“Actually, I prefer real cow flesh.”
I betray Seth’s confidence here only because I think it’s vital for you to understand that the granular details of the bill matter almost nothing until we have a better understanding of what’s going on within the unreported, unchecked halls of the influence peddlers behind the façade of the state. At heart, though, I remain a mathematician, and when I look at passage of this bill I see simple math: In the Democratic-controlled House, 35 percent of the prospective yes votes will come from New York, California, Oregon, and Washington, low-carbon states that stand to lose little economically from the legislation. However, these states represent merely one-twenty-fifth of the Senate, or 4 percent. Your body, Senator Fitzpatrick, an anachronistic and vigorously antidemocratic institution, will, as it has throughout history, prove the most intractable obstacle to major reform.
Three weeks later, Dr. Tufariello felt the need to recruit me for a subaltern mission involving a scientist no longer welcome in the public sphere. In the privacy of her office, she confided to me: “The Randall transition team has a white paper ready, and they want us to take it to outside sources. You’ve worked with Tony Pietrus?”
If I have not made it clear, Dr. Tufariello has earned my utmost respect. After growing up in rather discomfiting circumstances in West Baltimore, she has become one of the most energetic scientists in her field. I would honor any request within reason, yet this one seemed strange.
“I did. We met at the Global Change Research Program modeling forum. We did not exchange life stories, as they say, but we’re well aware of each other.”
She said, very carefully: “The president-elect wants Tony’s opinion. Without anyone knowing about it.”
This made halting sense. Dr. Pietrus became something of a celebrity based on his popular book One Last Chance, and then a pariah. Scientifically, his work on the parameterization of clathrates has been key to some models. He’s contributed to process and observational understandings of methane clathrates, one of the key unresolved climate-relevant processes. However, when the Seventh Assessment Report came out in early 2028, he called the IPCC “a joke that still bends to the whims of petrostates like Saudi Arabia, Russia, Brazil, and the US.” Pietrus gave interviews denouncing the report as a “genocidal document” and promoted his histrionic “Tombstone Domino Theory.” He alienated himself completely with an outburst at a World Economic Forum panel, when “he called the future president of the United States an ‘affirmative action hire,’ ” as Dr. Tufariello put it. He’s been labeled a racist by detractors, a truth-teller by admirers. He remains a controversial figure, and his early retirement from Yale has not calmed his critics.
“I’d be glad to meet with him,” I said. “But why not use Marty Rathbone? I believe the two are colleagues and friends.”
“Rathbone is an ape. He knows how to get himself on TV and duck a sexual harassment complaint. But also, no way can the head of the NEC talk to Pietrus. The wingnuts are already dreaming up conspiracy theories about Randall’s win in the primaries, and Tony would be even more toxic on the right than the left. You’ve gotten a taste of what it’s like to be at the center of a politicized issue, but nothing like this guy.”
“But Mary Randall wants his blessing on the bill?”
“She wanted to nominate him for the EPA actually. I guess she liked him for whatever insane reason. But McCowen shut that down because obviously getting him confirmed would be a nightmare no one wants. He’s seen as the most hardline scientist alive, so if he’s on board, it can protect our scientific flank. But we also have to protect our social justice flank. We keep those intact, and the Left as a whole will follow, even if the bill isn’t perfect. Which it won’t be.”
“If you don’t mind me saying, Jane, it feels as though we’re consistently attempting to craft a coalition before we even have the policy in place.”
“Yeah, well, welcome to politics. And listen, Ash, you need to exercise extreme discretion about meeting with Pietrus. Don’t use anything that goes out on a broadband connection. No phone, email, HoloChat, or Slapdish. In person. Make it a hotel and pick the conference room the day of.”
Perhaps this was paranoid of her, but everyone in Washington frets about being monitored or hacked, and working on sensitive legislation means that assumption is not without merit. Private spy networks, corporate data collection, and foreign espionage are all possibilities. Xuritas Corporate Services has rapidly increased its market share by promoting and gaming fears of terrorism, and it’s hardly a coincidence that its founder, Loren Victor Love, managed to secure himself a Democratic Senate seat in Montana. Meanwhile, Russia’s FSB, China’s MSS, and Mossad have now penetrated multiple presidential administrations and countless senatorial and congressional offices.
For instance, when I walked from my office to the Metro stop that would take me to Seth Young’s apartment, I passed through the sights of dozens of video analytics programs scanning multiple security cameras and processing huge amounts of data, including facial muscle observation, walking speed, heart rate, and other biometric data that might indicate if an individual was nervous or ill. People move through D.C. as if it were still a free city, but there is not a word, motion, website, photo, or sneeze that is not monitored, catalogued, and shuffled through the scrutiny of governmental and corporate AIs. That night, I told Seth we could not see each other for the week following, as my sister and her husband would be staying with me.
When I returned to MIT to pursue my doctorate in applied mathematics, I left behind a lucrative career as a professional gambler. My partner, Peter O’Connell, remained a good friend, and in my final year of doctoral work, my sister, Haniya, moved to Cambridge to pursue her doctorate in economics at MIT. This is how she met Peter. I moved on to work at the New England Complex Systems Institute, and then my mentors Dr. Sri Thankankur and Dr. Tufariello steered me toward work at NOAA. It was during my first months there that I received a call from Peter. We talked about basketball for a great deal of time, which usually indicates that he has something else troubling him:
“It’s the kind of thing where you could hate me, and it’ll rip the guts out of our friendship, get me?”
“Please continue.”
“Argh. Shit. All right. Ash, I love you dude. Okay: Haniya and I have been hooking up.”
This was indeed quite surprising: “Really.”
“Yeah, like a lot. For a long time.”
“Okay.” I paused for perhaps too long, lost in thought and forgetting how this cue might be interpreted.
“That’s like the bad news, dude. The really bad news is I’m pretty sure I’m head over heels fucking in love with her.”
“I see.”
“Yeah, man. At first, I just thought she was a fucking sexy whack job in bed, but… Nah. She’s Haniya. The Han dynasty. Han Solo. Harrison Ford. Ford Fusion EV, range of three hundred forty miles. When I told her how I felt, all she said to me was ‘I know.’ I fucking love her, Ash.”
At first, I harbored not just trepidation about this relationship but jealousy. They’d been having sex for nearly two years without telling me, and I resented this. After our father died, I became closer to my sister, our youthful misunderstandings dissipating. Peter, meanwhile—I’ll only say that I met him at a point in my life when I still harbored a great deal of anxiety and loneliness. Only years later did I understand what his friendship meant to me, the ways he taught me to be unafraid, to approach life with humor and bravery. Beyond that, I came to realize I was attracted to him, a problematic episode that I’ve never broached and never will. For a time, I kept my distance from both of them, hoping the relationship would run its course, until they visited me in Tennessee. I remember giving them a tour of my lab in Oak Ridge. I had a whiteboard hanging on the door and while I explained to Haniya how we were attempting to tackle the extreme-scale computing challenges of increasing spatial resolutions and representations of parameterizations, Peter, behind our backs, doodled an intricate portrait of the Millennium Falcon doing battle with a TIE fighter. The caption read, The Al-Hasan Brainbox Showdown. It made Haniya laugh very hard, and she took multiple pictures of it with her iPhone. After they left, I sat to write about the episode, as I sometimes do when attempting to work through moments of psychological complexity and decided that it was low of me to resent these two. They have become my closest confidants ever since. It so happened that while working on the white paper, Haniya and Peter visited me in D.C. It was their first vacation since the birth of my niece, Noor, and though I was eager to see her again, Haniya and Peter were more eager for respite and a few alcoholic beverages. My mother flew to Boston to spend the weekend with Noor. Peter, always a playful, slippery, logic-defying linguist, had dubbed my mother, Amala, “Grandmamala,” and it was one of Noor’s favorite words to hear. Perhaps the most surprising element of Peter’s romance with my sister was that my mother seemed to genuinely like him. It also helped that Peter had undergone “a half-conversion to Islam.”