Jane herself was eager to get off the plane. Exactly twenty-four hours after testifying in a courtroom on behalf of the largest ski resort company in the world, Jane stepped out onto a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And she had no idea what she was doing here.
************
Jane walked around the platform, taking in the view. Chris had brought them to the island, the part of the aircraft carrier that stuck out above the flight deck like a traffic control tower. Though most of the aircraft carrier was below-decks, the island housed the bridge, flight control, and anything else that needed a good view. From just outside the navigation bridge, Jane witnessed that unimpeded view, marveling at the vast ocean which stretched in every direction for thousands of miles. The majesty of the giant flight deck below her just accented how alone they were, a tiny speck in the endless blue sea. Jane gripped onto the handrail and forced herself to continue walking along the outside of the island. In her mind, a vast wave rose from the sea, loomed over the aircraft carrier and swallowed them up. She shook her head, suppressed her fear, and kept walking. Even after thirty years, memories of the tsunami still haunted her.
Then Gyre Island came into view. It reminded her of a patch of lilies, floating on top of a lake. She couldn’t imagine anyone living out there, floating on a giant life raft in the middle of the ocean.
“Beautiful isn’t it?” a rich gravelly voice said.
Jane turned around to see a dark-skinned man with graying hair standing behind her. He wore an elaborate blue navy jacket festooned with medals and tassels on top of a simple pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. Somehow he looked familiar.
“You are the captain I presume?” Jane asked.
He looked surprised. “Oh no,” he responded. Then he looked down at his jacket. “Oh this thing? This just came with the ship when I bought it. I’m Bryce Kandari.” He held out his hand. “At your service.”
“Bryce Kandari,” she repeated, taking his hand. “You’re the famous video game developer.” He shrugged. “So how did you end up with an aircraft carrier?” she asked. “Run out of Ferraris to buy?”
Bryce chuckled. “Actually, I like to think about this as doing my part. This is the U.S.S. Nimitz, commissioned back in 1975. She was our first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, but she wasn’t built to last forever. Back in the 2020’s, the Navy began decommissioning the Nimitz, but then the Medicare crisis of 2025 hit. With the federal government facing bankruptcy, they couldn’t afford the hundreds of millions of dollars it takes to safely decommission and store a nuclear carrier. Being the patriot that I am, I offered to take it off their hands, sans armament of course, and even stimulated the economy by hiring lots of people to fix it up.”
“I see,” she said unconvincingly.
“The ladies dig it more than a dozen Ferraris,” he added, giving her a wink. “You must admit that this makes a pretty cool yacht.”
“It does,” she agreed. “But why does the ECC need it?”
“It doesn’t,” he replied. “This has nothing to do with the ECC. It’s my home. Some people retire, buy an R.V., and travel across the country. My mobile home is a little bigger and allows me to fly guests in when needed.”
“Wow, rich people really are crazy,” she said.
“No dear,” he said. “Poor people are crazy. Rich people are eccentric. I paid a million dollars for a certificate that says so.” He looked completely serious.
Her eye caught something on the horizon. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to a white speck in the water.
“That’s one of the trawling ships,” he responded. “Gyre Island has four of them. They travel out to different sections of the Patch every day, dragging special collection gear, essentially large perforated buckets, along the sides. At the end of the day, they bring back all the plastic pellets back to the island for recycling.”
“They do the recycling on the island?” she asked. It seemed crazy to put a recycling plant way out here.
“Oh yes,” he replied. “That’s what all the solar arrays are for. You need a whole lot of energy to re-melt all that plastic. Of course you could do the recycling on land, but they don’t really pick up enough plastic to make it worth the long trip back and forth to the mainland. Instead, Gyre Island uses all the plastic it recycles. The floating island originally just housed a small recycling plant. Every year they add pontoons, making the island larger and larger. The residential accommodations are made from recycled plastic as is all the furniture. There are now one hundred volunteers who live on this island. As they pick up more and more garbage from the oceans, the island gets bigger and bigger.”
“That’s fascinating. So the ECC project is a success then,” she said.
“No,” said Bryce sharply. “It’s not. Every day, ships from every country that borders the Pacific leave port carrying tons of garbage. Ignoring whatever laws the international community has created and not enforced, they dump all of it into the ocean and get paid for it. Our solution is to use more ships, burning more fuel, to go around looking for that same trash that is now scattered throughout a vast swath of ocean and pick it up again. We collect a tiny fraction of what is dumped every day and expend far more energy trying to pick it up than they do to dump it.” Bryce turned to her. “So no, this is not a success.”
Jane looked confused. “Then why are you here?” she asked.
“I’m here for two reasons,” he explained. “First of all, we’re now in international waters. I need a base to operate independently, and not just to avoid liquor taxes. That’s why I acquired the Nimitz, and that’s why I’ve taken over the ECC to get Gyre Island.” Jane nodded tentatively. “And second of all, I’m here and by extension, you’re here because of the one hundred people that live on Gyre Island. More than anywhere else in the world, Gyre Island is an example of a small, closed ecosystem. Thousands of miles from the closest city, they’ve created a self-sustaining environment. All their energy comes from the sun. They then use this energy to desalinate water. That water is used to grow plants which provide food for the inhabitants. And as mentioned, raw materials come from the trash floating all around them.”
“Interesting,” Jane said, “but that still doesn’t explain why a reclusive and wealthy video game developer has obtained my research as ransom to get me to come to his floating vacation home.”
“Hold on there,” Bryce objected. “Contrary to what you may believe, video games are not the enemy of this Earth. I have just as much reason to save our planet and significantly more vision and resources to do so than anyone else. This is not a vacation home. The lessons we can learn from the Gyre Island ecosystem will play a critical role in my most crucial endeavor to date. Project Phoenix is the single most important project in the history of humanity.” He paused and then added, “And it needs your research, it needs you to succeed. This is not an exaggeration. So I ask you,” Bryce turned to Jane and made a short bow, “will you, Dr. Jane Ingram, help me save humanity?”
Jane was a little taken aback. Just like in the videos she had seen of him, Bryce was rather theatrical and a bit arrogant. But he also seemed genuinely passionate. “I’m intrigued,” she responded. “But I’m going to have to see a few more details before I can commit.”
Bryce chuckled. “Of course. Chris has already brought Mai-lin down to the conference room. Let’s go join them, and I promise to give you all the details you’ll need.”
************
They were in the oddest conference room that Jane had ever seen. The walls, the ceilings, the floor, and even the door they entered through was white. Instead of a table surrounded by chairs, the only furniture was a white circular couch with the seats pointed out from the center. Mai-lin and Jane sat on the couch as Bryce paced in front of them.
Bryce snapped his fingers. The room dimmed and suddenly the walls, the ceiling, and even the floor were lit up by images. They were completely shrouded within an image of the Earth, adjusted
so that it appeared that they were looking at it from the inside out. They were sitting in Antarctica. The North Pole hung above them. On the walls, the continents slowly drifted by. The display was calibrated so that even the corners and edges of the room disappeared, replaced by the roundness of the Earth.
“This is the Earth as we know it,” Bryce said. An overlay of colors appeared, covering the oceans and land in hues of yellow, orange, red, and white. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the temperature overlay.” Millions of tiny black spots appeared, clustering around the major cities of the world. “And here are the population centers, largely clustered around the industry of our civilization.” Jane nodded. From her work at the ICCF she was very familiar with these types of maps. Of course their displays weren’t quite as impressive. Kandari certainly had the money to afford the most cutting edge technology.
“This current display shows the world twenty years ago,” he explained. “Let me show you what’s happened since then.” Jane noticed that the colors shifted to a warmer hue. Some bits of white around the edges of Antarctica disappeared, and the dots grew more plentiful. “Now what do you think happens next?”
“Well that depends on what we decide to do,” Jane responded. “If the world comes together and reduces carbon emissions enough, then we can maintain our current environment.”
“Or, if some rich guy with enough money to buy an aircraft carrier funds our research,” added Mai-lin bluntly, “then perhaps we’ll make some breakthroughs allowing us to control our environment.”
“Perhaps,” conceded Bryce. “But those are both highly improbable events. My simulations suggest that there’s a 99.5% chance that disastrous climate change will occur before either of those two happen. So let me show you what happens next.”
All around them, the colors of the globe started to heat up. Large sections of Antarctica and Greenland disappeared. The ocean swallowed the coastlines of California and everywhere else around the world. The Netherlands completely vanished. And then the dots began to disappear quickly. “That’s all the crops dying,” Bryce explained, “followed by mass starvation.” But some of the dots moved up north while others moved south. The tropical areas of the globe became deserted, replaced by new settlements in the arctic regions.
“Yes,” interrupted Mai-lin, seemingly bored despite the light show. “We’re quite familiar with the climate models. Civilization will have to rebuild at high elevations and in the arctic regions.”
“Just wait for it,” insisted Bryce.
The temperature leveled out and became constant. The dots began to multiply. New centers emerged. It looked like the new civilization was prosperous. The dots kept spreading. Then suddenly, the temperatures changed again. The oceans expanded again. More green shifted to yellow, and the dots began to disappear.
“What was that?” asked Jane.
“Well it looks like we didn’t learn our lesson,” said Bryce. “History is cyclical.” Then he waved his hand.
The Earth surrounding them was replaced by complete darkness. Then stars appeared, scattered through the cosmos like pinpricks in their black box. “This is the world of Creation,” Bryce explained. “A billion people are involved in this simulation, using up to ten percent of the total computing power in the world. When I created this twenty years ago, I had no idea that it would still be thriving now, or that it would be the key to understanding our world as I do now. Aside from providing the funds needed for Phoenix, it also provides the guidance.”
“Wait, you’re basing everything on a video game my son used to play twenty years ago?” asked Jane incredulously.
“Oh, this is much more than a video game,” insisted Bryce. “For instance, five years ago, a group of players simulated hundreds of worlds similar to our present day Earth. They used these models to create a stock-trading program that made its trades based on the data from the simulated worlds. The players made over five billion dollars before being shut down by the SEC.”
“Oh, so it’s a fraud simulator as well,” Mai-lin said dryly.
Bryce continued nonplussed. “I’ve spent the last ten years studying the myriad of worlds that the players have created.” Along the walls, different planets zoomed into view in rapid succession. “I’ve seen the rise and fall of millions of civilizations on millions of worlds.” Jane saw temperatures shift, populations grow and shrink in seconds on the walls, the floor, and the ceiling. “Using advanced software, I’ve managed to extract strong trends from these simulations and come to some powerful conclusions. Here is the main one.” Bryce gestured grandly and all the worlds disappeared. He recited the words that covered the walls. “All civilizations end.”
“And they end pretty quickly,” he continued. “Civilizations end because of two interconnected reasons. One is political instability, and the other is environmental change. Often, they help each other out.”
“Well, those are pretty big categories,” said Jane.
“Yes, and they’re pretty important ones. And yet human progress is rarely measured in those terms,” explained Bryce. “In order for our civilization to sustain itself, it needs to build a culture that values these two things. We need to first and foremost pursue a stable government and the understanding and control of our environment. Instead, we have a culture that is focused on power politics, industrialization, and technology.” Bryce held up his hands. “Now of course, I’m not opposed to technology. However, we need to focus on the right technologies.”
“The human race is amazing,” Bryce continued. “In the last two hundred years we have grown enormously in our technical prowess. However, most of this progress has been in the form of industrialization rather than environmentalism. Unfortunately, industrialization speeds up the clock. It manufactures military weapons that allow us to kill ourselves faster. It creates strip mines that allow us to plow through our natural resources faster. Right now, we are racing against global climate change. The technologies we are trying to develop to meet that challenge, and the research we are performing to avert that disaster is fighting directly against the technologies that speed our journey towards our demise. We will lose this race, for the world is too stratified in governance and too ignorant of the environment as a culture to defeat it. You have witnessed this yourself in the dissolution of the ICCF and the Cairo Treaty.”
“So let’s imagine what will happen after the oceans rise and our agricultural centers turn into deserts.” Bryce waved his hand, and the setting around them changed back to the image of the Earth. “Land and food will become precious quantities, and there will not be enough to support the 12 billion people currently living on this planet. Maybe 500 million will survive. Who will those 500 million be?”
“The people who will make these decisions are the ones with the guns and the tanks. We will be entering a time of chaos and disorder. People will struggle to survive as the civilization we know crumbles around us. Much of our technology is dependent on the large global infrastructure built to support it. The parts from your mobi come from over a hundred different factories. How will anyone replicate it? In the shattered remains of our great society, the new powers will hoard the old technologies. Food, energy, water, and technology will all become vital resources, and the people who control them will shape the new society.”
It sounded a little too much like a bad sci-fi film to be true. But she had seen it too often in her own life to dismiss it. People might want to be good, but when backed into a corner, they did what they needed to in order to survive.
“The new society that emerges will be a competitive one,” Bryce continued. “It will be one that strives primarily to recover the industrial technology it lost. And thus, the new society will be built on violence, once again creating a fractured world fighting desperately to industrialize. The destruction of our current civilization will push the next one again into a resource-hungry culture that focuses on using the environment, not in understanding it.”
They found themselves surrounded b
y an onslaught of images. Planes dropped bombs over cities. Large artillery batteries fired into a smoky red sky. The image zoomed back out to show the entire Earth in the dead of night. Fires sprung up across the continents, little pinpricks of destruction. Bryce continued. “And thus, we are thrust into an ever-repeating cycle where our society destroys itself soon after its rebirth.”
Jane examined Mai-lin’s face. She showed no emotion, but Jane could sense that this was affecting her as well. They were being forced to come to grips with their own message that global climate change was on its way. Except this time, there was nothing they could do to stop it.
The images disappeared, the walls fading into pure white. “But we can stop this cycle,” Bryce said confidently. “We can create a society that holds as its values; freedom, stability, security, and above all, sustainability. We can create a self-sufficient and self-contained community where scientific progress is focused on the technology we need to truly understand our world, live peacefully with it, and even modify it. Perhaps in hundreds or thousands of years, we can become masters of terra-forming and revert the Earth back into our Eden, a temperate paradise, able to support the human population into infinity.”
One simple word appeared on the walls: Phoenix. “We will rise from the ashes and create a new humanity. We will be the rebirth of mankind. But the egg must be laid before the tragedy strikes. I have gathered the finest minds from all over the world. In fact many of them are your colleagues from the ICCF. We cannot stop the progress of technology and industrialization. It is too late for that. However, we can use that technology to found a colony and to keep it safe from the chaos that will reign. We will design a non-industrialized, self-sustaining, and self-contained society and charge it with the task of continuing your research. Your work holds the key to environmental design, but it is just the start of a technology that we have ignored for too long. It is too late to save the world, this cycle. We have run out of time. But through the Phoenix project, we will have hundreds of years to learn and grow, eventually freeing ourselves from this deadly cycle.”