Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  Her genie appeared in a corner of the screen.

  “Irene, I just connected you to five people around the world,” it said cheerfully. “Carefully selected, an experiment. We don’t want you to get too lonely.”

  “Frigg,” she said, “I wish you wouldn’t do things like that.”

  There were two messages from Tom. She thought of him in the boat three hundred kilometers away, docked to the experimental iceberg, and hoped he and Mahmoud were getting along. Good, he had only routine stuff to report. She scrolled through messages from the Arctic Science Initiative, the Million Eyes project, and three of her colleagues working off the northern coast of Finland. Nothing from Lucie.

  She let out a long, slow breath. Time to get up, make fresh coffee. Through the tiny window of the boat’s kitchenette, the smooth expanse of ocean glittered in the morning light. The brolly floated above it like a conscientious ghost, not two hundred meters away. Its parachute-like top was bright in the low sun, its electronic eyes slowly swiveling as the intelligent unit in the box below drank in information from the world around it. Its community of intelligences roved the water below, making observations and sending them back to the unit, so that it could adjust its behavior accordingly. She felt a tiny thrill of pride. The brolly was her conception, a crazy biogeochemist’s dream, brought to reality by engineers. The first prototype had been made by Tom himself, in his first year of graduate school. Thinking of his red thatch of hair framing a boyish face, she caught herself smiling. He was such a kid! The first time he’d seen a seal colony, he’d almost fallen off the boat in his enthusiasm. You’d think the kid had never even been to a zoo. He was so Californian, it was adorable. Her own upbringing in the frozen reaches of northern Canada meant she was a lot more cold-tolerant than him—he was always overdressed by her standards, buried under layers of thermal insulation and a parka on top of everything. Some of her colleagues had expressed doubts about taking an engineering graduate student to the Arctic, but she’d overruled them. The age of specialization was over; you had to mix disciplinary knowledge and skills if you wanted to deal intelligently with climate change, and who was better qualified to monitor the brollies deployed in the region? Plus Mahmoud would make a great babysitter for him. He was a sweet kid, Tom.

  She pulled on her parka and went out on deck to have her coffee the way she liked it, scalding hot. Staring across the water, she thought of home. Baffin Island was not quite directly across the North Pole from her station in the East Siberian Sea, but this was the closest she had come to home in the last fifteen years. She shook her head. Home? What was she thinking? Home was a sunny apartment in a suburb of San Francisco, a few BART stops from the university, where she had spent ten years raising Lucie, now twenty-four, a screenwriter in Hollywood. It had been over a year since she and Lucie had had a real conversation. Her daughter’s chatty e-mails and phone calls had given way to a near silence, a mysterious reserve. In her present solitude that other life, those years of closeness, seemed to have been no more than a dream.

  Over the water the brolly moved. There was a disturbance not far from the brolly—an agitation in the water, then a tail. A whale maybe five meters in length swimming close to the surface popped its head out of the water—a beluga! Well, she probably wasn’t far from their migration route. Irene imagined the scene from the whale’s perspective: the brolly like an enormous, airborne jellyfish, the boat, the human-craft, a familiar sight.

  The belugas were interested in the brolly. Irene wondered what they made of it. One worry the researchers had was that brollies and their roving family units would be attacked and eaten by marine creatures. The brolly could collapse itself into a compact unit and sink to the seabed or use solar power to rise a couple of meters above the ocean surface. At the moment it seemed only to be observing the whales as they cavorted around it. Probably someone, somewhere, was looking at the ocean through the brolly’s electronic eyes and commenting on the Internet about a whale pod sighting. Million Eyes on the Arctic was the largest citizen science project in the world. Between the brollies, various observation stations, and satellite images, more than two million people could obtain and track information about sea ice melt, methane leaks, marine animal sightings, and ocean hot spots.

  It occurred to Irene that these whales might know the seashore of her childhood, that they might even have come from the North Canadian archipelago. A sudden memory came to her: going out into the ocean north of Baffin Island with her grandfather in his boat. He was teaching her to use traditional tools to fish in an icy inlet. She must have been very small. She recalled the rose-colored Arctic dawn, her grandfather’s weathered face. When they were on their way back with their catch, a pod of belugas had surfaced close enough to rock their boat. They clustered around the boat, popping their heads out of the water, looking at the humans with curious, intelligent eyes. One large female came close to the boat. “Qilalugaq,” her grandfather said gently, as though in greeting. The child Irene—no, she had been Enuusiq then—Enuusiq was entranced. The Inuit, her grandfather told her, wouldn’t exist without the belugas, the caribou, and the seals. He had made sure she knew how to hunt seals and caribou before she was thirteen. Memories surfaced: the swish of the dog sled on the ice in the morning, the waiting at the breathing holes for the seals, the swift kill. The two of them saying words of apology over the carcass, their breath forming clouds in the frigid air.

  Her grandfather died during her freshman year of high school. He was the one who had given her her Inuk name, Enuusiq, after his long-dead older brother, so that he would live again in her name. The name held her soul, her atiq. “Enuusiq,” she whispered now, trying it on. How many years since anyone had called her that? She remembered the gathering of the community each time the hunters brought in a big catch, the taste of raw meat with a dash of soy. How long had it been since those days? A visit home fifteen years ago when her father died (her mother had died when she was in college)—after that just a few telephone conversations and Internet chats with her cousin Maggie in Iqaluit.

  The belugas moved out of sight. Her coffee was cold again. She was annoyed with herself. She had volunteered to come here partly because she wanted to get away—she loved solitude—but in the midst of it, old memories surfaced; long-dead voices spoke.

  The rest of the morning she worked with a fierce concentration, sending data over to her collaborators on the Russian research ship Kolmogorov, holding a conference call with three other scientists, politely declining two conference invitations for keynote speaker. But in the afternoon her restlessness returned. She decided she would dive down to the shallow ocean bed and capture a clip for a video segment she had promised to the Million Eyes project. It was against protocol to go down alone without anyone on the boat to monitor her—but it was only twenty-two meters, and she hadn’t got this far by keeping to protocol.

  Some time later she stood on the deck in her drysuit, pulled the cap snugly over her head, checked the suit’s computer, wiggled her shoulders so the oxygen tank rested more comfortably on her back, and dove in.

  This was why she was here. This falling through the water was like falling in love, only better. In the cloudy blue depths she dove through marine snow, glimpsing here and there the translucent fans of sea butterflies, a small swarm of krill, the occasional tiny jellyfish. A sea gooseberry with a glasslike two-lobed soft body winged past her face. Some of these creatures were so delicate a touch might kill them—no fisherman’s net could catch them undamaged. You had to be here, in their world, to know they existed. Yet there was trouble in this marine paradise. Deeper and deeper she went, her drysuit’s wrist display clocking time, temperature, pressure, oxygen. The sea was shallow enough at twenty-two meters that she could spend some time at the bottom without worrying about decompression on the way up. It was darker here on the seaweed-encrusted ocean floor; she turned on her lamp and the camera. Swimming along the seafloor toward the array of instruments, she startled a mottled white crab. It w
as sitting on top of one of the instrument panels, exploring the device with its claws. Curiosity . . . well, that was something she could relate to. The crab retreated as she swam above it, then returned to its scrutiny. Well, if her work entertained the local wildlife, that was something.

  A few meters away she saw the fine lines of the thermoelectric mesh on the seabed. There were fewer creatures in the methane-saturated water. Methane gas was coming up from the holes in the melting permafrost on the seabed—there were even places you could see bubbles. Before her a creature swam into focus: a human-built machine intelligence, one of the brolly’s family unit. Its small, cylindrical body, with its flanges and long snout, looked like a fish on an alien planet. It was injecting a rich goo of nutrients (her very own recipe) for methane-eating bacteria. She was startled by how natural it looked in the deep water. “Eat well, my hearties,” she told her favorite life-forms. Methanotrophs were incredibly efficient at metabolizing methane, using pathways that were only now being elucidated. Most of the processes could not be duplicated in labs. So much was still unknown—hell, they’d found five new species of the bacteria since the project had started. Methanotrophs, like most living beings, didn’t exist in isolation, but in consortia. The complex web of interdependencies determined behavior and chemistry.

  “If methane-eating bacteria sop up most of the methane, it will help slow global warming,” she said into the recorder. “It will buy time until humanity cuts its carbon dioxide emissions. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Although it doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long, too much methane in the atmosphere might excite a positive feedback loop—more methane, more warming, more thawing of permafrost, more methane . . . a vicious cycle that might tip the world toward catastrophic warming.” Whether that could happen was still a point of argument among scientists, but the methane plumes now known to be coming off the seabed all over the shallow regions of the Arctic were enough to worry anyone whose head wasn’t buried in the sand.

  Maybe her bacteria could help save the world. With enough nutrients, they and their communities of cooperative organisms might take care of much of the methane; in the meantime the thermoelectric mesh was an experiment to see whether cooling down the hot spots might slow the outgassing. The energy generated by the mesh was captured in batteries, which had to be replaced when at capacity. The instrument array measured biogeochemical data and sent it back to the brolly.

  Her drysuit computer beeped. It was time to return to the surface—or else she would run out of oxygen. She turned off the camera-recorder and swam slowly and carefully toward the light. “Message from Tom,” her genie said. “Not urgent but interesting. Two messages from Million Eyes, one to you, asking about the video, the other a news item. A ballet dancer in Estonia saw an illegal oil and gas exploration vessel messing around the Laptev Sea. There’s a furor. Message from your cousin Maggie in Iqaluit, marked Personal. She’s in San Francisco, wondering where you are.”

  Damn. Hadn’t she told Maggie she was going on an expedition? Maggie hardly ever left Canada so the trip to San Francisco must be something special.

  “I’m coming up,” she said, just as she felt a numbing pain sear into her left calf. The cold was coming in through a leak, a tear in the suit; her drysuit computer beeped a warning. Her leg cramped horribly. She looked up, willing herself not to panic—the surface seemed impossibly far away, and the cold was filling her body, making her chest contract with pain. She moved her arms as strongly as she could. She must get up to the surface before the cold spread—she had had a brush with hypothermia before. But as she went up with excruciating slowness she knew at once that she was going to die here, and a terror came upon her. Lucie, she said. Lucie, forgive me, I love you, I love you. Her arms were tired, her legs like jelly, and the cold was in her bones, and a part of her wanted simply to surrender to oblivion. Frigg was chirping frantically in her ear—calling for rescue, not that there was anyone in the area who could get to her in time—and then a voice cut in, and her grandmother said, Bless you and be careful up there, I’m praying for you. This was really odd because her grandmother was dead, and the accent was strange. But the voice spoke with such clarity and concern, and there was such an emphasis on be careful—and weren’t there kitchen sounds in the background, a pan banging in the sink, so incongruously ordinary and familiar?—that she was jolted from the darkness of spirit that had descended on her. Her arms seemed to be the only part of her body still under her control, and although they felt like lead, she began to move them again.

  Tom’s voice cut in, frantic. “I’m coming, I’m coming as fast as I can, hold on,” and Mahmoud, more calmly, “I’ve contacted the Kolmogorov for their helicopter—and the Coast Guard.” But the helicopter had been sent over to a station in Norway that very afternoon. She saw her death before her with astonishing clarity. Then she felt something lift her bodily—how could Tom get here so soon?—an enormous white shadow loomed, a smile on the bulbous face—a whale. A beluga? She felt the solid body of the whale below her, tried to get a hold of the smooth flesh, but she needn’t have worried, because it was pushing her up with both balance and strength, until she broke the water’s surface near the boat. Hauling herself up the rungs of the ladder proved to be impossible: she was shaking violently, and her legs felt numb. The whale pushed her up until all she had to do was to tumble over the rail onto the deck. She collapsed on the deck, pulled off her mask, sobbing, breathing huge gulps of cold air. Her suit beeped shrilly.

  “Get dry NOW,” Frigg said in Mahmoud’s voice, or maybe it was Mahmoud. She half crawled into the cabin, peeled everything off, and huddled under a warm shower until the shivering slowed. A searing pain in both legs told her that blood was circulating again. There was a frayed tear in the drysuit—had it caught on a nail as she was pulling it out of the cupboard? So much for damning protocol, something she never did if a colleague or student was involved. Her left calf still ached, and the tears wouldn’t stop. At last she toweled off and got into warm clothes, with warm gelpacks under her armpits and on her stomach. The medbot checked her vital signs while hot cocoa bubbled.

  “Frigg, tell Tom and Mahmoud not to come, my vitals are fine,” she said, but her voice shook. “Tell them to call off the rescue.” Her chest still ached, but as she sipped the cocoa she started to feel more normal. After a while she could stand without feeling she was going to fall over.

  She stepped gingerly out on the deck. The sun, already low in the sky, was falling slowly into the ocean like a ripe peach. The first stars sequined the coming Arctic night. The belugas swam around the boat. She finished her cocoa in a few gulps and felt a shadow of strength return to her. A whale popped its head out of the water next to her boat and looked at her with friendly curiosity.

  She put her arms between the railing bars and touched the whale’s head. It was smooth as a hard-boiled egg. “Qilalugaq,” she whispered, and tears ran down her cheeks, and her shoulders shook. “Thank you, thank you for saving my life. Did Ittuq send you?” She realized she was speaking Inuktitut, the familiar syllables coming back as though she had never left home. Ittuq, she whispered. She had been too young when her grandfather died, too shocked to let herself mourn fully. Now, thirty-nine years later, the tears flowed.

  At last she stood, leaning against the rail, spent, and waved to the pod as it departed.

  Later that night, when she had eaten her fill of hot chicken soup, she talked to Tom on video. He was touchingly grateful that she was all right and excited about the whale rescue. Irene said, “Don’t go around broadcasting it, will you?” She had no desire to see her foolishness go viral on the Internet. Fortunately Tom had something exciting of his own to share.

  “Look!” he said. “This is from this afternoon.” A photo appeared on the side of the screen. There lay the enormous bulk of the artificial iceberg to which his boat was docked. An irregular heap lay atop it.

  “Polar bear,” he said, grinning. “Must have been swimming
for a while, looking for a rest stop. Poor guy’s sleeping off a late lunch. I tossed him my latest catch of fish.”

  “Stay away from him!” Irene said sharply. “Wild animals aren’t cute house pets—remember your briefing!”

  “You’re a fine one to talk, Irene.” He grinned again, and then, anticipating her protests, “Yes, yes, I know, don’t worry. If I go aboard the berg with the bear on it, some kid somewhere is going to notice and send me a message. This morning I stepped out without my snow goggles and a twelve-year-old from Uzbekistan messaged my genie. Thanks to Million Eyes you can hardly take a shit in peace . . . er, sorry . . .”

  “It’s not that bad.” She couldn’t help smiling. Good for the kid in Uzbekistan. Tom could be absentminded. The screen image of the fake berg was impossibly white. It was coated with a high-albedo nanostructured radiative paint that sent infrared right back into the atmosphere, while leaving the surface cool to the touch.

  “Another interesting thing happened today,” he said, with the kind of casualness that betrayed suppressed excitement. “You know we have eight brollies on Big Lump?” Big Lump was the largest iceberg in a flotilla about fifty kilometers north of Tom’s station. “They’ve been screening meltwater pools on the berg from the sun, refreezing them before they have a chance to melt deeply enough to make cracks. Well, three nomad brollies arrived from Lomonosov Station—just left their posts of their own accord and came over and joined them. Mahmoud just reported.”

  “Very interesting,” she said.

  It was not surprising that brollies were making their own decisions. It meant that as learning intelligences, intimately connected to their environment and to one another, they had gone on to the next stage of sophistication. Her own brolly continuously monitored the biogeochemical environment, knowing when to feed the methanotroph consortia their extra nutrients, and when to stop. Her original conception of linked artificial intelligences with information feedback loops was based on biomimicry, inspired by natural systems like ecosystems and endocrine systems. Her brolly was used to working as a community of minds, so she imagined that facility could be scaled up. Each brolly could communicate with its own kind and was connected to the climate databases around the world, giving as well as receiving information, and capable of learning from it. She had a sudden vision of a multilevel, complexly interconnected grid, a sentience spanning continents and species, a kind of Gaiaweb come alive.