Survival Instinct- Forces of Change

by Sandi Gamble

  “Hurry,” I said, and not for the first time.

  Jace screeched to a halt in front of my house. Even before the vehicle was fully secured, I pushed open the door and jumped free, running toward my door. I knew Jace was right behind me.

  “Ari!”

  My mother pushed open the door and stepped out to greet me, wrapping her arms around me and hugging me tightly.

  “Mom, what’s happening?” I asked, wrapping my arms around her.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  I released my grip on her and pushed away. “Where’s dad? We need to speak with dad!”

  Just as I went to go into the house, Jace joined me. Together, we arrived at my father’s study to find him pouring over computer printouts, old texts, tables and equations. He seemed overwhelmed in a way I’d never seen before.

  “Father!”

  He looked up. His eyes took me in, but his expression seemed not to change. His focus was so entirely concentrated on the task at hand that he didn’t seem to have time for the most paternal of emotions.

  “What have you seen? What do you know?” he asked.

  He didn’t at that moment want feelings. He needed information. Data.

  I couldn’t imagine what it must be like for him, for my mother, for our neighbors. Jace and I, as confused and fearful as we were, had seen the event begin to brew. We’d had an inkling that something was coming. But when we’d left my parents earlier in the day, they had been enjoying a leisurely breakfast on the deck, enjoying the warmth of the early sun.

  We’d been gone less than an hour!

  Jace quickly told my father what we’d seen. Father’s eyes widened. He grabbed a phone and called the office. “I’m coming, yes. Right away,” he barked into the phone. “I will have Ari and Jace with me. They saw it.”

  Only a few moments later, we were being hurried into our family’s vehicle, Jace and I scrunched alongside one another in the front with dad. Then, without any further delay, we were on the way to the office lab.

  Along the way, my father peppered us with questions.

  What did we see?

  What was the air like?

  Could we describe any additional physical phenomena?

  Was it warm and then cold? Cool and then warm?

  We answered each question as accurately as we could, accounting for the fact that he was asking the next question even as we answered the one before it. He was desperate for information. We didn’t know what piece of data might be useful so we told him everything we could think of. We tried to remain organized, as we had been taught at the Academy. But the magnitude of what was happening; the need for information right away… the uncertainty as to which piece of information might prove useful, all this conspired to have us saying anything and everything we could.

  The sky was still a slate grey when we arrived at the office and hurriedly piled out of the vehicle. My father ushered us inside, taking an impatient moment to work through the various biometric security measures on the outside and then the inside doorways. Quickly enough, we were walking fast along the smooth, tiled corridor.

  “This way, come on,” father said impatiently, leading us through a doorway on the left.

  How he knew which doorway was beyond me. There were no markings on the walls and none on the doors that I could see. But he knew exactly where he was going.

  “Ari, Jace, please meet Noel,” he said, nodding in the direction of the wiry gentleman inside the lab we’d entered.

  Of course, both of us knew who Noel was. He was quite renowned in the field. Not only was he an Atmospheric Scientist but he also headed the Environmental Council. He would be, in short order, Jace’s and my “boss.”

  The Environmental Council was an umbrella for a number of different fields and disciplines. As climatologists, Jace and I fell into the category of Atmospheric Science even though our roles would differ to a great degree from my father’s.

  My father’s work, some of which had been a mystery from the time I was a little girl and other parts of it were things he shared with me freely, ran the gamut from weather prediction to research aimed at preventing the degradation of the Earth’s atmosphere.

  I remember even as a little girl him asking me if I thought it would rain on a given evening. I would look up into the sky, which was inevitably bright blue and I would shake my head.

  “No, it won’t rain.”

  “Are you sure?” he’d ask with a smile.

  “Of course I’m sure. The sun is nice and warm, and the sky is blue. There’s not a cloud anywhere.”

  “That observation is true. But I haven’t asked you if you thought it would rain now. I think it is quite clear to everyone that it won’t rain now. But what do you think will happen in eight hours? Or tomorrow?”

  “How should I know? No one can predict the future,” I said with certainty.

  He raised his eyebrow in amusement. “No? I’ll tell you what,” he went on. “I say it will rain tonight. You say it won’t. If you’re right, I’ll buy you a pony…”

  “Daddy! Really?”

  He laughed. “Yes, really. But what shall I get if I am right?” He took a thoughtful expression. “Hmm, maybe a hug and a kiss.”

  Even then, that seemed like a safe bet to me, so I took it. That day, I spent most of my time looking out the window. Throughout the afternoon, the sky stayed blue and bright. I was starting to think of names for my pony when, not long before dinner, some clouds began to move in. The breeze picked up. There was an electric feeling to the air.

  Even so, I could still see stars through the forming clouds that evening.

  However, not long before my bedtime, I heard the first, distant roll of thunder. Then a bolt of lightning shattered the darkness. Within fifteen minutes, raindrops began to fall, soon hitting the roof so hard that it sounded as if we were living under a waterfall.

  “Daddy, how did you know?”

  “I can see the future,” he said smugly. “Shall I collect my hug and kiss now or in the morning?”

  I agreed to “pay” him right then. But I still wanted to know how he knew that the weather would change. I pestered him through the evening and then again in the morning until finally, he laid out the rudiments of meteorology.

  The more he spoke, the more fascinated I became. When he finally ended by saying, “I think that is enough for your first lesson,” I was hooked. From then on, I was devotedly interested in Science and Climatology. I would constantly ask my father about cloud formations, weather patterns and how climate affected just about every aspect of my life.

  Although my father spoke expertly about meteorology and answered my questions thoughtfully and completely, meteorology was not my father’s area of study or passion. His knowledge of meteorology was secondary to his true focus, the study of the Earth’s atmosphere.

  It was in this context, the study of the gases that cocoon our planet, that my father’s importance and value to our existence was most acute.

  So it was that when Noel saw my father come into the room, followed by Jace and me, his expression brightened slightly. “Good, you’re here. Everyone is waiting.” He stood and led us through another door and into a lab, this one crowded with think tank drones. The drones immediately clustered around my father and all began talking at once.

  I immediately felt uncomfortable and reached out to grasp Jace’s hand. Unlike the decorum and order that I had come to associate with my father’s lab and, honestly, all aspects of scientific research and inquiry, this room was an explosion of noise and movement. It was easily as chaotic as the events unfolding outside. Rather than remaining at their workstations, focusing on their tasks and assiduously pouring over data, each member of the team seemed to have been jolted into motion by the most unpleasant and disturbing shock. They clamored around my father. Several paced nervously. Others tapped their feet, their eyes darting around the room. They all seemed to exhibit behaviors and postures that I associated with someone who had suffered
significant emotional trauma.

  In rapid fire, they spewed out figures and coordinates, temperatures and atmospheric wind speeds. I listened intently but was only able to understand every third or fourth word. Another was talking so fast and in such a frantic manner that he failed miserably at communicating, successful only in tripping over his own words.

  Another member of the team was moving around the room, a stylus behind his ear, and desperately trying to get anyone’s attention by shoving papers covered with graphs in their face.

  Still, another waited anxiously, a multipad at the ready, desperate to take note of the smallest bit of information my father might provide. As if this scene was not manic enough, even before any sort of order was able to take hold, several other people, equally distressed as the ones already in the lab, came tumbling in, adding to the noise and the confusion.

  They crowded around my father and, even as Jace and I were being pushed to the back of the room, I could see that my father managed to maintain his placid and calm demeanor. Even so, I could see that he had just about all that he was interested in taking. He raised his arm into the air and barked at the top of his lungs, “Enough!”

  The room fell into a sudden silence.

  “Now,” he went on, bringing his arm down. “Let us proceed one at a time.”

  There was a moment of absolute silence, followed by an immediate explosion of noise as everyone tried to be the first voice that spoke “one at a time”. In disgust, my father shook his head and pushed through the scrum of people and made his way into the conference room. As he made his way, he caught my eye and indicated that he wanted both Jace and me to join him. I reached out and grasped Jace’s hand and pulled him in the direction my father was moving.

  Jace and I slipped into the conference room, as did five of the top scientists. Father shut the door, keeping the buzzing drones at bay.

  Although it is quiet and focused in the conference room, it is clear that everyone there is deeply worried. To this point, father had not received any coherent information about what had happened, and what was continuing to happen. Having known my father my entire life, I knew him to be a man of exquisite reason, reason tempered with awe and appreciation for the world around him.

  It was no accident that he and mother met and fell in love. His responsibility kept him from the many adventures that mother took me on as a child, but he was fully supportive of them. What I did not know then was that mother would tell him about our adventures, filling him with longing for the wonderful way I was being allowed to grow up.

  My father was a decisive man. It fell to him to make some very vital decisions. Still, he was never rash. He needed information. He needed to know what had happened, and what was happening.

  He looked at the scientists in the room. “This is my daughter Ari, and this is her colleague, Jace. They were due to begin with us tomorrow.” He sighed and rubbed his face with his strong hand. “It seems that events have conspired to have them begin early.”

  There were nervous chuckles in the room. The nervousness was shared by Jace and me, but not the chuckles.

  “As these events certainly will affect all of us, I have decided to bring them in now on the ground level so they can get up to speed with the rest of us.”

  With that, he turned to a tall, thin man. “Mitchell,” he said, his voice direct and matter-of-fact, “talk.”

  On cue, he began. “At 9.20 am this morning there was an apparent earthquake…”

  “Apparent?” my father asked.

  Mitchell nodded. “I am making my assessment based on the fact that the ground shook. At about the time the incident occurred, our machines seemed to go crazy, and no discernable data was gathered.

  “Stranger still, there also appears to be no epicenter that we can locate.”

  My father looked distressed. I could not tell if it was because of what he was hearing or the degree of uncertainty behind the information. “No epicenter or discernable data? Apparently, an earthquake occurred? Damnit, Mitchell, was there or was there not an earthquake? How can your equipment fail to record an earthquake?”

  Mitchell shook his head. He raked his fingers through his thinning hair and cleared his throat. “The problem is not the equipment,” he said.

  “You’re certain?”

  He nodded. “It was all checked just recently. It just… it just didn’t record anything of value. Artifacts, nothing else.”

  My father brought his hand down against the conference table. “Does anybody have any data for me that we can put on the table so we can begin to work out what is happening out there?”

  There was a brief moment of quiet when a small voice began. “Yes,” Sim piped up. Sim, a short, boyish-looking man who tended toward blushing even when he was not embarrassed and whose shyness made him much more comfortable in the background, was about to have his moment to shine.

  He was younger than the others and only joined the Environmental Council a year earlier, after graduating from the Military Academy. He had quickly distinguished himself with the value of his data and insights.

  “Thank God,” father sighed as he turned to look at the young man. “What can you tell us, Sim,” my father queried.

  Without looking up from the stylus in his hand Sim began, “This morning Sir, the carbon dioxide levels jumped to almost double their normal level. An astonishing rate of change to pre-purge levels, which would be in keeping with a 3.0c to 4.5c rise in the global climate, Sir.”

  My father shook his head as if to dismiss the information. “There has to be some mistake,” my father said.

  The young man was clearly uncomfortable but held his ground. “No, Sir. Definitely not, Sir.” Sim might have been shy and timid, but he had absolute faith in his numbers.

  I was impressed by him. Clearly, he was shy and just as clearly he was intimidated by my father. The thought quickly went through my mind how odd it was to think of my father as intimidating. As his daughter, I always knew him to be anything but. However, here, in his workplace, I could see how his authority would affect others.

  Father seemed to accept what Sim said. “Are there any more facts to be presented?”

  Jordan pushed some paperwork across the table to my father. After my father looked down at the papers, Jordan then dealt copies of the packet to the rest of us.

  Jordan’s area of expertise was Oceanology and Marine Science. She had loved the sea since she was a young girl and always returned to it – whether as a study subject or a place to hold her dreams and hopes.

  On the council, it was her task to monitor the ocean for changes and to report those changes back to my father. As the person responsible for the Ocean Carbon and the Biogeochemistry program, she had a great deal of responsibility. She also headed the project on Ocean Acidification.

  Her voice was steady as she reported the information in the packet. “Immediately after the event this morning, the acidity of the ocean quickly peaked to its current pH level of 8.7%.”

  That was the first bit of information that made sense to me. Not how the ocean came to have the sudden rise in pH level – that was still part of the strange events that were occurring and needed to be explained – but why the ocean appeared to have that rust color. The change in pH would equate to a rise in algal blooms. I shook my head, amazed that I had not thought of that myself. But then again, perhaps the best lesson of the morning would turn out to be an appreciation of how much you miss when you are in shock.

  Jordan continued in a voice heavy with sadness. “There appears to be little or no plant or marine life left.”

  A pall descended on the room. Managing marine life had been a significant goal of the Council.

  “You’re sure?” my father asked.

  Jordan nodded. “We cannot detect any. And, quite frankly, no life could survive in such an alkali solution.”

  “I hate to add to the horrible news,” Thomas said, “but atmospheric conditions don’t appear to be much better. I haven’t ha
d time to crunch the numbers, but carbon levels in the atmosphere are past critical.” He paused as if the importance of what he was about to say next just fully occurred to him. “It’s only a matter of time before our ability to survive will become untenable.”

  A 3.0c to 4.5c rise in global climate would be enough to displace those living in tropical populations; would be enough to destroy natural ecosystems, force changes to agriculture and ultimately, to our very way of life.

  “My God,” my father sighed as he slouched back in his chair and brought his hand over his face. In some ways, seeing my father’s posture and hearing his sigh was more unsettling than the events Jace and I had witnessed this morning. After all, environmental calamities were one thing if my father and the council could address them. But if my father felt defeated… then we had indeed reached a very dire impasse.

  Then, as if speaking to himself, he began to ask questions. “What has caused it? Where has it come from? What happened to the world we woke up in this morning?” Frustration obvious in his voice. I was sure I was not the only one to note how tightly he was gripping his fists.

  After a moment, he looked up. His eyes landed on Jace. “Jace, open the door and let the think tank in please.”

  Jace immediately jumped up and went to the door. When he opened it, it was obvious that a large number of people had been idling just outside. “Think Tank please,” Jace said.

  In short order, a short line of men and women from the Environmental Council filed into the room. At that moment I found myself looking directly at Jace, and for the first time since we’d gotten to the Council, I looked at him, really looked at him. I had been so wrapped up in my own thoughts and feelings that I had neglected to take into account what he must have been going through. Looking at him now, I felt a wave of sympathy as I saw the concern on his face and tenseness in his body. This all must have been so overwhelming for him. I tried to will him to look at me, to give me the chance to silently express to him that I cared, that I understood. But he was too engrossed in everything that was happening, taking in everything that was being said, and picking up on all the unspoken cues, the frustration, the fear, the sense of foreboding.