by Paul Briggs
The players, few of whom had gotten even one full night’s sleep this week, were reacting to this new development with a mixture of weary resignation and shrieking madness. Carrie could see what was being said on the message board, but not who was saying it. This feature was intended to “encourage everyone to communicate freely” and it was achieving this goal.
“Really command their loyalty, don’t I?” said Carrie cheerfully. At the start of this simulation, everyone had been polite and professional and posting messages in complete sentences. It had been a rough ten days.
Carrie also wanted to see how the commonwealth managed given a minimum of federal assistance. The plan was for FEMA to be “paralyzed by scandal” and unable to help.
“Just out of curiosity, why’s the power still out in Northern Virginia?” said Carrie. “Don’t a lot of places there have solar?”
“When the grid goes down, everything connected to it goes down,” said Jacobson. “That way, the people trying to fix it don’t get electrocuted. Some systems can cut themselves off from the grid, but not all of them—and we don’t have exact numbers on how many, so it’s simpler to assume the worst. Not to mention all the solar panels that got blown off by the storm.”
Carrie nodded, then turned back to the simulation. The flash flooding in the mountains had reached the Potomac. She could hardly wait to read the comments when it hit Arlington.
It took a little longer this year for the surface of the ocean to cool enough for ice to form. It had, after all, been naked to the sun for three weeks more than it had by this time last year, and had grown somewhat warmer as a result. And when the ice appeared, it expanded more slowly. At the end of the year, the ice cap was even smaller and thinner than it had been last December.
The change in the ocean was already affecting the climate. Beginning in November, snowfall north of the Arctic Circle was heavier than it had ever been in recorded history, with the heaviest snow on the northern slopes of the Brooks Range in Alaska and in Norway east of Narvik. On December 29, there was a major avalanche near Hammerfest that killed thirty-seven people. At the time, however, this was seen as an isolated incident.
Throughout the northern hemisphere, the winter was, on average, warmer than it had been last year. But through most of the Northwest Territories, and everywhere north of the Arctic Circle, at least one to two feet of snow fell—more in some places. This might not sound like a lot for such a notoriously cold climate, but until very recently, these places had been desert-dry, seeing not much precipitation of any kind… especially in the winter.
But every now and then, for a week or so, the jet stream weakened, and a polar vortex descended from the north, bringing freezing temperatures to the northeastern U.S. or central Asia. At these times, only a few people ever stopped to reflect that every time arctic air intruded into a part of the temperate zones, it meant that somewhere else, air from the temperate zones was intruding into the Arctic, further slowing the growth of sea ice.
* * *
For Walt Yuschak, being live on camera with no idea what he was going to say was literally the stuff of nightmares, in much the same way that college students sometimes have bad dreams about taking exams they haven’t prepared for. So during his waking hours, he took pains to make sure this never happened. His writing staff was instructed to give him two different opening monologues every week, so that he could choose between them. They didn’t always manage this, but he had eight opening monologues already prewritten months ago in case his staff came up completely dry. Of course, these monologues were just general statements of opinion and had nothing to do with whatever was in the news this week, but in a pinch they would get him through until it was time for the first guest.
As he sat listening to his writing staff, he thought thank God I’ve got those prewrites. They’d given him two different monologues—both about the exact same thing, neither of which he could use.
“We’ve finally gotten proof global warming is a hoax,” said Skyler. “Check it out.” He gestured at the computer monitor.
“Glaciers in three different parts of the world are bigger than they were this time last year!” said Adam, unwilling to wait for Walt. “Norway, Alaska, Elliesomething Island—they’ve all grown!”
Sure enough, as Walt read the report it did indeed seem that several glaciers in those places had increased in volume over the course of the winter just past. Of course, there was also a quote from some scientist or other saying the reason the glaciers had grown was that snowfall in those areas had been way above normal that winter, and the real test would be if the glaciers were still bigger than they were supposed to be six months from now.
The hell of it was, he probably could deliver one of these monologues, and it would be… good enough. They were exactly the sort of thing his listeners wanted to hear, especially with the flooding on the lower Mississippi getting the alarmists all preachy again. But Walter Yuschak hadn’t gotten where he was today by aspiring to be “good enough.” His name was his brand, and he wanted it to stand for something.
“Lisa!” he said. “Go down to that place on the corner and bring me back a twenty-piece box of fried chicken.” Lisa scowled at him as she left. She was a committed vegan. Hopefully she’d learn a lesson here even if nobody else did. And the place at the corner did make excellent fried chicken.
Walt checked the news feed. Nothing terribly useful there. And his guest this week was a man who had a new e-book out arguing that hyperinflation was coming in six months. According to his staff, this guy had been saying the same thing for the past fifteen years. Walt personally liked the guy’s politics, but this was the sort of thing that made it hard to be respectful.
So today looked like a good day to start off with the chicken rant.
* * *
As the camera zoomed in, Walt sat at his desk, a napkin tucked under his chin and the box of chicken in front of him. Fortunately, it was a plain white box, so there would be no problem with accidental product placement. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to This Week in Freedom,” he said. “I’m Walt Yuschak, and tonight I’m here… to eat some chicken!” He picked up a drumstick. “Why? Because I’m hungry and chicken is delicious!”
He took a bite, chewed it, and swallowed it. “You know, I’ve read that chicken used to be something people only ate on special occasions, back when chickens were all being raised on tiny little farms. Thanks to modern factory farms, now it’s so cheap that anybody can afford it! According to the USDA, over ten billion chickens are slaughtered in the United States every year! Capitalism and American agribusiness—making the world a better place, one billion chicken dinners at a time!
“And yes, I know, chickens are being raised in horrible and inhumane conditions! They’re all jammed together into tiny little cages ankle-deep in their own shit! They’re going so crazy in there they have their beaks and claws clipped so they don’t eat each other! They’re forced to eat crappy food and listen to Charr Sutherland! It’s a chicken concentration camp, people!”
He took another bite. This was really good chicken. The skin was crisp and crunchy, and the guys at the corner place had a way of getting a little of the spice and salt underneath the skin before they cooked it, so the meat actually tasted like something.
“And when it’s time to slaughter them, they’re trucked to the processing plant in those tiny little cages and hung up by their ankles and scalded with hot water until their feathers fall off and decapitated by razor-sharp blades while USDA inspectors point at them and laugh! They laugh!” Walt put down the drumstick and picked up a chicken breast.
“And they’ve really been messed up by selective breeding. They’ve been bred to grow so fast and have such giant breasts that they can barely stand up under their own weight.” During his podcast days, he would have added a joke like too bad we can’t do that to girls, right, fellas?—not so much out of personal conviction as to reassure his mostly male listeners that he wasn’t an SJW and w
ould never try to make them feel bad about themselves or their desires. These days, he had to tone down his act a little for a wider audience. He pulled a chunk of meat off the breast and popped it into his mouth.
“So knowing all that, why am I eating this?” he said as soon as he was done chewing. “Because I don’t give a damn, that’s why. You want to know why I don’t give a damn? Because I have no respect for chickens!
“Listen to this,” he said. “Once upon a time, thousands and thousands of years ago, chickens roamed wild in the forests of… wherever the hell it was they came from. Somebody look it up online.” It wasn’t central to his point.
“They soared through the trees, they hunted for bugs and worms and whatever else they ate. They lived free and called no man master. Well, obviously they didn’t call anybody master, because they couldn’t talk, they were chickens, but the point is they were free.
“But it was hard out there in the woods. There was wind and rain. It got cold in the winter—unless it was some place like Central Africa, in which case it didn’t. And there were all these other animals out there that wanted to eat them—foxes, eagles, wild cats, big freakin’ snakes.
“I don’t think any wild chickens ever died of old age. Even if they lived long enough, as soon as the arthritis set in and they started to slow down, sure enough something would get them. With so many of ’em getting scarfed down it was a struggle pumping out enough baby chicks to keep their numbers up. But hey, that’s what evolution is all about.
“Then one day, somebody made them an offer they should’ve refused. Some human came along and said ‘Hey, chickens, why don’t you come to our farm? We got a special house built just for you, so you don’t have to be outside in the rain. We’re gonna feed you and take care of you and keep you safe from predators.’ And the chickens said, ‘Sure, why not? What’s the worst that could happen?’ Okay, that’s probably not exactly how it went down—like I said, chickens can’t talk—but you get the gist of it, right?
“So they did. And at first it was great—they were safe and warm, they didn’t have to watch their backs all the time, they got to watch their chicks grow up instead of getting snatched by hawks. And hey—free food every day!
“And then one day the chickens started to notice that their eggs were disappearing almost as fast as they laid them. And then they noticed that they were disappearing one by one. It probably took a while, ’cause, you know, they’re chickens. They can’t count too good. And finally, finally the chickens wised up and realized the truth—them and their eggs were being eaten by the humans who had promised to keep them safe! And the chickens said to the human, ‘Hey, we had a deal! You were supposed to protect us from all predators! That includes you!’ And the human said ‘I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.’ Thank you, George Lucas.
“See, when the chickens decided to abandon self-reliance and hard work, when they let us feed them and take care of them, that was when their fate was sealed. That was when they forfeited the right to complain if it turned out their caretakers had an agenda of their own. And—listen carefully, this is the important part—now they’ve been farmed and bred for so long they couldn’t take care of themselves if they wanted to! If a chicken truck overturned in the woods, how long do you think it would be before they all died? There’s no way they can survive in the wild!
“This is the part where some dumbass says ‘but there are a million times as many chickens as there are any other bird that size, so really, they’re an evolutionary success story.’ So what? If instead of there being eight billion humans on Earth, there were eight million billion humans all stuck in Martian people farms from War of the Worlds, getting ready to have their blood sucked out, would you really call that a better world?
“So I don’t know about these individual chickens,” he said, gesturing at the box, “whether they personally were good chickens or bad chickens—but as far as I’m concerned, chickens as a species got what they deserved. We’ll be right back.”
* * *
It was later. Walt’s writers sat around the staffroom, looking up at Walt as he glowered down on them. They seemed to know they’d done something wrong, but they didn’t know what.
“Let me remind you people,” he said, “that your employment here is strictly a convenience. It is not a necessity. I used to write two 15-minute podcasts a week all by myself. If I had to, I could do so again.
“First of all, two monologues about the same thing? Don’t I always ask for two completely different monologues?”
“We didn’t think, with this in the news, you’d want to talk about anything else,” said Caitlin.
“Come on. What have I always said about global warming?”
“You’ve always said it’s a natural phenomenon,” said Skyler.
“Exactly. And I’m going to keep on saying that.”
“We just thought today we had a chance to say something better than that,” said Lisa.
Walt shook his head. “I can say it’s not happening, or I can say it is happening but it’s totally natural,” he said. “But if I try and say both of those things, or say different things on different days, I’m going to sound like a bullshitter. I have to be consistent here.”
Adam laughed. “With all due respect, Walt, your viewers are morons,” he said. “You could tell them the president was a closet Rastafarian and they’d believe you. Your trying to be consistent is completely wasted on them because they can’t remember what…” Adam’s voice trailed off as he noticed the look on his boss’s face. It was an expression of utter contempt. Walt glared at him until he lowered his gaze to the table in front of him.
“Adam,” said Walt flatly, “don’t ever talk that way about my audience again, or you’re gone.”
Adam nodded, not meeting Walt’s eyes.
“Those people could listen to anybody or nobody, and they choose to listen to me. I owe them my respect. And as long as I pay your salary, so do you.”
Adam nodded again. The hell of it was, some days Walt suspected the same thing about the people who tuned in to listen to him, but he knew he couldn’t afford to think that way. If you didn’t respect your fans, then no matter how hard you tried to hide it, it would come out in your performance in one form or another. The fans would see it, and they would be furious. And they would be right to be furious. If they wanted to listen to people who thought they were stupid, there were plenty of liberals who’d be happy to oblige.
“I get what you’re saying,” said Skyler. “It just seems to me we’re throwing away a chance here and it might never come our way again.”
“Exactly,” said Walt. “It might never come our way again. And you know why, don’t you?”
Skyler blinked at him and said nothing.
“Think about it. If it really were a hoax, it wouldn’t matter if we missed out on a piece of evidence today. There’d be more evidence coming tomorrow or next week. Because that’s how reality works.” He shook his head.
“Listen to me. What’s happening up there is real. I’m not saying it’s us doing it, but it’s real. And it’s going to get worse, and worse, and worse. And there’s going to come a day when it hits people where they live, and they’re going to be like ‘Why doesn’t somebody do something? There oughta be a law!’ And when that day comes, the world’s going to need—more than ever before—somebody to remind them how awesome freedom really is and how they don’t want to throw it all away. And it can’t be somebody who spent the last few years with his feet in his mouth and his head up his ass.” As a conciliatory gesture, he dropped the box of chicken on the break room table. “Enjoy.”
The slow feedback loop in the Arctic Ocean continued its work. This year, there was open water at the North Pole by the end of June, and the last of the sea ice disappeared on July 24. The snow that had caused the glaciers to grow by the end of spring had all melted before the middle of summer.
Like a gear in the clockwork of the ocean currents, the
Beaufort Gyre rotates endlessly between the Bering Strait and the North Pole. The seawater spent nearly three months turning and turning under the midnight sun, growing warmer and warmer. Where its waters met the colder waters coming from the North Pacific, vast fogbanks arose. The fog blew over the Canadian Archipelago in waves the size of nations. Several older planes crashed when visibility dropped to zero not only at their intended landing site, but at every other landing site within range—no small matter in a region as dependent on the airplane as Los Angeles is on the automobile. Only those planes equipped with modern guidance systems aided by infrared cameras were safe.
* * *
Jerome Ross and four other younger members of Camberg’s political team were gathered around a computer in the Richmond Democratic Party headquarters, listening to Henry Pratt’s press conference. You didn’t even need to have the sound on to figure out what he was saying. The former businessman already looked like a generic president out of Central Casting, circa 1990 or so. He was tall—either six-two or six-three, Rome made a mental note to look it up. His hair was iron-gray frosted with white around the ears—possibly the most presidential hair of any of this year’s contenders. His face was equally skilled at stern expressions and reassuring smiles. He was wearing a navy-blue wool suit, which had been tailored to fit him but was otherwise identical to what every other man in politics was wearing. His one concession to personality was the reading glasses on a string around his neck, with a bronze frame that matched his tie.
Just listening to Pratt made Rome nervous. He knew how not to make it obvious that he was glancing at the teleprompter, and he had a real orator’s voice—deep, calm, and certain. A bit leaden, maybe, but that just gave it more punch. It was hard to doubt anything he said while he was saying it. The contents of his speech were more just-the-facts than fire-and-brimstone, to the extent that they were facts—Rome planned on doing some serious fact-checking, but his manner made the material effective.