“What’s the point?” Bruce felt whatever the next level below despair was. Everything was a joke, and he’d been deprived of the satisfaction of being the one to unveil the truth.
“Just show up, man. I promise it’ll be entertaining, if nothing else. What else are you going to do with the rest of your day, drive out to the beach and watch the seagulls dying?”
That was exactly what Bruce had planned to do after leaving DiZi. He shrugged. “Sure. I guess I’ll go get my toes stretched for a while.”
“You do that, Bruce. See you at three.”
* * * *
The drinks fairy must have gossiped about Bruce, because people were looking at him when he walked down to the main promenade. If there’d been a food court in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it would have looked like DiZi’s employee promenade. Bruce didn’t have his toes stretched. Instead, he ate two organic calzones to settle his stomach after the morning whiskey. The calzones made Bruce more nauseated. The people on Bruce’s marketing team waved at him in the cafeteria but didn’t approach the radioactive man.
Bruce was five minutes early for the strategy meeting, but he was still the last one to arrive, and everyone was staring at him. Bruce had never visited the Executive Meditation Hole, which also doubled as Jethro’s private movie theater. It was a big bunker under the DiZi main building with wall carpets and aromatherapy.
“Hey, Bruce.” Jethro was lotus-positioning on the dais at the front, where the movie screen would be. “Everybody, Bruce had a Crisis of Conscience today. Big props for Bruce, everybody.”
Everyone clapped. Bruce’s stomach started turning again, so he put his face in front of one of the aromatherapy nozzles and huffed calming scents. “So, Bruce has convinced me that it’s time for us to change our product strategy to focus on saving the planet.”
“You what?” Bruce pulled away from the soothing jasmine puff. “Are you completely delusional? Have you been surrounded by yes-men and media sycophants for so long that you’ve lost all sense of reality? It’s way, way too late to save the planet, man.” Everybody stared at Bruce until Jethro clapped again. Then everyone else clapped too.
“Bruce brings up a good point,” Jethro said. “The timetable is daunting, and we’re late. Partly because your Crisis of Conscience was months behind schedule, I feel constrained to point out. In any case, how would we go about making this audacious goal? Enterprise audacity being one of our corporate buzzsaws, of course. And for that, I’m going to turn it over to Zoe. Zoe?”
Jethro went and sat in the front row, and a big screen appeared up front. A skinny woman in a charcoal-gray suit got up and used her Robo-Bop to control a presentation.
“Thanks, Jethro,” the stick-figure woman, Zoe, said. She had perfect Amanda Seyfried hair. “It really comes down to what we call product versatility.” She clicked onto a picture of a nice midrange car with a swooshy device bolted to its roof. “Take the Car-Dingo, for example. What does it do?”
Various people raised their hands and offered slogans like, “It makes a Prius feel like a muscle car,” or “It awesomizes your ride.”
“Exactly!” Zoe smiled. She clicked the next slide over, and proprietary specs for the Car-Dingo came up. They were so proprietary, Bruce had never seen them. Bruce struggled to make sense of all those extra connections and loops going right into the engine. She pulled up similar specs for the ThunderNet tower, full of secret logic. Another screen showed all those nonsensical Robo-Bop menus, suddenly unlocking and making sense.
“Wait a minute.” Bruce was the only one standing up, besides Zoe. “So, you’re saying all these devices were dual-function all this time? And in all the hundreds of hellish product meetings I’ve sat through, you never once mentioned this fact?”
“Bruce,” Jethro said from the front row, “we’ve got a little thing at DiZi called the Culture of Listening. That means no interrupting the presentation until it’s finished, or no artisanal cookies for you.”
Bruce sighed and climbed over someone to find a seat and listened to another hour of corporate “buzzsaws.” At one point, he could have sworn Zoe said something about “end-user velocitization.” One thing Bruce did understand in the gathering haze: even though DiZi officially frowned on the cheap knockoffs of its products littering the Third World, the company had gone to great lengths to make sure those illicit copies used the exact same specs as the real items.
Just as Bruce was passing out from boredom, Jethro thanked Zoe and said, “Now let’s give Bruce the floor. Bruce, come on down.” Bruce had to thump his own legs to wake them up, and when he reached the front, he’d forgotten all the things he was dying to say an hour earlier. The top echelons of DiZi management stared, waiting for him to say something.
“Uh.” Bruce’s head hurt. “What do you want me to say?”
Jethro stood up next to Bruce and put an arm around him. “This is where your Crisis of Conscience comes in, Bruce dude. Let’s just say, as a thought embellishment, that we could fix it.” (“Thought embellishment” was one of Jethro’s buzzsaws.)
“Fix . . . it?”
Jethro handed Bruce a Robo-Bop with a pulsing Yes/No screen. “It’s all on you, buddy. You push yes, we can make a difference here. There’ll be some disruptions, people might be a mite inconvenienced, but we can ameliorate some of the problems. Push no, and things go on as they are. But bear in mind—if you push yes, you’re the one who has to explain to the people.”
Bruce still didn’t understand what he was saying yes to, but he hardly cared. He jabbed the yes button with his right thumb. Jethro whooped and led him to the executive elevator so they could watch the fun from the roof.
“It should be almost instantaneous,” Jethro said over his shoulder as he hustled into the lift. “Thanks to our patented ‘snaggletooth’ technology that makes all our products talk to each other. It’ll travel around the world like a wave. It’s part of our enterprise philosophy of Why Not Now.”
The elevator lurched upward, and in moments, they had reached the roof. “It’s starting,” Jethro said. He pointed to the nearest ThunderNet tower. The sleek lid was opening up like petals, until the top resembled a solar dish. And a strange haze was gathering over the top of it.
“This technology has been around for years, but everybody said it was too expensive to deploy on a widespread basis,” Jethro said with a wink. “In a nutshell, the tops of the towers contain a photocatalyst material, which turns the CO2 and water in the atmosphere into methane and oxygen. The methane gets stored and used as an extra power source. The tower is also spraying an amine solution into the air that captures more CO2 via a proprietary chemical reaction. That’s why the ThunderNets had to be so pricey.”
Just then, Bruce felt a vibration from his own Robo-Bop. He looked down and was startled to see a detailed audit of Bruce’s personal carbon footprint—including everything he’d done to waste energy in the past five years.
“And hey, look at the parking lot,” Jethro said. All the Car-Dingos were reconfiguring themselves, snaking new connections into the car engines. “We’re getting most of those vehicles as close to zero emissions as possible, using amines that capture the cars’ CO2. You can use the waste heat from the engine to regenerate the amines.” But the real gain would come from the car’s GPS, which would start nudging people to carpool whenever another Car-Dingo user was going to the same destination, using a “packet-switching” model to optimize everyone’s commute for greenness. Refuse to carpool, and your car might start developing engine trouble—and the Car-Dingos, Bruce knew, were almost impossible to remove.
As for the Crados? Jethro explained how they were already hacking into every appliance in people’s homes, to make them energy-efficient whether people wanted them to be or not.
Zoe was standing at Bruce’s elbow. “It’s too late to stop the trend or even reverse all the effects,” she said over the din of the ThunderNet towers. “But we can slow it drastically, and our most optimistic projections show major improvements in the
medium term.”
“So, all this time—all this hellish time—you had the means to make a difference, and you just . . . sat on it?” Bruce said. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
“We wanted to wait until we had full product penetration.” Jethro had to raise his voice now; the ThunderNet towers were actually thundering for the first time ever. “And we needed people to be ready. If we had just come out and told the truth about what our products actually did, people would rather die than buy them. Even after Manhattan and Florida. We couldn’t give them away. But if we claimed to be making overpriced, wasteful pieces of crap that destroy the environment? Then everybody would need to own two of them.”
“So, my crisis of conscience—” Bruce could only finish that sentence by wheeling his arms.
“We figured the day when you no longer gave a shit about your own future would be the day when people might accept this,” Jethro said, patting Bruce on the back like a father, even though he was younger.
“Well, thanks for the mind games.” Bruce had to shout now. “I’m going to go explore something I call my culture of drunkenness.”
“You can’t leave, Bruce,” Jethro yelled in his ear. “This is going to be a major disruption, everyone’s gadgets going nuts at once. There will be violence and wholesale destruction of public property. There will be chainsaw rampages. There may even be Twitter snark. We need you to be out in front on this, explaining it to the people.”
Bruce looked out at the dusk, red-and-black clouds churning as millions of ThunderNet towers blasted them with scrubber beams. Even over that racket, the chorus of car horns and shouts as people’s Car-Dingos suddenly had minds of their own started to ring from the highway. Bruce turned and looked into the gleam of his boss’s schoolmaster specs. “Fuck you, man,” he said. Followed a moment later by “I’ll do it.”
“We knew we could count on you.” Jethro turned to the half-dozen or so executives cluttering the roof deck behind him. “Big hand for Bruce, everybody.” Bruce waited until they were done clapping, then leaned over the railing and puked his guts out.
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS’s story “Six Months Three Days” won a Hugo Award and was shortlisted for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Tor.com, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, The End Is Nigh, and elsewhere. She’s the managing editor of io9.com and her first novel, All the Birds in the Sky, is forthcoming in early 2016. More info at charliejane.net.
THE SMOG SOCIETY
CHEN QIUFAN
TRANSLATED BY CARMEN YILING YAN AND KEN LIU
Lao Sun lived on the seventeenth floor facing the open street, nothing between him and the sky. If he woke in the morning to darkness, it was the smog’s doing for sure.
Through the murky air outside the window, he had to squint to see the tall buildings silhouetted against the yellow-gray background like a sandy-colored relief print. The cars on the road all had their high beams on and their horns blaring, crammed one against the other at the intersection into one big mess. You couldn’t tell where heaven and earth met, and you couldn’t tell apart the people, either. Passels of pedestrians, dusty-faced under filter masks that made them look like pig-faced monstrosities, walked past the jammed cars.
Lao Sun washed, dressed, and got his kit. Before he left, he made sure to give the picture frame on the table a wipe.
He greeted the elevator girl, and the girl greeted him back behind a layer of mesh gauze. “It’s twelve degrees Celsius today with the relative humidity at sixty-four percent. Visibility is less than two kilometers, and the Air Quality Index of six-eighty indicates severe smog. Long-distance travelers, please be careful. Young children, the elderly, and those with respiratory illnesses, please remain indoors . . .”
Lao Sun smiled, put on his mask, and stepped out of the elevator.
On his light electric bike, he nimbly wove through the gaps between the crawling traffic. There were plenty of children banging on car windows, hawking newspapers and periodicals, but no cleaners. This smog was there to stay for another couple of weeks. No point in cleaning cars now.
Through the goggles on his mask, he could just barely see the road for a couple dozen meters ahead. It was as if someone was standing above the city, pouring dust down endlessly. The sky was darker than the ground, dirty and sticky. Even with the filter mask, you felt as if the smog could worm its way through everything, through dozens of layers of polymer nanomaterial filter membrane and into your nostrils, your pores, your alveoli, your blood vessels, and swim all over your body from there; stuff your chest full until you couldn’t breathe; and turn your brain into a drum of concrete too thick to stir or spin.
People were like parasites burrowed into the smog.
* * * *
On these occasions, Lao Sun always thought of old times with his wife.
“Oh, Lao Sun, can’t you drive slower? There’s no rush.”
“Mm.”
“Lao Sun, stop at that store ahead; I’ll buy a bottle of water for you.”
“Mm.”
“Lao Sun, why aren’t you saying anything? How about I sing you a song? You used to like singing.”
“Mm.”
Lao Sun parked his bike at the roadside and entered the fancy big skyscraper with all the fancily dressed men and women going in and out. They were all wearing filter masks, saving them the trouble of greeting him. The building manager was polite to him, though. He told him one of the public elevators was broken, so the others were crowded. He should use the freight elevator in the back, although it meant climbing a few more floors.
Lao Sun smiled and said it was fine, although the manager couldn’t see that, of course.
He took the freight elevator to the twenty-eighth floor, then climbed the stairs to the open platform on the top floor. It made him pant and puff a little, but no matter. From the top of the skyscraper, he could better see the smog; the aerosolized particles that engulfed the city hung thick like protoplasm, motionless.
Lao Sun began to unpack his bag, taking out and assembling each intricate scientific instrument. He wasn’t clear on how they worked, but he knew how to use them to record temperature, pressure, humidity, visibility, particulate matter density, and so on. The devices were spruced-up versions of civilian-use models, less precise but much more portable.
He glanced northwest. He should have been seeing grand palaces and shining white pagodas, but today, there was only the same murk as everywhere else.
He remembered how it looked in the fall, the red leaves dyeing the hillsides layer by layer, trimming the clear blue sky. The white towers and the falling leaves all reflected in the lake’s emerald surface: a tranquil airiness through which the cooing of pigeons drifted.
On that day, the two of them had sat in a boat at the center of the lake, rowing slow circles. The oars drew ripples that washed aside the fallen leaves.
Golden sunlight spilled on the water, glittering. She was covered in golden light too.
“A rare thing, to have a peaceful day like this. Sun, sing something!”
“Haven’t sung in a long time.”
“I remember we went rowing here twenty years ago. A whole twenty years ago.”
“That’s right, Lao Li’s son is almost the age we’d been.”
“ . . . ”
“I—I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know what you meant.”
“I really didn’t.”
“This is pointless.”
“All right, if it’s boring, we’ll go back.”
“He would have been ten by now.”
“Didn’t you say not to talk about this?”
“Sun, I still want to hear you sing.”
“Forget it; let’s go back.”
At the designated time, Lao Sun recorded the data, and then started packing up. He knew that at that moment, t
here were more than a hundred individuals like him in each and every corner of this city, doing the same thing. They belonged to a civilian environmental organization, officially registered as the “Municipal Smog Research and Prevention Society,” unofficially known by the catchier moniker of “The Smog Society.” Their logo was a yellow window with a sponge wiping out a patch of cerulean blue.
The Smog Society wasn’t as radical as some green groups, but it wasn’t the government’s cheering squad, either. Its official status was unclear, its work low-key, its membership slowly and steadily growing. They sometimes appeared in the media, but only quietly and cautiously.
All groups had their own worldview and style, but not all viewpoints were acceptable.
The Smog Society only espoused what was acceptable: Aside from the biological dangers, smog also caused psychological harm—easily overlooked, but with far greater and longer-lasting consequences.
* * * *
Lao Sun hurried to the next sampling location. On his way, he saw some people with bare faces—manual laborers unable to afford masks. Their skin was much dimmer and grayer than the sky, suffused with an inky gleam like coarse sandpaper. They were constructing a completely enclosed skywalk to connect the whole of the central economic district together seamlessly so people wouldn’t have to go outside.
Lao Sun knew that antioxidant facial films were all the rage right now. Many women would apply a thirty-nanometer-thick layer of imported facial spray before putting on their masks. It blocked UV radiation and toxins, and would naturally shed with the skin. Of course, not everyone had a face precious enough.
If the facial spray had appeared a few years earlier, he would have bought it for his wife for sure. Just a few years earlier.
He shook his head. It felt as if his old wife was once again sitting behind him.
“Ai, Lao Sun, do you think the weather will get better tomorrow?”
“Mm.”
“This awful weather makes me feel all stifled—like there’s a rope choking me, getting tighter bit by bit.”
Loosed Upon the World Page 44