Mitigated Futures

by Buckell, Tobias S.

  I’d read some. Smart helped keep me a little ahead of others. I knew what I’d done, and that I wasn’t going to avoid being locked away. Or worse.

  I wasn’t going to go to the chair without taking a company with me. No fucking way.

  ***

  Mr. Ari Naisman, Genesec’s CEO, walked into his library and flipped on a light. He jumped when he saw me sitting behind his desk, eyes widening. He couldn’t stop staring at the gun.

  “I know this won’t stop it, or even solve much,” I said conversationally, but starting to warm up to the whole situation after spending a mind-numbingly boring two hours sitting by myself in the dark. “But I feel compelled to ask, why is your company screwing me?”

  “What?”

  “I’m told your company’s computer brain is taking over running things, and that it took upon itself the decision of hiring assassins to help the company out.”

  “Assassins?”

  I took out a can of Spam and set it on the man’s desk. “I’ve been killing people for your company. Until recently. When it got complicated. And Interpol got involved. That ring a bell, Mr. Naisman?”

  He stared at the can now, not the gun. “You.”

  Because in a way, he wasn’t any different than any of the other men who had looked at that blue can in their last moments. Advertising. Spam. Both were secondary effects of their company’s burning need for you to buy, buy, buy.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m going to go to jail for the things I did for your weird-ass computer, the one that decided it could use me to crowdsource assassinations. Now, I can’t take the corporation with me. Sure, I could implicate a few people in the structure, but then the things that company did will keep on being done. But it occurs to me, I can make people very nervous about wanting to come work for you. Shoot the CEO, work my way down through the chain, and see how far I get before they come for me and it’s all over. Because, for you and me, Ari, it’s all over.”

  “Wait …”

  I shot him. Left brain tissue all over those old, expensive, retro-looking books on the shelves.

  By the end of the night the chief financial officer, the vice president, and several other higher-ups were all dead in their homes.

  It was grim work.

  But I’d been doing it long enough, and been trained well enough by their pet company mind, that I was pretty good at it.

  ***

  The closest thing I had to a home was a small houseboat on a swamp near a national park. I took a small wooden boat out to it and settled in.

  Genesec was all over the news. People were wondering what was going on.

  Interpol would know. Eaves would know.

  I watched the news with satisfaction, and then settled into an old recliner toward the back of the houseboat and checked my offshore accounts, trying to figure out how long I could last in hiding.

  But they weren’t right.

  Too much money.

  Way too much money. Several million had been deposited in them. From Genesec?

  I stared at the zeros for a very long time, until I heard the creak of floorboards behind me. Something, or someone, was standing there.

  I had not been smart enough, I thought.

  Why would Genesec raise money online via crowdsourced donations to pay my bail?

  Why would Interpol point me in their direction?

  Oh sure, I believed what Eaves had said. I was probably being controlled by some strangely intelligent-not-intelligent program I didn’t understand.

  But I hadn’t taken the time to think too deeply about it all, had I?

  No, I’d basically been handed yet another mission: I’d eliminated Genesec’s boardroom in a fit of revenge.

  And whoever was putting the money in that account wanted to make it look like what I did was the Genesec’s mind’s idea. It was a set up.

  “This won’t work,” I say out loud. “People will get scared about these company minds and there will be a backlash if they think I was hired by Genesec to kill its own humans.”

  The figure behind me wore a blue uniform. I could see it in the reflection of my computer monitor, like a ghost in front of my account log in. I recognized the uniform. It was from a private security firm. They would have spam filters too, wouldn’t they? Minds like Eaves had described.

  I’d gone after the wrong thing.

  This had been a carefully orchestrated hit by one company’s mind on another. And this company didn’t care about blowback. A security company would do just fine in that atmosphere, offering solutions for better protection against other software. There would be even more escalation.

  I’d been little more than a program, or a tool, used by another tool, to create an outcome. A ‘subroutine’ as Eaves called me.

  The floorboards creaked again. The figure took another step forward. I gripped the sides of my chair and waited for the crack of the gun from the assassin behind me.

  Because I knew that whoever, no whatever, set all this up, did not want any loose ends or extra routines still running.

  Mitigation

  with Karl Schroeder

  I first met Karl at a local convention in Michigan, just a couple hour’s drive for me. He struck me as one of the most amazing thinkers in our field, and I excitedly cribbed notes from him about all manner of fascinating things. And it wasn’t just that he was great to have as a friend, when I first took one his novels home and opened it, I was delighted to find that I really loved his fiction as well.

  A few years after striking up a friendship, I was asked who I’d most like to collaborate on a story with on a podcast. I said Karl. In a second. Karl heard the podcast and suggested he’d be game, and so soon enough I was driving up to Toronto one weekend so that I could camp out in his office and work on this story.

  Without a doubt, one of the best weekends I’ve ever had, tossing ideas back and forth about the nature of an Arctic North turned into mostly ocean. In fact, I was so taken by the environment I returned to it for a whole novel in Arctic Rising.

  Chauncie St. Christie squinted in the weak, 3 A.M. Sunlight. No, two degrees higher. He adjusted the elevation, stepped back in satisfaction, and pulled on a lime-green nylon cord. The mortar burped loudly and, seconds later, a fountain of water shot up ten feet from his target.

  His satphone vibrated on his belt and he half-reached for it, causing the gyroscope-stabilized platform to wobble slightly. “Damn it. How close are they?” That must be Maksim on the phone. The damn Russian would be calling about the offer again. Chauncie ignored the reminder, and reset the mortar.

  His friend, Kulitak, stood on the rail of the trawler and scanned the horizon with a set of overpowered binoculars. “The eco response ships are moving to drop oil containment booms. Canadian Coast Guard gunboats are on the far edge of the spill.”

  “As long as they're busy.” Chauncie adjusted the mortar and dropped another shell into it. This shot hit dead-on, and the CarbonJohnnyTM blew apart in a cloud of styrofoam, cheap solar panel fragments and chickenwire.

  Kulitak lowered his binoculars. “Nice one.”

  “One down, a million to go,” muttered Chauncie. The little drift of debris was already sinking, the remaining flotsam joining the ever-present scrim of trash that peppered most ocean surfaces. Hundreds more CarbonJohnnies dotted the sea all the way to the horizon, each one a moronically simple mechanism. A few bottom-of-the-barrel cheap solar panels sent a weak current into a slowly unreeling sheet of chicken-wire that hung in the water. This electrolyzed calcium carbonate out of the water. As the chicken-wire turned to concrete, sections of it tore off and sank into the depths of the Makarov Basin. These big reels looked a bit like toilet paper and unraveled the same way, a few sheets at a time: hence the name CarbonJohnny. Sequestors International (NASDAQ symbol: SQI) churned them out by the shipload with the noble purpose of sequestering carbon and making a quick buck from the carbon credits.

  Chauncie and his friends blew them up and sank them almost as
quickly.

  “This is lame,” Kulitak said. “We're not going to make any money today.”

  “Let's pack up, find somewhere less involved.”

  Chauncie grunted irritably; he'd have to pay for an updated satellite mosaic and look for another U.N. inspection blind spot. Kulitak had picked this field of CarbonJohnnies because overhead, somewhere high in the stratosphere, a pregnant blimp staggered through the pale air dumping sulfur particulates into a too clean atmosphere to help block the warming sun. But in the process it also helpfully obscured some of the finer details of what Chauncie and Kulitak were up to. Unfortunately, the pesky ecological catastrophe unfolding off the port bow was wreaking havoc with their schedule.

  A day earlier, somebody had blown up an automated U.S. Pure Waters, Inc. tug towing a half cubic kilometre of iceberg. Kulitak thought it was The Emerald Institute who'd done it, but they were just one of dozens of eco-terrorist groups who might have been responsible. Everybody was protesting the large scale 'strip mining' of the Arctic's natural habitat, and now and then somebody did something about it.

  The berg had turned out to be unstable. Chauncie had heard the distant thunder as it flipped over somewhere in the mist-laden distance when they'd motored out to this spot. He hadn't heard the impact of the passing supertanker that collided with its underwater spur three hours later; but he could sure smell it when he woke up. The news said three or four million tonnes of oil had leaked out into the water, and the immediate area was turning into a circus of clean up crews. Media, Greenpeace, oil company ships, U.N, government officials, they would all descend soon enough.

  “There's money in cleanup,” Chauncie commented; he smiled at Kulitak's grimace.

  "Money," said Kulitak. "And forms. And treaties you gotta watch out for; and politics like rat-traps. Let's find another Johnny." The Inuit radicals who had hired them were dumping their own version of the CarbonJohnny into these waters. Blowing up SQI's Johnnies was not, Chauncie's employer had claimed, actually piracy; it was merely a diversion of the carbon credits that would otherwise have gone to SQI--and at $100 per tonne sequestered, it added up fast.

  He shrugged at Kulitak's impatient look, and bent to stow the mortar. Broken Styrofoam, twirling beer cans and plush toys from a container-ship accident drifted in the trawler's wake; farther out, the johnnies bobbed in their thousands, a marine forest through which dozens of larger vessels had to pick their way. On the horizon, a converted tanker was spraying a fine mist of iron powder into the air--fertilizing the arctic ocean for another carbon sequestration company, just as the blimps overhead were smearing the sky with reflective smog to cut down global warming in another way. Helicopters crammed with biologists and carbon-market auditors zigged and zagged over the waters, and yellow autosubs cruised under them, all measuring the effect.

  Mile-long oil supertankers cruised obliviously through it all. Now that the world's trees were worth more as carbon sinks than building material, the plastics industry had taken off. Oil as fuel was on its way out; oil for the housing industry was in high demand.

  And in the middle of it all, Chauncie's little trawler. It didn't actually fish. There was fish enough--the effect of pumping iron powder into the ocean was to accelerate the Arctic's already large biodiversity to previously unseen levels. Plankton boomed, and the cycle of life in the deep had exploded. The ocean's fisheries no longer struggled, and boats covered the oceans with nets and still couldn't make a dent. Chauncie's trawler was camouflage. Who would notice another one picking its way toward a less packed quadrant of CarbonJohnnies?

  Out in relatively clearer ocean Chauncie sat on the deck as the Inuit crew hustled around, pulling in the purposefully broken fishing nets so that the trawler could speed up.

  The ocean was gun-metal blue; there was no diving into these waters for a refreshing swim. Chauncie hadn't known how precious such a simple act could be until he'd lost it. The British Virgin Islands had been his whole universe once, but as he grew that world had dwindled away. When the Greenland and East Antarctica ice shelves slid into the ocean, so had his own island of Anegada, lost to the rising seas. These men he worked with cultivated an anger similar to his own: their arctic was long gone, but their deepest instincts still expected it to be here, he was sure, the same way he expected the ocean to be a glitter of warm emeralds he could cup in his hand.

  On days like today he wondered whether Kulitak's people hadn't gotten the worse end of the disaster. As the seven seas became the eight seas and their land literally melted away, the Inuit faced an indignity that even Chauncie did not have to suffer: seeing companies, governments, and people flood in to claim it all.

  He found it delicious fun to make money plinking at CarbonJohnnies for the Inuit. But it wasn't big money--and he needed the big score.

  He needed to be able to cup those emeralds in his hands again. On rare occasions he'd wonder whether he was going to spend the rest of his life up here. If somebody told him that was his fate, he was pretty sure he'd taken a last dive right there and then. He couldn't go on like this forever.

  The satellite data came back and the crew realized that they couldn't quite hide the trawler beneath anymore sulfur particle clouds today. It was time to head back to port. And as the ship surged along, Chauncie checked the satphone.

  Maksim had indeed called. Five times.

  Kulitak walked over. “The Croat?”

  Chauncie clipped the satphone back to his waistband. “You said it was a slow day, we're not making much. And with the spill, it's going to be a zoo. We could use a break.”

  His friend grimaced. “You don't want to work with him. There's money, but it's not worth it. You come in a powered canoe with me, the satellites can't see our faces, we hit more CarbonJohnnies. I'll bring sandwiches.”

  There was no way Chauncie was going to motor his way around the Arctic in a damn canoe. They'd get run over. By a trawler, a tanker, or any other ship ripping its way through the wide open lanes of the Arctic Ocean. There was just too much traffic.

  Kulitak was not just in it to make a living. A radicalized Inuit, seeking to help gain the People back some measure of independence as the world ran them over to fight for the Arctic, for him destroying CarbonJohnnies was a life's mission.

  “I'll think about it,” Chauncie said, as the satphone vibrated yet again.

  ***

  Late into the evening the next day Chauncie entered the bridge of a rusted out container ship that listed slightly to port. Outside the docks and cranes of Tuktoyaktuk cast long shadows.

  “Hey Max,” he said, and sat down hard on the armchair in the middle of the bridge. Chauncie rubbed his eyes. He hadn't stopped to sleep yet. An easy error in the all-day-long sunlight. Insomnia snuck up on you as your body kept thinking it was day. Run all out for 48 hours and forget about your daily cycle, and you'd crash hard on day three. And the listing bridge made him feel even more off balance and weary.

  “Took you damn long enough. I should get someone else, just to spite you.” Maksim muttered his reply from behind a large, ostentatious, and extraordinarily expensive real wooden desk, almost hidden behind the nine screens perched at various angles all over. Their light lit up the underside of his face. Maksim was a slave to continuos partial attention. His eyes flicked from screen to screen, and he constantly tapped at the surface of the desk or flicked his hands at the screens. In response, people were being paid, currencies traded, stocks bought or sold.

  And that was the legitimate trade. Chauncie didn't know much about Maksim's other hobbies, but he could guess from the occasional exposed tattoo that Maksim was Russian Mafia.

  “Well, I'm here.”

  Maksim glanced up. “Yes. Yes you are. Good. Chauncie, you know why I give you so much business?”

  Chauncie sighed. He wasn't sure he wanted to play this game. “No, why?”

  “Because even though you're here for dirty jobs, you like the ones that let you poke back at the big guys. It means I understand you. It mak
es you a more unique asset. So I have a good one for you. You ready for the big one, Chauncie, the payday that lets you leave to do whatever it is you really want, rather than sitting around with little popguns and styrofoam targets?” Maksim picked up a sweaty glass of iced tea with a large wedge of lemon stuck on the rim and sipped it.

  Chauncie felt a weird kick in his stomach. “What kind of big, Max?”

  Maksim had a small smile as he put the iced tea down. “Big.” He slowly turned a screen around to face Chauncie. There were a lot of zeros in that sum. His lips dried, and he nervously licked them.

  “That's big.” He could retire. “What horrible thing will I have to do for that?”

  “It begins with you playing bodyguard for a scientist.” Uh oh. As a rule, scientists and Russian Mafia didn't mix well. “I'm really just guarding her, right?”

  Max laughed; but Chauncie's question had been serious. Five years ago, a somewhat shadowy man by the name of Vadim convinced a number of various Eastern European bosses to fund the two trillion needed for a consortium of advanced materials companies to build an elevator to space using boron nanotubes. From this, a series of private space companies were paid to then launch and stabilize a series of space mirrors.

  The Mafia had hoped to do an end run around the large energy companies with a cheap energy source they'd have a stranglehold on. But it hadn't worked out. Cheap solar energy was fine enough, but oil still worked for building materials, still burned, and solar panels on Earth had seen improvements enough. It was a non event.

  A lot of green power scientists had been found dead shortly after. Vadim had been taken up the elevator and shot out the end without a spacesuit by the bosses. And people like Maksim were left still struggling to use their cheap energy to manipulate the market.

  And as for the elevator itself, last Chauncie read, they were still desperately trying to sell it to any world government. And the Russians were still looking for the big, world score.