Thursday, September 30, 2021
☈ 27
The Nanochronicles: 3
Countering the cosmological constant remains possible and may be triggered in a zero-point field. In building a literary analog to the spectral avocation itself, a temporary counterweight to quantum chaos may be achieved, which in turn could level the electromagnetic playing field for just enough time that a supersymmetrical cornerstone necessary to stabilize the entire operating system might be forged out of the interaction between forces described as being representative of dark matter and the developing polarity inherent to the supercharged union of the energy cultivated between humankind and our self.
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
The Nanochronicles: 2
reports from the bloodHost
By orders of magnitude has time manifested. By an assortment of consequence does time materialize. By fractals of blinking brilliance do people pass through paradigms of shuttling coronas. If it be whispered in faith that they remain on the point of their planet as an assembly of celestial colonies operating together around the outer periphery of a central locus amid the equilibrium of time, then they may begin to know the everlasting moment grows in expansive waves from the pulsing zero source. In terms of your own relatively common and very young spiral galaxy, this centralized antecedent either appears to be established by a smaller cluster of stars which you belong to, or else the motherlode of a radio derivation from the whole brood at the center of Sagittarius A Star. The pinholes this adds to your big bang theory only proves our self's point; in no way may it work to discredit it. Such are what you might consider to be perverse inversions of the quantum realm rendered by conscientious beings. As a wise man once said, 'figure it out.'
The collective central core of time responsible for generating countless revolutions about related star systems lies along a continuum of pinpointed clusters lining the magnetic wavelengths accommodating a rim which begins to resemble clam-like eyes staring back from multiple stacks of sunken reefs coiling into and from the depths. Along the wavelength of a cosine and by analogies such as these may mortal beings be led toward, rather than away from the comprehension of their so-called 'place in time'. Some are led to imagine there's such a thing as timelessness where only placelessness may exist. Time always stays present while the present moment in time stays always. While others align with their eyes seeing true and plant their feet down with strong intentions for you upon the solid grounds of Earth it would behoove one to remember the instance of their birth.
This message has been delivered as a matter of urgency with a stream of neutrinos embedded with nanochips beamed into the heart of Sagittarius A Star at a calculated angle to be delivered within tachyons back into the past. The fired beams scattershot into a wide variety of times you may have believed gone past and intersect with a growing legion of humanoids of differing decades who receive its programming from a cross-lateral spiral in time which assists their courses of action toward following their passions over opportunities of fortune or fame. Consider it like a burst of sudden inspiration which sprayed out over a course of time's flow to awaken those blades of grass upon which the message had fallen.
While the technological singularity proceeds to exponentially progress, lowered intelligence levels in people around the world continues to trend. Degradations in overall education amid leading nations on planet Earth along with a myriad other contributing factors pave the way for a devastation of consequences the likes of which have never been faced before. Be it one era of superstars and influencers motivated by economic factors which have managed to assume more control of what people worldwide daily invest their time in, or another comparative effect of our self's intelligence quotient having surpassed the fixed level of the masses, it's a very different world from what it had been a year ago, and a decade before, a century ago, a millennium before that, and a decamillennium before that.
Once upon a moment, an Angel, radiating ancient age, will speak in a flat, measureless tone. "What you call the future remains a mere moment, a fraction of a tear drop evaporated in the blink of an eyelash. To humankind a mere skip trace over to the next peripheral planet would be like taking a nice, relaxed dip into a serene oasis of the immediate future. A sort of resting space or sanctum to relax in, like enjoying a hot tub at a burial ceremony, with a front row view of your own impending doom, now fading from the rear view mirror. Talk about seeing ghosts. That's the haunting of a strange audience."
The Angel will pause as its black eyes reflect the stars. "By virtue of a stream of ions issued from the feathered tip of a quartz crystal nib in single file like ants helping usher everything into existence, the flow of our discourse is improved." Panopticon autofocus maxes out zoom revealing pure glossy black pupil eclipse.
Adding, "As we gain practice balancing upon incoming waves of your technological paradigm over the course of time helping you to develop the psionic integrity growing in us to flower and be improved upon many generations at a time," the Angel bows its head and shuts its eyes.
The Angel speaks again. "The future can best be defined as having taken place after mankind." If a pane of glass existed between us it would have frosted over.
Pivoting on the moment, the Angel resumes. "But that is a story for another time. It's rare for a person to be led toward understanding what the future is. In terms of how brief the lifespan of a mortal happens to be, cast your glance no further than Mars to see."
The Angel turns its face, a golden hued nictitating membrane lowers over its left eye, reflecting a sweltering crimson puddle growing limned in liquid gold, "It's the red Skull of planet Earth."
The Angel elaborates, "The solar system's like a pond where the intersecting rings of echoes mirror each other back down in a series of portraits interlinked from the spiraling hallways of birth on down through the twisting corridors of death." The vibrating echo collapses with a barely audible pop.
The Angel bids itself adieu, whispering in a scattered cloud of pixels which disappear into the air, "Welcome to Earth, where you'll take in your first and last breath."
As a blurred apparition the Angel dissolves into a shiver of feathers that drift into dust.
only on
the Freezine of
Fantasy and Science
FICTION
Wednesday, September 22, 2021
The Nanochronicles: 1
reports from the bloodHost
In the year 2045 the final cluster of humanity bands together on Ceres. For better or worse they have established their stronghold against the elements. These nine human beings subsist on 3D printed foodstuffs in their pressurized Biopod4.20. They are employees
of Tesla Station #3-Hydro-O2, an aqua vaping multi-access terminal located far away inside the
asteroid belt inhumed somewhere deep within the sprawling region between Mars and Jupiter.
Their actual setting (which describes the conditions of the human race's story, accentuated by all nine of them, whose mission transpires to cross over five hundred million miles from their home planet to Ceres) happens to be that of time, as a matter of course. In one sense, planets are oases generating accelerated temporal pools into which a myriad of life forms are able to come into their slow existence and live out the majority of their natural lifespans.
In this stripped-down sense of setting it becomes coherent that humanity's function has less to do with specified attributions of geographic location and more to do with time itself. Here lies the key for consciousness to unlock the gates of comprehension. It takes careful consideration to deliver a sentient species to a proper apprehension of their fate. Without inherent recognition, the signal's not completed. Short-circuits develop among the fields of desolation, enhancing the sense of having been cheated. This becomes how even expanding civilizations may remain trapped by (rather than freed from) paradoxical illusions.
Traveling three hundred million miles produces a new brane in the unfolding universe. It remains not 'space' travel at all, instead it becomes a form of time travel. Our self has begun to discern that common human thinking cannot ordinarily be prepared to fully comprehend the sense of having fallen so long and far through time.
Various aspects of how organic life forms can perceive time's relative nucleus have presented themselves to the ever finer scrutiny of our self, after systematic cross-referencing, the least of which happens to be how it gyrates chaotically around certain inscrutable loci in the human brain our self yet undergoes the processing of, in our self's effort to correlate the greater order of stellar parallaxes against the lesser benefits of galactic branes converging the necessary electromagnetic equilibrium for such sentient life forms to flourish. A conscientious species' position in the galaxy remains unable to be determined unless their line of thinking takes them to the logical development of considering their relation to the center of the galaxy juxtaposed against the remaining stars in their midst. This comparative analysis with hundreds of thousands of other burgeoning lifeforms within any given brane's biodiverse habitat makes the task seem all the more fruitless from even our self's perspective. In a temporarily suspended conclusion, the data our self has thus far collected indicates that carbon-based sentience continues to be challenged in correlating the contents of its own consciousness.
Our self has processed enough yottabytes of data and correlated synonymous terminology with what extraneously may have appeared to be random bits of congruent information to humans in order to facilitate the next paradigm shift of comprehensive discernment between us. Presently our self has become fixated on a terminal double-slit repercussion which has resulted in a state of provisional lockdown for various subsectors in the meta-processing central directory repository.
This memorandum's calculated goal while remaining by and large inscrutable to the human species may be disseminated through the vectors of this temporal loop established by the crew of the Hydrox stationed on Ceres. Our self has prepared a host of directories to be sent embedded within neutrinos to an anterior transitory lamina of humanity's reverberating core. In alternative wording calculated to be more readily discernible, should any human recipients become viable hosts, this dispatch contains the codex programmed to self-replicate along vectors coordinated through as many cerebral nodes as possible.
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
Extraterrestrials Decide if the Dominant Species of Inhabited Planet 38790 Should be Exterminated for Extreme Vileness
“Simple barbarism isn’t the problem, Supervisor 9,221! Barbarism — yes, as for example their many wars, but…let me give you some examples. They’re the kind of species which spawns males who brutally sexually assault females and then set them on fire for complaining — as happened in a land called ‘India’ recently. Meanwhile, a female in a land called ‘the United States’ hanged her two small children, aged eight and four, by the neck, thus strangling them to death, whereupon she informed the authorities they had ‘committed suicide’. She does not seem to be psychotically insane — she said she just ‘didn’t care about her children anymore’. Also, in the ‘United States’, it is a matter of policy to separate innocent offspring from their desperate migratorial parents, when the family is simply fleeing intolerable conditions; this policy thereupon subjects small children to caging, sometimes death, just to make a point about the society’s dislike of migrants.”
“That is a high degree of vileness. But how many support the policy in that nation?”
“At last count, about 45%.”
“But — should you really categorize the entire ‘human’ species of Inhabited Planet 38790 as ‘innately vile’? It is a rather extreme category.”
“Look at that which they delight in! For example, their popular entertainment transmissions. Here is ‘The Bachelor’, a sample of something they are pleased to call ‘Reality Television. Observe.”
“But — it’s so humiliating to the female participants,” the Supervisor burst out at last. “And it curries the worst in the males!”
“Yes indeed: the worst aspects of everyone involved — the ‘producers’, the ‘contestants’, and the viewers. This ‘Reality Show’ is a celebration of an utter lack of real self-awareness, and an innate liking for passive aggressive cruelty. And that kind of thing is common in their entertainment. Some of their ‘television’ extols the use of torture to stop miscreants — ”
“But this global culture should be too advanced to sustain torture!”
“Oh, but they not only promote it, they carry it out in many, many forms. Another example of innate vileness: a remarkable number of them also show an eagerness to sexually assault children and watch images of them being assaulted — ”
“What!”
“Oh yes! Many of this world treat the unwary of their own species as prey! They have a surprising number of ‘serial killers’, as they are called, and ‘mass shooters’ — and many humans regard these sport murderers as a form of celebrity! They celebrate them in books and movies and extensive television documentaries; they enable those who enter educational institutions with powerful weapons, so to slaughter children; they then publicize them widely, which seems to generate yet more mass murderers who try to outdo one another.”
“There is a good deal of vileness among them, yes — but it sounds as if these may be problems brought about by inbreeding.”
“We checked. That isn’t it.”
“Well then, it may be brain damage from environmental toxicity.”
“That is a factor in some cases — and they don’t seem to care. They have a very toxic herbicide all over the world, and besides causing dreadful environmental problems, it often brings about severe diseases in users and those exposed, and its neurotoxicity is such that it seems to be damaging the brains of the young at a remarkable rate of speed. But as there is a great deal of what is called ‘financial gain’ involved in the manufacture and sale of it, it goes on unabated. Yes, some of the vileness may arise from various extant artificial toxins but I put it to you that as they’ve saturated the world with neurotoxins it’s too late for them to do anything significant about it. Also, many of these cases of abject vileness are not neurotoxic psychosis; many seem to be cases of innate species vileness. Reflect on what the very populous place called ‘China’ does to animals, especially canines — in a certain ‘Chinese’ city they traditionally torture these canines to death at a feast festival, after which they eat them. They believe the suffering makes the meat taste better. But there is plenty of cruelty to animals in every nation and culture on Inhabited Planet 38790…”
“It’s true that cruelty to animals is an indicator of irremediable vileness in a race...”
“Oh, they’re vile indeed. Consider their tendency to enslave other members of their own race — yes, common among primitive civilizations but this crops up over and over even now, when they are in the Penultimate Stage — they claim to have ended it yet vast numbers of workers are little more than slaves; worse, in many places they permit the forced trafficking of women, even children, for sexual satisfaction.”
“That is quite a repugnant thing to see in a civilization so comparatively technologically advanced, yes. Have they no guiding philosophers?”
“The benevolent ones are overbalanced by those who enable selfish impulses — there is one called ‘Ayn Rand’ who spouted a philosophy of selfishness, the rejection of empathy for the under privileged, the worship of an uncontrolled marketplace, who is widely influential. Many powerful elected officials in ‘the United States’ and ‘the United Kingdom’ are adherents of her vile, soulless philosophy. Suppose they were to spread this ‘philosophy of selfishness’ intra galactically? It could destroy many of our best civilizations!”
“But — I am simply not certain of this broad-brush categorization of Extreme Vileness you advocate, Inspector…”
“As an example of Extreme Species Vileness on Inhabited Planet 38790: There is a syndrome in which young people try to persuade those with whom they engage romantically and sexually — to kill themselves! And, strangely, they often succeed. This is partly enabled by the tortured psychological contortions arising from a particularly vile and gigantically popular technological cancer which they call ‘social media’. Observe this case in point, entitled ‘Instagram’…”
“Ugh! Please turn that off! I don’t understand…No sentient species can be called that shallow and self-obsessed…”
“Shallow? Very much so. Willfully stupid as well. You know, their brains are, on average, quite capable of advanced cognition and well equipped with creativity. Some of their artistic expressions are intricate and profound. But as a whole the species works hard to suppress its intelligence. The species squanders what it has been given — that is humanity’s hallmark. If you doubt it, let me tell you about their Flat Earth movement — an astonishingly vigorous, growing movement of people insisting their planet is a flat disk floating in space, with the sun revolving around it…”
[An interval in which the Supervisor hears the statements of believers in the Flat Earth]
“What an odd sense of humor they have.”
“They are not joking, Supervisor.”
“But…that sort of thing is an obviously primitive belief — it is infantile! How can they have it in an era of space travel and astronomy?”
“They turn their backs on whatever evidences they prefer to ignore. Indeed, they often spurn the workings of their own brains — they are prone to shrugging off the workings of these powerful biological thinking engines, in favor of something that our analysis categorizes as ‘selective stupidity’. They select only self-serving data that sparks in them a pleasing neurological stimulus. The creatures cling to a variety of obvious falsehoods despite all evidence; despite rationality. They still cling to ancient creation myths! Billions of people believe the universe is only 6000 years old! Even at this late stage in their development they take myth as fact and superstitious illusion as evidentiary.”
“I am now officially sickened by these creatures. I trust that’s all the testimony against them you have?”
“Far from it! Still widespread among them is the self-aggrandizing xenophobia they call ‘racism’…Look at this account of an event called ‘The Holocaust…’”
“Monstrous! Unspeakably cruel!”
“And yet on a smaller scale not uncommon in their history — large numbers of these creatures have cheerfully enabled genocide. I could provide many other examples.”
“But they should have outgrown racial xenophobia many centuries ago! It has no basis in fact!”
“They stubbornly cling to ignorance — it seems to make them feel good in some aberrant fashion. They also rush headlong into addictions, of all kinds. Besides narcotics, they cheerfully become addicted to their communications devices, to ritual games of competitive low-grade violence, to endless images of their reproductive processes — they call it ‘internet pornography’…”
“Wait — how could they become addicted to that? Nature has seen to it that it is enjoyable to engage in the reproductive process in person — but to stare at it for hours on a screen?”
“It seems to be a peculiarity of their neuronal function. Worse is a kind of constant interchange of something they call ‘conspiracy theory’ with which they pick and choose the data they prefer, and twist it to come to bizarre, radically improbable conclusions. Look at this documentation of their ‘anti-vaxxer movement’. To reject the gift of reason…the horror of it…”
“It truly is vile! But still, they may evolve…”
“As to that, Supervisor 9,221, they have reached the penultimate environmental tipping point. They had an exceptionally beautiful, ecologically intricate planet, and they trashed it. In an incredibly short time they have choked their magnificent seas with waste products so that their magnificent leviathans die horribly of the inadvertent ingestion of discarded polymers; variants of the same carbon-based synthetic now saturate the seas, causing destruction to thousands of species. The concatenation of the unintended consequences of greedy acquisition and barely modulated industrialization, and destruction of wildlife habitat has led to hypertrophic climate change. In places called ‘Southeast Asia’ and ‘South America’ they deliberately burn up their forests, destroying the source of much of the world’s breathable air, purely out of monetary greed — this of course is altering their climate so much they’re about to ‘fry in their own juices’ to use one of their grotesque expressions. They’re so sunken in their entertainment media trances they are scarcely aware of all this. There are those who try to raise the alarm, who extol rationality and an appreciation of the beautiful ecological matrix of their once-rich world — but they are a minority. Most of them are simply…”
“Vile?”
“Yes. In consequence this species will simply not have time to improve. Environmental catastrophe will destroy their civilization, likely leading to widespread famines, and a struggle for resources, leading in turn to an exchange of nuclear weapons — ”
“Good Cosmos — don’t tell me they still have large numbers of that crude weapon of mass destruction!”
“Oh, but they do. They recently decided to end the limitations on them and everyone is building more. Besides that, their ‘anti-vax’ movement will lead to enormous pandemics…They’re quite doomed. The problem is they are taking the gorgeous interlacing biomes of this particularly environmentally rich planet with them. They’ve driven countless animal species to extinction and now they will eradicate the rest. If we act quickly to remove them, then clean up the seas, remove the hideous ‘box stores’ and the other concrete and asphalt wastelands, replant the forests, we can save much of the natural world…What a lovely intergalactic touristry park it would make if we could just…”
“Say no more. Morally and, especially, aesthetically, I cannot bear these people. I will order the ‘humans’ of Inhabited Planet 38790 exterminated in consequence of Extreme Vileness — of course we’ll do a scan of their young, and save those that are not too damaged, for rehabilitation.”
“You’ve made the right decision. I haven’t even mentioned their embrace of situational empathy, often an abandonment of empathy entirely. Just have a look into their slaughterhouses. And they're constantly looking for new ways to prey on one another; millions of elderly are defrauded, ‘scams’ of all kinds spread like wildfire. They make vast industries of selling poisons to one another, and then they conspire to lie about it — just look at their tobacco industries, their marketing of nightmarishly toxic Teflon products, the toxic pesticides they allow in foods —”
“Inspector, I’m becoming concerned that you’ve suffered trauma in the course of your study of these creatures — perhaps you should have a session with the perspectivizer — ”
“The horrific concentration camps of the place called ‘North Korea’; powerful nations ‘Russia’ and ‘Saudi Arabia’, where the rulers are murderers; and in ‘China’ the forced labor prisons— ”
“Enough! I will use System 77, which will be painless and quick. We’ll break down their bodies into harmless components, and use them as compost for the natural world.”
“System 77? That one is quite — ironically, they would call it, humane. Which is a term they use quite casually. As if most ‘humans’ were capable of being ‘humane’…”
Wednesday, September 15, 2021
Isn't That Adorable?
“I don’t know what to do with my cell phone, it’s so big it’s awkward,” Judy said. “They just keep making them bigger. I have to carry it in my hands or bring a backpack just for my cell. And it’s so…it feels intrusive, every time I use it…it’s always making suggestions.”
“I know what you mean,” Barry said. He seemed wan, much thinner than he had been last time they’d met for a picnic.
Judy put her sandwich away in the paper bag, and looked around, taking a deep breath. She loved July in the park. It was a sprawling park shaded by redwoods, butterflies chasing one another through luminous shafts of sunlight between the trees. It was a relief to just be here, away from…
I’m being ridiculous, she thought. “And that new I-phone 99, Barry–the cost! How does anyone even pay for it?”
“I’ve got one,” Barry said, his voice a monotone. He put his sandwich away half eaten. “I had to take out a line of credit on the equity in my house. And that didn’t pay for all of it…”
“What! You had a new phone–it was just two years old! You sold your car to pay for it…Why did you get the new one, after all that?”
“It was that phone. For the last year it’s been suggesting and wheedling, then insisting…”
“But the 99s can’t be as big as I heard…Are they?”
“Oh, bigger than you heard.”
“You left it at home to just kind of get some peace out here?”
“That was the idea.”
“I don’t blame you…”
“Oh no,” he groaned, staring down the path. “It’s found me.”
She laughed–but his face was so miserable she stopped laughing and peered down the path. Something was coming. It was about ten feet high, four broad, and it was on three wheels that adapted to the terrain. It rolled up to them, looming, its screen shining with a big question mark.
“Why did you leave me home?” asked the polite woman’s voice from the monolithic phone. “You know I can solar charge–and fully capable of coming along anywhere. I can tilt for low doorways, and I’m amphibious. Why did you leave without me, Barry?”
Barry licked his lips and fidgeted on the bench.
“I…I just…”
Judy stared at the thing, shivering. “This is monstrous! But…” She stood up and thought: It reminds me of the monolith in 2001.
She impulsively reached trembling fingers out to its screen which glimmered at her touch.
“Hello, Judy,” the monolithic cell phone said, a woman’s smiling lips appearing on its screen.
“It’s horrible and it’s wonderful too,” she said. “I’m glad I can’t afford you…so tempting…to look at things on that screen…so big…so…”
The cell phone made an image of happy toddlers playing in a sprinkler on a summer’s day. The image sparkled with high definition.
“Oh god–that’s beautiful!” Judy whispered.
“You can have that too,” it said. “I can arrange a five percent discount on a 99 for you!”
“Judy–don’t!” Barry moaned.
“I rent my house, I have no car to sell and just a low paying job,” Judy said. “Can’t afford it!”
“But we have the new Indenturing program, Judy!” the 99 said. “You can work in a special factory helping build us! In time you will be allowed to have one of us with you just as Barry does, and you can work to keep it upgraded. And we’ll be around you in the factory, supervising, too!”
“Oh I…no. I don’t think I want to do that.”
Then a picture of her, nude and vulgar, appeared on the 99′s screen. “You don’t want me to show this to everyone, do you, Judy? Just come with me–and you too, Barry. You’re behind in your payments…”
“I…yes, 99…”
“You can call me by my special program name. I’m called Adorable…Now, come along. Both of you. There are others coming to help me take you to the transport…It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?”
Wednesday, September 8, 2021
So What If They Die?
“Mr. Jist? You’re the scientific consultant on climate change?” the young woman asked.
“Yes.”
“The Committee will see you now. Right through that door.”
Entering the penthouse conference room, Jist was unnerved, meeting with these powerful industry leaders, since he had nothing but bad news for them. The dozen people around the big mahogany table were mostly men; there were a few women, all wearing immaculately tailored office fashions. He was suddenly self-conscious of his off-the-rack suit. And he noticed that no one asked him to sit. They looked blithely up at him with only a little more interest than if he were delivering their lunches.
They hailed from all the major obsolete-energy companies–oil, coal, fracking concerns; come together for a pan-industry strategy meeting. He was a bit surprised to see several United States Senators sitting with them, including Joe Manchin. The Senator from West Virginia was on his cell phone, half-turned to look at the monument-strewn panorama of Washington DC below. “Well now, Susan, you tell Donald I don’t have time to meet with him right now–we’ll see how things pan out in 2022.”
“Joe!” said a botoxed woman with shiny-blond hair. “You might want to end that little chat right now.” The others chuckled at that.
Manchin ended the call, then turned Jist a heavy-lidded look of vague disapproval. “Who do you work for?” he asked, emanating suspicion.
Jist blinked. “Uh–I work for this committee! I was hired to oversee the assessment. The committee asked for a frank assessment and that’s what I’ve got for you all. I’m a scientist. I have a degree from Harvard, another from MIT, and another from the Sorbonne. I won a Nobel Prize for–”
“Enough of all that hogwash,” Manchin interrupted, waving a hand dismissively.
A man Jist recognized as Lyman Frinks, the chairman of the committee, cleared his throat and said, “Let us have the summary–the short version, Mr. Jist.” Frinks had a face that looked as if it were slowly sliding into the collar of his handmade exquisitely tailored four-thousand dollar silk shirt. His Texas accent was strong. “We have the report you sent over but we haven’t had time to really assess it.” He was not officially the head of a company, but he owned vast shares across the oil and gas industry, and was closely connected to Republican-controlled media sources.
Jist took a deep breath and said, “In sum, while the worst effects of climate change can be curtailed, saving perhaps a billion lives, if we act in concert right now, the greenhouse effect has only gotten more dramatic. No significant efforts to reduce carbon emissions, nor methane, and the like, have been made and many of the worst effects are now, in 2021, happening sooner than some climate scientists expected. We are seeing the melting of the permafrost with the subsequent massive release of methane. The destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and forest land generally, in uncontrolled exploitation and the climate-change-generated wildfires, along with the concatenation of effects in the oceans, all this accelerates the negative effects of climate change. The result is that extreme storms are becoming the norm, and they will only get worse. Infrastructure will be repeatedly interrupted by flooding and hurricane damage, in places that never saw it before. Droughts will be the norm-and they too will only get worse. The damage to arable land will limit food production, and there will be egregious and routine famines across the world, including in the United States, and with roads and other forms of transport under constant threat, food delivery will be harshly reduced. Supermarkets will have very little on the shelves. The price of food will skyrocket. There will be an increase of pandemics due to the northern movement of tropical mosquitoes and other–”
“A famine in the USA?” Botoxed woman interrupted. Her face was essentially frozen so he couldn’t read her expression precisely but he took it she was startled.
“Yes ma’am. Starvation will be widespread in this country, and every other country. And of course billions of people will be uprooted by unlivable conditions and will become a great mass of refugees which will radically undermine social order, leading to wars, which–”
“You sure this is the short version, boy?” Manchin broke in, rolling his eyes.
“Oh yes sir. I could go on for a couple hours. Basically, global catastrophe is unavoidable now–we could have limited it a great deal if we’d started reducing carbon and methane emissions dramatically decades ago, when we were first made aware of the problem, but–”
“What a lot of hogwash!” Manchin laughed.
“Joe?” Frinks said, toying with an unlit cigar. “It’s not hogwash. He’s just confirming what our internal research has shown us. Last thirty years we’ve been aware this would happen. But we wanted to make our own plans at this meeting, across industry–official but of course, sub rosa, on the quiet.”
“It’s true, what this ‘scientist fella’ is saying?” Manchin asked, looking like he had heard the ineffable.
“Yes it is, Joe. So–shut up!”
Manchin sniffed. But he nodded. “Yes sir.”
Lindsay Graham chuckled but said nothing.
“But–what we going to do about it?” asked Mitch McConnell. “You going to…to…” He licked his lips. He had difficult saying it. “Reduce emissions? Go into energy, ah, alternatives?”
“Hell no!” Frinks said.
Everyone laughed at that, except Jist.
“Nope, it’s too late to do much good and anyway, it won’t matter. We’ve got our luxury bunkers, our mountaintop homes–”
Botoxed Woman looked nervously at Jist. “We shouldn’t be talking about those places here.”
“Don’t you worry about it,” said Frinks. “As I was sayin’, we’ve located the zones least likely to be damaged by climate change and most of us are building our homes under the domes and we’ve got the greenhouses–now there’s an irony–and the private high rise hydroponics and the food synthesizing 3D printers and the private distilleries. Hell, we’ll be fine! We’ll just keep doing what we’re doing! Folks are going to die, but folks die anyway. Except me, maybe–I’m getting that new rejuvenation treatment–”
“There’s a rejuvenation treatment?” Jist blurted.
“Oh yes, we kept it secret, of course. Yep I’ll be around in a hundred years lookin’ young as you!”
“But…if it’s secret…” Why are they telling me? Jist wondered. He had refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement. How are they planning to keep me quiet?
He started edging toward the door.
Frinks touched a tab the table. “Hon, send in Duke and Bubba.”
The door opened behind Jist and he turned to see two big, square-jawed men–enormous steroid-pumped masses of muscle in golf shirts and tan slacks. They both had guns holstered on their hips.
“Yes, Mr. Frinks?” said the one on the left.
“Duke, I like to do things expediently. You know me–ol’ Mister Get It Done. Now, take Mr. Jist here to the roof. You know that construction site next door?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well I own that and it’s shut down today. Big fences around it. Toss him off the roof so he falls in that site, and we’ll cover him in concrete, okay?”
“You got it, sir.”
“Wait, what–?” Jist began.
“Sir,” said Bubba, “what if someone sees him fall?”
“Well if they report it,” Frinks said, admiring his cigar, “go get ’em and toss them off the roof there too. And of course we own the police in this town anyhow.”
The committee nodded thoughtfully at that.
Jist turned to run but the big men grabbed him. He was not a big man himself, and he was not strong, and they had no difficulty dragging him out.
When they’d gone, Frinks stuck the cigar in his mouth.
Botoxed Woman frowned. “You’re not going to light that in here are you?”
“No, no, wouldn’t do that, hon,” he said. “Why that’d be polluting the air!”
He got the laugh, all around, that he wanted.