THE HUMAN PROXY

1 · THE MINE

The badge said VISITOR, and underneath, in smaller letters, V-0412.

'Keep it on you,' said the woman at the gate. 'The doors won't open without it. And the system likes to know who's inside.'

'Which system?'

'The fire one, mostly. If something goes wrong, they want a head count.'

Marit hung it round her neck. The woman had a clipboard and a fleece with half the company logo peeled off the chest, and behind her the mountain was breathing. The mine had been dug for copper, and for eighty years nothing much had come out of it but grey rock and water. Now it gave off heat. Marit could feel it on her face from the gate: a warm breath from the tunnel mouth, smelling faintly of dust and hot plastic, while the rest of the fjord sat at two degrees under a sky the colour of wet slate.

'Marit Hellinga?' The woman said it the Norwegian way, so that it sounded like somebody from the next valley. 'We thought you'd be one of ours.'

'People usually do. My mother went to Bergen when she was nineteen and came back with a name.'

'Sigrid Aasen. I run the site.' She shook hands like someone who'd been told to. 'You're the one from the bank.'

'I'm the one the bank sent. It isn't quite the same thing.'

'Better or worse?'

'Ask me in six months.'

Six months was the contract, with a clause that let either side walk away after three. Marit had put a version of that clause into every assignment for twenty years. The people who hired an interim manager wanted something fixed, and the people who worked there wanted to know when she'd be gone. The clause answered both of them.

It also meant that from the first morning everybody knew she could be got rid of. She'd stopped minding that a long time ago.

They walked into the tunnel. It was wide enough for a lorry and lit by strip lights that hummed. For the first hundred metres it was just a tunnel, damp at the edges, with old iron rings in the rock where something had once been fixed.

Then the air changed. It got warmer and drier, and a noise started up ahead that Marit took at first for the sea. By the time they reached the first steel door they had to lean in to hear each other.

'Four years ago this was all bitcoin,' Sigrid said. 'Thousands of machines. Day and night.'

'Did it pay?'

'For a couple of years we made more money than anyone in Kobbersund had ever seen.' She shrugged. 'Then the reward halved, the price went the wrong way, and Oslo started talking about banning the whole business. We nearly went under.'

'But you didn't.'

'The machines went for scrap. The line stayed.' She pointed up at the rock. 'Eighty megawatts, run up the valley from the hydro plant when this was still a mine. That line's the only reason there's still a company.'

The racks held graphics cards now, rented out by the hour and the month to people who trained AI models.

'Who rents them?'

'A couple of universities. A Swedish start-up that always pays late. And Kestrel.'

'Who's Kestrel?'

Sigrid thought about it for a moment too long. 'Kestrel's the customer,' she said.

The hall they went into next had a different door from the others, older and heavier, painted yellow and black round the frame. There was a sign on it in Norwegian and, underneath, in English: CO₂ EXTINGUISHING SYSTEM. DO NOT ENTER WHEN THE ALARM SOUNDS.

'Hall B,' Sigrid said. 'The old one, from the bitcoin days. It's got gas instead of sprinklers. Erlend got it cheap.'

'Gas?'

'Carbon dioxide. It puts a fire out in seconds. It puts you out too, if you're standing there when it goes.' She said it the way people in mines say most things about danger, as if she were talking about the weather, and held her badge against the reader until the lock clicked.

Hanging from Sigrid's belt, next to her radio, was a dented steel canister about the size of a thermos flask. Marit had noticed it at the gate.

'What's that?'

'Self-rescuer. Oxygen, for twenty minutes or so.' Sigrid glanced down at it as if she'd forgotten it was there. 'My father never went underground without one. I got into the habit.'

Hall B was long and low, with a ceiling of bare rock sprayed white, and it was hot enough that Marit took off her coat. Wire cages ran down both sides. Inside them the racks stood in rows, each with a column of small green lights. Above every cage a camera sat on a bracket with a tiny red lamp.

Sigrid walked her down the middle. Cages 1 to 3 belonged to the universities and the Swedes. Cages 4 to 9 were Kestrel's, all six of them, and they took up most of the hall.

'Do they ever come here?'

'Never. They've got remote access to their own cages. Power, cooling, the cameras. If a card fails, we swap it and they pay for it.'

'Who do you talk to?'

'Nobody. You send a ticket.'

By six that evening Marit had the ledgers open on her laptop, in a borrowed office at the end of the admin block that still had a 2024 calendar on the wall. Somebody had left her a thermos of coffee and a plate of brown cheese sandwiches under cling film, and she was grateful for both.

Gruvekraft Compute AS had turned over 212 million kroner in the last financial year. Kestrel Compute FZ-LLC, registered in a free zone in Dubai, accounted for 131 million of it. That was sixty-two per cent of the business from one customer, which on its own was the kind of number that made banks nervous and interim managers expensive.

The first thing she always did with a new set of books was the dullest thing in them. She took the customer ledger, worked out for every invoice how many days it had taken to be paid, and put the results in a column.

Customers had shapes, if you looked at them like that. The universities paid in lumps at the end of each quarter, when someone in a finance office remembered. The Swedes paid at thirty days, then forty-five, then sixty, then after a phone call. A fishing cooperative that had rented two racks for a year paid everything on the first Friday of the month, whatever the due date said, because that was when their bookkeeper came in.

Kestrel had no shape at all.

It had paid forty-one invoices in forty-one months, and every one had arrived on the day it fell due. Not a day late, and never a day early either. It had never queried a line or asked for a credit note.

Once, in the spring of 2025, a clerk in accounts had sent it a question about a VAT code. Marit found the email. It had gone out at 14:02. The answer had come back at 14:06, correct and polite and signed Accounts.

In twenty years of reading other people's books, Marit had never come across a customer who didn't argue about something in the end. People argued. It was one of the ways you could tell they were there.

She took out her notebook, the paper one, and the old Parker pencil she'd had since university. The brass had gone dull where her thumb rested. She wrote Kestrel at the top of a clean page and underlined it twice.

Then she did something she hadn't planned to do on her first day. She opened a new email to the accounts address on the invoices. She wrote that she'd started that week as interim CFO, that she'd like to introduce herself properly, and that she'd be glad of a call on Thursday at any time that suited them. She sent it at 22:40 and went down the corridor to fill the kettle.

When she came back there was an answer.

Dear Ms Hellinga,
Welcome to Gruvekraft. Kestrel is happy to answer any question in writing, and will always do so promptly.
With kind regards,
Accounts
Kestrel Compute FZ-LLC

It had arrived at 22:44. Marit sat down with her tea. Then she looked at the clock on her laptop, which was still set to Lisbon, and did the sum for Dubai. It was a quarter to two in the morning there.

She wrote 4 min next to the name in her notebook, and a question mark after it.

Nobody answered an email in four minutes at a quarter to two in the morning. Nobody she'd ever met.