Altered Seasons_MONSOONRISE

by Paul Briggs

Isabel’s car was over ten years old, but she’d had a modern feature added to it recently. The windows and windshield could go into mirror mode at the press of a button. This kept the inside of the car cool on hot summer days.

  It had other uses as well. To pick an example completely at random, if you and your boyfriend had just come from a concert that ended just before midnight, and your boyfriend had to catch a train at about three in the morning, leaving you with not enough time to justify the expense of a hotel room, but you had managed to find some decent overnight parking in D.C., mirror mode would allow you and him some privacy in the back seat of the vehicle while you tried to find out how much sex could be crammed into two hours and forty-five minutes.

  Three rounds. The first one was quick, hot, and rough, with the fire and thunder of Rodomontade’s music still echoing in them both. The second was slower, more tender, knowing this would be the last they saw of each other for months, if not a year.

  After that, Isabel and Hunter just sort of snuggled together. His beard was rough against her cheek. She was glad he’d lost so much weight. There wasn’t room back here for her to be on top. When his weight slipped off his elbows, as it always did at some point, having a 210-pound man on top of her was easier than having a 260-pound man.

  The third round was kind of experimental—can we do this? Yes we can! It took a little while, and once it was done, Isabel had to get back into the front seat quickly and head for Union Station.

  Restoring Amtrak to its former glory was not a high priority of the Pratt administration, but the route north to Montreal was still intact. As for the rest of the journey, somehow Canada kept its trains running on time despite Monsoon damage that made the U.S. look like it had gotten off easy.

  Hunter looked at the station, then back at her. Isabel tried to read his face by the light of the dashboard and streetlights. Excited? Scared? Sad? It looked like all those things.

  “This is it,” he said. He didn’t see Isabel pinching her own hand. For the first time in a long time, Hunter seemed happy and hopeful. She couldn’t begrudge him that. But it was going to be so hard to going back to living alone.

  “Let’s limit ourselves to one goodbye kiss,” said Isabel. “That way you won’t be late.”

  There was one goodbye kiss. It lasted as long as they could make it.

  “You… you look out for yourself out there, all right?” That hand-pinching thing was not working at all.

  “You’re the best girlfriend I could ask for,” he said. “I’ll come back to you, I swear. We’ll be together again.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  And so, he left. Isabel blinked aside a few tears and watched Hunter take his luggage out of the trunk and walk away. Maybe she was reading too much into the way he was walking and the new straightness in his back, but he seemed more confident, less apologetic. As if he knew exactly where he was going. Even though he didn’t.

  The heat wave dominated southern Arizona and New Mexico, a broad swath of west Texas and the interior of northern Mexico. It was not quite as bad as the heat wave that had plagued inland Australia six months earlier, but it was close. Daytime temperatures of 105, 110, 115 degrees held sway. At least the air was bone-dry, which made it possible to survive in the open by sweating until you could get somewhere there was water… unless of course you couldn’t, in which case it was a death sentence.

  Further south, a dry period in Oaxaca and Chiapas ended dramatically with a series of microbursts and macrobursts—so-called rain bombs—in late May, heralding a summer of heavy rain. Hundreds died in the resulting floods.

  Not even the Yucatán was spared. There was a brief period, from March to the middle of May, when the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean were too cool for hurricane formation. But they were still much warmer than usual for this time of year, so it didn’t take much to push them back over the edge. In late June, a Category 2 hurricane formed in the western Caribbean and began heading for Cancun.

  But Mexico had other problems besides the weather. For a long time, its drug cartels had divided its territory among themselves and shrugged off the efforts of the central government to defeat them. They had suffered the occasional disruption of a smuggling route, the loss of a refinery every now and then, the arrest of a kingpin. It had made no real difference. The one thing that could truly harm the cartels was a drop in demand for their product within the United States.

  And that was exactly what was happening. With the Pratt administration’s blessing, even those states that weren’t legalizing drugs were giving Jellicoe treatments to the addict population as a much cheaper alternative to prison. Many of America’s functional addicts were weighing their financial options and choosing the Jellicoe route as well. And for the people who weren’t really addicts at all, but just happened to like doing drugs, times were tough enough that all but the most well-off of them were cutting back on use. The cartels were now the apex predators of a collapsing food chain.

  The smarter members took whatever money they could and fled. The rest, inevitably, turned on each other, fighting desperately for shares of the diminished but still substantial revenue stream. And as the cartels fought, they grew more brutal. They had kept order within their own ranks, and enforced their will on others, with a mixture of money and threats. With money in short supply, threats were all they had left. The cartels began assassinating government officials, police officers—anyone who seemed likely to turn on them at their weakest moment.

  The government of Mexico—what remained of it—gathered up their families and took shelter with the armed forces, who were frantically purging their ranks of anyone who could be proven to be in league with the cartels. Once the army had secured the safety of its officers’ own families, it began the slow, relentless reconquest of its own country. In this it was joined by former enemies it could never have imagined partnering with—the leftist guerrillas of the south.

  * * *

  “Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, our special guest is a real-life American capitalist success story. She’s an inventor, a businesswoman, a certified genius, and living proof that diamonds really are a girl’s best friend. On top of all that, her business is helping to save the environment. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to the owner and CEO of De L’Air Diamonds, Sandra Symcox!”

  As Walt Yuschak watched her step up to the stage, he was struck again by how young his guest looked. If he hadn’t known she was selling artificial diamonds, he would have guessed she was selling Thin Mints and Samoas. She was wearing a cream-colored pantsuit and carrying a big black briefcase with both hands.

  “Welcome to the show. It’s great to have you.”

  “It’s great to be here.” Her smile was pleasant, but there was something sharp and knowing behind it. Well, of course there was. And she’d demanded that he treat her with respect and courtesy. As far as Walt was concerned, she’d earned it.

  “I just have to say, you are one incredible woman.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Really, you are. You’re a real-life rags-to-riches story. Five years ago you were living on ramen—”

  “Which was a lot cheaper back then.”

  “And now you’re worth what? Billions? Tens of billions?”

  “Let’s not get too specific. What the IRS doesn’t know won’t hurt them.”

  “A buttload of money.”

  “Umpteen-point-six buttloads as of last quarter.”

  “And I love the name ‘De L’Air Diamonds.’ It’s got that French classiness to it. Are you French, or do you have any French ancestry or heritage or anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “Just proping, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Here’s my big question. People have known ways to make artificial diamonds for a long time, but nobody’s ever been able to bring them into the market before. What did you do differently?”

  “Well, I had a more efficient way to make them—that was a plus—but it sounds like
you’re really asking about the marketing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I did a couple of things. First, of course, there was the whole eco-friendly aspect of using artificial trees to collect carbon from the air. That was a good angle. Second, I didn’t make the mistake people usually make—thinking ‘I made these things cheap, why not sell them cheap?’ You see, one thing I’ve noticed is that there are certain situations where people don’t want to save money—where they actually want to spend as much money as they can afford, because that’s their way of showing how much they care.”

  “And how much money they have.”

  “That too,” said Symcox, “but let me give you a specific example. Coffins. They cost thousands of dollars each, and they’re just boxes. You look at what they’re made of, the cost of labor, the fact that we just stick them in the ground, and there’s no reason they should cost more than a hundred… except that people want to spend that much on them. Nobody wants to lay their loved ones to rest in a cheap-ass plywood box. What I realized was that the same thing is true of jewelry. No matter what it’s made of, or how much or little it cost to make, nobody wants to be the guy saying ‘Will you marry me? I got this ring for fifty bucks!’”

  Walt laughed. “Speaking of the price, I got some news reports that say De L’Air diamonds are being sold—legitimately—in India for less than a fifth of what they’re selling for in the United States. How do you justify that?”

  “How do I justify it?” said Symcox cheerfully. “I don’t. I just do it. Again, it's what the market will bear. If anybody wants to start up a company and sell diamonds in the U.S. for a fifth of what I’m offering, I say let ’em try it and see how it works.”

  “A woman after my own heart,” said Walt. “So how do you know how much to overcharge?”

  “That’s the big question, isn’t it? Charge too little and people won’t want to buy your stuff. Charge too much and you’ll price half your customers out of the market.

  “Luckily, most of the job had already been done for me. The big boys in the business put a lot of mathematicians and market analysts to work trying to find the sweet spot on the curve. What I did was to look at what they were charging, then charge just a little bit less than that and say ‘And it’s eco-friendly!’ That way, I get more people who can afford it, and knowing you helped save the world a little bit makes up for the fact that you’re buying something cheaper.” Sandy gestured in the air as if pointing out words on a poster. “‘For your future. For her future. For all our futures.’”

  “I remember that. That was one of your early slogans, wasn’t it?”

  “Yep. So that was what we did the first few years. This spring we introduced colored gemstones, which we sold for about as much as our competitors were charging for clear ones. The trick was to make them better than mined diamonds—but not too much better. We didn’t want it to look like costume jewelry. It took a while to get the colors right, but we could afford to use up a lot of carbon on experiments. Some of them didn’t test well, like the Champagne line—focus groups said the color looked too much like pee. But anything that doesn’t work out can be sold as industrial grit. Let me show you what we’ve done.” Symcox picked up her briefcase, put it on the table and opened it up. She took out a roll of black velvet and spread it on the tabletop.

  Then she started taking out diamonds of various sizes and putting them on the cloth. “First, some regular clear diamonds for comparison,” she said. “Now here are the ones you’ve seen—the Moonlight, Snowshadow, Horizon lines. They’re made with just a hint of boron. They’re the ones we rolled out this spring. Notice how delicate the colors are. Very subtle shades of blue.” Walt motioned for one of the cameras to zoom in on them.

  “I’ll level with you,” he said. “I can’t tell the Snowshadows and Horizons apart.”

  “Not everybody can. The human eye isn’t really adapted to parse different shades of blue. They’re both the same intensity, but the Snowshadows have just a hint of violet in them. We also created some blue-green diamonds, but the color looked a little too institutional.”

  Then Symcox took out some more. “And now, for the first time ever, are the colors you haven’t seen before. We’ll be bringing them out for the holiday season this year. Nice warm colors for winter.” They were red-orange, yellow-orange and whiskey-colored. Walt could barely focus on their names, except that the red-orange ones were called “Hearthfire.” Just looking at them made him want to pull off a heist.

  Eventually she put them away. “Now, in addition to the diamonds you’re also in the graphene and diamondoids industry, is that right?”

  “Yep. In fact, they’re kind of my first love.”

  “Really? More so than diamonds?”

  “Really. I mean, diamonds have been good to me, but at the end of the day, they’re just shiny objects. Sometimes I feel like an English Lit major who got rich writing ‘My Stepbrother the Billionaire Weredinosaur’ erotica. No complaints about the money, but I want to do more. And I keep thinking everybody’s going to wake up tomorrow and say ‘Wait, why are we paying thousands of dollars for tiny lumps of compressed soot?’ It pays to diversify, just in case.

  “And graphene—I could spend the whole rest of the show talking about the properties and applications of graphene.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “But the hard part isn’t finding uses for graphene, it’s manufacturing it on an industrial scale without using too much energy or generating too much waste. I’ve found ways of doing that.”

  From there the conversation turned to the new materials being developed at De L’Air Graphene & Diamondoids. Symcox reached into her briefcase and pulled out a rectangle of something that looked like rigid white cardboard, only brighter than any cardboard could possibly be. Under the studio lights it was a hard, blazing white as if cut from a sheet of magnesium flame. Walt had to squint when he looked at it.

  “We call this ‘Point-925,’ because that’s the approximate albedo. That means it’s literally whiter than snow.”

  “I believe it.”

  “And it extends pretty far into the infrared and ultraviolet. In fact, if you could see in ultraviolet, this would look like a mirror.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Roofing tile. You put it on your house and it helps keep it cool in the summer. It weighs about as much as asphalt shingle and costs about twenty percent more, but you get your money back from lower AC bills.

  “We also have a little treat for the aerospace industry.” Symcox reached into her briefcase again—whoever packed that thing must have been a genius of organization, Walt could barely get his clothes for one weekend into one suitcase—and brought out a small net bag with a loose mesh. Something in the bag floated like a helium balloon, so she had to keep hold of the drawstring to keep it from drifting up to the ceiling. Whatever was in the bag was about six inches across, shaped like a cushion, and made of something so clear it was a little hard to see.

  “This is a vacuum bubble,” she said. “We call it a q-me.”

  “How is that spelled?”

  “Q-dash-M-E. We tried spelling it C-U-U-M-I-E, but everybody kept misspelling that and it got embarrassing. Anyway, it’s got a graphene skin, diamondoid reinforcement and literally nothing inside. As of now, this is the biggest one we can make, but if we made enough of them to make a balloon, it would have about the same lift as if you filled it with hydrogen. And because it’s small, you can tuck them into the fuselage of a plane or a drone and shave off a little weight.”

  * * *

  After the commercial break, Walt decided it was time to delve a little more into his guest’s history. “I understand you’ve got an IQ of 210. Tell us what that means, exactly.”

  “Well, in theory what it means is that I’m 2.1 times as intelligent as the average person. In practice, it means that I’m 2.1 times as embarrassed whenever I do something stupid.”

  “Obviously you’re doing something right. You
’re sure your superior intellect had nothing to do with it?”

  “Actually, it did,” said Sandy. “My superior intellect told me I didn’t know a damn thing about managing a company and I’d better find people who did. But not MBAs, because I’ve noticed they have this tendency to destroy everything they touch. So I found some people who’d managed nonprofits.”

  “It wasn’t just starting a company, it was taking on the diamond oligopoly and winning.”

  “That’s partly because it took them a while to start taking me seriously,” she said. “There was a point right near the beginning when they could have shut me down, but they ignored me. Then there was a point when they could have bought me out, but they tried to shut me down. Then there was a point when they should have started treating me as an equal, but they tried to buy me out. Now they’re treating me as an equal. A lesson for us all, I think.”

  “Elaborate on that.”

  “Well, at first they treated it like a gimmick. Then, when they realized they were losing serious market share, they tried to make it illegal for us to call what we were selling ‘diamonds.’ In the U.S., they went to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Commission said ‘talk to Congress.’ Then they spent God knows how much money lobbying Congress. We just asked for judicial review… and the Supremes ruled in our favor. What they said was—I'm paraphrasing—‘If De L’Air were lying about where their product came from or how they made it, that would concern us. But they’re putting it right there in the ads. It's free speech.’”

  “Good to see the regulators losing a battle every now and then.”

  “I don’t see regulatory agencies as the enemy,” she said. “I see them as a battlefield—a strategic location you have to fight for. If your competitors take control of them, they can lock you out of the market. So you want to either control them yourself, or at the very least deny them to anyone else. Keep them as no-man’s-land.”

  “That’s an even scarier way of putting it. Thank you for that.”