by Niko Perren
“Shut up, please,” said Tania. “I have to concentrate.”
***
At 1 PM, Tania brought up the Pax Gaia web page on her omni. She took Ruth’s hand. “This is both of ours now,” she said. Together they tapped the “publish on web” option. Where will this end? It felt as if they’d just trundled a large boulder down a mountain cliff. I wish I’d had an extra year. There’s so much we could still improve.
She checked her hair one final time, then headed for the auditorium.
“Rule number one is that positive ideas stick better than negative ones,” Witty had stressed. “We need to bring people to our side by showing them what they’ll gain. We need to paint a picture of the world we will create.”
Tania stepped into a fog of camera light. I’m actually doing this. She launched into what would be the first of many speeches, mixing images of wildlife and natural areas with animations showing how wilderness would expand under Pax Gaia. She explained how job creation could ease pressure on ecosystems. How technology-based farming practices could produce more food on less land. And how the shield’s weather interventions would support these transitions by blunting nature’s extremes.
Ruth watched from the edge of the stage, just out of the cameras’ view. Applause thundered, and then it was over. She met Tania with a hug. “You were fantastic!”
Tania’s omni buzzed. She turned away from the two bodyguards lurking in the shadows. Witty was in his characteristic shorts, but his million-watt smile was missing. “Loved your speech, Tania,” he said. “But I’m afraid I’ve got some news. Do you want the bad, the worse, or the worst news first?”
Tania groaned. “That’s not the way it works. You’re supposed to offer me good news and bad news.”
“There is no good news,” said Witty.
“Fine,” said Tania. “Let me guess. The bad news is you got a cease and desist on the astronaut images.”
Witty shook his head. “I wasn’t even counting that as news.”
“Oh, shit,” said Tania. “So lay it on me. What’s the bad news?”
“The astronauts have been banned from speaking on my show,” said Witty. “Apparently since they are government contractors, their communications can be restricted.”
“Oh, shit,” said Tania. “I don’t even want to know what the worse news is.”
“Their return’s been delayed until after the UN Climate Summit,” said Witty. “So they won’t be able to help out on the media tour either.”
Tania felt the optimism that had surged during her speech draining away. “So I’ll do the show alone. The ratings won’t be as good. But we’ll still get in front of billions of people.”
“That’s the worst news,” said Witty glumly. “We can’t do the show either. The network is making me cancel your appearance.”
“What?” said Tania. “Can the network even do that?”
“Yeah. It’s called the Witty Show,” Ruth said angrily. “You’re Bill Witty. Tell them to fuck themselves.”
“The network has final control,” said Witty. “They normally only use it during elections. But somebody leaned on them. Hard.”
Tania reeled. “My appearance on your show is essential. It’s the only way we can reach enough people. Our whole publicity build is based on it.”
Witty shook his head. “It’s been a fun diversion, and I believe in what we’re doing. But I’m not going to sacrifice my career by going against the network. Night show hosts are more replaceable than you’d think. And they’ve muzzled us too well. Our chances of success are too slim.” His flawless face settled into a drooping puppy expression, as sad as his smile could be radiant.
“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” asked Tania. “You’re giving up on our planet’s future. Grow some balls.”
“Whoa, easy.” Ruth shot Tania a warning look. “Sorry, Bill, we’re obviously upset.”
“I’d like to continue helping,” Witty said. “I’ll stay on as an advisor.”
Tania clenched her teeth. “Help away,” she said. “How do we spread the word to 8 billion people without your pulpit?”
Chapter 43
ENEWS: SEPTEMBER 7, 2050
PAKISTAN President Raza Talwar called India’s decision to divert water from dams in Jammu and Kashmir an act of war. “This is a humanitarian catastrophe,” he said at a morning press conference. “The Indus River was already low from glacial loss. Now we don’t even have drinking water.”
Indian Prime Minister Lana Gandhi defended the move. “The evidence shows that reckless sulfuring by the United States and China is already disrupting our monsoon. We are only protecting our citizens. Besides, the amount of water we are capturing is tiny. Pakistan’s government is using this opportunity to divert attention from their own poor water-management.”
The escalating rhetoric is a serious blow for UN Secretary General Khan Tengri, who has encouraged Pakistan and India to unite behind Pax Gaia, the five-day-old environmental plan from UNBio Director Tania Black. Pax Gaia contains provisions for feeding monsoon countries by reprioritizing food production. The dam closures are a clear vote of nonconfidence.
***
The video window on Jie’s scroll froze, and the image of his mother faded to black. “Your call has been terminated by an automated system for violating the terms of a legal agreement,” intoned the voice.
Jie threw up his hands. “I know, I know. The number will unblock in 24 hours. Stupid rén chā!”
“I guess we can’t say ‘environmental plan’ either.” Sally made a note on her scroll. “That’s twenty-one trigger terms so far. I hate censorship algorithms.”
Sharon looked up from her reading. “Aren’t you running out of people to call? You’ve been at it all day. I don’t think you’re going to figure a way past the censor software.”
“We got Witty’s receptionist,” said Jie.
“Once.” Sally consulted the page. “For eleven seconds. And after that, voicemail redirects stopped working.”
Rajit looked up from the corner. “Maybe you should stop, before the adaptive AI cuts us off completely. I’d like to continue talking to my sister. Even if there are twenty-one topics I have to avoid.”
“You talk to your sister?” asked Sally. “When?”
“I’m an introvert, not a hermit,” said Rajit. “My sister teaches math at the University of Mumbai. We talk all the time, in my cabin.”
Jie leaned forward, directing his voice away from the ceiling microphones. “What about hacking the radio?” he murmured. “There must be receivers on Earth that could pick up a direct signal.”
Sharon thought for a moment. “Not a bad idea,” she whispered. “Does anybody know anything about radios?”
Silence. Rajit shook his head.
“Scratch that then,” said Sharon. “I’m sure the censorship software won’t allow us to research radio hacking.” She made a rude gesture at the camera. “I don’t mean you, Earthcon,” she said. “You’re still our friend.”
At least, we assume Earthcon is still friendly. Just like we assume that the microphones and cameras can’t hear low voices. But how can we be certain?
Jie closed his eyes. What else? What else? Six of the nine nanofactories were running now, and the last three were in transit from Earth. He’d just spent his whole rest day studying Pax Gaia’s beautiful plans for Beijing. The green belt would not only create a wilderness area, but it would clear up the dust storms that had plagued the city for decades. Why are so few people excited about this? After the initial burst of attention, Pax Gaia had slowly faded from the mainstream media. He could find Tania on TV and social networks of course, if he looked. But in digital back alleys, preaching to the converted. Never on the mainstream sites where fledgling ideas became truly viral.
The Climate Summit is in two weeks. The battle will be over before I get there. There has to be something I can do from here.
***
Cheng’s class, all in neat blue uniforms,
worked in small groups at their touch tables under the helpful guidance of their teacher. A ponytailed black girl – obviously from the exceptional refugees program – squealed and pointed at the screen. ‹They’re here!›
Bedlam! Cheng ran to the camera. ‹Dad! Sally! Rajit! Sharon!›
“Hello everyone,” Sharon waved from the couch. “My name is Sharon Steel, and I lead the lunar team.” She elbowed Rajit, who was still in his book. “To celebrate career day, we’re going to watch the shield’s self-assembly startup with you today. Did everyone practice their English?”
“Yes,” cried a flurry of voices.
“Good,” said Sharon. “Can somebody tell me how we get Jie’s Nanoglass tiles from the moon to the assembly robots at L1?”
A flurry of hands rose. The teacher pointed to a boy in the back. “You shoot them with mass driver?”
“That’s right,” said Sharon. “We pack the tiles in metal payload shells, and then use a line of electromagnets to accelerate the shell so fast that it flies right out of the moon’s gravity.” She turned to Rajit. “Your question, Rajit.” She lowered her voice. “And no differential equations. Remember, they’re kids!”
“I thought you said they were gifted,” Rajit muttered. He turned to the students. “Does anyone know what the steering thrusters on the payloads shells are for?”
The class erupted. “For steer!” shouted several students.
“Why not just aim correctly to begin with?” asked Rajit.
“The moon vely fah away,” shouted another kid.
“Exactly!” said Rajit. “Our mass driver is on an orbiting, spinning moon, aiming at a two-meter wide receiver 1.5 million kilometers away. It’s like sinking a golf ball on a windy day by rolling it around the earth five times. So we make small course corrections as the payloads travel. Study your math. With an art degree, you can’t do any of this!”
The comment drew laughter from the adults and cheers from the students. Rajit looked surprised, as if trying to figure out what was funny. I’m never quite sure if he’s playing it up. The seam between his oddness and sense of humor was nearly invisible.
‹Look at your screens everyone,› said Sally. ‹The first tiles are arriving.›
Cheng’s distant classroom fell silent except for the inevitable fidgeting of ten-year-olds, and the video shrank into a window in the corner of the screen. The rest of the display gave way to an animated rendering of the shield’s recently completed core, generated from realtime telemetry data streaming back to Earth. Initially the image showed just a horizontal line with a disk at its center. As it zoomed closer, the line became a radial spoke, like a radio mast full of wires and supply lines, and the central disk resolved into an enormous ring of solar panels. The central disk collared a donut-shaped control hub about 20 meters across, which was where the two spokes originated.
A familiar payload shell drifted into the frame. ‹That’s one of our tile payloads,› Sally narrated. ‹It left the mass driver a week ago. In the next two years, there’ll be a million more, although the shield will start being useful well before it’s completed.›
Magnets pulled the shell into the control hub’s docking cradle. A burst of laser light pierced the shell, and trillions of Nanoglass tiles flowed into the tile storage tank. Then magnets nudged the empty shell into the vaporizer, where it would be recycled into the raw materials that would extend the skeleton of the shield.
Tiles started flowing through the spokes, past the solar panels, towards the sprayers mounted 2 kilometers away. As the view zoomed out again, it became clear that the entire structure was spinning, the spokes sweeping enormous circles through the void.
‹Who’s been on a merry-go-round?› Sally asked the class. Most of the hands went up. ‹Remember how the merry-go-round pulls you outwards? Well, the shield uses the same idea. All the parts are designed to rotate, which keeps them stretched into shape. The shield is all physics: circles, and forces, and angular momentum. Another reason to study math.›
The Nanoglass tiles reached the sprayers, which charged them, then ejected them through a billion microscopic jets. Magnetic forces snapped the tiles together; molecular hooks on their edges bonded and solidified the structure. At inconceivable speed, a sheet of material 200 meters wide by a few atoms thick emerged behind the rotating spokes. An arc started to form, invisible to any observer, but rendered in glimmering blue on the animation. Five hundred meters done. Then a kilometer. This is live data! This is actually happening!
When the sprayers had completed half a circle, each met the point where the other one had started. The sprayers turned off, leaving the first completed ring of Nanoglass.
‹It worked!› Jie shouted. The ring of Nanoglass, 12 kilometers in circumference, spun slowly, exquisitely balanced between the earth’s and sun’s competing gravities. The students cheered, high-pitched young voices shrieking with excitement. Cheng bounced in front of the camera, clapping hands with his classmates.
Jie lost sight of the screen as Sally leapt to hug him. ‹What does it feel like?› Her eyes were wide with amazement. ‹You invented this!›
‹I invented Nanoglass,› said Jie. He blinked away his joy. ‹What the shield engineers have done with it is beyond my imagining. Look at the machine they’ve created.›
Even as they celebrated, the spokes ratcheted out, preparing to lay another ring as soon as more payloads arrived. A swarm of tiny Haier Construction Spiders skated across the completed sheet of Nanoglass, laying out the radial control wires that would soon aim the sunlight passing through each section.
“Oh, oh,” said Sally. A silence fell over the room. The spiders had stopped moving.
“Hackers!” piped up one of the kids. “Terrorists finded a security hole.” That caused a rush of excitement in the class.
“Communications with the shield are encrypted,” Sharon assured them. “The only way to take control of the shield would be to go to L1 and reset the control hub computers by hand. I think we’d know if somebody was there.”
“Aliens!” suggested another kid.
Much to the students’ disappointment, the alien theory also proved wrong. The spiders started moving again less than a minute later. After a few more questions, Sharon disconnected them from Cheng’s class.
“We’ve done it,” she said. “Now we hook up the last nanofactories, and wait until Earthcon lets us go home.”
Jie sank into the couch. Home. What will it feel like to hug Cheng? Will Cheng even tolerate a hug? And to smell a flower. To taste the ocean. To feel wind on my face. He tried to picture trees, but saw only the empty gray moonscape. If I stayed here long enough, would I stop dreaming in color?
“Are you excited to go back, Sharon?” Jie asked.
Sharon jerked, as if he’d caught her deep in thought. “I am,” she said quietly. “It was different last time. We were so full of optimism then. At the high water mark of human exploration, ready to venture out into the solar system. To Mars. To the stars even. But we forgot about getting our own planet in order. I don’t imagine I’ll be back here again.”
“Is it hard to return to Earth gravity?” asked Jie.
“You get used to it,” said Sharon. She pushed with her hands, easily bobbing 50 centimeters above the couch before falling back in slow motion. “But you’ll never stop dreaming of this.”
Sally poked Jie in the ribs. “It won’t be as bad for you Jie. You’ve gotten so skinny you’ll barely feel Earth’s gravity.”
“The nearest fried rice balls are a half million kilometers away,” said Jie. “It cuts down on my snacking.”
Chapter 44
“MY JOB FEEDS my family. It puts a roof over my head. It allows me to enjoy life.” The man was beautiful, teeth gleaming white, hair parted with a ruler. His left arm wrapped around his wife, a sexy yet wholesome brunette just full-figured enough to put normal women at ease; his right arm held the hand of a little girl. She clutched a teddy bear.
“My job helps the
whole world,” the man continued. “When we use iron, or timber, or food from other countries, we spread our wealth and create jobs there, too. And when people in other countries have jobs, they don’t have to fight each other.” Images of burned corpses flickered in the background. The little girl looked over her shoulder and shrunk closer to her father.
“Radical activists have created a plan to take our jobs away. They say that when we feed our families, we harm the planet.” As he spoke, his face paled. He grew skeletal. Developed sores. Holes appeared in the girl’s clothing, and she looked down in horror, swatting at dark stains spreading like oil slicks on her dress. She moaned in fright.
“Tania Black doesn’t care what happens to me. Or to my daughter. Because her agenda isn’t based on compassion. It isn’t even based on science. Her agenda is created by people like Rodelia Flint, an eco-terrorist who hides under an assumed identity.” The picture showed Ruth, barely rec-ognizable after a blasphemous digital makeover.
“We all know where terrorism gets us,” the man said darkly. A cross-fade, to the nuclear blast crater in Philadelphia, an image seared into the mind of every American over the age of 25.
“Fortunately, President Juarez stands up to the fanatics. When Tania Black wanted more hurricanes, President Juarez said ‘No!’ Now Tania Black wants to take away my job and destroy our economy. And President Juarez is saying ‘No!’ again. President Juarez thinks my family is more important than endangered grasses in Australia. That’s why she worked with the Chinese government to create Tamed Earth. So that everyone on the planet can live in safety and prosperity. In harmony with nature, instead of in fear of it.”
This message has been paid for by Environmental Citizens for a Green Future.
Ruth saluted the television with double middle fingers. “Fuckers,” she sputtered. “It doesn’t even make sense. How are we anti jobs? And the images make it look like I bombed Philadelphia.”