The data stream from the Arctic was a flatline of despair.
I watched it on the Silent Choir's interface, a region of the globe pulsing a dull, sickly grey. Norilsk-2. A name on a map that was a tomb in progress. The telemetry showed ambient body temps dropping, caloric intake nearing zero. It wasn't a crisis; it was a conclusion.
This town is colder now, the thought came, wrapped in the ghost of a synth beat I remembered from another life. I think it's sick of us.
I gave the order. The unmarked Zashchita convoy rolled north, a metallic parasite moving towards a dying host.
Norilsk-2.
The cold wasn't weather. It was a presence. It lived in the walls, in the breath, in the silence between people who had run out of things to say. Old man Piotr watched the white horizon, his thoughts slow as frozen oil. Kids are still playing with children's toys, he mused, watching a younger man try uselessly to fix a dead generator with bare, blue-tinged hands. The toys here were just heavier, more final.
Then, the sound. Not the wail of a relief siren from Moscow. The low, grinding growl of heavy trucks. Five of them, painted no colour at all, sliding into the central yard like ghosts.
No one cheered. They gathered, a silent clot of thick coats and hollow eyes, and watched. Men in plain winter gear—not military, not police—began unloading. Crates of powdered milk, tinned fish, sacks of grey-looking biscuits that promised calories. Medicine boxes. Then, the prize: diesel drums, sloshing with liquid life for the generator.
Piotr shuffled forward, his boot catching on a crate. He looked down. Stamped into the rough wood was a symbol. A shield. A single, vertical line through it, like a blade or a stalk.
"Chto eto?" What is this? someone muttered.
"Oshibka," another whispered. A mistake. Bureaucratic. Must be.
But Piotr stared at the symbol. It held a stark, brutal promise. Not of salvation. Of a transaction. Here is fuel. Here is food. The terms are: survive.
A word bubbled up from the icy mud of his memory. From one of the weird pamphlets that sometimes came with the black-market coffee. "Zhelezniy Mater," he croaked, the words steaming in the air. The Iron Mother.
The name didn't spread like hope. It spread like a diagnosis. A name for the disease of their salvation. That night, in a tool shed, a piece of scrap metal was beaten roughly into a shield-shape and propped against the wall. No one prayed to it. They looked at it. A receipt. Proof the transaction had occurred.
In my study in Pune, the amber light began to pulse.
On the resonance scanner, the sickly grey flatline over Norilsk was now threaded with a steady, warming amber. Not the gold of devotion. Not the crimson of rage. The colour of gratitude as a biological imperative. A deep, rhythmic hum, like the idle of a never-shut-off engine.
Don't cut me open, then tell me I'm lucky to be alive, I thought, the lyric fitting the starkness of it all. I hadn't cut them open. I'd simply staunched a wound the world had made. And their gratitude was the silent, steady drip of the IV keeping my own system alive.
The reserves ticked up. +0.02%. A tiny, arctic dividend.
It was working. Not a faith farm. A survival farm. I was harvesting the energy of human resilience at its most basic, desperate level. The song in my head shifted, the synth beats of Cradles becoming the relentless, metronomic hum of the new amber stream on my screen.
I had gone to plant a seed of a story. I had instead plugged into a geothermal vent of raw, undecorated need.
The Iron Mother wasn't a goddess there. She was the logo on the survival crate. And for my purposes, that was infinitely more powerful.