AT WORK AND at home, Adrianne wielded tools that she didn’t understand. The web crawlers and other bots gathered data and then filtered it for her eyes. But even the most competent expert wouldn’t have noticed the unique bots added to her account. That small event happened early on a Saturday morning. Waking at ten after five, as usual, she discovered e-mails and classified reports from Mainland China. Asking for origin reports, the new software told reasonable lies about failures to encrypt and a nameless hacker who must have left her cleverness sit exposed for too long.
This week’s blog was supposed to focus on a renewed US space program. Not anymore.
Adrianne read and reread the translations, slept five hours, and finished her research on Sunday morning. The blog was written in two hours, which was quick for her. Instead of railguns, she described the secret fissures inside the Three Gorges Dam and how the Chinese government was doing nothing of significance, nervously hoping that their wildest worries would prove without merit.
At the moment of publication, the empress had 709 scattered followers. Sunday evening was unremarkable, and the next two days were pleasant enough. Wednesday seemed to offer more of the same. A courtyard was adjacent to the cafeteria. Adrianne sat in the shadows, eating a peanut butter sandwich and small apple and then two Girl Scout cookies bought from a colleague’s daughter. Thin Mints. Arguably the finest cookie in the history of humankind.
“How bad?” a bypasser asked.
“They still don’t know,” his companion said.
“How many people live downstream?”
“Millions.”
The men were past, gone. The final cookie was half eaten. That very calm woman took a moment to examine her tooth marks in the bright black chocolate. Then she finished the cookie and the last of her low fat milk, and she disposed of the trash and used the restroom, returning to her station two minutes before one o’clock.
Every monitor in the office showed the Chinese flood. The giant dam hadn’t just split open. It had failed catastrophically, dissolving into rubble and a wall of filthy black water that was slashing through the nightbound countryside, and it wouldn’t stop flowing until wreckage was washing up on American shores.
That portion of the future was easy to predict.
Other parts were less certain.
Most humans would have been traumatized, and many would have mentioned their brilliance or dumb luck. But no, Adrianne had a project to shepherd along. Her department was trying to calculate the likely changes in life spans in the Western world. Insurance companies never stopped making these assessments. Until now, she had been enjoying a productive week, discovering speculative works in places that normally didn’t share ideas, including several interesting reports about a small start-up in France working with anti-aging drugs.
Adrianne was the only person in the office who had found the anti-aging references. Which was bothersome. Her staff was badly distracted, but she sent one of her boys chasing the French story, expecting and even hoping that he would follow the crumbs to the same destination.
But he didn’t, no.
“I’m not finding anything, ma’am. Where am I supposed to look?”
Adrianne drove home as usual. The evening news was filled with videos of cities being gutted, churning waters filled with animal corpses and human corpses. She stayed awake past midnight, just after a light-water reactor and various storage facilities were inundated. The disaster had reached a new level of appalling. By five o’clock the next morning, her time, martial law had been imposed across China, and there were rumors of a major shake-up in Beijing.
The Chinese civil war remained weeks in the future.
Arriving late to work, Adrianne found one of her boys standing beside her desk. He smiled nervously. The young man looked happy yet uncertain, rocking from foot to foot. His voice cracked when he said, “Hello,” and then he laughed at his obvious terror.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Her voice broke. Just a little, in places only she could hear.
The man tried laughing again. But he couldn’t make himself. “I don’t read it a lot,” he confessed.
“Read what?” she asked.
“Your blog.” He sighed. “But I did see something... I don’t know... it’s been a couple years. And you were right.”
“Was I?”
“China. It was ripe for environmental disaster.”
At that moment, Adrianne would have been hard-pressed to write any coherent opinions about Chinese futures. The flood was enormous, but good things might come from this. Sometimes chaos supplied the fuel to make meaningful changes, destroying corruption, ensuring stability for hundreds of millions of survivors.
“You were right,” he repeated.
Finally, she saw what was obvious. “You didn’t read my last article. Did you?”
“No, ma’am, I’m sorry. Like I said, I don’t get to it much.”
Adrianne felt sick.
“Why? Should I become a follower?” He was nearly a boy, years younger than her son. “I’ll read it right now. How’s that?”
“No,” she said.
Loudly, almost shouting.
He blinked. “Okay. You’re right. Work first.”
Adrianne’s hope was to cross the day, to finish these hours and escape back home and then make some accommodations to this very unlikely coincidence. But the peace only lasted until ten in the morning. People from other departments began to stop outside the office. Familiar, nameless faces came to look at the slender woman with the neat gray hair and out-offashion glasses. With caution and nervous wonder, they stared, and then she would glance up and they would retreat. Then one bold lawyer asked how she could be so right about this goddamn mess. And suddenly her own people were demanding explanations. Adrianne had no choice but some species of honesty, and then nobody was working. Everyone inside her office and throughout the complex began to read and reread a few thousand words predicting the century’s largest disaster.
Adrianne took her lunch home and called in sick.
By evening, with the help of two cocktails, she checked her blog. The comments went on and on, many in Chinese. And she had just under fourteen thousand followers, the number rising every time she refreshed.
SOMEONE HAD FED her the information.
That was the first and still obvious explanation. She kept imagining the Chinese dissident, crafty and out of reach, and with that bit of false-knowledge in hand, Adrianne wrote her next blog – a careful piece using bits of new research.
With words and tidy graphs, she reminded her readers that hydrocarbons were common, both in the world and across the universe. But being common didn’t matter. Most of the world’s oil was too expensive to lift out of the ground, and what could be lifted was often too expensive to refine, and the energy gained at the day’s end was approaching the grim fulcrum where the modern world couldn’t afford to pay its bills.
The topic was familiar. She had investigated peak oil many times. But she had more followers now, a lot of new heads to absorb her thinking, and that’s why she wrote the piece, expecting that a few of her readers would appreciate and maybe even welcome her calm logic.
Fifty-eight years of life gives a person experience with insults and curses.
But what surprised Adrianne was the intimacy of the threats – violent words coupled with images from people who didn’t simply doubt her numbers and good sense, but who wanted to come her house just so they could cut off her head, to claim it as a trophy they would nail to their truck hoods or use in ways far worse than that.
She slept badly for a week. And while awake, every stranger deserved small anxieties.
Yet nothing evil ever came to her door, and everything that was good proved to be excellent. Adrianne’s staff rallied around her. Unfit men in their thirties and forties acted as unofficial bodyguards, and without fanfare, the youngest member of her staff – a girl in her mid-twenties – broke company rules by bringing both a Taser and pepper spray into the office. That next Sunday, Adrianne published a brief, dense blog about magnetoinertial fusion engines – the best means for opening up the solar system. And inside the piece, she included schematics plucked from what looked like a NASA website.