Veil

by Eliot Peper

  “For fuck’s sake, Papi,” said Zia, her shock tinged by a grim, guilty satisfaction.

  “Sorry, I—” he looked around, suddenly lost, grasping for words. “Sorry.”

  The sparkling water pooling on the floor fizzed in the ensuing silence.

  They both stared at it for a moment, then he shook his head as if to clear it.

  “The aerosols are keeping the planet artificially cool, despite the fact that people keep burning fossil fuels,” he said. “But take away my drones, and temperatures will jack right up commensurate with the actual levels of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Nobody really knows what that kind of a termination shock would look like, but we don’t want to find out. So even if I were to discontinue the program, and I’m not, it would take years to ramp things down safely.”

  “Unbelievable,” she said, grasping the counter for support. Human ingenuity was a gift and a trap, and for a shimmering moment all of scientific history coalesced before Zia in an interlocking chain of intensifying cause and effect. “You’re not just hijacking the climate, you’re holding it hostage.”

  “The people holding the climate hostage are the US, Europe, and every other country that got rich burning carbon and refuses to face the consequences. They’re not just fucking over their own grandchildren, they’re fucking over everyone who’s not privileged enough to win the birth lottery and grows up somewhere else, somewhere poor, somewhere that doesn’t have the luxury of centuries of fossil-fueled economic development. Poor people can’t afford to ‘just move’ or to build fancy ‘resilient infrastructure’ or any of the rest of it, so their lives fall apart, if they’re lucky enough to escape with them. This program gives them a fighting chance. It saves hundreds of millions of people from becoming climate refugees. It gives poor countries space to raise their populations out of poverty without being hammered by mega-storms.” He gave her a look that was at once sharp and somehow vulnerable. “I thought that of all people, you would understand.”

  “When was the last time you actually talked to a poor person?” Zia was suddenly tired. So very tired.

  “What?”

  “All these people you say you want to help, when was the last time you met one of them?”

  “Look, I’m running Interstice and this program simultaneously,” he said. “I don’t have time to tour around for enlightening chats.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Zia, halfway transported to a dozen separate but identical beige conference rooms, playing nice with well-meaning donors and foreign aid project managers who salved their consciences with charity from a comfortable remove. “Well, let me pass something along. One of the most disempowering aspects of poverty is that your entire life is shaped by forces that you don’t understand and that are totally out of your control. When everything happens to you, it’s hard to learn that you can happen to things. And what I see here is another system in which the powerless have no representation, another system that’s a mechanism of external control, another system built right on top of all the rest. If you care so much about protecting other people, why is this program secret? Why are you so afraid of sharing it, of letting other people participate in making decisions that impact their lives?”

  “Because people suck at making collective decisions! Climate change won’t wait for a bunch of miserable humans to squabble into a halfway workable solution. It just happens and we’re fucked.” His face tightened into an ugly, unfamiliar, wrenched expression. “Zia, I’m telling you, this program is the reason we haven’t had another Heat Wave.”

  That hit harder than a thrown tumbler ever could.

  Zia turned away and stalked out the door.

  +

  17

  +

  Zia descended the pedestrian path leading down from the house. Her shoes rasped against the flagstones. Low energy red lights lining the sides of the path provided just enough illumination to walk safely. Jungle encroached on all sides, buzzing with life. The Milky Way hung high above like a rent in the black velvet of the universe.

  She had woken from drug-induced slumber a day and a half ago but it felt like she had been on this remote outpost of Indonesia for years. That was the thing about her father. His ideas were clockwork universes with internal symmetry that sucked in everyone they touched as they ratcheted themselves forward, ever forward. The inescapable gravity his visions generated was what had made him such a successful entrepreneur. If you weren’t paying attention, they would sweep you up, claim your allegiance, and dictate the shape of your future.

  Growing up, Zia had been enamored with her father’s indefatigable sense of purpose and the breadth of his perspective. It took years for her to start to pay attention, really pay attention. Only then did she begin to notice that his worldview was not the world, that the grand architecture of his ideas had chinks and gaps and infinite loops, that their elegance was a product of their limitations, their internal consistency a feature of their imperfect reflection of reality.

  That was when Zia finally began to appreciate her mother’s books for the first time. Zia had always loved the hikes, the overgrown chaos of the untended garden, the bottomless well of naturalist lore. It took time and experience, but she finally began to make out the shadow of a slippery message that swam beneath the surface of her mother’s words like a literary eel. A reader could follow breadcrumbs through the moving anecdotes and more easily imagine that reality far exceeded human comprehension, that truth was often messy and ineffable. That was why her mother’s stories struck a chord that resonated with the zeitgeist. After putting down one of her books, you couldn’t help but notice new shades of meaning brushed onto your world like glaze on clay. It was the depth of her mother’s humility that had been the counterweight to the breadth of her father’s hubris.

  Zia reached an unmarked fork in the path and chose a direction at random. She could taste the sea. Leaves shushed each other in the surrounding darkness. She slapped away a mosquito and felt how stiff and sore her body was in the wake of fights, escapes, climbs, falls, and abduction. Her broken toenail ached. The creamy sweetness of the chai she’d enjoyed with Galang reverberated through the karmic medium from some previous incarnation.

  The path turned a corner and suddenly she was back amongst the villas, their windows dark, their residents sleeping or absent. She wandered through them like a stray dog through a ghost town. The scent of jasmine hung in the air. She had a sudden urge, quickly suppressed, to track down Logan’s villa and fuck her worries away. Underwater lights turned the abandoned pool into an aquatic gem. The tennis courts were empty. Like an illustrator assessing a blank sheet of paper, Zia took in the net, the lines, and unbidden and intermingled flashes from tournaments long past flitted through her mind. Bounce. Toss. Serve. Return. Volley. Point. Game. Set. Match. Zia had been good. Had she genuinely liked it, she might have been great. But tennis had been a discipline to her, not a game. It had taught her about concentration, about mastery, not joie de vivre.

  Not that joie de vivre was something she had a lot of right now.

  The path widened and she emerged onto the beach. Zia kicked off her shoes and relished the feeling of sand beneath her feet, sinking under her weight and grinding up between her toes. She walked through the gentle, wild-sculpted hillocks and down to the water. A wave crashed, collapsing into itself. Spray kissed her face and whitewater churned up around her ankles, salt stinging her scratches and blisters with a sharp, cleansing pain. She let another wave crash, and another. Then she retreated just beyond their reach. She sat down in the sand and crossed her legs. The surf washed away every vestige of her footprints.

  Moonlight transmuted the ocean into quicksilver. The wet smack of froth hitting the beach was a metronome loyal to the rhythm of whatever distant storm had churned up these waves and sent them rippling across the Pacific. Zia picked up a handful of sand, let it dribble out grain by grain. …a thin mist with a combined surface area approximating that of every grain of sand in the Sahara
Desert. She lay back on the beach and stared up at the stars. Did they twinkle more because photons reaching the end of their millennia-long journey across vast tracts of space had to find gaps in the fabric of her father’s stratospheric veil in order to reach her eyes? What did it mean to try to fix the planet like it was a machine in need of maintenance? What did it mean to know that such a fix might indeed be possible, but demur?

  Pulling out the new phone her father’s people had supplied, Zia retreated into the comforting embrace of the group chat, scrolling through an endless feed of photos, anecdotes, video clips, teasing, emojis, discussion, and inside jokes that had ballooned into Escher-esque architectures of irony and self-reference. Aafreen and Galang posted a selfie drinking tea together in the floating capital of the Maldives. Selai had an extremely detailed breakdown of every Easter egg hidden in the new Pixar movie. Kodjo was asking for advice on navigating the fraught emotional straits of his divorce proceedings. Daniela, no surprise, had uncovered yet another unknown band that was sure to top the charts within a year. Li Jie’s parents had been cleaning out his basement and discovered a forgotten stash of old clothes from high school, which he’d somehow managed to squeeze into, sharing ridiculous, nostalgia-inducing pictures of the results. This was why Zia’s closest friends were still those she’d made in boarding school. The digital epoxy of the group chat had held them together over the subsequent years and across thousands of miles. It was the collaborative narrative of their lives, the stories they told themselves about themselves that made them who they were.

  You won’t believe this, typed Zia. She paused, searching for words, then retracted the message. No. She wasn’t ready for that just yet. Even dropping a hint about what she was going through right now would attract a flurry of concern and offers of help, support she didn’t want to invite and wouldn’t know how to channel. Frustrated, she stashed her phone.

  Zia wanted to return to Chhattisgarh. She wanted to brainstorm negotiation tactics with Himmat. She wanted to send off the quarterly report to Jason. She wanted to find her way to the airfield, commandeer one of those long-winged drones, set a course for India, and forget this ever happened. She and her father would go back to not speaking to one another and she would lose herself in a workload that built up as steadily as silt in a river delta.

  But prying herself out of this mess wouldn’t be as easy as hopping on the next flight out. Santiago’s schemes weren’t easy to extricate oneself from, no matter how desperate or practiced the fugitive. How could Zia hope to do her job with a full security escort following her around day and night? As much as she wanted to, how could she refuse an escort while her kidnappers were still at large?

  It was still possible that her abductors had just wanted to hold Zia for ransom. It was still possible that they might have been hired by Governor Rao or some other grudge-holding Delhi powerbroker looking to pluck a thorn from his side. Anything was possible. But as Zia had learned working on President Kim’s campaign, intrigue flocked to secrets like moths to a flame. Despite the fact Zia had known nothing about it at the time, it was difficult to imagine that her kidnapping and her father’s geoengineering program were mere coincidences.

  Which left her… Where, exactly?

  Zia blinked. Something had blotted out the stars, a clotted mass of darkness devouring the sky. Panic seized her for a moment, a blind terror that the shadows might wrap her in long articulated fingers and squeeze out every drop of soul. She felt a sharp tap on her forehead. Reaching up, she discovered beads of water trembling on her skin. Then, tap. Tap, tap, tap. Fat raindrops fell in an accelerating rhythm. Zia sat up, heard the distinctive murmur of rain on sea. The rain pitter-pattered on her scalp, saturated her hair, poured down her face, dribbled along her spine and between her breasts, soaked her clothes. Leaning her head back, she opened her mouth and tasted the storm, each drop planting a cool kiss on her tongue.

  “Zia, mija, is that you?”

  She stared out at the sea.

  Santiago hurried across the beach holding an umbrella against the driving rain. He sank down into the wet sand at her side. The umbrella formed a roof over them both. Rain hammered at it like a drummer’s palm onto the skin of a conga, the water sloughing off and enclosing their little column of dry air in a sheath of waterfall.

  Her father put his free arm around Zia’s shoulder. She could feel his every breath, heavy from exertion, the sharpness of his ribs. Heat came off him in waves, and only because of his steadiness did Zia realize that she was shivering all over. She glanced over at him and was shocked to see silent tears streaming down the hard lines of his face.

  Lightning flashed, momentarily illuminating the seething wall of water that encircled them. This program is the reason we haven’t had another Heat Wave. It was all so like her father. An orthogonal solution to a problem everyone assumed was insoluble. Making global scale and universal application prerequisites. Never stopping to ask for permission or outside input. Assuming that unintended consequences could be tackled as they developed. Centralizing control to maximize individual efficacy and accelerate iteration. Cultivating various sources of value stemming from a single, technologically sophisticated operation such that the whole thing somehow managed to rake in outsized profits. Thunder growled in the distance. Yes, this godforsaken geoengineering project had Santiago’s name written all over it.

  He had begun ten years ago, in the wake of her mother’s death. Just as Zia had thrown herself into humanitarian aid, Santiago had devoted himself to a secret skunkworks, both of them attempting to assuage their consciences by committing every ounce of their beings to subduing the demon that had murdered Miranda. Maybe if Zia could help enough people, she could save other families from the tragedy that had ruptured hers. Maybe if Santiago could wrangle the climate with his hack, he could avert future disasters of the magnitude of the one that had taken his wife. In the absence of other outlets, their respective endeavors were the tortured language of their grief.

  Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

  Zia reached over and squeezed her father’s knee.

  +

  18

  +

  Zia sliced the blood orange in half and crimson juice leaked out across the cutting board. The meat was striated cherry and hot pink and the sharp tang of citrus suffused the kitchen. Her father sat across the counter from her, finger tapping out the beat of the Cuban salsa playing at low volume. She remembered hearing the same song playing at the hole-in-the-wall where they’d pick up fried sweet plantains after tennis when she was little—how much she’d loved laughing with her dad as she licked residual sugar from sticky fingers. Beyond the wall-to-wall window, morning sun burned off clouds scuttling along in the wake of last night’s storm and rising mist caught and scattered the light like gaseous prisms.

  “You said that this program is a hedge against human shortsightedness,” said Zia carefully. She was a general marshaling arguments instead of troops, anticipating traps and orchestrating flanking maneuvers. If she was going to get out of this mess, she had to be more than angry—she had to be as relentless as Santiago himself.

  Santiago nodded. “Transitioning the world’s entire energy system off of carbon is hard. Doing it quickly enough to avoid disastrous global warming is that much harder. Harder still to do it without undercutting the ability of poor countries to develop economies strong enough to raise their populations out of poverty. This gives us a buffer.” He gestured out at the drone lifting off from the airfield, long wings glinting as it banked up and out over the ocean. “I’m buying us time.”

  Zia sliced open another orange. “You’ve always bet on the long run.”

  “There’s no easier way to differentiate yourself from the mob.”

  Differentiating himself from the mob. Yes. Santiago wanted to be the best. Always the best. Anyone who wanted to win that badly would all too easily forget the full humanity of each and every person that made up the mob that the
y so desperately wanted to rise above. “And what’s the point of short-term thinking if you want to make a long-term impact?”

  “Eso.”

  “So what’s your long-term PR strategy?”

  Santiago frowned. There weren’t many words he hated more than “public” and “relations” strung together. Outside of her father’s irregular, celebrated essays, Interstice was famously tight-lipped. Teams were broken up into strict communication silos. NDAs were ironclad. There was no logo. The service aesthetic was of seamless invisibility. The company itself was named for the small intervening spaces incidentally formed by interlocking structures.

  “Silence,” he said shortly.

  Slice. Slice. Slice. Zia wanted to go after him with the knife. Instead, she let the word hang in the air, forcing it to endure their rapt attention like a model on a catwalk.

  “I see,” she said at last. “And how long do you expect to keep your secret?”

  “Nobody’s caught on yet.”

  “That’s not an answer,” she said. “And I thought the whole reason you assigned a clandestine security team to me, the whole reason I’m here and not rotting in a cell, is because you’ve been having infosec issues. You told me that Interstice is under increasing pressure from corporate espionage.”

  “They’re fishing,” he said, his tone thorny. “That’s all it is.”

  “You hope,” she said.

  “There’s no way—”

  Zia scooped up an orange half and pressed it down onto the juicer. The electric motor interrupted her father and thick juice poured into a waiting glass.

  “Meanwhile,” said Zia, as if puzzling through a particularly circuitous brainteaser, “the rest of the world is less worried about climate change than ever because global temperatures have leveled off. Confined to their diet of Interstice data falsified to hide your operation, the scientific community loses more credibility by the day because they can’t figure out what’s really going on. SaudExxon’s propaganda machine amplifies the confusion as their masters snap up new concessions and distribution contracts. And if I understood your explanation correctly, the more carbon gets pumped into the atmosphere, the worse the termination shock were your drones ever to be grounded.” She paused to juice another orange. “So while your program may buy us time, the world, in its ignorance, appears to be using that time to make everything worse. And why shouldn’t it? After all, nobody knows that they’re squandering your precious buffer.”