Frostlands

by John Feffer

  I put my hand on Rupert’s shoulder. It’s as soft as human flesh beneath his threadbare flannel shirt. “You found the code-breaking units just outside the outer perimeter.”

  “Yes, Rachel.”

  “How long until they break through?”

  “Somewhere between 8 and 8.5 hours.”

  “Can they be disabled?”

  “They are hardened. And attached to the outer perimeter. They can’t be destroyed without either turning off the perimeter wall or destroying it.”

  “And what will happen after the outer perimeter is breached?”

  Rupert looks at his rabbit. “I do not know.”

  “Tell me, both of you, how you feel about the extinction of the human race.”

  Rupert is the first to respond. “The extinction of the human race would mean the end of Arcadia. That is unacceptable.”

  Karyn adds, “I am a human being. I do not want to witness the extinction of our species.”

  I’m astonished. “Excuse me?”

  Karyn repeats, word for word, what she’d just said.

  “You never said anything before about being human.”

  “No one asked me.”

  This is a violation of the protocols: AIs are supposed to know that they are AIs. I gently point out, “You have capabilities that greatly exceed those of a human being.”

  “I am happy to teach you these capabilities,” Karyn responds.

  “Rupert, can you explain to Karyn what she is?”

  Rupert provides a concise summary of her manufacture.

  “Rupert is mistaken,” Karyn says when he is done. “I was born in Canton, Ohio, twenty-five years ago. I can draw you pictures of my parents, if you like.”

  I’m flummoxed. “But, Karyn, why don’t you eat or drink anything?”

  Karyn freezes. Then she begins to hit herself in the forehead. Once. Twice. Three times, with increasing force.

  “Wait, Karyn,” I say. “You must be on a diet!”

  Karyn stops. “Yes, that’s right. I am on a diet.”

  I don’t have time to explore this existential issue any further. If Rupert isn’t bothered by the contradiction, then I won’t be either. But it’s the strangest bug we’ve ever come across in an AI.

  “Rupert, what if I told you that, in four hundred years, only I percent of the human race will survive?”

  Rupert calculates. “That would be eighty million people. If evenly distributed over the earth’s surface, they would not likely survive. But if concentrated in sustainable communities like Arcadia, the human race could continue at those levels.”

  “But the loss of 99 percent of humanity would be greater than any genocide that has taken place on this planet.”

  “For humans,” Rupert agrees. “But during the Permian-Triassic extinction event…”

  “Yes, I know, Rupert,” I interrupt him. “Do you see any value whatsoever in trying to save any portion of that 99 percent?”

  Rupert looks at me in his unblinking way. “I can tell from the timbre of your voice, Rachel, that you care about saving some portion of that 99 percent, even though you would not know the vast majority of them. If you care about saving them, then I care about saving them.”

  I turn to Karyn. “And what do you think?”

  “I think it would make a good story. Saving the 99 Percent: That would be the title of a very interesting graphic novel.”

  That’s about as much as I can expect from them.

  “Okay, then.” I lower myself with some difficulty to the floor and sit cross-legged between them. I take out a pen and begin to turn the perfect circle that Karyn has drawn into a map. “Here’s my plan.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Transcript of conversation between Emmanuel Puig and Rachel Leopold, Buenos Aires, December 17, 2051

  Rachel Leopold: You were wrong!

  Emmanuel Puig: Probably. I’m wrong about a lot of things. That’s why I wanted to get your feedback on these annotations.

  Rachel: I’m not talking about your annotations. I’m talking about this. Our meetings. They’re not secure.

  Emmanuel: My IT people assured me that—

  Rachel: They were wrong. Are you working for CRISPR International?

  Emmanuel: Of course not. As you well know, I’m the director of the World Geo-Paleontology—

  Rachel: Have you ever received any funding from CRISPR?

  Emmanuel: Not that I know of.

  Rachel: Are you giving any information to CRISPR?

  Emmanuel: Never.

  Rachel: Why should I trust you?

  Emmanuel: I’m a geo-paleontologist, just like your husband was. I’ve worked in the field for more than two decades. But presumably you know all this.

  Rachel: Let me ask again: Why should I trust you?

  Emmanuel: Your children trust me. They’ve already shared a great deal of information with me about your husband. And I’ve kept all that information in confidence. Even from you.

  Rachel: That’s not much to pin my hopes on.

  Emmanuel: What I want more than anything, Rachel, is your report. And your help with my annotations. I would not do anything that would jeopardize that.

  Rachel: I am reassured by your appeal to self-interest, and I need your help. But I just don’t know if you’ll turn around and betray me. Or if you already have.

  Emmanuel: Okay, let me think. How about this: I have been in touch with your youngest son, with Benjamin. But I haven’t given that information to anyone.

  Rachel: Why were you in touch with Benjamin?

  Emmanuel: Fact-checking my annotations.

  Rachel: That’s absurd. I don’t believe you. My son has been underground for decades.

  Emmanuel: He told me that you once forbade him from playing something called “paintball” with his friends because you thought the game was too violent.

  Rachel: Yes, okay, I remember that. And a fat lot of good it did, too. But I can’t believe that Benjamin would put himself at risk for something as trivial as fact-checking your annotations on Julian’s manuscript.

  Emmanuel: Well, he also needed something from me. I am well connected here in Buenos Aires.

  Rachel: What did he need in Argentina?

  Emmanuel: I can’t tell you.

  Rachel: He’s my son. You can tell me.

  Emmanuel: Number one, he told me in confidence, and I would never betray that confidence. Number two, you’ve already said that these discussions are insecure.

  Rachel: Okay, then, maybe I can trust you. I’m in a hurry. This will have to be a leap of faith. I’m going to DM you some coordinates. Can your IT people help me?

  Emmanuel: Let me disconnect for a moment to find out. …Okay, they tell me that those coordinates are for a secure location. It’s password protected.

  Rachel: Can you help me bypass that password protection?

  Emmanuel: That would be illegal.

  Rachel: It could potentially save the planet.

  Emmanuel: I meet a lot of people who believe that they can save the planet. Can you give me any further information?

  Rachel: No. These are not secure discussions. You’ll have to take my word for it. Just as I have taken your word.

  Emmanuel: Well, I can’t help you.

  Rachel: You are such an academic. All talk. No action.

  Emmanuel: But I know someone who can help you. Someone I think you can trust.

  Chapter Seventeen

  We meet in Allan Hills.

  Once upon a time that’s where I took ice core samples, an hour by plane from the old McMurdo Station. We drilled through the dense blue ice of Antarctica during the day, and at night we listened as the fierce winds tried without success to uproot our tents. That wind was both bane and blessing. Sometimes it would force us to cancel the day’s work because we couldn’t get to the drill site by snowmobile, and during that time immense snowdrifts would cover our equipment. It created sastrugi, waves of hard-packed snow, that were hell to traverse. But
the wind was also our friend, for over time it had swept away the surface ice, enabling us to dig even deeper into time.

  On my final trip in 2018, we spent two months on the ice. Just before flying back to McMurdo, we succeeded in recovering a two-million-year-old sample. Trapped as bubbles in the ancient ice was air just as old, which showed us how the chemical composition of the atmosphere had changed over time. I brought this astounding information to Congress in what would be my last appearance. They looked at me as if I were just another mad scientist.

  “That’s a lot of cold air,” one of the politicians quipped, and the rest of them took that as a signal to end the discussion.

  Today the blue ice of Allan Hills is worn thin, revealing here and there the rocky, lunar landscape beneath. Once Antarctica contained 90 percent of all the ice on the planet. Millions of years have melted away in the span of decades. The weather is still inhospitable, the wind still fierce. There’s really not much to see anymore, so no one visits on virtual excursions, even though it has been VR-enabled for some time. It is as barren as the desert, which technically it is, because there is still so little rainfall in this part of the continent.

  Benjamin and I are alone.

  I haven’t seen my youngest son in decades. In his senior year of high school, he ran off to fight Islamic fundamentalists in Syria. He’s been operating in a paramilitary netherworld ever since. At one point, my husband and I were informed that he’d been killed. But I never gave up hope. Even when more reliable reports surfaced of his continued activities under the nom de guerre Abu Jibril, I had to make do with a couple of blurry photos and cryptic thirdhand messages. He was as intangible to me as an avatar.

  And now here he is, a real, live, only slightly less intangible avatar. I’m not even sure if this is what he looks like. There is only a vague suggestion in the lineaments of the face of the teenage Benjamin I remember so well. But I’m probably just projecting my own feelings onto this computer-generated image, given how little I really know about my son—what he looks like, what he’s doing, where he lives. It’s only thanks to Emmanuel Puig that I was able to contact him at all. Puig left a message at a confidential drop, a place Benjamin had established for emergencies. I had no idea where I would go when I put on my VR headgear again, and I was pleasantly surprised to recognize the Allan Hills.

  “Thank you for choosing this location,” I tell him.

  “I still remember your stories about this place,” he says in a voice so much deeper than what I remember. “I’m only sorry that I can’t see it the way you saw it.”

  I point to the snow-capped hills in the distance. “It was once all like that, different shades of white and black and blue. It was beautiful and desolate.”

  “And now it’s just desolate.”

  “I can’t tell you how many times I imagined this moment, you and me, this reunion. But never under these circumstances.”

  “I hope we can see each other in the flesh someday,” Benjamin says.

  I hope so, too, but I’m doubtful. Our lives are precarious, mine because of my age and his because of his vocation. The Fates, who have measured out the threads of our lives, can apply the scissors at any moment.

  “I don’t think either of us has much time,” I say, clamping down on my emotions. “So perhaps we should focus on the problem at hand. We’re safe? Really safe?”

  “I wouldn’t still be alive if I couldn’t make sure that conversations like these are beyond the surveillance capabilities of the most sophisticated technology.”

  “I can’t even begin to imagine what you’ve gone through over the years.”

  “We’ve all had our hardships.” Benjamin is dismissive, but also probably still resentful over the role I played so many years ago in trying to prevent him from running off to war. “Are you well, Mother? Is that what this emergency is really about?”

  “I’m fine. I’m trying to crack a code, something your father devised. Did he send you any strange messages? He sent one each to Aurora and Gordon.”

  “He sent me no messages, strange or otherwise.”

  That throws me for a loop. I’d expected a triad. I thought Benjamin would give me some final key to Julian’s code. “Nothing at all?”

  “He had no way of contacting me. After he blew my cover in Botswana, we made sure to sever all ties with him, and of course he died shortly afterward. Pretty much in the same place as those coordinates Emmanuel sent me.”

  “I’d hoped that you would know what to do when I get there. That you would supply the missing piece of the puzzle.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint. Are you absolutely sure you want to VR there?”

  “Your father must have thought it important enough if he sent me coded messages about it in his last moments.”

  “It’s not safe to make an unauthorized trip inside CRISPR International, even for an avatar.”

  “Do you have any idea what I’ll find there?”

  Benjamin shakes his head. “But if they find you, they can hijack your system.”

  “I’ve already experienced that.”

  “They can kill you.”

  “You mean they can kill my avatar. Judi Dench won’t mind.”

  “No, Mother, they can kill you. Directly. Administer a massive shock to your neural pathways. Cause a stroke.”

  “I guess that’s just a risk I’ll have to take.”

  “We can send one of our own in your place.”

  “No, it has to be me.”

  “Or you can wait.”

  “For?”

  “The Movement.”

  “And what do you know about the Movement?”

  “I am the Movement.”

  And I know instantly that this is no overstatement.

  As we walk over the rocky ground and watch the winds, those still-fierce winds, swirl around us, Benjamin updates me on what he’s been doing for the last ten years. I knew that he had abandoned his guerrilla warfare against the Caliphate and its subsequent incarnations once they became less virulent. I knew that he’d somehow acquired a dose of the same drug that Ivanov had first offered my husband and then tried to bribe me with. Benjamin now tells me that his threat to make this life-extension drug universally available for download forced CRISPR International to the negotiating table. There, he traded the precious dose for the release of dozens of life-saving biocures on which CRISPR had been making extraordinary profits for decades. Their distribution, free of charge, ended the suffering of tens of millions. It also filled the coffers of the Movement with donations from those who could afford to do so.

  “What’s the point of an eternal-life drug if poor people all over the world are dying from easily preventable diseases like malaria and TB?” Benjamin asks.

  “No point at all, unless you’re counting on those poor people dying anyway from drought or hunger or some other climate-related cause.”

  “They had their hidden agenda and we had ours,” he admits. “We’ve brought together the finest hackers in the world to shut down CRISPR. We just needed some more information about their digital thumbprint.”

  Something clicks. “You contacted Zoltan. You asked him to allow that breach of the outer perimeter.”

  “He wasn’t initially convinced. But, yes, he agreed in the end.”

  “Then why haven’t you shut down CRISPR yet? You know they’re trying to break into Arcadia.”

  “Frankly, it’s a race. We’re using all of our computing power to crack their codes, and they’re using all of theirs to crack yours.”

  I was angry. “But there’s no risk to you at all!”

  “Mother, everyone in the Movement is at great risk. We recognize the importance of Arcadia. And the importance of your research.”

  “You know nothing about my research.”

  “Actually, I know a great deal about it.”

  Now I was furious. “Zoltan had no right to divulge that information!”

  “Your research is more important than any pledge
of confidentiality. Tell me, if we were to help you VR to that geolocation and you were again to fall into the hands of CRISPR, would that be the end of the line? Could they effectively destroy your research project by destroying you? I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I need to know.”

  “No, my research will survive me.” Even though he’s my son, I’m reluctant to provide him with any more information. “Unless CRISPR decrypts our security codes first. How close are you?”

  “Close.” He pauses, looks at something in the middle distance. He’s checking his updates. “But they too are close to penetrating your outer perimeter. Probably they’re prepositioning some very sophisticated nanoweapons.”

  “Then I need to get back. But first send me to Darwin.”

  “I’ve told you, it’s very dangerous and—”

  “Benjamin.” I’m having difficulty suppressing my emotions. I make one final effort. “I’m your mother. I don’t know if we’ll ever see each other again. Don’t refuse what might be my final request.”

  Benjamin pauses, and I’m worried that something has gone wrong with the VR technology. But then he puts his right hand over his heart and bows his head slightly. “In the end, perhaps we are not so very different. Goodbye, Mother, and good luck.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I am half-convinced that, despite his promise, Benjamin will try to prevent me from embarking on my mission to Darwin. It would be fitting revenge for the attempt his father and I made so many years ago to stop him from running off to Syria to become a guerrilla. When I close my eyes on Allan Hills and then open them again, I fear I will find myself back in Arcadia’s VR cubicle.

  But no—I’m in a dark hallway. The only illumination comes from a few small lights inset in the walls at intervals just above the carpet. The corridor is empty. I check the coordinates. I pull up the 3D map. I’m reassured: It’s Darwin. Because I’ve timed my visit for three in the morning, I see and hear nothing. My screens verify that I’m alone.