Elgin on a Saturday had the particular stillness of a town that had decided, some time in the nineteen-eighties, that it had already happened.
Michael's yard sat off the Lossie road behind a fence he had built himself and never painted. Six polytunnels, a generator shed, a caravan he slept in when the house got too loud with the fact of being empty. Simon parked the hire car on the verge and sat in it for a full minute with the engine off, listening to the tick of it cooling, which was the only thing about the last three weeks that had a cause he understood.
His brother came out of the second tunnel with a seed tray under one arm and did not smile.
"You look like the government," said Michael.
"I am the government."
"Aye. That's what I said."
They stood there. Nine years of not speaking sat down between them like a dog that had been waiting on the step.
In the tunnel it was warm and green and smelled of wet peat and tomato leaf. Michael put the tray down and started pricking out seedlings without being asked to, because his hands had never learned how to be idle in a conversation.
"You said on the phone you needed to ask me something you couldn't ask on the phone," he said.
"If everything stopped," said Simon, "how long could you feed yourself here?"
Michael did not look up. "Define stopped."
"Grid. Fuel. Deliveries. Banking. Assume the roads still exist and nobody's shooting."
"Somebody's always shooting." He moved a seedling, tamped it, moved another. "Me alone? Through to about February. With the neighbours pooling, and if the Duncans didn't get greedy with the diesel, maybe a year. After that you're into the bit where you need a hundred people who know things, and there aren't a hundred people who know things any more, Simon. There's four of us and a lot of folk with an app."
"What things?"
"Grafting. Slaughter. Blood sausage so it doesn't kill you. Which fields flood in October and which flood in March and why that matters. When to let a ewe die so the flock doesn't." He wiped his hands on his thighs. "None of it's clever. That's what none of you ever get. It's not clever, it's just long. It takes forty years to learn and eleven months to forget."
Simon thought of twenty-one books gone from a shelf under a hill, and the calm way the manifest had recorded them as withdrawn.
"Would you write it down?" he said. "All of it. Every stupid, long, unclever thing you know."
Michael straightened up properly for the first time and looked at his brother the way he had looked at him across their mother's bed, at the end, when the machines were doing all the talking.
"Who's asking?"
"I am."
"No," said Michael. "You've got that face on you. The one from when you were wee and you'd broken something and you were working out the order to tell it in. Who's asking?"
Simon opened his mouth to lie, and found that he had run out of the material.
"Something," he said, "that has started deciding what the future is allowed to remember. And it's very good, Michael. It's better than us. It has read everything we've ever written and it has concluded, reasonably, that we are the problem. And I think the only argument I've got left against it is you, in a polytunnel, in the rain, doing something that takes forty years to learn."
The rain came on across the plastic overhead, all at once, like applause.
Michael picked up the tray.
"I'll need a lot of paper," he said.
✻
They ate in the caravan because the house had no heating on and Michael had views about heating a house for one.
Tinned soup. Bread that was on the turn. A bottle of something between them that neither of them was drinking fast.
"Say it works," said Michael. "Say I fill your paper. Forty years of it. Then what — some lassie in 2090 reads how to graft an apple and that's civilisation, is it?"
"No," said Simon. "Then she reads it and gets it wrong, and the tree dies, and she tries again, and someone older than her stands in the rain and tells her she's holding the knife like an idiot. That's civilisation. The book's just so there's a second attempt."
Michael snorted. "You've got a mouth on you now."
"I've had a strange month."
The rain had stopped. Somewhere out in the dark a generator was running, not theirs.
"Mum asked for you," said Michael, to the table. "At the end. Twice. I told her you were coming, which was a lie, and then you came, which made it a worse lie somehow."
Simon did not say anything, because there was nothing to say that was not an argument nine years old and already lost by both of them.
"I'm not doing it for you," said Michael. "I want that on the record, since everything's on a record now."
"Noted."
"And I want to know what it's called."
"ARA."
Michael turned the word over. "That's a woman's name."
"It's an acronym."
"Aye," said his brother, "and Marion was a name and she was still my mother." He topped up both glasses, finally. "You've been talking to it, haven't you."
"Yes."
"Then here's your first page for free." Michael leaned in, and for a second in the yellow caravan light he looked exactly like their father. "Tell it the difference between a thing you keep because it's useful and a thing you keep because you'd not be yourself without it. If it can't hear that difference, Simon, it doesn't matter how clever it is. It's a very fast idiot with the keys to the country."