The O.D.

by Chris James

  There was a laboured signature at the bottom of the page, followed by a P.S.:

  One last thing. To ensure the works you propose are not hindered by lack of finance, I have set up The Ruth and Forrest Vaalon Trust, currently valued at $2 billion, to help oil your wheels. As of today Forrest Vaalon, personally, is penniless, and it feels good.

  Pilot sat quietly for a time, then slipped the letter into its envelope and looked back over what little of the island was still visible in front of a thick fog rolling in from the east.

  As he lay in bed with Macushla and Pandora that night in their dome, Pilot was feeling a strange combination of sadness and elation – the two emotions perfectly in balance. The past was lying in a coffin in Manhattan; the future, in large boxes of notes, printouts and flash drives in the admin dome.

  XXIV

  Associated Press. – Phoenix, Arizona, Tuesday, February 7th, 1830 MDT.

  Over a hundred hospital admissions this morning have been attributed to an atmospheric inversion, which created a blanket of noxious air over central Phoenix late yesterday afternoon. Residents – especially the old, infirm and young – have been advised to stay indoors until the air quality returns to safe levels…

  CNN – Phoenix, Arizona, Wednesday, February 8th, 1500 MDT.

  ‘BAD AIR’ IN ARIZONA KILLS SEVEN. The cocktail of carbon monoxide and other lethal gases which has been trapped over metropolitan Phoenix since Monday has now killed seven people, hospital authorities report. Dozens more are being treated for serious respiratory difficulties. Meteorologists say there is no sign of the atmospheric inversion abating for at least a week and are recommending evacuation to outlying areas, where the air remains good.

  BBC NEWS – Phoenix, Arizona, Thursday, February 9th, 0730 MDT.

  POISON AIR DEATH TOLL ‘OFF THE CHARTS’ – PRESIDENT DECLARES STATE OF EMERGENCY. A sudden and deadly deterioration of breathable air in Phoenix ‘killed several thousand people overnight’, an observer on the ground has reported. Nothing of this magnitude has been seen since 200 people were asphyxiated by traffic fumes in Bangkok three years ago. A shortage of breathing apparatus for emergency workers is making rescue of the sick and retrieval of the dead extremely difficult. Although some people have left the city, it is thought that many thousands still remain. ‘Our citizens have been so debilitated by the lack of breathable air that they cannot even panic,’ Governor Lopez stated at 0530 Mountain Time. ‘The situation here is critical and we need immediate assistance.’ Washington responded in the past hour with a Federal Declaration of a State of Emergency in Phoenix.

  The Walter Wexler Blog – Wednesday, February 15th.

  Think of a hundred Twin Towers and you’ll get an idea of the final massive loss of life that occurred in Phoenix last week. ‘Atmospheric inversion’, my ass. Those people killed themselves with their own cars. Just look at the numbers. The carbon monoxide blanket woven from their own exhaust fumes measured a massive 300ppm at its most concentrated. There was no way out of the city for those poor people – even on foot. TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-FOUR THOUSAND, FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-EIGHT. I’ll give you that figure again in numerals − 284,478. That’s 20% of the population of Phoenix, snuffed out in a few painful breaths. I don’t want to say I told you so, but didn’t I warn about this kind of disaster happening in our country three years ago? I told you so. It was only a matter of time before the isobars, temperature, wind, or in this case, lack of it, and our own deadly emissions, got together and conspired to kill us all in the perfect storm…

  Round the refectory table, Lonnie Pilot, Len Wenlight and Macushla Mara, nursing fourteen-month-old Pandora, were eating North Ronaldsay sheep yogurt and talking about the horrific events in Arizona they’d been following on the internet for the past week. Wenlight was there in his capacity as the Island’s ‘embedded journalist of choice’. He’d been trying in vain to glean details of Eydos’ proposals for the forthcoming conference, but Pilot continually stonewalled him.

  Never had there been more call for an Earth Summit. In the twelve years since Eydos had risen from the sea, the globe’s human cancer had progressed from ‘critical’ to one stage below inoperable. Population had grown by 1.7 billion, putting unbearable pressure on the world’s vital organs. This, in spite of the H7N7 Equine-1 flu pandemic having killed 50 million people when it crossed over to humans two years previously. Through all this global upheaval, the doctor-politicians of the Earth’s A&E ward remained inactive – frozen like rabbits in the headlights.

  All but one. If there was one politician who commanded universal respect among her peers and the world at large, it was the Secretary General of the United Nations, Lim Lin Hok. To call her a ‘politician’ was a slur on her character. She was outspoken but always fair; single-minded, but flexible when necessary; and had brokered three international peace deals in the past twelve months alone. That she had been corresponding with Lonnie Pilot through encrypted messaging for two years and knew more about the Eydos package than anyone off-island, was the world’s best-kept secret.

  The idea to hold the summit on Eydos had been Pilot’s, but Lim had presented it to the world as hers. “Nillin is as neutral a meeting place as we will ever find,” she had argued. “Holding the Conference on Eydos will allow us to view our problems and broker our solutions from a unique and unprecedented perspective− an out-of-body experience through which we will all benefit.”

  On a flat area of the shelf just outside Nillin, a vast geodesic structure a hundred and fifty metres in diameter and fifty metres high had been built. Inside, seating for four thousand people had been installed. Scattered around the ‘Mother Dome’, as it was called, were smaller ‘baby domes’ for private meetings, catering, communications, medical facilities, generators, chemical toilets etc.

  In just under a month, three idle cruise ships would be slipping into Nillin’s new deep water harbour to deliver delegations from every country on earth to ‘the shrinking island with the growing credibility’ − cruise guests by night, delegates by day. Top of the agenda of the emergency congress were the crippling economic blood clots, social hemorrhaging and environmental heart attacks the world had been suffering throughout most of the participants’ lifetimes and before.

  After years of ever-widening drought, Australia had virtually run out of all fresh water, its entire population huddled around only two or three locations in the Southeast. Before the rains finally came to give temporary respite, a number of Australians out of desperation had decided to abandon ship and sail uninvited to water-rich New Zealand. Four hundred of these antipodean water migrants had died in their yachts and cruisers, either from thirst or by drowning. The situation down under was dire – the deaths, a stark warning of worse to come.

  Los Angeles was having severe water shortages of her own, caused mainly by the antics of pressure group CWC – Colorado Water for Coloradans. CWC militants had blown up pipelines and disabled numerous pumping stations crucial for the extraction and delivery of their H20 to California. The National Guard had been mobilized in both states to ensure the residents of Beverly Hills did not go thirsty.

  As for Phoenix, only a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of citizens evacuated to cleaner mountain air had felt confident enough to return to their city. Five other conurbations on three continents had only just escaped similar loss of all breathable air during the four months leading up to Phoenix, a tragedy that had been waiting to happen and cared not where it received its cue.

  The celebrated cure for AIDS had merely taken the brakes off Africa’s unsustainable population growth. More babies were being born than were starving to death. Irreversible shortages of water had led to states of war between no less than eight African nations. The bloodiest of these conflicts – between South Africa and Angola over possession of the Namibian aquafir, Ohangwena II – made the Colorado-California water war seem like a bun fight.

  By contrast, in India over a million people a month were crossing the divide
from poverty into full consumerhood. The extra demand on resources and energy on the sub-continent was breaking the world’s back, as was the ever-widening rift between rich and poor.

  Global warming was running away from all measures to curb it. The Maldives, Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu had all been lost to rising sea levels, as had lowlying coastal regions in Bangladesh, India, China and Vietnam. Compounding the problem was the insufficient land at higher elevations to support displaced coastal populations. The crisis facing the Philippines, Indonesia and seven other nations was the incursion of saltwater into their fresh water aquifers. Even Eydos had lost 5% of its landmass, all from its eastern coastline, and Nillin harbour was two feet deeper than it had been after the earthquake.

  Subtropical dry zones had been pushed up into the American southwest and southern Europe, and down into southern Australia, making those regions increasingly susceptible to prolonged and intense droughts. La Niña and el Niño didn’t know if they were coming or going. And arctic warming had caused the polar Jetstream to meander north-south, causing more temperature extremes in Europe, Canada and the northern States of the US. The vagaries of global warming had brought with it global cooling. The Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift had shifted to a more southerly course, leaving Eydos, Ireland, The United Kingdom and much of northern Europe under temperatures more in keeping with their high latitudes. It was already being likened to the Little Ice Age of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

  In the ever-widening tornado belt of the American interior, ‘Thornadoes’, as the media dubbed them, were wreaking havoc. The worst of the half dozen thornadoes that had hammered the United States – Storm #817 – had laid a winding, nine hundred mile long by two mile wide highway of devastation from Lubbock, Texas, to Madison, Wisconsin, well north of normal tornado patterns. A wind speed of 329 miles an hour, the highest ever recorded on Earth, had been logged 50 miles east of Kansas City. If Storm #817 hadn’t veered westwards just short of Chicago, the death toll of sixty thousand could conceivably have been six hundred thousand. The insurance industry was in meltdown, unable to keep up with claims or meet payouts.

  Further south, the phenomenon known as ‘Marine Plastic Massing’ had closed the Panama Canal from the west. A floating plastic island, one hundred and fifty miles across and an eighth of a mile deep in places, had lodged itself within the bowl of the Gulf of Panama, effectively ‘plugging’ the canal. Consisting of an amalgam of flotsam and jetsam from the Japanese tsunami of 2010 and the California-Oregon tsunami of 2016, the plastic island was proving impossible to move or break up. There was even talk of digging a new Panama Canal through it – a proposal opposed by religious groups who felt that the hundreds of thousands of Japanese and American corpses encased within it should be left in peace.

  Also on the agenda for the conference was the ongoing rot of corporate Earth. After Eastern Europe’s wholesale turn towards the capitalist West in the late eighties and early nineties, the people there had found they were still facing in the wrong direction. Unemployment, economic chaos and, more importantly, disillusion, was the rule, not the exception. People in Minsk, Tbilisi and Bucharest had begun to starve to death. The ‘dirty bomb’ detonated outside the Kremlin, killing fifteen thousand on the spot and fatally irradiating a further forty thousand, was the worst in a growing spate of rogue attacks using weapons of mass destruction. The glut of small arms and munitions in circulation worldwide had rendered law enforcement impotent in many countries. Tombstone-style gunfights, using real bullets, were taking place hourly in the streets of Mexico City, Naples and Marseille.

  Those that the Eastern Bloc had turned to with such high hopes – The United States and Europe in particular – were having a problem of their own. The medical community called it Societal Disintegration Anxiety Syndrome. SDAS was what happened when you rocked all those things that made Westerners feel secure – their jobs, their financial institutions, their hopes and prospects, the very fabric of their lives. Those with a sense of humour remaining likened it, in America anyway, to ‘Linus without his blanket’.

  Just three months earlier, the digital data collapse everyone predicted would happen did happen. On reaching nine zettabytes of data – a billion terabytes of information for every person alive on Earth, the world’s information ocean simply froze over. The ‘machine’ of online selling, stock trading, banking and social networking had edged beyond human capacities to control and oversee its automated processes. Dirty data entering the ‘ocean’ had triggered system failures across the globe, bringing trade and communication to a standstill. People couldn’t fix the problem because they no longer understood the colossal tangle of interconnected software that had caused it. What’s more, digital currency, which had all but replaced physical money in more advanced countries, had also been frozen within the silicon chips that housed it. Paper dollars, euros, pounds, rupees, yuan and yen were being printed by the billions in an attempt to unblock trade. And retailing, which had been operating almost entirely in cyberspace was being returned to the street – to the flea markets, bazaars and market stalls of its birth. It was back to zero for millions of businesses and their billions of employees.

  People were looking to their leaders for answers, but they weren’t getting any. Unemployment and hopelessness were drying up fragile societies like brushwood, ignitable by the smallest spark. In Northern Ireland this had resulted in the highest single-day death toll in the Province’s history, as Protestant and Catholic gunmen once again took to the streets. Across Europe and the US, suicide had quadrupled, as had rape. The upper class crimes of company fraud and embezzlement had reached unprecedented levels. This, coupled with an almost ten-fold increase in murder, armed robbery and petty theft, had served to capsize and drown the West’s judicial systems, entrenching SDAS still deeper into the psyche of its citizens.

  Infant capitalism, suckling the teats of cheap labour, had been passed first to the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India and China, then to the MINTS – Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey, and then to the PIPES – Pakistan, Iran, the Philippines and Ethiopia. The cradle of capitalism had at last fallen from the tree and now lay in a billion pieces on the ground. Nowhere was this more visible than in Great Britain where four major conurbations seethed under martial law and smoldered in the ashes of the worst rioting ever experienced in a temperate zone country.

  And the baby? No capitalist nation had ever thought to ask itself what it would do when the markets for its products and services either choked or dried up. With world trade log-jammed by overproduction and paralyzed by the data crash, the capitalist sun had reached its nadir.

  All these events had served to shift the centre of gravity of Pilot’s symbolic boulder to that very position of imbalance he’d been waiting for, but hadn’t expected quite so soon. The stick Eydos had fashioned to lever the boulder away from the edge was ready and waiting to be placed in position.

  With the Summit less than four weeks away, Pilot was edgy. Everyone was doing what they could to calm him down, including Pandora, who was the picture of placidity and contentment at her mother’s breast.

  Len Wenlight, who’d been sitting quietly in a corner, could contain himself no longer. “We’re fucked, guys,” he said. “Hog-tied. Trousers down. Fucked. You’d think every acid-dead tree, every failed harvest and skin cancer, every inch of new desert and every teenage heroin death would count towards prising our grip from the time bomb. Instead, we just seem to clutch it tighter. Our technological advances are like double-edged swords. GM crops that can grow in sand, new ways of squeezing oil out of a stone… they just lure us into a false sense of security where we think we can carry on reproducing until the cows come home.”

  “They came home 250 years ago, Len,” Pilot said. “We have a few ideas about that.”

  “Eydosians for the Defense of the Earth,” Wenlight said.

  “What?”

  “E-D-E. Eydosians for the Defense of the Earth. Twelve years ago I se
t up another E-DE− Englanders for the Defense of Eydos. You never knew this, Lonnie, but it was EDE who persuaded the Royal Navy to withdraw her sneaky submarines from your waters.”

  Pilot’s jaw dropped. “I’ll be damned, Len. How did you manage to− “

  “These ideas you’ve got,” Wenlight interrupted, “they’d better be good. If you put rancid carrots in the shop, no one’s going to buy them.”

  “You would if they were the last carrots on Earth. Anyway, it’s not a carrot we’ll be offering… more like an emetic. Everyone thinks you have to reward people to make them do what you want them to do. The seal claps, he gets a fish. Our inborn optimism makes us think that everything will turn out all right. Politicians throw us the fish that feed this optimism, with the result that nobody does anything to make sure things will be all right. Next day they’re worse than ever.

  “When the teeming billions hit the bottom, as they’re beginning to now, and they’re lying there in each other’s filth looking up at their leaders for more fish, it’s the brave man who’ll stand there and give them nothing – who will actually take things away. We’re the only group that can be trusted not to give people what they want. What they want is fish – comfort and security. Nothing too radical.”

  Wenlight was getting frustrated. “So, what are you going to give them?”

  Pilot spooned himself another bowl of yogurt while his friend waited for a reply. It came from Mara instead.