Carbon Run

by J. G. Follansbee

  “You made me look for her.”

  “You wouldn’t let me look for her.” Anne folded her arms, still defiant. “I could hear you calling her name. When you came home without her, I swore to hate you the rest of my life.” Anne looked sorry for her oath.

  “She came home. Remember?”

  Anne’s smile beamed, as if Maxie had returned from another sojourn.

  Her father laughed with her. “She brought us a present.”

  “The idea of eating that rabbit after what it had been through was ridiculous. I’m proud that I nursed it back to health. I haven’t eaten rabbit since.”

  “The point is, Maxie disappeared and we thought she was lost, maybe even dead. But she came home, safe and sound. She even brought a gift.”

  Anne scratched the dog’s ears. Her face darkened. “What are you going to do?”

  The relived joy of Maxie’s miraculous reappearance faded. “I don’t know. Get a job on a ship, maybe.” Bill said. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so happy you were here. Now I have to say goodbye.” Tears filled his eyes again and he covered his mouth to hide his chagrin.

  “Why don’t you stay here and fight the charges? The BES will listen to reason. Maybe they’re not as strict as people say.”

  Anne’s plea echoed her grandmother’s, Bill’s mother, though he barely remembered the details of his parents’ clashes after his father’s deceit on the environmental monitoring was discovered. No amount of reasoning and apologizing swayed the bessies from following through on their threats to close and liquidate the farm. I won’t risk that kind of humiliation for Anne.

  “They want me. If I go away, Kilel might leave you alone. You’ll have to trust me on this.”

  Anne wiped away her own tears. “I know, Daddy. I love you, but I know you have to go. They’d just put you in jail for something that wasn’t your fault.”

  Bill lifted the backpack to his shoulders and tightened the straps. Maxie bellowed, as if she knew what was next.

  “I’m coming back, Anne,” Bill said. “Don’t you worry. Hey, I almost forgot.” Bill reached up to a shelf near the barn door and removed a cloth-covered object. “I rescued this before the fire got it. I know how much it means to you.”

  Anne’s face lit up as she unwrapped the object and found the woodcut, the one with the English sailor and the little girl, protected by a plastic sleeve. Bill never got around to framing it.

  “Read the caption, Anne. Tell me what it says.”

  Anne covered her mouth with her hand, tears welling again. The words fought their way out. “A fair wind and a following sea, so that thou may return to me.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  After a mile or so of determined, fast-paced hiking, Bill heard the buzzing of the heat-sensing mini-copters. He donned the inexpensive night vision glasses sold by the outdoor equipment stores to help people lost at night find their way to a road or a settlement. The goggles magnified the stars into green punctures of light in the dome of the sky. Bill used the starlight to run further into the pine and oak woodland. He hoped the copters would have trouble seeing the heat of his body through the forest canopy.

  The buzzing intensified and he heard a voice, which he recognized as Kilel’s.

  “William Penn. This is Inspector Kilel of the Bureau of Environmental Security. Surrender and no harm will come to you.” The message repeated as texts in his minds-eye, but the repetitions did little to persuade Bill to alter course. He avoided every path, walked on rocky ground, doubled-back on himself, took a path for a few yards and got off, all to confuse trackers, human and bot. One thing could hide his tracks: fire.

  He picked up his pace toward a new fire he noticed back home. He smelled smoke, and the goggles picked up the glow of flying embers, like lightning bugs. Kilel’s voice echoed in the woods, making honey-sweet promises of a bath, a warm meal, and a reunion with Anne.

  He heard the roar before he saw the flames. The fire was below him on a steep slope, and the rising heat carried the embers up the hill. The brush and dead grass was so dry it exploded when the heat reached the combustion point. The whine of the fire-fighting aircraft drew Bill’s eyes skyward as they swooped over, but no water or retardant fell. They were attacking another point in the fire.

  Fearful the fire would overtake him before he found shelter, Bill searched for a break in the brush, a small meadow, or a large rock, something with little fuel that would burn in the fast-approaching fire. He spotted something better. A jumble of rocks had formed a tiny natural shelter. He ripped away the dried grass and debris from the narrow entrance. The tiny cave smelled like animals.

  Nothing attacked Bill, but he glimpsed other creatures bounding away from the fire, and a part of him begged to follow. He had faced other storms and survived, and he stayed calm. The fire climbed the hill fast. The flames were so bright that Bill took off the night vision glasses. Flames swooped up into the crown of a pine tree. The crackling sounded like a thousand tiny toothpicks breaking in half, and Bill threw his backpack off his shoulder. With the fire yards away, he found the portable fire shelter, and opened the package, shaking out the spring green fabric like a blanket. He pulled the cover over his head, praying the fire would not consume all the oxygen around him as the raging blaze passed over.

  CHAPTER 7

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  MARTIN SCRIBB SAT IN THE train station for hours with his empty bowl before the truck driver spoke to him. No one else had said a word to him, though he had collected a few coins.

  “Where’re you headed, father?” The driver was unshaven, about forty-five years old with a paunch that spilled over his belt.

  “I’m sorry, friend, I’m not a priest,” Martin said. “I have a mission, a job to do. I’m headed to the Arctic.”

  “I’ve been there. There’s not much to see, except a lot of crazies.”

  Martin glanced at his bowl. “A small gift would help me pay my way there.”

  The driver bent down, his knees cracking, and he dropped a €10 credit token into Martin’s bowl and walked away. It was the biggest gift Martin had received in weeks.

  The driver returned to Martin. That’s odd. I’m sure that he saw I am disidentified.

  “I’ll take you as far as the Canadian border.” The driver beckoned and headed to the exit.

  Martin ignored the flash of anxiety in his gut and slipped on his sandals. People never gave him free rides. For the first hour or so, Martin watched the driver, ready to defend himself from an attack. Most people thought of the dissed as fair game for an easy robbery or a sexual assault, and they were right, as far as the law was concerned. Yet the driver kept his eyes fixed on the road, his paunch jiggling when the truck hit a bump. A figurine of the Virgin Mary was glued to the dash. On the dry hills flanking the road, robot-like, spidery towers taller than the abbey’s bell tower marched two-by-two like monstrous soldiers on the way to some battle. Power lines sagged between the towers.

  “So how’d you get that?”

  The driver’s voice woke Martin from a doze. “What?” The driver had said his name was “Raul.”

  “The mark.” Raul touched his forehead. “Environmental crime, eh?”

  As a tumbleweed rolled across the truck’s path like a skeletal beach ball, Martin’s mind played back the entire story, from the beginning. Martin felt again that surge of optimism, even hope, at the start of Project Algid. He would go after the last great reserves of fossil fuels, to give people some breathing room while the new energy sources came online, and relieve the suffering of those who couldn’t heat their homes or cook their food.

  We were so committed, almost fanatic. Young men and women. Engineers, financiers and academics. Full of themselves. Arrogant. With Martin as the “visionary.” Everyone knew where the energy sat, untapped, but no one knew how to get it out. Martin and the Project Algid team solved the extraction problems. Geologists thought disturbing the methyl hydrate deposits might release catastrophic levels of methane into the atmosphere,
increasing global temperatures at a stroke, but the Algid techniques proved themselves safe in test after test. Success meant enough clean energy for a hundred years. Molly so promised, and she stabbed me in the back. Martin would make sure Algid was safe for the earth, that it wouldn’t affect a climate already damaged by the Warming. He’d step back, the job done, the earth carbon-free, easy as pie. Everything was ready. All over the globe, Martin’s friends waited for his go signal. Stations on every continental shelf watched him. The whole world waited. What a show it would be, unsurpassed in history. A turn of a key, and the Hydrate Era would begin.

  A new era alright, but not what Martin imagined.

  The painful memories pressed against Martin’s temples. “Yes, an environmental crime.”

  Raul waited, as if expecting more details. Martin shook his head. He was not ready to reveal the entire story to a stranger. The truck’s AI swerved to avoid a dead animal in the lane.

  “My brother was dissed, too, but he was framed.”

  Martin feared a connection with Raul, because it exposed the driver to legal jeopardy. “What happened?”

  “It was the Crash of ‘35. He was a currency trader in New York West. I don’t get the details, but I guess he sold when he should’ve bought.” Raul’s huff was a mix of pain and recollection. “They put an ‘Au’ right here.” He touched his forehead in the same place where Martin had his tulip.

  “The chemical symbol for gold.” Martin stifled a laugh at the International Monetary Reserve’s idea of a joke.

  “He didn’t do it,” Raul said. “He was at the trading desk, but one of his partners pulled the trigger. That’s what Juan always said, anyway, before he passed.” Raul crossed himself.

  The phrase opened a new floodgate of memories. I was in my office, when she pulled the trigger. Molly Bain was the trigger man, not me. She’s the one guilty of attempted murder of a planet’s biosphere, not me. “Your brother, he took the blame.”

  “He took the fall, indeed.”

  I took the fall for her crime. She pushed me into this pit of Hell. The brilliant AI scientist is a demon who spawned a bug that nearly killed everyone with a global belch of methane. “I’m sorry, Raul. Perhaps Juan has found justice in the next life.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Raul remained silent for the next few hours until the truck came to a roadblock. A message was posted on the public net saying that an emergency repair crew was fixing a washout after a flash flood. Raul pulled the truck over to a parking area. Martin exited the cab, and his ears were assaulted with a hiss, which blossomed into a muffled roar as he came to a old concrete platform. It jutted out into space at the lip of a cliff, and a rusted railing ringed the outside edge. Squat sagebrush and bunchgrass struggled in the cracks. Martin peered down into a canyon.

  Stretched from one wall of the canyon to the other, maybe a full mile, was the remains of a gigantic concrete structure. The masonry was recent, but something had happened to the structure. It had been cut in a step-like fashion on each end, down to the river bed, leaving a thousand-foot gap in the center. Millions of gallons of water flowed through the cut, the spring snow melt pouring through it as if pouring over the spout of a giant pitcher. A huge eddy received the water, which churned white for several hundred feet downstream.

  Martin remembered. The structure was once a dam, one of the biggest in the world, built during an economic disaster in the 20th century. The dam generated electric current before the Warming, before the wind farms and solar arrays. In their ignorance, the builders had destroyed an ecosystem. It wasn’t until the salmon disappeared that people decided to redeem their mistake. All the dams on the Columbia River were breached. The fish never returned. Mother Nature killed by a human dream, like Project Algid.

  Molly Bain fired the bullet, not me, but no one listened.

  The roadblock lifted and Raul motioned Martin back into the cab. Two hours later, Raul pulled over. The truck and double-trailer raised a cloud of choking dust. The border crossing was a half-mile ahead. “I have to let you off here. I can’t be caught taking you across the border.”

  Martin exited the cab. “God bless you for your kindness, Raul.” Other semis and cars flew past. Raul didn’t fit the stereotype of the long-haul trucker. He was too gentle, too well-spoken, and he struggled with more than a lost brother. Martin smelled guilt. Raul was the partner who sent Juan and the world into perdition.

  “Most people turn their backs on me when they see who I am,” Martin said.

  “Driving truck, you think a lot,” Raul said. “We failures have to stick together.”

  CHAPTER 8

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  ANNE PENN LAY QUIET, RELAXING her neck and facial muscles. A trapped mosquito bounced against the mesh door of her tent. Through the nylon veil, she gazed at the devastation of her home—the blackened bones of her house, the scorched earth that surrounded it, the carbonized truck, the outbuildings that had survived intact, and in the middle distance, the remnants of the wildlife refuge. The English woodcut hung from the zipper pull like a talisman. She touched it, believing it still warm from her father’s touch, though he had left the evening before.

  She unzipped the mesh and waited for the mosquito to exit. The spare refrigerator and large freezer in the storage shed still worked, and she grabbed a couple of brown eggs. They crackled in the iron skillet on the solar-powered camp stove, and she added a spoonful of diced onion and red pepper from the garden. After her meal, she went back to work modifying the chicken coop.

  The simple and repetitive tasks soothed her. Hammer on nail. Saw through wood. Anne relaxed and focused on the readouts from her minds-eye. She lost herself in the postings of her Brier Valley friends and com acquaintances all over the world. Her father’s avatar was marked “offline” and hued a pale gray. Like death. The gray-out meant one of two things: He was not within sight of a com tower, or he’d switched off, which the police discouraged, especially if you were hurt or injured and they had to find you. Only criminals, hermits, and Luddites switched-off, but her father did not want to be found. Bill didn’t like the com culture much. He and Anne shared only text because he never upgraded from his old-fashioned jack-in tech. Too much sharing and not enough thinking, he’d say.

  She was disappointed that Mike Schmidt’s avatar was labeled “inactive.” Just knowing he was on the net brightened her day sometimes. He was the image of his father, the deputy sheriff who had shown kindness after the disaster that had destroyed her life. Mike’s features had more angles, and his hair was a deeper brown, cut in a layered style that reflected an interest in life outside his isolated community. His gray eyes had a gentleness that Anne had always found attractive. They’d known each other since primary school.

  He was the only man she knew that made her want to try deep sharing. She had the basic limbic system extensions for emo-sigs, but she couldn’t afford the expensive gear that allowed individuals to share complex emotions or long-term memories. Or carnality. A few more months and I’ll have the money to buy them. The basics, though, let her feel and experience the texts, as well as the holo and 2-D pics and vids, shared by others. They faded in and out like dreams, enhanced by the sigs that colored them to communicate the poster’s emotional attitude. The com company offered hundreds of pallettes based on the traditional hues: green for envy, crimson for love, beet red for hate, blue for sadness.

  Mike Schmidt’s avatar changed from “inactive” to “available,” haloed with the color of anticipation. Anne smiled inwardly.

  Mike sent: < I saw you online. Just wanted to say hi. >

  < Hi back. >

  < Have you heard from your dad? >

  Anne wasn’t sure how to answer. Rumors flew constantly in the c-tribes about police snooping.

  < If you don’t answer, no problem. > Mike’s amended question was painted with understanding.

  Anne checked her emotional filter settings to keep her emotional expressions low key in the tribe. < I’m fine, in c
ase you’re wondering. > The color was correct, if vague. Mike’s avatar abruptly grayed-out, which usually meant a lost carrier from the com company towers, a constant problem in mountainous rural areas if you didn’t stand in one place. She watched his avatar a moment, hoping it would come back quickly.

  The rest of her c-tribes provided plenty of distraction as she measured lumber and tightened wood screws on the coop. She joined c-tribes on subjects she cared about: birds, environmental science, the pop band Hindu Mistress. She kept an eye on the BES Watch c-tribe and its citizen journalists, because they exposed the agency’s abuses. They might mention Dad. Sometimes, she let the stream of data flow over her like water.

  < ...warmest temps for Moscow ever recorded... >

  < …uncle can’t reach the vets agency. Does anyone know... >

  < ...Paris artists are way too political these days. The Louvre... >

  < ...grabbed my boob and I slugged him. Knocked out his tooth, ha... >

  When Anne got her first com set, Bill insisted she set the filter defaults to exclude the racier c-tribes, though she sneaked in. Once she turned 18, she blocked his monitoring. He threw a fit, but got over it.

  Mike’s avatar turned “active” again, and Anne was conflicted on whether to contact him as she labored to position a two-by-four of found faux-wood. Like many of her friends in the aftermath of the fire, he had offered to lend a hand with cleanup or rebuilding, but she politely said No to all the offers. She preferred to fix problems herself, a trait her father respected while noting that no one ever achieved anything important by themselves. She shared her thoughts and mental images about her chicken coop, though she had to keep secrets about that project as well. If I decide I need help, I’ll ask Mike first.

  Her miracle, as she labeled it in her own mind, kept her going. Shortly after the fire, as Anne watched a dragonfly cruising along the heads of overgrown grass, she heard a rapid-fire screep-screep-screep. At first, she thought she was in that state between sleep and wakefulness, when some people dream that monsters lurk at the foot of their beds. Could the fire itself have been a terrible nightmare, and the refuge as lush and alive as before? She heard the sound again, faint, but clear.