The O.D. (36 page)

After years of ever-widening drought, Australia had virtually run out of all fresh water, its entire population huddled around only two or three locations in the Southeast. Before the rains finally came to give temporary respite, a number of Australians out of desperation had decided to abandon ship and sail uninvited to water-rich New Zealand. Four hundred of these antipodean water migrants had died in their yachts and cruisers, either from thirst or by drowning. The situation down under was dire – the deaths, a stark warning of worse to come.

Los Angeles was having severe water shortages of her own, caused mainly by the antics of pressure group CWC – Colorado Water for Coloradans. CWC militants had blown up pipelines and disabled numerous pumping stations crucial for the extraction and delivery of
their
H20 to California. The National Guard had been mobilized in both states to ensure the residents of Beverly Hills did not go thirsty.

As for Phoenix, only a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of citizens evacuated to cleaner mountain air had felt confident enough to return to their city. Five other conurbations on three continents had only just escaped similar loss of all breathable air during the four months leading up to Phoenix, a tragedy that had been waiting to happen and cared not where it received its cue.

The celebrated cure for AIDS had merely taken the brakes off Africa’s unsustainable population growth. More babies were being born than were starving to death. Irreversible shortages of water had led to states of war between no less than eight African nations. The bloodiest of these conflicts – between South Africa and Angola over possession of the Namibian aquafir, Ohangwena II – made the Colorado-California water war seem like a bun fight.

By contrast, in India over a million people a month were crossing the divide from poverty into full consumerhood. The extra demand on resources and energy on the sub-continent was breaking the world’s back, as was the ever-widening rift between rich and poor.

Global warming was running away from all measures to curb it. The Maldives, Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu had all been lost to rising sea levels, as had lowlying coastal regions in Bangladesh, India, China and Vietnam. Compounding the problem was the insufficient land at higher elevations to support displaced coastal populations. The crisis facing the Philippines, Indonesia and seven other nations was the incursion of saltwater into their fresh water aquifers. Even Eydos had lost 5% of its landmass, all from its eastern coastline, and Nillin harbour was two feet deeper than it had been after the earthquake.

Subtropical dry zones had been pushed up into the American southwest and southern Europe, and down into southern Australia, making those regions increasingly susceptible to prolonged and intense droughts. La Niña and el Niño didn’t know if they were coming or going. And arctic warming had caused the polar Jetstream to meander north-south, causing more temperature extremes in Europe, Canada and the northern States of the US. The vagaries of global warming had brought with it global
cooling
. The Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift had shifted to a more southerly course, leaving Eydos, Ireland, The United Kingdom and much of northern Europe under temperatures more in keeping with their high latitudes. It was already being likened to the Little Ice Age of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

In the ever-widening tornado belt of the American interior, ‘Thornadoes’, as the media dubbed them, were wreaking havoc. The worst of the half dozen thornadoes that had hammered the United States – Storm #817 – had laid a winding, nine hundred mile long by two mile wide highway of devastation from Lubbock, Texas, to Madison, Wisconsin, well north of normal tornado patterns. A wind speed of 329 miles an hour, the highest ever recorded on Earth, had been logged 50 miles east of Kansas City. If Storm #817 hadn’t veered westwards just short of Chicago, the death toll of sixty thousand could conceivably have been six
hundred
thousand. The insurance industry was in meltdown, unable to keep up with claims or meet payouts.

Further south, the phenomenon known as ‘Marine Plastic Massing’ had closed the Panama Canal from the west. A floating plastic island, one hundred and fifty miles across and an eighth of a mile deep in places, had lodged itself within the bowl of the Gulf of Panama, effectively ‘plugging’ the canal. Consisting of an amalgam of flotsam and jetsam from the Japanese tsunami of 2010 and the California-Oregon tsunami of 2016, the plastic island was proving impossible to move or break up. There was even talk of digging a
new
Panama Canal through it – a proposal opposed by religious groups who felt that the hundreds of thousands of Japanese and American corpses encased within it should be left in peace.

Also on the agenda for the conference was the ongoing rot of corporate Earth. After Eastern Europe’s wholesale turn towards the capitalist West in the late eighties and early nineties, the people there had found they were
still
facing in the wrong direction. Unemployment, economic chaos and, more importantly, disillusion, was the rule, not the exception. People in Minsk, Tbilisi and Bucharest had begun to starve to death. The ‘dirty bomb’ detonated outside the Kremlin, killing fifteen thousand on the spot and fatally irradiating a further forty thousand, was the worst in a growing spate of rogue attacks using weapons of mass destruction. The glut of small arms and munitions in circulation worldwide had rendered law enforcement impotent in many countries. Tombstone-style gunfights, using real bullets, were taking place hourly in the streets of Mexico City, Naples and Marseille.

Those that the Eastern Bloc had turned to with such high hopes – The United States and Europe in particular – were having a problem of their own. The medical community called it Societal Disintegration Anxiety Syndrome. SDAS was what happened when you rocked all those things that made Westerners feel secure – their jobs, their financial institutions, their hopes and prospects, the very fabric of their lives. Those with a sense of humour remaining likened it, in America anyway, to ‘Linus without his blanket’.

Just three months earlier, the digital data collapse everyone predicted
would
happen
did
happen. On reaching nine zettabytes of data – a billion terabytes of information for every person alive on Earth, the world’s information ocean simply froze over. The ‘machine’ of online selling, stock trading, banking and social networking had edged beyond human capacities to control and oversee its automated processes. Dirty data entering the ‘ocean’ had triggered system failures across the globe, bringing trade and communication to a standstill. People couldn’t fix the problem because they no longer understood the colossal tangle of interconnected software that had caused it. What’s more, digital currency, which had all but replaced physical money in more advanced countries, had also been frozen within the silicon chips that housed it. Paper dollars, euros, pounds, rupees, yuan and yen were being printed by the billions in an attempt to unblock trade. And retailing, which had been operating almost entirely in cyberspace was being returned to the street – to the flea markets, bazaars and market stalls of its birth. It was back to zero for millions of businesses and their billions of employees.

People were looking to their leaders for answers, but they weren’t getting any. Unemployment and hopelessness were drying up fragile societies like brushwood, ignitable by the smallest spark. In Northern Ireland this had resulted in the highest single-day death toll in the Province’s history, as Protestant and Catholic gunmen once again took to the streets. Across Europe and the US, suicide had quadrupled, as had rape. The upper class crimes of company fraud and embezzlement had reached unprecedented levels. This, coupled with an almost ten-fold increase in murder, armed robbery and petty theft, had served to capsize and drown the West’s judicial systems, entrenching SDAS still deeper into the psyche of its citizens.

Infant capitalism, suckling the teats of cheap labour, had been passed first to the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India and China, then to the MINTS – Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey, and then to the PIPES – Pakistan, Iran, the Philippines and Ethiopia. The cradle of capitalism had at last fallen from the tree and now lay in a billion pieces on the ground. Nowhere was this more visible than in Great Britain where four major conurbations seethed under martial law and smoldered in the ashes of the worst rioting ever experienced in a temperate zone country.

And the baby? No capitalist nation had ever thought to ask itself what it would do when the markets for its products and services either choked or dried up. With world trade log-jammed by overproduction and paralyzed by the data crash, the capitalist sun had reached its nadir.

All these events had served to shift the centre of gravity of Pilot’s symbolic boulder to that very position of imbalance he’d been waiting for, but hadn’t expected quite so soon. The stick Eydos had fashioned to lever the boulder away from the edge was ready and waiting to be placed in position.

With the Summit less than four weeks away, Pilot was edgy. Everyone was doing what they could to calm him down, including Pandora, who was the picture of placidity and contentment at her mother’s breast.

Len Wenlight, who’d been sitting quietly in a corner, could contain himself no longer. “We’re fucked, guys,” he said. “Hog-tied. Trousers down. Fucked. You’d think every acid-dead tree, every failed harvest and skin cancer, every inch of new desert and every teenage heroin death would count towards prising our grip from the time bomb. Instead, we just seem to clutch it tighter. Our technological advances are like double-edged swords. GM crops that can grow in sand, new ways of squeezing oil out of a stone… they just lure us into a false sense of security where we think we can carry on reproducing until the cows come home.”

“They came home 250 years ago, Len,” Pilot said. “We have a few ideas about that.”

“
Eydosians
for
the
Defense
of
the
Earth
,” Wenlight said.

“What?”

“E-D-E. Eydosians for the Defense of the Earth. Twelve years ago I set up another E-DE−
Englanders for the Defense of Eydos. You never knew this, Lonnie, but it was EDE who persuaded the Royal Navy to withdraw her sneaky submarines from your waters.”

Pilot’s jaw dropped. “I’ll be damned, Len. How did you manage t
o−
“

“These ideas you’ve got,” Wenlight interrupted, “they’d better be good. If you put rancid carrots in the shop, no one’s going to buy them.”

“You would if they were the last carrots on Earth. Anyway, it’s not a carrot we’ll be offering… more like an emetic. Everyone thinks you have to
reward
people to make them do what you want them to do. The seal claps, he gets a fish. Our inborn optimism makes us think that everything will turn out all right. Politicians throw us the fish that feed this optimism, with the result that nobody does anything to make sure things
will
be all right. Next day they’re worse than ever.

“When the teeming billions hit the bottom, as they’re beginning to now, and they’re lying there in each other’s filth looking up at their leaders for more fish, it’s the brave man who’ll stand there and give them nothing – who will actually
take
things
away
. We’re the only group that can be trusted not to give people what they want. What they want is fish – comfort and security. Nothing too radical.”

Wenlight was getting frustrated. “So, what
are
you going to give them?”

Pilot spooned himself another bowl of yogurt while his friend waited for a reply. It came from Mara instead.

“What we put down on the table isn’t going to be what people want. Not at first. They might see the sense in it eventually.” Macushla handed Pilot his daughter across the table, which meant it was burping time.

“We haven’t arrived at this point blind,” Mara continued. “There are a lot of interests at stake, and we’ve brainstormed them all; consulted all the top minds. Our conclusions and solutions are sound. Now, we need to convince
everyone
that the only interest of any real and lasting importance is that of the planet. We’re not going to turn around nine billion people just like that, but they can turn
themselves
around with a little persuasion and a sound premise.”

“
Persuasion
?” Wenlight said. “Do you people really think you’re ready for this?” The baby burped and was handed, smiling, back to her mother.

“Not as ready as we would have hoped,” Pilot said. “And there’s another problem.”

“Namely?”

“How to get our voice heard beyond the borders of the developed nations. In those places where deprivation is the norm, people’s lives never rise above their basic daily needs and, because of that, the influence this island can wield is limited to only a small fraction of the planet – to those people with the time and opportunity to think, talk, read. I thought we’d have more time, you know, to build up our credibility and widen our audience. But it’s all happening so fast, our audience is actually
shrinking
as more people are thrown into subsistence, or mere survival living. We’ve got to go straight in there and deliver our package next month, credibility or no credibility.” He threw in Maryburg’s premature baby analogy, then shut the door on further discussion.