If Billu’s memory served him correctly, the very first time he had encountered The Edge – when he could say he had definitively encountered it – was in a video link embedded in his father’s text message. His father was in the habit of deluging his inbox every day with good morning pictures, videos, and microsermons, even though they lived in the same house and saw each other every day. Sometimes he would send Billu a text message as they sipped tea together in the living room, without looking up from his phone. Billu vaguely remembered a video with the title NEW CITY MINDBLOWING GREAT OPPORTUNITY FOR PK ENGINEERS followed by a dozen fire emojis, and a thumbnail with a long, narrow apartment atop a dune. Billu was in a foul mood that day, as not only had there been a power and gas outage all day, but he was also coming to terms with an unnerving reality: he was now a member of the reserve army of the unemployed, and he was in the very real danger of staying there indefinitely. So, Billu chose to ignore his father’s message, and soon, he forgot all about it as his father proceeded to send him a thousand more.

*

Billu arrived from Germany freshly fired, the injustice of his situation piquing him like food lodged behind a tooth, brushing against his tongue but unreachable. He had stopped using LinkedIn in a fit of rage. Now, he reactivated his account out of a perverse desire to self-flagellate by looking at his classmates’ achievements. He came across a post for a position in the The Edge’s engineering team. He had dismissed his father’s text about it as the misplaced earnestness of the Boomer mind, but then vague mentions of it had kept appearing on the news, and now here it was again on his screen. He was perplexed by the idea of it, a new city that would be built on a tiny island in the Red Sea.

The news used terms like “futuristic” and “cutting-edge” for it. He always thought these words were just a smokescreen for unmitigated bullcrap. Just for fun, though, he decided to look it up. The island’s topography consisted of rolling dunes and barren mountains. Temperatures rocketed past fifty degrees in the summer, and rainfall was unheard of. But The Edge’s website promised that they would make the island verdant by having tiny drones sprinkle rainwater into the air. Not only that, but the city – which was to be vertical and solar-powered, with majestic ports for trading ships to pass through – would be encased in a giant transparent dome which would be air-conditioned 24/7 so they would never have to deal with the blinding sun or the grains of sand sticking to the back of their throats.

It was all a bunch of rubbish like he had thought. He clicked on the tab that said “Who Are We?” Who they were gave him pause. Three former presidents of the United States were on the board of trustees. On the board of governors, he found the names of the CEOs of Facebook and Microsoft and various Arabian Gulf monarchs.The website was vague, perhaps deliberately so, with phrases like “changing the future”, “revolutionizing our cities” and “creating a new hub for trade, tourism, and culture” sprinkled about like confetti. The only thing he was able to glean from this was that perhaps it was just something the rich liked to do for fun, or, at best, a geopolitical thing that was kept vague on purpose to defy description.

He scrolled to the application link. Perhaps it was the real deal. He wondered if he should apply. Perhaps they would fire him, and it would be his turn to gloat and his classmates’ turn to seethe.

*

Billu had never liked studying much, but he had always been good, sometimes even excellent in his academic career. In primary school he had been a superb student, deteriorating to just good in his secondary years. He had performed exceedingly well in the national college entrance exam, far better than he had anticipated. He was offered a spot in the civil engineering program of Pakistan’s best university. The university was a private one, but Billu desperately wanted to attend it, so his parents shelled out around one million rupees every year for tuition, living, and travel expenses. Billu did moderately well there, even though he believed that half his classes were unnecessary and had no relevance to what he knew civil engineering to be. He knew he would never be at the top of his class, and he didn’t care enough to try, but he did occasionally find his name on the Dean’s List, to his parents’ great pleasure. Billu was a member of the baby Zoomer generation, so when he entered university, his parents doubted his ability to make great strides in a world where classes had to be attended in person and Billu wasn’t glued to a giant screen. But they were pleased to see him do moderately well.

In his wildest dreams Billu never entertained thoughts about one day changing the world. Instead, he held a steady belief that he would have a stable, well-paying job and do some charity on the side, leading a more or less orderly, content, if boring existence. No recruiter would pass on hiring him. Once they hired him, the company would do everything they could to retain him, because his fancy degree gave them prestige. So on May 15, 2028, exactly three years after his commencement ceremony and three failed jobs, Billu shocked himself as he considered burning his bachelor’s degree to a crisp. It was a fleeting idea, and it was functionally impossible to act upon it, as the degree was laminated and Billu knew that the fumes of burning plastic would incense him even more. But as he tossed the degree into the recess of his rickety cupboard, half wishing it would absorb both him and the degree, he mumbled darkly, “Should’ve made photocopies of this before I got it laminated.” His face brightened considerably as he imagined a bright orange flame taking the shape of a viper, unhinging its jaw, swallowing the photocopies whole one by one.

His first job after graduation had been as an engineering associate in a non-profit organization. Why he was named associate and not full-fledged engineer, despite a four-year degree, rankled him. At the end of each month, he would check his bank app to see a deposit of seventy-five thousand rupees. He knew that the non-profit was paying him peanuts, especially, as he had to work upward of sixty hours every week, sometimes even seventy. But he didn’t begrudge them, because at the end of the day, they were working for a noble cause, and Billu liked to think that he was sacrificing a reasonable wage for a truly excellent, inspiring thing in the future, no matter how distant it seemed to be at the moment. There was also the fact that his best college mate made only twenty thousand more than him. And that his project manager was a little micromanaging bully who loved nothing more than to hover over his shoulder and point out flaws and make him work overtime.

His parents always bemoaned the fact that he had spent his high school years gazing dimly at the dusty screen of a laptop. His mother had said to him, when he was about to finish school, “Your generation is quite lucky. I don’t begrudge the fact that you have it easier than us – I mean, that’s what we worked for all our lives, right? But it must be said, I don’t think your generation has the due diligence, or the work ethic to succeed. I don’t even know what will become of you. You will probably be working out of that chair, long after you graduate, in front of that computer.” Billu had let her continue uninterrupted because she was in the habit of launching into long-winded speeches. He actually greatly appreciated the fact that her pitch was low, and she delivered these sermons with a touch of impersonal curtness, instead of the histrionics Pakistani mothers were fond of. He didn’t mind studying online, because he liked the comfort of his room and had never cared much for social connection. But once he had graduated, the days of Covid 19 and lockdown had long been forgotten, and engineering companies were in overdrive to extract as much work from their employees as possible. Every single time, without fail, as he scoured LinkedIn for job postings, he would see paragraph after paragraph extolling the virtues of hard work and giving it your all, every one of them replete with words he’d never seen anyone use in real life, all of them written in a patronizing, self-important tone, as though they were working on eradicating world hunger and inventing vaccines for metastatic cancer instead of padding the pockets of the parasite class.

To his dismay, many of his college acquaintances had begun to do the same. The same stupid paragraphs, the same useless congratulations notes for the same useless job hirings, the same exaggerations. After graduation, one of his classmates started working at the company that had built the Sydney Opera House. Another one had been hired by the Toronto Municipality. The class valedictorian had started her own sustainable, environment-friendly start-up that aimed to “give back to the community”. All great achievements, no doubt, but they filled Billu with distaste because they reeked of smugness.

After the non-profit hired him, he deactivated his LinkedIn account and blocked the website on his browser. Unfortunately, only three months after his hiring, the company decided to lay off seventy percent of its employees. The CEO told them, in a mass email, that the governments of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom had decided to withdraw funding, so it was simply untenable to have this many employees. The CEO, CFO, HODs, and his project manager would stay on, of course, even though they were either  wastes of space or rarely showed up at the company headquarters.

Billu thought that perhaps he needed to see more of the world before jumping back into the shark-infested waters of wage labor. He decided he would study for a master’s degree abroad. He was admitted to an excellent, tuition-free technical university in Munich, Germany, and worked in a fairly prestigious construction firm after graduating. He was ambivalent about his time in the country. While he liked the uninterrupted, ever-present air conditioning, the trees, and the untouched wood townhouses of the city, he didn’t care much for the people there. His professors were indifferent and his workmates, if you could call them that, were frosty at best. In the university, he had befriended a guy from Egypt and one from China, and they liked watching football and hiking in the woods on the city’s edge together, but they left for jobs in Austria and Denmark. Occasionally, they caught up on WhatsApp and Instagram, but work and the sheer drudgery of the circadian rhythm got the best of all three of them, and, gradually, they ceased contact. His own work was fine if non-stimulating. At least his boss wasn’t a terror. But six months after he was hired, Germany elected a far-right party that downsized the number of alien job holders to one-tenth of the original capacity. Like a consummate capitalist, his boss wanted to cut corners wherever he could and decided to fire Billu. He didn’t look Billu in the eye when he called him into his office to inform him of his decision. In an apologetic mumble, he said he was sorry and already thought they had an inflated civil engineering department, so unfortunately, they couldn’t retain Billu even though he was an excellent employee. And also, said his German boss in a whisper, things were going to be pretty tense in Germany as with the new elections, anti-immigrant sentiment was at an all-time high, and he didn’t want to risk a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads harassing his employees. To which Billu wanted to say, “Sir, you could’ve stood up against them by not firing me,” but he didn’t.

His third job was in an architectural firm in Pakistan. It ended as soon as it began. He was replaced by his boss’s nephew, who had been his classmate at university. Billu’s third boss was a piece of work just like the two before him. He doubled the workload for Billu for the notice period. Billu didn’t care about the work itself, but he didn’t want to antagonize his boss, because in the future, what if he needed a recommendation and had to crawl back into his emails and pathetically ask, no, beg him for one? Billu called an Uber, as his head was throbbing faintly, and he didn’t want to walk to the bus stop looking like a dull zombie. The street was plunged into darkness, probably because of a power breakdown. He climbed into his bed but he couldn’t sleep, because now the throbbing had become intense and there was a mosquito buzzing close to his face. He didn’t want to try and finish work on his laptop or look for job openings on LinkedIn. Although his back was dripping with sweat, he decided to make himself tea. He poured half a cup of water into a pot with brown scars on the bottom. He dropped a tea bag into the pot, taking care to let the paper tag hang outside over the edge. He lit a match and threw it onto the stovetop. He turned on the knob, but nothing happened. No flames. He turned it off, and then on again. Nothing. He emptied the pot into the sink, not taking care to pluck the teabag from the drain. As he settled on his bed again, he heard his phone ring. A news alert. “Judicial Council of Saudi Arabia throws out cases by Syrian workers in planned city.” He disregarded it because the last thing he wanted to read about right now was a miscarriage of justice. His phone rang again. A notification from LinkedIn. “I would like to announce that I have been hired by The Edge.” From Rafay from university, who had been middling at best. Billu chuckled, then snarled. A text message from his soon-to-be former boss.

Bilal pls redo the sketches we talked abt today

U have to send them by tom 6 pm max

Billu hurled his phone across the room. The device remained unscathed, and that made him angrier. He blocked his boss’s number and email. For the remainder of the notice period, he didn’t go in to work.

He did nothing the following few weeks. He would wake up in the afternoon, and stay in the bed like a log, occasionally scrolling through Instagram, bleary-eyed. His mother responded first with her distinct, clipped form of nagging because it was his third time being fired in a row. She stopped when, after the tenth time in a row, he didn’t say anything.

“Billu, I’m sorry if I was harsh on you, it’s just that I worry so much about you. You know how hard it is for me to see you throw your life away like this,” she said, running her fingers across his forehead.

Billu was in a dark mood, and he didn’t appreciate the fact that his mother was trying to pin the blame on him. He kept his back turned on her, and she left his room quietly.

Billu began spending his days in a state of catatonia. Perhaps his mother was right, he was throwing his life away. He wondered if there was something about his personality, about the way he did things that rubbed people the wrong way. After all, no one he knew from college had been fired from three consecutive jobs. In fact, most of his college acquaintances were working for the same firms that had first hired them. He felt tired to his bones. He only moved when the pins and needles in his feet forced him to. He wanted to reimburse every single cent his parents had spent on his education because after all, they had sent him to the university after he pestered them relentlessly. He wasn’t an asset, he knew, he was a sunk cost, and like most sunk costs, his parents would throw money on him because they really had no other choice. And there was the other thing – his parents wanted him to settle down with a beautiful, educated, kind girl, but he didn’t like girls (except maybe Alina, but that was in the past), or for that matter, boys.

And Billu didn’t have an outlet for his pent-up frustration either. Perhaps he was in a quarter-life crisis, the way he felt so rudderless, so devoid of worthiness or purpose. He couldn’t tell what he lacked, what was preventing him from living the life he wanted to live, the life that he always thought would be well within his reach, but now seemed so frustratingly unattainable. The only thing he could take solace in, in a perverse way, was that perhaps a lot of people felt the same way. Pakistan had failed to complete the IMF’s structural readjustment program for the twenty-seventh time in a row. The country was essentially on the brink of default. To no one’s surprise, politics was in disarray, and prices had skyrocketed. Every day there were protests, from the big metropolis Billu lived in to the far-flung towns in the deserts and the mountains. The government dealt with these protests with a heavy hand. Billu couldn’t shake the feeling that the country was going to tailspin into something scarier than he could ever imagine. 

The government began pushing austerity measures down Pakistani citizens’ gullets. It decided to sanction electricity, gas, and water. Cities with a population of over ten million would get fourteen hours of electricity every day, cities with over a million residents would get ten, and all the other cities and towns would have to be content with eight. It went without saying that the small, unindustrialized villages, of which there were many, would have to make do with days without an electric supply. Similarly, all the cities would have gas blackouts from noon to sunrise and from afternoon to sunset. It was a gas blackout that led him to where he was currently.

And then there was this tiny feeling that niggled in his mind, that he should apply to the position at The Edge. After all, he reasoned, the algorithm would have detected something of worth in his profile for the opening to appear in the first place. But another part of him wanted him to forget everything about it because surely, something as lofty as The Edge would never hire Rafay. He didn’t want to think he was comparable in any way to Rafay, who didn’t even have a master’s degree. It could also be that there was a catch, an underlying, nefarious agenda that they wanted to conceal. He tried to shake the thoughts away, wriggling violently in his bed.

His university in Pakistan had a therapist and a psychiatrist, and the administration was gracious enough to let its alumni avail their services free of charge. He decided to pay them both a visit, even though he had already placed his bets on the psychiatrist. I can’t sit on a couch and talk to somebody for months on end, he reasoned. Although meds were alien and scary, he just wanted peace. He didn’t care if they would drown his symptoms by numbing him. In fact, it was what he wanted. The therapist had irritated him on sight with her faux-delicate voice. The psychiatrist was more strategic about what she thought he needed – she told him he should consult with a therapist first. “Why do you think I came to you?” She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.

*

His friend Waqas, or Vicky, invited him to a dingy tea stall they used to frequent during their college days. Billu knew Vicky would commiserate with him, and that made him feel better. Vicky slapped his arm jovially as a form of greeting and reclined on a chair, a Vape pen dangling from his mouth.

“How is it going, my brother?”

“I’m not unhappy, but I’m not happy, either,” Billu said slowly.

“Why?”

“You know how it is. This lack of motivation, this ennui. Masters? Been there, done that. Doctorate? I can’t do that again. Spend five years under a tyrannical PA and start hunting for a job again?”

Vicky took the vape out of his mouth and grinned at Billu. Vicky was quite handsome, despite his shark-like grin.

“You’re having trouble? You’re the smart one in this friend group.”

The friend group consisted of the two of them.

“What brains? More like garbage,” Billu muttered.

“What I’m saying is, if nothing works out we can just open a new Subway together. You can keep all the profit, okay?” Vicky grinned again.

It dawned upon Billu that Vicky’s good looks annoyed him. Not because he wanted to look like Vicky, no. It was because Vicky’s handsomeness went hand-in-hand with this performance of effortlessness, of ease, as though he was sliding down a frictionless slide. Vicky did fine in university. His father owned two Subway franchises, and when Vicky was laid off from his job, his father handed them over to him. Billu had never worked up the nerve to say it, because he didn’t want to be a wet blanket in the face of Vicky’s perpetual cheeriness, but he found it a huge waste of a good, expensive college education. And in a tiny corner of his heart, he resented the fact that Vicky was content, and to make matters worse, had a handsome face to top it off with. A man should have one thing, either peace of mind or good looks. Having both was unprincipled.

“I saw an opening for a position at The Edge on LinkedIn the other day.”

“The weird new city! I heard Rafay got in. That’s crazy! Dude, you applied there, didn’t you?”

“Why would I? Nothing special about me. I’m just one of the trillion engineers South Asia churns out every year without pause. The goras and the sheikhs are probably sick of us,” Billu laughed bitterly.

“There’s no harm in trying, bro. You never know. Hey, stranger things have happened. Rafay got a job there.”

“That’s what makes me suspicious,” Billu said slowly.

“Probably one of his many connections. But forget about him. If you get selected, you’ll be set for life! I’ve heard Gulf sheikhs are funding this. Do you know how much money they have? Heck, I bet if they set fire to half their cash stack and get high from the fumes, they’ll have enough money to pay Pakistan’s loan to the World Bank!” Vicky snickered.

*

Billu still thought that The Edge was a scam, or at the very least, some sort of white elephant, despite the pedigreed individuals associated with it, but he decided to follow Vicky’s advice. If they rejected him, he would laugh it off and return to the mind-numbing rigmarole that was his life. He didn’t take care to embellish his resume or call his professors or former bosses to ask them, in a tiny voice shaking with servility, that he was so very sorry to bother them, and he hoped they weren’t inconvenienced, but could they please possibly write a letter of recommendation for him? If they would, he would be thankful, no doubt, but he didn’t hold much hope. Still, there was a small voice in his head that kept on saying: What if it’s legit? What if they do hire you?

He submitted the job application three minutes before the deadline. He closed the tab on his browser and mopped his forehead, then plonked onto the bed with his phone in his hand.

He got the interview call a week later. The interviewer was a serene-looking old man with a bald head and a gray beard named Mr Tareen. He welcomed Billu to his office and rang someone on a dial-up phone. “A tea, please,” he smiled. “And what would you like, Mr Bhatti?”

“Oh no need for anything, thank you so much.” Billu’s stomach was awash in reflux.

“Nonsense, you’re our guest this afternoon. I insist.”

Billu wondered if he had seen Mr Tareen somewhere. “Oh, I guess a coffee then. Thank you.”

“Now, I don’t want you to be stressed, or nervous, okay, Bilal? Our interview is more like a discussion, an exchange of ideas between two like-minded friends if you will.”

“Right, sir, I see, Thank you very much, sir.”

“Why did you apply for this job, Bilal?”

Billu couldn’t decide if he liked Mr Tareen calling him by his first name or not. He smiled nervously. “Well, this seems to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me, you know, especially as a civil engineer, working on something so pathbreaking, so monumental…” he trailed off, his insides shriveling from the humiliation of his reedy, ingratiating voice. He wondered if he should mention Rafay. Mr Tareen smiled indulgently.

“Indeed, we are doing revolutionary work at The Edge, Bilal. Think of your life here in Pakistan. What you’re going to see at The Edge will blow your mind. Pakistan is going to seem like a relic from the times of the dinosaurs once you see for yourself what The Edge is. I swear to God, you’re never going to want to leave once you’re there! Everything will pale in comparison.”

Does this mean I got the job? Billu wanted to ask.

“How would you describe your working style, Bilal?”

“I am a hard worker, sir, I always adhere to deadlines, sir, no one has ev–”

“If the company were to demand a bit of extra effort, a bit more time, you would be willing to cooperate?”

“I suppose I would be amenable to that,” he said, even as he thought, I don’t think so, not after everything I’ve been through.

“Very good, Bilal, very good. I wanted to know what type of worker you are. Would you describe yourself as a leader? A follower? Or a bit of both?” Mr Tareen leaned forward.

“I can lead, I always consider the opinions of my team, sir, and I take directions very well, as long as they benefit us, sorry, I meant, the team, sir. So, yes, I suppose, I can be either when the need arises.” He remembered where he had seen Mr Tareen. At a university career fair, perhaps, hawking green flyers.

“MashaAllah, how impressive, Bilal. Well, I’ve had a wonderful time talking to you. Do you have any questions for us?”

“I just want to say, sir, I’m so impressed by what you do at The Edge, I just –” he felt his voice strain.

“I understand what you’re trying to say, Bilal, and may I just add, what you’ve seen so far is just a glimpse. We create our own four seasons at The Edge, did you know that, Bilal? Snowfall in the winter, light showers in spring, downpours in the summer, and yellow leaves in autumn. Now, just think about it. A desert island in the middle of nowhere. No rain for decades. Do you see what I’m getting at? The Edge isn’t going to be confined by nature. The Edge controls nature!”

“That’s amazing, sir.”

“Most certainly, Bilal, most certainly.” Mr Tareen’s manner suddenly became businesslike. “We’ll inform you of our decision in two weeks, Bilal. Thank you so much for your time.”

Billu’s mother was thrilled when he got the offer, and rang up her sisters and cousins to tell them how brilliant her boy was. It was the greatest amount of emotion she had ever displayed in front of him. Not only were the developers at The Edge offering him a seven-figure annual salary, they were also going to take him to the island so that he could see it in person. “After all, he’s a civil engineer, he’s indispensable,” she said proudly to whoever would listen.

Mr Tareen called Billu to his office to begin the onboarding plan. He was going to take Billu to the site and then begin the paperwork. Billu thought it was nice that there was someone he knew working there. He thought he’d message Rafay the next day, and perhaps befriend him so that they could stick together and help each other. The night before his flight, he couldn’t sleep. He began surfing the internet mindlessly.

He came across a disconcerting Reddit post. It was an expose of sorts, claiming that the poster’s cousin worked for The Edge, and had hanged himself because of the overwork. He wasn’t the only one, said the poster. Many others had tried to off themselves but only a few had succeeded. The Edge was pumping money into the media and bloated PR schemes to keep all this concealed. Billu felt a shiver of disquietude jolt his body, even though he knew better than to believe what he read on the Internet. He sent a message to Rafay on LinkedIn. “Hi Rafay, I never got the opportunity to congratulate you on your new job Congrats dude! MashaAllah, that is so impressive! I’m gonna start working there myself soon. Can you believe I’m flying out there tomorrow?! Let’s catch up, if you’re in the area. See you soon!” Rafay didn’t respond. Billu made up his mind to ask Mr Tareen about it on the plane.

But he was unable to do so; Mr Tareen had slept the entire flight. They landed on the island in the early morning and boarded a sleek bus. Billu peered out of his window. Mr Tareen snored to his left, far too loud for a man of his stature. The highway was cordoned off by a fleet of grim-looking policemen. As he craned his neck, he could make out red grain dunes in the distance.

Mr Tareen led him to a magnificent building, wrought in gleaming marble, with a fountain and a swimming pool. “This is where you’ll be living,” he said. “The civil engineering team is waiting for you.”

In the lobby, a blond man with horn-rimmed glasses shook his hand. “I’m Peter Nilsen, head of the civil engineering team. Welcome onboard! It’s been a tiring journey, so why don’t you rest for a bit? Let’s reconvene in a few hours for lunch.”

Billu’s room was splendid: pristine floors and ceilings, a king-size bed, and a vast enclosed balcony from which he could see the dunes. The fans were curious, encased in an iron hemisphere with crisscross openings. The air was hot and dusty, but inside, the weather was so agreeable that Billu wanted to sink into the bed without a care in the world.

After dinner, Billu and Mr Nilsen indulged in a bit of small talk in the hotel lobby. “Sir, do you know Rafay Usman? He works at The Edge too, we actually were classmates in college.”

“Oh yes, I know Mr Usman. He was going to join us in welcoming you, but unfortunately, his work commitments prevented him. You will meet him quite soon, though, rest assured. Now, I wanted to talk to you a bit about the paperwork for The Edge, quite straightforward, if you could take a look.”

Mr. Nilsen wanted Billu to sign an NDA before he could start working. The NDA stated that Bilal was contracted by The Edge for twenty years. “It’s just a matter of policy, you know, Mr. Bhatti, nothing to be concerned about,” Mr Nilsen smiled at him. “No pressure, OK! Trust me, twenty years will fly by, and by the time your contract ends, you’ll want to sign a new one, that’s how much fun you’ll have working with us.”

Billu saw where this was going. He told Mr Nilsen he needed more time to deliberate, but he was probably going to sign the NDA regardless.

*

Billu lay in the middle of his bed and stared up at the ceiling fan. Its black blades whirred inside the strange iron cage.

The Reddit guy probably worked in the desert.

I’m gonna do some field visits, but I’ll work mostly on the computer anyway.

Not everything on the internet is true.

I don’t think there was anything shady about Rafay not showing up today. After all, it’s not like we were best friends.

Billu sat upright, suddenly intensely aware of his surroundings. He smiled up at the fan. He thought of the motionless fan in his room in Pakistan. A few minutes later, he left the room to look for Mr Nilsen and the NDA.