Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  * * * *

  Our audit consisted of eight Auditors and an Auditor General. They sat on a bench, each shaded by an umbrella held by a borderline. The Retributor, Advocate, and Wardens all wore top hats. This was highly symbolic. The indulgence generations had gloried in being casual and individual. Now was the age of formality, unity, and sacrifice. Black robes and black cloaks were the uniform. Black hats were for the important people, and black cowls for the really important. The latter were the Auditors. Just three decades ago, it would have looked ludicrous, but three decades ago, the Earth was three degrees cooler. The black robes were uncomfortable to wear in the merciless heat and symbolized the suffering that had been caused by the tippers who had burned too much fossil carbon.

  We tippers sat exposed to the sun, whose effect we had enhanced so much. There were nine circles of tippers. Nine circles of hell. Nine degrees of warming that were predicted by 2100. We had been heating the world during a natural cooling cycle. When the next warming cycle kicked in, things went straight to hell in every sense.

  The audits began as the sun’s disk rose clear of the horizon. We were meant to suffer.

  “Audit of Jason Hall, climatologist,” the Clerk of the Audit announced.

  There was a quota of audits for each day, so no more than minutes could be given to any one. For most, it was the work of less than a minute to confirm guilt and pass sentence. I was escorted to the dais by a Warden as the Retributor climbed the three steps to the lectern. Without using notes, he began.

  “Worthy victims, I have records, confirmed by the defendant while wired to a veritor, proving that he squandered the resources of the Earth to acquire a second doctorate. I maintain that he did this for sheer vanity and so is guilty of display and squandering.”

  “Defendant?” asked the Auditor General.

  “I did my second doctorate in history to get credibility. It was not display or squandering,” I responded.

  “Credibility for what?” the Retributor asked with smug confidence.

  “I was studying links between the Little Ice Age and witch burnings from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.”

  The Retributor opened his mouth to scoff, failed to find suitable words, and closed it again. He had been caught unprepared. A buzz of speculation rippled through the circles of tippers and borderlines, and even the auditors whispered among themselves.

  “Ridiculous,” said the Retributor, resorting to bluster. “The topic is frivolous.”

  “Not so: my research showed close parallels with the World Audit before—”

  “Moving on to your use of motorcycles—”

  “Objection!” called the Advocate. “My honorable colleague has made a statement but not allowed the defendant to refute it.”

  “Objection sustained,” said the Auditor General. “The honorable Retributor must either withdraw his statement or allow the defendant to address it.”

  That was the first objection that had been decided in favor of a tipper within anyone’s memory. Anger clouded the Retributor’s face for a moment, then it cleared.

  “I stand at your honor’s pleasure,” he said.

  “Defendant, you will continue,” said the Auditor General.

  I now had the undivided attention of everyone. This was not just some boring accusation of SUV rallies or ten-kilowatt Christmas light displays.

  “During the fifteenth century, around the time that the climatic event known as the Little Ice Age became really severe in Europe, the number of witch trials and burnings suddenly increased. Witches were said to call up storms, cause frosts, and induce other meteorological disasters.”

  “Point of clarification,” said the Auditor General. “Are you suggesting that witches caused the Little Ice Age?”

  “Absolutely not, but records show that people believed them to be responsible.”

  “Point taken. Proceed.”

  “As bad weather became more frequent and severe, people began to look for someone to blame. Supposed witches were plausible and vulnerable targets.”

  “Are you suggesting that audits such as yours, here, today, are witch trials?” asked the Auditor General.

  “No, your honor.”

  For a moment, my life seemed to hang by a thread as she paused to discomfort me.

  “Proceed.”

  “When I began my second PhD in 1997, I wanted to get credibility as an historian. As an expert in both history and climatology I thought my warnings would be taken more seriously.”

  “Warnings?”

  “Warnings to polluters and squanderers that when human-induced climate change gripped the Earth, their descendants might want revenge. There would be whole generations of old tippers to provide guilty and vulnerable targets.”

  “Surely the Christian church initiated the medieval witch trials, not the general population?”

  “Actually, most witch trials were secular and at the village level.”

  “Interesting. That is how the World Audit operates.”

  “True.”

  “Then what are you suggesting?”

  “I am only relating history, your honor. My PhD was about instances of popular anger in response to severe weather. In the fifteenth century, anger was foolishly directed against witches. Popular anger has now revived, this time due to induced climate change. I make no judgment about whether it is just or unjust.”

  “Enough, enough,” said the Auditor General. “You have demonstrated to my satisfaction that your second doctorate was in defense of the ecosphere. Retributor, do you have any further accusations?”

  “Oh, yes, multiple accusations of squandering.”

  “Then I declare this audit of Jason Hall, climatologist, adjourned. Clerk of the Audit, what is the next audit?”

  “Audit of Kieran Harley, who owned and operated a Jet Ski.”

  “For recreation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Guilty as charged. Death, second class. Those in favor? Against? Confirmed. Next audit?”

  My audit had been adjourned! I was borderline. I would join the ranks of those considered guilty but too difficult to waste time on. After all, millions of undeniably guilty tippers could be audited and executed easily.

  * * * *

  Religious services were not as popular with the tippers and borderlines as one might have expected. Religion had not seriously challenged the World Audit, just as in the mid–twentieth century, the major religions had made no effective protests when American and Soviet politicians had threatened the world with thermonuclear annihilation. The World Audit promised action and revenge for what had been done to the planet. Unlike religions, it delivered.

  Thus there were services to prepare people for death at the camp, but not much more. There was no shortage of entertainment, however.

  Among the borderlines, there were tippers who had memorized their favorite movies and television shows, word for word. Over my two weeks in the adjourned backlog, I sat in the audience while episodes of Cheers, Star Trek, Buffy, and Seinfeld were acted out in the dusk and moonlight. The performances were a little stiff and arthritic, the props were minimal, and the theme music had to be hummed and whistled by an aged orchestra, but the dialogue seemed accurate.

  On my second night, there was an extravaganza performance in the form of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. At the center of the stage space were the actors, along with those playing the parts of chairs, tables, doors, and a bed. Flanking them were a chorus of singers to the right and an orchestra of hummers to the left. Surrounding all this was the participating audience, who sang, danced, and called responses at the actors. The rest of us merely watched, although some tippers born after 1990 seemed a bit bewildered. The Wardens looked on, impassive.

  Apparently, a suicide wave had been not only planned but coordinated with the Wardens. At the end of the show, the audience participators charged the Wardens, shouting lines from the show, hurling rocks, and waving walking sticks. Everyone else dropped and flattened them
selves against the sand as the Wardens’ assault rifles chattered into life and bullets whined overhead.

  “Don’t move,” said the man beside me.

  “Who’s moving?”

  “They’re tippers facing greenhouse or mines. A bullet is way better than that.”

  The firing died down to the occasional sharp bark of a pistol shot.

  “That’s the Inspector of Wardens,” said my companion. “He’s finishing them off with a Smith & Wesson 1006. Beautiful gun, real classic.”

  A gun fancier. He was sure to be up for squandering, display, and possibly greed.

  “Now, those Wardens, do you see what they got?”

  The Wardens were carrying guns with curved magazines. They were very good at killing people, and that was about as much as I understood.

  “Assault rifles?”

  “Yeah, and they may be made in China, but they’re still AK-47s.”

  “Er, that’s Russian,” I said, recalling television news items about terrorists and guerrillas from a lifetime ago.

  “That’s right, developed in the forties but perfected in nineteen fifty-nine. The M16, now, that was a better gun; the old AK couldn’t shoot as fast or far. Mind, AKs could take way worse treatment and keep firing, and were cheap as chicken feed to make.”

  He kept talking, but my thoughts had already wandered. The AK-47 design was ninety years old, yet it still did the job. It also needed little maintenance and was cheap to build. That symbolized the modern world. Everything was merely good enough rather than optimized to have a slight edge. All things being equal, a slightly better range or rate of fire at twice the cost was no advantage because all things were never equal. The victims had new values, and better was seldom desirable. Good enough meant a softer ecological touch. The Chinese-made assault rifles designed in Russia were good enough, so good enough was perfect.

  “All stand!”

  The inspector’s command meant that everyone was dead who was meant to be dead. I was put on a stretcher team, carrying away dead, bullet-riddled men and women painted with fishnet stockings and suspenders.

  * * * *

  Hours later, I awoke beneath a sky that blazed coldly with stars. For someone who had spent so much of his life studying the atmosphere, I knew surprisingly little about the constellations above it. In desert skies, the stars are so numerous and intense that even the most familiar patterns are almost overwhelmed. I sat up and looked around.

  Wardens patrolled the perimeter of the camp, no more than deeper shadows in the shadows and moonlight. The snores and wheezes from those nearby had stopped; in fact, all sounds had ceased.

  Suddenly he was before me, a figure now in the black robes of a climate penitent. None of the Wardens reacted to him; perhaps he had no warmth for their thermal imagers to detect. I thought that I should be visible, but nobody paid me attention, either. Perhaps I was not alive when he came to see me.

  “Don’t try to say I summoned you,” I snapped.

  “Still, it’s true.”

  “So now what?”

  “Come along.”

  His voice was cold and remote but free of malice. I fell in beside him as he glided along through the darkness. The audit space was just a long bench for the Auditors, a lectern for the speaker, a dais for the accused, and a desk for the clerk. Everyone else sat in the sand, in the nine great circles.

  “When does the audit begin?” I asked.

  “This is not an audit.”

  “Then why bring me here?”

  “You summoned me.”

  “I did not!”

  “Everyone summons me, eventually.”

  “Everyone? Then you really are Death?”

  “Close, but not quite.”

  “You keep denying it, but who else could you be?”

  “That is for you to discover. Yesterday, how would you have audited James Harrington?”

  “He was just a fool who never looked at his carbon footprint.”

  “But how would you have audited him—as an Auditor?”

  “Death, second class. He chose to ignore the plight of the wilderness he loved. He was like a doctor fondling a woman’s breast yet not telling her she has breast cancer.”

  “How would you audit him, this time as Jason Hall?”

  “Service, second class, in wilderness restoration.”

  “What of Ellen Farmer, the woman who followed him onto the tipping gallows?”

  “She built a fourteen-room house just to impress her friends and vacationed on cruise ships three months out of twelve. Guilty for aggravated display and squandering.”

  “How would you audit her—as Jason Hall?”

  “Service, first class. Half a lifetime of healing the ecosphere in return for half a lifetime of screwing it.”

  And so it went. Two hundred people had faced the audit that day and the day before, but only a dozen cases had been adjourned. Mine was one. The specter knew every name, and so did I. I have a very good memory.

  “Craig Brand?”

  “He built supertuned engines for street racers and was a paid-up Climate Denier. Guilty, death, second class.”

  “Jason Hall?”

  “Innocent.”

  “There is no such verdict. Pardoned is the most lenient.”

  “Then pardoned.”

  “You are less severe than the Retributor. Only three deaths in two hundred sentences. Do you feel compassion for them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Most were fools, not monsters.”

  “The fool kills just as dead as the monster.”

  “True, but some fools are harmless. The audit has a perfect record; it’s always death or mines for tippers, yet some deserve service, branding, or even pardoning.”

  “Many audits are adjourned. Yours was.”

  “And I’m eighty. I will probably die in the borderline backlog.”

  “Would you abolish the World Audit?”

  “No. The Audit is all we have, but it must be seen to be fair; otherwise, the Auditors will look like a pack of Nazis.”

  “The Auditors think of themselves like the judges in the Nuremberg trials.”

  “Perhaps, but to them, everyone born before 2000 is an eco-Nazi, guilty of climate crimes.”

  Suddenly, I was alone. I felt no chill on the night air, and when I put my hand up, I could see stars through it. I would have been convinced that I was dead, yet I knew I would awake alive.

  * * * *

  To everyone’s surprise, I was called back to the audit the following morning. The Retributor said that I had commuted on a motorcycle when I could have used public transport. I quoted well-memorized figures proving that my motorcycle had a smaller carbon footprint per passenger mile than the public transport then available. Again, my audit was adjourned.

  I was put on cart duty after the morning audits. Thirty of us were harnessed to a stripped-out SUV and made to draw it out to the north greenhouse fields. Death, first class, was performed here. Sector five was where we were going, but we had to pass through other sectors first. In sector two, they were performing executions.

  Our team moved slowly. Ahead of us I saw a strong, fit-looking man of about fifty being forced to the ground by the Wardens. With the skill of much practice, they spread-eagled him on his back and chained him to a wooden frame in the shape of an X. All the while, he was shouting about his rights, demanding a retrial, telling the Wardens he had right of appeal, and calling for a proper lawyer.

  “Your turn will come. You’ll pay for this!” he screamed. “This is a concentration camp.”

  “You helped run the concentration camp called the global economy,” replied a Warden. “You kept Mother Earth in there until she was a living skeleton.”

  They took two large glass panels and clamped them over him in a tent shape. We were level with them as they fitted a pair of glass triangles over the ends.

  A greenhouse. For causing the greenhouse effect, death by greenhouse. I
t was a hideous way to die, roasted slowly in a glass oven. The unlucky ones lasted to evening, got the respite of night, then had to face a second day. As we trudged on, straining at our harnesses, we passed the glass tents that had already been set up. There were muffled screams and groans from these, but most were already weakening.

  The next sector was at stage two of the greenhouse cycle. Here, teams of borderlines were slicing open the skin of the recently executed so that the sun could evaporate their bodily fluids. We moved on through the sector where bodies were drying out within their little glass tents. In sector five, the greenhouses were being dismantled and bodies stacked in neat piles. We stopped. Service borderlines loaded the desiccated dead into our SUV. The bodies were quite stiff, as if carved out of wood.

  As we returned with our load, people began talking at last.

  “Remember the old days?” said the man beside me.

  “I’ve only been here two days.”

  “Yeah? In that case, welcome to hell. I been here since the start. I got service, second class.”

  “I didn’t think tippers ever got off, except to be put in the backlog as a borderline.”

  “I’m a victim.”

  “Ah.”

  “Fifteen years to go.”

  “Fifteen years of this?” I said, shaking my head.

  “It’s job security. I’ll be fifty when I’m released. Then I’m back to work.”

  “Back to work. What was your work?”

  “Landscape gardening.”

  “And for that you got service, second class?”

  “I drove a big off-roader. I got it free, so it seemed like a good deal back in twenty-nineteen.”

  “That was after the tipping year. Bad time to be seen in an off-roader.”

  “Yeah, but I was nineteen and stupid. The audit found that all my work was urban, so I should have driven a fuel-efficient utility.”

  “You were lucky. Not many people who drove off-roaders get less than death.”

  “I never drove mine recreationally; that was the trick. I love growing things, so gardening was all I ever did. Big demand for people who grow things now, so I got a future.”

  We trudged along in silence for a while. He had his sentence; mine was not decided. Because I was guilty until proven worthy of pardoning, I had to do service.