Fiction River: How to Save the World

by Fiction River

  Tossing off their veils, the women and Raela ran toward them.

  Sam Briggs, her arm in a sling, reached out to Raela. “What’s happened?” she asked.

  “We’ve left Nevaeh to join your fight,” said Raela.

  “Welcome to civilization,” Sam said, grinning. She motioned to three people in uniform, letting the rest rush toward the compound. “Resources are tight, but we’ll manage to save the world somehow.”

  “There are three hundred more hands to launch your balloons now,” said Raela.”

  “Mama!”

  Raela froze at the sound of Saphir’s voice as Lieutenant Briggs appeared out of the swirling heat. With Saphir in his arms. He set her down and she ran to Raela with outstretched arms. Raela hugged her, sobbing into her thick brown hair.

  “Saphir, my little bird, where did you come from?”

  The little girl pointed at Briggs.

  “Last night, I followed some of your brothers,” he said. “They sold her to a neighboring compound.”

  “Sold my daughter?” And there were other compounds?

  Briggs nodded. “Sam and I raided three neighboring compounds last night and rounded up all the children. This has been going on for a long time. We’re still sorting through everything, including the graves, but we’re here to arrest Brother Enoch and Brother Keith.”

  It was over. She slumped in the dirt, Saphir clinging to her. It was really over.

  Briggs covered his head as an explosion rolled across the arid landscape, greasy red and black trails of smoke rising in the sky.

  “What happened?” he asked, raising an eyebrow as he got to his feet.

  Raela smiled. “I burned the Word—and the ammunition. If they want to follow scriptures, they’ll have to start with real translations. And they’ll do it without using women as cattle.”

  ***

  With three hundred eager women helping, the nearby town launched four times as many sulfate aerosol balloons into the atmosphere than before. Over time, the sulfates cooled earth’s temperature by two degrees, allowing the planet to heal while work began to scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and use it to grow crops.

  Raela and the women of Nevaeh never looked back as they learned how to put the captured carbon dioxide back into the depleted soil. And new hope into themselves.

  Introduction to “Earth Day”

  I could wax rhapsodic about everything that Kris Rusch has done over her widely-varied career, but I find she does an excellent job of that herself, so without further ado:

  Hugo-award winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch is publishing several series at the same time, all under different names. She writes award-winning mystery as Kris Nelscott in the Smokey Dalton series, award-winning romance as Kristine Grayson, sf/romance as Kris DeLake, and has three series under Kristine Kathryn Rusch: the Retrieval Artist series, the Fey series, and the Diving series. For the first time in her career, all of the books in all of the series are in print. She’s excited about that. The next Diving book, Skirmishes, will appear in the fall of 2013, the next Smokey Dalton novel in March of 2014, and the next Retrieval Artist book shortly after that. Her standalone thriller, Snipers, just appeared from WMG Publishing.

  Her thoughts about “Earth Day”: “When John Helfers sent the invitation, I found myself thinking of and discarding a million different ways to save the world. I didn’t think they’d work permanently, anyway. I was a journalist in another life and I was trained as a historian. Humans don’t keep to anything for very long, especially if it’s good for them. One morning, just before the deadline, I woke up with this entire story in my head. That almost never happens, even though I wish it happened all the time.”

  It is very difficult to write short, and even more difficult to tackle such a wide-ranging theme like this in a shorter story. Kris is one of the few authors I know who can do both regularly, and hit the mark dead-on every single time.

  Earth Day

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

  Excerpt:

  …personal documents identify him as Albert Suttles, but in his statement, he repeatedly referred to himself as Raymond Bilojek…

  My mom had an obsession with Senator Gaylord Nelson. Nobody remembers him any more, except in dusty old history books, not that there are dusty old history books any more. Everything’s online now. Even our confessionals.

  Here’s mine.

  Let me start again.

  Mom had an obsession with Senator Gaylord Nelson. Not a stalkerish obsession, but one of those I-think-this-man-is-the-greatest obsessions. She used him as an example all the time, particularly in the dysfunctional early decades of this century.

  There are no more men like Senator Gaylord Nelson, she said to me on her deathbed—not that I was with her at her deathbed. I was a full professor by then, supervising more research than I truly had time for, living in Berkeley, and enjoying it. Especially the weather. California weather, for a good Wisconsin boy, is like an early glimpse of heaven.

  Not to mention that I spent my formal education in cold places. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yale, MIT. If it weren’t for my second post-doc at Cal-Tech, I would’ve thought that you had to nurture scientists in the cold in order for them to flower.

  But I promised myself no jokes in this manifesto. Not that people get my jokes anyway. I’m too quiet. I think of the joke, turn it over in my mind, then inject it too late into the conversation. People have looked at me funny my entire life.

  I long ago gave up trying to impress the unwashed with my conversational skills, even though I admire folks who have them. Earliest influences for me include comedians, especially the really brainy ones—George Carlin, Dennis Miller, Lewis Black—the ones who can quip their way out of anything. Or I thought they could, until I saw Carlin in his dotage, just out of rehab, working off a paper script, telling the audience honestly that he was testing material for an HBO special.

  You remember HBO, right? That’s where I first saw the “Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television” speech. I must’ve been ten, maybe, one of those years when we could afford premium cable. 1977? Something like that. We were pretty itinerant, and I didn’t see much television at all, especially premium television as it was called then. So I remembered seeing Carlin on HBO.

  But his other routines? I didn’t see those until later. And his influential “bad case of fleas” routine? I didn’t see that one until maybe mid-2007, on the Internet. Ironic, right?

  Anyway, Mom. Senator Gaylord Nelson. She met him, you know. One of those Earth Day rallies back in the day. Said I met him too, back when Earth Day was a movement, and she was part of it. Not that she ever left the movement.

  The movement defined our lives. She’d say, we moved for the environment.

  Not for the weather, like normal people. But for the environment. Someone needed a volunteer to coordinate rallies? Mom was there. Someone needed a volunteer to post flyers? Mom was there. We lived off the kindness of strangers, she’d say, and it took me years to understand that she was quoting a Tennessee Williams play.

  The kindness of strangers got me into a science-only high school. We need scientists, too, the man who fronted everything said. He was one of those truly rich bastards, the kind who gave his money to all sorts of causes. But his favorite was Mom’s favorite: the environment.

  Everything from the Sierra Club to some wacky fringe organization (Save The Cockroaches!), this guy gave it money. And he funded Mom for years, which is something I don’t want to think about even now. Because I don’t know why Mom in particular, even though I have a hunch.

  It does go back to Mom, you know. I’m smart enough to know that. The therapist I hired at my first tenured position told me I was “unhealthily obsessed” with her, and we had to break the obsession. That therapist couldn’t divorce me from Mom entirely. I recognize that too. Because without Mom, I wouldn’t be a tenured professor with a large research staff and grants for fifte
en different projects, including the private one you’re seeing today.

  Or will see today.

  But I digress.

  My digressions are why I’m not doing this as a video. Or a holographic video. Some kind of statement broadcast on every single remaining broadcast channel.

  The Internet.

  No one’ll see this until after.

  But then, no one will see it after either.

  Heh. Just realized.

  This is all for me.

  Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

  Excerpt:

  …his research assistants, graduate students, and post-doctoral candidates weren’t hard to find. All wore Earth Day T-shirts, modeled on the first Earth Day poster from 1970. Separate interviews attached. Each mentions Suttles/Bilojek’s insistence on the Earth Day experiment, which most participated in for a grade or because they were terrified of losing their research posting…

  My influences:

  1. Comedians (see above).

  2. Space photos, particularly that one from the late 1960s—you know, the beautiful blue-and-green globe? That was Mom’s favorite too. But for different reasons. Me, I like the vivid colors, the rocks against the blackness, the vibrant life that we don’t recognize as life—you know, the sun big and deep like an ocean, with storms and spots and—I could go on forever. But we don’t have forever. 

  3. Great scientists from the past. The unassuming guys, at least in the beginning. Archimedes in the bathtub. Galileo dropping balls from the Tower of Pisa. Einstein contemplating the universe from the silence of the patent office.

  They didn’t have grants and grad students, publish-or-perish mandates, the necessity of finding the smallest niche in the large world of science just to get someone to fund a project. They didn’t have to write grandiose papers before their discoveries. Sometimes they didn’t even write grandiose papers after their discoveries.

  So of course, in this modern era, I decided not to write a grandiose paper either. I got dozens and dozens of smaller grants, on smaller topics, and isn’t it ironic that if you Google (Google. Heh. Created outside the system.) my professional name, you’ll see article after article, interview after interview, with me, whom they call the Scientist of Small Things.

  Apparently I did find notice. Someone—maybe a scientifically minded clerk, handling grant applications for the U.S. government—noticed my name originating most of them.

  No one put together all the topics, though.

  No one except me.

  Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

  Excerpt:

  …appended to this file a report from several different departments in Homeland Security, as well as reports from similar bureaus in Germany, Russia, China, South Africa…

  Senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day and, some say, the founder of the modern environmental movement, was a saint. George Carlin, comedian, the enemy.

  At least according to Mom. On her deathbed. Or what I call her deathbed—that dreadful nursing home bed she didn’t leave for the last few years of her life. I saw her a year before she died—2007—and after that I discovered why Carlin was the enemy.

  In that wonderful, eye-opening routine, he said he hated Earth Day. He said, and I quote: “Environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat.”

  Ah, it rang true. It rang so true.

  That’s when I realized all my degrees, all those little environmental things I was doing weren’t for the planet. They were for the environmentalists. Like Mom.

  And then, in that same routine, Carlin said, he said, the planet will be here after we’re long gone. And he added the inspiration: “The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.”

  That was my Eureka moment.

  I know how to get rid of fleas.

  Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

  Excerpt:

  …when the FBI received a notice from the Patent Office, delineating several patents that returned to the same man, known as the Scientist of Small Things. The small things, when combined in the proper order, could be seen as a potential terrorist threat. The patent office employee [name redacted] did not contact the FBI immediately. After some thought, however, she determined she could not remain silent….

  It took very little tweaking to move from “Save The Earth For Environmentalists” to “Save The Earth.”

  Because to save the earth for environmentalists, you have to know what will kill the little buggers. Instead of getting rid of those factors, you add to them. You tweak them.

  You make them stronger.

  I figured out the balance. Tweak this and touch that and you make the planet shake off the fleas a little faster. It is a multidisciplinary approach. To understand how water reaches entire populations, one must know the engineering of water treatment plants as well as urban planning. One must also learn the details of water processing in each community.

  Tiny things, small things, all reported back to the one man who can understand it all.

  Amassing small bits of data into one large experiment. Only large minds can understand this.

  And there are very few large minds around any more.

  Almost none.

  Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

  Excerpt:

  … the case built slowly. The initial investigator retired, and Agent William Franks took over. Franks had received a Masters in Biology from Harvard before joining the Bureau. He did not like the coincidences either, and talked off the record to two of Suttles/Bilojek’s graduate students. That raised enough suspicions to bring in additional field agents….

  My pet graduate students run all of my projects. I have developed a multidisciplinary department, highly regarded, since most of my students go on to so-called great things in the so-called real world.

  My current graduate students and post-docs are doing a one-day experiment for me, or so they think. They are not large minds. They are useful small minds. In the years I have planned this, it has always helped to have useful small minds.

  It has also helped that in 2007 my mission changed from Save The World For Environmentalists to Save The World. Because of Mom, because of my initial environmentalist approach, I know how to talk to small minds, to make them believe I am on their side.

  And I am. Truly I am. I do want to save the world.

  In fact, my pet scientists and I are doing exactly that today.

  My pet scientists have tweaked the ground water, and the air filtration systems. They’ve added toxins to all the poisons we already touch, from oil to Styrofoam. They’re adding viruses to enclosed spaces, like airplanes and ships. They’re even coating restaurant surfaces.

  I don’t care how we get the fleas off the planet. I just care that we do.

  And now we will.

  As the first Earth Day T-shirt says, “We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us.”

  Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

  Homeland Security, FBI Division

  Arresting Officer William Franks

  Excerpt from Franks’ verbal message, attached to the huge packets of reports submitted to the U.S. Justice Department:

  …gotta say, Dave, it’s a good thing guys like this are rocket scientists. If they understood people, they wouldn’t confess before the crime. Whenever I feel down about humanity, I gotta remember that good citizens saw this manifesto and reported it. Dunno if we got everyone, but I hope we did. If nothing else, the outbreaks will be isolated now. This guy had a good plan. He almost killed millions.

  Creepy bastard. When I locked him up, he smiled at me like we were old friends. Then his grin widened to crazy. You know. You’ve seen it on the face of so many of these bastards.

  Usually you can dismiss them. But I’m having trouble shaking this one. Because of what he said to me I started to walk away.

  He said, “So, flea, how does it feel to save the world?”

  Introduction to “Deus Ex Machina”
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  Freelance writer, novelist, award-winning screenwriter, poet, podcaster, biker, roustabout, Travis Heermann is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the author of The Wild Boys, the Ronin Trilogy, and Rogues of the Black Fury, plus short fiction pieces in anthologies and magazines such as Weird Tales, Historical Lovecraft, and Shivers Vol. VII. As a freelance writer, he has produced a metric ton of role-playing game work both in print and online, including The Legend of Five Rings, d20 System, and the MMORPG EVE Online. He dreams of bestsellers, a produced screenplay, and a seat in the World Series of Poker.

  Travis is too humble in his bio, in my opinion. If you want to read some of the best Asian historical fantasy fiction written today, check out the Ronin trilogy, including Heart of the Ronin and Sword of the Ronin (Disclosure: I edited both books, and acquired the first for the now-defunct Five Star Science Fiction line. However, that has nothing to do with my esteem of his writing ability.) Able to move between genres with ease, apparently he also had another widely held dream of mankind on his mind when he wrote this tale: “This story wasn’t inspired so much as something that has been on my mind for a long time, which should be obvious by the end.”

  I love it when an author takes the long (in this case, really long) view about humanity’s survival, and then shows just what might have to happen for us to get there. I also love it when my bookend stories come together so neatly—when I finished this piece, I knew two things; that I had to have it, and that it would be the final story in the anthology.