Pinatubo II

by Les W Kuzyk

  Chapter 22

  They flew back from Agadez that day for an afternoon update meeting with Jeri. Vince sat with the other two around the downstairs meeting room. When Brad suggested kick around time, they talked Jeri into a game of crib—three way. The ten desert tons at Agadez made up the latest sulphur dioxide ascending, yet when Vince filed the report with Jeri that hadn’t stilled her clamour for more climate model data.

  “I just don’t get it. When’s Ms. Meacham going to define all project phases?” Jeri looked at them as she dealt the cards.

  “And fill us in on who’s got drones snooping,” Brad said. “More I think about it, more I’d say that was a surface recon drone. Right outside our Agadez storage yard.”

  “Whoever has an interest,” Vince said. “That’s who.”

  “That’s just it,” Brad said. “On climate everyone has an interest. So who knows?”

  “Russia,” Jeri said forcefully. “Communists.”

  “How about China?” Vince said. “If you wanna talk about democratic or not.”

  “Who’s got the most at stake?” Brad said.

  “Any northern country that wants to keep the planet warm.” Jeri stared at Vince. “Like Canada. They got drones?”

  “Everyone’s got drone capacity,” Brad said.

  “Yeah.” Jeri looked at him. “Any drone hits Niger and I tell you guys, I’m gone. Contract or no contract.”

  Vince and Brad eyed each other, neither speaking.

  “Five cards each, right?” Jeri asked.

  “Yeah.” Brad nodded. “Your crib.”

  “Anyway,” Jeri said. “If they want any accuracy on the Sahara phase III and global phase IV runs, we need integrated model definitions. The model solidifies when we enter real data. But what have we got? Three tons here and ten tons a thousand miles away. That’s just not enough to stitch the model internals together.”

  “Seven hundred fifty three kilometers away.” Brad corrected her. “Our direct flight.”

  “Whatever,” she muttered.

  “Phase III and IV remain talking points, for hypothetical comparison only.” Vince shook his head. “We do the Niger national release, and that’s it. The president wants to run his political show around Niamey for the city people. You’ll get numbers from that. Then there’s the real release around Agadez, to give our client their national tonnage. You’ll get big numbers then. They’ll be negotiating around that for years. You guys are gonna be home for American Thanksgiving.”

  “Yeah.” Jeri shook her head. She threw the last card down to start the crib pile. “I wonder if the Air Force will see this as a national security threat.”

  “Whose air force?” Vince asked.

  “We Americans,” Brad said. “Our Air Force.”

  “Ah, yes,” Vince said.

  “I dunno,” Brad said. “Don’t wanna scare Jeri off yet but I’d say we’re on a drone target list. Someone’s watching us.”

  “Yeah right,” Vince said. “Like we’re terrorists.”

  Brad looked at him, eyebrow raised. “So what’s a terrorist?” He shrugged. “A political label.”

  “Aside from all your drone talk, say the Air Force does say yes, security threat,” Jeri said. “Say they shoot down a certain number of balloons when we’re in mid-launch. Now that would screw up our model—we’d have to do contingency runs on a whole matrix of scenarios.” She gave them a sordid challenging gaze. “That would be a complex model run, borderline chaotic.”

  “Hey Jeri.” Brad winked, reading her look. “People.” He lifted his chin towards her.

  She shrugged. “It’s possible.”

  She looked at Brad’s face, her eyes drilling into him. Then one corner of her mouth began an upward curl.

  “Alright you engineers, here’s an equation for you. Say P equals C. That’s People equals Children. Both constants. Then throw in a maturity variable, say applied to the children side, so P equals M multiplied by C. And that M is your Maturity factor.”

  Vince watched as Brad’s smile dimmed, and he became attentive. Could he be equating his chipper outlook as goofy, like immaturity?

  “What do we know about children? They play with toys, right? For sure that’s what my husband does. Boy’s toys. Big trucks, ATVs, bush machines—whatever he can load up and pull around; gives him a sense of macho power. He can puff out his chest like at the playground. And the more money he makes—he does quite well there—the more toys he gets. He’s always going upstate Michigan with his buddies, where they over and over play out the conquer nature scene. Zero progress—so maturity factor equals one. He is a total child.”

  “That Argosy school have anything to say on that?” Brad counted fifteen two and marked the points.

  “I was really hoping one of you would ask.” Jeri sported a half smile now. “Studies show my husband’s behavior ranks as typical. The classic America view of the purpose of nature. An archetypal Christian based belief—nature was created to be subdued by man. Man, not woman mind you. His church reinforces this identity...a little scripture goes a long ways on belief support. The right select scripture, mind you, so that same church helps his deep belief that he’s a self-made individual. His God sort of kicks around in the back of that church somewhere, not interfering much.”

  “Yeah, well women too.” Vince nodded ardently. “Reverse that gender role. My wife fits right in there, not the church or conquer part, but replace the boy’s toys with girl’s toys. All she wants is a bigger house. No stopping, bigger and then bigger and bigger. Her M factor would never exceed one either. Drives me up the wall.”

  “Okay, point taken.” She looked at Vince over her two cards. “Anyway, my husband counts how much nature he can squash. Cuts notches into his stick with his bucky-boy knife. He feels like a real big boy when he drives his Hummer around. He shows off to the people on the streets of Chicago, and he gets all kinds of pats on the back from his buddies up in Michigan.”

  Vince looked at what cards were played. Strategy only went so far in this game, mostly luck. So whatever. “Twenty.” He placed his card, looking back up. “All I know is the bigger your house gets the more it’s like living in a warehouse.” He heard his voice getting louder, louder than he had spoken in years. “And then you get to play warehouse manager.” His voice rang with sarcasm. “You have organizational and scheduling tasks by the carload.”

  “That’s a go for me,” Brad said. “You got an Ace?” He asked Jeri. “So unless you got an Ace, Vince, peg one for last card. And I start with a seven.” She shook her head no and he put his last card down.

  Jeri laid down her last, an eight. “So that’s fifteen two for you, Jeri,” Brad gestured at her peg on the board.

  She moved her game token, and sat back, lifting both hands open to the above. “Where is the maturity, dammit? Why are we so adolescent? Me, the big childish me, as long as this climate change thing doesn’t affect me and absolutely not my standard of living. How is that attitude going to adapt to the end of the economic growth model? What kind of a maturity factor does that suggest? When I am only interested in myself, my own wellbeing? Ahh, makes me want to scream sometimes.”

  She pushed her chair out and took her coffee cup over to the machine.

  “You know I got a friend in one of those 12 step groups,” she said. “And I’ve been to a couple meetings just to listen—well they got at least one thing figured out. They say the biggest problem is self. And they talk about maturity a lot; the drinkers say when they started drinking was when they stopped growing up. So when they quit, that’s where they get to start over on the growing up process.”

  “People are making a lot of technological progress,” Vince said. “Any points there on our M factor?”

  “No way. My husband’s looking at a hover bike, but that’s no game changer on his attitude.”

  “How about Mission Mars, Jeri.” Brad winked at Vince. “How about Jackie and Haydon?”

  She walked back around the table
and took her seat again.

  “Martian astronauts or not, they’re still a couple. They’ve got issues, that’s for sure.”

  “Authority disallows formal legal marriage en route to or on Mars,” Vince said. “So they call it pair bonding. Like back on the savannah or even before.”

  “Let’s see how long they stay bonded,” Jeri said.

  “The thing is, everyone knows all about them,” Vince said. “That’s one issue with world focus. North American entertainment links—that one’s solid.”

  “Yeah, just wait ‘til she gets pregnant.” Jeri nodded knowingly. “Then we’ll have us an entertaining world story.”

  “Mission Mars relies on the entertainment factor,” Vince said. “Their budget’s crowd sourced.”

  The engineers counted their points and pegged. Jeri let Brad help her count her points.

  “Argosy study,” she said, watching. “On the inside, we’re still trying to please our parents. My husband’s father was a rock solid GOP businessman. Driven by fear of not measuring up, discomfort at not appeasing his deep knowing of his parents’ desires. Who ever said we need to be like our parents? These aren’t the Middle Ages anymore; we don’t need to learn our father’s trade to survive.”

  “No shit,” Vince said softly.

  “The thing is, our parents are our primary model,” Jeri stated. “We spend our growing up life watching them and emulating certain traits. You could say the soft genetics of personality, and character.”

  Vince nodded, musing. How much he does that, he thought, and has done that all his life.

  “So you got one chance there Vince, with your daughter,” Brad said. “You gotta show her a happy face. The best you got becomes a part of her.”

  “Well you are helping, you bugger.” Vince half grinned, making effort to hold his smile at the thought of his Calgary home.

  “What else about people, Jeri?” Brad gave her a creased his brow look.

  “People are like a frog in a hot pot.”

  “Whoa, shit, frogs now,” Brad said. “My deal.” He pulled in all the cards and began to shuffle.

  Jeri stared directly at Brad. “You throw a frog into boiling water and he jumps our right away. Try it. Put him in warm and slowly bring the pot to a boil and he does not notice. He dies. Global warming’s just like that on a macroscopic level.” Jeri shook her head. “Look around you. You see people, young people, set on mimicking the baby boomer lifestyle, or even more—completely unaware of, and totally uninterested in what’s coming. Just look at them; look at what they’re doing. Each of them plays along as a cell in the body of that frog.”

  “Dopy frog.” Brad nodded absently, finishing the deal and placing the last card down next to him for crib.

  “But people think they’re quite clever.” Jeri nodded as she spoke. “My husband thinks he’s the smartest one around. The ego of the clever ape, that’s what I say. That ape, just came down out of the trees and now fresh off the kindergarten plains of Africa.”

  “A growth spurt,” Brad said. “If we gotta grow up, don’t even goofy kids grow in spurts?”

  “So all of a sudden our child will start having an adult conversation,” Jeri said. “My teenage boy husband, clearly with all the power of a man, will grow up? All of a sudden? Forget it—never gonna happen.”

  “C’mon,” Brad said. “Lots of kids goof around for a while.”

  “Yeah, like say you’re a teenager,” Vince said. “You get a fast chance, or you get a slow chance depending on your situation. You don’t fit in, you get depressed, you think of suicide, you get charged with a crime—then you grow up fast. Alright. Or say you drop out of school, but you go back later—you get a slower chance.”

  They looked at their cards, each selecting one to place on Brad’s crib pile.

  “How about counselling Jeri?” Brad said. “My wife’s something of a counselor and she says people can change.”

  “My husband would never talk to someone like that—he’s in total denial. That’s a typical psychological state and he’s stuck in party mode,” Jeri stated, placing her hand flat on the table. “The future looking so bright you gotta wear shades makes for a total disconnect from reality. But the little boy wants that bright future, and to have that oh-so-cool look of the shades. How do you counsel someone who’s having too much fun?”

  “Lotta people gonna need those sunshades for their drive up to Alaska,” Brad said. “Lots of people figure they’ll head north for a holiday soon, and survive no problem in Alaska. Others are scheduling in one last spin down to the tropics before the last reef dies off.”

  Jeri stared at him, and Brad stared back.

  “So imagine your husband in a self-care group, and they fit that Alaska trip in as a response to climate change,” Brad said. “They could get his cooperative pro-social side activated for a climate crisis response. Build up his hope level.”

  “Yeah, shut up on my husband.” Jeri smiled, playing a card. “In a million years. Anyway, hope is bullshit too. Lots of people ‘hope for the best’, and all that does is drown out the truth. People really have to accept their loss, that being their lifestyle, and process the grief. Get past the denial. Gotta crash first.”

  “I personally believe less work could be the answer,” Brad said. “I’ve run the analyses and a more laid back lifestyle produces less carbon. So come out gliding, eh Vince?”

  “We have to detach from our old future and reattach to a new future,” Jeri stated. “Our self-esteem, our status, our image has to come from making things other than money. So I think you got something there.”

  Vince nodded along listening to the other two bantering. Except for the ideals, and prospects of radical change all of what they said translated into a harsher and more unpredictable future for his daughter, for all children.

  “Maybe there’s a God,” Vince said slowly. “At least a friendly creative force that’s going to help us out here.”

  “Oh, there is a God,” Jeri announced. “No question there.”

  “You go to that church with your husband?” Vince asked. “You talking Bible?”

  “That’s his thing, not mine. Why piss around with religion?” Jeri looked directly at Vince. “Read the latest proof-of-heaven series. When a brain surgeon goes through a week long near death experience, and then documents the whole thing scientifically, why waste time trying to figure out stories thousands of years old? The most recent evidence should carry the loudest voice.”

  “I dunno, people like ancient stories,” Vince said. “Everyone knows about angels. So I tell this engineer here some kinda force is giving us a chance to grow up.” He looked at Brad. “Sure, stipulated as a growth spurt. This climate change is all about an opportunity to do just that. High risk, for sure, depending how adolescent we want to be.”

  “So God planned this opportunity,” Jeri nodded her head, smirking. “Just for us.”

  “First steam engine started it,” Brad laughed.

  “Now, if we could just get everyone to experience a near death or something similar, that would wake people up. Near death typically has a real impact on people.” Jeri almost softened. “A really positive, beneficial impact.”

  Vince thought she sighed—he must be imagining. “All that being said,” he said. “And I know you don’t have any kids Jeri.”

  “My trucker boy didn’t want any. Would interfere with his life.”

  “All that being said.” Vince tried again. “What with Argosy and all, where does that leave kids already born? I mean they never caused this problem any more than the Nigeriens, but they’re set to get hit hard just the same.”

  Brad gave him a rare serious look.

  “I’m glad I got my trucker boy. Better not to have any kids,” Jeri said. “I mean, yeah, sorry guys, not looking too good. With all that we’ve been saying.”

  Vince wondering if humanity as a whole had an M factor of one or anything at all higher. And if his thought were true, that this climate
change thing could be a chance to grow up at a global scale. Or, what if like Jeri’s husband, there was no interest in growing up? Then a plan like Brad’s survival cell carried more weight than ever.