“You weren’t aware he worked for your company? Is it that big?”
“It’s big enough,” he said. “The computer division does its own personnel work. They might have hired him without me knowing about it.”
“So you don’t know why he was let go.”
“No.”
“But you seem to know he worked in computers.”
“I knew that, yes.”
“Did you know he worked in high-frequency trading codes?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Does your firm do high-frequency trading?”
“Of course. Every investment firm does.”
Gen paused a beat, to let that remark reverberate a little. “Not true,” she pointed out. “Yours does, but not all do. It’s a specialty.”
“Well, a specialty,” Vinson said, again annoyed. “Everyone has to keep up with it one way or another.”
“So your firm does it.”
“Yes, as I said.”
“And your cousin was working on your systems, and may have seen evidence of illegal practices.”
“That’s not possible, because we trade within the rules set by the SEC. And as I said, I haven’t been in contact with him myself for over ten years.”
“Can you recall the last time you were in touch with him?”
“No. It wouldn’t have been consequential. Maybe when his mother died.”
“That wasn’t consequential?”
“Not in terms of work. Come on. I’ve nothing more to say about this. Are you finished here?”
“No,” Gen said. “My team is here to search your records, and anything your people send to the cloud from this point on is subject to interdiction.”
“No. I think not. I think you’re finished here.”
“What do you mean?”
A big team of men in security uniforms entered the room, and Vinson gestured at them. “I’ve answered your questions out of politeness, but I won’t allow our confidentiality to be breached. I don’t believe that your warrant is valid. These security officers are here to escort you from the building, so please cooperate with them and leave now.”
“You’re kidding,” Gen said.
“Definitely not. Leave the building now, please. These security officers will see you out.”
Gen pondered. “All this is being recorded, of course.”
“Of course. If it comes to that, we’ll meet in court. For now, please cooperate with the security rules of our building.”
Gen looked at Lieutenant Claire, who shrugged; nothing to be done. Gen said, “We are leaving under protest, registered here and now. You’ll be hearing from us again about this.” Then she left the room, followed by her people, and then the building security team. The elevator was crowded.
When the elevator doors opened they crossed the vast windy plaza and stepped down the broad steps to the dock.
When they were on the police boat, Gen said, “Those fuckers.”
Claire said, “I planted mayflies all over the building. Maybe some of them will hide and hear something.”
Olmstead was still red with bulldog indignation; the bone had been snatched away from his jaws.
“Good work,” Gen said to Claire. “We’ll have to hope for the best. Keep surveilling everyone who was in the building, and their cloud connections, and we’ll see if we spooked something beyond just a questionable eviction. At the very least we might be able to hurt them for that.”
“I hope so.”
Both Claire and Olmstead were looking furious. Gen wondered if that would be the only good result she would get out of this move. They were young, and now they were mad. They would be on the hunt.
PART SIX
ASSISTED MIGRATION
New York’s sewer system starts with six-inch-diameter pipes coming out of the buildings. These connect to street sewers that are twelve inches in diameter, which run into collecting sewers that are five feet or more in diameter. There are fourteen drainage areas in the city, the sewers following the old watersheds of the harbor area down to treatment plants on the water’s edge.
The inlet that cuts into Seventy-fourth Street from East River was called Saw Mill Creek.
Things change when the air changes.
—David Wojnarowicz
a) the citizen
Closing the barn door after the horses have escaped: of course. That’s what people do. In this case the horses in question happened to be the Four Horses of the Apocalypse, traditionally named Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. So the closing of the barn door was particularly emphatic.
Although naturally even this instinctive and useless reaction was contested, as many pointed out that it was indeed too late. Having torched the world, many argued, why not just go with the flow, ride the wave, enjoy the last efflorescence of civilization and stop even trying to fix things? This was called adaptation, and it was a popular philosophical position among certain cloud citizens and libertarians and academics in various disciplines, all tending to be young and childless or otherwise feeling that they somehow didn’t have skin in the game. It made them cool, it often got them tenure from like-minded intellectuals, and it was a very expedient cynicism all round, as one could behave as if things were still fun and exciting and the new normal. When certain scientists pointed out that actually a runaway greenhouse effect could have quite remarkable consequences, like the kind that Venus had experienced a few billion years before, so that the Four Horses already unleashed could exponentially swell and devour much of the biosphere, meaning the mass extinction event already initiated could possibly include among its victim species even one certain Homo sapiens oblivious, this was generally scoffed at by the sophisticates in question, who were too hip to imagine that expert overconfidence might refer to they themselves, as knowledgeable and coldly realistic as they felt themselves to be. People love to be cool.
Then the food panic of 2074 occurred and the resulting price jumps, hoarding, hunger, famine, and death gave everyone, and this time everyone, the sudden awareness that even food, that necessity that so many had assumed had been a problem solved or even whipped by the wonders of modern agriculture, was something that was made uncertain by the circumstances thrust on them by climate change among other anthropogenic hammerings on the planet. Average weight loss for adults worldwide through the late 2070s amounted to several kilos, less in the prosperous countries where it was sometimes welcomed as a diet that worked (at last), more in developing countries where the kilos were not there to be lost, except to death.
So this incident forced the governments of the world to refocus attention not just on agriculture, which they did posthaste, but also on land use more generally, meaning civilization’s technological base, meaning, as a first order of business, what got called rapid decarbonization. Which meant even some interference with market forces, oh my God! And so the closing of the barn door began in earnest, and the sophisticates advocating adaptation slid away and found other hip causes with which to demonstrate their brilliance.
At that point, as it turned out, despite the chaos and disorder engulfing the biosphere, there were a lot of interesting things to try to latch that barn door closed. Carbon-neutral and even carbon-negative technologies were all over the place waiting to be declared economical relative to the world-blasting carbon-burning technologies that had up to that point been determined by the market to be “less expensive.” Energy, transport, agriculture, construction: each of these heretofore carbon-positive activities proved to have clean replacements ready for deployment, and more were developed at a startling speed. Many of the improvements were based in materials science, although there was such consilience between the sciences and every other human discipline or field of endeavor that really it could be said that all the sciences, humanities, and arts contributed to the changes initiated in these years. All of them were arrayed against the usual resistance of entrenched power and privilege and the economic system encoding these same, but now with the food pa
nic reminding everyone that mass death was a distinct possibility, some progress was possible, for a few years anyway, while the memories of hunger were fresh.
So energy systems were quickly installed: solar, of course, that ultimate source of earthly power, the efficiencies of translation of sunlight into electricity gaining every year; and wind power, sure, for the wind blows over the surface of this planet in fairly predictable ways. More predictable still are the tides and the ocean’s major currents, and with improvements in materials giving humanity at last machines that could withstand the perpetual bashing and corrosion of the salty sea, electricity-generating turbines and tide floats could be set offshore or even out in the vast deep to translate the movement of water into electricity. All these methods weren’t as explosively easy as burning fossil carbon, but they sufficed; and they provided a lot of employment, needed to install and maintain such big and various infrastructures. The idea that human labor was going to be rendered redundant began to be questioned: whose idea had that been anyway? No one was willing to step forward and own that one, it seemed. Just one of those lame old ideas of the silly old past, like phlogiston or ether. It hadn’t been respectable economists who had suggested it, of course not. More like phrenologists or theosophists, of course.
Transport was similar, as it relied on energy to move things around. The great diesel-burning container ships were broken up and reconfigured as containerclippers, smaller, slower, and there again, more labor-intensive. Oh my there was a real need for human labor again, how amazing! Although it was true that quite a few parts of operating a sailing ship could be automated. Same with freight airships, which had solar panels on their upper surfaces and were often entirely robotic. But the ships sailing the oceans of the world, made of graphenated composites very strong and light and also made of captured carbon dioxide, neatly enough, were usually occupied by people who seemed to enjoy the cruises, and the ships often served as floating schools, academies, factories, parties, or prison sentences. Sails were augmented by kite sails sent up far up into the atmosphere to catch stronger winds. This led to navigational hazards, accidents, adventures, indeed a whole new oceanic culture to replace the lost beach cultures, lost at least until the beaches were reestablished at the new higher coastlines; that too was a labor-intensive project.
New but old sea transport grew into the idea of the townships, again replacing the lost coastlines to a small extent; in the air, the carbon-neutral airships turned in some cases into skyvillages, and a large population slung their hooks and lived on clippers of the clouds. Civilization itself began to exhibit a kind of eastward preponderance of movement, following the jet streams; where the trade winds blew there was some countervailing action westward, but the drift of things was generally easterly. Many a cultural analyst wondered what this might mean, postulating some reversal in historical destiny given the earlier supposed western trend, et cetera, et cetera, and they were not deterred by those who observed it meant nothing except that the Earth rotated in the direction it did.
When it came to land use, effects were multiple. Carbon-burning cars having become a thing of the past, little electric cars took advantage of the world’s very extensive road systems, but these roads were now also occupied by train tracks and biking humans, and many were also taken out entirely, to create the habitat corridors reckoned necessary for the survival of the many, many endangered species coexisting on the planet with humans, other species now recognized as important to humanity’s own survival. Since people were tending to congregate in cities anyway, this process was encouraged, and an almost E. O. Wilsonian percentage of land was gradually almost emptied of humans and turned over to animals, birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians, and wild plants. Agriculture joined this effort and sky ag was invented, in which skyvillages came down and planted and harvested crops while scarcely even touching down. Cattle, sheep, goats, buffalo, and other range animals became quite free range indeed, and turning them into food was a tricky business. In fact most meat for human consumption was now grown in vats, but done right, animal husbandry proved to be carbon negative too, so that didn’t go away.
Deacidifying the oceans? That wasn’t really possible, although there were attempts to frack the new basalt on the mid-Atlantic rift to capture carbonates, also attempts to in effect lime the oceans, also to build giant electrolysis baths and new algal life communities, and so on. Still the oceans were sick, as between a third and a half of the carbon burned in the carbon-burning years had ended up in the ocean and acidified it, making it difficult for many carbon-based creatures at the bottom of the food chain. And when the ocean is sick, humanity is sick. So this was another aspect of their era, and something to keep land agriculture itself at the front of the docket, because aquaculture (which had been one third of humanity’s food) was now a very active and complicated business, not just a matter of hauling fish out of the sea.
Construction? This used to release a lot of carbon, both in the creation of cement and in the operation of building machinery. Lots of explosive power needed for these jobs, and so to continue them biofuels were important; biofuel carbon was dragged out of the air, collected, burned back into the air, then dragged down again. It was a cycle that needed to stay neutral. Cement itself was mostly replaced by the various graphenated composites, in the so-called Anderson Trifecta, very elegant: carbon was sucked out of the air and turned into graphene, which was fixed into composites by 3-D printing and used in building materials, thus sequestering it and keeping it from returning to the atmosphere. So now even building infrastructure could be carbon negative (meaning more carbon removed from the atmosphere than added, for those of you wondering). How cool was that? Maybe so cool it would return the world to 280 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, maybe even start a little ice age; people shivered with anticipation at the thought, especially glaciologists.
But so expensive. Economists could not help but be dubious. Because prices were always right, because the market was always right, right? So these newfangled inventions, so highly touted by those neo-Malthusians still worried by the discredited Club of Rome limits-to-growth issues—could we really afford these things? Wouldn’t everything be better sorted out by the market?
Could we afford to survive? Well, this wasn’t really the way to frame the question, the economists said. It was more a matter of trusting that economics and the human spirit had solved all problems around the beginning of the modern era, or in the years of the neoliberal turn. Wasn’t it obvious? Just come to Davos and look at their equations, it all made sense! And the laws and the guns backing adherence to those laws all agreed. So hey, just continue down the chute and trust the experts on how things work!
So guess what: there was not consensus. Are you surprised? These interesting new technologies, adding up to what could be a carbon-negative civilization, were only one aspect of a much larger debate on how civilization should cope with the crises inherited from previous generations of expert stupidity. And the Four Horses were loose on the land, so this was not the sanest of world cultures ever to occupy the planet, no, not quite the sanest. Indeed it could be argued that as the stakes got higher, people got crazier. The tyranny of sunk costs, followed by an escalation of commitment; very common, common enough that it was economists who had named these actions, as they are names for economic behaviors. So yeah, double down and hope for the best! Or try to change course. And as both efforts tried to seize the rudder of the great ship of state, fights broke out on the quarterdeck! Oh dear, oh my. Read on, reader, if you dare! Because history is the soap opera that hurts, the kabuki with real knives.
This is a kind of verbal fugue, if Writer says so.
suggested David Markson
The strangest is that which, being in many particulars most like, is in some essential particular most unlike.
—Thoreau discovers the uncanny valley, 1846
b) Stefan and Roberto
Roberto and Stefan loved it when the great harbor froze over. New Yo
rk’s schizophrenic weather only made it happen for a week or so at a time, usually, but while the ice held they were in a different world. The previous year in a freeze they had tried to make an iceboat, and though it had not been a success, they had learned some things. Now they wanted to try again.
Mr. Hexter asked if he could come along. “I used to do the same thing when I was a boy, out of the North Cove yacht harbor.”
The boys looked at each other uncertainly, but Stefan said, “Sure, Mr. H. Maybe you can help us figure out how to attach the skates to the bottom.”
Hexter smiled. “We used to screw them to two-by-fours, as I recall, and nail those to the bottom of whatever we had. Let me see what you’ve got.”
So they walked right down the center of Twenty-third, along with hundreds of other people doing the same, and then when they hit the river they went down to the Bloomfield aquaculture dock, where the boys had chained their iceboat’s deck to a concrete bollard, with a box of tools and materials hidden under it.
“Where do you guys get all this stuff?” Hexter asked them as he pawed through it. “Some of this is pretty decent.”
“We scavenge,” Stefan said.
Hexter nodded uncertainly. It was almost plausible, for most of it. The city was full of junk. A trip to Governors Island or Bayonne Bay might do it.
The dockmaster, Edgardo, came by and welcomed the boys, distracting Mr. Hexter from this line of inquiry. And it turned out Edgardo knew Mr. H a little. They talked over old times for a bit, and the boys were interested to learn that Mr. Hexter had once kept a rowboat at this dock.
When Edgardo moved on, the old man inspected their skates. “They look serviceable.”
“But how do you attach them so you can steer?” Stefan asked.
“Only the front one has to move. That one has to have like a rudder.”