John Barnes - Mother of Storms

Well, this is different. There’s a priority-one. She sits down, switches on the full playback, and watches the phone conversation, just before Jesse gets back into Tucson on the zipline.

Ten minutes later she has called Di Callare and asked for an interview; he says he’ll be happy to talk to her while he’s taking the zipline home tonight. She sets her clock for that. At least she now can prove that there’s more to worry about than they are talking about.

All she has to do is make the whole story come out in a way that saves her financial butt, which, according to the last message, is about one week from oblivion. Still, it’s a better chance than she’s had in a long time. The bleak, dark, gray day that has emerged from the bleak night looks pretty good to her.

Just as Mary Ann Waterhouse is undressing, but trying to do it as Synthi Venture for Rock, and struggling to keep the thought, This is the last time, the last time, the last time, my breasts are so sore, so sore, please, please, this is the last time , from getting loud enough in her head to be picked up by the estimated three hundred twelve million women (and a scattering of curious men) worldwide who are experiencing her right now, and as Jesse is seeing through Rock’s eyes and watching those amazing cartoon-girl breasts pop out of the tiny bra, and Rock himself is wondering (below the level where Jesse can hear it) if after all this he’s going to have any energy left for Harry, his own longtime boyfriend—

and as Di has finally gotten the organization chart to meet the criteria he started with—

and as Berlina Jameson notices that she has a priority-one call from a datarodent—

and before Akiri Crandall and Gunnar Redalsen have even become aware that their days are going to be unpleasant—

At that instant, Glinda Gray notices that an AI thinks it’s picked up something important.

The trouble with the damned things is that they’re right too often to ignore and wrong too often to inspire any confidence. She’d really rather leave now; she promised Derry she’d get home early enough for them to have lunch together, and here she is working on a Saturday and looking at keeping going right through the day.

Well, if she checks it, and it’s nothing, she’s going right out the door and home to Derry, and she’s going to use the privacy router that the boss is always telling her to use. Klieg is such a nice guy he wants her to cut herself off from the company every weekend and take the time on her own, and if nice guys like Klieg were all the company had, it wouldn’t last a week. Got to stay on top of the competition, because in getting blocking patents, being second is spending money for nothing.

She hits the key before she can worry about it anymore, reads it—and whoops like the cheerleader she was in high school. In the silence that follows as she re-reads, she can hear six doors out in the corridor open and her co-workers asking each other whose office that noise came from, and did it sound like someone was upset? Normally she’d run out to tell them it was okay, but normally she wouldn’t have whooped in the first place—and things are anything but normal.

She sits at her desk, hugging herself. It’s really a shame that there’s no equivalent of Liver Treats or a scratch between the ears for an AI, because this AI has earned any treat it could want, if it were capable of wanting anything. What’s its number?—GT1500AI213 + 895. She writes it down, since she’ll want to copy its rule system for the next generation of Als to use as a starter.

Sitting on a node near NOAA central, a datarodent, running random checks, picked up several conversations of this guy, Diogenes Callare, and reported them to the AI. The AI in turn reprogrammed the datarodent to pay special attention to Callare after it noted that his boss talks about him a lot and cites him as an authority; and spotted Callare’s use as an influence to get a bright but difficult former employee—Carla Tynan—back into the organization for the crisis.

It even picked up the fact that Carla Tynan used to work in their blue-sky, crazy-people division, which implies that if they want her back, it’s because they aren’t sure of what they’re doing, or they’re afraid of getting zapped by something they haven’t thought of, and that it isn’t possible to tell whether this is because Diogenes Callare is so influential within the circle of meterologists there that he’s the only credible one to make the offer, or because Tynan, brainy maverick that she is, wouldn’t listen to anyone who wasn’t equally bright, so that all the calls it picked up to, from, and about Carla Tynan were vital evidence for Diogenes Callare as the key to the whole thing.

It thus quite properly began to pay very close attention to Callare himself, and when it caught him explaining it all— to his kid brother! you couldn’t ask for anything more perfect! it’s all in simple nontechnical language with no CYA in it!— it ran that explanation against the official press release, found out where the missing emphases were in the press release, and dashed off down the fibrop to let everyone know.

The press release began with the basic weasel-position of saying that maybe nothing would happen, and that with so many possibilities it was very hard to say for sure that anything would, and then described the scenarios as if they had been a set of worst cases.

But when you read this conversation against it, the key thing is that three times, Di tells his kid brother—an engineering student, so someone who doesn’t know meteorology but does know physics—that a huge amount of energy is getting dumped in. To most ears it just sounds like Di is saying “big,” but it’s the key to the whole thing. To people who’ve taken physics as a serious subject, energy is the name for that which is expressed in the universe as either mechanical work or as heat. Work is change in a mechanical system—the distance a thing is moved times the force resisting it. So a big difference in energy in a mechanical system (such as the atmosphere) translates into immense changes in where things are and how fast they move.

Or in very simple terms, to big, big winds.

The AI went so far as to run some calculations, and they’re pretty fascinating—in a spooky sort of way. The increased energy retained by the Earth and not bounced back into space is just about one-third of one percent more than normal—but the last time it got that much less it was enough to get the Little Ice Age started. At the present rate of global warming—which, the AI notes, is at least supposed to be slowing down—the Earth shouldn’t reach the overall global temperature it will reach this year until… holy jumping jesus god, 2412.

So the press release is the sheerest thin tissue of fact stretched over an implied lie. The one thing that is for sure is that something will happen, and that something will be huge. Everything else is reassuring noise for the public, helping it to believe that the people in charge probably know what’s true.

Moreover—and this is what brought out the whoop—if you don’t worry about specifics, if you lump things together instead of splitting them apart, then there’s something that several of the scenarios include or imply, something that gives the key to making money off this; and her AI has already turned that key.

She uses her priority to put through a call to John Klieg’s office, and it doesn’t surprise her at all that he’s there. He thinks everyone else works too hard and wants to take care of them, but look at the care he takes of himself—or rather doesn’t take. The man’s attitude toward work is positively twentieth.

“Boss, I think we’ve got what we wanted here.”