need to be in the right environment. The nujaqaqtut find certain things harder than we do. They’re less social, they don’t work so collaboratively. All those brilliant minds were stuck in the Stone Age for two hundred thousand years. But we have the tools to help them realise their potential. There’s now a small colony of nujaqaqtut at the Air Force base in Nuuk that Telperion’s been working with. They can’t speak, but we’ve been teaching them to type. In fact, there’s a little girl there called Ada who wrote you a letter. I have it here.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: Go ahead.
ANANYA RAO: She writes: Dear Senator ‘Jumping’ Jim Schpultz, my name is Ada and I am four years old and I love you because you are a US Senator for the state of Wyoming and Wyoming is my favourite state because of all the states it’s the closest to being a perfect square which is my favourite shape. Colorado is also close to being a perfect square but Wyoming is closer than Colorado. Wyoming is defined by geodesics along 41°N to 45°N latitude and 104°W to 111°W longitude so its borders form a near-spherical quadrilateral however the Earth is not a perfect sphere so using the Vincenty formula on the WGS84 reference ellipsoid its north-south and east-west geodesic lengths are approximately 570.3 km and 444.4 km which means an aspect ratio of 1.28. Colorado’s aspect ratio is 1.36 which makes it less like a perfect square. However even though the meridional convergence at higher latitudes contributes to Wyoming’s lower aspect ratio Colorado’s angular excess on the WGS84 ellipsoid calculated with L’Huillier’s theorem is 0.38 while Wyoming’s angular excess is 2.35° which means Wyoming has greater distortion on an ellipsoidal manifold and therefore Colorado is actually more like a square as plotted in Euclidean space. One day I want to visit Wyoming and see its famous sights which include Devil’s Tower National Monument, Yellowstone National Park, and Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Yours sincerely, Ada.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: That’s very sweet.
ANANYA RAO: Thank you.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: She sure sounds like a smart kid.
ANANYA RAO: She is.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: But as sweet as your letter is, it’s not the only letter I’ve been receiving. See, I also got a letter from Dr Sarah Fang. Dr Fang is an anthropologist attached to the Air Force Culture and Language Center out of Maxwell AFB in Alabama, and the whole time you’ve been studying these nujaqaqs, she’s been studying them too. Unlike yourself, she can’t appear before this hearing, but she tells me that the, uh, cries and wails of these—let’s call them these folks you have there in Greenland—to the extent that they’re a language, it’s now been pretty well deciphered. Now you can call that little, that little pup you have—you can call her Ada if you want, but her mother never called her that. Dr Fang tells me that in the language she actually speaks, there’s no such thing as a name. They don’t have them. There’s also no words, she says, for ‘me’ or ‘you.’ Are you aware, Ms Rao, of any human languages that don’t have a word for ‘me’ or ‘you’?
ANANYA RAO: I’m not a linguist.
SEN. SCHPULTZ: You’re not a linguist. Now, earlier, you said that the nujaqaqs don’t work as collaboratively as we do. Well, that’s one way of putting it. Dr Fang tells me the same thing. She says they have no form of social organisation whatsoever. They don’t have chiefs or leaders, they don’t have collective myths or narratives, they don’t build any kind of individual or collective dwellings, and they don’t have any concept at all of God. Even monkeys touch and groom each other, but not these fellas. They do not have such a thing as family. Once a child is weaned, the mother just abandons it on the ice. I reckon my dog is a better mother than that. Now, ladies and gentlemen, you might wonder how a species that hates its own kind so badly would even manage to survive so long. Well, in her report, Dr Fang explains it. Let me read here. In the absence of any stable mating or kinship structures, she writes, Nunjaqaq reproduction is achieved sporadically and opportunistically, almost exclusively through what our society would consider rape.
A murmur in the room. Whispers fluttering. The creak of seats.
ANANYA RAO: Senator, this is naked fearmongering. We’re talking about a situation—
SEN. SCHPULTZ: Now, I understand that Telperion stands to make a lot of money from these nujaqaqs. You have your Big Tech shareholders to answer to, and that’s our American system. But I have my constituents. What am I supposed to say to the parents of a little girl who’s been raped by one of your pet geniuses? How am I supposed to comfort them when their little angel has been raped, savagely raped, and then not just killed, but killed and eaten? You are talking about introducing a population of prehistoric predators into our country. You want to bring these man-eating carnivores into our towns and cities, into our workplaces, into our schools. You say they’re entitled to be part of our American society. You say you’re not going to debate their humanity, but that’s exactly the debate we need to have. Now I reckon that if you don’t have any notion of a family, any notion of home, or any notion of God, that disqualifies you right there from being an American. And to be frank, if you go about buck naked and you live off human flesh, whatever you may be, it isn’t human. These are wild animals, and if you let them in here, they will do exactly what they did in the Pleistocene. They will rape, and they will kill, and they will eat. And I tell you now, Ms Rao, as God is my witness I am not going to let you or your monsters do that to any of my little girls.
Uproar. Four members of the Joint Committee start shouting at once. Members of the press rush towards the podium. A clamour from two of the other expert witnesses, objecting in the most strenuous possible terms. The Ambassador from Denmark is trying to bellow over everyone, mottled red and white and clammy like a slice of bacon. Another expert witness is rocking back and forth and giggling to himself. Beasts! he giggles. Beasts! Monsters! Subhuman! Someone lands a punch on Senator ‘Jumping’ Jim Schpultz and suddenly the entire hall is a froth of human bodies pressing and tearing at each other. Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is buried under a frenzied, amorous mob of her own staffers. Shreds of red cloth spurt upwards into the air. Meanwhile some members of the public have cornered Senator John Fetterman (D-PA). We found one, they bellow, he’s here, they brought one here. They advance with makeshift spears made from tripods and table legs and bits of doorframe, jabbing Senator Fetterman in the gut as he moans in inarticulate rage. The Capitol Police arrive, but after their orders to stop are ignored they start firing at random into the churning crowd. Finally, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), presiding, briefly achieves consciousness long enough to call the committee to order. Calm returns. Ananya Rao and Senator Schpultz return to their positions.
ANANYA RAO: Senator, you seem very concerned by what the ancestors of the nujaqaqtut did in the Pleistocene. I’d remind you that back then, our ancestors hunted them to the point of extinction. You say that they haven’t changed. Have we?
SEN. SCHPULTZ: No. I yield the floor.
The day the Supreme Court announced its verdict in Telperion v. California, the stock market soared. Nujaqaq Intelligence was about to remake the world. A solution for climate change. A solution for disease. A solution for death. Telperion nearly doubled in value. It was also a very good day for Steyr, Beretta, and Bushmaster. Millions of civilian customers, all suddenly very interested in buying a .50 calibre anti-materiel rifle.
In the end, Telperion hadn’t made the compassionate case for nujaqaq humanity. No one was interested in that sort of thing any more; the world had moved on. They’d just pointed out that the United States had long set a precedent in which the best and brightest individuals from across the world had a right to settle in the country, and even during the age of racial restrictions on immigration, the fundamental criterion had always been intelligence. The Court’s function was to safeguard the interests of the United States, and it was obviously in the national interest to possess the nujaqaqtut. If America didn’t, China would. Delivering the majority verdict, Justice Sailer estimated that recognising as few as one hundred nujaqaqtut as American citizens would shift the national IQ past Germany; two hundred and the average American would be just a hair smarter than the average Chinese. With three hundred nujaqaqtut, every American, whatever their background, could say with pride that they belonged to the smartest country in the world.
The same day saw a large earthquake near Volgograd in Russia. Half the city flattened; dust-caked children crawling out the ruins of their homes. Volgograd is not a seismically active region. The Russian government announced that it believed the earthquake was caused by the United States, using some new weapon provided by its army of inhuman morozniks. Any further disasters on Russian soil would be considered an act of war by the United States, and met with an appropriate response. But what counts as a disaster? A snowstorm? A car accident? Anything; the enemy can do anything. What about the ordinary miseries of life? Later, a meeting of the Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church affirmed that the morozniks are demons.
In Copenhagen, the Danish government was in frantic conversation with its lawyers. The country was not doing well; half its economy had spontaneously evaporated when Ozempic users started ascending to Buddhahood and shedding the brute carapace of the physical body. That was why the Frederiksen government had agreed to start talking with Donald Trump about Greenland, and in the end they got nothing. They couldn’t sign over the island without a referendum, but then, once the Greenlanders had made it clear that they’d rather be Americans, how could Denmark take any money? The artist of the deal had won again, the government had collapsed, there were riots on the streets—and that was before a the world’s most valuable natural resource had been found in the land they’d just given away. Now Prime Minister Paludan and his Stram Kurs Party were leading a country on the point of collapse. If Denmark didn’t get something out of these nujaqaqtut, it might be civil war…
In London, the widely despised essayist Sam Kriss—now hunchbacked, jowly, and bald as the Moon—wrote what was generally considered to be the single worst take published on the issue. Kriss begins by limply hailing the result in Telperion v. California as an important blow against the forces of nativism and bigotry, obviously, obviously, we all agree. The nujaqaqtut will, he concedes, be able to integrate seamlessly into modern Western society. But what does it say about our society, he asks, that this is possible? ‘Everything that’s supposed to be strange and foreign about the nujaqaqtut is actually strangely familiar. The only human society with no creation myth, no culture-heroes, no metaphysical beliefs about the world—except, of course, from our own. We can understand metaphor, figurative language, murky forms of signification that doesn’t operate on the same naïve principle as number, and they can’t—but haven’t you people looked at this year’s Booker shortlist? Our literary culture is a shrinking circle of screeching literalists; everyone else has reverted to a preliterate, almost prehominid state, lapping up the natural signs that trickle out their phones. The biggest difference, though, is that nujaqaqtut society isn’t really a society at all, just a sprawling mass of isolated individuals who can only relate to each other through sporadic acts of violence. You see where I’m going here. When the nativists say that nujaqaqtut can never be real Americans, they’re not just bigoted; they’re factually incorrect. America is a society founded not on human social relations, but the principle of utility and selection, paring off population sectors from Europe and Africa, rearranging them in an inhuman hierarchy of phenotypes. Once this radical disarticulation was called Liberty. No one uses that word any more, but they’re still at it. The very notion of skilled immigration, attracting the best and brightest, most of all of intelligence as an abstract quantity: it’s a Neanderthal notion, a notion for lonely savages that howl wordless in the night. We are not for solving puzzles. I truly believe we are, in some sense, for loving each other. Thirty thousand years ago, this difference between ourselves and the Neanderthals was so profound that it could only be resolved through a war of extermination. We won that war, despite having far less computational power in our brains, because we could give names to the stars and build a commons out of the sky, and they could not. But in the end, it was all for nothing. We took the long way round, but we and the Neanderthals have converged on the same autistic point.’
The essay continues in this vein for another twenty-three thousand words, helpfully split into four paragraphs. Afterwards, the few remaining editors who still put up with Kriss all independently decided to stop replying to his emails. And he deserved it, because the essay was wrong on every point. Maybe if he’d bothered to ask the nujaqaqtut if they thought they were exactly the same as their hosts, he might have understood.
In Greenland, the great hunt was finally winding down. In fact, the whole island was winding down. Most of the half a million American settlers had already returned to the mainland: Greenland is over, it’s washed, the money’s dried up; the only way to be a big deal in Greenland is to get mauled to death by a nujaqaq. A lot of Inuit were leaving too. You can live in a dark, narrow apartment built by the Danes in 1967, or you can move to Houston, get a job on an offshore oil rig, and put your family in a brand-new house with a three-car garage. Obvious choice. The ice can creak to itself. Pointless to stay, now the nujaqaqut were gone. Operation Guardian Watch had been a success, but it came at a heavy price: some two hundred US servicemen killed or woundedin various engagements while trying to safely subdue a shrieking foaming nujaqaq. There was some unfortunate but unavoidable loss of life on the other side too, but of a total population above eight thousand, less than one thousand nujaqaqtut died in the relocation process. Now, after months of waiting, the next stage could begin. Telperion sent a fleet of especially modified jets to Nuuk. On each flight, a hundred nujaqaqtut sat in rows, heavily sedated, chained to their seats, transported to America.
They lived in underground cells on the Telperion campus in Mountain View. They liked the dark. They liked the sense of being enclosed. They liked going online too, although there was something about the way they typed that always seemed to make other users upset with them. Sometimes they were asked to solve small, self-evident mathematical problems, so they solved them. Is every finite lattice isomorphic to the congruence lattice of some finite algebra? Is the Mandelbrot set locally connected? The nujaqaqtut didn’t wonder why their hosts kept bothering them with this piddling stuff; that’s not the kind of question they think about. But they tried to fit in. They had learned about names; they had picked out new names for themselves from a list. They didn’t mingle outside their cells but they liked to chat on Discord. Some of them, like Cody and Dana and Ellen, had shaved their hair, the glorious thick white hair that protected them on the ice, to reveal the raw pink skin underneath. A smooth, pink face. Cody claimed to have listened to music. The company had told him he might enjoy something called Bach, which was made of numbers, but the chaos of reverberating strings and air moving through pipes had been so horrible he’d had to turn it off after only a few seconds. Ellen had started wearing clothes. It was uncomfortable; the sensation of clothes against her naked skin; the first time she shrieked uncontrollably and tore them to pieces. After a few weeks she was wearing them all the time. She didn’t go up any more, though. The one time she did go outside she had liked walking around on the grass and touching the trees, observing the little birds that made noises like moving ice, but then she came to the edge of the campus and on the other side of the fence there was a huge group of them, all shouting and yelling and they threw rocks over the fence to hit her. These were the creatures that had stormed out of nowhere fifty thousand years ago to destroy the world, and now it had happened again. They looked like smaller, weaker, hairless humans, but they weren’t human at all; they were something else. An insect, a type of ant or bee, a hive-kind, almost mindless but swarming. Ellen knew what it meant to be happy or sad or angry but it made no sense that these things could be happy or sad or angry in a group. Their angry swarm had swallowed everything until Ellen was reduced to the furthest patch of ice on the edge of the world, but it wasn’t enough. Eventually there had been someone on the ice. Ellen stood and stared at the swarm as it shrieked and wailed its strange collective fury. Rocks bounced harmlessly off her head.