by John Barnes
Methane is a greenhouse gas, and the quantity of methane released, in a matter of a few days, is 173 billion metric tons. That’s just about nineteen times what’s in the atmosphere in 2028, or thirty-seven times what’s in the atmosphere in 1992.
Diogenes Callare gets Jesse’s call and has to say he doesn’t know anything yet. He’s glad to see, via the little screen, that the kid is driving a Lectrajeep out into the Arizona desert, and that there’s a cute little brown-haired chick beside him.
They chat a little, and Jesse says hi to the kids as he always does; Jesse is six-year-old Mark’s favorite uncle, but Nahum, who is three, doesn’t always remember who he is.
When Di has talked with Jesse and assured him that no one yet knows what the detectable consequences of the cram bombs in the Arctic seabed might be, he takes some time to look around his living room, at the kids and in through the lighted doorway to where Lori is still working. Life is pretty good. The furniture is decent looking and goes together, he’s reasonably in love with Lori, the kids seem to be at the intelligent end of normal, and this place—on the Carolina Coast zipline, only forty-five minutes from his job in Washington, but a comfortable couple of hundred miles away from the big city itself—is big and could easily pass for a real instead of a duplicate Victorian.
He’s doing pretty well, what the old man would call Getting On In The World. He wonders for an instant if the old man still talks to Jesse in capitals. Probably not. Di and his brother practically had different fathers, the dogmatic tyrant who raised Di somehow having faded into the crusty old character who raised Jesse.
Di goes in to play with Mark a bit more before the next bedtime; it still seems strange to have young kids awake when it’s close to midnight, but he has to admit that the new way of doing things, with kids taking a lot of long naps that either he or Lori share with them, does seem to make for happier and less frustrated children. They are putting up a block house, not very successfully because Mark finds it more fun to knock things over. But since Di fundamentally enjoys building block houses and watching Mark knock them down, it’s a good partnership.
“What was up with Jesse?” Lori asks, passing through on her way to the coffeemaker. She’s currently at work on The Slaughterer in Yellow, the sixth of her very popular “spectrum series” of books about the Slaughterer, the serial murderer who finishes every book by framing the detective. Her success does not account for their having a house here—Di’s job at NOAA took care of that—but it does account for the fitted hardwood and the extra-large bedrooms.
“Oh, he and his muffin of the month are worrying about Rivera’s taking out the Siberian missiles. Not that it’s not something to worry about, but the current muffin is a political muffin, so they’re worrying about it more than normal kids would.”
“Not the best muffin it could be, then,” Lori says, grinning. “Good thing all you wanted in a muffin was a good body and moral turpitude.”
“Yeah. At least I hope his muffin only has that aggressive tight-mouthed expression because she’s a Deeper and not because she has ARTS.”
“Turpitude,” Nahum says, distinctly. He adds, “She has ARTS.”
“Oops,” Lori says. “Maybe he’ll forget it before Mom comes to visit.”
Di winks at her and she grins back, and the thought crosses his mind that the kids will be expiring soon, Lori usually finishes up around 1:30 A.M. when the kids are in the depths of their longest sleep, and it might be nice to slide between the sheets with a grownup tonight.
Lori wets her lips with the tip of her tongue, turns to stick her bottom and chest out, and gives him the grin she always does when she says “Not bad for an old broad,” another phrase they’d had to lose since the time two months ago when Nahum expressed the view that Grandma was not bad for an old broad.
You never know, really, what kids are picking up on, but Mark hugs Di’s leg and says, “Time for bed?”
“Beds!” Nahum agrees, and just as current thinking says, there’s no problem at all with getting the two of them onto the big, comfortable, low bed, and by now they’re so secure that Di or Lori need only join them for most naps, not for every one.
A cynic might note that Di is often a bit short of sleep and that the new-fashioned way really only functions because Lori works at home. A deeper cynic might ask when parents have ever been other than short on sleep.
Still, tonight the kids go right to bed and shut up. Better still, Lori sits down next to him on the couch instead of going back to work. “So what do you think?” she asks.
“The floor of the Arctic Ocean is about as irrelevant a place as you can find for weather forecasting,” Di says, accepting the brandy she hands him. “I mean, temperatures down there have something to do with absorbing global warming—when the deep ocean gets warm, then one of the brakes on the system will be gone, but it won’t get warm for another generation or so if the computer is right. And by that time we should have emissions really under control and might have even started the re-cooling everyone seems to think we want to do.
“No, I just get bothered by the politics. I mean, you and I grew up pre-Flash. We know how weird it is to have the UN having any say in all this. And they’re not doing much of a job. If they hadn’t forced Russia to grant Siberian independence, or the USA to grant Alaskan independence, would all this have happened? And then not to check what was behind what they were shooting at. Typical UN operation. That’s all. If President Grandma or Harris Diem were running this show there’d have been no shooting and it wouldn’t have made the news at all—Abdulkashim would be out with no fuss. This guy Rivera is smart but he’s a show-off and he likes to see the planes fly and the bombs fall. One of these days we’ll get a smarter aggressor or a dumber SecGen, and then we’ll be in the soup.
“But as for the meteorology—nothing to worry about, I don’t think. The heat being released down there won’t bring up the bottom temperature by even one one-hundredth of a degree once it’s spread over the whole ocean.”
She snuggles against him and says, “I did not knock off early to talk meteorology, actually.”
He feels what he’s going to say on his tongue just as the phone rings, and it’s the ring from the NOAA office, so he has to answer. Probably the same question Jesse asked but less politely framed.
He knows it’s big when he sees it’s Henry Pauliss on the screen, and his boss looks freshly shaken out of bed. Probably the UN has had something weird happen down there and wants NOAA to figure it out, because the USA still has the best Weather Bureau there is… which is why there’s been stuff in Scuttlebytes all the time about a UN bid to take over NOAA.
As if to forestall Di’s irritation, Henry opens with a sigh. “What I want you to do is tell me to go back to bed, after I call the President and tell her that it’s nothing to worry about, so she can call the SecGen and tell him the same thing.”
“I won’t tell you that if it isn’t true.”
“That’s why I called you. It’s not really your bailiwick—though we will have to get the computer models going on it as well. It belongs over in the old Anticipatory Section, and since we don’t have one anymore, it belongs to anyone who has a lot of experience and won’t shade the truth for me.”
Di wonders what the flattery is leading up to.
“Okay, here’s the story.” Henry tells him, briefly, about the breakdown of the methane clathrate beds and the methane pouring out of the Arctic Ocean. “Near some openings in the ice it’s thick enough to have asphyxiated some seals, and as a precautionary thing the UN guys tried igniting it wherever it was dense enough—but that’s not even putting a dent in the release, because mostly it’s drifting up through tiny fissures and holes and not building up much at any one point. Still, the UN satellites have found about a hundred plumes they can ignite, and they’ve used Global Launch Control lasers to get them burning, and that should reduce the problem by about two or three percent.
“Which is not a lot. Bottom line is,
we’ve still dumped something like a hundred fifty or two hundred billion metric tons of methane into the air. We’re going to have twenty times the normal level for at least a little while. You know how much shit hit the fan when the last Five Year Global Warming Assessment came out. They’re scared to death of… you know.”
Di is almost amused. As a senior official of the agency officially blamed for the Global Riot—the biggest embarrassment since NASA’s Replicator Experiment nearly ate Moonbase—poor old Henry can’t quite bring himself to say the word.
The problem with XV is exactly that it’s like being there. So when the prediction was for the grain famine in Pakistan to continue, and things blew up in Islamabad, in half an hour there were plenty of XV freaks getting the same load of hormones and excitement in Tokyo, Mombasa, Fez, Lima, Ciudad de Mexico, Honolulu. In Seattle, a group of Deepers had all plugged into the Pakistani scenes just before going to one of their “actions,” trying to shut down a neonatal unit, which was supposed to be nonviolent, but with all the glandular workout they’d just had, it didn’t stay that way—or maybe it was that the devoutly Catholic commander of the Federal troops, as the Deepers later claimed, ordered the troops to fire into the crowd.
At any rate, two XV reporters were caught in the cross fire, a man and woman who usually worked the Newsporn Channel, and as she died in his arms, shot through the lungs, half a billion experiencers jacked in and felt every sob and gasp from both of them, smelled the blood and felt the shots—
The glands start pumping and the place gets jumping, as they say on Dance Channel, and suddenly all the streets of the Earth were full, shop windows shattering, cops shot, fires going up and firemen unable to reach the hydrants. And everywhere, more XV reporters worldwide jumped in to pick up the additional excitement, more rioters pulling on scalpnets to share the rioting elsewhere while they did their own.
UNIC can shut down one government or group, or even a consortium of a few dozen, but trillions of parallel links, any combination of which can be a pathway between four million XV reporters and twenty thousand XV channels, with all that message traffic jumping from link to link a couple of times per millisecond, is utterly unstoppable. UNIC couldn’t do more than cause a little static here and there, not enough so anyone even noticed them. Raw experience that would normally never have made it on anywhere was pouring over the channels into even the most restricted societies.
Ed Porter and the other XV editors had the best day of their careers. Plug into XV and you could be standing on the sidewalk watching a store burn in London, then watching a mob strip a woman naked in Montevideo, then crouching behind an overturned car while shots scream off it in Seattle, then facing the insectoid cops and their riot guns in Tashkent, back to London for more fire, back to Montevideo for a flash of a rape, back to Tashkent as the guns roar and blood sprays everywhere, on to Paris where an XV reporter choking on smoke is trapped on a third floor—all that in three seconds, not pictures but full sensory experiences, on and on.
Finally, the only thing that seemed to limit the Global Riot was that most people preferred to stay home and wear the goggles and muffs so that they could experience violence and destruction worldwide with their full concentration, instead of having it be background music for their own rioting.
As it was, at least half a million people worldwide died while plugged into XV, not realizing that while they popped back and forth between the firestorm in Seoul, troops going berserk in Denver, liquor-store looting in Warsaw, and the ever-popular gang rapes in Montevideo, the building was burning down over their heads. There were nine million dead in total, worldwide, not counting suicides afterward, crashes of fire trucks and ambulances trying to get to the trouble, or heart attacks while experiencing it all on XV.
So far nobody has figured out any way to prevent the next Global Riot. Di understands perfectly well what Henry is worried about. Supposedly UNIC has gotten equipped to grab net control and shut down global communications if need be, but after seeing them unable to shut down Abdulkashim earlier tonight, Di knows that’s strictly propaganda.
All this comes to Di as one big impression while he swallows hard. “All right, then, Henry,” he says. “Offhand I’d say a methane release that big is going to have effects and people are going to notice. Methane is one of the major ways the Earth traps heat, and it’s letting loose right before spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s going to warm up a lot faster than usual this spring. You’ve got to make them understand this won’t just blow over and can’t be kept secret. So… how much how fast? You said a hundred and fifty to two hundred billion tons—is that firm?”
“That’s the estimated volume in the beds that have already gone,” Henry says, “and since to some extent they seem to be able to set each other off mechanically, it’s probably low. How fast—I don’t know. How long does it take a not very dense gas to rise to the surface? It’s not very soluble in water, so we won’t get much help from its dissolving; besides, I suppose whatever dissolves is just going to block the absorption of other methane from other sources later. As for finding its way through the ice—you want my bet? I bet it didn’t take an hour to get to the undersurface of the ice. And there are so many cracks and fissures, big and little, that I don’t expect it to stay under the ice more than two or three hours. We thought about flaring the pockets—use missiles to punch holes and set the stuff on fire—but the collapse after the pocket goes will probably break the ice up more and let other methane escape. I guess we’ll do it so that it looks like we tried, but we don’t expect it to accomplish anything. So very unofficially, figure it’s all in the air tomorrow.”
Di gives a low whistle, leans back, reaches for his terminal, unfolds it onto the table in front of him. “I’ll have to get back to you—and I need numbers, accurate ones, soon. I can do some preliminaries on it pretty fast. And you’re right, we need the old Anticipatories.”
He thinks for one moment of pointing out that it was Henry who let them cut out the “Wild Thinkers” on grounds that the things the Anticipatory Section dreamed up were mostly not going to happen and tended to scare the daylights out of voters and taxpayers.
But after all, the alternative was cutting Henry, and then they’d have ended up with a worse hack, so Di just adds, “If I remember right, there’re several processes that take methane out of the atmosphere—”
Henry nods. “Right. We might look into which ones can be accelerated or altered—”
“Wasn’t thinking that far ahead. It matters how long the stuff stays at elevated concentrations. If it’s only a couple of days, not much will happen, but if it’s twenty years, then we’re in deep.”
“Got you.”
“And Henry—you really ought to see about getting everyone back from Anticipatory. Most of the people you have left are just amateurs at this.”
Henry almost looks happy, and says, “I’m way ahead of you there, at least. Next person I talk to after you is Carla Tynan. And I intend to beg, plead, and whine until she agrees to head up the research on this—whatever it takes. Then I’ll beg, plead, and whine some more so they’ll okay hiring her.”
Di Callare has to smile. “That’s going to take some whining.”
“You know it. But we don’t have anyone else who knows as much about the weird connections that might be out there.”
“Well, I look forward to working with her again. You can learn a lot.”
“Unh-hunh. Some of it about meteorology and global climate. All right, guess I better call Hardshaw back first, then get to Carla. You take care and we’ll talk whenever one of these sleepyheads in here comes up with any of the numbers you asked for. Get some sleep tonight… might not be another good chance for a while.”
Henry pings off, and Di turns around to find Lori has been listening, out of sight of the phone’s camera. “You got that?”
“Yep.” She unfastens a button and winks at him more blatantly than he’d have thought possible. “And you heard you
r boss. Better take your chances while you’ve got them….”
In the middle of the twentieth century, the phone company learned to sell the dead time on a line, if there were enough lines. That is, if people make noise into the phone line only eighty percent of the time, then if you can switch conversations off as soon as someone falls silent, reconnect them through the first available line as soon as there’s any sound, and do it all fast enough so that no one notices the brief cutting off of the beginnings of sounds—well, then, you need only four lines per five conversations.
In the mid-1960s, to maintain communications in the event of a nuclear war, USDoD came up with ARPAnet, which begat Internet, a term you still hear old people call it in their boomtalk, instead of just “the net” it has evolved into, a system for moving e-mail in which each message knows where it is going and wanders from node to node in a network, taking every opportunity to get closer to its destination.
By 1990, intelligence organizations were using the splitting up of messages across multiple channels to make it impossible to monitor a conversation; one split second of it went across the country from microwave tower to microwave tower, the next split second went through an unused TV channel on a satellite, the next jumped around the world on satellite-to-satellite relays, and it all got together at the phone.
By 2028, that technique is no longer used for security; it’s simply the most efficient way to use the trillions of fibrop pathways and laser groundto-satellite links. But it has the same effect: nothing and no one can jam information as long as it’s coming from and going to enough different places at once. You can keep any one person from talking or listening… but that’s all.
And the same trillions of channels are the ones on which the UN, the governments, and the corporations depend. They can no more unplug than you can stop breathing; or rather the cost of doing either would be the same.
