No longer can we restrict ourselves to the machinery and equipment of industrial capitalism. We must confront the actors who make this genocidal system possible. We must make it dangerous to profit from the holocaust of our world. What the last two decades have taught us is that systems of militarism, carbon energy, and white supremacy will do anything to hold on to power. The people whose lives we took on August 15 are being described as innocent. They were not. They were the factotums of a machine that is killing millions daily with its ultimate endgame the annihilation of every species on the planet, including humankind. If there was ever a moral argument for initiating a campaign of violent resistance, this is it. There is no neutrality in this war.
Past the heightened security in the Russell Building, blocks from the blackened lobby of Treasury, everyone was whispering about how 6Degrees pulled this off. The security perimeters they’d infiltrated, the moles they’d planted, the protocols they’d stolen, the computer systems they’d hacked. It was a terrorist attack unlike any other because of its sophistication. With five of Congress’s own dead, the political bodies were terrified. Ash was right. With a Green Tea conservative installed as majority leader, the Republican Senate passed the compromise bill, and it was back to the House and on Hamby’s desk within two days.
The Ecological Restoration and Solutions Emergency Act (ERASE) passed with 73 votes in the Senate and 345 in the House on September 10, 2037. All the decarbonization measures made it through, including the shock collar, as well as the Green Infrastructure Bank, carbon removal financing, the Civilian Climate Corps, ARPA-B, most of the Coastal Resilience and Defense Authority, funding for Climate-Resilient Mobilization Cities, and American Shores National Park. The spending portion was significantly scaled back from $17 trillion over ten years to $3.7 trillion over two years with an additional $8 trillion over nine years. Indemnity for fossil-fuel companies was included, but the tax reforms were not, which meant a significant increase in the deficit. There would be no universal health care, free college education, or other social spending, and Aamanzaihou’s democracy expansion was whittled down significantly, with D.C. and Puerto Rico admitted to the Union as soon as the next election if their citizenry voted in favor of statehood. The Climate Stabilization and Development Fund to finance clean energy and adaptation for the developing world made it through, while the Refugee and Immigration Authority was laughed out of the room. The aid to states proved crucial, at least momentarily pausing the meltdown as a public-sector hiring binge ensued while the Climate Corps would begin putting tens of thousands of people to work by the end of the month.
“It’s dispiriting,” Ash mused. “That this is only the very first step.” There was a dead cockroach in the corner of Ash’s office. Tony was always surprised by how filthy government buildings were. “And what these revolutionaries don’t seem to understand is that capitalist-economic collapse will doom the planet as well. The problem is so far gone, the only answer is for extant power structures with expanded authority to meet the challenge of rapid decarbonization and planetary environmental management.”
“And yet it doesn’t mean jack-fuck-all unless we get China,” said Tony.
“Yes. These bilaterals with China, Germany, India—you’ll be in attendance?”
He thought of Gail. He thought of his cancer. “Yes, of course. If we don’t get the major economies on board, all of this will be for nothing.”
That night, he dreamed of walking over verdant countryside, gazing out at rolling hills that gave way to mountains beneath black clouds. Families were crossing the fields, young children scattered everywhere. He had Gail and his girls by his side; they were all much younger. Holly preteen and quietly curious about every blade of grass, Catherine a bouncing ball of energy. The four of them passed a horse dying in a muddy road. Maybe it had been struck by a vehicle. Its body was paralyzed, but it could lift its head. Tony wished he could help, but they had to keep moving. They passed a woman growing a vegetable garden in the hull of an old boat half-buried in the earth. A man was asking her if the deer would get to her vegetables. She sighed and said probably. Tony took his girls by the hands, and they kept on. He didn’t know where they were going. Maybe they were trying to get home.
On September 15, as Tony prepped for his meeting with representatives from the newly formed Chinese parliament, the FBI surrounded the Tennessee compound of a man name Kellan Harley Murdock. Rather than surrender, Murdock took his own life with a handgun. Inside his property, the FBI and ATF found a treasure trove of bomb-making materials. A veteran of the Iraq War and explosive ordnance disposal, Murdock was suspected to have been 6Degrees’ primary bomb maker, though they were certain he’d trained others. On October 1, three arrests were made: a middle school teacher in New Hampshire, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and a data scientist in San Francisco. The three were arrested based on a “detailed anonymous tip from a source who was believed to be involved with the terrorist organization,” wrote the New York Times. They were charged with the attacks of August 15, and although authorities in no way thought this was the extent of the network, they believed they’d apprehended the group’s primary leadership. After an investigation and manhunt lasting over a decade, the FBI had not actually been close at all. The anonymous defector was the only reason they were able to close in on the organization’s leaders, Kai Alani Ismael, Janine Cecilia McCurdy, and Quinn Rhona Worthington. All three were detained as enemy combatants under Statute 1034 of the Pollution Reduction, Infrastructure, and Research Act of 2030. If convicted of conspiracy and material support for the 8/15 assassinations, they would face the death penalty.
Rathbone, Tufariello, and Dahms were tapped to oversee the rollout and implementation of ERASE. Meanwhile, it fell to Tony and Ash to begin bilateral meetings for a global carbon framework. The agreement would need major signatories, but mostly they needed China.
Before meeting with the Chinese vice premier, Tony and Ash sat through a briefing by the CIA’s East Asia experts. Beginning in 2033, just before the global food price shock, several teenagers were arrested for disseminating memes of the American VR comedy duo Henny and Dillpickle. Images of the child shock jocks had been banned by the Communist Party for their rants against Chinese state censorship and for comparing the president of the People’s Republic to an “ass-sock.” Soon after the arrests, the bodies of the teenage boys and girls were returned to their families with clear signs of torture. Rather than tamp down the dissent, protests erupted, which were put down violently by security forces. As the brutality increased, and children, including some as young as seven, kept disappearing, army units began to defect to the Minyun Movement. All of this happened out of view of the rest of the world as food prices rose, drought worsened, the sea level crisis loomed, and the country exploded. The president was deposed in hopes of stabilizing the situation, but the military lost control in several cities. The exposure of the Uyghur camps created a political and economic hurricane that was roiling every sector of Chinese society. Rather than plunge the country into civil war, Communist Party leadership created a quasi-democratic governing institution called the People’s Liberation Parliament. Because it was more or less awkwardly grafted onto the existing political system, it was anyone’s guess what kind of outcomes the first Chinese elections would produce.
In this context, they met with Vice Premier Qui Qian, whose personality did not quite jibe with the gravity of his country’s situation. Qian’s translator conveyed his sense of humor, which was quick, winsome, absurdist even. He’d been instrumental in pushing the party toward democratic reform and had been imprisoned twice.