by A. Bernette
Rupert’s skin was like powdered cocoa but unlike his mother, he’d come from the beautiful islands off the northeast coast of the continent of Southern Allegiance. Zura had been born in Southern Liberty. Before the government of the World Consensus was formed, it had been called Africa.
Many of the old places had been renamed to loosen people’s obsession with the divisions that had been associated with them, but since no one seemed too concerned with claiming the wasteland he was on, it remained as Antarctica.
And it was here, where no one wanted to be, that the questions that no one could ignore, would originate.
Chapter Nine
Questions
Antarctic Research Center
Curiosity filled Rupert and Mave’s eyes as they looked at each other.
“What do you think this meeting will be about?” Rupert asked Mave, already suspecting they both knew.
“More of the same probably. Of course Zura has the knack for seeing the bigger picture and the longer trends that we might have missed. Maybe she has something new for us.”
“New would be good. Especially since we’ve been dealing with delivering them reports that no one likes for months and nothing has changed. I know they’ve invested billions of lubles into the infrastructure and the companies that maintain them but, at some point they have to hear reason, right?” Rupert asked Mave.
“You’d think that, but reason didn’t stop them from using these emission pump holes to begin with. They pushed it through because we were in a pollution crisis and needed something quick.”
“You’re right. Anyone who tried to get real solid research done was considered a threat, disloyal, and discredited in some way or another,” Rupert said, remembering some of his former colleagues.
“Now, they’ve got more reasons to keep doing what they are doing than to stop. At least, they have until now. I am hopeful it’ll be different this time. I feel pretty good about Zura making the case,” Mave said, nodding her head.
Zura had a keen eye and mind for seeing what was coming with just a few pieces of information. She must have passed that gift on to Stephen. His mind was almost like a computer when it came to patterns and probabilities. They were lucky to have him, even if he was just fifteen.
“I guess we better go then. She doesn’t like to be kept waiting.” Rupert said as the two made their way down the stairs and through the short tunnel to the control room.
They went through the same process as Stephen. Each removed their shoes, exchanging them for the white booties before taking turns in the chamber. Mave went first, taking the minute to collect her thoughts again before facing Zura.
When Rupert followed her, she knew he’d taken advantage of those quiet seconds as well. The two gave a knowing nod as they walked through the lab and into the ROC room. Rupert had barely exited the lab when Zura was showing a barely stacked pile of papers into their hands.
“Hey you two, take a look at this. I keep staring at it and it seems right but it just doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t seem to be possible. Tell me if you are seeing what I’m seeing.” Zura projected the data that had held her captivated onto the center table and started walking around it in circles, as if she were on the hunt.
Mave glanced at Rupert and then said, “Zura, can we take it down just a half a notch. Let’s sit and look at it. Remember, we haven’t seen all the data together, only our pieces of the puzzle. It looks like you’ve put the puzzle together, so to speak. Give us a few minutes to look it over and then we can all talk about what we see. How’s that sound?” she asked. Mave was always the voice of reason and calm.
“Good idea, Mave. Five minutes,” Zura said as she got ready to tap a button on her wrist. “Start…now.” Zura couldn’t help but time it. She was particular that way.
Mave was the main reason Zura had made it through the first two years with the twins. It had been Mave and Zura’s parents moving to Northern Allegiance for a few years to help that were her salvation. They told her when she was pregnant that they weren’t going to miss their only grandchildren even if they were half way around the world.
However, it was Mave who kept Zura sane in the long cold months when she had to leave them in Northern Allegiance to come back to the ARC. She’d never felt she had enough time with them when they were young, but they still turned out to be good kids.
A few minutes later, Johan walked in holding a cup of coffee still steaming over the green brim. Stephen followed him, carrying a hot cup of coffee in each hand, delicately balancing them so that they didn’t spill on him or on the clean floors of the ROC room. He didn’t feel like getting on his knees to scrub the floors today, especially since he was so freshly clean.
“Sorry I’m late. I wanted to pull a few more data points from today before chiming in myself on this. Have you all had a chance to look at the reports Zura made?”
Johan’s deep eyes moved between Mave and Rupert, before settling on Zura. She still lit up his world. He handed her the coffee he was holding, took one from Stephen, and sat beside her. Stephen, holding one last cup sat down in the last empty seat. With everyone being so preoccupied, they might not notice he was drinking coffee too.
Zura slid a report over to Stephen and took the data from Johan. She then began looking back and forth at the different reports. She stood up and restarted the data load into the center of the table through the holograph system that turned it into a three dimensional image. She knew where she wanted to start.
“Okay, let’s go. Rupert, what are your thoughts?”
Rupert cleared his throat before beginning. “You see this data point here?” he asked pointing to what seemed like a random dot on the graph. “It seems like a minor anomaly at first, until you notice that it is repeated here, and here, and here, by proportion. So it becomes less of an anomaly but rather a periodic spike,” he said as he slid his finger to move it along to what Johan had been studying.
“I think this goes along with Johan’s findings. The spikes we see here are because the entire earth mantle is connected. What happens over here in the North and South Allegiances or over in the Eastern Way affects us down here.”
“And,” Mave added, “keep in mind they’ve been adding new drilling holes over the past decade where we’d previously had none. So rather than having these gases pumped into the ground in just a dozen areas, we are now up by nearly 100%, even with the three that are closed. No one is talking about long-term solutions.”
“What I’m seeing,” said Johan “is compressed gases being pushed into the surface and then expanding once they are below ground, pushing the earth apart underneath. It is literally destabilizing the layer that we live on and that the ocean sits on. It’s, of course, worse where the holes have been drilled but, like Rupert said, it’s affecting everywhere.”
Zura nodded her head thoughtfully. She was restless and stood up to begin walking in circles again. It was what she’d suspected but needed to hear it from the people she trusted most. “So what can we do?” Zura asked. “And more importantly, how long do we have before these gases push against a tectonic plate or close enough to a volcano to erupt it?”
“It’s already happening in some places. We’ve seen more volcanic activity even without full scale eruptions. There have been more tremors reported by the Science Institute and we’ve measured more here too, including on the ocean floor. The earthquake in Southern Allegiance was pretty bad, but that was just one of several incidents,” Rupert answered.
“Based on the data collected over the past seventeen months, the probability of smaller events in the next six months however, is over .7 if conditions do not change.” Stephen said in his nearly monotone voice.
“When did you work that out Stephen?” Johan asked.
“Last night, before bed. I hope you don’t mind, mom. I borrowed copies of the reports,” Stephen said to a smiling Zura.
“I don’t mind at all. Thank you.” She couldn’t help but think, her son was a genius. Turn
ing her attention back to the information projected and her teammates, Zura continued. “Based on that, what can we do to turn this around so that the conditions change and we avoid the next event in a series of events that will destabilize our world?”
Mave paused for a moment, running her hands through her long hair. She hadn’t bothered to put it up that morning since she knew she’d just be around friends. She pushed her coffee mug back and leaned forward on the table.
“Zura, the first thing is to confirm what Stephen said. The second thing is to tell UniCorps and we need to tell our contacts at the World Consensus Science Division too,” Mave continued to lean in, her eyes on Zura.
There was silence around the room, with the exception of Stephen’s perfectly timed sipping of his coffee and subsequent gagging as he burnt his tongue. Zura looked at him and then decided to let it go. He’d been up working on this like the rest of them. He’d earned his grown up wake up. Stephen looked around the room at the faces of the people who had become of his family. He didn’t get what the big deal was about telling their funders.
Quietly, his mother spoke, “And then what? We can’t just go in and drop a bomb like this without having a practical and workable solution. I’m not ready to tell the science divisions of either UniCorps or the World Consensus. The World Consensus doesn’t like bad news, never has. UniCorps doesn’t like anything that may negatively affect their productivity or profits. Along with that, anything at all that might scare the public generally gets buried by everyone.”
“We can’t let this stuff happen and just be quiet about it. That isn’t fair. It isn’t right,” Stephen said, disturbed at the suggestion.
“It’s okay, Stephen. We’ll tell them when the time is right. When we have answers for the questions. Right now, we don’t have answers and we don’t have a solution,” Zura said trying in vain to calm her son.
“No, mom, it’s not okay. I’m fifteen years old. If we let this situation continue, the probability of there being a world that is habitable when I’m as old as you, is pretty much zero. Actually to be more precise it is .12 to .15 but that is close enough to nothing.” Stephen stood up with his coffee and left the lab.
Stephen reversed his steps to exit the science center. As he walked through the tunnels that led to their unit, trying to keep his coffee from spilling, he could feel himself becoming more frustrated. He didn’t understand them. They’d rushed to put in the pump system to solve a problem that they’d created. At the time, it was the easier fix and much faster given they could reuse some of the existing infrastructure. Now no one wanted to be responsible for it or what it was doing to the planet.
He entered their unit and walked past the aging furniture Zura had personally picked out before they were born.
She’d changed the art and knick-knacks out once when they were about ten years old but no one had done much since. Right now, he didn’t see any of that as he walked past it and into his room, shutting the door hard behind him.
He felt silly for wanting his sister home, but he did. He needed someone to talk to. Someone who would understand.
Stephen banged his head on the wall a few times and then rubbed the red spot on his forehead. That does hurt. He then remembered Stella asked him not to do that since it gave her headaches. Spent of any other ideas of what to do, Stephen turned and flopped onto his bed.
Touching the small shiny black band around his wrist he projected it to the wall. Within a few seconds a half awake face with a hand over an eye trying to get the sleep out, appeared in front of him. The young man had serious bed head from falling asleep at his desk. Stephen was annoyed that Marco could pretty much look like that when he woke up. He could spend all day grooming himself and still just look completely average.
“Hey Marco, how are you? I need to ask you about something,” Stephen said rushing in without even letting Marco answer. Marco rubbed his eyes.
“Hi Stephen. What’s going on?”
Stephen paused and stared at the screen. He realized he needed to talk to someone but hadn’t thought it through. Telling Marco what was going on wasn’t something he could really do. Neither was it possible to ask him for advice, even hypothetically. He couldn’t talk to anyone else about this at all, except Stella and he’d have to wait for her to get back.
“I’m sorry Marco. I made a mistake. I’ll talk to you later.”
Marco swore under his breath and rolled his eyes as Stephen hung up. He’d fallen asleep at his desk doing some research of his own, when Stephen had come through. Marco had his own work he needed to finish if he wanted an edge on his competition.
The walls stared back at Stephen. He had never decorated them like Stella. They’d been painted a bluish grey color when he was a little kid and he’d left it that way for more than eight years. The maintenance staff touched it up every year with the same color and for the past three years had asked if he wanted a new color. The blue still comforted him and there was no need to change it despite everyone else’s suggestions.
The only picture displayed on the wall was of his family on a vacation back in his mom’s native home, Hankura, on the western coast of Southern Liberty. They went back to visit her home with their grandparents nearly half his lifetime ago. It had been taken the same year his room was first painted. Since that time he’d only been back once, but he could still remember how beautiful it was.
The people were so full of life and the colors were vivid. Stella had taken nearly a thousand pictures trying to somehow capture and take with her the warmth of the people, the vibrant hues of the buildings and the trees, and anything else that would remind her of Hankura.
One day he planned on returning to attend The Southern Liberty University’s West Coast campus. It was one of the best universities in the world for science and scientific research and it was where his parents had met, where they met Mave and eventually Rupert.
Otherwise, his room felt bare. Built-in dressers and a personal disposal unit for garbage gave more floor space and his bed took up nearly half of it. The handle for the PDU was near the door one and a half feet from the floor. The ARC’s system collected all the waste in units such as that for recycling, composting, and conversion into fuel.
Aside from that the only other furnishings were his chair and desk with a projection area where he could have his system read and organize his written notes. He didn’t understand why his mother wouldn’t use hers. Instead she’d have all that paper, everywhere. He sat down at his desk and launched the projection. He scanned the report his father had run that morning and added it to the data before projecting it to the wall.
For hours he sat again with the information, re-running scenarios in his head and recalculating probabilities, hoping to decrease the probability of occurrence or increase the timeframe of it happening. He’d done something similar the night before, but tonight he optimistically hoped to find something different. He was searching for the answer to the burning question his mother had asked and every other person in the room had thought. What could be done?
No matter what scenario he ran, he kept coming to the same conclusion. It wouldn’t matter what they did on their end if the International Association of Corporations, known as UniCorps, didn’t act. They couldn’t act if they didn’t know.
He turned off the projection. There was nothing more he could do now, but he would show Mave what he ran tomorrow.
Chapter Ten
Right
Antarctic Research Center
As Stephen traversed the pastel painted tunnels with sconces placed near the ceiling as well as tracks of lights running along the top, the path to the science center felt ridiculously cumbersome. A never-ending puzzle with twists and turns.
The genius of his father’s honeycomb to honeycomb design meant that it could easily be closed off section by section if heating went out or if there was any other type of emergency. It also meant getting anywhere on the ARC took twice as long as it should.
When he f
inally arrived at the door to the science center, he startled them. They were huddled together talking quietly but it was quickly followed by a sudden hush the moment he entered the doorway. Mave went for the coffee pot as was her nervous habit.
“Good morning, Stephen,” Zura smiled. “Come on in. It looks like you’ve been up late again.”
Stephen looked down at himself and realized he had woken up, grabbed the notebook and his watch, and run out of his room. Navy blue cotton pajama pants and a long-sleeved sleep shirt hung loosely off his slender frame. They weren’t his usual clothes to start the day but it didn’t matter.
Stephen had marched out of his room, anxious to show his parents, Rupert, and Mave what he discovered in his number crunching the night before. He was convinced that once they saw this, they would have to tell someone. There was no way they could keep quiet at that point.
“Yes. I was up late. I think you’ll want to see this. Yesterday, you said you needed to get a closer look at the data. I took a closer look to see if there was something that could be done that would make the outcomes better. I kept changing the assumption and rerunning the models but kept getting the same or very similar results. They were all bad., that is until I started changing some of the other variables. Variables that we’ve continued to hold constant.” Stephen picked up Zura’s tablet and copied his report to it before handing it to her.
“What are you saying Stephen?” Johan asked stepping over to take a closer look.
