Flood f-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Gary whispered to Lily, “Yeah. It’s the heat of the ocean surface that is spawning that big storm outside right now. Ocean heat is the fuel for hurricanes.”

  Thandie outlined the effects on the biosphere. There had been blooms and diebacks in the living things in the oceans. Coral reefs, for instance, were being hit hard by the temperature shifts and increasing depths of coastal waters.

  All of this was uncontroversial enough. It was when Thandie moved on to the fundamental causes of the flood, and her projections for its future, that the IPCC delegates started muttering.

  The oceans were rising. There was a complication that as the oceans heated up the water expanded, which itself contributed to the rise. But the blunt truth was that to fill up the oceans, just like a brimming bathtub, you needed a running tap.

  It didn’t take Thandie long to dismiss the consensus theory that the source of the floodwater could be melting ice caps. The caps, north and south, were monitored as closely as any other aspect of the planet’s climate system, and yes, they were melting-in fact the global ocean rise was accelerating the melting in Antarctica and Greenland, as it lifted sheets of ice away from the rock that anchored it. But there was no way the measured mass loss from the ice caps could be fueling the global expansion of the oceans; the numbers simply didn’t add up.

  So Thandie spoke of other sources-of water stored within the Earth, and now being released. She produced images taken from the Trieste and other probes of vast, turbulent, underwater fountains, places where it seemed clear that hot, mineral-laden water was forcing its way out of the rock substrate.

  And she produced her most striking figure. It was a map of the subterranean seas she believed she and others had been able to detect, from the evidence of seismic waves and direct submersible exploration. They were long reservoirs beneath all the major mid-ocean ridges, under the Atlantic, around Africa, spanning the Antarctic Ocean and surrounding the vast Pacific plate. The Atlantic reservoir was the best mapped, directly from Trieste; the rest she had had to construct from coarser seismic data.

  Thandie had boldly given these sunken seas names, like Ziosudra and Utnapishtin and Deucalion, the last for the great Atlantic reservoir. Thandie said the names were variants of Noah, for a legend of a global flood had arisen in many cultures. Ziosudra was Sumerian, and Utnapishtin featured in the Gilgamesh saga. Deucalion came from Greek mythology. When Zeus punished the men of Hellas with heavy rain, he instructed Deucalion to build a chest within which he floated for nine days, finally landing on Mount Parnassus…

  The delegates were increasingly restless, Lily saw, shifting in their seats and glancing at each other.

  “Big mistake,” murmured Nathan. “You don’t bring in Noah with these guys.”

  Thandie moved on to the question of why it should be just now that the subterranean reservoirs broke open. But here she was on shaky ground. She could only point to dramatic and abrupt changes in Earth’s climatic state in the past. Earth didn’t move smoothly through climatic changes; it seemed to have only a fixed number of stable states, between which it lurched, rapidly. For the last two million years the climate seemed to have been flickering between ice ages, glaciation, and warmer interglacials. The transitions could be rapid, taking only decades, even mere years. Maybe this was just another of those dramatic but natural transitions.

  Or maybe it was humanity’s fault, Thandie said cautiously. She produced familiar statistics that showed how, since the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, humanity had become a planet-shaping species now overwhelming natural processes, making significant changes to cycles of oxygen and sulfur and nitrogen and moving ten times as much rock and dirt each year as the wind and the rain. Maybe the level of human intervention in the Earth’s cycles had reached what the climate modelers called DAI, for Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference. Humans were kicking the complex, interwoven, nonlinear processes of Earth so hard that the whole system was flipping over to a new stable state…

  It seemed to Lily that Thandie had already lost her audience. The IPCC delegates looked away, chatted to each other, and one was even talking into a phone.

  Thandie produced her conclusions, in a stark set of bullet points. She recommended funding for a widening study of the sea-level rise and its sources. For instance she wanted the use of US Army Deep Digger bombs, meant for busting bunkers, which could burrow deep and fast into solid rock, to confirm what was down there under the ocean floors. She wanted the big spaceborne planet-finder telescopes to focus on the physics of other watery worlds: did those planets have a dry-wet cycle? She wanted more modeling of the impact on the changing ocean heat distribution on global climate systems. She wanted modeling of the changing isostatic loads: would there be any more Istanbuls?

  And, most of all, she wanted the delegates to have their governments prepare for, not a cessation of the sea-level rise, but an acceleration. There was no foreseeable limit to the volume of water her subterranean seas could yet release. The trends were still uncertain, but a long-term exponential rise was emerging: exponential meaning the rise would double, and double again and again, beyond any limit Thandie could see.

  That was it. She didn’t get a round of applause. There were a couple of questions, neutral points about details of the science. Then the meeting broke up; people simply stood and walked out. Thandie, isolated, closed down her display. Lily saw Piers enter at the back of the room. He snagged delegates by the coffee machines; he seemed to be trying to talk to them.

  Nathan Lammockson sat back in his chair and puffed out his cheeks. “Well. She blew it.”

  Gary was looking worriedly at the data on his laptop screen.“They’re not so sure about the track of the storm as they were. The city’s Office of Emergency Management has woken up. Telling people not to try to evacuate the island, the freeways and expressways are jammed, where they’re not already flooded or otherwise blocked. They should go home and prepare a safe room.”

  “Nice advice if you’re living in a tent in Central Park.”

  “I think I’d better go take another look outside.” He stood and hurried away.

  Lammockson paid no attention to him. “She should never ever in a million years have mentioned Noah. What a balls-up.”

  “Come on,” Lily said, standing. “You can buy me a LaRei-class coffee, and we’ll go speak to Piers.”

  35

  “You’re right, Nathan,”Piers said grimly. “The religious allusions put them off. That was certainly the feedback I got.” They were standing in a circle, Piers, Nathan, Thandie and Lily, in the anteroom behind the lecture theater, cradling coffees. Far from being LaRei-class, to Lily the coffee tasted sour, over-strong.

  “All I did was assign a few names. What’s wrong with that?” Thandie spoke rapidly, her gestures jerky; she gulped at her hot coffee. She was still on an adrenaline high from her presentation.

  “You’re missing the point,” Nathan said, exasperated. “Shit, Thandie. I personally know people who believe that nuclear war is predicted in the Book of Revelation. You were too damn clever. You should have stuck to the numbers. You pressed the wrong buttons. And you gave the delegates a reason not to listen to you that had nothing to do with your precious science.”

  Piers nodded. “Anyhow, it’s done. At least the argument got aired. So what now?”

  Nathan ticked the points off on his fingers. “One. We keep arguing this process through. We work on the IPCC delegates, we put pressure on the reviewers, we try to talk directly to governments. And we keep gathering data. But, two. We don’t wait for the wheels to grind. We prepare options.”

  “Options for what?” Lily asked.

  “The worst case,” Nathan said. “Whatever that is.”

  Gary came running up, breathless. “Look at this.” His laptop showed a radar image, a knotted-up swirl of colored light creeping toward an outline map of New York City.“Aaron’s not behaving as modeled. They think a new center has formed, invalidating the old forecasts. An
d there’s minimal shear, meaning the high-level winds which can lop the top off a developing hurricane aren’t helping in this case.”

  Thandie whistled. With her finger she traced a doughnut of orange red, right at the center of the storm swirl. “Is that the eye wall? Must be fifty kilometers across. That’s a beauty.”

  “It’s a beauty that’s headed this way,” Lily said practically.

  “The chopper,” Nathan said. “Now!”

  They ran for the elevator to the roof.

  The weather had changed utterly. They emerged into a battering wind, and rain that lashed horizontally, rain tasting of salt, accompanied by sheets of white spray. Lily was soaked in a second, her clothes, her face, her hair, and deafened from the wind’s howl.

  The sky above was a sculpture of swirling creamy cloud, a vast rotating system, a special effect. Lily saw lightning crackle between the layers, illuminating the cloud from within, pink and purple. It was impossible to believe that all this was just air and water vapor and heat.

  The chopper sat on its pad, bolted to the roof by clamps, its rotors turning. They had to get to the bird by edging their way around the shelter of a wall, working hand over hand along a metal rail; otherwise there was a danger of being blown clean off the roof. The pilot was the same bluff woman who had transported Lily and the others to Central Park earlier. She helped them climb aboard, hauling them in one by one with unreasonable strength. She yelled into Lammockson’s face, “Thirty more seconds and I’d have gone without you.”

  “Just get us out of here.”

  The doors slammed shut and the chopper’s engine roared. They scrambled for seats and belts. The pilot released the runner clamps, and the bird soared up. Looking down, Lily glimpsed the slim, graceful lines of the Freedom Tower rising from the turbulent water that covered the Memorial.

  Then the chopper surged west, heading over the Hudson and hurrying inland. It was buffeted; even Lily, used to tough chopper sorties, felt exposed.

  Gary snapped open his laptop.“Damn it. They’re saying Aaron’s now a category four. Borderline five.”

  Piers asked, “What kind of damage will that do?”

  Gary tapped at his keyboard. “New York hasn’t been hit by a hurricane since… 1938. Preparedness, nil. And the city’s already flayed open by the floods. The colder waters at this latitude should weaken the storm-you know hurricanes are fueled by ocean surface heat. But on the other hand you have the peculiar topography of Manhattan. All those concrete canyons. The winds will be amplified.”

  “Shit,” Lammockson said.“Well, that’s it for NewYork. Thank Christ I got my assets out in time.”

  “The rich believe they have choices,” Piers said grimly. “While the poor must accept their fate.”

  “I don’t notice you turning down a ride,” Lammockson snarled at him.

  “The eye wall’s about to hit,” Gary said.

  They all twisted in their seats to look back.

  The hurricane was a bowl of churning air, like a vast artifact suspended over the heart of the city. Lily could see a storm surge already roaring through the streets of the Financial District, gray walls of foam and spray and sheer muscular water pushing between the tall buildings. Debris rode the waves, massive to be visible from here, cars, uprooted trees perhaps. And, incredibly, she saw the prow of an ocean-going ship being forced down one of the avenues.

  Then the storm itself broke over the town. Lesser buildings simply exploded, burst open from within by the primal force of the wind. The towering skyscrapers survived, huddled together against the lashing rain, reminding Lily of images of emperor penguins. But there was a kind of sparkling around them, like a mist of raindrops before the buildings’ sheer walls. That was glass, Gary said, the glass of a million windows sucked out of their frames and shattered, a glass storm that must be rending any living flesh exposed to it.

  The chopper dipped its nose and fled toward the sanctuary of the higher ground.

  36

  December 2018

  From Kristie Caistor’s scrapbook:

  In the final days Maria spent as much time as she could in her flat, in central Manchester just off Deansgate, alone with her virtual child. Whenever Maria logged on, Linda always abandoned her toys and the soulless avatars who shared this domain with her, the pets and companions and nannies, and came running to her mother’s image with squeals of delight.

  Little Linda, a HeadSpace baby, was four years old now. She lived in an apartment cut into the side of a cliff, overlooking a sparkling sea. Maria had designed the place herself. The location within the virtual world called HeadSpace was non-specific, but Maria had vaguely modeled it on the Sorrento coast, where she had had some happy holidays as a kid with her own family. Of course the sea was a hateful thing now, and Maria had installed louvered blinds to close the big picture windows and shut out the view. But the little girl playing on the sunlit patio still made a beautiful image for Maria to gaze on, in her desktop screen, in her damp, darkened flat.

  Linda was Maria’s baby, entirely virtual, painlessly born and raised within the glowing domain of HeadSpace. Everything Linda knew Maria had taught her. Maria had gloves and a headset, and she could hear the child laugh, feel her when her avatar hugged her, a ghostly presence through the pads on her fingertips. She still couldn’t be with the child, not fully. Her screen was a barrier between HeadSpace and the real world-Dullworld as Maria thought of it, this damp, breaking-down world where she was stuck, a drab, childless thirty-seven-year-old.

  But that barrier was going to melt away someday soon. The transhumanists had promised. Technologies such as AI, genetic engineering and nanotechnology would accelerate human evolution; they would uplift Maria herself into a union of flesh and technology. And beyond that would come the singularity, the point at which human technologies became smarter than humans themselves. It would all exponentiate away into a glittering transcendence, out of anybody’s control, the opening up of a new realm of enhanced existence. She had been reading about this for years, for half her lifetime. When the singularity came she would be able to live forever, if she chose. And she would be able to step seamlessly between one world and another, between the dull world of Manchester and the shining realm of HeadSpace. She could be with her child, in the light, as real as Linda was.

  But the singularity was slow in coming.

  She rarely heard from her transhumanist contacts now. As the floods bit away there were power-outs or, worse, failures at the ISPs that linked her to Linda in HeadSpace. And Maria herself was distracted from her time with her child. Forever hungry, thirsty, cold, she found herself spending hours in queues for food and medicines, even fresh water.

  The fact was, her access to HeadSpace was the product of a complex and interconnected society, the capstone of a pyramid grounded in very old technologies, in farming and mining and manufacture and transport and energy production. It was only as that essential pyramid was crumbling that Maria became fully aware of its existence. The singularity came to seem more and more out of reach-an absurdity, actually. You couldn’t have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.

  It was a Sunday morning when the HeadSpace website finally crashed. She kept trying to access it through that day, over and over, into the night. She didn’t accept it had gone for good for twenty-four hours, when her own internet connection failed.

  Then the power went. She sat in her dark, cooling flat, her open hand against the dead screen, longing to pass through out of Dullworld to join Linda in the pixelated sunlight.

  At last she began to mourn.

  37

  May 2019

  “You have to leave Postbridge, Amanda. You and the kids. ow.”

  Amanda stared at her sister. Lily stood in the door of the caravan, her rucksack at her feet, wearing a scuffed blue coverall stitched with AxysCorp logos. Lily was deeply tanned, her graying hair shaved short. She looked fit, lean and intent.

  Wayne sat at the caravan’s single table, shap
ing a bit of leather for a harness. At thirty-one he was younger than either of the women. Amanda was aware of the way he appraised Lily’s body, the curves flattened and hidden by the coverall. He was like that with every woman he met, even those close to him-including, uncomfortably, fourteen-year-old Kristie. It was a habit Amanda had learned to ignore.

  Lily ignored him too. She kept her gaze fixed on Amanda’s face. Amanda said,“How long is it since I’ve seen you? More than a year.. Where did you say you’ve been working?”

  “Peru. A big AxysCorp project there.”

  “Peru? South America? I thought Nathan was going to hole up on Iceland.”

  “Change of plan.”

  “Peru, though, Jesus! Well, it’s doing you good.”

  “You have to leave,” Lily said again.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you,” said Lily, strained. “Come with me to London. There’s transport out of the country arranged from there. I’ve got a car. It got stopped by the roadblocks and I had to walk, but it will pick us up at Cheriton Bishop.” That was on the A30, the main trunk road east out of Dartmoor.

  “London’s drowned,” Wayne scoffed at Lily. His own London accent came out strongly. Drah-ned.

  Lily said patiently to Amanda, “There’s a boat at Marlow. Then, further downstream, a helicopter.”

  Amanda asked, “Why can’t the helicopter just come here?”

  “It’s not safe.”

  Amanda knew what she meant. Everybody was a bit insular up here on Dartmoor, hostile to the Londoners and the Brummies who still came pouring from their flooded suburbs across Salisbury Plain or the Cotswolds. The roadblocks were one thing, but there had been a rumor that somebody had taken out a police chopper with a surface-to-air missile, like some terrorist in Beirut.