Frostlands

by John Feffer

  “Tell us what to do,” my charges implore me. They are still of an age when everything seems possible and the future looks friendly, not armed and dangerous. I’m probably the first person to tell them otherwise.

  I can fill them in about the past, but I can’t tell them what to do. I barely know what to do myself.

  The ice, all the precious ice that I once studied, has nearly disappeared, and with it the ability of the earth to reflect the sun’s rays. Unprotected by the ice and snow, the ocean waters absorb more and more of the sun’s heat, growing warmer still. This is the ice-albedo feedback loop. Yet a greater catastrophe lies just around the corner: huge amounts of methane are trapped beneath the remaining Arctic permafrost. If this gas is released, then it’s game over.

  So, that is my project—to preserve and regenerate the permafrost before it’s too late. I’m close to a solution. I just need a little more of that most precious commodity for an eighty-year-old.

  Time.

  Chapter Three

  Lizzie looks tired—and scared. Her pale face is even more bloodless than usual.

  I’m not sure why. Today’s attack was short and the damage limited. Neither Anuradha nor Zoltan seemed particularly worried about the breach or its consequences, but Lizzie looks as though she’s seen a ghost.

  The Capture is no ghost, though. She looks very solid indeed, sitting on a chair in the Quarantine Room, safe behind protective glass. She’s a young woman with startlingly blue eyes and smooth ebony skin, and she’s gazing about the room with mild curiosity. She doesn’t look dangerous in the least. Thanks to the Quarantine Room, any murderous diseases lurking in her bloodstream or murderous plans lodged in her psyche can’t possibly harm us. The room has, in fact, prevented a succession of plagues from reaching our community—the avian flu in 2033, last year’s PNC3 staph infection—not to mention a suicide bomber who blew himself up a dozen years ago and, other than traumatizing Lizzie’s predecessor, did no damage.

  Skipping the social niceties, as is her style, Lizzie gestures in the direction of the Capture and says, “Watch this.”

  She makes a movement on a screen in front of her that releases a microdrone from an aperture in the far corner of the room just behind the Capture’s back. It speeds directly at her dark, shaven head, sharp beak aimed at the base of her skull. I’m tempted to turn away before metal strikes bone. But the Capture just casually tilts her head to one side at the last moment and plucks the metal object from the air. She looks at the deadly projectile without curiosity and then slowly crushes it as if it were an errant hornet.

  “You get it?” Lizzie says.

  I’m startled, but yes, I understand. I’d expected flesh and blood, another Bertrand. I manage to ask, “Why is she still here?”

  “I disabled the kill switch,” Lizzie explains. “It wasn’t easy. There were ten of her. She was the only one we preserved.”

  “Also a sublime polymer?”

  “No, a conventional kill switch. The other nine just combusted before I could freeze them and hack into their systems.”

  “She looks sophisticated.”

  “The most sophisticated I’ve ever seen. That’s what worries me. Where does she come from, Rachel?”

  I have my suspicions. Instead of voicing them, I ask Lizzie, “Are there any bugs?”

  “Oh, she has bugs. Listen.” Lizzie makes another movement on the screen and then speaks a little louder. “What is my name?”

  The Capture looks bewildered. “Your name?”

  “What’s my name?” Lizzie repeats.

  The Capture suddenly slaps her palm against her forehead. Her head recoils from the blow. Once. Twice. Three times. It’s painful to watch.

  “Okay, stop,” Lizzie says. “My name is Lizzie.”

  The Capture stops and smiles in the direction of Lizzie’s voice. “Hello, Lizzie.”

  Lizzie turns to me. “She does that whenever she doesn’t know the answer to a direct question.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “I wish some of the men in Arcadia had that flaw!”

  “I’m sure she has other bugs, but that’s what I’ve found so far.” Lizzie flicks her black bangs away from her eyes. “They didn’t spend a lot of time programming her to interact with humans in real time. She’s a Spongebot. Absorb and transmit. I’ve disabled the transmit function.”

  “We should introduce her to Rupert, perhaps they’d get along. As long as he doesn’t ask her any unanswerable questions.”

  “He might have a better shot at determining where she comes from,” she admits.

  “You’ve tried asking her, I imagine. Or does that produce more head-thumping?”

  Instead of answering me, Lizzie again speaks to the Capture. “Where do you come from, Karyn?”

  “I was born in Canton, Ohio,” she replies.

  “And who do you work for?”

  “I’m self-employed. I do some spot welding to make ends meet. But I spend most of my time creating graphic novels.”

  “And what brought you here to Arcadia?”

  “I was hiking and got lost.”

  “Actually, you were part of an armed raid on this community,” Lizzie points out matter-of-factly.

  Karyn is not taken aback by this information. “I must have accidentally fallen in with a bad crowd.”

  “You also were armed.”

  “Was I?” Karyn looks genuinely perplexed. “I don’t remember that.”

  Lizzie turns off the mic. “There’s a lot she doesn’t remember. If it were up to me, I’d turn her into parts. She makes me uncomfortable.”

  Lizzie is like that: unsentimental. Sometimes I think that Rupert, our own AI, has more of an emotional life than she does.

  I look at Karyn, with her smooth bald head and the Gothic tattoos running up and down her neck. “I suspect that she’s going to be worth more than the sum of her parts. You’ve scanned her code?”

  “It’s clean,” Lizzie says. “Whoever designed her knew how to wipe away the fingerprints.”

  “We could incorporate her into the community. She’s harmless now that she’s disconnected, right? We could use a good spot welder. If they bothered to program that into her.”

  Lizzie brings up a screen of unintelligible strings of characters. “I’ve machine-scanned her code very carefully. But there might be a Trojan in there that I don’t recognize. I don’t want to be responsible for the people she strangles in the middle of the night. Look at what she does to her own forehead.”

  “I don’t think she’s designed to kill anyone.”

  “You believe she’s just a harmless graphic novelist?”

  “You said there were ten of them, right? Can you show me the schematic of the attack?”

  Lizzie pulls up 3D archive footage of Arcadia, rewinds it to just before the attack began, and hits play.

  It’s a fully automated assault. First comes some kind of pulse that briefly brings down one segment of the outer perimeter. After a couple minutes, the drones discover the opening and pour through like bats from a fireplace. They quickly circle the outer ring. Karyn and one other AI follow through the breach before the virtual wall repairs itself. The others remain arrayed in a circle around Arcadia. Then, with the exception of Karyn, all the intruders disappear, either as a result of our firepower or their own auto-destruction. Karyn is the last bot standing. I look at the time signature. The outer perimeter was down for less than ten seconds, and the whole assault lasted no more than ten minutes.

  “They didn’t even try to penetrate the inner perimeter,” I point out. “This was just reconnaissance. How much information did they send back before they were destroyed?”

  Lizzie shows me the figure. It’s staggering.

  “How did they disable the outside perimeter?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know.” She swallows. She’s not accustomed to the fog of ignorance.

  “It’s not your fault, Lizzie. Whoever it was probably has the best coders in the world working for
them. Look at Karyn. This is no random army of hackers.”

  Lizzie manages a tight smile. “Do you want to bring Rupert over?”

  “Sure. Plus some scrap metal and some pens and paper. Let’s see how talented our new Capture really is.”

  I find Rupert sitting in his favorite location, a corner of the laundry room. I suspect he likes the way the vibrations from the washing machines pass through the floor and up into his body. He’s stroking the stubbled head of a rabbit. A tuft of stuffing protrudes from what had once been an ear. The rabbit, a discarded doll, is not long for this world.

  Rupert also isn’t much to look at, despite his superficial handsomeness. We don’t have a high-tech assembly line, just a couple of 3D printers that have seen better days and some young people eager to try out their skills. So Rupert’s gait is a little off and he has a kind of Parkinsonian twitch, not to mention all the dings and scratches he’s sustained on his trips outside the community. I feel bad for him. He’s only three years old, yet he walks and talks more like an octogenarian than I do.

  Like all AI, he also has a couple of mysterious bugs, random ghosts in the machine. For instance, he loves stuffed animals and now carries this rabbit with him everywhere. We’ve tried to prevent him from taking it along when he leaves Arcadia, but he insists. So, to ensure that both his hands are free, we made him a monkey backpack whose arms wrap around his neck. For all his faults, Rupert remains extraordinarily useful, particularly on those rare external missions, and I’ve grown quite attached to him.

  Rupert looks up as I walk in.

  “Good afternoon, Rachel,” he says in his posh English accent. That was Lizzie’s doing—she was binge-watching episodes of the old TV show Downton Abbey while coding his personality. He looks like a young aristocrat down from Oxford for the weekend. “How are you today?”

  “I’m a little tired,” I confess. “What do you think of the recent attack, Rupert?”

  He looks at me, and it’s almost as if I can see his inner gears moving as he reviews and synthesizes all the available information. It takes only a few moments. “Rather a cock-up it seems. We responded quickly and effectively. And we have a Capture. You are here because you’d like me to visit her, yes? Lizzie connected me to the video feed. Her name is Karyn. She seems a proper young woman with a fondness for graphic novels.”

  “Could she still be a threat to the community?”

  “I’d like to meet her first before I come to any definitive conclusion.”

  “Well, you know where she is,” I say, preparing to leave. “Oh, Rupert, one more thing: how did they get through the outer perimeter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I’m grateful that he doesn’t have Karyn’s bug. Rupert is fragile enough at this point that he could easily smack his head right off his neck. “It was too sophisticated for you?”

  “Oh, no, Rachel. That part of the archive is not available.”

  I stare at him. “Not available?”

  “Except for the visuals, those 10.5 seconds are not available. I’m sorry, Rachel.”

  “How is that possible?”

  Rupert turns his attention back to the limp rabbit in his hands. “I wish I knew,” he says.

  “Could the attackers have disabled the virtual perimeter and simultaneously erased all evidence of their hack?”

  “Yes, that is possible, but I do not see any evidence of that.” He holds up the rabbit. “Do you think we can fix this, Rachel? I’m afraid that it might have been my fault.”

  “I’ll sew it up for you tonight.”

  Rupert smiles. He looks quite human at that moment. He hands me the rabbit. “Shall I fetch a blowtorch and a sketchbook?”

  “Yes, Rupert. Please put her through her paces. A full diagnostic.”

  I’d escort him back to quarantine, since I’m eager to see his initial interaction with Karyn, but I have a more important task.

  Zoltan is in the Hub, a large room off the Assembly Hall where he spends most of his time. The Hub is the nerve center of Arcadia—the above-ground one, at least. The co-chairs occupy facing tables in the center of the room, but Zoltan prefers to sit in the corner before a wall of screens. He usually has three dozen windows open conveying information from every part of Arcadia, along with international climate information, news of terrorism attacks, coding updates, and streams in several languages, as well as at least two ongoing chess games with distant partners. I suffer vertigo every time I watch him work.

  Zoltan swivels around at the sound of my approach. He has a spidery physique, all arms and spindly legs. He spends so much time in front of screens that, unlike everyone else his age in Arcadia, he wears glasses. The small wire-rims make him seem even younger than he is. When he was a child, I tried to persuade him to spend some time in the sun, to no avail. Both he and Lizzie used their superlative coding skills to get out of Arcadia’s manual-work requirements.

  “What do you think of Karyn?” he asks.

  “A conduit,” I say, “for information.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And you saw how much information was generated by this attack.”

  “An impressive amount.”

  I want to surprise Zoltan with something that he doesn’t know. “You realize that the kind of sublime polymer in those drones is currently in the design phase.”

  “I do.”

  “There are only a handful of outfits that could move it to the kind of operational stage we saw today.”

  “Actually,” Zoltan smiles impishly, “there’s only one.”

  “You knew immediately that it was CRISPR International.”

  “I suspected.”

  “It was confirmed by the breach of the perimeter,” I point out. “That was no amateur hack.”

  “It wasn’t a hack at all,” Zoltan says.

  I stare at him. “What do you mean?”

  Zoltan looks as pleased as a new parent. He pushes his glasses up his nose. “I did that. I opened the gate and let them in.”

  My heart freezes.

  Chapter Four

  I’ve been an ice woman my entire life.

  When the other kids in my high school stared out the window in class thinking about the beach, I dreamed of stealing back in time to stow away on the legendary expeditions of the Victorian era. I had an insatiable appetite for narratives of great suffering and achievement: the race to the South Pole, the ice-bound saga of Ernest Shackleton, Robert Peary’s dogsled search for the geographic North Pole. To reproduce those experiences as best I could, I’d go on long winter hikes in the White Mountains with a small cache of dried fruit and beef jerky as well as a journal to keep an obsessive log of my daily slog. My parents and my few friends considered me a lunatic.

  I was born in the wrong era. When I came of age, there were no polar adventures left. Still, as I learned during my very first year of college, I could explore downward. By taking ice core samples, I could see what Shackleton or Peary couldn’t: the history that lay beneath their feet. In search of that history, I would spend as much time as I could in the frostlands.

  It used to be a staple of science fiction tales that a receding polar cap would unleash some antediluvian monster that had been in the deep freeze for millions of years, or a virus with the potential to sweep the planet. The real threat turned out to be more mundane. Submerged beneath the permafrost and trapped beneath the sea ice enclosing the continental shelves in the far north are immense pools of methane. If all that ice melts, the methane will shoot up into the atmosphere in immense plumes of lethal exhalation. My initial calculations suggested that fifty gigatons of released methane would push the earth’s temperature up by a degree or more. Since then the ice has indeed melted, and methane has intermittently plumed into the air. For reasons too complicated to explain, however, most of the methane remains trapped. The world has been given a temporary reprieve. My latest calculations suggest that there’s at most a year left in this suspended sentence, perhaps only a few months.
I’ve checked with a colleague in a distant institute with more resources, and he concurs.

  This is my last mission: to prevent the Great Methane Cloud from forming. With the help of Zoltan, I’ve been running computer simulations on methods of restoring the ice cover. If CRISPR, with its Lazarus Project, can bring back the passenger pigeon, surely we can bring back the polar ice cap. I believe I’ve come up with an elegant solution for how to do so, though I need to stress-test the results in my lab a few more times to make sure.

  Zoltan is the only person in Arcadia who knows about this research. We agreed to keep it quiet. Were it to leak out, our community could become a target. Powerful interests are invested in the current status quo. The shrinking of the ice has opened the Arctic to industries desperate to vacuum up the world’s last fossil fuels and minerals. The Northwest Passage has become a lucrative shipping route. Various militaries and paramilitaries have been fighting for decades over the territory in the previously frozen north. Locking it up under ice again would effectively rebury our remaining carbon resources—an eminently wise decision that no powerful official could ever endorse.

  It might seem ridiculous to maintain a status quo that will soon tip into ecocide. Greed, however, is a powerful motivator. Just ask the man with clogged arteries who orders a second helping of ice cream even though he’s already short of breath and feels that telltale tightness in his chest. The treasure up north beckons like an immense hot-fudge sundae, and humanity has a deadly sweet tooth.

  A number of actors, if they knew of my research, would go to great lengths to disrupt it. But the one with the most skin in the game—and the most resources to devote to maintaining the current rules of the game—is CRISPR International. This corporation, which made its mark and its money by genetically engineering away multiple sclerosis and diabetes, has grown into a conglomerate with interests everywhere. The international community has withered away, and CRISPR International seems to have taken its place.