The core of our stabilization plant had been built into the hulk of an offshore oil rig. We could see the rig from here, a blocky monochrome shape that loomed maybe a couple of kilometers from the shore. On a scrap of low, badly eroded cliff, a marquee had been set up, a brightly lit dome of some transparent fabric. The marquee had a good view of the offshore rig. Here we would witness the ceremonial start-up of the facility. And then, assuming the whole thing didn’t blow itself sky high, we would be flown out by chopper in small groups for a hands-on inspection. It was all good showmanship.
We pushed into the marquee through a kind of airlock, past the scrutiny of massive EI security guards. We dumped our coats; I was grateful to get into the warmth. A hovering bot offered me alcohol or hot drinks. I accepted a nip of Scotch, and a big mug of steaming latte. I wandered away from the rest, taking in the scene.
Maybe fifty people milled in that marquee, most of them EI employees or colleagues of Shelley’s. The accountants and other administrative types wore crumpled suits, but the engineers tended to be more casual, in jackets and jeans. The place was brightly lit and surveillance-rich, with football-size drones that floated in the air, and a finer mist of micro-drones, just a glittering dust that you only noticed if you focused closely.
“An impressive setup. And all for my benefit.” The liquid female voice was very familiar.
I turned to see Edith Barnette standing at my side, with Ruud Makaay at her elbow, beaming proudly.
Barnette wore a mid-length black dress; her legs were thin and pale, her feet clad in heavy-looking shoes. She was surprisingly tall, and her face was big-boned, her jaws heavy. Her skin, deeply wrinkled, was tanned pale gold, and her hair, sprayed into a dense helmet, was an uncompromising white. But she stood straight, her eyes were bright and alert, and when she spoke her voice was as mellow as it had always been.
At the side of today’s sole VIP, Makaay was in his element. His blond hair shone sleek in the bright lights. “Not entirely for your benefit, Madame Vice President.” He outlined his plans, and his intention that today should serve as a rehearsal before we encounter more unforgiving audiences.
Barnette said, “Then I will be sure to give you plenty of feedback.”
“I’ll welcome it. Forgive me, I’m due on stage.” He ducked out, bowing.
“So, Mr. Poole,” Barnette said to me. “All this was your idea, the stabilization project?”
“I guess so. It was me who asked the right questions. But it was in the air, the community I work with. Sooner or later somebody would have seen the need to—”
“Oh, don’t wiffle, man, I’ve no time for that.” She fixed me with a pointed finger, slightly crooked. “Your brainchild. Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“It seems we will all owe you a debt of gratitude.”
I felt increasingly uncomfortable. Like Barnette the world tended to have a simple view of such projects; the media always looked for the chief engineer, the unsung double dome behind it all. But it wasn’t a role I was going to be comfortable playing, even if the project went well.
“I guess so,” I said. “If it works.”
“If?”
“We can’t be sure. We think we’ve modeled all the consequences.”
“You consulted Gea, didn’t you?”
“Gea has supported us from the start… You know her?”
“Never met it. Her? But I was responsible for major tranches of her development funding.”
I nodded, impressed. “But even with Gea on board, all we have are theoretical models. We can’t be sure what will happen.”
Barnette surprised me with her understanding. “I’m told some scientists believe the biosphere may be algorithmically incompressible. Is that the right phrase? — it literally can’t be modeled, for its intrinsic complexity is simply too great. The biosphere is its own unfolding story.”
I was impressed. “I’ve seen that, too.”
“Do you believe it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think it makes a difference. The biosphere is bigger than we can manage confidently right now, so it doesn’t matter how big it is, ultimately.”
She smiled. “Spoken like an engineer. I always liked engineers, you know, though I was a philosophy major. You are pragmatists! Though I suspect many of you couldn’t even spell the word. Despite the unfathomable complexity of the world, we must pragmatically tinker with it because of this hydrate destabilization business, mustn’t we?”
“I believe so.”
“Well, I hope you’re right. About everything.”
She was interrupted by a soft chiming. Ruud Makaay had mounted a low stage and in his customary fashion was gently tapping a glass with a pen.
“Madam Vice President, everyone, thank you for joining us here on this exciting day. Of course most of you are paid to be here, and mostly by me, but thanks for showing even so…” Expert stuff, laughter easily evoked. “We’re here to witness the first full-scale end-to-end integrated trial of the hydrate stabilization system prototype,” he said, to a few whoops from his engineers. “But I think we should begin with some context.”
Makaay snapped his fingers, and a screen appeared in the air behind him. To my surprise it showed an image of what looked like an oasis in the desert, a splash of green against pale yellow, with a clear blue pool at its center. “The polar hydrate deposits, a massive store of greenhouse gases, are unstable. But they are not the Earth’s only instability…”
The images he showed us were of the Sahara Desert. As everybody in the marquee knew, one twist to the general global pattern of climate change was that the Sahara was greening. It had happened before, Makaay said. Five thousand years before an extended drought had caused an environment of woodland and marshes full of crocodiles to flip over to a parched plain with only a few scattered oases, with crocodile bones left under the drifting sands for paleobiologists to puzzle over. The Sahara appeared to be on a permanent knife edge, flipping between dry desert and wet woodland. It was thought such astounding transformations could take just twenty years — maybe less. This fundamental instability was why it had been possible for EI to hurry the process in selected parts of the desert, with its immense artificial lakes back-filled with Mediterranean water.
This was one example, Makaay said, of a common feature of Earth’s climatic evolution. If you forced it, for instance by injecting greenhouse gases in the air, it tended not to respond smoothly, like rubber deforming under pressure. Instead it tended to snap, like the Sahara, switching abruptly from one stable state to another. The world was full of systems, which if pushed too far, might undergo “abrupt and irreversible change,” as Makaay put it: he listed the possible failure of the Gulf Stream, and the creation of a permanent El Niсo storm that might dry out rainforests and create deserts across the tropics.
“We know we have to stabilize the hydrate deposits,” Makaay said. “But this will not be the last time we will have to intervene on a massive, indeed global scale, if we are to ensure that the Earth’s systems do not transition into a condition that makes the planet uninhabitable for us. We must learn to manage the Earth, our home, even while we cherish it…”
Edith Barnette leaned down to whisper to me, “Nice presentation. I enjoyed the focus on the green Sahara — nothing wrong with an unexpectedly positive image. But now he sounds like an EI corporate report. I suggest in the future he cuts to the chase.”
Now Makaay showed us blow-up images of our new baby, a glistening, complacent-looking mole. The moles had been trialled individually, but today was the first integrated trial of the system as a whole. A dozen moles would be dropped down defunct oil boreholes to begin the construction of an interconnected network, spreading out through hydrate strata, chattering to each other through sonar and other comms channels, and closing the complex loops around which the liquid nitrogen would flow.