Ecopunk!

by Liz Grzyb

  Jocelyn followed the EA to a very plush office set in one corner of the top floor with large floor to ceiling windows looking west and north. The EA asked if there was anything she could get her but Jocelyn was so gobsmacked by the view—she thought she could see the Rockies way off in the distance over the Great Plains—that she was barely aware of the EA’s presence. “Uh, no,” she replied distractedly, returning to the vista.

  “Stunning, isn’t it?”

  Jocelyn was vaguely aware of someone else talking and it took her a moment to realise it was Terry Sharp.

  “Uh, yes,” she replied, trying to shake herself back to the task at hand.

  “Coffee? Or tea?” he asked and Jocelyn realised that part of what she had assumed was his desk in the office corner was in fact a kitchenette. “I’m normally a coffee drinker, myself,” he said, “but my CFO is from Cornwall and has been trying to convert me to drinking tea in the morning.”

  “Uh, coffee, thanks,” Jocelyn managed. “No milk.”

  “Is that a Ohioan idiom? Starting every sentence with ‘uh’?”

  Jocelyn blushed for real this time. She mentally slapped herself back to the task at hand.

  He poured them each a coffee from a steaming pot and handed her a cup. “You know,” he said as he took a seat on a long white leather couch that faced west, “if I hadn’t read your CV, I would have said that your accent was more Berkeley or San Jose than Ohio State.”

  Jocelyn almost choked on her first sip—how the hell did he know that? “Uh, I grew up in California,” she said too quickly, kicking herself again, not just for starting yet another sentence with ‘uh’. “I moved to Ohio when I was in junior high, so I haven’t had a chance to pick up the local vernacular.”

  Terry nodded and turned to consider the view. “Was that before or after you graduated with distinction from UC, Ms Kuepper? Or maybe it was just before you started working at the New York Post?”

  Jocelyn knew there was no point in denying the facts that Sharp’s obviously very competent security people had discovered about her. But if they knew so much about her, why had they let her get this far? Surely they wouldn’t have even considered the possibility of thinking about letting her into the building under false pretences.

  “OK, you got me, Mr Sharp,” she admitted finally. “I’m not Sally-Anne Humpeldink.”

  “Please, call me ‘Terrance’. No one else does.”

  Jocelyn ignored the offer. “If you knew that I was not who I said I was, why did you let me in?”

  Sharp sipped his coffee then tilted his head to one side as he considered the question. “Well, Jocelyn—may I call you Jocelyn?—well, Jocelyn, as you may be aware, as a result of the businesses that I run I constantly receive requests for interviews—some formal, some informal. To date I’ve not acquiesced to anyone, regardless of their persistence or ingenuity. However, that does not mean that I do not wish to talk to the media. I’ve just been . . . waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “For the right person to come along.”

  “But I put in a request to interview you nine months ago.”

  “Yes,” Sharp agreed. “A request a week for six weeks, and then one a month until you suddenly went quiet seven weeks ago, which was what tipped me off that you were up to something.”

  “So, why now?”

  Terry tilted his head the other side. “Do you know, I have no idea. Maybe it’s because I now wish to talk. Do I need more reason?”

  “No, I suppose not. So how did you want to do this? Did you want to make some bland patronising statement and for me to lick your boots and fawn over you like all your other pet brown-nosers?”

  “No, I’ve enough of them. How about you ask me some of those questions you’ve been preparing and we’ll see how it goes?”

  “Are you serious? You’d let me interview you?”

  “I said you can ask your questions,” Sharp said with a smile. “We’ll see as to whether you receive any answers.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve another appointment at one o’clock but I’m all yours until then.”

  Jocelyn open her notepad and scrolled through to the extensive list of questions she’d been developing ever since her editor had suggested she do a piece on Sharp. Unfortunately, she had not prioritised them, never thinking she would actually get the opportunity to ask any of them.

  “Let’s see,” she said, trying to buy some time. She was acutely aware of Sharp’s presence opposite her, watching her every movement, which added to her sudden inability to find any question that seemed worthy of the moment. Finally, the sense of time passing drove her to pick one at random.

  “So, Terrance—Terry, why did you create the Sharp Recovery and Resilience Alliance? Aren’t there already many international humanitarian emergency response organisations, many of them better resourced and funded than you?”

  “That is true, but many of them are affiliated with governments and so frequently have difficulties accessing all necessary lands without crossing someone’s foreign policy. As a truly independent organisation Sierra can get anywhere anytime.”

  “But of all the possible things you could do, why international emergency response?”

  “Well, if you really want to know, it started with my brother, Darren. He was a dwob in Angola—”

  “A what? A dweeb?”

  “DWOB, the acronym. He was with Doctors without Borders. He was based in Luanda but spent many months of the year working in the hinterland treating the poor and maligned. He was an exceptional physician but his situational awareness was woeful. The region he was in had become the stakes in a petty war between two Marxist factions that had escalated beyond reason. He was kidnapped and ransomed. My parents petitioned the State Department to step in and rescue him but they refused to get involved—too provincial, too unimportant and too sensitive for US government involvement, they were told. They tried the Red Cross, the UN, every international humanitarian organisation in the business but none of them were able or willing to intervene for us. I was in junior high at the time and much of it was beyond me but I understood that after six months, time was running out for Darren. My father went back four times trying to meet with the leader of the faction. The fourth time they murdered him. Two days later Darren’s body was found in a burnt-out car not far from Luanda. The day Mom and I buried them I swore that I would one day create an organisation that saw no borders, saw no politics, saw only those that needed help and provided it.”

  “So you created the SRRA and have seen this company achieve remarkable financial returns.”

  “Yes,” Sharp agreed, “but also some remarkable achievements.”

  “What’s your most memorable?”

  Sharp sucked in a breath between his teeth as he thought. “Oooh, that’s a hard one. Probably the Cyclone Harriet rescue of the Cook Islands. We extracted over 15,000 people in less than 6 hours.”

  “Very impressive,” Jocelyn allowed. She scanned through her questions and selected the next one. “Are you as CEO of the SRRA intentionally breaching the 1977 United Nations convention on the prohibition of the hostile use of environmental modification techniques, in particular article two in regard to deliberate manipulation of the atmosphere?”

  “Whoa!” Sharp exclaimed. “Where did that come from?”

  “Do you deny that you have developed weather modification technology, specifically a device or series of devices located in the upper mesosphere on orbital platforms, that can modify the atmospheric conditions at a regional scale to bring about whatever weather conditions you desire? Do you also deny that you use such capability for financial gain by creating such adverse weather conditions that force the affected peoples to engage your company’s unique capabilities to intervene to save their lives?”

  Sharp laughed deeply and honestly. “What on earth makes you think I can control the weather?”

  Jocelyn felt her already diminished confidence wilt further but she pushed on. “You said as much in the me
eting this morning,” Jocelyn observed, her heart beating wildly in response to the adrenalin being dumped into her system. “In the five years since Sierra commenced business, you have undertaken 23 recovery operations. Of these, 18 were in the immediate aftermath of a major weather event—three cyclones, four hurricanes, two typhoons, six major tropical storms and one monsoonal flood.”

  “What can I say?” Sharp said. There was a smile on his face but none in his eyes. “Many people need rescue and recovery assistance in the wake of major weather events. With our highly volatile climate still seeking a new basin of stability, our world is at the mercy of the extremes that Mother Nature throws at us, which seem to be becoming more frequent and more intense.”

  “That is true,” Jocelyn conceded, “but each of these events was preceded by a number of anomalous meteorological observations. The Atmospheric Research laboratory at the University of Swansea in the UK has documented abnormal infra-red signals in the upper stratosphere in at least 13 of the 18 major weather events, infra-red signals consistent with some form of artificial thermal forcing.”

  Sharp looked kindly at Jocelyn. “Now, Jocelyn, I may be wrong, and I frequently am. Or at least sometimes. Well, now and then. Once in a while. You know what I mean. But don’t tropical storms have a lot of heat energy associated with them that would show up in the infra-red spectrum?”

  “You know they do,” Jocelyn observed.

  “Oh? How so?”

  Jocelyn scrolled through her notes to the right page. “Despite what it says in your CV on your company website and in the NYSE filings for your companies, there’s no record of you completing any college undergraduate degrees. There is, however, record of someone very similar in appearance to you at Cornell University graduating with a dual Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and meteorology and a Master of Science degree in dynamical systems theory. This person, named Theodore Stammel, disappeared from all records approximately two years after graduation and eight years before the earliest independent records of one Terrance Sharp.”

  “Very interesting, Ms Kuepper. I’m sure it will make a nice story for the New York Post, but there’s not a shred of reality to any of it. It might be better suited to the Enquirer.”

  Before Jocelyn could begin to outline the rest of her well-planned attack of Sharp and his facade of intrigue and financial dealings, a tall, gaunt man in a very nice suit approached Sharp and whispered into his left ear. Sharp’s face, which, despite her darnedest efforts, hadn’t lost its bemused look, suddenly went pale and serious. He spoke briefly with the man, whom Jocelyn now recognised to be Roger Gorton, who left just as quietly as he’d arrived.

  “My apologies, Jocelyn. It seems our friends, the Homeland Defence Guard have murdered the Missouri Governor in an attempted coup and have the taken over that state’s capitol building. The National Guard has been sent in but things are very dicey.”

  “Surely the National Guard can handle a bunch of redneck domestic terrorists?”

  Sharp smiled and Jocelyn saw for the first time that he looked tired; he now seemed a lot older than she had first thought.

  “That may normally be the case, Jocelyn, but they have somehow procured a decommissioned nuclear warhead and are threatening to detonate it unless Missouri secedes from the United States.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Quite. Hopefully cool heads will prevail and the situation won’t escalate. Now, where were we?”

  Jocelyn blinked as she tried to keep up with Sharp’s rapid gear changes. “Uh,” she started again, “you were denying that you are in fact Theodore Stammel with a very strong background in meteorology, mechanical engineering and dynamical systems theory. All the necessary ingredients for developing the technology necessary to control the weather for your own financial advantage.”

  Sharp looked at her in silence for a long, uncomfortable moment. “Teddy Stammel and I were very close at college. He died not long after we graduated.”

  “Oh.” It was possible that there had a been a mix-up in their yearbook with Sharp’s photo in Stammel’s place. “How did he die?”

  “Teddy killed himself. Took a warm bath with a hairdryer.”

  “My God. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yes. It was a blow to all of us.”

  “Do you know why he . . . did it?”

  “No one will ever know for certain. Teddy had been working on some pretty advanced stuff in precisely the areas you identified—meteorology, mechanical engineering and dynamical systems theory. For his masters research project he’d been developing a device to reduce the intensity of tornadoes. But word of his early success had got out and pretty soon the military began to hound him, presumably wanting him to carry out research into weather control for them—clearly in breach of the very UN resolution you quoted earlier. Teddy had tried his best to avoid getting entangled in their snare but obviously it all became too much and he took the only way out that he felt possible. And the world has been a poorer place ever since.”

  “Did his device work?”

  “Don’t you think that if it had, you might have heard about it?”

  “Not if the military got their hands on it first.”

  Sharp smiled. “Yes, perhaps. I have no idea. I moved to Chicago and started my first business soon after.”

  “Yes, Dynamico Incorporated,” Jocelyn read from her notes. “A company of one person that developed mathematical models of the stock market based on dynamical systems theory, very similar to the models Stammel wrote about in his Masters mid-term paper.”

  Sharp raised his eyebrows. “You’ve done your homework. Not many people could have found, let alone understood, Stammel’s mid-term report. Nor made the connection to Dynamico.”

  Jocelyn smiled graciously. “Not many people would have been able to spin Dynamico into a multi-million dollar company in the three short years it operated,” she said.

  Sharp waved the compliment away. “It was only a means to an end. Once I’d got sufficient funds, I moved on to more altruistic endeavours. I started a company that sourced cheap food and power for third-world countries built on a business model that monetised global corporate citizenship.”

  “At any point did you feel guilty about using Stammel’s intellectual property for your own financial gain?”

  It was now Terry Sharp’s turn to pause. “No,” he said, finally.

  “For a man whose multi-billion dollar company’s mission is to, and I quote, ‘Preserve the safety and rights of all humanity’, don’t you think that that also includes people’s rights to their own intellectual property?”

  “Of course.”

  Jocelyn felt the adrenalin running through her system again, but this time it was good, exhilarating. All those hours of brainstorming with the Carol the sub-editor, developing the bones of a story that would make front page reading, the detailed lists of seemingly arbitrary connections that, seen in the right light, revealed Sharp and his company to be far from the philanthropic pin-up that it seemed to be. All of it was coming to a point that was almost within her grasp.

  “Just not Teddy Stammel’s rights?” she asked, watching Terry Sharp squirm uncomfortably in his plush seat as he realised the nastiness of trap into which he’d fallen. Jocelyn could almost see the headline: ‘Sharp admits to stealing IP for profit’.

  Sharp refused to answer the question so Jocelyn went in for the kill. “Did you murder Teddy Stammel and steal his research project?”

  “No, I did not.” He spoke quietly but Jocelyn sensed an undercurrent of anger.

  “But you did take the results of Teddy Stammel’s research project and use it to create a company that in its first year made a profit of more than two million dollars.”

  Sharp swallowed the rest of his coffee and then spoke quietly and clearly: “The technology I used as the basis for Dynamico was entirely mine.”

  “Not Teddy Stammel’s?”

  “I was Teddy Stammel.”

  Jocelyn blinked, hoping
she hadn’t misheard that admission. “So, you are in fact Teddy Stammel?”

  Sharp nodded.

  “Why the charade?”

  “Because what I said about the military was true. They were asking me to do things that I was not comfortable with. But my work was only tangentially related to what they really wanted so it wasn’t hard to throw them off my scent. I packed up Teddy Stammel’s life, ceased any and all communication as him, moved to Chicago with a new identity—very easy if you know how—and built a new life where no one knew or cared about Teddy Stammel. You’re the first person who’s managed to unearth him.”

  “Well, what can I say—I’ve been trained by the best.”

  “Yes, I know. That’s why I selected you.”

  Jocelyn felt a moment of trepidation—what exactly did that mean? “And the artificial thermal forcing in the upper stratosphere? How does Stammel’s research fit there?”

  “Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect?”

  “Of course. It’s related to chaos theory—the sensitive dependence, especially of non-linear dynamical systems, on the initial conditions. The story goes that a minor event such as a butterfly flapping its wings in South America could theoretically eventually affect the atmospheric conditions and cause a hurricane to form in China.”

  “It was Brazil, a tornado and Texas, respectively, in the original title, I believe, but yes, that’s the essence. While some meteorologists believe that the atmosphere is not as malleable as the theory would have us believe, the atmosphere is a huge non-linear dynamical system that, if given the right nudge in the right spot at the right time, can statistically favour certain outcomes over others.”

  “So you can control the weather!”

  He levelled a look at her. “Do you really believe that anyone can control the weather? No, but I can influence it to a certain degree.”

  “Like a butterfly whisperer.”

  Terry smiled. “I suppose.”

  “And you use it to fleece innocent people who can’t protect themselves?”

  “Hardly. I don’t suppose that of the 23 recovery operations you analysed, you considered what the antecedent conditions were that led to the need for a recovery operation?”