Dr. Çok smiles reassuringly. “We have a graduate student who’s addressing each report submitted by the public.”
“But my score doesn’t go up.”
“We appreciate your participation. To be clear, you’re upset that you haven’t won?”
Yes. “No. I’m upset because the game is rigged to reward conservative thinking.”
“The game is designed to reduce uncertainty in climate change projections. This is what the funding agencies want and the policymakers demand. A single number, or as close as we can give them. Not a wide range that governments can use to argue for inaction. Given the opportunity, they would happily bank on the slim chance that the low estimate is the right one, and leave later generations in the lurch.”
“Precise doesn’t mean accurate.”
Patience has fled Dr. Çok’s voice. “I am well aware of the distinction,” she says. “Fix Your Climate Model! isn’t just a game, and winning is not just about one individual. I’m sorry if that offends your aesthetics. For decades, we’ve struggled to get a handle on cloud variability, and we’re actually making progress now.”
“But you’re preconditioning to predict the answer you want,” Esme says.
“It’s not about what I want.” Dr. Çok makes an arrested motion, as if to pinch the bridge of her nose. “I have a meeting to attend. Good day.”
Esme lounges in her chair and steeples her fingers. The image of Dr. Derya Çok lingers on her screen until she keystrokes out of the program.
Should have gone with the avatar, she thinks as she spins in a circle.
* * * *
Esme needs a hacker.
She doesn’t have the computer skills to do what needs doing, and she doesn’t have the people skills to convince a random person (or project scientist) to help. Which leaves family. Her father’s out of the question. She logs into her private chat room and pings Jacob.
“Hey, bro,” she says when his avatar materializes. “I need a hacker.”
He mills around the sectional sofa and quirks an eyebrow at the media screen that covers most of one wall. “And you’re telling me this why?”
“More specifically, I need your husband.”
“I need my husband too,” he says. “Too bad you made a scene at our wedding.”
She checks to make sure she didn’t actually call her father. “You don’t really care about that, do you? Toasts are lame. Better that I talked too little—”
“Try not at all.”
“—than too much. I saved you the embarrassment.”
“That’s really not how I . . .” He sighs. “When are you going to stop playing games and grow up, Esme?”
“What do you care how I spend my time, anyway? You have your pretty apartment and your pretty husband. Isn’t that enough to keep you occupied?”
“It would be, if not for Dad,” he says. “I’m sick of being the responsible heir. Take some of the fucking pressure off me for once.”
“Reality is one big game to Dad. At least I’m honest about what I’m doing.”
An orange tabby leans into Jacob’s leg. Jacob starts, then bends over to scratch the cat behind its ears. The beast starts to purr. Esme programmed it to put her guests at ease.
Esme relents. “If you help me with this,” she says, “I’ll do my best to make up with Dad.”
“Deal. If Manuel agrees, of course.”
“I agree,” a cheery voice calls, picked up by the mic in Jacob’s headset.
“You had us on speaker?” Esme says in disgust.
“Just grant Manuel access.” Jacob logs off, and Manuel appears a moment later.
“So, I’m pretty?” Manuel settles on the sofa, and the cat jumps into his lap.
“Sure, but can you code?”
They share a grin, and Manuel cracks his knuckles.
“Do you know where the code repository is?” He pulls up a window in the space in front of him and leaves it visible to her.
“The lab in New Jersey.”
“Give me the address. Let me run a pentest on it.” His hands flex in a flurry of keystrokes, and a moment later, he groans. “This is a government computer.”
“Technically, it’s a government-funded computer. Nonessential, non-defense.”
“I don’t think they see the distinction.”
Esme thinks of Dr. Çok. “They never do.”
Manuel lowers his voice. “Do you know any staff account usernames?”
Esme’s gaze strays to the open window of Fix Your Climate Model! hidden from Manuel’s view. The scoreboard taunts her. “Try dc2100.”
“I’ll attempt to brute-force the password first. Give me a minute.”
“Does my father know you can do this?” Esme says.
“He hired me.”
Smart. Sense of humor. Maybe Jacob landed a good one after all.
She leaves off pondering her brother’s love life when Manuel’s hands still. “I have write access. Tell me how you want the game to work.”
Esme explains about the convergence. She gets pissed off all over again thinking about it.
“So they’re weighting entries more heavily that fall within some preferred range? And then the models are tuned to those outputs and provide more of the same?” Manuel asks.
“Exactly that,” Esme says, grateful he grasps the problem immediately. “I don’t want to break the physics of the models. I just want them to sample the full range of variability.”
“I think I can reset the thresholds.”
He makes it sound so easy. Esme shakes her hands nervously, and her stomach grumbles. “How long is this going to take?”
“Don’t know,” he says without looking away from the window.
“Do you mind if I grab something to eat?”
Manuel gives a distracted nod and Esme puts her avatar on standby. As she slips out of VR, she plucks her sweat-soaked shirt away from her skin and fans herself. It’s only three o’clock but she grabs a box of noodle soup and switches on the hotplate. By the time Manuel resurfaces, she’s licked the bowl clean.
“I uploaded the patch,” he says. “You know network security might question dc2100 and clue in to the backdoor?”
Esme restarts Fix Your Climate Model! “As long as they don’t catch it till Monday. I have a game to win.”
Manuel glances to the side, presumably to a hidden display. “Jacob sent me some articles. . . . This game has sparked a wave of climate mitigation policies. It’s a good thing they’re doing,” he says softly. “You’re not out to destroy the world, are you?”
Esme recalls what Dr. Derya Çok said. How the policymakers want an answer, and it doesn’t so much matter if the answer is right or wrong as long as they’re seen trying to do something. It’s not good enough.
“I’m fixing the world.”
* * * *
She’s nervous to resume the game. What if Manuel’s patch didn’t fix the problem? What if an overzealous network tech was paying attention and undid the changes to the source code? Esme gives her display the side eye as she selects the first simulation.
It’s a boring one. She swipes through the output until she finds something worth flagging.
Chills run along her spine, and she knows Manuel’s hack worked.
The image spread before her is a surface map, which is her favorite, because continents. Most of the simulations in the game focus on cloudy skies up in the troposphere, but the problem with big data—the reason the global community of scientists crowdsourced gamers to troll through it in the first place—is that there’s too much of it and it’s too complex to winnow automatically. And occasionally, she runs across surface maps.
It takes her a moment to identify what’s different about this particular simulation, a sweep of blues across the whole northeast quadrant of North America. Esme squints at the color bar, then finds New Jersey for reference. It’s colder. By about five degrees C, and the temperature gradient between the equator and pole is out of whack. From
hours spent playing Fix Your Climate Model!, Esme knows the warming pattern has a profound effect on the circulation of the atmosphere, the distribution of clouds, the intensity of rain. The boundaries of deserts.
She stares at the display. With the original thresholds back in place, this find will send her to the top of the scoreboard, but so what? Who does that help other than her own ego? Not the homeless encampments up and down the Eastern seaboard.
Esme’s hand flexes in an aborted keystroke. If only she had a way to pull up the matching precipitation file, or the emissions cocktail, or the daily extremes. She wants access beyond that doled out by the game, the kind of access that no one will grant a gamer. She also has more resources than most, much as she hates to admit it.
Dr. Derya Çok was right about one thing. Fixing the game world is the lesser goal. Esme scares herself, a little, even contemplating manipulating the actual climate. Engineering hurdles don’t daunt her but unintended consequences do. As does the ethical dilemma of optimizing one region’s climate at the expense of another’s, and what does “optimize” even mean? But it would be irresponsible not to study these cases. If some models are simulating more amenable climates, she wants to know why and if that can be replicated in the real world.
Esme sends a chat request to her father. If her family wants her back in the fold, they’ll have to take her on her own terms.
Her father is quiet for a long moment after she makes her proposition. “How do I know you won’t bail on this project, too?”
“I didn’t leave last time,” Esme says, encouraged that he hasn’t said no outright. “You pushed me out.”
“I expected you to want to learn the ropes from me, not try to take over.”
Esme shrugs. “I had my own ideas. I have my own ideas.”
She finishes the conversation with her father and turns her attention back to Fix Your Climate Model! Into the comment box, she types:
Dear Derya/dc2100,
I know you’ll tell me it’s way more complex than I realize. That this one (awesome) simulation spit out by one climate model doesn’t represent a panacea. That’s okay.
But if there’s one outlier, there can be another. It’s beautiful, what’s out here in the fringe.
I’m involved in a new geoengineering working group at Huybers-Smith, and we could use your expertise. I’ve already okayed your consulting fees.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if you seeded that simulation for someone to find. Either way, I’m pretty sure shilling your precisely accurate predictions to the government gets old, though I’ve done what I can to alleviate that. Besides, where’s the fun if you’re always in first place?
Esme Huybers-Smith
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NICOLE FELDRINGER holds a PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Washington and a Master’s degree in Geological Sciences. In 2011, she attended the Viable Paradise Writer’s Workshop, and her first published short story appeared in the Sword & Laser Anthology. She currently lives in Los Angeles where she is a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Find her on Twitter @nicofeld.
QUIET TOWN
JASON GURLEY
She was in the laundry room, bent over a basket of Benjamin’s muddy trousers and grass-stained T-shirts and particularly odorous socks, when a rap sounded on the screen door. She didn’t hear at first; she’d noticed, bent over there, a cluster of webbed, purplish veins just below her thigh, beside her knee. She didn’t like seeing them. They were like a slow-moving car wreck, those veins, a little darker, a little more severe each time she looked.
The front porch creaked, and the screen door rattled on its hinges as the knock came again.
Bev eased up to standing, still clutching a mound of laundry against her middle. She pinned the clothes with one hand and, with the other, looped the hair out of her eyes.
“Yeah?” she called over her shoulder.
“Me,” the answer came.
Bev took in a long breath, let it fill up her lungs, and raised her voice to a tone one might reasonably mistake for pleasant.
“Come on in, Ezze,” she hollered. “Coffee cake on the table, you want some.”
The screen door complained a bit, and not for the first time Bev made a mental note to oil the damn thing. But she knew she’d forget between now and the next time Ezze hobbled over. The door banged shut, followed by the scuff of the dining chair being pulled out, the expulsion of breath as Ezze dropped, too heavily, onto it. The chair wouldn’t take such abuse forever. Bev sometimes wished it would give out, and then felt guilty for thinking such things. Beneath her gravel and bluster, Ezze was just lonely.
Bev stuffed the clothes into the wash and spun the old machine up. It rocked agreeably, knocking with a small clatter into the dryer beside it. She leaned against the wall, just for a second, just to take a few breaths before going in to the kitchen. The back door was open, its own screen door shut. Gray light spilled through the window, leaked through the uneven gaps in the door jamb. She could see the pale, lumbering clouds that scraped the tops of the houses around hers. Most of those houses were empty now.
Just me and Benji, Bev thought.
From the kitchen, a smacking sound, the clink of a serving knife against the platter.
Just me and Benji and Ezze, Bev corrected.
She didn’t like the wind out there today. The Aparicios had left laundry on the line when they moved out—in a hurry, like everybody these past few weeks—and almost all of it was scattered around the neighborhood now, T-shirts and pantyhose and thermal underwear caught up in bare tree branches, soaked and plastered in gutters. Almost all of it, except for the heavy quilt, heavier now from all the rain, that dragged the laundry line low. The wind caught even that, lifted it nearly horizontal, a cheerful, soggy flag.
“A bit dry, dear,” came Ezze’s voice.
Bev turned away from the screen door. Cold air breathed around it, pushing through the gaps, and Bev shivered. But she left the inner door open for Benjamin and went into the kitchen.
“How’s the hip?” Bev asked, ignoring Ezze’s comment.
Ezze groaned theatrically. “I’d give anything for a new one,” she said. “But who’s got money for that?”
Her gray cane rested against the table beside her, tipped up on two of its four stubby feet. The rubber nubs on the end of each were damp and clumped with gray earth and grit. Bev sighed and picked up the cane and carried it onto the porch. Ezze didn’t say anything. Bev cranked the spigot attached to the house. It choked and sputtered, coughing up a weak stream. Bev rinsed the cane, then propped it against the house and went back inside.
Ezze regarded her irritably as Bev spritzed a paper towel with Windex, then wiped up the mud the cane had left behind.
“That’s for windows, dear,” Ezze said, watching Bev from beneath her glasses.
Bev didn’t say anything, just balled up the towel and dropped it into the wastebasket. The plastic lid swung twice, stopped.
“That’s why it’s called Windex,” Ezze went on. “Windows. Win-dex.” She wrinkled her slug of a nose and squinted up at the ceiling thoughtfully. “Don’t know where the ‘-ex’ part came from, though.”
Bev went into the kitchen, her hands searching for tasks. Perhaps if she appeared to be busy, Ezze would leave. But the countertops were tidy, the sink free of dishes.
“Your linoleum’s soft,” Ezze said. Bev looked up to see the woman bouncing lightly in the chair. Beneath her, the linoleum bowed. “It’s cheap stuff. I’ve got the same in my place.”
“Well, stop making it worse,” Bev said.
Ezze laughed as if this was funny. “You should see mine,” she said. “Sagging all over the place.”
I wonder why, Bev thought.
Ezze took another bite of coffee cake, then made a show of gagging on crumbs. “Water,” she croaked, putting one damp hand to the loose skin around her throat. “Water.”
B
ev filled a glass from the tap, then put it down in front of Ezze, who stared at it in horror, her stage act forgotten.
“Dear,” Ezze said. “You’re not drinking it, are you? There’s a warning. It’s all over the TV.”
“We don’t have a TV,” Bev said flatly. “What warning?”
“Contaminated supply or something. I don’t know.” Ezze waved her hand about. “Real problem is what I came over to tell you about, though. You’re not going to believe it.”
Bev took the glass of water away from Ezze, crossed back into the kitchen, and dumped it aggressively into the sink. Then the fight faded from her, just as quickly as it seemed to have risen up. Ezze didn’t mean any harm, she reminded herself again. She was old; she was alone. It wasn’t her fault, none of it. Can’t fight age. Can’t make people stay.
“What’s that?” Bev asked, brushing her hair back again. “Believe what?”
The back screen door banged open then, and Benji clattered into the kitchen like a runaway shopping cart. He was out of breath, his pants rolled up to his knees. He held his tennis shoes in one hand, but whatever he’d gotten into, he’d taken them off too late. They were caked with gray mud, and his legs were splashed with it.
Ezze looked at Benji, who gasped like a fish, trying to get some words out.
“He knows,” Ezze said. “Don’t you, boy.”
Bev looked wide-eyed at Ezze, then back at Benjamin. “Knows what? Benjamin, you’re filth—”
Benjamin shook his head and held up a hand, working on just breathing.
“Oh, fine,” Ezze said. “I’ll tell her.”
“Tell me what?” Bev asked. “What the hell is going on?”
Benjamin, cheeks strawberry-colored against his pale skin, said, “Water—water—”
Bev turned to fill her glass again, but Benji lurched forward and grabbed her hand.
“No,” he said, chest heaving. “Water’s— The water—”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Ezze said. “The water’s here, Bev.”
* * * *
What was it Gordy had said?
Loosed Upon the World Page 42