John Barnes - Mother of Storms

Jesse gives a long, slow whistle. “So no-bullshit, this is really a big deal? Worth getting worked up about?”

“It’s a big deal, all right. Worth getting worked up about depends. The human race is not in a position to do anything about it, you know, and though I suppose you could join the nationalists and blame the UN for it, or turn uniter and demand that all power go to the UN, the truth is, no matter what people did, the same thing would have happened sooner or later. The seabed is lousy with methane clathrate all over the high latitudes. Sooner or later, nukes or antimatter weapons were going to go off in it, or an undersea lava flow would have melted it, or maybe a major meteor strike would have come down right in the middle of it. Or for that matter, at the rate global warming is going, all those methane clathrate fields might very well melt once the deep ocean warms up in a hundred years. I’ve got one paleontology team digging into the evidence—there were several superbrief warmings in the geological record, and this is probably what they were. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.”

“A lot like a traffic accident, though.” Jesse looks a little shaken. “No matter how predictable it is, you wish it wouldn’t happen to you.”

“Yeah, pretty much. Anyway, in less than ten years it will all be over; by that time the extra methane will be absorbed in the ocean and eaten by the microbes, burned up in lightning flashes, zapped apart by ultraviolet in the high atmosphere, all that kind of thing.”

“Well, gee, that’s a lot to absorb,” Jesse says at last. “There doesn’t seem to be anything that anyone can do about it—”

Di shrugs. “We could be urging people to get ready for bad news. That’s about all. Heat is energy, and more energy in the system means whatever happens, it’s going to be a big one. Hope I was some help.”

“You always are. You’re the flattest big brother I’ve got. Say hi to Lori and the kids.”

It takes Di a second to remind himself that flat is a positive word.

When they hang up, there is no “broken connection” as people imagine; throughout their long call, each little piece of data has been running through the trillions of possible pipes all on its own, only rejoining at the other end. All that happens is that no more of them go running through the maze.

At the substation near Di’s office, where Jesse’s incoming words and picture were assembled and where Di’s outgoing words and picture were fragmented, there were more than thirty interested datarodents.

When ordinary voice-visual phone went to digital packetized transmission, the newspapers had been full of the dangers and potentials for “viruses”—the boomtalk pejorative for self-replicating software—on the phone system.

As usual, the word was far behind the news. The replicating code that carried messages to reprogram nodes could be duplicated and modified, intelligence added, and the whole turned into a datarodent (so called because it listened and ratted on whoever it could). Datarodents crouch in the nodes near anything important and listen as the little data-pieces come back together to form the conversation; they make copies of messages to send back to their masters.

Within a decade of the first datarodents showing up, human masters were no longer needed. The masters were programs themselves, artificial intelligences that could recognize enough to tell important from not.

After a while longer, datarodent and master alike began to replicate themselves and to move about on the net, always looking to colonize a node they had not yet infected. In 2028, the datarodents have gnawed away every bit of privacy.

As long as los corporados got paid when datarodents did this, the only people who cared were the sort of isolated nuts who sent paper mail to congressmen complaining about “invasions of privacy.”

It’s obvious to a lot of different organizations—especially after the Global Riot—that important things come out of NOAA. So the listener programs have been breeding in the nodes around NOAA like mosquitos in a swamp. In a way it’s a miracle that only thirty families of datarodents run out to carry the news elsewhere.

One little gang dashes only a scant mile or two—though it does it via nodes in Boston, Cleveland, and Trinidad, in part—into the FBI’s phone analysis program, which scans quickly and concludes that Di has divulged nothing that should be confidential, then calls up the dossier on Jesse, spots the connection to Naomi, concludes that she can make no use of the information either except to gain influence among the campus organizations, connects that with the FBI assessment of her as uncharismatic and therefore harmless, or at least preferable to several other possible campus leaders. It makes the note, records the data and the assessment, and closes the file.

Most of the other datarodents work for data-gathering organizations, and these clip the relevant parts of what Di said, note that it’s semantically all but identical to material that NOAA sent over the wire as a press release forty-five minutes ago, and gain from it two useful pieces of information: the name Di Callare and the fact that NOAA is not currently lying.

At about the point where Jesse is unsticking his phone’s camera and screen from the compartment wall of the zipline, and Di has had time to exhale and look back up at the chart—those facts are weighted, included into the database, and priced. If anyone wants them, they’ll be there, for a fee.

Three small and crude datarodents—ones that bear all the marks of underfunding—scuttle off with data for the three presidential campaigns. The only conclusions they lead their masters to are that the campaigns are still being kept in the dark. The Republican candidate’s office fires off a plaintive letter complaining to President Hardshaw and appealing to her party loyalty. It is such a routine matter that they have a form letter for it.

One purely commercial, barely tailored datarodent fires off a record of the whole conversation to Berlina Jameson, currently at the Motel Two in Point Barrow, Alaska. It lacks even the intelligence to decide whether a thing is important or not, but because so many things it is looking for were mentioned frequently, it tags the record as top priority.

One datarodent is not like the others—it’s very big and very smart. It fragments itself into a million chunks for the journey to GateTech headquarters at Cape Canaveral, and slips into the net a chunk at a time like a water moccasin swimming out from a bank. Besides a full recording of the conversation, the attached indexing and cross-referencing to other calls, and the snippets of material from it, there is a whole structure of thoughts and questions, and it is about the size (if it were somehow written out in text) of twenty of the old, paper Encyclopedia Britannica.

Eleven milliseconds later, at Cape Canaveral, one of the artificial intelligences that Glinda Gray has created and put to work drops a note into her electronic hopper, saying it may have found a significant piece of information. By now it has written a summary report of only five pages, though it still contains the name “Diogenes Callare.”

Another datarodent belongs to Industrial Facilities Mutual, a large industrial insurance consortium, and it is perhaps the second smartest datarodent in the substation. It hurries off to headquarters in Manhattan, carrying with it the assessment that the risk of severe weather has been badly underestimated.

Artificial intelligences there study the issue, agree with the datarodent, and re-prioritize. Engineer inspections are scheduled based on priority—a factory in a dry California canyon is inspected for fire risk more often than one on the Oregon coast, for example—and thus they step up the priority on all severe weather risks: broadcast towers, aboveground power lines, factories with flat roofs where snow tends to accumulate, shops in floodplains….