CHAPTER 5
The Worriers and the Ostriches
Next Queens College was visited. "Here the focus is on concerns about the extent of worrying humans do, and also on concerns about a lack of worrying or about worrying about the wrong things," said Mary, as they arrived.
"Swell," said Ed. "Maybe we'll get another note."
"Academics yapping about worrying sounds even more useless and pointless than what we've already heard," echoed Driscal.
While Ed and Driscal politely tried to at least look like they listened to the speakers, their primary focus was again on trying to identify possible kidnappers. Ed monitored mostly emotions. Driscal studied body and facial language. Mary scanned the crowd and checked attendee identities and backgrounds, and found no discrepancies or other hints of kidnappers. Again they had no luck in spotting guilty or antagonistic looking individuals.
One speaker argued that in modern times mankind suffered from unhealthy levels of anxiety due to more and more dangerous problems to worry about, including even worry about worrying. He then provided an extensive list of worrisome issues, most of them deadly and difficult. Some were astronomical or geological: dangers involving titanic natural phenomena well beyond the control of man.
Another speaker argued that the wrong things were being worried about and that in many cases the dangers of some issues were being exaggerated and in many cases worry was being exploited for economic or political reasons. Another categorized issues as known unknowns, known knowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns. Most human focus was on realized immediate known-known issues: on realized threats such as emerging human-caused climate change. Meanwhile preparation to address likely future cataclysms was almost non-existent. Most worries were not being taken seriously enough, it was argued, and that was something to worry about.
The final speaker worried that Omega worriers were uselessly worrying while unseen, unknown, and unknowable dangers were converging to obliterate human and other life from the face of the Earth. Omega produced and publicized quarterly papers and summary reports on their findings, with very little apparent interest or influence - which was also a cause for worry.
Yes, perhaps in the bigger scheme of things that was something to worry about, Ed thought, but right now he was much more worried about his kidnapped loved ones. He felt helpless and guilty. His own beloved daughter was who knows where, suffering who knows what, at the hands of who knows who, while he sat comfortably listening to depressing talks about issues that likely had absolutely nothing to do with the kidnapping.
It was appropriately dark and dreary when the visitors finally returned to the Humvee, were Driscal fed his jants several pounds of sugar while he again voiced his disapproval of the strategy being pursued. "I have a feeling that somewhere the kidnappers are laughing at us, watching us as we completely waste our time with this damn lecture tour among the most useless and pathetic bunch of folks I've ever seen. Speaking of pathetic people, let's see if my ex-wife has turned up any real leads."
She hadn't, they all concluded, as they listened to a summary report given by one of her staff via a recorded voice-mail. They then phoned Ann, to whom Ed relayed their progress or lack thereof. Though upset and disappointed, Ann relayed highlights of a brief meeting that she just had with the Tribe concerning the Stone-Coat issue. Ed had completely forgotten about the so-called labor dispute that had brought him to the City.
"The Stone-Coats have a long-term plan for New York City that they have already started to implement without meaningful human input," Ann relayed. "The Tribe fears a likely adverse human reaction once they learn details of the plan, and that is happening as we speak. The Tribe fears that they will be caught in the middle of an ugly situation."
"So what's the Stone-Coat plan for the City?" Ed asked.
"As you know, climate change is on pace to provide another two-hundred feet of ocean level rise over the next several centuries. The Stone-Coats plan to let over ninety percent of the City flood while they elevate and protect only small parts of it. Mostly parts of Manhattan, but also bits of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Originally their inclination hadn't been to protect any of it beyond the current twenty to thirty foot levies, but Stone-Coats modified by human templates persuaded the others that New York City is symbolically too important for humans to lose it totally."
Driscal groaned but Ed merely sighed. "OK, given that without Stone-Coat help virtually all the city would be lost, but the Stone-Coats want to save at least parts of it, what's the problem?"
"The story has already gone public and local anti-Stone-Coat sentiment is sky-rocketing. Much of the public wants giant dikes to be erected to preserve the entire City. Already there are dikes twenty to thirty feet high. To simply keep making them higher seems to be the obvious thing to do. Street protests are already being planned."
"But don't they see the big picture?" asked Ed. "As you say, over the next few centuries ocean levels will eventually rise further by over two-hundred feet. The human experts agree that even with Stone-Coat help an extensive dike system for the City isn't possible or practical. It's the same story world-wide. Already ocean levels have risen eight feet and Greenland and Antarctic melting is accelerating. Coastal towns, cities, and countryside are already being abandoned. That's a fact that people have to live with.
"The time to prevent that was the last couple centuries and those centuries are history. It will take more centuries to get greenhouse gasses under control and possibly reverse the warming. But in the meantime, in between time, what will be left of New York City and Long Island?"
"There is a ridge of hills that runs most of the length of Long Island, and a high patch of ground in central Statin Island," said Ann. "Those will together form a natural string of small islands," said Ann. "The Stone-Coat plan is to link them and what remains of the saved portions of the City together with a mammoth bridge system. Sort of like those tropical Florida Key islands that are now being abandoned, but these will feature rock-solid Stone-Coat constructions.
"Parts of Manhattan will gradually be raised by over two-hundred feet in order to keep them above water," continued Ann. "A few historical sites will be preserved by raising them but about twenty stories worth of most preserved buildings will be simply filled in with rock brought from the Catskills by rail and shaped and fused by both stationary and mobile Stone-Coats. Small interconnected islands will result. Think of Venice before it was abandoned. A reduced City of perhaps three million people will remain.
"Required human resources will be minimal. The Stone-Coats are consuming land-fills and mountains for the materials to increase their numbers and consuming nuclear power-plant radioactive waste to power the project. It will be one of the biggest construction jobs in history and will take four centuries to complete: a very short time period from a Stone-Coat perspective."
"And it's already started?"
"Yes. For example even as we speak the Statue of Liberty is becoming preserved as a Stationary Stone-Coat. Eventually she would be disintegrating waist high in water if she wasn't raised higher and strengthened. Already the rest of Liberty Island is submerged."
"Why not make her a mobile Stone-Coat?" Ed obviously had to ask. "She could lead parades and so-forth."
"No, she has to stay hollowed out so that humans can still climb up inside her. But instead of thin copper she'll have much thicker skin, so she'll be made twice as tall and stand atop a pedestal that's twice as tall. Proportions will be maintained."
"That all sounds pretty nifty to me," said Ed. "World-wide, building tens of thousands of miles of dikes over two hundred feet high would be a physical impossibility anyway, even over centuries. Like it or not the entire ocean coastline is shifting inland, in some cases for over a hundred miles. Entire countries and states will be lost. Already over a hundred million people have been displaced from low-lying, highly populated coastal areas. Around the world there are coastal areas where billions of people now live that will ultimately be flooded, and the
resulting necessary massive migrations simply can't be avoided. In monetary terms the impact will be many trillions of dollars, and extreme effort and cooperation within and among nations will be required to avoid millions of deaths."
"Good thing it's happening in super slow-mo," said Ann. "Even so, it's pretty obvious that not even the Stone-Coats can prevent the coastal flooding that is only starting. If all big coastal cities were to be saved as the normal plan many would become isolated islands miles from the new shoreline, which would eliminate most of their strategic value anyway. So the Stone-Coats plan to save only parts of a few iconic cities including New York. Rebuilding most cities further inland is the only practical approach, and the Stone-Coats have generously agreed to help with that."
"So I give up," said Ed. "Given that big picture, what's the beef with saving only part of New York City? Letting Ice Giants rebuild Manhattan instead of losing it all sounds like a wining plan to me!"
"You're expecting people to be rational instead of emotional," said Ann.
"He always had that problem," piped in Mary.
"So I'm an optimist about people instead of a total cynic!" countered Ed. "But what does the Tribe expect us to do about the situation? Is there a way to get public support for the Stone-Coat plan?"
"You can make a positive thing of it," suggested Mary. "Turn that frown upside down. Announce cheerfully and with great fanfare that the kind and generous Stone-Coats are immediately beginning to build a new Manhattan and City that will be the new proud wonder of the world. They are saving part of New York City, even though most coastline and coastal cities all around the world must be abandoned. Hold a Stone-Coat and Tribe-led parade that celebrates the good news that the City will be saved.
"I always liked parades," said Ed. "Maybe a Statue of Liberty balloon could be made using tough Stone-Coat-spun carbon fabric. Or better yet have an Ice Giant formed like Miss Liberty."
"You and Ann could be masters of ceremony for the shindig," said Mary. "Break out your best Mohawk Tribe clothes and ride atop the shoulders of a Miss Liberty-shaped Ice Giant with the Mayor. Push the famous New York City pride thing. The crowds will eat it up!"
"Wow!" said Ann. "Maybe you should have my job, Mary! That's a terrific idea that I should have thought of, as I've initiated many similar events across the world! I'll float it by the Tribe and the Mayor, but it sounds like a sure-fired winner! We should do the parade in the Spring when along with warm weather, optimism returns to the City, but we should announce right away that it's going to happen to get us through the current controversy and the nasty winter that has just started."
"Anything else?" Ed asked.
"Bring Tracy and Mouse home safe," said Ann.
"Soon," said Ed, though he didn't know how the hell he would do that. "They'll lead our big happy parade, I promise," he added as he signed off, though throughout the day his optimism with regard to rescuing the kids had been fading.
"You are extremely worried, Ed," noted Mary. "That is of course a useful trait for water and carbon-based life-forms such as humans, but it will avail you little in the current circumstance. You need to focus on the job at hand."
"Don't Stone-Coats worry?" Ed asked.
"Not with the debilitating emotional intensity of humans," said Mary. "The associated logic of problem avoidance and mitigation is of practical value, but worry itself cannot be allowed to dominate thought, or useful action is blocked. The famous human computer programming problem of being stuck in a software do-loop provides a useful analogy. Stone-Coats have been computing survival solutions for hundreds of millions of years and long ago eliminated unhealthy thought patterns such as over-wrought emotions including excessive worry."
"What about you, Driscal? Do jants and their zombies worry?" Ed asked.
"Not this zombie," said Driscal. "I keep myself busy hunting down scum-bags. That's what pure humans mostly do also, they worry more about the day-to-day stuff and avoid thinking about the big picture stuff they mostly can't do anything about anyway. So for me it's a mix of worrying and staying personally alert about the day-to-day stuff, along with sticking my head under the sand like an ostrich for the big stuff so that I keep my head from going crazy or getting it cut off. But that's largely my human heritage, I suppose. Jants are more coldly logical and some thought-linked colonies of the ten or so biggest jant consortiums look at the big picture a lot more than I do."
"What about the Eastern Consortium?" Mary asked. "Do the thousands of Eastern Consortium jant colonies telepathically linked and thinking together worry about big picture concerns?"
"They worry plenty," said Driscal. "You probably noticed that several Omega members we encountered today are zombies. Most of them are like me animated by rogue jant colonies, but some are of the Eastern Consortium, keeping an ever-watchful eye out for potential existential threats to jants, including jants themselves."
"There are plenty of existential threats to worry about," noted Mary, "including whoever and whatever disassembles Stone-Coats and kidnaps humans. Speaking of kidnappers, we have heard nothing from them on this Queens College stop."
"Maybe we just have," said Driscal, as he pointed to a Humvee dash-screen. On the screen was a short e-mail message above a red-flashing omega symbol:
'Your pitiful efforts to find us will fail,' it said. 'Soon we will kill all of you.'
Simple and direct, thought Ed.
"Well ain't that sweet!" Driscal remarked. "The kidnappers really do care about us!"
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