Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  As a chastened Gustafson headed the truck back toward the military base on the outskirts of the city, she leaned forward to have a look at the sky through the windshield. Overcast, as always. The usual tepid rain on tap for the evening. Other than that, the weather report was promising. Temperatures in the low nineties and humidity down to seventy-five percent. Things were a lot worse the closer one got to the now nearly uninhabitable tropics, she knew. The tech journals were full of reports of new threats emerging from the depths of the impenetrable Amazon. Ten-foot carnivorous beetles. Deadlier scorpions. Six-inch-long fire ants . . .

  Home and business owners might fret over giant centipedes and spiders with three-foot leg spans, but as a military-trained specialist, she worried far more about the ants. All ants. Not because they were prolific and not because they could bite and sting, but because they cooperated. Cooperation could lead to bigger problems than any sting. In terms of sheer numbers, the ants had always been the most successful species on the planet. Let them acquire a little of the always-paranoid Gustafson’s hypothetical intelligence to go with their new size and . . .

  She checked the weather a last time. Atmospheric oxygen was up to forty-one percent, give or take a few decimals. It was continuing its steady rise, as it had over the preceding decades. How big would the bugs get if it reached forty-five percent? Or fifty? How would the fire brigades cope with the increasingly ferocious firestorms that had made wooden building construction a relic of the past?

  Rolling down her window, she removed her mask and stuck her head outside, into the lugubrious wind. Gustafson gave her a look but said nothing and stayed with his driving. Overhead and unseen, another giant dragonfly dropped lower, sized up the potential prey, and shot away. A human was still too big for it to take down. But if its kind kept growing . . .

  Lissa inhaled deeply of the thick, moist air. It filled her lungs, the oxygen boost reinvigorating her after the confrontation in the basement. Drink of it too much and she would start feeling giddy. There were benefits to the increased oxygen concentration. Athletes, at least while performing in air-conditioned venues, had accomplished remarkable feats. Humanity was adapting to the changed climate. It had always done so. It would continue to do so. And in a radically changed North America, at least, the military would ensure that it would be able to do so.

  As an exterminator noncom charged with keeping her city safe, her only fear was that something else just might be adapting a little faster.

  * * *

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALAN DEAN FOSTER is the bestselling author of more than a hundred and twenty novels, and is perhaps most famous for his Commonwealth series, which began in 1971 with the novel The Tar-Aiym Krang. His most recent series is the transhumanism trilogy The Tipping Point. Foster’s work has been translated into more than fifty languages and has won awards in Spain and Russia in addition to the U.S. He is also well-known for his film novelizations, the most recent of which is Star Trek Into Darkness. He is currently at work on several new novels and film projects.

  TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  From 40 Signs of Rain

  The light under the thunderheads had gone dim. Cloud bottoms were black, and splotches like dropped water balloons starred the sidewalk pavement. Charlie started hurrying and got to Phil’s office just ahead of a downpour.

  He looked back out through the glass doors and watched the rain hammer down the length of the Mall. The skies had really opened. Raindrops remained large in the air, as if hail the size of baseballs had coalesced in the thunderheads and then somehow been melted back to rain again before reaching the ground.

  Charlie watched the spectacle for a while, then went upstairs. There he found out from Evelyn that Phil’s flight in had been delayed, and that he might be driving back from Richmond instead.

  Charlie sighed. No conferring with Phil today.

  He read reports instead, went down to clear his mailbox. Evelyn’s office window faced south, with the Capitol looming to the left, and across the Mall the Air and Space Museum. In the rainy light the big buildings took on an eerie cast, like the cottages of giants.

  Then it was past noon, and Charlie was hungry. The rain seemed to have eased a bit since its first impact, so he went out to get a sandwich at the Iranian deli on C Street, grabbing an umbrella at the door.

  Outside, it was raining steadily but lightly. The streets were deserted. Many intersections had flooded to the curbs, and in a few places well over the curbs, onto the sidewalks.

  Inside the deli, the grill was sizzling, but the place was almost empty. Two cooks and the cashier were standing under a TV that hung from a ceiling corner, watching the news. When they recognized Charlie, they went back to looking at the TV. The characteristic smell of basmati rice enfolded him.

  “Big storm coming,” the cashier said. “Ready to order?”

  “Yeah, thanks. I’ll have the usual, pastrami sandwich on rye.”

  “Flood too,” one of the cooks added.

  “Oh, yeah?” Charlie replied. “What, more than usual?”

  The cashier nodded, still looking at the TV. “Two storms and high tide. Upstream, downstream, and middle.”

  “Oh, my.”

  Charlie wondered what it would mean. He stood watching the TV with the rest of them. Satellite photos showed a huge sheet of white pouring across New York and Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, the tropical storm was spinning past Bermuda. It looked like another perfect storm might be brewing. Not that it took a perfect storm these days to make the mid-Atlantic states seem like a literal name, geographically speaking. A far-less-than-perfect storm could do it. The TV spoke of eleven-year tide cycles, of the strongest El Niño ever recorded. “It’s a fourteen thousand square mile watershed,” the TV said.

  “It’s gonna get wet,” Charlie observed.

  The Iranians nodded silently. Five years earlier, they would probably have been closing the deli, but this was the fourth perfect storm in the last three years, and like everyone else, they were getting jaded. It was Peter crying wolf at this point, even though the previous three storms had all been major disasters at the time, at least in some places. But never in DC. Now people just made sure their supplies and equipment were okay and then went about their business, umbrella and phone in hand. Charlie was no different, he realized; here he was, getting a sandwich and going back to work. It seemed the best way to deal with it.

  The Iranians finished his order, all the while watching the TV images: flooding fields, apparently in the upper Potomac watershed.

  “Three meters,” the cashier said as she gave him his change, but Charlie wasn’t sure what she meant. The cook chopped Charlie’s wrapped sandwich in half, put it in a bag. “First one is worst one.”

  Charlie took it and hurried back through the darkening streets. He passed an occasional lit window occupied by people working at computer terminals, looking like figures in a Hopper painting.

  Now it began to rain hard again, and the wind was roaring in the trees and hooting around the building corners. The curiously low-angle nature of DC made big patches of lowering clouds visible through the rain.

  Charlie stopped at a street corner and looked around. His skin was on fire. Things looked too wet and underlit to be real; it looked liked stage lighting for some moment of ominous portent. Once again, he felt that he had crossed over into a space where the real world had taken on all the qualities of a dream, being just as glossy and surreal, just as stuffed to a dark sheen with ungraspable meaning. Sometimes, just being outdoors in bad weather was all it took.

  * * * *

  Back in the office, he settled at his desk and ate while looking over his list of things to do. The sandwich was good. The coffee from the office’s coffee machine was bad. He wrote a memo for Phil, urging him to follow up on the elements of the bill that seemed to be dropping into cracks.

  His phone rang and he jumped a foot.

  “Hello!”

  �
�Charlie! Are you all right?”

  “Hi, babe; yeah, you just startled me.”

  “Sorry, oh, good. I was worried, I heard on the news that downtown is flooding, the Mall is flooding.”

  “The what?”

  “Are you at the office?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is anyone else there with you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are they just sitting there working?”

  Charlie peered out of his carrel door to look. In fact, his floor sounded empty. It sounded as if everyone was gathered down in Evelyn’s office.

  “I’ll go check and call you back,” he said to Anna.

  “Okay, call me when you find out what’s happening!”

  “Okay. Call you back in a second.”

  He went into Evelyn’s office and saw people jammed around the south window or in front of a TV set on a desk.

  “Look at this,” Andrea said to him, gesturing at the TV screen.

  “Is that our door camera?” Charlie exclaimed, recognizing the view down Constitution. “That’s our door camera!”

  “That’s right.”

  “My God!”

  Charlie went to the window and stood on his tiptoes to see past people. The Mall was covered by water. The streets beyond were flooded. Constitution Avenue was floored by water that looked to be at least two feet deep, maybe deeper.

  “Incredible, isn’t it.”

  “Shit!”

  “Look at that.”

  “Will you look at that!”

  “Why didn’t you guys call me?” Charlie cried, shocked by the view.

  “Forgot you were here,” someone said. “You’re never here.”

  Andrea added, “It just came up in the last half hour. It happened all at once, it seemed like. I was watching.” Her voice quivered. “It was like a hard downburst, and the raindrops didn’t have anywhere to go, they were splashing into a big puddle everywhere, and then it was there, what you see.”

  “A big puddle everywhere.”

  Constitution looked like the Grand Canal in Venice. Beyond it the Mall was like a rain-beaten lake. Water sheeted equally over streets, sidewalks, and lawns. Charlie recalled the shock he had felt many years before, leaving the Venice train station and seeing water right there outside the door. A city floored with water. Here it was quite shallow, of course. But the front steps of all the buildings came down into an expanse of brown water, and the water was all at one level, as with any other lake or sea. Brown-blue, blue-brown, brown, gray, dirty white—drab urban tints all. The rain pocked it into an infinity of rings and bounding droplets, and gusts of wind tore cats’ paws across it.

  Charlie maneuvered closer to the window as people milled around. It seemed to him that the water in the distance was flowing gently toward them; for a moment, it looked (and even felt) as if their building had cast anchor and was steaming westward. Charlie felt a lurch in his stomach, put his hand to the windowsill to keep his balance.

  “Shit, I should get home,” he said.

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “We’ve been advised to stay put,” Evelyn said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. I mean, take a look. It could be dangerous out there right now. That’s nothing to mess with—look at that!” A little electric car floated or rather was dragged down the street, already tipped on its side. “You could get knocked off your feet.”

  Charlie wasn’t quite convinced, but he didn’t want to argue. The water was definitely a couple of feet deep, and the rain was shattering its surface. If nothing else, it was too weird to go out.

  “How extensive is it?” he asked.

  Evelyn switched to a local news channel, where a very cheerful woman was saying that a big tidal surge had been predicted, because the tides were at the height of an eleven-year cycle. She went on to say that this tide was cresting higher than it would have normally because Tropical Storm Sandy’s surge was now pushing up Chesapeake Bay. The combined tidal and storm surges were moving up the Potomac toward Washington, losing height and momentum along the way but meanwhile impeding the outflow of the river like a kind of moving dam. The Potomac, which had a watershed of “fourteen thousand square miles,” as Charlie had heard in the Iranian deli—dammed. A watershed experiencing record-shattering rainfall. In the last four hours, ten inches of rain had fallen in parts of the watershed. Now all that water was pouring downstream and encountering the tidal bore, right in the metropolitan area. The four inches of rain that had fallen on Washington during the midday squall, while spectacular in itself, had only added to the larger problem, which was that there was nowhere for any of the water to go. All this the reporter explained with a happy smile.

  Outside, the rain was falling no more violently than during many a summer shower. But it was coming down steadily and striking water when it hit.

  “The trains will be stopped for sure.”

  “What about the Metro? Oh, my God.”

  “I’ve gotta call home.”

  Several people said this at once, Charlie among them. People scattered to their desks and their phones. Charlie said, “Phone, get me Anna.”

  He got a quick reply: “All circuits are busy. Please try again.” This was a recording he hadn’t heard in many years, and it gave him a bad start. Of course it would happen at a moment like this: everyone would be trying to call someone, and towers and lines would be down. But what if it stayed like that for hours—or days? Or even longer? It was a sickening thought; he felt hot, and the itchiness blazed anew across his broken skin. He even felt dizzy, as if a limb were being threatened with immediate amputation—his sixth sense, in effect, which was his link to Anna. All of a sudden, he understood how completely he took his state of permanent communication with her for granted. They talked a dozen times a day, and he relied on those talks to know what he was doing, sometimes literally.

  Now he was cut off from her. Judging by the voices in the offices, no one’s connection was working. They regathered; had anyone gotten an open line? No. Was there an emergency phone system they could tap into? No.

  TV told them what was going on. One camera on top of the Washington Monument gave a splendid view of the extent of the flooding around the Mall, truly breathtaking. The Potomac had disappeared into the huge lake it was forming on the Mall, all the way up to the steps of the White House and the Capitol, both on little knolls, the Capitol’s higher. The entirety of Southwest was floored by water, though its big buildings stood clear; the broad valley of the Anacostia looked like a reservoir. It seemed the entire city south of Pennsylvania Avenue was a building-studded lake.

  And not just there. Flooding had filled Rock Creek to the top of its deep but narrow ravine, and now water was spilling over at the sharp bends the gorge took while dropping through the city to its confluence with the Potomac. Cameras on the bridges at M Street caught the awesome sight of the Creek roaring around its final turn west, upstream from M Street, and pouring over Francis Junior High School and straight south on 23rd Street into Foggy Bottom, where it joined the lake covering the Mall.

  Then on to a different channel, a different camera. The Watergate Building was indeed a curving water gate, like a remnant of a broken dam. The wave-tossed spate that indicated the Potomac looked as if it could knock the Watergate down. Likewise the Kennedy Center just south of it. The Lincoln Memorial, despite its pedestal mound, appeared to be flooded up to about Lincoln’s feet. Across the Potomac the water was going to inundate the lower levels of Arlington National Cemetery. Reagan Airport was completely gone. A voice on the TV said that ten million acre-feet of water were converging in the metropolitan area, and more rain was predicted.

  Out the window, Charlie saw that people were already taking to the streets around them in small water craft, despite the wind and drizzle. Kayaks, a waterski boat, canoes, rowboats. Then as the evening wore on, and the dim light left the air below the black clouds, the rain returned with its earlier intensity. It poured
down in a way that surely made it dangerous to be on the water. Most of the small craft had appeared to be occupied by men who it did not seem had any good reason to be out there. Out for a lark—thrillseekers, already!

  “It looks like Venice,” Andrea said, echoing Charlie’s earlier thought.

  “Wow. What a mess.”

  “Shit, I got here by Metro.”

  Charlie said, “Me too.”

  They thought about that for a while. Taxis weren’t going to be running.

  “I wonder how long it takes to walk home.”

  But then again, Rock Creek ran between the Mall and Bethesda.

  * * * *

  Sometime during that second night, the rain stopped, and though dawn of the third morning arrived sodden and gray, as the day progressed the clouds scattered, flying north at speed. By nine, the sun blazed down onto the flooded city between big puffball clouds. The air was breezy and unsettled.

  Helicopters and blimps had already taken to the air in great numbers. Now all the TV channels in the world could reveal the extent of the flood from on high, and they did. Much of downtown Washington DC remained awash. A giant shallow lake occupied precisely the most famous and public parts of the city; it looked like someone had decided to expand the Mall’s reflecting pool beyond all reason. The rivers and streams that converged on this larger tidal basin were still in spate, which kept the new lake topped up. In the washed sunlight the flat expanse of water was the color of caffè latte, with foam.

  Standing in the lake, of course, were hundreds of buildings-become-islands, and a few real islands, and even some freeway viaducts, now acting as bridges over the Anacostia Valley. The Potomac continued to pour through the western edge of the lake, overspilling its banks both upstream and down whenever lowlands flanked it. Its surface was studded with floating junk, which moved slower the farther downstream it got. Apparently, the ebb tides had only begun to allow this vast bolus of water out to sea.