The End of the Beginning

by Eichholz, Zachary

  “I-I-I am Lieutenant Jeon, uhhhh, Seong. Seong Jeon, sir,” the man stuttered.

  “Jeon, huh?” Korean. “Captain William Emerson.”

  They shook hands. Seong’s were cold and sweaty. He turned boyishly excited.

  “Captain W-W-William Emerson? The William Emerson? The Hope Giver of K-K-Ko-Korea?”

  “Yeah, that’s me,” William said, reluctantly.

  “C-Captain Emerson, sir. Oh, dear. I never thought I-I-I would be serving under you on a project like this!”

  “Serving under?”

  “Yes, sir. You're in Subgroup 1, Search and Rescue Squadron 3? Yes? It says so on-n-n your patch.”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “I am too, s-s-s-sir. As lieutenant within our squadron I am your second in command.”

  Sure enough, William looked at Seong’s shoulder patch and it was the same as his. Shit, he thought, just what he needed. A neurotic, nervous second-in-command to make things tougher.

  “I will be at your side, sir. Y-you can count on me. I enlisted three times b-before I was accepted,” the lieutenant continued eagerly, fighting his way through his stutter.

  This guy, a lieutenant? UNIRO was more desperate than he thought. Before William could say anything further, a man in a UNIRO uniform, white, blue, boots, beret and all, entered the room. Someone in the front row saw him and shouted for everyone to stand at attention.

  The man was a major, outranking everyone in the room. Seong tripped on the way up to stand. William almost had to restrain himself from either laughing or crying, he could not tell which. White fingerless gloves made the major look rough and his muscle tone screamed it. His face was lobster-colored and his arms were crossed behind his back, staring down each trainee individually for a few seconds, remembering each of them. Then he turned his back to the class, took a few steps towards the whiteboards and turned back around to face them.

  A second man, much shorter than the major, entered the room wearing khaki shorts, white tennis shoes, high white socks and a baggy navy collared shirt.

  “Good morning,” he said to the major and then took a seat at the control console, unpacking a few things from a backpack as he did.

  The major spoke finally with a gritty Australian accent. “At ease. Sit those asses down.”

  Everyone sat down.

  “I’m Major Hansen. I will be your class’ overseeing commanding officer for the next three months of hellish training. Welcome back to school. Including you guys, I’m in charge of a hundred new scrubs that haven’t had an ass kicking yet in a sorry group called Delta Group. That will be your group’s identification name for the remainder of training.”

  Hansen began pacing.

  “By the end of training, you will either hate me or despise me. Either way, I don’t care. The world's a hateful place. Your class is the last group of 9,450 to come through this facility. There are 1,050 of you would-be rescuers and officers in this particular trainee class and some of you may not make it. That’s up to you. By the end of this three-month period, you will join the other 8,400 base personnel as true members of UNIRO, the greatest fucking force for good this pitiful world has ever seen.”

  Hansen whipped his red head over and frowned at an unlucky trainee in front of him.

  “And I’ll be damned if even one of you do anything to screw it up. Low work ethic, low physical stamina, and academic dishonesty will not be tolerated. Hopefully, my size thirteen boot up all your asses will help to keep you all in line. My group of 105 will be the most badass rescue force to come out of here; they are every time and I have a wager going with the other class leaders. I haven’t lost yet since class one. And now that you will be the last group for a while, I want to end on a good note. Delta Group will be up against nine other groups that are all looking to beat you. Each of your training schedules has been emailed to you all as of this morning. Follow it and don’t be late. The first two weeks will be in here, in the classroom, and then will be mixed with more class sessions and hands-on training out in the Yard, as they like to call it. For those of you who haven’t already, that is where you will finally meet and train with your squadrons.”

  He stopped, as if looking for something else to say, then pointed to the man in the collared shirt to his right.

  “This is Dr. Olin, a climatologist. Welcome to Climate Change 101, your first class. We have an enemy out there, ladies and gentleman, and it's one that we have created. We are the doctor that created the monster, a monster that has no enemies or allies, no remorse for its makers, and certainly no care to its damages. Understanding it though, is our key to stopping it. You are all that is left standing in its way of complete control of its makers. Us. It’s time to cage the beast people, and then bury it where we found it. We will repair all the damage that it has done, rescuing a person or two along the way. If you fail in this mission,” Hansen raised his upper lip and scoffed, “you’ll have to deal with something far worse than me.”

  The room was dead silent. William heard Seong breathing.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and make that speech to two other unlucky classrooms. Good luck.”

  And then he left, rather smoothly for a man of his size. No one said anything until Dr. Olin did.

  “Good morning, everyone.”

  Collectively everyone said, “Good morning, sir,” back.

  Seong was the only one out of sync, saying it too slowly. Despite the stutter, his English was very good.

  “Welcome to training. As the major said, I am a professor of climatology. It is something I have studied for years, both in the field and in the lab and now here with UNIRO. As you all hopefully know, UNIRO is an international organization dedicated to combating the cause and the effects of Earth's ailing climate system. You need to know what this natural system is and how it is being unnaturally influenced by man's civilization. We are not going to talk politics, just facts and science. Feel free to take notes on your tablets; you will be tested on this.”

  It was a good thing William liked science; otherwise, he would have fallen asleep. He began to type away, his fingers tapping against the glass surface.

  Escaping his notes quickly, he checked his class schedule via email. He had six more classes to go, each fifty minutes long, each with very dull titles: Rescue in the Modern World, Temporary Relief Shelter Construction and Management, Interagency Cooperation, Technical UNIRO Communications Technology and Operation, to name some.

  Humming from above made him look at the board. The ceiling projector came on. A series of charts, graphs, and figures appeared with trend lines that generally pointed up appeared on the whiteboard. Then, strangely, a picture of a planet came up on the screen. Dr. Olin took out a laser pointer and aimed it at the planet, waving it across its equator.

  “Does anybody know what planet this is?” asked the doctor.

  Someone said Jupiter, another Mars. William rolled his eyes. Politely, the professor said no to each and then asked if anyone else knew.

  “Venus, sir,” said William impatiently. The professor looked up to the sound of William’s voice.

  “Yes, excellent. Thank you, up there ah… up there, thank you.” Then he went back to his presentation. “You all may be wondering why I’m showing you a picture of Venus; this isn’t astronomy, after all. Venus has been called Earth's twin in the solar system. It has almost the same mass and density as Earth and is only slightly closer to the sun, about thirty percent closer. It has an atmosphere with clouds just like us, and even geological activity. But Venus is not us, as its surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead and its atmospheric surface pressure is so great that one would feel like they were walking through water, not air. Then they would be crushed.”

  A few chuckles came from the class.

  “Over ninety-six percent of its atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that both our planets share. Ladies and gentleman, the reason I am showing you this is because this is an example of when
things go wrong. It’s a prime example of a greenhouse effect gone too far. Venus has an average surface temperature of 482 degrees Celsius, around 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, Earth will never become like this in our civilization’s lifetime. Instead, today we worry about what only a small rise in this greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, can do to our planets own average temperature. Today, the amount of CO2 in the planet's atmosphere is the highest it’s been in over 800,000 years. Some say millions of years. The point is we have a problem and the problem is growing.”

  Dr. Olin next showed a picture of a fogged-out mountain peak with black soil under a collection of buildings.

  “NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded carbon dioxide levels at 430 parts per million last month. What this means is that for every million-air molecules out there, 430 of them are CO2 molecules. This increase in atmospheric CO2 is creating an enhanced greenhouse effect, like Venus, that will see our planet warm to dangerous levels that will have the ability to disrupt society in very negative ways. By the end of this century we could be looking at CO2 levels in a range of 700 to 1,200 parts per million, contributing to a surface warming of somewhere between two and eight degrees Fahrenheit. The Paris Agreement could put a dent into these numbers, but even a temperature change at the lower end of that range would be devastating. A temperature change to the higher end of that range could be flat out catastrophic. The increase of this natural greenhouse gas by fossil fuel burning, transportation, deforestation, and agriculture have tipped the planet's natural carbon balance. Even with a comparatively small increase compared to other gases it has thickened our atmosphere, insulating the surface by trapping more heat from incoming and outgoing solar radiation. As a result, we see what is happening around us right now.”

  A temperature line chart appeared.

  “Each year is warmer than the last, sea levels are rising, and weather has grown more unpredictable. Since the Industrial Revolution, the planet has warmed over a consistent trend, interrupting what otherwise should have been a cooling period. In fact, we have changed the planet's temperature for the foreseeable future so much that we have successfully put off the next ice age. Global warming is here and UNIRO will be combating it. It seems daunting, yes, but we have the same power in stopping it as we did in starting it. In this class, we will go more in depth into this subject and start talking about geoengineering, our weapon to undo what we have done. As I understand it, UNIRO has twelve geoengineering projects in the pipe that will rehabilitate and reverse environmental damage and even more are being considered. Each of these will be discussed, as some of you will find yourselves on these megaprojects. Now please, direct your attention to this animation.”

  A colored animated map of the world showing average surface temperatures across the globe starting in the year 1880 began playing. The world was mostly blue and white with a few dim yellows and oranges around the equator when the animation started, and within forty five seconds, the world had traveled through time over a hundred years across a tie-dye adventure of blobs and stains of changing color to the year 2020. By this year, it looked as if someone had spilled red ink across the globe. Almost no blues and definitely no whites remained. Blood red arched across the poles and bled their color down into the mid-latitudes across North America, Europe, Siberia, and banded across Africa and into the outback of Australia and the Andes of Chile in South America.

  The animation continued until it came to the present year, then journeyed onto the next decade and the next and the next until it stopped in the year 2100. That year seemed so far away, seventy-three years, that William had a hard time thinking what the world would be like in that future time. There was no longer any blues and even the yellows were few and far between. Electric purples in the poles replaced 2020’s blood red poles. The reds were now down in the equator across Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, the southeast United States, southern India, the Amazon Delta, and the Oceania region in the western Pacific.

  NASA had put together this particular animation and it took into account a scenario in which humanity was much too slow to react and reduce its carbon emissions.

  “We know it’s us. There is no doubt. Current observed climate change literally has civilization’s fingerprint on it. Basic physics has told us for centuries that CO2 has the ability to warm an atmosphere and now it has the ability to tell us definitively where it comes from.”

  A new graphic appeared.

  “According to the World Meteorological Organization, we humans have emitted over 375 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. We know these 375 billion metric tons are ours because of atmospheric carbon isotopes, specifically carbon fourteen. Carbon fourteen, an elemental isotope of the carbon atom with two extra neutrons, is found naturally in the Earth’s atmosphere, where it is produced through collisions between nitrogen atoms and cosmic rays from the Sun. It is also found within the Earth’s crust, having been absorbed from the atmosphere. Carbon fourteen is radioactive and decays relatively quickly. The ratio of carbon fourteen to CO2 in the atmosphere is decreasing. Fossil fuel stores are so old, on the order of millions of years; they no longer have carbon fourteen isotopes within them because of its quick decay rate. So, when these fossil fuels are burned, CO2 is being released into the atmosphere with no carbon fourteen, verifying the ratio we are observing across the globe.”

  Dr. Olin looked across the auditorium to see some dumbfounded faces.

  “Okay,” he sighed. “Imagine you have an empty room that has only two things in it, one apple and one orange. Pretend the orange is a carbon fourteen atom and the apple is a CO2 molecule. Suddenly, I start burning more fossil fuels, thus throwing in more apples (the CO2) and keeping the one orange (14C). The ratio of oranges to apples decreases. This proves the increase in apples, CO2, is coming from the burning of fossil fuels because fossil fuels are the only source of such massive carbon stores that are old enough to add so much CO2 and not carbon fourteen.”

  William thought about this for longer than he imagined and caught the doctor mid-sentence at the end of his lecture.

  “…so that next time, we will discuss various greenhouse gas sources, the role of water vapor, and a process called carbon sequestration. Thank you everyone, have a nice day. See you tomorrow.”

  Hoping to make a quick getaway before his starry-eyed lieutenant could talk to him again, William stuffed his glass tablet into his backpack and doubled stepped down to the door. His path was blocked, though, by other trainees trying to leave and he slowed.

  “Captain! C-Captain, wait up!” he heard behind him.

  Oh, no. William turned to Seong in clumsy disarray, trying to reach his side.

  “Captain, h-hey. What is your next class? Mine is, ah, is UNIRO Structure and Organization.”

  “That’s mine too… ”

  “Oh, great. We can w-w-walk there together.”

  Seong walked so closely to William’s shoulder they almost got stuck in the classroom’s doorway.

  “So,” asked Seong as they both made it into the hallway, “have you-you-you had a chance to meet any of our squadron members?”

  “No, I haven’t had a chance to yet.”

  “That’s okay, sir. I-I have. They are n-n-n-nice people. I think you will lead them well. You’re a well leader. Wait, I mean good. A good leader. I read about you and Korea. You r-r-risked your life to try and save my people. You, sir, the stories I heard, the missions you lead, w-were an inspiration for me to fight, to find the c-c-courage I needed to do what was right.”

  Seong took a little bow of gratitude, which was awkward in the crowded hallway they were in.

  “You served in the war?” asked William intriguingly.

  “Y-Yes, I did. I served when w-w-war broke out. I was nineteen I r-remember seeing the first artillery barrages go over my head a week after Flight 491 was shot down.” William saw Seong’s eyes water slightly. “I lost m-much when it was all o-o-over, including my f-fam-family.
”

  William looked away, as if to block any memories of his own about the war. Suddenly, he felt great empathy for Seong and guilt for trying to ignore a fellow soldier.

  “I’m sorry,” William said, looking back at Seong. Seong sniffled his nose and wiped his eyes. Seong remained silent, still looking emotionally moved.

  “Hey, Lieutenant Jeon. Lieutenant, are you okay?” William gently asked.

  Fumbling around again with his tablet, Seong gradually looked up at William. “Korea is sometimes not my b-b-best subject,” he said with an embarrassed chuckle.

  “Oh, well that’s okay. It’s not my best either,” said William with an uplifting smile. He pointed to his head. “But… we don’t have to ever go back there if we don’t want to. I won’t let what happened to you, or me, stop us from being the best damn squadron there ever was. How’s that sound? Nothing will bring us back to that hell, you hear me Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, sir. B-B-But I still fear, sir, one day something will.”

  CHAPTER 22: Cooperation Not Annihilation

  The Pentagon, Virginia

  Monday, April 5, 2027

  “Madam. Secretary,” said Colonel Mapfeka, “thank you for allowing us the opportunity to brief you today. It is yet another symbol of the new found cooperation UNIRO wishes to instill in its member states - ”

  “Sovereign,” cut in Senator Matthew Barnes. “Sovereign member states is the correct term, Colonel.”

  Secretary of Defense Katelyn Grant gave Barnes a quick admonishing look from the head of the conference table. Barnes pretended not to see it.

  “Excuse me, Senator, sovereign member states,” Mapfeka kindly corrected himself. He cleared his throat. “We believe this meeting is a symbol of our organization’s continued cooperation with its sovereign member states that we hope to only see spread in time.”

  “Thank you for those kind words, Colonel Mapfeka,” Secretary Grant said with a smile. “This meeting comes as we see new reminders around the world for the need and continued presence of UNIRO. With the death toll of Lima’s earthquake two weeks ago now topping 12,000 and the continued emergence of climate-related conflict, this country’s military and aid agencies are concerned over how best to act and prepare for a future where the norms on which we have based our entire national defense system no longer exist. That is why you and your associate are here, Colonel, need to train and inform our top military commanders and national security advisers about UNIRO, its outreach, and, as you said, cooperation with this nation.”