Mother of Storms (40 page)
Authors: John Barnes
It’s not exactly what she’s supposed to be working on but it’s close, so she gives up her resistance to the problem and lets herself play it through, constructing models that are not of weather but of the future. She finds herself sliding forward to 2050; global data take shape and … .
She falls forward into the simulation. She is in Times Square, and in front of her there’s a gigantic picture of Klieg. The street is very, very clean … and everything seems to be well organized. She realizes that people are walking between painted lines on the sidewalk, steps over to examine a line, and a policeman approaches her. This frightens her enough to make her run—
The policemen all wear the blue beret and there are thousands of them. And every shop she runs past has a large black “K” in the window, indicating that it is authorized to receive space-manufactured materials … and by now, she realizes, that’s everything of any significance, Klieg is making the world’s steel, glass, and aluminum up there, growing the food—
The cops close in on her. She notices that no one bothers to look. They have an oddly bland expression, not unlike that of Klieg on the building.
They are all white.
She wakes up, is hurled back into her hotel room on Guadalcanal, the waterbed bouncing under her, her fingers crawling at the jack in her head. She makes them relax and tug smoothly, and now she is back in her own
brain, nobody in here in her head but herself, shuddering. The dream was surely just a vivid metaphor; a little like trying to see something in the distance and leaning over a high railing too far, she thinks, that’s all that happened. She was trying to visualize what the data were saying and there she was in the middle of the data. Her own imagination and paranoia, and her natural distrust of a businessman like Klieg, overwhelmed her.
brain, nobody in here in her head but herself, shuddering. The dream was surely just a vivid metaphor; a little like trying to see something in the distance and leaning over a high railing too far, she thinks, that’s all that happened. She was trying to visualize what the data were saying and there she was in the middle of the data. Her own imagination and paranoia, and her natural distrust of a businessman like Klieg, overwhelmed her.
But a part of the back of her brain is saying something else entirely. She realizes that she knew on another level what was happening in the simulation even as she lived it, and that among other things a dozen processors around the globe dedicated themselves to scanning all of the available bio and footage on Klieg and Rivera and half a dozen important people in the world, running them forward; that was Times Square as Klieg, with his bland Midwestern sensibility, would remake it, and his sense of order was being enforced. And it is true that the global economy is just at the point where space-based resources might expand very quickly, and if Klieg were to have a monopoly on the gateway … .
Why was everyone white? Did the system pick up on some latent prejudice in Klieg? Did it pick up on some nightmare of hers? When Carla was young, she had an old great-uncle who was bluntly, vocally racist and used to terrify her by describing how he wanted to kill some of the black children Carla played with, his voice filled with terrible relish as he recounted tales of long-ago lynchings he had heard from elder relatives. He had a Midwestern accent, not unlike Klieg’s … was that the reason for the association?
She looks down and realizes she is still holding the data jack. And now that she’s wide awake it should be all right.
Carla plugs back in, stretching out again, trying to make herself relax but determined not to fall asleep again. The whine of mosquitos outside the surrounding netting blends into the whine of the electronics in the net—
And she receives an odd shock. There is a presence out there looking for her, a felt sensation that someone wants to talk to her. She recoils from it instinctively, then turns to face it as she recognizes—
Herself?
She has a strange sense of facing herself in a mirror, and then of moving closer, closer until she touches her image and she is abruptly merged with it. At once she knows what happened. She did not stop the billions of parallel programs running in millions of processors. And to them the physical Carla is merely one big processor, one large node in the net … a processor dropped out, but they kept running.
And what they were all doing collectively was simulating Carla. No, scratch that thought, they
were
Carla, in some sense, an extended version of her. So while she was unplugged, they kept working—tens of thousands
of times faster than she could. There is a complete report now, which they give to her in very high-speed summary so that it comes to her like the best of her flashes of intuition: the evidence that Klieg’s impulse toward the world will be to homogenize it (though the “all white” version was probably just an error in the first simulation run, because Klieg appears to be indifferent to skin color as long as other people act just like Klieg’s idea of proper behavior), and the evidence that if he is allowed to rescue the world from Clem and Clem’s daughters, he will have that kind of power.
were
Carla, in some sense, an extended version of her. So while she was unplugged, they kept working—tens of thousands
of times faster than she could. There is a complete report now, which they give to her in very high-speed summary so that it comes to her like the best of her flashes of intuition: the evidence that Klieg’s impulse toward the world will be to homogenize it (though the “all white” version was probably just an error in the first simulation run, because Klieg appears to be indifferent to skin color as long as other people act just like Klieg’s idea of proper behavior), and the evidence that if he is allowed to rescue the world from Clem and Clem’s daughters, he will have that kind of power.
The system has even modeled possible degeneration of Klieg’s moral structure and ethics under the pressure of such power, and concluded that he probably wouldn’t change much—his view of the world is too stable to be altered by even so large a change of circumstances. This is not altogether a positive thing, since it clearly implies that his economic dictatorship is apt to be benign, even friendly—he would probably shut down a large number of ethnic conflicts in an extremely even-handed way, for example—and thus will not generate much rebellion until it is far too late for the world to shake it off.
As she re-merges with her report, she discovers something else. Louie had been suggesting she plug into some optimizer software with the note that he had found it made big differences in his work on the moon—for example, the weather satellites he’s now launching are an enormous leap in technology, and Louie is neither a design engineer nor a meteorologist.
His suggestion must have been somewhere in her mind when she unplugged, for the software has been optimized in many ways, not all of which she understands. One that is clear, however, is that it is now no longer sending the bill to a U.S. government account. It had to stop doing so because the bill was going to be far too large, but rather than shutting down, it has found its way around the accounting programs. She is running on stolen time from thousands upon thousands of systems worldwide, and her tracks are being covered even as she moves through the net.
She is now independent of the people who pay her, and free to decide what’s best … but then, hasn’t it always been that way?
Back to work. The question is, who else or what else could do the job Klieg is proposing to do? Her simulations seem to show that if Rivera and Hardshaw turn down the offer from Klieg (probably on grounds that it is “tainted” by the close interconnections with the Siberian government), then Klieg and the Siberians will go public with the offer—and the public will force the UN to take the deal.
Global public opinion is a new thing, something that didn’t exist even ten years ago—but then ten years ago there couldn’t have been a global riot, either.
She lets herself drift, only to discover that she doesn’t feel drowsy
anymore when she does this. Part of her, without effort, finds a confidential report in a NASA file and reads about what happens when cross-systemcapable optimizer viruses invade a mind. She discovers that Louie, too, has lost the need to sleep for mental rest, though he needs much more bed rest to keep his immune system functioning, given the large blood sugar demands made by his active brain and the high-radiation environment. Well, she’s already in bed, and it will be hours—which she can experience as millennia if she wishes—before daylight, when she can go get a huge breakfast. Meanwhile she has more time than she’s ever had before to just think—and she realizes this will be with her for the rest of her life. She glories in the thought of how much time she has.
anymore when she does this. Part of her, without effort, finds a confidential report in a NASA file and reads about what happens when cross-systemcapable optimizer viruses invade a mind. She discovers that Louie, too, has lost the need to sleep for mental rest, though he needs much more bed rest to keep his immune system functioning, given the large blood sugar demands made by his active brain and the high-radiation environment. Well, she’s already in bed, and it will be hours—which she can experience as millennia if she wishes—before daylight, when she can go get a huge breakfast. Meanwhile she has more time than she’s ever had before to just think—and she realizes this will be with her for the rest of her life. She glories in the thought of how much time she has.
And so does Louie, she realizes. She won’t even have to be lonely.
She turns her eyes—satellites of several nations, including theoretically closed military ones, seaborne instruments, instruments on aircraft—onto Clem, and watches as the outflow jet suddenly kicks around, creating the pressure release she had feared. The great bubble of air, twenty kilometers across and a thousand kilometers from Clem’s eye, blisters upward and tears open; at sea level, the whirling winds, at hurricane force even this far from the eye, split around the upwelling air, merge, begin to flow faster—
In less than ten minutes, a hurricane eye has been formed, and begins to gather a storm around it. It’s the reverse of what’s always been seen in nature before, but there is no question—Clem has given birth to an eye, and the eye is accreting a hurricane. Moreover, the two hurricanes are putting out enough air together to create a high pressure spot between them, and thrust them apart—which means this daughter will head for the Americas.
Carla reaches for her own voice back in Honiara, but before she moves herself it occurs to her that it’s just as easy to compose a message in text, so she sends that to Di, and to Harris Diem, who is supposed to be the White House contact for weather matters. As she composes each word of the message she runs thousands of models to improve her view of what’s about to happen; virtually all the possible news is bad.
Diogenes Callare and Harris Diem get word at the same time, shortly after Berlina Jameson’s datarodents have pirated Carla’s report.
By late afternoon, when the two men return from Henry Pauliss’s funeral, shirts damp with the sweat of D.C. in July, a new edition of
Sniffings
has been out for hours.
Sniffings
has been out for hours.
Berlina is proud and getting prouder. The distributors are sending her demogs that show she has three separate core audiences, which is a good place to be, because it means she can occasionally offend one of them.
Her most loyal fans are old people who remember Bartnick, Arnott,
Rather … heck, some of them probably remember Cronkite—and who find it comforting to get the news the way Berlina gives it. Fair enough—classical forms draw classicists.
Rather … heck, some of them probably remember Cronkite—and who find it comforting to get the news the way Berlina gives it. Fair enough—classical forms draw classicists.
But there also are the people in the United Left who like it because it seems lower-tech to them (though just what’s low tech about putting together television documentaries from the rear seat of your car, while the car drives itself, Berlina would like to know) and because it seems like it’s the inside track on the kind of thing they always suspect (rightly) is going on. And that’s okay too—the Left of any kind, whether it thinks it’s United or not, has a long affinity with the news media in any country in which the media are independent of government control.
Then there’s that other group, which she can’t quite figure out … there are a substantial number of young subscribers who say they like it because it’s “flat,” which is sort of the generic word for “good,” the way “cool” is in boomtalk.
That’s okay, except that by “flat” they also mean it’s emotionally uninvolving, and Berlina would love to know how they can feel that. She intercepted Army video coming out of the first whistler that got over Honolulu after visibility cleared up, and popped in a closeup of the huge pile of bodies on Kalei Road, students from a shelter at the university that burst open only during the washback of the fourth giant wave, sucking the students out of the shelter and crushing and drowning them between the walls of a wrecked shopping mall two miles away. She covered President Hardshaw’s sidestep of the traps in Secretary-General Rivera’s aid package, got UN and U.S. officials both on camera denying things that were patently true, even caught a little footage of one UN official from Ecuador pounding the table and telling his subordinates that “this is when we settle with the
yanqui
bastards once and for all.” She doesn’t exactly understand how they can feel it’s “flat,” but since they do, she’s glad it makes them watch.
yanqui
bastards once and for all.” She doesn’t exactly understand how they can feel it’s “flat,” but since they do, she’s glad it makes them watch.
Then again, she thinks for the thousandth time over the thousandth cup of coffee, perhaps everything is flat compared to XV. Maybe the use of the word “flat” among the more bohemian fringe of the young bodes something good about the future, that people are going to turn their backs on those damned hallucinations, or at least insist on a context that lets you evaluate it rather than get sucked into the story.
She talked, the other day, on one of the ubiquitous bulletin board systems, with a professor of communications who was explaining to her that she was “Brechtian” while the XV was “Craigean.” That wasn’t totally fruitless—she looked up who Bertolt Brecht and Gordon Craig were, and it might come in handy to impress people at a foundation dinner or something—but when you came right down to it, all it meant was that Berlina
would rather persuade people than overwhelm them. Which she knew in the first place.
would rather persuade people than overwhelm them. Which she knew in the first place.
This latest capture isn’t high drama by itself, but in context it will be interesting enough for her audience. There’s a new hurricane forming and headed for Central America (or, given the time it has to get there, and the way the things can veer around, possibly for Colombia’s Pacific Coast or even for Baja). It looks like anything as big as Clem can spawn other ones … which swiftly grow to Clem’s own size. The potential for scare stuff in this story is wonderful, but she’s going to deliver it the way that Berlina does, the way that people turn to
Sniffings
to get—“Hat, rad, and cool,” as she likes to say to herself.
Sniffings
to get—“Hat, rad, and cool,” as she likes to say to herself.
It feels so good to know that there is really an audience out there, and that they really want to look at what she wants to do, that she sits in the back of her speeding car hugging herself, just feeling happy about everything, instead of working. In a few minutes she’ll have to get down to the difficult business of snipping together information, and of mastering yet more meteorology—who ever thought that the boring old weatherman’s slot would be the one she wishes she’d had? In the last three days she’s learned more about outflow jets than she used to know about the Ways and Means Committee.
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