Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  Just as Bruce was passing out from boredom, Jethro thanked Zoe and said, “Now let’s give Bruce the floor. Bruce, come on down.” Bruce had to thump his own legs to wake them up, and when he reached the front, he’d forgotten all the things he was dying to say an hour earlier. The top echelons of DiZi management stared, waiting for him to say something.

  “Uh.” Bruce’s head hurt. “What do you want me to say?”

  Jethro stood up next to Bruce and put an arm around him. “This is where your Crisis of Conscience comes in, Bruce dude. Let’s just say, as a thought embellishment, that we could fix it.” (“Thought embellishment” was one of Jethro’s buzzsaws.)

  “Fix . . . it?”

  Jethro handed Bruce a Robo-Bop with a pulsing Yes/No screen. “It’s all on you, buddy. You push Yes, we can make a difference here. There’ll be some disruptions, people might be a mite inconvenienced, but we can ameliorate some of the problems. Push No, and things go on as they are. But bear in mind—if you push Yes, you’re the one who has to explain to the people.”

  Bruce still didn’t understand what he was saying yes to, but he hardly cared. He jabbed the Yes button with his right thumb. Jethro whooped and led him to the executive elevator, so they could watch the fun from the roof.

  “It should be almost instantaneous,” Jethro said over his shoulder as he hustled into the lift. “Thanks to our patented ‘snaggletooth’ technology that makes all our products talk to each other. It’ll travel around the world like a wave. It’s part of our enterprise philosophy of Why-Not-Now.”

  The elevator lurched upward, and in moments they had reached the roof. “It’s starting,” Jethro said. He pointed to the nearest ThunderNet tower. The sleek lid was opening up like petals, until the top resembled a solar dish. And a strange haze was gathering over the top of it.

  “This technology has been around for years, but everybody said it was too expensive to deploy on a widespread basis,” Jethro said with a wink. “In a nutshell, the tops of the towers contain a photocatalyst material, which turns the CO2 and water in the atmosphere into methane and oxygen. The methane gets stored and used as an extra power source. The tower is also spraying an amine solution into the air that captures more CO2 via a proprietary chemical reaction. That’s why the ThunderNets had to be so pricey.”

  © 2013, Lauren Pedersen / ASU

  Just then, Bruce felt a vibration from his own Robo-Bop. He looked down and was startled to see a detailed audit of Bruce’s personal carbon footprint—including everything he’d done to waste energy in the past five years.

  “And hey, look at the parking lot,” Jethro said. All the Car-Dingos were reconfiguring themselves, snaking new connections into the car engines. “We’re getting most of those vehicles as close to zero emissions as possible, using amines that capture the cars’ CO2. You can use the waste heat from the engine to regenerate the amines.” But the real gain would come from the car’s GPS, which would start nudging people to carpool whenever another Car-Dingo user was going to the same destination, using a “packet-switching” model to optimize everyone’s commute for greenness. Refuse to carpool, and your car might start developing engine trouble—and the Car-Dingos, Bruce knew, were almost impossible to remove.

  As for the Crados? Jethro explained how they were already hacking into every appliance in people’s homes, to make them energy-efficient whether people wanted them to be or not.

  Zoe was standing at Bruce’s elbow. “It’s too late to stop the trend, or even reverse all the effects,” she said over the din of the ThunderNet towers. “But we can slow it drastically, and our most optimistic projections show major improvements in the medium term.”

  “So all this time—all this hellish time—you had the means to make a difference, and you just . . . sat on it?” Bruce said. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  “We wanted to wait until we had full product penetration.” Jethro had to raise his voice now; the ThunderNet towers were actually thundering for the first time ever. “And we needed people to be ready. If we had just come out and told the truth about what our products actually did, people would rather die than buy them. Even after Manhattan and Florida. We couldn’t give them away. But if we claimed to be making overpriced, wasteful pieces of crap that destroy the environment? Then everybody would need to own two of them.”

  “So my Crisis of Conscience—” Bruce could only finish that sentence by wheeling his arms.

  “We figured the day when you no longer gave a shit about your own future would be the day when people might accept this,” Jethro said, patting Bruce on the back like a father, even though he was younger.

  “Well, thanks for the mind games.” Bruce had to shout now. “I’m going to go explore something I call my culture of drunkenness.”

  “You can’t leave, Bruce,” Jethro yelled in his ear. “This is going to be a major disruption, everyone’s gadgets going nuts at once. There will be violence and wholesale destruction of public property. There will be chain saw rampages. There may even be Twitter snark. We need you to be out in front on this, explaining it to the people.”

  Bruce looked out at the dusk, red-and-black clouds churning as millions of ThunderNet towers blasted them with scrubber beams. Even over that racket, the chorus of car horns and shouts as people’s Car-Dingos suddenly had minds of their own started to ring from the highway. Bruce turned and looked into the gleam of his boss’s schoolmaster specs. “Fuck you, man,” he said. Followed a moment later by, “I’ll do it.”

  “We knew we could count on you.” Jethro turned to the half-dozen or so executives cluttering the roof deck behind him. “Big hand for Bruce, everybody.” Bruce waited until they were done clapping, then leaned over the railing and puked his guts out.

  Bojanovic/Shutterstock, Inc. & Electra/Shutterstock, Inc. (SUV & coyote)

  STORY NOTES—Charlie Jane Anders

  Until recently, I was always intimidated to approach real scientists and experts to check the science in my stories. I figured they’re busy people and don’t have time to worry about my weird flights of fancy.

  But I’ve found lately that scientists really like getting the chance to have input into science fiction, and working on my story in Hieroglyph really helped me get over my fear of being an annoying author.

  For my story in Hieroglyph, I was hoping to pull off a fake-out—you think the story is going in one, fairly depressing, direction, and then it suddenly turns out to be something quite different. And for that to work, I needed there to be some technologies for mitigating environmental damage embedded in these apparently useless gadgets that everybody is carrying around.

  So the great part about writing, and especially revising, this story was getting to have a crash course in different technologies that could absorb carbon. I exchanged tons of e-mails with two people at Arizona State University: Braden Allenby, Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics, and Jean Andino, Senior Sustainability Scholar with the Global Institute of Sustainability. And I also e-mailed a lot with Jez Weston, a policy analyst with the Royal Society in New Zealand who had given a talk about geoengineering at Nerd Nite Wellington.

  The thing I learned from all three of these experts was that doing things like reducing a car’s emissions below a certain point, and capturing carbon from the air, are difficult and expensive to do—but there are things that could be coming along, even if they would be expensive to implement. (Perfect for the overpriced gadgets in my story.) Braden Allenby suggested you could spray sodium hydroxide into the air and capture carbon for storage underground. And then Jean Andino came up with an even better solution—you could use liquid amines to capture the carbon, with solar power used to regenerate them. Dr. Andino, who had done a lot of work for Ford Motor Corporation, also suggested a technology that uses a photocatalyst to convert CO2 emissions and water into methane, which could be used as a fuel source. You could even capture the CO2 within the car’s cabin.

  This was a really fun research gig, and a chanc
e to learn something about the cutting-edge technologies that could help save the planet someday.

  “THE DAY IT ALL ENDED”: THOUGHTS OF A TECHNOLOGIST—Brad Allenby

  Brad Allenby, an engineer and ethicist at Arizona State University, discusses the radical worldview of “The Day It All Ended” at hieroglyph.asu.edu/DiZi.

  TECHNICAL PAPER—Carbon Capture

  Read an article from the peer-reviewed Journal of Materials Chemistry A about the production of solar fuels, coauthored by “The Day It All Ended” collaborator Jean Andino of Arizona State University, at hieroglyph.asu.edu/DiZi.

  TALL TOWER

  Bruce Sterling

  MY WIFE WENT TO the Tall Tower. She left for orbit, never to return to Earth. Gretchen so wanted to go on up there.

  I got pretty lonesome. The Tall Tower commenced to weigh heavy on my troubled mind.

  To dream big and to build big, that was the big idea of the Tall Tower. To build a tower that touched the cosmos. In weightlessness they build bigger than the green Earth can allow.

  Big dreams do come true sometimes, but time goes on, despite the size of dreams. I’d fulfilled some dreams. A loving bride, two fine sons. I’d gotten in my full share of trout fishing and campfire songs with the guitar.

  I had built a home, and I’d run a good business, too. I was a historical tour guide by trade. My horse, Levi, and I led a mule train of tourists together, down into an old-time copper mine.

  That hole in Arizona was one of the biggest structures humankind had ever created—and in my own day, it was a mighty ghost mine, a feral wilderness of landslides, rattlesnakes, and cactus.

  Levi and I made that Arizona copper mine into an exotic tour business. We kitted out for every season in our heritage cowboy gear: me with my white hat and blue jeans, plus a six-shooter and a lariat. Levi sported his shiny silver saddle and his blue-and-white-striped horse blanket.

  The tourists were generous to me, while the tourist kids always loved Levi. In the off-season, Levi and I ventured far over the horizon, sometimes as far as the tumbledown ruins of El Paso and Tucumcari. The two of us were restless souls by our natures as man and beast.

  © 2013, Haylee Bolinger / ASU

  Time had made me an older man. Being a horse, Levi was downright elderly.

  That being said, the time had come for me to venture to the Tall Tower. Plenty of room up in orbit for a man’s soul to grow to vast dimensions. Living in outer space, I would have a superhuman life span and wield superhuman powers. I’d be up among the stars, with the highest of the high technologies.

  But one simple matter bothered me. What about my horse? To become “superhuman” is a great thing, obviously. But what about the “superequine”?

  It was the wife who had first put that problem into my head. “It just don’t seem fair,” Gretchen told me one summer evening, as we sat on our back porch together at the rancho, drinking homemade beer. “Our animal friends will never share our bliss, when we’re Ascended Masters up in Outer Space!”

  My wife, Gretchen, enjoyed an intense spiritual life. Gretchen had always lived within sight of the Tall Tower. The Tall Tower cast its morning shadow from Arizona clear to Los Angeles.

  Nothing mankind had built could match the steely splendor of that six-legged derrick soaring toward the stars. Big lights glared upon it, and small lights twinkled brightly, up and down the curves of its almighty slopes. Pretty swarms of drone-planes flew among its cross-braced beams.

  Flower gardens hung off it. Trailing clouds rippled from the Tall Tower like pennants, because it pretty much made its own weather.

  Since its completion, no earthly structure had ever matched the Tall Tower. Why build two of them? And why build such things on Earth? You had to build off the earth to outbuild the Tall Tower. The Tall Tower was the tallest, grandest possible structure that the earth could support.

  The tower sang to us as it stood there. Every night there were launches, the passenger ships firing off. Those space-trains carried crowds of eager human beings, shedding all earthly limits, abjuring all worldly ties.

  As mankind departed from Earth to build grander things in outer space, the healing Earth grew green and wild again. A man on a good horse could follow the empty highways from the Yukon to Honduras, and never set an eye on a fellow human being.

  With technology lofted to the starry realm, the bears, wolves, and bald eagles returned to rule Earth’s rivers, plains, and peaks. Longhorn cattle abounded. So did rugged mustangs, like my Levi. The earth abided under a night sky swarming with satellites.

  Gretchen respected the Ascended Masters, putting faith in them for her salvation. Each and every night, cartridges of human astronauts were loaded into the Tall Tower’s base. A narrow launch tube ran up the tower, a rifle barrel to the stars.

  These spacecraft capsules, nestled within, would get quantumly transposed, through the astral technology of the Ascended Masters. The capsules existed down at the tower’s base, and yet also existed far up at the tower’s remote summit, both at the same cosmic instant.

  When that wave-form probability collapsed, the quantum spacecraft would fling themselves from the tower straight to the heavens, squirting off slick as watermelon seeds.

  When Gretchen betook herself upward, we didn’t fight about that matter. The Ascended Masters had astral capacities. They lived in stellar paradises forged from the iron of asteroids, great space cities so colossal that I saw them in the daylight with my naked eye.

  We human beings knew as much about their cosmic science as my horse, Levi, knew about saddle-stitching. The Ascended Masters were nano, and robo, and bio. We human beings were their larvae. The Ascended Masters never reproduced—for they left that vital task to us, humanity.

  Through their own wise choice, the Ascended Masters were celibate. The greatest of them were astral, boneless entities, all telescope eyes, nerves, and megatons of living brain, floating through the cosmos in shining steel shells.

  Earth was their cradle. The Ascended Masters called us from that cradle, to become their recruits. We ventured up there to join them in the heavens, once we felt good and ready for it, and until then, they kept their starry distance from us. That was a sensible arrangement.

  Now, to tell the truth, some people had some problems with this state of affairs. Human nature is crooked, and sometimes we balk at salvation like a horse will shy at a shadow. So I will confess that I, too, had a problem. What about my horse?

  That arrangement excluded my horse. A man is a being. And a horse is also a being. But humans are aspirational beings, who imagine, and speculate, and plan, and build.

  No horse does all that. Yet Levi also had his dignity and worth. Because Levi wore the saddle and was dutiful. Levi had met his bargain with me. Now I found myself alone with him. My boys had grown, my wife had gone her own way. It was just him and me, under those bright stars and satellites.

  Call me stubborn, or call me a sentimental fool, but I owed something to my sturdy beast.

  So I settled my affairs. I sold off the spread, and I gave away my earthly possessions. I took a last farewell look around, and I saddled him up. The two of us headed for the Tall Tower to meet our destiny.

  NEVER ONCE HAD I ventured to the remote and icy peak of the Tall Tower—I had only seen it, stenciled on the skyline like a promise of redemption. But I had been to the wicked city that grew within the spread legs of the tower’s mighty base.

  This thriving, noisy desert metropolis, crowded with space-bound pilgrims of every size, shape, and creed, bore the name of “Desconocido.”

  Because it had a giant tower standing on it, Desconocido was a mighty easy town to find. Finding trouble in that town was even easier. Those who dwell in the shadow of the gods will always make fun of the divine. The townsfolk of Desconocido were sharp-witted and crooked people, always full of their own schemes, with the much-mixed pigments of a whole lot of local color.

  Desconocido was an oasis by its nature. The Tall Tower collec
ted ice on its slanting, cloudy spars. Meltwater trickled down through a host of pipes. Giant steel shadows crawled across the city every day, sundial style. Every neighborhood had its own climate.

  So as to get shot off up into orbit, pilgrims came to Desconocido from every corner of the world. Commonly, these sacred pilgrims would have some final fit of the nerves before they left Earth forever. They naturally desired some farewell glutting of the fleshpots. The locals were more than ready to oblige.

  So Desconocido was a fine place to wake up next to a stranger. A place to discover new tastes for ancient human vices. A place to get robbed, or to get killed, maybe. Maybe all of that would happen to you in one single day.

  My own needs were simple and my aims were clear. My horse, Levi, and I had long been partners. I refused to become superhuman until Levi was superequine. I had made up my mind that Levi would transcend the innate limits of the horsely.

  Somebody in Desconocido would help me with my ambition. Obviously this notion of mine could not be entirely new. Nothing was entirely new to Desconocido.

  I therefore commenced to look around the town, with the caution of my worldly wisdom, being a man of mature years.

  My first concern was proper shelter for my horse. I found that stable above the city.

  The Tall Tower had vertical farms. Vast expanses of steel real estate sloped upward. Crops could grow within chosen spaces that were cooler, wetter, drier, or brighter, all according to taste.

  So I found a perpendicular hacienda run by some kindly Jewish folk. These religious sectarians had strict dietary requirements. Their ancient scriptures didn’t allow them to eat modern foodstuffs.

  Modern dining was based on microbes, algae, and insects, as one might well expect from agricultural science. The Jews found that prospect bothersome. Nobody else did, but the chosen folk had never been just anybody.