by Gregory Mone
Though it is very much the focus, the Vegas meeting is not all business and marketing. It is also a chance for Santa and his lieutenants to unwind and relax after a physically and mentally grinding Christmas. Food, drink, long sessions of blackjack, massages, seaweed wraps: Santa sponsors everything his lieutenants desire. Except lap dances. That would just be wrong.
12
Memory-Erasing Milk
BRAIN PODS, LIEUTENANT RECRUITMENT, AND THE PUBLISHERS CLEARING HOUSE SWEEPSTAKES
Toward the end of the conference, Santa meets with each of his lieutenants individually. They review the year’s performance over a cold glass of milk and some cookies, shake hands, and wish each other a happy new year. That is, unless the lieutenant’s term happens to be expiring. If this is the case, they rarely make it to the handshake. Typically the lieutenant drops to the floor halfway through his milk.
No, Santa doesn’t kill his ex-employees. He just knocks them out and erases their memories before returning them to their homes. These men do, after all, have lives to resume. The OC recruits them from all over the globe. Department-store Santas are always a good source; for all the deadbeats looking to make a few extra dollars off their extra pounds, there are some genuinely jolly, generous men working the malls. Santa also solicits doctors, entrenched public-school teachers, desk-bound newspaper reporters being pushed toward retirement because of the rise of Web-based journalism, leather goods salesmen, gnarly-knuckled locksmiths, and even the occasional information technology professional. The trade is irrelevant. What the OC looks for in his sub-Santas are qualities like joviality, generosity, and a high tolerance for repetition. What he wants is hardworking men who don’t mind monotony.
Naturally there are other requirements. Fluency in foreign languages is a bonus, since Santa is a global figure. An ideal Santa is also at least fifty-five years of age, with a decent head full of hair. It doesn’t necessarily have to be white: A little gene therapy turns the average new employee’s locks to the hue of fresh snow in a matter of months.
Originally, he limited his search to large men, but since the obesity problem has become so significant, and Santa himself has shrunk his waistline, he now prefers skinnier lieutenants.
Most important, prospective Santas need to be willing to be away from their families for several years, and potentially (on the off chance they tunnel through a wormhole to an alternate universe) forever. If the prospective Santa is married, his wife has to give her blessing, which isn’t an easy process, given that he can’t tell her where he’s going to be, or what he’s going to be doing, for the next few years. He can only assure her that there won’t be other women around and that he’ll come back rich and, in all likelihood, far more healthy. Often this argument isn’t sufficiently convincing; Santa has a much higher success rate with widowers and single men.
(You’d think he could get around the family problem by letting the employee work for him, then sending him back in time to a few minutes after he left for the North Pole in the first place, to carry on with life as usual. But the universe probably doesn’t allow this kind of trickery, for reasons discussed in chapter 21. Besides, this would be terribly traumatic in the cases when lieutenants don’t make it home.)
Now, how does Santa ensure that one of these lieutenants, after returning home, doesn’t write a tell-all memoir describing his experiences? He erases their memories.
The science of how Santa trashes the files in his lieutenants’ brains is a bit murky. It’s also impossible to determine whether Santa uses this technology on Mrs. Claus, though it would obviously be advantageous if he were to engage in some sort of extramarital activity, in Las Vegas or elsewhere, and be caught in the act by his loving wife. What we do know is that contemporary research suggests that memory erasure, in general, doesn’t look to be absolutely impossible. Yet it’s not going to be easy to figure out, either—at least, not for scientists without the benefits of time travel and alien benefactors.
The first problem is that memories don’t really have an address in the brain. You can’t just fry a specific set of neurons and erase your recollection of the time you wet yourself in front of the entire elementary school during the finals of the spelling bee. You can’t simply wipe out the bitterness of your victory, how what should have been one of your proudest days as a child turned out to be your worst. That experience doesn’t reside in a single tangle of neurons. Instead, scientists say that memories are stored diffusely, throughout the brain, and that they’re constantly being maintained and refreshed.
Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, the process of delivering repeated jolts to the entire brain, has the capacity to wipe out several months’ worth of mental files. Yet ECT doesn’t really meet Santa’s standards. For one, it’s not entirely reliable. With ECT, memory erasure isn’t a guarantee, so it’s possible that a particularly crafty lieutenant, claiming to have no recollection of his Christmas duties following a shock, could then head back home and spill it all out in People a week later. Or he could craft a lengthy memoir, if it’s the ex-journalist who emerges unaffected. Furthermore, if Santa or, in all likelihood, his robotic surgeons, had to repeatedly shock the lieutenants every few months, there’s a strong chance he’d toast a brain now and then.
A drug called Halcion, commonly prescribed to treat insomnia, can cause memory loss, but this is an uncommon side effect, so, again, it wouldn’t really be right for Santa. In both cases, ECT and Halcion, the technology has also been around for too long; Santa’s highly advanced alien benefactors surely would have developed something much more efficient, even if their brains don’t work quite like ours.
Today’s basic research hints at such possibilities. In a 2006 experiment with lab rats, NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux demonstrated that it’s possible to soften traumatic memories, and the associated stress, without jamming up the rest of the brain. Another project, spearheaded by scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, recently found that a peptide called ZIP can alter memories. ZIP halts the activity of an enzyme that some researchers think is key in maintaining long-term memories. In their study, which was coauthored by neuroscientist Todd Sacktor of the Downstate Medical Center of the State University of New York, the researchers trained lab rats to associate a specific scent with sickness. If water had this characteristic smell, the rats learned to avoid it. Once they were given ZIP, however, this association disappeared, and the rats resumed drinking the smelly water again.
This recent work might give us some clues to Santa’s technique. For instance, the milk and cookies. Why has Santa insisted that kids leave them out for all these years? Is he really that gluttonous? Or do the milk and cookies, and the fact that his lieutenants will naturally associate them with their deliveries, since they are one of the few common threads between the many living rooms they visit, somehow have a function in the deletion of their Christmas-related memories? Remember: They drink milk and eat cookies shortly before Santa knocks them out in Vegas. Is this the key? We don’t know. It might only knock out the link, or association, and not the memory itself. There may be no hidden purpose here; it may be that Santa just really likes milk and cookies.
What we do know, getting back to the larger question of why anyone would want to sign on as a lieutenant, is that these men are returned home with no clue as to what they’ve just endured. Halfway through their glass of milk they tumble to the floor. A pair of elves rush in and wheel them out, and Santa calls in the next lieutenant. Meanwhile, the unconscious, mind-wiped former Santa is returned home.
There have been instances in which the sight of a Christmas tree, a gift that’s wrapped just so, or even the taste of a candy cane has induced brief seizures in these former Santas, but no one has ever died from one of these reactions. Overall, in fact, they return home far healthier than when they left. They all get to keep their brain pods, for example. These MP3-player-sized devices, implanted under the scalp, constantly monitor an individual’s mental health and administer small do
ses of drugs should they start tending toward depressive or compulsive states. (They also have a sleep-related function described in chapter 23.) With these and other upgrades, the men are all but guaranteed to be mentally and physically healthy for their last few decades on Earth.
Oh, and rich, too. This is critical, and, of course, it’s the primary reason Santa and Mrs. Claus became so deeply involved in business in the first place. Santa needs to reward his workers. That said, a mysteriously fattened bank account wouldn’t do. This would only spur confusion, trouble with the IRS, even perhaps a suspicion-ignited divorce if the men are married. Instead, after Santa returns him home, the standard ex-lieutenant, or his wife, answers the door the next day to discover that he has won the Publishers Clearinghouse sweepstakes. This often takes some convincing, as the men Santa recruits are generally fairly intelligent and suspicious of this very sketchy organization. But the money, they discover before long, is very real, and it allows the couple to retire happily.
13
The North Pole Is Melting
GLOBAL WARMING, ARCTIC ICE DEPLETION, AND THE PRECARIOUS POSITION OF SANTA’S HEADQUARTERS
Once the conference in Vegas wraps up and Santa erases the memories he needs to, he and his remaining lieutenants return to the North Pole. Not the literal North Pole, though, since that’s really more of an idea than an actual place. It’s merely a spot in the Arctic Ocean covered with sheets of ice one to three meters thick.
Unfortunately, the ice in this part of the world is disappearing. In the summer of 2008, the nineteen-square-mile Markham Ice Shelf split away, drifting off into the Arctic Ocean. Half of the Serson Ice Shelf, another enormous chunk of frozen water, did the same. One recent study predicts that the summertime covering of ice could be gone completely by 2040. This is an unsettling trend in terms of the health of the planet. Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, are concerned that the loss of Arctic sea ice in the vicinity of the North Pole could change global ocean circulation. Water flowing in different directions might not sound like a big problem, but altering or weakening major ocean currents could damage marine life, put a serious chill on northern Europe, and dampen the sea’s ability to suck greenhouse gases out of the air.
There’s no doubt that this scenario is downright scary, but from Santa’s perspective, it is far from the most immediate threat. Santa’s aliens picked a location for his headquarters in northern Greenland. Presumably they chose it because it was remote, unpopulated, and dark through most of the winter months. It also afforded extra privacy, since the spot allowed them to situate the entire facility deep in a two-mile-thick sheet of ice. Apparently, though, these aliens do not have perfect foresight. They didn’t anticipate that the Greenland ice sheet would start to melt.
Over the past several decades, climatologist Konrad Steffen has been studying the withering of this massive slab through a series of small observation stations. Thanks to his Greenland Climate Network, Steffen found that between 1992 and 2005, as global temperatures rose, the ice sheet dripped away at an increasing rate. Melting was a normal phenomenon in the warmer months, but from 1992 on, Steffen learned that it was taking place farther inland, and at higher altitudes, than ever before. A 2006 study that gathered data from a satellite observatory revealed that the sheet was shedding fifty-seven cubic miles’ worth of ice per year. That’s a seriously large ice cube, slightly less than four miles on a side. Just imagine the size of the cocktail that would include such voluminous chunks of ice, how long it would take to drink, and how hungover you’d be in the morning. Staggering.
Steffen believes that the Greenland Ice Sheet doesn’t respond slowly to climate change, as conventional scientific wisdom would suggest. Instead, he thinks that water leaks down through fissures in the ice to the bedrock several miles below and actually accelerates the melting process. Other scientists have proposed that this rate will only increase as the years progress and that the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet could be a major contributor to the rise of global sea levels in the coming decades. This wouldn’t just raise the ocean’s roof. All of that melted freshwater would also dilute the salination of the ocean and could alter major currents like the Gulf Stream.
This sort of development would be bad for a number of reasons—flooding low-lying coastal regions populated by millions of people, for example—but it’s particularly jarring news for Santa. Surface melt has already dropped the height of the ice by several meters in some places on Greenland’s sheet. As a result, the tops of several of Santa’s buildings have become exposed and are at risk of being spotted by researchers like Steffen or even the thinning population of indigenous people. We can only hope that in either case, these witnesses will respect Santa’s privacy and keep the secret to themselves. If not, though, he could always offer them a drug-laced glass of milk and wipe out their memories.
14
Living Green in Greenland
UNDERWATER TURBINES, SUPERCOOLED SERVER FARMS, AND AUTONOMOUS SUBMARINES
Visiting Vegas is a difficult thing these days for environmentally concerned individuals. With its always-on bright lights and tremendous thirst, the city practically drains the blood from Mother Earth’s veins. You’d think Santa and his crew would feel a bit guilty during their lengthy stay at this resource-swallowing oasis, but that’s not really the case. They’re immune to such feelings, given that they spend the rest of the year living in one of the greenest spots on the planet.
Various artists, writers, and filmmakers have painted Santa’s workshop as anything from a series of quaint buildings to a small city crowded with stout, smoke-puffing brick factories. This is undoubtedly intentional; Santa, through his off-season film and creative work, clearly encourages this variety, so that no one will discover clues to the true nature and location of his headquarters. But the fact is that Santa’s actual facilities would be difficult to depict from the outside. Until that ice started melting, they were entirely underground.
The Pole, as it’s known to its residents, consists of living quarters for up to 300 lieutenants and more than 5,500 elves. The elves’ rooms are typically half the size, in height and breadth, of those reserved for Santa and his lieutenants, so their wing is not much larger than a major Hilton. The Pole also has a small medical center, several chapels, numerous gymnasia and recreation facilities, and scattered cafeterias.
And what about the workrooms? Thanks to self-assembly, toys and other gifts are manufactured at the delivery point, in children’s homes (see chapters 32 and 33), so there’s no need for massive industrial plants staffed by assembly-line elves. There are a few workshops, but they’re designed for engineering elves, not craftsmen. They serve as repair shops for the wormhole-based time machines and, on those rare occasions it’s not running perfectly, Santa’s warp-drive-powered sleigh. Most of the work at the Pole, though, is computer based.
The largest single room is a vast, cubicle-filled space packed with elves toiling away at advanced workstations. (The aliens, for those of you who are interested, use a Linux-like operating system.) Inside, they monitor the huge amounts of information piped in from Santa’s widespread surveillance network, parsing data gathered by ornaments, satellites, and tiny, sensor-equipped flying robots. If you’re trying to picture what this room looks like, imagine a crowded telemarketing center, then shrink all the workers and give them pointy little ears.
All of the data racing in, and all those computers, require servers, and these are housed in hundreds of thousands of square feet of climate-controlled rooms. Today, massive companies like Google and Microsoft work very hard to hide the number of servers they use because the machines are tremendous energy hogs. Since they need to be cooled constantly, they swallow up huge amounts of electricity. This is where that beneath-the-ice setting works to Santa’s advantage and makes his alien benefactors look so brilliant. Santa’s servers can’t overheat; a series of fans suck in cold air from the icy surroundings, keeping the information techn
ology heart of his operation constantly chilled.
Okay, so we’ve got numerous recreation centers. Several hotels’ worth of living quarters. Thousands of computer workstations. A massive server farm. And yet the North Pole is green? How is that possible?
If you were to ask Santa that question, he’d smile awkwardly, try to laugh so that his no-longer-substantial belly shakes like a bowl full of jelly, and then hurry away, claiming that he has some urgent business to attend to. Why? Because he has no idea how most of this stuff works. He’s good with gifts and people, but green technology? Not really his forté.
Ultimately, though, this doesn’t matter, because the North Pole’s power-generation infrastructure is entirely automated. Remember, Santa moved up there in the mid-nineteenth century. There were no televisions yet, let alone computers. If those aliens had tried to do a walk-through with old Jebediah Meserole, explaining all the technology at the Pole, plus how it’s all powered, his head would have imploded. The guy was a shipbuilder. Yes, they handed him a stack of operations manuals, but they advised him not to open them. They told Santa it was all effectively magic, and that he wouldn’t have to worry about a thing.
The Pole gets the majority of its power from a vast field of underwater turbines, the blades of which spin as ocean currents flow past. As in a wind turbine, the mechanical energy of the spinning blades is converted to electricity. This power is then routed to a central cable and carried back under the ice to the Pole. In places where the ocean’s currents do not run so swiftly, underwater buoys that rise and fall as waves pass overhead generate additional power. The top of the buoys drop as a crest passes above them, then lift up as the trough of the wave flows by. From this simple up-down action, the buoy system borrows juice.