Engineering Infinity (7 page)

“Oh?” Gennady arched an eyebrow. “We
who grew up in the old Soviet Union know a little about disappointment.”

Ambrose looked mightily
uncomfortable. “I grew up in Washington. Capital of the world! But my dad went
from job to job, we were pretty poor. So every day I could see what you
could
have, you know, the Capital dome, the Mall, all that
power and glory... what
they
could have - but not
me. Never me. So I used to imagine a future where there was a whole new world
where I could be...”

“Important?”

He shrugged. “Something like
that. NASA used to tell us they were just about to go to Mars, any day now, and
I wanted that. I dreamed about homesteading on Mars.” He looked defensive; but
Gennady understood the romance of it. He just nodded.

“Then, when I was twelve, the
Pakistani-Indian war happened and they blew up each other’s satellites. All
that debris from the explosions is going to be up there for centuries! You can’t
get a manned spacecraft through that cloud, it’s like shrapnel. Hell, they
haven’t even cleared low Earth orbit to restart the orbital tourist industry. I’ll
never get to
really
go there! None of us will. We’re
never gettin’ off this sinkhole.”

Gennady scowled at the ceiling. “I
hope you’re wrong.”

“Welcome to the life of the last
man to drive on Mars.” Ambrose dragged the tufted covers back from the bed. “Instead
of space, I get a hotel in Kazakhstan. Now let me sleep. It’s about a billion o’clock
in the morning, my time.”

He was soon snoring, but Gennady’s
alarm over the prospect of a metastable bomb had him fully awake. He put on his
AR glasses and reviewed the terrain around SNOPB, but much of the satellite
footage was old and probably out of date. Ambrose was right: nobody was putting
up satellites these days if they could help it.

Little had probably changed at
the old factory, though, and it was a simple enough place. Planning where to
park and learning where Building 242 was hadn’t reduced his anxiety at all, so
on impulse he switched his view to Mars. The sky changed from pure blue to
butterscotch, but otherwise the landscape looked disturbingly similar. There
were a lot more rocks on Mars, and the dirt was red, but the emptiness, the
slow rolling monotony of the plain and stillness were the same, as if he’d
stepped into a photograph. (Well, he actually had, but he knew there would be
no more motion in this scene were he there.) He commanded the viewpoint to
move, and for a time strolled, alone, in Ambrose’s footsteps - or rather, the
ruts of Google’s rover. Humans had done this in their dreams for thousands of
years, yet Ambrose was right - this place was, in the end, no more real than
those dreams.

Russia’s cosmonauts had still
been romantic idols when he was growing up. In photos they had stood with their
heads high, minds afire with plans to stride over the hills of the moon and
Mars. Gennady pictured them in the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse,
when they still had jobs, but no budget or destination any more. Where had
their dreams taken them?

The Baikonur spaceport was south
of here. In the end, they’d also had to settle for a hard bed in Kazakhstan.

In the morning they drove out to
the old anthrax site in a rented Tata sedan. The fields around Stepnogorsk
looked like they’d been glared at by God, except where bright blue dew-catcher
fencing ran in rank after rank across the stubble. “What’re those?” asked
Ambrose, pointing; this was practically the first thing he’d said since
breakfast.

In the rubble-strewn field that
had once been SNOPB, several small windmills were twirling atop temporary
masts. Below them were some shipping-container sized boxes with big grills in
their sides. The site looked healthier than the surrounding prairie; there were
actual green trees in the distance. Of course, this area had been wetlands and
there’d been a creek running behind SNOPB; maybe it was still here, which was a
hopeful sign.

“Headquarters told me that some
kind of climate research group is using the site,” he told Ambrose as he pulled
up and stopped the car. “But it’s still public land.”

“They built an anthrax factory
less than five minutes outside of town?” Ambrose shook his head, whether in
wonder or disgust, Gennady couldn’t tell. They got out of the car, and Ambrose
looked around in obvious disappointment. “Wow, it’s gone-gone.” He seemed
stunned by the vastness of the landscape. Only a few foundation walls now stuck
up out of the cracked lots where the anthrax factory had once stood, except for
where the big box machines sat whirring and humming. They were near where the
bunkers had been and, with a frown of curiosity, Gennady strolled in that
direction. Ambrose followed, muttering to himself, “...Last update must have
been ten years ago.” He had his glasses on, so he was probably comparing the
current view to what he could see online.

According to Gennady’s notes, the
bunkers had been grass-covered buildings with two-meter thick walls, designed
to withstand a nuclear blast. In the 1960s and 70s they’d contained ranks of
cement vats where the anthrax was grown. Those had been cracked and filled in,
and the heavy doors removed; but it would have been too much work to fill the
bunkers in entirely. He poked his nose into the first in line - Building 241 -
and saw a flat stretch of water leading into darkness. “Excellent. This job
just gets worse. We may be wading.”

“But what are you looking for?”

“I - oh.” As he rounded the mound
of Building 242, a small clutch of hummers and trucks came into view. They’d
been invisible from the road. There was still no sign of anybody, so he headed
for Building 242. As he was walking down the crumbled ramp to the massive
doors, he heard the unmistakable sound of a rifle-bolt being slipped. “Better
not go in there,” somebody said in Russian.

He looked carefully up and to his
left. A young woman had come over the top of the mound. She was holding the
rifle, and she had it aimed directly at Gennady.

“What are you doing here?” she
said. She had a local accent.

“Exploring, is all,” said
Gennady. “We’d heard of the old anthrax factory, and thought we’d take a look
at it. This
is
public land.”

She swore, and Gennady heard
footsteps behind him. Ambrose looked deeply frightened as two large men, also
carrying rifles, emerged from behind a plastic membrane that had been stretched
across the bunker’s doorway. Both men wore bright yellow fireman’s masks, and
had air tanks on their backs.

“When are your masters going to
believe that we’re doing what we say?” said the woman. “Come on.” She gestured
with her rifle for Gennady and Ambrose to walk down the ramp.

“We’re dead, we’re dead,”
whimpered Ambrose, shivering.

“If you really must have your
proof, then put these on.” She nodded to the two men, who stripped off their masks
and tanks and handed them to Gennady and Ambrose. They pushed past the plastic
membrane and into the bunker.

The place was full of light: a
crimson, blood-red radiance that made what was inside all the more bizarre.

“Oh shit,” muttered Ambrose. “It’s
a grow-op.”

The long, low space was filled
from floor to ceiling with plants. Surrounding them on tall stands were
hundreds of red LED lamp banks. In the lurid light, the plants appeared black.
He squinted at the nearest, fully expecting to see a familiar, jagged-leaf
profile. Instead -

“Tomatoes?”

“Two facts for you,” said the
woman, her voice muffled. She’d set down her rifle, and now held up two
fingers. “One: we’re not stepping on anybody else’s toes here. We are
not
competing with you. And two: this bunker is designed
to withstand a twenty kiloton blast. If you think you can muscle your way in
here and take it over, you’re sadly mistaken.”

Gennady finally realized what
they’d assumed. “We’re not the mafia,” he said. “We’re just here to inspect the
utilities.”

She blinked at him, her features
owlish behind the yellow frame of the mask. Ambrose rolled his eyes. “Oh God,
what did you
say
?”

“American?” Puzzled, she lowered
her rifle. In English, she said, “You spoke English.”

“Ah,” said Ambrose, “well -”

“He did,” said Gennady, also in
English. “We’re not with the mafia, we’re arms inspectors. I mean, I am. He’s
just along for the ride.”

“Arms inspectors?” She guffawed,
then looked around herself at the stolid Soviet bunker they were standing in. “What,
you thought -”

“We didn’t think anything. Can I
lower my hands now?” She thought about it, then nodded. Gennady rolled his neck
and then nodded at the ranked plants. “Nice setup. Tomatoes, soy, and those
long tanks contain potatoes? But why in here, when you’ve got a thousand
kilometres of steppe outside to plant this stuff?”

“We can control the atmosphere in
here,” she said. “That’s why the masks: it’s a high CO2 environment in here.
That’s also why I stopped you in the first place; if you’d just strolled right
in, you’d have dropped dead from asphyxia.

“This project’s part of Minus
Three,” she continued. “Have you heard of us?” Both Ambrose and Gennady shook
their heads.

“Well, you will.” There was pride
in her voice. “You see, right now humanity uses the equivalent of three Earth’s
worth of ecological resources. We’re pioneering techniques to reduce that
reliance by the same amount.”

“Same amount? To
zero
Earths?” He didn’t hide the incredulity in his voice.

“Eventually, yes. We steal most
of what we need from the Earth in the form of ecosystem services. What we need
is to figure out how to run a full-fledged industrial civilization as if there
were no ecosystem services available to us at all. To live on Earth,” she
finished triumphantly, “as if we were living on Mars.”

Ambrose jerked in visible
surprise.

“That’s fascinating,” said
Gennady. He hadn’t been too nervous while they were pointing guns at him - he’d
had that happen before, and in such moments his mind became wonderfully sharp -
but now that he might actually be forced to have a conversation with these
people, he found his mouth going quite dry. “You can tell me all about it after
I’ve finished my measurements.”

“You’re kidding,” she said.

“I’m not kidding at all. Your job
may be saving the Earth within the next generation, but mine is saving it this
week. And I take it very seriously. I’ve come here to inspect the original
fittings of this building, but it looks like you destroyed them, no?”

“Not at all,” she said. “Actually,
we used what was here. This bunker’s not like the other ones, you know they had
these big cement tanks in them. I’d swear this one was set up exactly like
this.”

“Show me.”

For the next half hour they
climbed under the hydroponic tables, behind the makeshift junction boxes
mounted near the old power shaft, and atop the sturdier lighting racks. Ambrose
went outside, and came back to report that the shipping containers they’d seen
were sophisticated CO2 scrubbers. The big boxes sucked the gas right out of the
atmosphere, and then pumped it through hoses into the bunker.

At last he and the woman climbed
down, and Gennady shook his head. “The mystery only deepens,” he said.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t help you
more,” she said. “And apologies for pulling a gun on you. I’m Kyzdygoi,” she
added, thrusting out her hand for him to shake.

“Uh, that’s a... pretty name,”
said Ambrose as he, too, shook her hand. “What’s it mean?”

“It means ‘stop giving birth to
girls,’“ said Kyzdygoi with a straight face. “My parents were old school.”

Ambrose opened his mouth and
closed it, his grin faltering.

“All right, well, good luck
shrinking your Earths,” Gennady told her as they strolled to the
plastic-sheet-covered doorway.

As they drove back to
Stepnogorsk, Ambrose leaned against the passenger door and looked at Gennady in
silence. Finally he said, “You do this for a living?”

“Ah, it’s unreliable. A paycheck
here, a paycheck there...”

“No, really. What’s this all
about?”

Gennady eyed him. He probably
owed the kid an explanation after getting guns drawn on him. “Have you ever
heard of metastable explosives?”

“What? No. Wait...” He fumbled
for his glasses.

“Never mind that.” Gennady waved
at the glasses. “Metastables are basically super-powerful chemical explosives.
They’re my new nightmare.”

Ambrose jerked a thumb back at
SNOPB. “I thought you were looking for germs.”

“This isn’t about germs, it’s
about hydrogen bombs.” Ambrose looked blank. “A hydrogen bomb is a fusion
device that’s triggered by high compression and high temperature. Up until now,
the only thing that could generate those kinds of conditions was an atomic bomb
- a
plutonium
bomb, understand? Plutonium is really
hard to refine, and it creates terrible fallout even if you only use a little
of it as your fusion trigger.”

“So?”

“So, metastable explosives are
powerful enough to trigger hydrogen fusion without the plutonium. They
completely sever the connection between nuclear weapons and nuclear industry,
which means that once they exist, the good guys totally lose their ability to
tell who has the bomb and who doesn’t.
Anybody
who
can get metastables and some tritium gas can build a hydrogen bomb, even some
disgruntled loner in his garage.

“And somebody
is
building one.”

Stepnogorsk was fast approaching.
The town was mostly a collection of Soviet-era apartment blocks with broad
prairie visible past them. Gennady swung them around a corner and they drove
through Microdistrict 2 and past the disused Palace of Culture. Up ahead was
their hotel... surrounded by the flashing lights of emergency vehicles.