Frostlands

by John Feffer

  “And what evidence do you have of that?”

  He pulls his device back to his side of the table and swipes a few more times. “I haven’t yet shown this to anyone. It’s a list of direct messages sent from Arcadia over the last two years.”

  He turns the device around so that I can see the list of encrypted DMs from the approximate geolocation of our community. My name is on the bottom of the list.

  I expected him to inspect the VR logs, but I didn’t think he had access to the DMs. So much for the security of Rupert’s burner account. “I contacted my daughter,” I tell Zoltan, striving to keep my voice calm. “To let her know that I was coming.”

  “You’re missing the point,” he says, his finger dancing over what I now see is the same name highlighted over and over again in yellow.

  Bertrand.

  I shake my head. Not Bertrand. He’s the last person who would turn against the community that welcomed him in. “Betray his own daughter?”

  “What better way to win our trust than to contribute flesh and blood to the community?”

  “This doesn’t prove anything. You don’t know where the DMs went, or their content.”

  “I’m working on that,” Zoltan says. “I think I can get geolocations for some of the addressees. But even without that information, I can ask the question: Who is Bertrand DMing and why has his DM activity gone up in the last month?”

  “You think he’s been a sleeper for twenty years? And this is the first time he’s done anything suspicious?”

  “That’s what sleepers do. They sleep. Until they’re awoken.”

  “Have you confronted him?”

  “Not yet. I want to gather more information first. And I don’t want to distract from the urgent task before us.”

  “Preparing for CRISPR’s next attack.”

  “Oh no, the best defense is a—”

  “Of course, you want to attack first.” I should have anticipated that move. “With the Movement’s help.”

  “But first I need your help at the Council meeting today. I want to provide the Movement with all the digital information we gathered from CRISPR’s attack. It should be enough to bring down CRISPR’s network worldwide.”

  “Even though the Movement is part of the problem, not part of the solution.”

  “Right now CRISPR is the main threat to us.”

  “And you think I’ll support you because?”

  “Because if they know that your research project precipitated CRISPR’s attack, the Council will put a lock on your lab. At least that’s the solution I would support, as co-chair.”

  “I’ll simply explain the importance of the research.”

  Zoltan smiles. “They’re panicking, Rachel. They won’t even be able to understand what you’re talking about or why it’s important. It’s quite simple: If you want to save the world, you’re going to have to save Arcadia first. And if you want to save Arcadia, you’ll need to back my plan.”

  Check.

  Chapter Eight

  I have to admit: I don’t know what Zoltan’s game is.

  He’s been the only one in the community to help me with my research project. But has he been doing so only to provide CRISPR with continuous updates on my progress? He’s also been an advocate for siding with the Movement to take down CRISPR, but for all I know he could be working with CRISPR to take down the Movement. Or—and this is an even darker thought—has he been conspiring with his family to take over Arcadia? Maybe Zoltan’s been the sleeper all along.

  I’ve never been very good at chess. I can see only one or two moves ahead before I’m undone by the branching possibilities. I may well be a pawn in Zoltan’s larger game, but to protect my research project, I’m the one who has to make a sacrifice. At the emergency Council meeting this evening, I speak in favor of his plan.

  Anuradha is plainly shocked by my reversal. After the vote, which goes narrowly in Zoltan’s favor, she’s more abrupt than usual when she invites me on our weekly evening constitutional.

  It’s a balmy December night, the temperature in the upper fifties, the new normal for northern Vermont. She’s wearing a mauve sari and has a wrap around her shoulders against the evening chill. Her dress must have been exotic indeed when she first moved to this part of Vermont, where dairy farmers, male and female, favor jeans and flannel shirts. Her saris, however, anticipated the hotter summers and milder winters of the new Northeast. She makes them herself, with silk harvested from the silkworm farm she established long ago in an unused milking shed attached to the silo. The dyes come from the fruits we grow, the mauve from the mulberries whose leaves feed the silkworms.

  It’s but one of the many ways Anuradha has led by doing. Arcadia was her idea, although she’s always insisted it was a collective effort from the start. For all her commitment to collective action, however, she refuses to let the natural inertia of the group prevent progress. She never says “someone should,” only “I will.” If not for Anuradha, I might have long ago given up on this community and its myriad internecine struggles. If she could endure the compromises of group living for the greater good, then so could I.

  I shrink from disappointing her, and tonight she’s disappointed. I can tell from the fussy way she wraps her shawl around her shoulders and the pinched tone she uses to address me.

  We’re taking our usual path around the duck pond/fishery. It’s dark, our way lit only by the full moon and the few solar lights that run along the side closer to the water. She takes my arm and we walk slowly. The path is smooth. I know it well, so I’m not afraid of falling.

  “You switched sides, Rachel. Why?”

  I’ve already prepared my cover story. “I was afraid after yesterday’s attack. That changed the calculus.”

  “If CRISPR wants to destroy us, they will, but we shouldn’t give them a reason to do so.”

  “I’m beginning to think that it’s us or them at this point.”

  “That’s precisely the kind of bipolar thinking we’ve tried so hard to avoid here.” Anuradha’s fingers tighten around my bicep as if to reinforce her point. “Zoltan has his virtues, I don’t deny it, and we’re fortunate that the next generation is so capable, particularly when it comes to modern technology. But I fear that he believes that all the world’s a chessboard. A black-and-white world.”

  “You know I agree with you,” I say.

  Then I take a breath and hold it. I very much want to tell Anuradha about my research. We talk about everything else on these walks: our families, our frailties, our fears, everything but that. It’s not that she wouldn’t understand the details. A biologist by training, she certainly would grasp the basic science behind my technique. But I’ve known from the start how potentially dangerous my research is. If I hadn’t needed sophisticated number-crunching, I wouldn’t have told anyone. I reached out to Rupert’s predecessor for help with the math, but he didn’t have the necessary programming skills. Lizzie was still too young when I needed that initial assistance. So that left Zoltan. As it was, I didn’t explain why the quantitative analysis was so important for me. Yet, though he was only nineteen at the time, he figured it out by himself.

  I exhale and continue. “But I think we should see how far we get with Zoltan’s gambit.”

  I can’t see Anuradha’s face in the darkness, but I suspect her expression is one of sorrow.

  We walk on in silence for a few minutes. I listen to a fish breaking the surface of the pond, a duck shaking water from its feathers. I miss the chorus of frogs.

  “We can’t just think of our generation,” Anuradha begins. “Or the generation of Zoltan and Lizzie. We must think of the seventh generation. We must always ask ourselves: Is what I am doing good for the seventh generation?”

  It’s a favorite topic of Anuradha’s. I murmur agreement.

  “Arcadia is built for the seventh generation. We are not only carbon-neutral, we’re reforesting this whole quadrant. If you add in our carbon-dioxide removal units, we’re undoing t
he damage done over the last hundred years in this part of the country.”

  “Yes, and it still isn’t enough. Not by a long shot.”

  “If we’re talking about the next hundred years, of course not. But if we’re talking about the seventh generation.”

  “It still isn’t enough.”

  “Let’s say we add fifty more people every twenty years. Then let’s say that we inspire other communities. We begin with an arithmetic progress. Then at some point, it becomes geometric. We start small and go from there.”

  “We don’t have enough time to wait for the arithmetic to turn geometric.”

  Anuradha sounds impatient even as she counsels patience. “It’s not a quick fix. As you’ve said yourself, there are no green swans.”

  I have indeed said that many times. For the last seventy-five years, the world has awaited its green swan—the unexpected discovery that will radically alter the climate-change equation. First it was solar power, but that didn’t stop the use of fossil fuels. Then it was carbondioxide-removal facilities that would turn greenhouse gasses into pellets of calcium carbonate, but the technology couldn’t be scaled up sufficiently. And, always, there has been the false hope of geoengineering, of tweaking nature itself so that it can solve the problem we created for ourselves. Unfortunately, these all proved to be false dreams of mastery.

  As Anuradha continues to lecture me on the theme of the seventh generation, I suddenly understand the real reason I’ve never told her about my research project. She would be furious at me. What have I been doing but a sophisticated version of geoengineering? Haven’t I succumbed to quick fix–ism myself? It hardly matters that I believe my plan will work—that a hitherto unappreciated feature of ice-crystal formation, if nudged in the right direction, might reverse the ice-albedo effect, restoring the polar ice caps and preventing all that trapped methane from pushing the earth past the point of no return. After all, what use is it to talk of the seventh generation if we’re on the verge of a sixth great extinction?

  This afternoon, between my lunch with Zoltan and the emergency Council meeting, I’d squeezed in just enough lab time to apply the results of Zoltan’s last round of calculations. I had stimulated ice-crystal formation in above-freezing conditions and verified those results numerous times. Now I can control the spread of this crystalline frost precisely, along all three spatial axes. We ran the numbers on how large the polar caps would need to be to recreate a homeostatic ice-albedo effect, reduce global temperatures to what they had been a hundred years ago, and then stabilize them at that level. In other words, I just verified to my satisfaction that we might actually be able to bring the planet back from the edge of the furnace without plunging it into a deep freeze. I’ve always told myself that I was just experimenting at the margins. But now I have to be honest: I’ve caught sight of a green swan. I’ve touched its soft feathers. It’s as real as you or me.

  “Do you see what I mean, Rachel?” Anuradha concludes.

  “I do,” I say. And I do.

  But perhaps because I’m eighty years old and mistakenly equating my diminishing lifespan with the planet’s, I feel that Zoltan is right too. He’s worried about CRISPR. I’m worried about methane. Either way, we’ll need to act fast.

  “And yet you voted against our best interests. Our decisions have consequences.”

  “Sometimes, if presented with two bad choices, we just have to pick the lesser of two evils,” I point out.

  “But that’s exactly the bipolar thinking we should avoid!”

  Of course, she’s right. By choosing the lesser of two evils—an inadequately moderate response to climate change instead of outright denial—the world signed a death warrant for many island nations, ensured that dozens of countries fell apart at the seams, and added fuel to conflagrations across the globe. We didn’t stand up to evil, of the greater or lesser varieties. We didn’t have the courage. I’ve always thought, though, that the smallest subset of we, the we of Arcadia, had done the right thing. Now Anuradha is telling me that I and many of my fellow Arcadians have succumbed to the same errors of thinking that have doomed the rest of the planet.

  “I was right about the Captures, wasn’t I?” I respond, desperate to end this uncomfortable conversation.

  “It’s apples and oranges.”

  “Perhaps. But let’s give Zoltan’s plan a little time to see if it works.”

  I say this even though I know how little time we probably have. I say it even though I secretly intend to find out what side Zoltan is really on, and whether his plan is a lesser or a greater evil.

  Chapter Nine

  The security is beyond lax. That’s the first thing I notice about the Farm. No elaborate VR vetting. No Quarantine Room. No high-tech perimeters. There’s only a rather old-fashioned stone wall that a determined intruder could breach with nothing more sophisticated than a ladder.

  “Just trees around here,” Ilona explains in heavily accented English as she gives me a tour of the greenhouses. “The logging here ended twenty years ago, and even then this part of the Piscataquis County was very much uninhabited. I do not think there were even 200 people living in an area almost twice the size of your Vermont. So forget about anyone just bumping up into us.”

  The Farm is indeed located in a remote corner of a Maine forest. It’s too far away from Arcadia for any physical connection, and I’m not sure we would have maintained one even if this renegade offshoot were just down the road. Its founders, including Ilona and her husband, Aladar, left Arcadia almost a decade ago, along with thirty other dissenters. The split was painful. Even now I detect frostiness in Ilona’s attitude toward me. She was hesitant when I first contacted her about the visit. I emphasized the urgency of the situation, though, and she relented. I suspect she did so only to get an independent update on her son Zoltan.

  Ilona and Aladar were mathematicians recently arrived from Hungary when they joined Arcadia. They’d been environmentalists in their home country, part of an international scientific project to model the effects of climate change. They’d decided to leave Hungary because of the increasing discrimination that Aladar, a Roma, was facing. They thought the United States would be safe. After only a couple years at Dartmouth, however, growing anti-immigration sentiment and know-nothingism sent them into double exile—to Arcadia. And then into triple exile on the Farm.

  Like me, Ilona is in charge of the greenhouses. We trade stories about tomato blight, about yields and seed saving. It helps to have at least one common interest when you’re straining to be civil. The Farm is much smaller than Arcadia, only sixty people, but it maintains nearly as many greenhouses. In the decade it’s been in operation, they’ve managed to clear only modest acreage for planting. Cutting down trees and pulling out stumps is a laborious process, Ilona explains. And the Farm doesn’t have the luxury of nearby communities to trade with. Since it’s even more self-contained than Arcadia, greenhouse production is that much more essential to the community’s survival.

  The Farm can ill afford to let its members spend their time on frivolities like coding AI. Ilona admits that they still do maintain a few screens for communication purposes. Courtesy of technology Arcadia once provided, part of the community is also VR-enabled, from the conference room in the Common House along a path to the greenhouses. This is fortunate, since I don’t have time to apply to use one of Arcadia’s two functioning hovercars to make the round trip. The technology has also proved fortunate for the Farm: In the community’s second year, Ilona had to deal with an unfamiliar root rot that threatened their first crop. Catastrophe was averted thanks to a VR visit from an old friend in Budapest, who immediately diagnosed the problem.

  Aside from these concessions to the modern age, the Farm could belong to another century altogether. The structures I can see from the path to the greenhouse are rough-hewn: no solar paint, only a few old crystalline silicon panels, and smoke rising in tendrils out of chimneys. Rudimentary construction equipment—shovels, a wheelbarrow�
��lies scattered in the mud.

  Modern machines transformed two adjoining dairy farms into Arcadia. The Farm, by contrast, is more like a homestead on the old American frontier.

  Ilona also could be a visitor from the past. Middle-aged, with rough homespun clothing and black hair cut so short she could be a nun, she also looks more leathery than I remember. It’s as if the Maine woods were turning her into pemmican.

  She wastes no time. While we talk, she continues weeding the carrot beds. She addresses the plants, not me, as if the mere presence of an avatar was polluting the community.

  “Is there anything you need? I could ask Zoltan to—”

  “We are perfect,” Ilona says.

  “We’ve developed a new variety of blueberry that thrives in this weather,” I say, in the spirit of gardeners trading tips.

  “Blueberry!” Ilona snorts, as if I’d offered to send her some spare night soil.

  “They have excellent antioxidant properties.”

  “This is no yuppie commune!”

  I cast around in my mind for something else to offer. “We’re thinking of getting a new printer. Once we do that, we could send Rupert over with the ones we’re currently using. Then you could—”

  “Printers? This is Zoltan’s idea?”

  “Actually, no, he…”

  “That is why Zoltan say absolutely no, he doesn’t want to come here to us. No playthings for him here.”

  “Well, Zoltan seems to enjoy Arcadia.” I put some inflection on the word “seems” to see if it elicits any response. “He has his friends.”

  “Friends?” Ilona barks. “That is unusual. Only friends are his games.”

  “You know, he’s quite brilliant.”

  “This is no age for geniuses.” She holds up a handful of weeds, without deigning to turn around. “This an age for hard work. For dirty hands.”

  “But if it weren’t for Zoltan, Arcadia probably couldn’t survive. It’s because of his coding that—”

  Ilona stands up, face reddening. Now she’s looking at me, and her expression is terrifying. “Survive? Survive at what price?”