“We’re old school,” the head engineer told me. At least, he seemed to be in charge. His name was Renaldo and he had a seemingly infinite supply of black T-shirts emblazoned with cryptic sayings. My favorite read ‘Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.’
Renaldo claimed that was the best approach to projects like mine. “You know how the US space program works,” he said. “They triple check everything and build safeguards into their safeguards and redundancies onto their redundancies. We’re the opposite of that.”
In the warehouse parking lot, the Ant Factory had created an obstacle course where they held robot trials. Some parts of the course were constant – broken pavement, loose rocks, a pile of sand that could bury a bot in an avalanche. Other parts changed every day – the team was constantly adding booby traps and barriers. A slick of ice, a small mountain of melting snow, a sticky patch of some sort of goo – I thought it might be something toxic, but it turned out to be molasses.
The Ant Factory built me a robot that could traverse the course while rolling out fart catcher carpet. Actually, they built me a hundred robots – Renaldo called them “pequeninos peidos” – Little Farts. With a hundred robots, he said, it wouldn’t matter if a few of them failed. “Power in numbers,” he said.
Powered by hydrogen fuel cells, designed for rough terrain – originally the Little Farts were agribots designed to roll over just about any lump, bump, or tussock.
On my last night at the Ant Factory, I sat on the old loading dock and watched a dozen Little Farts navigate the course, towing and unrolling a large carpet that Renaldo assured me was heavier than the fart catcher. The team was celebrating. I had sprung for pizza and beer – a pilsner from a local brewery called Drown Your Sorrows. The label showed an ocean wave washing down Sao Paulo’s main street.
“I don’t know how I can thank you for all this” I told Renaldo as we watched one bot climb the slush mountain, trailing black carbon fibers. I wasn’t paying the Ant Factory much. I’d almost exhausted my crowd-sourced funding.
He sipped his beer, surveying the rubble-filled yard. “You know those Hollywood movies where a few people save the world. We’re those people. We’ll make a difference.”
I nodded.
Renaldo knew someone who knew Katrin, so he already knew about my success with methane cracking. “What are you doing with the hydrogen you’re producing?” he asked me. “I have a friend who would be happy to purchase it.”
“Technically, I can’t actually sell the products of my work,” I told him. “That’s against NSF regulations.”
He nodded. “I understand. I am confident my friend would accept any hydrogen you chose to give him. He would offer goods and services in exchange.”
“That could work. Of course, there is the problem of transportation.”
“No problem. My friend Hehu lives in the Raft. He can take care of transportation.”
The Raft was a seasteading community, a loose affiliation of over a hundred vessels that had been converted to floating farms and cities by climate refugees from small island nations that had been wiped out by rising waters.
“Let me contact him on your behalf.”
I RETURNED TO the Arctic with Renaldo’s bots. Jackson didn’t ask questions about where I got them. He and I had developed a fine working relationship. He was glad that I needed a smaller work crew. The muskoxen were spooked by the bots at first, but they got used to them.
Renaldo’s friend Hehu came through. He reached the research station with two ships – a former Arctic cruise ship, now modified as a floating farm and residence for a few dozen people, and a former navy ship, now modified for hydrogen transport.
Hehu was from Woleai Atoll, the first island group to be swamped by the rising sea. I liked his team of engineers – the head of the group was from JPL and he knew one of the aerospace engineers who had calculated the satellite orbits for me. He had, like me, gone rogue, and we had a fine time discussing the advantages and disadvantages of leaving the confines of the university.
It was a fabulous summer. There were the usual problems with sinkholes and sleet storms and polar bears, but the robots worked well and I successfully expanded the area covered with the fart catcher to about twenty square miles. As autumn approached, it was all going very well. Until it all went very wrong.
I should have paid more attention to the news. While I’d been setting up partnerships and laying carpet and dodging polar bears, there had been a presidential election, a major change in congress, and a shift in national priorities. Hurricanes had wiped out New Orleans and a few other southern cities. Storm-driven waves were eroding beach bluffs and flooding US cities. Funding was being diverted to disaster relief. Franklin Station would shut down at the end of the season.
And somehow my work had come to the attention of new political appointees in charge of climate research. They were upset by my dealings with Renaldo and the Germans and Hehu and... oh, just about everybody who had been helping me out. Some of my partners were apparently on terrorist watch lists.
At least, that was one story. Some of my friends suggested that the concern about terrorism was a cover. What had really pissed people off was the success of my methane cracking – steel manufacturers did not like the possibilities offered by cheap availability of pure carbon.
Whatever the cause, I was in trouble. Jackson told me that navy personnel who came to close down the station would be taking me into custody and charging me with a list of offenses including theft of government property and conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism. Jackson had been ordered to confine me to the station.
The day before the Navy ship was due to arrive, I left. At my request, Oki had packed a box of supplies – including all of the fresh carrots that were left in the greenhouse. Before hugging me goodbye, he quizzed me on my equipment. He listened carefully to a long list: silk long johns, qiviut underwear, a layer of wool, windproof coat and pants, parka, bunny boots, hat, hood, air filter to warm the air before it entered my lungs, rifle for the polar bears, a popup shelter, and on and on.
“All right,” he said at last. “Stay warm, stay dry. Don’t get dehydrated and eat as many calories as you can stuff in your face – and you’ll be fine.” He hugged me goodbye.
It was a sunny day with a light wind. Two Little Farts accompanied me, dragging my gear on an improvised sled made of a plastic pallet I had found on the beach among the driftwood. In addition to the food and gear I had listed for Oki, I had a fiberglass kayak that had been left in the station’s storage by a seal researcher.
I took no satellite phone, no GPS, no electronics that might be used to find me. Such a strange feeling, leaving all that behind.
The muskoxen followed me – not out of affection, but in return for carrots that I dropped along the way. Their hooves completely obliterated my tracks and the marks left by my improvised sled and the Little Farts.
The hike to the shore was about a mile. When I reached the shore, I reset the Little Farts to return to the station. The muskoxen followed them, hoping for more carrots.
I abandoned the plastic pallet on the beach where I had found it, loaded the kayak, slid it into the water and headed west for a place I knew.
A few years back, I had decided to retrace the steps of my favorite Arctic explorer, Ernest de Koven Leffingwell, a guy who never got a lot of press. Everyone paid attention to Peary and Amundsen and Scott. Big voyages, big funding. Leffingwell never had much funding and didn’t give a damn about reaching the North Pole.
He came up here in 1901 and fell in love with the Arctic. He spent nine summer and six winters up here, traveling around, making observations, keeping meticulous records. No fancy equipment – he had Inuit guides; he used dog sleds and small boats. He made the first map of the coastline worth looking at. He was the first person to explain ice wedges and the very first to pay any attention to the permafrost.
A few years back, I spent the better part of a summer retracing his journeys
in this area. On that trip, I spent a week in an old prospector’s house where Leffingwell had wintered. Half sod-hut, half log cabin, it was still in pretty good shape. Good shelter, well-concealed, near the coast, and so obscure that only a dedicated permafrost researcher would know about it.
The wind was with me, but even so it was a long paddle down the coast to the small inlet where the cabin was located. I beached the kayak and dragged it and all my gear into the cabin. The wind had picked up and I knew it would erase my tracks.
Inside, out of the wind, I made myself at home and waited for the search to come and go. It was a long wait. When weather was calm, I could hear the search helicopter from miles away – the distinctive whup, whup, whup of their rotors warned me to take cover so searchers couldn’t spot me.
When the wind was blowing, the helicopters didn’t fly. Then I would listen to the wind. Sometimes a gust would make the hut shudder so the boards creaked and groaned. More often a steady wind would make the walls vibrate, so I felt like I was shivering even when I wasn’t. The wind had been trying to tear the hut down for more than a hundred years.
In the first week, a bear found my hiding place, but I had my rifle. Bear meat, while not fine dining, is a good source of protein.
The nights grew longer and longer until the sun never rose. When the sun was just below the horizon, it wasn’t completely dark. It was like that time right after the sun sets, when the sky is the deepest possible blue. Imagine that deep blue moment stretching on and on. The blue light colored the entire world, reflecting from the snow and the water. I felt like I was swimming in the sky.
For me, that was the important moment. Not the brilliant golden flash of the lake’s explosion, but rather the cool, blue, liminal light where nothing seemed real and I was not sure what would become of the world.
I had to wait a long time for the searchers to give up and leave, but eventually I stopped hearing helicopters. I returned to the station for the winter, a long paddle followed by a long walk over the pack ice. It was so cold that I could feel the mucus freeze in my nose when I took a breath without my air filter on. The very act of breathing put me at risk of dehydration – since every bit of water vapor froze instantly, the air was bone dry.
The station had been stripped down, but my friends had left behind everything I needed. There was a stash of canned food in the kitchen. The hydrogen-powered generator in the greenhouse was still there.
The winter was cold and long and lonely. I grew potatoes under improvised grow-lights. I set up a still and perfected the finest hooch ever made in the Arctic Circle. Arctic Fire, I called it.
Satellite communication had been shut down when they closed the station, but I rigged a ham radio. When the ionosphere cooperated, I could catch news broadcasts. The news was never good: heat waves, drought, hurricanes, flooding, famine, disease.
I managed to contact a few friends and I told them I was all right. They told me that the Navy team had searched for me in all the safety huts and all known emergency shelters. They fixated on the largest of the sinkholes – the one that almost swallowed my crew. They spotted some marks at the edge that could have been made by a rope and figured a sinkhole offered a great hiding place. Down there, there’d be no wind, no bears.
It had taken their team a week to stage an expedition to the bottom to look for me. I’m glad they all got in and out all right. Dangerous place, a methane sinkhole. Not somewhere I’d like to spend a lot of time.
Come spring, finding me was no longer a priority for the US government. The Arctic winter was summer in the Antarctic, and there had been some major developments down south. The Western Antarctic ice sheet, which scientists had thought would remain stable for several more decades, had started collapsing in a most spectacular fashion. The top layers of the sheet had been melting each summer, exposing long-buried crevasses. One of those crevasses broke through the bottom of the ice shelf, and an iceberg the size of Connecticut broke loose. A few weeks later, another one, just as big, broke free. Then another.
The icebergs were dramatic, but they weren’t the real problem. The Western ice shelf held back the glaciers on the Antarctic continent. Without it, those glaciers would flow into the sea. All told, that could add 30 million cubic kilometers of water, give or take a few million, to the world’s oceans. Faced with this threat, politicians were turning their attention to immediate construction projects to hold back the sea. A rogue scientist eating potatoes and polar bear meat in a closed research station was way down on anyone’s list of concerns.
With the return of the spring, Hehu arrived with ships laden with fart catcher net, methane cracking equipment, and empty tanks to be filled with hydrogen. That was thirty years ago.
Now we have the world as it is.
I sit in Jackson’s office. I still think of it as his, though he hasn’t been here for thirty years. I use it as my office now.
Hehu sits in the chair on the other side of the desk. It’s spring again and he has sailed north just as he has each spring for the last thirty years. But he hasn’t come alone. Each spring, a fleet of ships comes north to spend the summer in the Beaufort Sea. It is a ragtag fleet of cruise ships and barges and freighters and navy ships, all repurposed for this new world, all laden with food and supplies for the station, all carrying folks eager to work on the annual methane harvest.
Some ships are equipped with methane cracking facilities; others carry empty hydrogen tanks or empty holds. Each ship has its own unique community and culture – some grow tanks of algae; others grow forests; some grow pot farms. Some are environmentally based communities with overtones of Native American cultures; some are party boats with overtones of Burning-Man culture.
They call themselves the Sunseekers. I call them the summer people. The winter doesn’t exist for them – not really. It is always summer where they are.
I pour Hehu a glass of my Arctic Fire. “You make the best hooch in the Arctic Circle,” he says.
I smile. I didn’t make this hooch by myself. The station staff, all of them young and smart, do the hard work to keep the station running, monitoring the fart catcher, tending the muskoxen and reindeer, making high octane booze, and preparing for the Sunseeker fleet’s arrival.
When the ships arrive in the Arctic, there is a great celebration with much singing and dancing. They celebrate the summer methane harvest and they treat me like a hero.
All summer long, the Sunseeker ships crisscross the ice-free Arctic ocean, visiting fart-catcher projects in Norway, Greenland, Siberia, Canada. Each autumn, the ships take away tanks of hydrogen and holds filled with pure powdered carbon.
The Sunseekers are a cheerful lot. And why wouldn’t they be? This is a fine new world, a utopian future, a happy ending. As the permafrost melts, they capture the methane. As the oceans rises, they build more ships.
To them, it seems so natural that half the world’s remaining population lives in nomadic floating colonies. Most of them didn’t know any of the people who died in droughts and floods, heat waves and blizzards. They didn’t know all those who suffered disease and famine.
Jackson died of dengue fever when disease-carrying mosquitos brought that disease to the American South, a shift made possible by warmer temperatures and increased rain. Katrin starved in the European famine – caused by unseasonable snowstorms resulting from the slowing of the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift, ocean currents that kept Europe warm. Renaldo drowned in a flood that wiped out Sao Paulo, the result of a monster storm. Just one extreme weather event among hundreds.
They all died. Billions of people died. Not millions – billions. It took all those deaths to bring the world population down to a more sustainable level and let us reach this happy ending.
This isn’t the way I thought it would work out when I set out to save the world. All those square-jawed heroes of the old science fiction stories had it wrong. You can’t save the world as we know it. I did what I could, and I did some good in the world. But you ca
n’t save the world without changing it.
“A toast,” Hehu said, lifting his glass. “To the future.”
I nodded and lifted my glass. “To the future. There’s no stopping it.”
SHE WAS OFFERED the comfort of a drug-induced apathy. She refused.
The cell where she waited to die was, in true Erhat fashion, humane. Really, it was no worse than the room she had rented when she’d first arrived on the station, except for the hard lock on the door. She still had the same music at her fingertips, the same narrative media, the same computerized games of skill or strategy or wit or pure abnegation. All she lacked was freedom.
And a future.
Fuck.
She’d taken to pacing. Four steps wide, seven deep, over and over again until the door chimed – ahead of schedule – and her body seized up in panic, her breath vanished, and her hands fisted of their own accord.
But the voice which came through was... curiously non-final. “Kiu Alee. Do you consent to receive a visitor?”
She hesitated a moment, staring at the door. As her heartrate slowed, she said, “Yes” – more from morbid curiosity than anything else. After a moment, she added, “I didn’t know I was allowed visitors.”
The door slid open.
The man on the other side, flanked by a guard whose presence seemed almost cursory, was much taller than anyone in the local Erhat population – much taller than her, as well. Over two meters, at an estimate; he looked taller, with the long black robes that fell in a line down his body. His limbs were long and thin, like articulator arms on a dock, and his movements were fluid, but still hesitant. He had to duck his head to come in, and when he did, he stood there like an abstract statue, head tilted, eyes unfocused, ear turned her way.
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