by Paul Briggs
“I’m sure it wasn’t anything you did,” he said.
“You’re right—it wasn’t. One or two of my friends who shall remain nameless tried to get around the patent laws for some of the tools we were using. I told them that was gonna bite us in the ass.”
Martin nodded, then put a hand on her arm.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “When was the last time you really, completely failed at something? Until this year, I mean?”
Sandy had to think for a few moments. It wasn’t so much that she hadn’t had failures, it was that most of them had been in the area of romance or interpersonal relations. Come to think of it, the failure at Verdissimus could be thought of that way. If you knew your friends and coworkers in a start-up were making a bad move, didn’t you owe it to whatever you were trying to accomplish to try harder to talk them out of it?
“That long silence kind of says it all,” he said. “Everybody does it sometimes. God knows I’ve done it often enough.”
Sandy nodded. She’d known she wasn’t going to succeed at everything, but… this was not supposed to have been the failure. We were going to do great things. We were going to change the world.
“You are so incredibly young,” he said. “You’ve already accomplished more than most people, and you’ve still got practically your whole life ahead of you.”
Sandy nodded again.
“Don’t give up.”
“Dad, I’m not contemplating suicide, if that’s what you mean. I’m just… tired and I need a little break. That’s all.”
“I understand.” He paused. “How are things between you and—what’s his name—Trevor?”
Sandy winced. Another subject she didn’t want to discuss.
“We broke up,” she said.
“Sorry to hear that. What happened?”
“Stop and think, Dad. How much do you actually want to know about my sex life?”
“Not much,” he said. “I guess it’s enough to know you have one.”
Yes, it is something of a minor miracle, isn’t it? I have the body of an anorexic thirteen-year-old. I keep hearing how this is what our culture thinks is beautiful, but every guy I meet treats me like his little sister.
Well, not every guy. There is a certain kind of guy who thinks I’m one smokin’ hot piece of ass. But they’re not much fun to date.
Martin rested a hand on her shoulders. “You know, you really are an extraordinary human being,” he said. “I hate myself for not having been there for you as a child. I really missed out on a lot. I just…” He shook his head. “Twenty years ago I was a different person. A complete man-child. I wasn’t ready to be a dad. I couldn’t handle the responsibility.”
I, I, I, I, I, thought Sandy.
“Anyway, I’m ready now,” he said. “If you need a father, I’m here.”
Dad, that ship has sailed. It is far beyond the horizon. But he was the only parent she had left now. He wants a second chance. You need a place to crash. This will work if you let it. Don’t let your drama get in the way. She smiled at him.
“Do you have a basement?” she said.
“We can keep you in the spare room.”
“That’s not what I meant. There’s a machine in the trunk of my car and I’d like to set it up somewhere it won’t get in anybody’s way.”
“What is it?”
“Just a little something I slapped together while I was working for Verdissimus. Don’t worry—my contract let me keep the patent myself.”
“What’s it do?”
“It turns raw carbon into some basic diamondoid materials. It’s kind of limited in what it can do, but it’s more energy-efficient than other machines that do the same thing.”
“Are you going to sell it?”
“I don’t even know if there’s a market for it. I want to try and make some money with it myself before I do anything else.”
“A start-up in my garage,” said Marty. “I like the idea.”
“We can’t afford to support this,” said Nora.
“I’m not asking you to,” said Sandy. “I know a good crowdfunding site.” She took off her shoes and spent a moment fingering the loose sole.
“Where do you keep the epoxy?” she said.
As in every year, with the passing of the autumnal equinox polar twilight and polar night descended over the Arctic Ocean in expanding concentric circles of darkness. The ocean surface, never very far above freezing to begin with, lost its heat to the cooling air.
In early October, the first traces of grease ice appeared. The ice spread, forming a slushy layer over the surface of the ocean that gradually hardened into glittering chunks. The ice chunks thickened and merged. By December, the Arctic Ocean was again covered—mostly—by a reassuring white blanket that reflected the sun’s radiation back into the emptiness of space, even as it held in what remained of the ocean’s heat.
But the damage was done.
Winter that year, while warmer than average worldwide, was not too far outside what had come to be accepted as normal. In North America, the jet stream flowed just south of the U.S.-Canada border. There were still snowstorms, although not generally south of the Ohio Valley and the lower Missouri unless you were in the Rockies, where small amounts of snow fell as far south as Flagstaff and Albuquerque. In February, a severe ice storm hit the Carolinas.
The story elsewhere was much the same. Record warm temperatures in France, the Balkans and Iran, record snowfall in Japan and Korea… but overall, not a winter to ring alarm bells. Not compared to those the world had already gone through. And spring, when it came, was if anything slightly cooler than it had been last year, particularly in North American and western Europe.
* * *
One of the courses Isabel was taking this semester was called “Wargaming the Apocalypse.” It was taught by a Dr. Tanaka, who grew his graying hair down to his shoulders and kept his shirtsleeves permanently rolled up as if to say Look at me! I’m cool!
It was one of those gut courses whose only purpose was to provide a break from the stress of real work, but it did pose a certain amount of intellectual challenge. Using powerful computers and their own imagination, Isabel and her fellow students spent the semester simulating various disasters and their effect on society and debating the best possible response by the government. They discussed large-scale and small-scale nuclear war, asteroid strikes on land and sea, a miniature black hole that had half the mass of the moon dropping through Earth and out the other side, a solar storm taking out most of the world’s electronics, and the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano. They tried to model the effects of epidemics destroying 30 percent, 60 percent and 95 percent of the human population. Those “war games” went fairly well, unlike the famine war game, which broke down completely over the question of whether the unskilled, the elderly, or those with criminal records should be eaten first.
During the last month, they moved into more exotic threats. First, they gamed out two different kinds of zombie outbreak. They found that an epidemic of sprinting rage-monster zombies would be a definite existential threat under any circumstances, whereas the slow-but-relentless variety of zombies would only pose a public hazard in an environment where order had already broken down due to war or natural disaster. This was the sort of discussion that made Isabel wonder if this class was really the best use of her tuition money.
Then it was infertility plagues—diseases that didn’t kill anyone but left men, women, or both unable to conceive or bear children. At first, more than half the class thought this sounded like a good thing—a painless long-term solution to the problem of overpopulation. Isabel was inclined to agree, but she kept her mouth shut. Knowing Dr. Tanaka, there had to be a catch.
Sure enough… “What happens when more than half the population is over seventy-five?” said Dr. Tanaka. “When a third of the country is physically too old to work? Who takes care of them? Who pays into the programs that support them?”
“Who car
es?” Gregg in the front row said. “Let ’em die.”
“We can’t,” Isabel said.
“Sure we can.”
“No, we can’t. Because they vote. And they’ve got us outnumbered.” Isabel was already imagining herself conscripted by the government to work sixteen-hour days caring for the elderly at some gigantic nursing home/concentration camp. It would just be bedpan after bedpan after bedpan… As if it were already happening, she thought to herself How dare they force me to do this? Then she thought How many people have to die of untreated bedsores so you can spend your time reading books and surfing the Internet, you selfish cow? Then she thought You’re beating yourself up over nothing again! Stop it! There were people in mental hospitals with fewer voices in their heads than Isabel Bradshaw.
So the class divided into small groups and went to the computers. What they found was that sperm and egg banks, plus financial incentives for fertile individuals to have extra children, worked well enough to prevent a major demographic imbalance as long as at least 10 percent of the population was still fertile. Below that, however, you just couldn’t find enough fertile people who were willing to have that many more children.
It was at this point that the phrase “captive breeding program” entered the conversation. Some of the more outspoken feminists demanded that it exit the conversation immediately, along with anyone who thought of it as an option. Isabel couldn’t blame them—now she was haunted by the mental image of herself strapped naked to a hospital bed while strangers stood around her with turkey basters in their hand and expressions of sorrow on their faces, explaining that they didn’t want to do this, but it was for the sake of Social Security. This was probably somebody’s sexual fantasy, but it didn’t do anything for her.
Fortunately, the next week the subject was a little more cheerful; what if aliens started abducting people en masse? Nadia, who sat right behind Isabel, calculated that if the aliens were interested in sustainable harvesting, they could take as many as five million humans per month. Just to be conservative, Dr. Tanaka lowered this to one million a week. “We’re assuming here,” he said, “that they’re concentrating on major cities, where the largest numbers of people are, and that they come to a different city at every visit.”
Deon raised his hand. “How are they abducting people?” he asked. “Are they teleporting people, or just sort of levitating them up with tractor beams?”
“What difference does it make?” said Dr. Tanaka.
“See, if they’re just beaming people up, presumably they could do that whether we’re inside or outside. But if they need a clear shot at us, so to speak, then they’d have to start knocking holes in buildings. Otherwise we could just all go inside when they show up, and boom, the aliens are defeated.
“So let’s say they just need to beam people up. The flying saucers show up over New York City, a million people just disappear, and then off they go.
“What happens to the city? It’s not like a plague. Lots of people are gone, but the people left behind know they’re safe until the next time the aliens hit New York. So businesses put out a bunch of ‘Now Hiring’ signs, lots of apartments are for rent, a whole bunch of cars end up on the black market, and that’s about it.”
“You’re forgetting the economic effect of removing that many consumers.”
“Right. But if they have to open up the buildings to get at the people inside, that’s a whole different thing. Then when the aliens are gone, there’s still people missing and now the city is all smashed up. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done and fewer people to do it.”
“Okay, let’s assume the aliens can’t just beam people out,” said Dr. Tanaka.
“Wouldn’t people start moving out of the cities after a while?” said Isabel.
“Indeed they would,” said the professor, “I certainly would. And how would the aliens respond to that?”
“By… breaking up into smaller groups and going after people everywhere, I guess.”
The last week was devoted to an equally theoretical threat—weaponized cognitohazards. Brown notes. Things that you could be hurt, or possibly killed, by just seeing or hearing them… and what would happen if they got on the Internet. How would people protect themselves? What would this do to freedom of speech? They started by reading some of David Langford’s stories.
At the end of the semester, Dr. Tanaka gave a little speech.
“If you’ve learned anything from me,” he said, “then what I hope you’ve learned is that the one prerequisite for coping with any sort of disaster is knowledge. We don’t need to know exactly what the future holds. It’s enough to understand what it might hold. That gives us the power to plan ahead.
“Our whole society is built on this. It’s not this way in every country in the world, but here in America, and in most First World countries, you can drive through a town a year after a hurricane or an earthquake hit and hardly know anything happened. The whole place has bounced back. Everything’s been rebuilt and repaired.
“There’s a reason for that, and it’s not just the economy. The economy’s just money. What we have in the First World is lots and lots of ways of getting the money where it needs to go. We’ve got the federal government, state government, local government, we’ve got the Red Cross, we’ve got all kinds of construction firms to do the work, we’ve got banks of every size to finance it, we’ve got insurance, we’ve got reinsurance… seems like we’re ready for anything, right?
“But all these things are built around certain assumptions. Actuarial assumptions, based on previous experience. How much damage is Mother Nature going to do in any given year? How many things are likely to go wrong, and how much are they likely to cost? How likely is any one kind of catastrophe?
“You see, if you can estimate the answers to these questions, then even if the news is bad you can still get ready for it. Change the estimate, and the institutions change to reflect it. Take away the ability to estimate, the ability to predict even in the vaguest way… and we’re at the mercy of whatever the universe throws at us.”
The Arctic ice cap in mid-April was a little over five million square miles in area—the smallest on record for that time of year, but surprisingly large considering it had disappeared without trace six months ago. Some wondered if they had gotten worried over nothing.
Although the area of the cap was much easier to measure, looking at the volume would have given a clearer picture of the situation. Comparing the current thin scab of ice to the massive floating layer that had once existed was like comparing a Hollywood backdrop to a brick wall—its volume was barely a third of what had existed at this time last year. If by some miracle the Earth’s temperature had suddenly dropped enough to allow some trace of it to survive the summer, it might have formed the core of a new multi-year ice cap… but this did not happen.
In May, the same forces that had destroyed the ice cap in the first place got to work on its replacement. By the middle of July, there was open water at the North Pole. By August 19, the ice was gone once again.
Deep ocean water has a much lower albedo than ice. Even the weak sunlight of the high latitudes, absorbed by the water, was enough to warm the Arctic Ocean slightly—and when it warmed, there was no more sea ice to melt and cool it again. A slow but irreversible feedback loop had begun.
* * *
Carrie, now Governor Camberg, spent the last ten days of August inflicting psychological torture on state emergency management personnel. It was in a good cause.
Mimicane was a complex program commissioned by the National Guard to simulate a hurricane hitting any part of the East or Gulf Coast. It was like an MMORPG with a more detailed map but much cheaper graphics. Carrie was using it to drill the Department of Emergency Management—and, of course, herself—in hurricane response.
The storm was being planned by Josh Jacobson, their consultant from Mimicane. Carrie had told him to hit Virginia with the worst possible hurricane, and he had exceeded all sane ex
pectations. Jacobson had instructed the computer program to model the cyclone after Hurricane Allen of 1980, which had had winds of up to 190 mph and a 39-foot storm surge. The program had sent the eye of the storm heading straight for Hog Island with only four days’ warning. Just to be evil, Jacobson had also planted an unexplained high-pressure system over northeastern U.S. and Canada, forcing the storm due west in violation of all historical precedent for storm tracks.
At this point, every single county in Virginia had either had its share of simulated damage or was in the process of getting it. Anything built on the coast was gone. The eye of the storm had passed over Richmond last night. Yes, the eye was the calm part—the trouble was that immediately before and after it passed overhead, the most violent part of the storm would do the same. So as far as the computer was concerned, Richmond was a field of drenched rubble, shell-shocked survivors and quite a few non-survivors.
It has to be said, at this point, that Carrie was cheating. In her capacity as governor during this hypothetical storm, she wasn’t supposed to know any more about what was going on than the Department was telling her. In her capacity as governor during this actual test, she knew what was happening long before they figured it out. Jacobson was in the office with her right now, pointing out the finer points of the catastrophe.
The Department wasn’t so lucky. The players could communicate with each other—that also was something of a cheat—but enough cell phone towers and landlines had been destroyed that their ability to assess the damage was limited. As for getting to where the damage was and looking at it, parts of the roads had washed away while other parts were blocked by fallen trees and debris from buildings.
And with the storm now hitting western Virginia, the fun wasn’t over yet. “The hurricane has started spawning tornadoes where it hit the high-pressure system,” said Jacobson. “About six of them are crossing northern Virginia right now.”