“So you have me beat,” Tony quipped.
After translation, Qian laughed very hard at this and said in decent English, “American prison a McDonald’s compared to Chinese prison. American prison, you play checkers. Chinese prison, you play checkers with land mines.”
The framework was not a new idea: Each country would bring its per capita carbon emissions into alignment so the carbon budget of developing countries could rise minimally while developed nations would have to drastically reduce theirs. The CSDF would pay for zero-carbon infrastructure in the Global South, while debt forgiveness would be tied to each participant’s decarbonization and biodiversity preservation. Free riders would be dealt with, first with limited sanctions and then economic boycotts. If the major economies could stick to this, it would flush the carbon out of the world’s economy fast enough to limit warming to 2.5 degrees.
Qian was most engaged by the discussions of geoengineering. Chinese researchers had already been experimenting with the mining and dumping of limestone into its acidic northern seas to try to raise the pH levels. He wanted to know about ARPA-B’s more radical (some might say, insane) plan to buttress the West Antarctic Ice Sheet through the largest civil engineering project the world had ever seen.
“I know it sounds like science fiction,” said Tony. “And it’s going to cost an absolute fucking fortune, but it works in all the models, and it could mean the survival of both Hong Kong and New York City.”
“Not without solar management,” said Qian. He went on to explain how their systems models that feared a breakdown of the Asian monsoon had long ago been reevaluated. The new normal was wreaking such havoc on the Asian continent that a weakening of the hydrological cycle would likely be a net benefit. Not that any of this was without massive risk, but: “We have to…” The translator stopped as Qian searched for words. Then he said the phrase in English:
“We must, uh, purchase our time.”
“Buy some time?”
Qian winked at him. “How much do you have in your wallet?”
When he and Qui Qian met with their counterparts from the eighteen largest industrial economies, the debate about albedo modification was largely already complete: It was time to break the glass. They would start the process with a two-thirds vote at the 2038 Conference of the Parties for a new global compact and require a three-fourths vote of signatory countries to end it so that it might have some insulation from political pressure. The potential downsides were severe, but they were dealing with a new looming threat, the coiled spring of aerosol reduction: They had to take coal off-line as quickly as possible, but this would precipitate a sudden drop in the aerosols that dimmed the sun. According to models, the sudden removal of those gases could raise the global temperature by at least half a degree centigrade, which could be, as Tony put it, “A fucking global cataclysm. I’ve always said it’s a delusion to think we can engineer our way out of this, but now we have no choice.”
Tony’s oncologist called from New Haven after Qian left but before he was to sit down with the Russian and Indian delegations. Germany and Brazil were coming the week after.
“You are playing with absolute fire here, Dr. Pietrus. You need to come back for a scan. Or even get one in D.C.—I don’t care, but you need to begin treatment immediately, probably with a regimen that includes oxaliplatin, and that’s going to be very tough stuff. You said one month when this started, then suddenly I see you on TV? Now it’s October. You need to get back here.”
“Not sure if you noticed this, Doc, but the financial crisis stopped dead in its tracks last month. The banks and insurers are stabilized, the job losses have peaked. We passed once-in-a-generation climate legislation.”
“And you want to be around to see your success,” she insisted. “Please, I’m begging you. Get the scan.”
“I still have work to do,” said Tony. “Thank you for your concern.”
And he hung up.
On October 21, the Kansas National Guard was decommissioned and sent home. The Kansas governor’s mansion was surrounded by federal law enforcement, and though he’d promised a bloodbath if authorities moved in, they simply shut off the electricity. A day later, with temperatures in the high eighties, Governor Justis, his family, and the staff that had implemented so many of his illegal actions emerged and were placed under arrest. Rather than swearing in the lieutenant governor, Kansas was placed under temporary military control, using post–Civil War Reconstruction laws as a model to readmit the state to the Union.
On October 23, three men with ties to white power groups opened fire with assault rifles outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Building in Atlanta. Police killed one of the gunmen, but the other two proceeded inside, where they murdered twenty-one others before a police drone entered the building and shot them dead.
On October 25, The Pastor promised to organize one of the biggest marches on Washington in the history of the republic. “I’m calling on every Christ-fearing citizen of this country to come to the nation’s capital, armed with weapons and the Holy Spirit, and in the name of Jesus, we will stop this illegal and immoral green power bill from taking the last of your freedoms! I don’t want violence, but I can’t promise anything. If any of the establishment’s thugs stand in our way, we will do what we have to. Mark my words.” D.C. remained on lockdown, so the protest gathered on the Virginia side of the Potomac, upward of fifty thousand people carrying The Pastor’s flag, watched by drone, infiltrated by undercovers, and monitored by security forces. There was no violence. Social VR was awash with promises of total war against ERASE, including people who swore they’d shred the monthly rebate checks from the climate dividend. “That is blood money!” screamed The Pastor to the orgiastic peals of his audience. “God help you if you spend even a dime of that! It is your duty before the Lord to burn those checks or donate them to a righteous cause.” He suggested his operations would be a fine place to finance the resistance.
On November 2, the Joint Terrorism Task Force broke down the doors of thirty-one additional suspects believed to be associated with 6Degrees. Unlike so many of the past arrests, these individuals were active participants in the terrorist network. Two days later, the Washington Post broke the story of the JTTF’s failure to connect the dots between two primary players, Kellan Murdock and John G. Gerald. Tony read about how Murdock had been interviewed and dismissed by the FBI. Gerald, the suicide bomber responsible for the deaths of Haniya, Peter, Emii, and Mackowski, had actually been a suspect in the Ohio River Massacre and had even served time on unrelated charges. He’d been ruled out as an operational suspect, but sources within the DOJ claimed that predictive analytics and political pressure were largely responsible for overlooking him. Tony and his lawsuit were even mentioned in the piece as an example of predictive policing’s failures. Under Victor Love, the DOJ had mostly investigated and pursued members of legitimate organizations, particularly A Fierce Blue Fire.
When Gail lost her hair during the chemo she’d said, “Now I know how you feel. No wonder men will go to any length to stop this.” Tony had started going bald when he was in his midtwenties and never put up a fight. No minoxidil or special shampoos, no combover, comb-forward, comb-anything. He watched the remaining skeins of hair retreat, the light catching more and more of the rising pink island of his lumpy skull. Now he had only a fringe of gray that rode around his dome into his beard. Still, he marveled how, for now, he looked okay. He’d been experiencing more shortness of breath and had to get up and leave a meeting with the South African delegation. The talks had dragged on into the holiday season, and the novelty of negotiating in bilateral meetings for the fate of the planet had long worn off. These things were all routinized: the same conference room with flowers in the center of a square table, a small microphone in his face, requisite glass of ice water, and the two countries’ flags hugging each other in the background before a blue curtain. His life had become a pile of briefing binders with titles like “Bhutan Drought Scenarios.” He’d been implanted with an RFID chip that tracked his movements and heart rate; Secret Service picked him up every day in an enormous SUV and he had to wear body armor on his walk inside. “From enemy of the state to one of its most prized eggs,” he told Hasan. “Package me carefully.”