“Maybe droneport is the wrong name.”
“Maybe we can call it a ‘drone place’?”
Ledgard laughed—he and Foster had
rigorously addressed these questions five
years before, although he didn’t point
this out to the group. The hours ticked
by. Someone proposed that the group
name the droneport Mtego, because, he
said, “I learned today that it means ‘net’
in Swahili. And this will capture wealth,
and it will be networked.” A Spanish
L.V.C. organizer wrote “M-T-E-G-O”
on a whiteboard, in blue marker. In fact,
mtego means “trap.”
T
wo days later, Ledgard and I left
Mwanza for Nairobi, with a brief
fuel stop at Kilimanjaro. From there, he
would continue to Marseille, to consult
with the theoretical physicist Carlo Ro-
velli on the shape and meaning of time,
and then to Prague, where, for the past
two years, Ledgard has served as a vis-
iting professor at the Czech Technical
University’s Center on Artificial Intelli-
gence. In transit, I reread “Submergence,”
Ledgard’s second novel, which was pub-
lished in 2011. It depicts a love affair be-
tween a deep-ocean biologist and a spy,
but it’s really Ledgard’s attack on short-
sighted politics and an ode to our sickly,
fading earth. A favorable review in the
Times called it “obsessed with unexplored
depths, whether of self, of world conflict
or of the ocean.” Kathryn Schulz, writ-
ing in New York, called it “the best novel
I’ve read so far this year,” and compared
Ledgard’s prose to that of John le Carré,
Anne Carson, and W. G. Sebald.
In the book, James More, a British
intelligence officer who lives in Kenya,
is Ledgard the reporter, a man who has
“a flaw in him that urged him to cata-
logue rather than to enjoy,” Ledgard
writes. “He was tasking agents to infil-
trate mosques in Somalia and along the
Swahili coast,” places where you could
work out how many people lived in a
settlement by the number of plastic bags
on the trees. Danielle Flinders, the bi-
ologist, is Ledgard today: “She was try-
ing to understand the pullulating life in
the dark parts of the planet at a time
when, up above, mankind was itself be-
coming a swarm and setting off in ever
more artfully constructed but smaller
and more mindless circles.”
James is captured by jihadis in So-
malia, and faces execution—but it is
Danielle who puts into perspective the
fragility of life itself. “We exist only as
a film on the water,” she explains. Life
on earth began in the deep, and the
search for extraterrestrial life continues
in the oceans of distant moons. “We’re
nature’s brief experiment with self-aware-
ness,” she says. “Any study of the ocean
and what lies beneath it should serve
notice of how easily the planet might
shrug us off.”
Since “Submergence” came out, Led-
gard has been working with Olafur
Eliasson to broadcast the sights and
sounds of the deep ocean in a gallery,
to show that “there is another world in
our world,” which is vast and fragile,
and largely unknown. As we drove
through Nairobi, during a layover, Led-
gard gestured in the direction of the
Great Rift Valley, the site of many of
the oldest known human remains. “Early
humans walked out of that place sev-
enty thousand, maybe eighty thousand
years ago—an incredibly short period
of time, compared to microbial life,” he
said. Now we’re choking the planet.
According to a United Nations study,
humans have “severely altered” two-
thirds of the earth’s marine environ-
ment. Each decade, we lose ten per cent
of the world’s sea-grass meadows anddump some four billion tons of heavy
metals, solvents, toxic sludge, and other
industrial wastes into the world’s wa-
ters. “If this was happening in a science-
fiction world we would see it clearly for
what it is, but we don’t because it’s hap-
pening here and now. It’s obscured by
the money someone is making off it,”
Danielle says. “If man had a sense of
proportion, he would die of shame.”I
n Czech, the phrase jdi do Prčice lit-
erally means “go to Prčice,” but it is
widely understood as an affectionate
way of saying “get lost” or “go fuck your-
self.” Ledgard, who has a weekend house
near Prčice, says he does much of his
best thinking on walks in the Czech
countryside, and it was on one of his
outings, last year, that he had “a eureka
moment.” Many of the planet’s bio-
diversity-rich areas happen to be in
cash-poor places. What if endangered
species could, in effect, pay local com-
munities for their own protection?
Might it be possible to store value in a
pear tree in Tajikistan, or in a chimpan-
zee in Uganda’s Albertine Rift?
Last November, in Prague, he pre-
sented this idea at Avast, an artificial-
intelligence and cybersecurity firm, before
Ondrej Vlcek, the C.E.O., and a team“I punched way, way too far up.”