Cullsman #9

by Michael John Grist

  I want to punch him for saying 'sir'.

  "Give me the damn list again."

  He hands it over. The first name, at the top, is Iran.

  " C 22," I muse. "Miracle cure."

  "The only cure," says Baumann, and I glare at him. I dare him to say something like 'The Final Cure'. He may be a Jew himself, but I'll only be pushed so far. He doesn't push.

  "Will you be the nation's steward, or the driver who takes her down into the canyon with the rest of them?" he presses.

  "Shut up, Rufus," I tell him, but there's no spirit in it. Instead I point at the two vases either side of the big desk, surrounding the desk where Lincoln and all those great men sat before me, where the microphones reside.

  "Strip those completely," I tell him.

  "They're already turned off."

  I snort a laugh. "Czar for the environment."

  "The paper, sir," he says.

  I take it, and look down the list. Iran. North Korea. Yemen. The names run down the length of the page.

  "All of them?"

  "How many people survived the Titanic?" he counters.

  I take up my pen, and sign.

  Phoenix Sept 2017

  Atmospheric CO2 – 414ppm - Mauna Loa Observatory

  We reach the bore-hole, spattered by gale winds blowing the desert sand in our faces. Baumann is grimacing through his safety goggles. We are almost alone on this wind-swept plane, only the ARF-36 chopper behind us, and a slim metal outcrop before us. It looks like a high-tech toilet cubicle.

  "After you," he says. I get in. Inside are palm prints, and we access our way to the deeps.

  Down below, we go through long straight underground labs, drilled out of the bedrock by the same machines that dug the channel tunnel between the UK and France. Stalwart allies. On loan for canalizing projects, and this is what we turned them to.

  We ride the monorail along the underground bore-hole. It is white, clinical, air-tight and odorless. Either side of us, built like stations against the circular walls, are the endless parade of labs. Within every one, people in white haz-mat suits, mixing C 22.

  "Like Cern," I say. Baumann detects the irony in my voice, and wisely remains silent.

  I watch the researchers either side of me put the finishing touches to the Final Cure. It's what I call it now, in my head.

  At the end of the line is the press conference hall, mocked up to be the Oval Office. There will be no questions, as this room is empty. I stand at the lectern and tell the cameras a new dawn is at hand, a new world of potential and opportunity.

  "American scientists have developed the first stable isotope of Carbon 22. It will not decay radiologically. It is more dense and energy-rich than oil, natural gas, and coal. Once blended together in a complex fusion lab, a single mote of C 22 can act as a seed that will draw carbon out of the atmosphere. Under controlled conditions, enough C 22 plants could solve the climate change crisis, bypass peak oil, and take the whole world into a new energy rich future."

  I hold up a single bead of black material.

  "Within this graphite marble is a seed of C 22. We will make them available, along with the invaluable technology to harness their intrinsic power, to any nation that should wish to have them. We don't require that those nations renounce their nuclear ambitions. We don't expect them to follow some new mandate or yoke themselves to International law. We only hope that together, as peoples of the Earth, we will shepherd in a new era of mutual prosperity, hope, and innovation."

  After I'm done I feel like vomiting. Baumann is there by my side, taking my elbow.

  "The folly of perpetual motion," I murmur.

  He grins. "The folly of Ice 9."

  A curse on science fiction writers. I straighten up, before anyone can see me like this. Together we march out.

  Leningrad Feb 2021

  Atmospheric CO2 – 400ppm – Mauna Loa Observatory

  Sitting across from Russian President Smorsky. He smells like vanilla pipe tobacco. He's dressed in tweeds and great big galoshes, as though he's just been out wading for ducks.

  "Your seed is defective," he tells me. "Doesn't work."

  He tosses the C 22 bead onto the desk between us.

  "Inert," he adds, warping the 'e' like he learned his English from some ancient Baba Yaga.

  I take the bead in my hand and hold it between my finger and thumb.

  "Not in Nigeria," I say.

  "Nigeria is gone!" he declaims. "Your plants, your inert toys. Now the whole country is gone."

  I roll the bead into my closed fist, slip it into my pocket. "Then you won't need this, will you?"

  "I choose tiger," says Smorsky. "Fucking you and your princess. There is no hope in this dream."

  I lean across the table to look him close in the eye. He meets my gaze. His face is so covered in lines. I wonder then, does he know?

  "Are you sure?"

  He slaps the table with his open hand.

  "Get out! You, get out!"

  We leave.

  Nigeria lies ravaged by a nuclear blast larger than the world has ever known, so violent volcanoes in Hawaii erupted, so virulently radioactive no-one can enter the country for a hundred years.

  In Air Force One I take my news with Baumann watching me. I sip coffee, and wait for the first of the flash-bangs to detonate over Iran.

  C 22 is not a miracle. It is a weapon, and we knew that. Still, we gave it to them all.

  For Iran, we report it was the Allied peoples of the African League, sneaking alkali into their C 22 manufactories. Iran goes up in smoke.

  The final solution.

  The week becomes the bloodiest in history. The dregs of Iran alkali-bombs Uganda, Kenya, and Guyana. The African League alkali-bomb Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and UAE. Israel implodes, alongside Pakistan, parts of India, several of the Stans. C 22 factories, mid-decommission, are alkalied in North Korea, Siberia, Mongolia, Israel, and Indonesia. Numerous alkali missiles come our way, but we're ready for that, because there is no active C 22 in our whole country.

  By week's end, some 2.2 billion people are estimated dead, some 40 million square miles of land impossibly irradiated.

  Refugees are led out, and we are left looking like fools for supplying such dangerous materials to them all. I go into my faux Oval Office and explain to cold cameras that C 22 was a terrible error, reactive in ways we could have never predicted. We are sorry, so sorry. We will secure every radioactive zone.

  As I speak, I feel the sickness rise cold again. So many lies, and this the worst of them all. They should be thanking me every day, for giving their lifeboats meaning.

  We move in to the radioactive zones, start building immense border walls, concrete sarcophagi encircling the blast zones like the Chernobyl reactor.

  Within another week, carbon parts by million in the atmosphere are down by 10. Rads are unchanged.

  Washington Oct 2022

  Atmospheric CO2 – 300ppm – Mauna Loa Observatory

  I stand at the lectern and preach hope. I preach the Princess.

  The story of the Princess and the Tiger goes like this; a man commits a crime against his King, and for that crime he is sent to the arena like a common Christian. In the arena are two doors, and behind one is the Tiger, the other the Princess. He must choose. One will rip him to shreds, the other will marry him.

  He turns to the stands, where the woman he loves is standing. She can see what is behind the doors. She can signal him to either door. Will she see him married and happy with another woman, or will she see him destroyed by the lion?

  I preach the Princess to them. Every time, every time, we must point to the Princess. We gain nothing by hurting our fellows. We gain nothing by any of it.

  I hold up a bead of C 22, the tool of the world's destruction. This is the last speech I will give as President.

  "I still believe this is the Princess," I tell them, all those millions of Americans, all those billions around the world. "It was misused, in ways we shou
ld have foreseen. But it will still point to it as our savior until my dying day."

  No applause. I step back, away, the camera fades out. My Presidency is over in all but name.

  Now the real work begins.

  Redmond May 2025

  Atmospheric CO2 – 270ppm – Mauna Loa Observatory

  Baumann is by my side as we survey the information sin-bin. Golliger walks us through the stats piling up on the big screen, while NASA-like controllers fill the floor below in a half-moon, at their desks, ready to launch.

  "The satellite coverage over Israel," says Baumann. "Was it a worm?"

  "Trojan," says Golliger. He's Huli tribe, Papua New Guinea, and his cap-like hair has been tonsured into a thick DNA spiral atop his head. His skin is pitted with child-hood abrasions. "Hackers from the PRK, probably, pushing at the screen."

  "Did they see anything?"

  "30 second peep-hole, maybe," he answers. "But what are they going to see? Only green."

  "There shouldn't be a damn thing there at all," snaps Baumann. "It's an atomic wasteland."

  "Nope," replies Golliger calmly, pulls up an image of what looks like black tar on the big wall. "Got that figured. Radiologic mushrooms, found 20 years gone in Pripyat. They suck up the Rads, photosynthesize, and chlorophyllate."

  I look at Baumann askance.

  "Turn green," he says patronizingly, without looking away from the screen. "Then you'll seed the web with this?"

  "Already linked it out, post-dated as a study we conducted 2 years gone."

  I sigh a breath of relief.

  "Anything else, then?"

  He shrugs. "The usual runs at the barriers, mostly around Nigeria. Looters in gaffer-taped Haz-mat. Rebuffed. Picked up a few on satellite, sneaking up a dry-river bed. Hit them with a blast of alpha. They'll be in hospitals now bleeding from their pores, spreading the fable."

  I sigh. "Good work."

  He shrugs. "It's what we do, innit?"

  * * *

  I go on Meet the Press to tell them how well the spent C 22 in the blast-zones is working. In every irradiated country, the C 22 fragments are leeching carbon out of the air like suckling pigs at the teat. Parts per million are down to the lowest in a century. The Princess works.

  There's no audience, but the crew stand for an ovation when we're done. The video loops to footage of our border walls across the world, shielding whole countries as quiet and clean as commercial ionizers, gestating black gold in their innards.

  If only they knew.

  I wonder if they ever will.

  C 22, the miracle cure. The alternative to heal the air, when there was no alternative.

  Oil drilling is down across the Middle East- those kingdoms and satrapies that weren't obliterated in the nuke-storm. There are fewer people to serve now.

  2.2 billion dead, 40 million square miles of land, and all the world does is try to poke holes in the satellite coverage over Israel. It makes me want to laugh at how easy it all was. How easy it could be again.

  * * *

  Dinner with Baumann. The only person I ever have dinner with. I see my wife once a month, if they let me. I don't blame them though, I only let them see their families once a year. Executive privilege, I suppose.

  The lab technicians and all the originators of C 22 are buried in their bore-holes. All the hard-lines were cut after the storm went down, only one elevator to the surface running, and we let them out to gulp at the desert air once in a blue moon.

  "Stars," they all say, staring up at the sky. "I forgot there were stars."

  Gilliger and his crew are the same. We all have our roots into each other. I ponder that other work of science fiction, 1984 by George Orwell, and its spreading chestnut tree.

  I think this must be the price of this lifeboat. We're all tied up in each other, and we won't one of us go down, lest we all do. We've built the opposite of the Prisoner's Dilemma, though we certainly are all prisoners.

  I wonder what they look like now, the new lungs of the planet. I imagine them, growing thick and lush over the runways and cities of all those places that C 22 took. I imagine the networks of men, every one a small team, every one unaware of the others, every one in gleaming haz-mat and believing they need it, coming in like custodians to plant the seeds, lay down the fields of black-glass brick.

  "You're thinking of the dead," says Baumann, over his lamb and peas. There's mint sauce on the side. It's delicious.

  I nod absently. I think of them a lot, 2.2 billion.

  "It used to be true that there were more people alive in the world now, than all those who ever lived throughout human history," I say.

  He smiles.

  "Of course that isn't true anymore."

  "And would you have it any other way?" he asks.

  I shrug. I think of the first of the C 22 factories to implode. We chose Nigeria because we'd had trouble with them for decades. They didn't want to play nice, and follow the united way. People might believe they did it to themselves. They might believe they'd start a terrible chain reaction.

  We didn't want them in our lifeboat, and that was that.

  We alkalied all the plants. We set the seeds where we wanted them, then detonated the plague.

  I take out the bead of C 22 I got from Smorsky. I roll it on the table before me.

  "You still carry that?" he asks.

  I nod. I've thought about swallowing it many times, though I know it would never kill me.

  "Don't drop it in your soup," says Baumann, with a smirk.

  Of course it isn't live. We never meant to gas the Russians. But perhaps I could choke on it. The ultimate irony.

  I'll get to see my wife in a few weeks. They've got her believing there was a nuclear apocalypse, and she's being kept in a bunker far underground. There's lots of wives and children down there, held as collateral against any of us spilling the truth.

  There were no nuclear bombs. C 22 was never meant to fix carbon. The 22-proton isotope of carbon has a half-life of only a few microseconds. It isn't a real thing you can see. It was just a permeable carrier for a crystallized shred of bacterium.

  "Do you ever think of them?" I ask Baumann. "All those billions, just stopped in their tracks, falling where they stood?"

  "I've seen movies where it happens," he says. "I can imagine what it might look like. So no, I don't think about it."

  I chew on a piece of tender lamb. It's delicious.

  "Have you seen Soylent Green?" I ask him.

  "What is that, some kind of deodorant?"

  I chuckle. There's no point explaining. Charlton Heston, running through the decrepit streets crying out, "Soylent Green is people!"

  Our lifeboat is made of people. Where we promised the Princess, the miracle of C 22, we brought the Tiger- a lethal breed of small pox that would kill in under an hour, ragingly infectious, with a life-cycle of one day. After one day, it would die. With every C 22 live pay-load we shipped for energy, we shipped the end.

  Billions died. They fell where they stood, and became so much fertilizer. From their bodies we grew jungles, vast, Jurassic jungles that cover 1% of the Earth's surface now and spreading. They are the lungs that are scrubbing the air, not C 22.

  Princess, Tiger. Mandeville said it back in the 17th century, you have to hurt to get any benefit at all.

  All this energy, the fuel that drives our world now, comes from that reclaimed land. Like the Nazis before us, we rendered the civilizations that we killed, and made of their bodies things useful to us. We mulched their fertile land and rotting bodies to green lungs. We paved their deserts with photovoltaic cells. We looted every scrap of usable material from their cities and recycled it into our own.

  We cannibalized the world to save it. That's our lifeboat. That's C 22.

  I roll the bead of black stuff between my fingers. Maybe I will swallow it, someday, and try to choke. But first I'll see my wife. I'll hold her in my arms, in that false bunker, and I'll promise her, like I promised them all, that
someday we'll emerge together and the world will be our Eden.

  6. CULLSMAN #9

  THE CULL NEEDS YOU

  The signs are everywhere, the only color in this dry and wasting endopolis. I turn my eyes away, stamp my feet on the cracked bitumen decks heading home. It is cold. There are people lying in the dry gutters, licking at drips of moisture sweating down the walls. The last Great Rains came long before I was born.

  Waiting for the lowrail to come, I look up through the soft wall canopies overhead, to the planet in the sky. The Second. The remnants of its cities are now just scattered lights, glittering like distant stars around the crevice where the core-moon once shone. I look at the remnants of their ravaged world and wonder how they feel, the Cull nearly complete, as they look up at me and see their life repurposed, for this.

  I scuff a dying weed with the toe of my boot. It is brown, cracked. The air smells of burnt fuel. We are dying too.

  * * *

  At home Sylabry greets me at the door, the warning in her eyes. I am not to speak of it here, not with the girls still watching.

  "Daddy!" calls Glaya, running up to me with her favorite doll held up to my face. "King Trunk missed you!"

  I take the faded toy and give it a hug, then take my daughter and lift her into a hug too. She is so light it pains me, but of course I smile.

  "I missed him too! Now has he been a good Trunk or a bad Trunk?"

  She giggles into my neck as I walk us into the dimly lit living room. "Silly, of course he's good! He's the King, everything he does is good."

  When dinner is done we lower the gas and send the girls to bed. Glaya is scared of the Seconds, the little people from the twinkling sky, but I hush her and promise her sister Foral will watch over her. Foral nods solemnly and follows her to bed.

  In the quiet after they are gone, my wife and I sit. The things I have to tell her cannot wait, but still I hesitate. I cannot bear to bring this to an end.

  "They're closing the fourth adjunct soon," she says. "I heard it from the Sullys."