by Paul Briggs
Altered Seasons
MONSOONRISE
Paul Briggs
Contents
Title Page
Year Zero
1. The Day the Ice Cap Died
Year One
2. War Games
Year Two
3. Men Who Will Not Self-Destruct
Year Three
4. Novus Ordo Seclorum
Year Four
5. Water Always Wins
Year Five
6. If at First You Don’t Succeed…
Questions
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Altered Seasons: Monsoonrise
Copyright © 2018 by Paul Briggs
Published 2018
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Cover Art by Molly Phipps of www.wegotyoucoveredbookdesign.com
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Author photo by Sara Grantham
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All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher, except for brief excerpts used for purposes of review.
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ISBN: 978-1-944962-48-7
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018931871
To Evan and Jonah.
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May the world they grow up in
be better than I could imagine.
To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.
H.P. Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep”
Going by average global temperatures, this was only the second-hottest year on record—the previous year had been the hottest. It was warm enough, however, to complete a process that had begun many years earlier and which last year had nearly finished.
When spring came to the eastern United States, it brought with it the worst tornado outbreak since 2011. This was followed by a succession of polar vortexes that flowed out of the northwest, bringing cool weather as far south as Tennessee and North Carolina. The Rockies and the West Coast, on the other hand, were dominated by a searing heat wave that began in April and continued for most of the year. In Barrow, Alaska, temperatures in the summer went into the seventies.
In Europe, March was so warm it was described as “May come two months early.” Strong south winds in May and June brought Sahara-like conditions to the Mediterranean lowlands and flooding to the southern slopes of the Alps and Pyrenees, even as the pleasant weather that Spain, Italy, and Greece should have been enjoying held sway from Ireland to Karelia.
In Asia, heat waves and drought sent forest fires raging through Siberia from the end of March all through the summer. In August and September, typhoons hit the Philippines, Taiwan and southern Japan, even as the monsoon failed in India.
But the real story was what happened up north.
In a typical year, the polar ice cap in the Arctic Ocean spends the six months from April through September shrinking, then grows again from October to March. Last year was so terribly hot that the ice cap shrank to less than one million square miles in area—smaller than it had ever been in recorded history. That year the major news organizations issued a series of tongue-in-cheek stories for the benefit of small children, to the effect that Santa Claus was moving himself and his workshop to the South Pole, where the ice was still good and solid.
By April of this year, the ice cap had rebounded to 5.35 million square miles of sea ice, with a volume of 5100 cubic miles—more than anyone had hoped for, but still much smaller than it had been this time last year. An unfortunate combination of circumstances—bright, sunny weather in May and June, warm water from the North Atlantic flowing under the ice, and warmer air from Eurasia flowing over it—combined to shrink it further. Arctic cyclones in July and August created waves that broke off tracts of ice the size of states, exposing the interior of the ice cap and speeding the melting process. Meanwhile, the prevailing winds blew warm air from northern Alaska eastward over the Canadian Archipelago, melting the ice in the labyrinth of channels between the islands.
The more the ice cap shrank, the thinner it became, raising its surface-area-to-volume ratio and exposing an even greater percentage of its mass to the air and water. By the beginning of September, there was nothing left but a tiny remnant clinging to the northern coasts of Greenland and Ellesmere Island. And then, in less than two weeks, it vanished entirely.
Nobody saw the precise moment it happened—clouds and low-lying mists had obscured that stretch of ocean for more than a week. Then, on September 11, the weather cleared, and a satellite overflying the poles recorded that the last traces of sea ice in the Nares Strait and the Lincoln Sea were gone. The Arctic Ocean was finally ice-free.
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In a dorm room in College Park, Maryland, a new student was getting in her daily twenty minutes of exercise. She was heavily built and basically okay with it, but she didn’t want to get any heavier than necessary.
The room, lived in for three weeks, was half alarmingly neat and half messy to the point where it interfered with navigation. Isabel was in the neat half, where there was room on the floor for a yoga mat. Her face turned pink as she curled her fingers behind her head and pulled herself up into a sitting position. Her light-brown hair was pulled back and threaded through an O-ring to keep it out of her face.
As she exercised, Isabel cast an occasional guilty glance at her school reader, which had all her textbooks downloaded onto it. Her guidance counselor had made it very clear to her that in the field of STEM, the more options you had, the better. So, at age eighteen in a week or so, she was pursuing dual degrees in engineering and meteorology.
At least, that was what she was doing this semester. Right at this moment she was just doing sit-ups while listening to Rodomontade’s “The Two.” Later this afternoon she would be working at Celebrazione, an Italian restaurant just south of the Beltway.
While we’re waiting for something to happen, let’s get her backstory out of the way. Isabel Bradshaw grew up on Tilghman Island in the Chesapeake Bay, daughter of one of the few remaining full-time watermen. Her father worked very hard, earned a good living, and had done his best to impress upon all his children the importance of working hard and earning a good living doing something else entirely. Those children were, in birth order, Chelsey, Isabel, Kristen, and Scott. We’ll learn more about them as they appear. At the moment, Isabel was at College Park, Kristen was in high school, Scott was in middle school and Chelsey was… Chelsey. As a child, Isabel suffered from a potentially fatal allergy, but after a few years of treatment she got over it. This will come up later, but for now, just forget about it.
Isabel’s cell phone rang. “It’s Chelsey,” said the phone over the ringtone. She turned off the music.
“Hey, blondie,” said Isabel.
“Hey, chunkybutt,” said Chelsey. “Guess what?”
“What?”
“I
’m pregnant.”
What.
“Um…” Before she started congratulating Chelsey, she wanted to hear a few more details, but there wasn’t any good way to ask is this something you and Rod had intended, or did you just get careless? Chelsey sounded excited about it, but that was not necessarily a good sign—Pop-pop had always called Chelsey an “outdoor cat.” Exciting things happened to outdoor cats. Often these were bad things.
“Surprised?”
“Well… yeah,” said Isabel.
“I’m gonna give Rod the good news tonight.” Isabel mentally translated the phrase “the good news” to mean yes, we actually meant this to happen and we have a plan for what to do next, so you can stop worrying. At this point a little voice inside her head piped up and told her she was a horrible person for being so suspicious of her older sister. The rest of Isabel told herself it wasn’t like Chelsey had ever given her any great reason to be confident.
“That’s great! When’s the baby due?”
“The doctor said April.”
“Cool.”
“I think Rod can get some time off by then,” said Chelsey. “He’s going to be really busy the next few months—the company’s buying up a huge load of property.”
“What about you?”
“I’m gonna hang on till the Christmas rush is over. Rod’s making pretty good money, so I think I can take some time off.” Isabel didn’t quite trust Rod, mostly because he was a thirty-two-year-old business school graduate and he was dating a twenty-year-old woman with a GED. Since Chelsey was that twenty-year-old woman with the GED, Isabel had a hard time finding a good way to express her suspicions.
Then Chelsey changed the subject. “Hey, how’s your girlfriend?”
“Jezi? Still kinda clingy. Told her yesterday she didn’t have to call me every day and she got that hurt look.”
“You should dump her.”
“I can’t.”
From there, the conversation moved into smaller matters. Mostly they talked about their friends. It will come as no surprise to learn that Chelsey’s friends got into much more interesting scrapes than Isabel’s.
Truth to tell, it kind of annoyed Isabel that she had been typecast in her family as the studious, diligent, responsible sister—the “indoor cat,” as Pop-pop put it—while Chelsey had been typecast as the wild child who went out and had fun. There was a good deal of truth in all this typecasting, of course, and it was kind of flattering that other people expected more of her, but sometimes it rankled a little. Isabel had read that introverts actually enjoyed themselves more during their non-partying hours, which after all were most of a normal person’s life, but Chelsey still managed to look like she was having more fun.
By the time they were done talking, it was almost time for Isabel to go to work. First, she checked the news to see if there was anything interesting. Every single news story seemed to be about the 9/11 commemorations. Isabel checked a sea-ice monitoring site she visited often.
What she found… You knew it was going to happen sooner or later, she told herself.
Yes, but not today, she replied.
She logged in and posted a link to the news on her blog. She added only three words:
Then she logged out, strapped the phone to her arm and started changing into her waitress outfit. It wouldn’t do to show up late for work.
* * *
In a loft apartment in Denver, Walter Yuschak, age twenty-nine, stood in the bathroom and took a long last look at his reflection.
He was a big, heavyset man with a red face and dark, thinning hair. The key word there is “thinning.” His bald spot was getting harder to hide every day. As a teenager, his father’s comb-over had been the laughingstock of all his friends. At the time, he had sworn he’d never let that happen to him. But the spot had been so small at first—no bigger than a quarter. Surely, he’d thought, he could cover it up for a little while.
But the spot was now an inch and a half wide and two inches long, and it was only going to get bigger. And his hair was dark. And his scalp was pale. And his public profile was rising. His biweekly podcasts had been discovered by a wider audience. A cable news station was showing interest in him. Soon his face would be as famous as his voice… as would the hairline above it, if he didn’t act right now. Today.
“Say cheese.”
Walt turned. Susie was standing in the doorway, holding up her phone.
“I just want one more picture of how you used to look,” said his girlfriend.
“In case it turns out I look awful?” He’d heard of a guy who’d shaved his scalp after a lifetime of long hair, and had immediately screamed, “Dear God, my head’s shaped like a gourd!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m sure you’ll look fine.” Judging by the expression on her face, she thought he was making a big deal about nothing. Sensitivity to women wasn’t Walt’s strong point, but it occurred to him that what she was thinking right now might be the same thing he thought when he saw her spending ten or fifteen minutes making infinitesimal adjustments to her hair and makeup—do you really think it makes that much difference?
One she’d taken the picture, he set to work. He started with the scissors, trimming his hair away in careless chunks until it was less than an inch long and looked like it had been chewed on by goats. Then he got out the electric razor and ran it over everywhere, enjoying the buzz against his head as it reduced his hair to stubble. Finally, he lathered up the stubble with shaving cream and scraped it away. He managed it without nicking himself. Then he ran a wet washcloth over his now-naked scalp, and that was all.
Walt’s head was surprisingly shiny. It gleamed with authority. He hoped people would think so, anyway. It was hard to tell right now—he was still in his pajamas, which kind of spoiled the effect.
“Missed a spot,” said Susie, tapping behind his left ear. It was a little hard for him to see properly in the mirror, so he handed her the razor. With a few strokes, she finished the job.
“You look… ageless,” she said, and kissed him.
Walt decided she was right. At first glance, he might have been twenty-five or forty-five. He looked just old enough that you couldn’t quite dismiss him as a kid, anyway.
While Susan was getting a couple of beers for them to toast his new look, Walt checked the job postings on his smartphone—just in case the cable news deal fell through. His source of income, in addition to his podcast which some people did actually pay to listen to, was voice acting for radio announcements and the occasional animated production. But there were no job openings listed today.
Then he checked the news feed for something he could talk about in his podcast. He scrolled past the blurbs about 9/11 commemorations—he’d already recorded his thoughts on the anniversary yesterday. And there was plenty of good material in the news today for the next few days.
Here was some prisoner’s advocate responding to the news that an audit of the New York State prison system had shown them spending over $21,000 apiece per year feeding the prisoners. The advocate was saying that from what he knew, the meals they were getting were somewhere near dog-food quality. A lot of Walt’s followers wouldn’t be inclined to believe it, but with the right words, maybe he could convince them: Either these goons in there are eating like kings, or—and here’s my theory—most of that money is going right into somebody’s pocket. This is what happens with the state! They wait until you’re scared half to death, then they ask for bigger prisons, bigger budgets, less oversight… and when you give it to them, you get this! If you’re lucky!
Also, the FBI was trying to gain more power to investigate online rape threats… or at least, that was what they said their motive was. That one practically wrote itself: Some sad little troll in his mom’s basement goes on the Internet and says to a man “ooh I’m a big scary tough guy and I got kicked out of the SEALs for unnecessary roughness and I’m gonna come over to your house and kick your ass” and everybody laughs at him. That same bag of hair goes onli
ne, tells a woman “ooh I’m a big scary rapist and I’m gonna come over there and rape you” and all hell breaks loose! Talk about your bad incentives!
There was another blurb—something about Arctic sea ice—but he ignored it. He’d made the transition from “global warming is a myth” to “it’s a natural phenomenon and has nothing to do with us” years ago, and he was not a man to look back.
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On I-64 about thirty miles east of Richmond, a new Lexus hybrid followed the highway as it turned southeast. It was royal blue, with a CAMBERG for Governor bumper sticker on the back, because if you didn’t support yourself, who would?
The big woman in the front passenger seat had a broad, pleasant face, a streak of gray in her dark hair and a default expression of cheerfulness that didn’t quite go with her somber black pantsuit. She would be forty-three in another month. Her husband sat in the driver’s seat, his head nearly touching the ceiling. Small, neat spectacles perched on what Carrie thought of as a ruggedly handsome face. He was almost a full year younger than Carrie, and a few weeks under the hard white sun of the Himalayas three years ago had turned his red hair permanently blond, hiding the silver threads in it.
Roger had been quiet, but this wasn’t a bad sign. He was taciturn by nature—it had taken Carrie a long time to get used to it. And even after fourteen years of marriage, Carrie’s circle of friends didn’t have a lot of overlap with his, and it would be her friends at this commemoration ceremony. Also, he took to suit and tie like a duck to… suit and tie.
