Fifty Degrees Below. Kim Stanley Robinson
an engineering team …
Frank almost called Edgardo, as a fellow realm-straddler, to ask him what he knew; because among other factors, Edgardo had come to NSF from DARPA. DARPA was like NSF, in that it staffed itself mostly with visiting scientists, although DARPA stints were usually three to four years rather than one or two. Edgardo, however, had only lasted there a year. He had never said much about why, only once remarking that his attitude had not been appreciated. Certainly his views on this surveillance matter would be extremely interesting –
But of course Frank couldn’t call him. Even his cell phone might be bugged; and Edgardo’s too. Suddenly he recalled that workman in his new office, installing a power strip. Could a power strip include a splitter that would direct all data flowing through it in more than one direction? And a mike and so on?
Probably so. He would have to talk to Edgardo in person, and in a private venue. Running with the lunchtime runners would give him a chance at that; the group often strung out along the paths.
He needed to know more. Already he wished Caroline would call again. He wanted to talk to everyone implicated in this: Yann Pierzinski – meaning Marta too, which would be hard, terrible in fact, but Marta had moved to Atlanta with Yann and they lived together there, so there would be no avoiding her. And then Francesca Taolini, who had arranged for Yann’s hire by a company she consulted for, in the same way Frank had hoped to. Did she suspect that Frank had been after Yann? Did she know how powerful Yann’s algorithm might be?
He googled her. Turned out, among many interesting things, that she was helping to chair a conference at MIT coming soon, on bioinformatics and the environment. Just the kind of event Frank might attend. NSF even had a group going already, he saw, to talk about the new federal institutes.
Meet with her first, then go to Atlanta to meet with Yann – would that make his stock in the virtual market rise, triggering more intense surveillance? An unpleasant thought; he grimaced.
He couldn’t evade most of this surveillance. He had to continue to behave as if it wasn’t happening. Or rather, treat his actions as also being experiments in the sensitivity of the surveillance. Visit Taolini and Pierzinski, sure, and see if that gave his stock a bump. Though he would need detailed information from Caroline to find out anything about that.
He e-mailed the NSF travel office and had them book him flights to Boston and back. A day trip ought to do it.
Some mornings he woke to the sound of rain ticking onto his roof and the leaves. Dawn light, muted and wet; he lay in his sleeping bag watching grays turn silver. His roof extended far beyond the edges of his plywood floor. When he had all the lines and bungee cords right, the clear plastic quivered tautly in the wind, shedding its myriad deltas of water. Looking up at it, Frank lay comfortably, entirely dry except for that ambient damp that came with rain no matter what one did. Same with all camping, really. But mostly dry; and there he was, high in the forest in the rain, in a rain forest canopy, encased in the splashing of a million drips, and the wet whoosh of the wind in the branches, remaining dry and warm watching it all. Yes, he was an arboreal primate, lying on his foam pad half in his sleeping bag, looking through an irregular bead curtain of water falling from the edge of his roof. A silvery green morning.
Often he heard the other arboreal primates, greeting the day. These days they seemed to be sleeping on the steep slope across the creek from him. The first cry of the morning would fill the gorge, low and liquid at first, a strange cross between siren and voice. It never failed to send a shiver down his spine. That was something hardwired. No doubt the hominid brain included a musical capacity that was not the same as its language capacity. These days people tended to use their musical brains only for listening, thus missing the somatic experience of making it. With that gone the full potential of the experience was lost. ‘Oooooop!’ Singing, howling; it all felt so good. ‘Ooooh-oooooooooooo-da.’
Something else to consider writing about. Music as primate precursor to language. He would add it to his list of possible papers, already scores if not hundreds of titles long. He knew he would never get to them, but they ought to be written.
He had extended his roof to cover the cut in the railing and floor through which he dropped onto his rope ladder, and so he was able to descend to the ground without getting very wet. Onto the forest floor, not yet squishy, out to his van, around D.C. on the Beltway, making the first calls of the day over his headset. Stop in at Optimodal, singing under his breath, ‘I’m optimodal, today – optimodal, today!’ Into the weight room, where, it being six AM, Diane was working on one of the leg machines. Familiar hellos, a bit of chat about the rain and her morning calls, often to Europe to make use of the time difference. It was turning out to be a very cool summer in Europe, and rainstorms were being welcomed as signs of salvation; but the environmental offices there were full of foreboding.
Shower, change, walk over to NSF with Diane. Amazing how quickly people developed sets of habits. They could not do without them, Frank had concluded. Even his improvised life was full of them. It might be said that now he had an array of habits that he had to choose from, a kind of menu. Up to his office, check phone messages and e-mail, get coffee, start on the messages that needed action, and the making of a daily Things To Do list out of the standing one on the whiteboard. Bit of breakfast when his stomach reminded him it was being neglected.
One of his Things To Do was to attend another of Diane’s meetings late that morning, this one attended by various division heads, including Anna, and some members of the Science Board.
Diane had been busy organizing her own sense of the climate problem, structuring it in the broadest terms possible. First, however, she had some good news to share; the appropriations committees in Congress had streamlined approval of two billion dollars for NSF to engage with climate issues as soon as possible. ‘They want us to take action, they said, but in a strictly scientific manner.’
Edgardo snorted. ‘They want a silver bullet. Some kind of technical fix that will make all the problems go away without any suffering on Wall Street.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Diane said. ‘They’re funding us, and we’ll be making the determinations as to what might work.’
She clicked to the first of her Power Point pages. ‘Okay. Global environmental problem, having to do with habitat degradation and a hundred parts per million rise in atmospheric carbon, resulting in species loss and food insecurity. You can divide it into land, ocean, and atmosphere. On land, we have loss of topsoil, desertification, and in some places, flooding. In the oceans, we have sea level rise, either slow because of general warming, already happening, or else fast, as a result of the West Antarctic ice sheet detaching. Probability of the Antarctic ice sheet coming off is very hard to calculate. Then also thermohaline circulation, in particular the North Atlantic stall in the great world current. Also fisheries depletion, also coral reef loss. The oceans are more of a source of trouble than we’re used to thinking. In the atmosphere, carbon dioxide build-up of course, very well known, but also methane and other more powerful greenhouse gases.’
She clicked to the next slide. ‘Let’s start with atmosphere, particularly the carbon dioxide aspect. Now up to 400 parts per million, from 280 before the industrial revolution. Clearly, we need to slow down how much CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere, despite the industrialization of China, India, and many other places. Then also, it would be interesting to see if we could remove and sequester from the atmosphere any significant amounts of CO2 that are already up there. Drawdown studies, these are sometimes called.
‘What’s putting carbon into the atmosphere? The bulk of it comes from energy production and cars. We’ve been burning fossil fuels to create electricity and to move us and our stuff around. If we had cleaner technologies to create electricity and to power transport, we would put less carbon in the air. So, we need cleaner cars and cleaner energy production. There’s been a lot of work done on both fronts, with some very exciting possibilities explored, but bottom line, the oil and car industries are very big, and they work together to obstruct research and development of cleaner technologies that might replace them. Partly because of their lobbying here in D.C., research into cleaner technologies is under-funded, even though some of the new methods show real promise.