Eschaton - Season One
Page 5
“Energy,” Dixon said, still smiling, “shouldn’t be a problem, should it? We have lots of it, thanks to my father, may he rest in peace.”
Jamal Tyson rubbed his nose and didn’t smile back. “We used to have lots of energy, Mr. President. I’m not sure how much we will have in the future.”
Dixon frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Remember how I mentioned that the burst had two major effects on our atmosphere? So far we’ve only been talking about the depletion of the ozone layer. But there is also the sharp increase in NO2.”
“So what does that do?” Dixon asked through gritted teeth.
“Unlike oxygen or carbon dioxide, NO2 is not transparent. It’s of a reddish-brown color. If you’ve ever seen twentieth century photographs of smog over cities like Los Angeles—a good part of that dome of dirty air was NO2. Now imagine such a cloud hovering not only over a single city but over the entire planet. NO2 has a great capacity of absorbing sunlight which will significantly reduce the efficiency of our solar farms. I’m not saying we won’t have enough energy to sustain ourselves, even if we use a big part of it on generating oxygen, but a lot of things are going to have to change if we want to avoid exploding energy prices and frequent power outages. And of course the reduced sunlight will also have a negative effect on the ability of plants to photosynthesize, which means even less oxygen.”
“Now wait a minute,” Dixon said with a whiff of hope in his voice, “won’t that NO2 also filter out the radiation you were talking about?”
Tyson scratched his beard and shook his head. “Sadly, no. NO2 absorbs light mostly in the visible spectrum, but not UV rays.”
“Dammit!” Dixon said. “And how long is that gonna last?”
“Again at least ten to fifteen years. The atmosphere will eventually clean itself, but the way it’s doing that is by literally washing the NO2 out of the air. It will all come down on us as acid rain which will, depending on its intensity and concentration, have fertilizing effects in some parts of the world but destroy crops and wild plants in others.”
“Jesus Christ, Tyson!” Dixon said agitatedly. “Who are you are you? The four horsemen of the apocalypse all in one? Do you have any good news at all?”
“As a matter of fact,” Tyson said with an unenthusiastic smile, “yes. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that the reduction of sunlight will have a considerable cooling effect on the planet. In other words, the effects of climate change will be reversed. We will experience a period of global cooling. For the first time in a hundred years the polar ice caps will grow again, and sea levels will stop rising, perhaps even fall.”
“Oh yeah, huh? That’s great, Dr. Tyson. Half of us got fried to death, the rest will choke, but at least it’ll be nice and cool!”
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Mr. President,” Tyson said sheepishly, “but things are what they are, I’m afraid, tehehe.”
It took Dixon a while to ponder Tyson’s words. Then he looked at Brent, Nelson, and Ellie. He could see the doubt in their eyes. Their looks spoke volumes, and it took Dixon no unreasonable amount of imagination to predict what they were going to tell him the moment they left that hotel suite and made their way back to the White House. In full panic mode they would tell him that national security had to be their highest priority right now. With the country on its knees, they would say, other global players were lining up to deliver the deathblow to America, the once prod and mighty nation that hasn’t always been as successful at making friends as it has been at making enemies. They would suspect insidious motives behind any offers of aid and support and advise him to lash out at every helping hand like a wounded animal. His advisors were the kind of people for whom the end of the United States of America was a far more daunting prospect than the end of the world.
“Give us the room for a minute, will you?” Dixon finally said.
Brent, Nelson, and Ellie looked at Dr. Tyson and waited for him to leave.
“No,” Dixon clarified, “I was talking to you. I would like to speak with Dr. Tyson in private.”
The three exchanged bemused looks, then got up and left the room without a word.
“Hehehe,” Tyson said after Ellie had closed the door behind them.
Dixon got up from the sofa. He walked over to the minibar and poured two small bottles of bourbon into two glasses. Then he handed one of the glasses to Tyson and sat back down again.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s cut the crap. How bad is it?”
“Well, Mr. President. We know very little at this point, but we can use the little that we know to make a few educated guesses. What we know is that people who were directly exposed to the burst are suffering from severe cases of acute radiation syndrome and will die pretty quickly, while those that were inside a building may feel a little sick but will probably be fine. Now, the burst happened at around 10 p.m. Eastern. That’s 7 p.m. Pacific. On a beautiful summer evening in California. We’re talking probably tens of millions of people who were directly hit by the burst and who will be dead in forty-eight hours.”
Dixon felt all the blood drain from his face. “Jesus Christ!”
“And it’s not just us. The situation will be the same up in Canada and down in Central and South America. Taking into account the star’s position in the sky and the time the burst hit us, my guess is that the area directly affected goes all the way from Hawaii to the western parts of Europe and Africa. But of course it’s 4 a.m. over there so most people will have been inside, sleeping. I’d be surprised if their immediate death toll exceeds a few ten thousand. Still a terrible tragedy, but of course nothing compared to what’s happening in the Americas. For Asia and Australia on the other hand, the burst will have happened below the horizon, so they’re not immediately affected, but they will still suffer from the long term effects like the rest of us. In the long run we’re probably talking about billions of deaths. So yeah, all things considered, I’d say this is pretty bad.”
“Is is the end-of-the-world kind of bad?”
“Well, hehehe. That depends on how you define ‘world.’ You see, the earth has been around for close to five billion years and we’ve been through worse. Not much worse, but worse, and not very often, but occasionally. Please note that by ‘we’ I don’t mean only humans. I mean life in general. There have been five major mass extinction events in the history of the planet, and we think that at least one of them may have been triggered by a gamma ray burst. Back then, at the end of the Ordovician some four hundred and forty million years ago, about half of all animal species died. Now whether or not the Ordovician event was worse than what we’re beginning to experience tonight is impossible to tell. The point is, half of life on earth having become extinct also means that the other half did not. Life in general is persistent, stubbornly persistent, and the species that did survive back then went on to thrive more than they otherwise would have. So if you’re asking me if this is the beginning of the end of the world, then I will have to say: probably not. The earth will continue to move around the sun for a couple of billion years and life on earth will continue to thrive in one form or another. However, whether or not humans will still play a major part in that is a very different question.”
After a few long moments of silence and sipping bourbon, the best response Dixon could come up with was, “Fucking hell.”
“Mr. President, may I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Dixon said. “Ask away.”
“Do you love this country?”
Dixon frowned. “Of course I do.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Yes, Mr. President. Why. Why do you love this country?”
“Well,” Dixon said, “because it’s the greatest country in the world, I suppose.”
“Tehehe,” Tyson said. Then his face turned serious and he leaned in to the Dixon. “With all due respect, Mr. President, but that is bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
“I suppose,” Dixon said, sounding entirely unconvinced.
“And patriotism is exactly like that. It’s like religion,” Tyson continued. “You love what you were born into. If you’d been born in China, chances are that you’d think China is the greatest country in the world. But patriotism, true patriotism I should say, is not about unconditional love or unreflected worship. It’s about honesty. Like friendship. A true friend is not someone who sugarcoats things for you or tells you only what you want to hear. A true friend will always be honest with you, even if it hurts. You know what I’m saying, Mr. President?”
Dixon nodded and took another sip of bourbon. “I happen to know a thing or two about honesty, Dr. Tyson. I’m a Dixon.”
“I see,” Tyson said.
“Do you remember my grandfather, the senator?”
“Of course, Mr. President. Senator Dixon was one of the greatest national politicians the country’s ever seen. One of the most popular, too. It’s a shame he could never bring himself to run for president, if I may say so, hehe.”
“You may, Dr. Tyson,” Dixon said, “you may. But what if I told you that he never ran for president because he didn’t trust the American people?”
Tyson shook his head. “I’d find that very … interesting, Mr. President.”
“You would, wouldn’t you? Well, let me tell you how that came about, Dr. Tyson. I vividly remember many a conversation—or argument I should say—my father had with my grandfather about America, about politics, and about the presidency. You see, the senator thought that America had indeed been the greatest country in the world once—and certainly the most powerful. But that was a long, long time ago and only for a brief period of time, roughly from the 1930s to the 1960s under the presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. During that time we came out of the Great Depression much stronger than we’d gone into it, we beat the Nazis in World War II, we built a strong middle class that became the backbone of this country and that made the American Dream a real possibility for everyone to achieve. Heck, we even put a man on the moon. We were the greatest country on earth at the time. Strong, invincible, just. A force for good in the world. But it all went south from there. Or east, I should say, to China. Jobs became our biggest export commodity. We sold out the American worker and destroyed the middle class. Fueled by megalomaniacal delusions of omnipotent power, we waged one mindless war after another, bankrupting the country financially and morally. We incarcerated more and more of our people only because they were struggling to survive in a country that had abandoned them. That’s what the senator thought, and he fought his entire life to turn back the wheel, to restore equality, justice, and civil liberties. Because you see, Dr. Tyson, as much as the senator hated the excesses of unfettered capitalism and the way the American people and their civil liberties became casualties in that fifty-year-war on terror, he never gave up on this country. He knew America wasn’t the greatest country in the world. He knew it wasn’t even in the top ten anymore. But he always knew and he always believed that it still had the potential to become great once more. And that’s what he always fought for.”
“And yet,” Tyson said, “he never ran for president. Why?”
“Because of his religious beliefs,” Dixon said.
Tyson frowned. “His religious beliefs?”
“Or lack thereof. The senator didn’t believe that the American people would ever elect someone who openly admitted that he didn’t believe in God. And to lie to the people, to pretend to be religious when he wasn’t, was not an option for him. He didn’t see how he could be a good president for America and the American people if he couldn’t even be completely honest about his beliefs. What you just said about friendship and honesty reminded me of that.”
“It just speaks for his integrity,” Tyson said. “Your grandfather was a very wise man. Hehehe.”
Dixon nodded. “Anyway, a huge fight broke out between my father and the senator. My father urged him to run, he begged him to run, but the senator wouldn’t have any of it. He thought the religious right was too strong in this country. Not as strong as they had once been, but still strong nonetheless. And my father disagreed. He said the religious right wasn’t strong, it was just loud. The senator thought this was just semantics. In his opinion, a loud voice was tantamount to political power, and he didn’t want to engage in a shouting match. The two nearly fell out over this. Although my father never explicitly said it, the senator knew that my father thought he was a pussy. That he didn’t have the courage to take on that fight. It was then that my father made the decision to prove the senator wrong. That was the single most important reason for my father to run for president: to prove the senator wrong on this. And even though it would take him twenty years, my father never lost his focus. He never gave up on that goal. ‘A Dixon can do’ is what he always said. Whenever someone told him something couldn’t be done, he would say, ‘A Dixon can do.’ It always was his mantra, and he turned it into his campaign slogan: Dixon can do! In the end he won the election by a ten point margin.”
“Too bad the senator never lived to see it,” Tyson said.
“I don’t know, Dr. Tyson.” Dixon shook his head. “If the senator hadn’t already been dead, it would have killed him to see how the religious right pounced on my father, how from the moment he announced his candidacy until his last day in office they tried to discredit him, to denounce him, to sabotage every single one of his policies. He could have personally invented a cure for cancer and they would have attacked him for destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs in oncology. My father faced even fiercer opposition than Obama did, can you believe that? Back then, although everyone knew that a lot of the criticism against President Obama was just latent racism, they never openly attacked him for being black. ‘Oh no,’ they would say, ‘it’s got nothing to do with the color of his skin, I just don’t like his policies, that’s all.’ And the media and the public believed it. With my father they never tried to be that subtle. They never shied away from calling him a godless Satanist who was against God and against America, even if it was complete nonsense. My father was an atheist. He wasn’t against God, he simply didn’t believe in God, meaning he didn’t believe in Satan either. It’s such a simple fallacy: he doesn’t believe in God, therefore he must believe in the devil. So easy to see through, so easy to debunk, and yet the label stuck. Remember all those United Satans of America T-shirts with my father’s face on them? They sold millions of them throughout his presidency.”
“Most people,” Tyson interjected, “wore them ironically, though. Most everyone I knew in college supported your father, and they only wore those T-shirts to mock and taunt the religious right, hehehe.”
“Even so,” Dixon said. “It’s not something you’d want to be recognized or remembered for. My father was a proud and honorable man, you know. All this Satanism crap hurt him. It hurt him deeply.”
“It didn’t hurt his presidency, though. After all, he was re-elected at a time when the country hadn’t seen a two-term president in over thirty years.”
“But at what price?” Dixon asked glumly. “Yes, he was a strong president, because he had to be. But it changed him in ways he never anticipated, and it affected his policies in ways he didn’t like. Have you seen how in his eight years in office his hair went from pitch black to almost white? My father was a good president, a successful president. ‘Dixon can do’ was not just a campaign slogan. It was his promise to the American people, and he delivered on that promise. He really could do. But the presidency t
ook its toll on him, and if the senator had still been alive, he would have been devastated to see how it changed my father not only physically, but on the inside.”
“Don’t you think,” Tyson said, finishing his drink, “that he would have been tremendously proud also? Considering all the good things your father has done for this country?”
Dixon shrugged. “Perhaps? My father has done many a great thing he’s worth remembering for. Energy independence, balancing the budget, starting to pay back our debts, improving our relations with the Arabs. But under his leadership our relations with China cooled down, and both our prison population and our food prices kept rising. The senator was a skeptic, always has been. He always looked at the other side of the medal. If you could ask my father, he’d tell you that all the senator ever did was to look at the other side of the medal. He wasn’t exactly an optimist, you know? My father turned the country around and put it back on track, but if the senator had still been alive, all he would have focused on was everything my father did not accomplish.”
“Well, hehehe,” Tyson said, “you cannot fix in eight years what was messed up in the hundred years before.”
“That’s true. But apparently everything that’s been accomplished in the three hundred years of this country’s existence can be eradicated, wiped out, in an instant, in a single night. In a fucking flash.” Dixon took another sip of bourbon. “I mean, let’s face it, we’re down on our knees. We cannot recover from this blow all by ourselves, not if what you say is true and we have tens of millions of dead people lying around. And make no mistake, we’ve been a pain in the world’s ass for most of our existence. Do you really think they will help us to once again become the global bully that we used to be? They will help us survive all right, but it will be entirely on their terms. Europe and China will control the future of the world. No, no, Dr. Tyson, this country is done. The American people elected me to finish what my father had started, to continue his policies and to fulfill his vision for America. To make this country the greatest country in the world once again. But now it looks as though all that’s left for me to do is to prepare us all for the end.”