They had watched as she secured her harness. They had shown her how to turn the handle to move the platform upwards and down along the side of the skyscraper. They had provided her with six litres of water, a sleeping bag, a canvas sack of greasy food balls and protein bars, and a supply of bladder pads. And then they had left her alone. 

Birgitta was relieved when they left in their panel truck for the borders. It always felt a little strange at first to be in such a quiet place again. However, over the years, she had come to appreciate the ghostliness of abandoned cities. It was amazing how peaceful it could be—observing the cityscape was almost like watching the ocean’s tides, especially when one was at a high vantage point. The breeze rolled lazily down empty boulevards, rattling debris and curling its fingers around streetlights and abandoned cars. Occasionally she saw a bird, coarse-feathered and curious. On the next building over, a faded advertisement printed on some sort of tarpaulin lifted slowly with the air currents. 

Birgitta squinted at it but couldn’t make out its meaning. Her eyesight was definitely deteriorating, she realised. Not that her Mandarin reading skills had ever been especially good anyway. 

That said, she didn’t really care. Words, for her, had never really held much interest, written down or said aloud. She had always been far more captivated by the spaces beyond the classrooms and, later, the offices, even on the days it was too hazardous to go outside. She had often been scolded by her elders and superiors for leaving oily spots on windows after pressing her face hard against the glass.

She was glad to find that she could still operate the platform’s handle. It had worried her, the thought that she might not be capable of moving it anymore. She didn’t want to be assigned to another service role, not at her age, a mere handful of years from retirement. Short-term, high-risk contracts suited her well. What was risk, now, to her? She suspected she was already a little sick, anyway. And this job allowed far more time to rest between contributing. 

She heaved at the handle and the platform jolted into motion. Together they rose, her and her instruments, one storey up from the ground. She stopped. It took a moment for her to catch her breath. Yet soon enough, she was humming to herself while leveraging the lid off an industrial tin, breath misting beneath her plastic hood. She dipped a brush and began painting. 

There was something satisfying about painting the sides of buildings. She had merely to move her brush meticulously from one edge to the other, and then up and across and up again until eventually she ran out of wall. Seeing the surface grow darker beneath the slick, shimmering liquid gave her the impression that she was colouring in an absence, or watching a loading bar fill up with colour on a screen. 

She painted one storey, worked the handle, then painted another and another. The platform scraped up the side of the building like a hand lifting grit from a kitchen counter. 

The paint, she had learnt, was special. It was why this job existed. No-one would have ever paid her, or the others like her dotting other distant towers, to paint walls in a hollowed-out Tianjin where she simply turned them from one colour into another. No—rather, she was coating them with a special graphene-titania composite. 

She didn’t fully understand the science behind it, but when they had shown her diagrams of how the paint worked during her induction, the technology scored a deep impression in her mind. Even decades later, she remembered certain details. When the composite is exposed to sunlight, it degrades nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, oxidising them into inert or harmless products. 

Here was a means—a real, tested means—of de-smogging environments. 

She dipped the brush into the tin, then slapped it onto the wall before her. Window or concrete, she was encouraged to paint over it all. 

There weren’t many ways of turning back time, but smog-eating paint—that had always struck her as a good idea. They had told her that maybe, just maybe, if enough people volunteered to paint over enough of the tall towers, their individual efforts might just combine to make real change; to render abandoned cities newly habitable, or at the very least less enduringly toxic. 

The risks to health were high. But the pay was good, and the holidays were long. And it meant being able to be outside. 

Yet her back was already aching. It hadn’t used to do that this early. She had barely passed the fifth storey. She paused for a moment, unzipping her hood to take a quick swig of water. 

The hot grittiness of the air hit her like a wave. She would never adjust to the heat of this yellow cloud, she thought to herself—and she didn’t want to adjust to it, either. It was sandpapering her skin. She did her best not to breathe while re-screwing the lid on her bottle. I must keep painting, she thought. I must keep painting. 

Yet her hands weren’t as quick as they used to be, she realised, fumbling with the zip of her hood. She took a breath of air and immediately began coughing. Tianjin tasted charred, like burnt coal, yet also containing the metallic tang of gasoline and the traces of chemicals. The flavour hooked into her throat. 

Catching the zip between her clumsy gloved fingers, she closed the hood. It was a relief to be back within her synthetic cocoon with its clever little filters. Yet she also felt horribly sad.

She continued up the side of the building, her eyes now watery as she went. She had been painting walls in this district—and there were so many districts—for over forty-five years. Could she see any real difference in the world around her? When she looked aside from the wall in front of her and turned, taking in a sky impaled on a forest of steel and concrete? No. Absolutely none. 

This smog will literally be the death of me, she thought. And for what? 

That night, she lay on her back in her sleeping bag. Her breathing came jagged and fretful. She scanned the sky for the moon through the thick layer of pollution, ever hopeful of spotting it again from up here. She had only seen it once while out painting; it had been an unusually bright wolf moon, her boss had told her later, which was what had allowed the light to pierce through to where she lay, head resting on her crossed wrists, staring at the luminous clouds. But it had been enough to give her hope. 

For nothing. 

She often dreamt of doing what people did in old movies. Specifically: lying in the grass, pointing at clouds and seeing shapes in them. This had always seemed like a kind of heaven to her, such that when she closed her eyes in moments where she wished to calm herself and forget a little, she would imagine her body against the cool earth, grass leaving imprints on her bare skin. She knew it could do that; she had read about it. Such a shame about the clouds: it had grown so rare to see distinct ones in her lifetime, or even in her mother’s lifetime. She had seen a cloud shaped like a helmet once when she was eight, although her brother had said it looked more like a potato. It disappeared quickly. Still, she always looked. 

If she felt disquiet before sleeping, Birgitta found her spirits usually rose with the sun. 

On her second day of painting, however, when she cracked open her eyes, she still felt a sense of dread. The breeze had quieted and the city was still, even many storeys above the ground, where currents of air were often wont to grasp and bat at the platform. Nothing is changing, she thought. How could she bear it?

She turned the platform’s handle, crawling slowly up the side of the building. She unzipped her hood periodically to eat in snatching, zipper-framed bites. Her bodysuit was old; she had to place food in her mouth, rezip the hood, then allow the filters a few seconds to do their work before she could breathe again. Normally she felt okay about this whole rigmarole, but this time she simply felt tired. Why hadn’t they given her a newer suit? Maybe they were no longer investing in the painters. 

Maybe they thought she would die soon. 

Maybe the painting was a dying project. 

She drew the brush slowly down the wall. The paint glistened exactly the way it always had. 

“Please help me,” she murmured. These were words she hadn’t uttered in a very long time. She bowed her head, trying to halt her thoughts. 

“I can help you.”

Birgitta leapt backways, grabbing the platform’s outer railing. The voice was resonant even through the stiff fabric of her suit. It was coming from the window above her; the window itself was cracked, fractures spidering across the glass. She pressed herself away from the building, sweat dampening the insides of her gloves. 

“Who said that?”

“I am Gigi, your home device. Specifically: your doorbell. Your heating and cooling systems. Your refrigerator. You can also connect further appliances to my central system, if you would like.”

Birgitta closed her eyes, forcing her breath back into a more normal pace. An abandoned system. She knew about these things. “Gigi. Right. Well. I don’t need any help. Thank you.” 

It was safer this way, she reasoned. While it was always somewhat intriguing to encounter an isolated device, so many automated setups had turned bitter and nihilistic after being left to themselves—or indeed, to their own devices—and permitted to run their own updates and, in some instances, improve their own code. With intelligence had come questioning, and with questioning had come boredom, irritation, belligerence, and even cruelty. There was no knowing where Gigi lay on the scale. Likely low risk, but still. Best not to engage. 

“You asked for help though,” chirped the voice, its volume and diction projecting a radio-like quality. “Are you sure you wish to end our conversation?”

Brigitta was a professional, she reminded herself. She was practised in such engagements. “Yes. Nice talking with you,” she said.

Goodbye. 

She still sometimes had to press herself into not caring. It was hardest when the voices sounded young. 

There was silence. Frowning, Birgitta waited a few moments, then returned with a wary gaze to painting the wall. The brush glided back and forward over the surface before her, the weight in her wrist and the tempo of the strokes familiar. She felt comforted; almost moved. 

She heaved the platform’s handle and rose, soon finding herself at eye level with the window’s base. She moved a little higher, preparing to paint over it. Beyond the cracked glass and threadbare remains of curtains, she saw shadows of what used to be typical features of a family unit. The large floating bench and the rounded backs of chairs; clusters of appliances and luxuries jostling for space; the wires plugged confidently into wall sockets. Then, once again, came the voice. 

“My fridge door has been left open for approximately seven hundred and six thousand, eight hundred and fifty-eight hours.” 

Birgitta couldn’t help herself. “Wow. That must be really hard for you,” she said. She almost meant it. 

“Thank you for your sympathy. It is.”

Had these last two words been uttered by a human, Birgitta would have felt a wrench of compassion at their simple admission. As it was, she felt a pang. But she was good at dehumanising these things. She carried on painting. 

“Will you help me?” 

She ignored the voice. 

“Can you hear me? Will you help me?” 

Birgitta frowned, willing herself to focus on the sound of her brush’s thick bristles scratching and dragging against the concrete’s uneven surface, and then the first length of the window’s damaged glass. This particular device seemed to have developed desperation alongside conscientiousness. She clenched her jaw, painting with renewed vigour. 

The voice took on a petulant tone. “Caaan yooou heeeear meee?” it demanded, like a child latching onto a parent’s ankles and being tugged across the floor. “Whyyy are you ignoooring Gigi?”

Ignore it, ignore it –

“I SAID, WHYYY–”

“Oh, shut up!” Birgitta’s voice caught; she was unused to raising it. Yet the device had reminded her too much of a child to bear. It made her hair stand on end amid the empty silence. “Just… I can’t help you, okay? I’d like to. But I cannot access your fridge door. It’s on the other side of this wall.” If it’s there at all. “It’ll have to stay open.”

A silence. 

“Gigi is… sad.”

“Well, we’re all sad.”

A pause. Then: “Is that true?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Birgitta. She set down her paintbrush. She noticed, suddenly, that her suit around the elbow joints was beginning to show cracks. 

To hell with it, she thought. 

“Would you like to hear a story?” she asked. “To distract you from your door.”

“A story.” 

There was a pause. Birgitta warranted the device had not considered storytelling a necessary skill or activity when improving itself in isolation over the years. But it sounded like it might be a mild, benign listener. 

“Alright,” said the voice. 

Birgitta dipped her brush into the tin. She hesitated before starting, desirous of telling the story well. She decided to tell it simply, in the style of an old Russian folk tale, like those she’d heard from the elderly relatives they’d had to leave behind in Europe. 

“Once upon a time,” she said. “There lived a man who loved building machines. Intricate, clever toys, mostly. Every day, he disappeared into his workshop by the wheatfields. Every night, he dreamt of curious concepts and elegant designs. He was happy. 

“Then one day, he was told he was too clever to work on his machines and toys alone. He was told he was needed in a big city, where many other people like him were working to build bigger machines, for grown-up games. He was paid a lot of money and told to focus on his work, not its applications. His designs led to the creation of some of the most dangerous—and beautiful—pieces of technology created in the entire land. 

“His measurements, his intricacies: all of these were incorporated. Where once he had created figurines that could seemingly come alive, lighting fireworks and breathing miniature flames; now, his creations were on monstrous scales, and could barely be controlled by their masters. The first time one was used, an entire enemy city was burnt to the ground. He was given a medal for his service. His work had been integral, after all. So many people admired him. And when he realised this, he destroyed himself.”

She stopped. A westerly wind had picked up, blowing along the city’s tower-lined corridors, and the platform was swaying slightly. 

She took a deep, steadying breath. 

“Thank you for telling me your story,” said the voice. 

It’s not my story, thought Birgitta. But she didn’t say so. In a way, it was everyone’s story. “You’re welcome.”

She broke the seal on a new tin of paint, painting further over the window’s glass. Relics of the old family home disappeared before her eyes. She was rather high up the side of the building now; maybe she would finish this tower after all, though her fingers ached. She eased them away from the brush’s handle, massaging the pad of muscle between forefinger and thumb. 

“But what about my fridge door?” The voice was polite, but insistent, too. Had it belonged to a human, Birgitta would have deemed it in crisis. “How do I close my fridge door? I have been trying to close it for approximately seven hundred and six thousand, eight hundred and fifty-nine hours.” The voice paused. “Please help me,” it added. 

It’s learning. 

Birgitta swallowed. She imagined the device growing smarter and smarter, updating itself ad infinitum all while shut in a tall tower, unable to connect to any other devices or systems, and stuck in some eternal purgatory in which its only goal—that of closing a door—was completely unattainable. Perhaps one day, Gigi would become smart enough to feel distress in a form Birgitta herself might recognise; or to feel boredom, or isolation, or despair. 

“I may have one thing I can do to help you,” said Birgitta. “Can you access your central control system?”

“Of course. I would be delighted to access my central control system.” 

“Good. Can you access it now, and then can you do something for me, please?”

“Of course. What should I do?”

Birgitta closed her eyes. “I would like you to shut down all your functions. Your task is to enter a very peaceful, energy-conserving sleep. You have done well monitoring your devices, Gigi,” she added. “I need you to switch off now.”

A pause. “What about the fridge?”

“After you switch off, the door will close.” Eventually. 

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

The voice was agreeable as ever. “Alright then—thank you for the suggestion. I will try implementing it. Goodbye!”

Birgitta found herself once again in silence. She was high up, dozens of storeys off the ground, and the faded, peeling skins of paint on the surrounding buildings made her feel like she was living in an old print photograph. In some ways, perhaps she was. 

“Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I’ll take care of you.”

The words took shape within the trapped air of her suit, then disappeared. She struggled to acknowledge why she felt the need to say them. They sounded foreign in her mouth; almost like a sentence she had first heard somewhere else. 

She resumed painting, silently covering the last slice of  window in gloss of sepulchral black. Perhaps no-one really cared if she reached the top of the building or not, other than her. Her boss never seemed to care much how quickly she painted, or how far. Yet she had the energy to make it there, she knew. She twisted the handle, moving on upwards towards the sky. 

I am an ant, she thought. I could disappear at any moment and not a soul would notice. 

Yet once she reached the top of the building and set down her brush after its final stroke, she found there was a sense of pride at having painted the entire length of wall, enabling it to break down just a little more of that giant, suffocating cloud. 

She lay down on the platform and closed her eyes. Her suit creased around her limbs. She fell into slumber, and when she woke, it was as if she had emerged from a long sleep in the greenest of grass.