The Offset

by Calder Szewczak

  Her first impression is one of rich darkness.

  This far north there’s only a little light in the day: the sun only just makes it up past the horizon before sinking down again. For all the time that it hovers below the horizon, the light takes on an astonishing blue that is neither the indigo of night nor the cerulean of day, but somewhere between the two: a deep cobalt tinged with aqua. If she thought the skies at Inbhir Nis were remarkably clear, it’s nothing compared to here. With no light pollution and little in the way of industry, there’s nothing to choke up the atmosphere and today there are no clouds either.

  Above her in the dark loom the shadows of broad gantries and cranes. Nearby are the warehouses where the sample cores are held, racked high in their crates. Wide asphalt tracks branch and loop across the ground, providing easy access for the AGVs on their heavy-duty wheels.

  Although she’s seen this all before in drone footage, Jac’s itching to go and look round, to linger in this place that is at once so familiar and so alien. The site has always been managed remotely. Even its initial construction was done robotically. No human has walked where she now walks. No human has seen with their own eyes what she now sees. The knowledge of that – of being the first – makes her reel. But she must focus, not let herself get distracted. There is a task at hand.

  Fumbling with her bag, she digs around for the torch that the Facility Manager found for her. It’s a headlamp. With a little fiddling – tricky as ever in the bulky gloves – she adjusts the straps so that she can fit the thing over her hood. Once it is securely in place, she jabs at the button on its underside and trains the beam across the landscape.

  A tree-lined slope rises steeply up from the dock. In the light of her lamp, she recognises the distinctive shape of the Project Salix trees, the long, hanging stems of silver-pale leaves swaying gently in the wind. Willows are not native to Greenland, but Project Salix trees have been engineered specifically for its radioactive soil. Once, Greenland would have been far too cold, but the shift in climate has proved perfect for the willows. Greenland has become ever-temperate. The expansion of the Gulf Stream out towards the North Pole keeps the island constantly protected by warm waters and means that no snow or ice forms even in the darkest winters, and hasn’t done so for hundreds of years.

  The trees are managed by a variety of robots, each one with a specific function. Even in this small part of the landscape, there are several hard at work, their anti-collision LEDs and work lights glowing gold amongst the dark trees. Jac can’t help but draw a tight smile as she watches them go about their work. A few drones hover among the treetops, monitoring the trees for anthracnose, scab and black canker. She spots a surgeon-rover – a pair of metallic arms that terminate in massive, vice-like claws – moving with mechanical precision from tree to tree, gripping a branch with one claw and reaching out for the other with the next. It stops every so often, pruning a defective shoot here, applying a targeted fungicide there. In this way it can cover a vast amount of terrain without ever touching the ground. A cutter briefly roves into view and then vanishes into the depths of the forest, its strimmer whirring furiously to clear the understory.

  In the distance, a sower trundles over the hillside, off to plant more seedlings. She doesn’t spot any of the springfooted borers, though, that cut the sample cores from the trees. Doubtless these are all consigned to a separate quadrant somewhere out of sight, maybe even on the other side of the island, days away. Jac doesn’t know; she hasn’t had cause to check the timetables in months.

  Rising high above the tops of the trees are the pylons of the cable car that runs all the way from the loading bay to the top of the mountain. The car is mostly used to carry crates of harvested cores down to the dock, though it occasionally comes in handy when shipments of spare parts and heavy machinery from Inbhir Nis need to be transported up from the loading bay, or to transport the materials required to maintain the global monitoring station at the top.

  Moving stiffly in her hazmat suit, Jac heads for the base terminal of the cable car and climbs into one of the waiting cabriolets. It is, essentially, an open-topped carriage attached to a steel cable. Less at home here than she was in the command centre of the NAX, she looks around uncertainly for the means of operation. She spots something that looks like a control panel and approaches it nervously, sure that she’s going to find a dead-man’s switch similar to the one the Archivist used to run the cargo lift down the mine shaft, but it turns out just to be a maintenance hatch. Taking her time, she examines the cabriolet thoroughly. Except for the buttons that control the doors, there doesn’t seem to be anything she can push or twist or turn. Nothing to set the thing in motion.

  What if only the robot workers can set the cabriolet going? she wonders. After all, the site was never intended for human operatives.

  Cursing herself for not having thought to check the schematics before she left, Jac steps back out again to take a better look at the terminal. There’s a sheltered area where several cabriolets are nested together. She can see the housing where the bull wheel turns the cable and, set into the ground, a large electric motor. Suddenly, she understands: the cabriolets aren’t motorised individually, all the components move at once.

  Now she knows what she’s looking for, it doesn’t take her long to spot the tall lever concealed behind the nest of cabriolets. She yanks on it hard. To her relief, as soon as she does, the entire cable car creaks into action, the motor puttering into life, the bull wheel turning in its housing to run the circulating cables. At least now she need not fall at the first hurdle. One by one, the cabriolets move forward, swinging into the sky as the cable pulls them up.

  Several of the cabriolets pass her by before she works up the confidence to climb in. Wearing her bulky and precious hazmat suit, boarding a moving cart by the light of a headlamp is no mean feat, even if it is going very slowly. But she manages it all the same, gaining the security of the cabriolet just as it lifts from the ground. Gripping the side tight in her gloved hands, she looks out as the cable car bears her up the mountain, quickly picking up speed as the terminal falls away so that the wind whips across her suit.

  Suddenly, the cabriolet crests a peak and the rest of the rolling mountains come into view, each one bristling with orderly rows of Project Salix trees. The sight of them crushes the breath from Jac’s lungs. The view is a world apart from the drone footage. She’s never dared dream that she would get to see in person the physical manifestation of her life’s work and here it is; as far as the eye can see, her trees stand proud and tall. She wishes that Alix and Miri were there with her to see it too, that she had some means of capturing it and bringing it back for them. The trees are tall and graceful, their drooping branches thick with bristling silver leaves. As they stretch out beneath her, it is almost impossible to believe they are dying.

  When the top terminal comes into view, a black shadow on a rocky outcrop, Jac readies herself to disembark. The cabriolet slows as it pulls into the terminal. She opens the doors and steps out onto the platform, only this time she misjudges it, planting her front foot at an awkward angle that throws her off balance. Half-in, half-out of the cabriolet, she fights to stay standing while it continues its slow progress through the terminal, dragging her back foot along with it. At the last moment, she manages to snatch her foot forward. Already listing at a precarious angle in her unwieldy suit, this motion is enough to send her sprawling to the ground. She lands heavily on her front and the impact sends her headlamp flying through the air. It clatters down on the platform a few feet away, its beam angled up at the bull wheel.

  While Jac recovers herself, the cabriolet gracefully completes its circuit of the terminal and then begins the descent, quickly disappearing into the dark.

  The dosimeter beeps for a second time.

  With a groan, Jac gets to her feet and stumbles over to pick up the head torch. By the light of its beam, she carefully checks her suit. To her relief, there doesn’t seem to be any sign of abrasio
n or damage, and the breathing system is uncompromised. Snapping the headlamp back into place above her visor, she looks around. The sky is darker now, the stars no longer visible behind a tranche of thick cloud. The terminal stands just above the treeline and a flat, even path has been drilled out of the rock to allow for easy transport of crates and machinery to and from the cable car.

  The meteorological station – a tall, upright mast held in place by a number of tensioned guy ropes – stands but a few feet away, drawing from the same powerlines that feed the cable car. It resembles nothing so much as an oversized weathervane, with a number of modular components hanging from the mast. These are attached to a supercomputer and allow for the measurement of air temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed and so on. One of the instruments nestled amongst the rest has been specifically dedicated to measure the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; a figure that Jac checks regularly from her office in St Pancras and has, for some time now, been sitting at 500 ppm, hailed by all as a respectable improvement. But now the Project Salix trees are beginning to fail, she knows the figure must be wrong and that the records from the meteorological station must have been tampered with just like those relating to the core sample measurements.

  Jac has been half-expecting to see some evident signs of interference on the mast but, as far as she can tell, everything is as it should be. This doesn’t offer any particular reassurance – she’s still struggling to work out at what point the data gets intercepted and altered – but that’s something to think about later. For now, she just needs proof that the carbon reading is wrong. To that end, she once more swings the rucksack down from her shoulder and unpacks it, setting out the test kit, empty capsule and trowel in a neat line on the ground. Once she’s measured the carbon, she’ll take a soil sample to bring back to Inbhir Nis as evidence.

  The test kit consists of a sampling syringe, a length of rubber tubing and a colorimetric detection vial. Picking up the syringe, she selects a patch of air at random. It doesn’t matter what sample she takes, everywhere here will give the same result. The result that’s supposed to be transmitted to the Borlaug servers. She pulls the plunger back along the plastic casing. Now she has the sample. Then she pushes the rubber tubing onto the nozzle of the syringe and attaches the other end to the detection vial, a thin shaft of glass filled with a chemical reagent. When she slowly depresses the plunger, the air is passed through the tubing and into the glass vial where it reacts with the chemicals. From the change in colouring and the carefully calibrated scale within, she can determine the level of carbon dioxide in the sample.

  She holds the glass vial up to her visor, squinting at the minute scale in the light of her headlamp. Then she frowns.

  Her reading is 480 ppm.

  That can’t be right, she thinks. She’s been expecting to find the carbon dioxide level to be significantly higher than that transmitted by the meteorological station. What she’s found is the opposite: the carbon dioxide level is not only dropping, but dropping by a much greater amount than anyone had cause to believe.

  Jac isn’t sure she does believe it. Perhaps the colorimetric detection vial is faulty. Thankfully, she had the foresight to bring a backup. Taking up the trowel, she kneels and makes three incisive cuts into the ground, then she lifts up a plug of earth to deposit in the capsule. As she does, she thinks over the carbon reading. It doesn’t make sense. She’s seen for herself that the trees are failing. She has measured their very cores herself and observed with her own eyes that they’re smaller than they should be. If their growth is stunted, they simply can’t be sequestering as much carbon dioxide as they should. The carbon level has to be higher.

  Unless… Unless she’s wrong about the trees.

  Jac takes the increment borer and microcalipers from the rucksack and heads down the slope to the nearest tree. Assembling the increment borer is easy enough, even hampered as she is by the constraints of her hazmat suit. When she is done, the device looks like nothing so much as a large capital “T”, a rigid blue handle serving as the cross stroke, a black auger as the stem.

  Satisfied that it is correctly assembled, she holds the borer at roughly chest height and places the tip of the auger against the bark of the tree, guiding it with her hand for the first couple of centimetres until the drill has enough purchase. Then she grips the handle with both hands and begins to turn it in a slow, clockwise motion. Once she reaches what she judges to be the centre of the tree, she slides the silver extractor tray into the auger and then gives the handle a quarter of a turn anti-clockwise. When she slides the extractor tray back out, it holds a cylindrical core of wood, perfectly intact, and identical to those that she handled in Inbhir Nis. Leaving the increment borer stuck into the trunk, she holds the core carefully level in its extractor tray and takes up the microcalipers, trying hard to remember what size the core was projected to be by this point of the project. After a moment, she has it.

  Holding her head still to keep the light steady, she carefully pincers the core with the microcalipers and takes the measurement. Then she lets out a frustrated roar. The core is 0.2 millimetres too small. Again. She was right, the trees are failing. Her carbon reading must be wrong.

  Jac feels her knees go from under her and she keels forward onto her hands as the true enormity of the situation hits her. She is no closer to understanding the problem than she was several hours ago back at Inbhir Nis. And she has risked so much since then, travelling hundreds of miles, exposing herself to fatal levels of radiation, and all for nothing. She should have stayed put. She should have got that train and made it home to hold her wife in her arms one last time. Now it’s too late. She wasted that time for nothing.

  She stays in that awkward position, completely frozen. A single tear peels down the side of her face, smearing off onto the visor of her facepiece and leaving a cloudy stain.

  Then something lands on the back of her hand, white against the silver glove.

  At first, she thinks it’s just dust or maybe something in her eyes. But the speck doesn’t move. Instead it slowly melts away, only to be immediately replaced by another, and then another and another. It takes her a while to realise what she’s seeing. Something that no living soul has ever seen. Something impossible.

  Snow.

  For the third and final time, her dosimeter emits a shrill beep that rings through the Arctic sky and in her ears long after the sound has died away.

  34

  Miri is in the drawing room of the Warren. It’s another sweltering summer and she tugs at the front of the scratchy black dress that Alix picked out for her, wondering how long it will be before she’s allowed to escape to her room and change. The only child present, she skirts warily around the groups of sombre-clad adults and goes to linger beside the long table that groans beneath platters of glazed soy skins, tempeh parcels and crumbling spirulina cakes.

  For the most part, the adults ignore her too, though every so often one will catch her eye, come over and mutter something about how much they admired her grandmother and how Miri must miss her terribly. The appropriate response to this, Miri has discovered, is to say thank you and look downcast. This certainly seems to meet with more approval than what she did first, which was to shrug her shoulders as though she didn’t really mind one way or another.

  The truth is, Miri barely knew her grandmother. Even though she lived only a few miles away, she rarely ever came to the house. And up until now, it hadn’t occurred to Miri to question why.

  There is a sudden commotion as several of the guests beat a hasty retreat from where Jac is holding court in the centre of the room, taking long drafts from her gin glass and growing increasingly combative.

  Curious, Miri picks up a bio-cassava farl from the table and gravitates towards her.

  “…she didn’t speak to me for ten years after that!” Jac is saying as Miri approaches. Of those gathered, some nod in sympathy and understanding, others twist away in embarrassment, surreptitiously nudgi
ng their partners to signal that it’s time to leave.

  “My parents were the same,” says a woman Miri doesn’t know. “After my own Offset–”

  “My mother wasn’t like other parents,” says Jac, cutting her off. “She was completely wrapped up in herself. Didn’t give a damn about anyone but herself.”

  “You can hardly accuse her of selfishness, Jac,” says one man reproachfully. “Her charitable work–”

  “Was a smokescreen at best! A way of making herself feel important and less guilty. She didn’t care about any of those charities. She was only ever killing time.”

  This elicits a few moans in the crowd. One couple peels away, making a beeline to the door with an apologetic glance in Alix’s direction.

  The old man, animated now, continues to challenge Jac. “Did her intentions really matter in the grand scheme of things? Can any of us, hand on heart, say we think of the plight of others every single minute of the day?”

  “I can,” insists Jac. “I do. And my work is serious, not some fucking hobby for the wealthy and bored. I’m actually trying to make the world a better place. If you can’t see the difference in that, you’re a fool!”

  Affronted, the man turns on Jac. “You children are all the same. You never do forgive your parents, even when you become parents yourselves.”

  Jac gives a bitter laugh. “And people like you always think you’re better than people like me,” she says. “But remember, when you die – which I doubt is that far off – there will be no one around to remember you. No one will ever even say your name.”

  It is then that Alix comes rushing over. “Jac, please,” she hisses, sweeping Miri away from the circle. Looking over her shoulder, Miri sees Jac’s unsteady gaze follow her and Alix from the room. Her expression is one of surprise, as though she wasn’t expecting to see Miri there at all.