Frostlands

by John Feffer

  “It’s probably ridiculous to suggest, but I should mention that we’ll soon be expanding Arcadia. I could possibly get you and Ming-hwa onto the list.”

  Gordon just laughs. “Really, Mom. I would shrivel up and die in Arcadia. I might as well join a lamasery.”

  I launch into a description of how Gordon could contribute to the development of Arcadia. It’s a prepared speech, and it’s all nonsense. Gordon and Arcadia are a terrible mismatch. During my deception, however, I DM him the same message I’d sent to Aurora. Unlike his sister, Gordon doesn’t need any time to sift through his memories. I can see that he immediately understands what I’m looking for. It takes him no time at all to supply what I need.

  “It’s hopeless, Mom,” Gordon cuts me off. “Remember when Dad tried to get me to help out with his big idea for the house in DC? He wanted to remodel the basement so that we could have a kitchen and dining room down there? He had this grand plan that we would do this project together and have some father-son bonding time. It just didn’t work out. Same thing with you and Arcadia. It’s just not a good fit. I’m sorry.”

  I’ve known ever since he was a child that Gordon is quick-witted, but I hadn’t seen his intellect in action for a long time. His ability to pivot so smoothly, to refashion the nugget of information so that it seamlessly flowed into our conversation, was Gordon at his best. He’d come up with an anecdote about Julian instantaneously and established immediately that what he was about to say was patently false in a way that only I would know. After all, our home in Washington, the one destroyed in 2022 in Hurricane Donald, didn’t have a basement.

  “Ah, I guess you’re right,” I say admiringly. “You’ve always been a frontiersman, Gordon. In fact, I’m surprised you’ve acquired the trappings of domesticity here in Xinjiang. It must be Ming-hwa’s influence.”

  “I’ll let you be the judge of that,” Gordon says, beckoning me down to a path along the river. “We can walk to the restaurant. You can see it from here, anchored to the riverbank. It’s a facsimile of an imperial barge. Not very authentic, but the food is excellent. And it serves wine from my vineyard—an excellent Merlot.”

  I am torn. I want to meet Gordon’s wife. They’ve been together for almost two years now. It’s his third marriage, but the other two were so short-lived that I found out about them only after their dissolution. I’m understandably curious about what kind of person can tether a bird of prey. But I also want to rush back to Arcadia with this new information. Along with the interpretation that Emmanuel Puig offered of the message sent to Aurora, I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do next.

  I decide to compromise. I’ll stay for the first course, be properly introduced to Ming-hwa, then beg off for the rest of the evening. Gordon will understand. The very fact that I, who rails so often against retinal implants, DM’ed him conveys the urgency of the situation.

  I set off after Gordon. But something isn’t right.

  “Hey, Mom, we’re going this way.” Gordon is waving at me. “Down here. Toward me. Mom? Mom!”

  I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do to move in Gordon’s direction. But it isn’t working. My son is getting smaller. It’s as if someone has taken over the controls of the VR.

  As it turns out, someone has.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I don’t know where I am.

  All I know is it’s a desert. Undulating hills of sand stretch in every direction. I am on top of one of those hills, which affords me an unobstructed view of emptiness. No signs of habitation. No oasis in sight. No road or track of any kind cutting through the sand.

  There are only three things in this landscape: me (or at least a version of me), the chair my avatar is sitting on, and an empty chair across from me.

  It’s midday. The sun, directly above my head, has burned a hole through the blue canvas of the sky.

  One moment I was walking along that river away from my son and the next I’m sitting in this chair in the middle of an immense, barren expanse.

  Here in the desert a limited range of avatar motion has been restored to me, but what use is it? Where can I go? I stand up, then sit down again. With a flick of my eyes I try to return to Arcadia. I can’t. It’s a bad dream from which I can’t awaken.

  As I search through screen after screen for some virtual way out of this desert, I become aware of a change in the landscape. A large man, or at least a large avatar, is now across from me. I’m overwhelmed by him even though we’re both sitting down.

  “Hello, Rachel,” he says. “My apologies for bringing you to this meeting without any explanation. I didn’t want to take you away from your son Gordon so suddenly, but we’re on a rather tight schedule. You are, too, yes?”

  “Where are we?”

  “I hope you appreciate the view. It was quite a job to enable VR here, but it’s worth it. What better place than the Sahara for a virtual rendezvous if you don’t want to be interrupted?”

  “I don’t know who you are but—”

  “I was a friend of your late husband. Well, ‘friend’ might be overstating the relationship. An acquaintance.”

  He’s dressed in a black suit and a crisp white shirt, and that stirs a memory of something my ex-husband wrote in his report. He has a slight Australian accent, not a Russian one, but still I make a guess.

  “You’re Ivanov,” I said. “Or at least that’s what Julian called you. The man from CRISPR who interrogated him.”

  “Interrogated? I wouldn’t use that word. We contracted with your husband to write a report, and then we asked him some questions about it. Everything was very professional. On our side, at least.”

  “You tried to kidnap my younger son, my Benjamin, and you failed. I don’t see how that was ‘very professional.’”

  “Well, your Benjamin was a very nettlesome fellow who was trying to destroy the planet. I know that sounds over the top, but honestly, he would have done it. Anyway, he cost us a lot of money, but that’s not why I’m here. And that’s not why you’re here.”

  “I have no information for you.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t jump so quickly to that conclusion, Rachel. Please hear me out.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “We all have choices. But we haven’t gotten to your choice yet.”

  “Go on,” I say weakly.

  Ivanov places his hands on his large stomach, looking for all the world like a happy, expectant mother. “We know about your research. In rough outline. And we know that you are currently on some kind of quest. We don’t really care about your quest, but we do care about your work.”

  “I’m just visiting my children.”

  “I didn’t realize that Emmanuel Puig was one of your children. Perhaps another illegitimate son? Sorry, that was unnecessary.”

  I seethe. Puig had assured me that our meetings were entirely secure. “How do you know about my research?”

  “We’ve been following your career for a very long time.”

  “I haven’t had a career for a very long time.”

  “Indeed, your last publication on the ice-albedo effect was in 2021. Journal of Glaciology, volume twelve, number two. Top notch. Or so I’ve been assured by those who know their ice. But you have been in touch recently with Bjorn Amundsen. We’ve simply filled in the blanks. And now, suddenly, you’re all over the map. So much travel at your age must be taxing.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll have another opportunity to see my family.”

  “Precisely. And that brings us to the crux of the matter. Your choice.”

  “This, too, is just a conversation, not an interrogation, right?”

  “Not even a conversation, really. Just a chat.”

  “In the Sahara. Against my will.”

  Ivanov shrugs. “If that’s how you feel, I won’t keep you long. Here’s your choice. You can hand over all of your research results and we will, in exchange, give you the same drug we promised your late husband. It will extend your life as much as
forty years and, given subsequent medical advances, probably a great deal longer. We’ll also throw in a supply for Gordon and Aurora and your grandchildren, because we believe in family at CRISPR International. Without family, we are nothing.”

  “How thoughtful.”

  “Or we can go about it the hard way. We’ll take your research results by force. And I think you know that we are fully capable of that.”

  “In a professional way, I’m sure.”

  “When the fate of the earth hangs in the balance, we must act by all means necessary. Which is why we are making this generous offer to you.”

  “What’s the point of extending my own life and the life of my family if the planet shrivels up and dies?”

  “But it won’t. We’ve run the numbers. Many times. Barring something unexpected, like our life-extension drug falling into too many hands, the planet will regain its equilibrium in about four hundred years. After it jettisons approximately 99 percent of the human population.”

  “And you’ll be part of the 1 percent.”

  “And you can be, too.”

  If I could have spit in his face, I would have. “I’m not interested in individual longevity. I care only about species longevity.”

  “So do we, so do we,” Ivanov says, clapping his hands together like a small child. “We are truly on the same page.”

  “We’re not even in the same book.”

  “Oh, but we are! We’re just quibbling about the numbers. We both want humanity to survive these difficult times. One percent of humanity is still a lot of humanity.”

  “Somehow I don’t think that these difficult times are quite as difficult for you and your colleagues as they are for everyone else.”

  “We all have a strong tribal instinct. You want your family to survive and prosper, yes? You want Arcadia to survive and prosper, yes? If you agree to our terms, you can ensure their safety. Their sustainability.”

  “I’m an old woman and I’m tired,” I tell him, thinking that I’m overusing this excuse. “Do I have to make this decision right now? Under this hot sun in the middle of a desert?”

  “Of course not. You have twenty-four hours. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Rachel. I’ve admired you from a distance.”

  And with that, Ivanov disappears. I sit in my chair for a moment, relieved that I don’t have to make an immediate decision. But I fear that Ivanov is giving me time, not space— that I will have to sit in this chair for the next twenty-four hours.

  Before this fear can take proper hold over me, however, the desert is gone and I’m back in Arcadia.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I remove the VR headset and discover Zoltan standing in front of me.

  “I was visiting Gordon,” I begin.

  “Emergency meeting of the Council,” he says tersely.

  I look down at my wristband. It has turned orange.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Code breakers,” Zoltan says, helping me out of the VR apparatus. “Rupert found two units operating in parallel next to the outer perimeter.”

  “CRISPR?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “Can you change the locks again?”

  “The units would immediately know the new code.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “If they were ordinary computers, we would have at least seventy-five years. But these are some new type of quantum computers.”

  “So how much time do we have?”

  Zoltan looks sheepish. That’s when I know how serious the situation is: Zoltan never looks sheepish. “Possibly as little as twenty-four hours.”

  “And what about the inner perimeter? It has a different code, right?”

  “Yes. They might try to decrypt it, or they might use brute force.”

  I can’t resist asking him: “If you knew then what you know now, would you have breached the outer perimeter?”

  He clears his throat, but then says nothing. And that’s even more unusual.

  I find Arcadia in a tightly wound spiral of anxiety. Everyone is conferring, but in whispers, as if afraid of waking someone or something. Defense corps members have taken up arms but are not yet at their guard posts. Zoltan says that they’ve only been told that an attack similar to the one we experienced the day before might happen again. We have to avoid a panic.

  The Council meeting is already a pitched battle of accusations and recriminations when Zoltan and I arrive.

  “This is what we warned you about,” Bertrand is saying, his eyes flicking toward Zoltan and me. “If we allied with the Movement against CRISPR, then CRISPR would attack us.”

  “As far as we can tell,” Zoltan says above the uproar, “the bots left the units during yesterday’s attack. In fact, I now suspect that it was simply a distraction while they put those units in place. Which means it was something they did before we decided to work with the Movement.”

  “Then why are they doing this?” asks Bertrand.

  Zoltan skirts the question. “I’m trying as hard as you are to understand what’s going on.”

  Other Council members begin to talk again. Anuradha has to stand to quiet the tumult. “Let’s not focus on the past. The question is: What should we do now? Zoltan, please update us on any cooperation with the Movement.”

  Zoltan clears his throat. “I made contact with the Movement representative yesterday and provided the data we were able to gather during the breach. He said it was invaluable.”

  “How invaluable?” asks Bertrand. “Invaluable enough to disrupt CRISPR’s attack?”

  Zoltan purses his lips. “I’m still waiting to hear back.”

  The other Council members are abuzz with questions. They want to know what to expect, how long the outer perimeter wall can hold, what kind of weapons we might be facing. They want to know about any emergency contingency plans.

  Above all, they want to know what CRISPR’s looking for.

  I bang the table with my fist. That gets their attention. Startled, they look at me. They’ve never seen me act this way.

  I say simply, “CRISPR wants me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rupert and Karyn are sitting cross-legged on the floor of the laundry room. Karyn is drawing circles on a piece of paper. Petting his rabbit, Rupert is watching carefully.

  “Do you see that, Rachel?” he asks when I come in. “Karyn draws perfect circles every time. I wish I had that kind of hand-eye coordination.”

  “I can teach you,” Karyn offers.

  “No, you can’t,” Rupert says without a trace of self-pity. “I can do many things. But I will never be able to do that.”

  “What have you two been up to?” I ask, genuinely curious. Since Karyn was released from quarantine, she and Rupert have become inseparable.

  “Karyn doesn’t have access to any of our digital resources,” Rupert says. “I’ve been telling her the story of Arcadia so she can create a graphic novel about our community.”

  “Is that something you want to do?” I ask Karyn.

  “I like to draw. But I also like welding.”

  “We don’t need any spot-welding at the moment,” Rupert says. “But we don’t have any graphic novels about Arcadia.”

  Karyn looks at him with what seems almost like affection. “I would like to help you better understand yourselves.”

  Lizzie has repurposed Karyn to help the community in whatever ways she can. Her original programmed abilities—to collect information, to pluck drones from midair— might also come in handy at some point. The jury is still out on her cartooning capabilities.

  “Thank you, Karyn,” I say. “On a somewhat different topic, what can you tell me about CRISPR International?”

  “CRISPR International began operations in 2020 and quickly established a reputation as a leader in bioengineered medical solutions. It has since diversified into many fields of innovation.”

  “Have you ever had any contact with CRISPR International?”

&nb
sp; “No,” Karyn says.

  “None at all?” I press.

  “There are no CRISPR operations in Canton, Ohio.”

  It’s impossible to get an AI to deviate from its core narrative, but it’s always worth a try.

  “Rupert, I want to ask you about CRISPR as well. Can you pull up a map of its facilities in Darwin, Australia?”

  “Of course, Rachel. I’m looking at it now.”

  “How many buildings are there?”

  “Four.”

  “They differ in size, yes?”

  “I can give you their square footage in descending rank.”

  “Is one quite a bit smaller than the other three?”

  “The smallest building is 14,763 square feet. The other three are all larger than 35,983 square feet.”

  “Can you tell me the purpose of this smallest building?”

  “The other three buildings are clearly research facilities, given the energy requirements and the nature of the effluents. The smallest building does not have a research function.”

  “If you had to guess, what would you say that its function is?”

  “There is an 86 percent probability that it has an executive function.”

  “How many floors does it have?”

  “Three floors above ground. One floor below ground.”

  “Can you tell me what takes place in this basement?”

  “I am sorry, Rachel, I do not know.”

  But I’m relieved that the coded messages from my former husband make sense. From Aurora, I learned that I was looking for the smallest of four things; Emmanuel Puig confirmed that the CRISPR headquarters in Darwin consisted of four buildings; and Gordon pointed me in the direction of the basement. Julian wanted someone—perhaps me—to know what was going on in the basement of the smallest of the four CRISPR buildings in Darwin. Perhaps it’s the nerve center of the corporation. Perhaps my husband anticipated this very moment, when CRISPR International would try to breach the outer perimeter of Arcadia. Perhaps if I can get into that basement, I can flip a remote kill switch on these code-breaking units. Perhaps I can bring down the edifice of CRISPR with a great crash. I’m putting a lot of faith in a string of conjectures that could collapse as easily as a fragile ice bridge.