John Barnes - Mother of Storms

“All this has happened because I have been asking, over and over, the simple question that everyone wants an answer to: now that a UN military operation—”

That ought to boost the ratings. UNSOO is officially a peacekeeping, not a military, organization, despite what it actually does. Calling it a military operation will cause an automatic warning flag from UNIC—they won’t kill the story but they will suggest that peace-loving decent citizens not read it. The nationalists will promptly read it because of that. The United Left will send her hate mail, and that will register as traffic and draw attention from the critics. True, she doesn’t especially want to encourage the nationalists… or the critics, for that matter. But they pay access charges the same as anyone else….

“DICTRON BACK UP AND MERGE. -now that a UN military operation has accidentally released one hundred and seventy-three billion tons of methane into the atmosphere, given the evidence of the geological past that such releases have produced brief periods of intense warming, what is going to happen to us? Should we be evacuating half of humanity up into the mountains? Will we lose the Netherlands, Florida, and Bangladesh as the seas rise? Will new Saharas form where grain grows now, and will we see global famine? Are we facing flood, famine, or storm?

“No one will say, and I have come to realize that what they are covering up is not some disaster of awesome proportions, but that they themselves do not know; despite all the advances of science, we are waiting between the lightning and the thunder—”

No, strike that, it’s melodramatic. No, keep it. Melodrama is what we want… melodrama always made money, and the line is getting pretty short. But it’s not the right metaphor.

“DICTRON BACK UP, MERGE, ERASE. -despite all the advances of science, we must simply wait for it—but the one thing they are sure of is that the effect will be big. We have whacked Nature hard, with a hammer, and now we stand facing her while she makes up her mind what to do about it.”

This is beginning to roll. It will need work, but it’s a damned sight livelier than the stuff she’s been doing up until now.

It ends up being a long day spent entirely in the car; she puts it on auto-gas, so that it just pulls over at automated stations when it needs to and fills up. The story goes through six drafts and when she’s done, “Sniffings” is a very nice little twenty-minute program with all kinds of up-close footage of people evading the issues, and some really good animated graphics. For her own narration, she uses the little rig that she bought used, ages ago, that lets her hang the teleprompter and camera from the ceiling, pointing down at her as she lies on the bed, with a pale blue reflector underneath her. Edit out the reflector and superimpose the “Sniffings” graphic she came up with, and damn if it doesn’t look at least as good as what was on the old networks themselves as recently as thirty years ago.

It’s in the can. “DICTRON: POST TEXT SNIFFINGS ONE, PUBLIC NET UNDER COPYRIGHT, ACCESS FEE SET TO BERLINASTAND-ARD—”

“ADJUST FOR INFLATION?” the Dictron asks.

“ADJUST FOR INFLATION,” she confirms. She really will have to revise her rate schedule sometime soon. “NOTE HEADER—SNIFFINGS TO BE A FREQUENT RELEASE AT TWENTY-MINUTE LENGTH. REBROADCAST AUTHORIZED IN NONCOMPETING MARKETS AND IN TRANSLATION, AT ACCESS FEES SET TO BERLINASTANDARD. ADJUST FOR INFLATION.”

“CONFIRM?” It reads back her release order; she confirms it; it goes out to the net.

Time to celebrate. Sniffings 1 is a damned fine piece of work, even if no one ever looks at it—and she feels in her bones that at least a few people somewhere will look at it.

She pulls over at a rest area, plugs the car into a fresher that will vacuum out the dust and accumulated body smell, swap out the squat pot, and zap the whole works with ultraviolet and microwaves so that it will smell like a car rather than a monkey pen when she gets back. Tote bag on her shoulder, she goes into the public showers; a cleanup, a change of clothes, and a good meal are the rest of the agenda, to be followed by a good long sleep in the car.

What the hell, it’s better than Ernie Pyle usually got. After she hangs up from Louie, Carla Tynan finds it’s a little difficult to get back to her peaceful sunbath. In the first place, that damned rocket jockey has gotten her horny, and even though there’s no one out here on the Pacific, with a featureless horizon in all directions, to see her, she can’t quite bring herself to masturbate outside. Growling to herself for a silly prude, she goes below to get a little relief.

Afterward, with MyBoat rocking gently on the surface, she starts to compare the numbers from Louie with the ones NOAA gave her in more detail. She isn’t surprised that that gang of political hacks has been holding the numbers down, but she is surprised at how much they’ve been holding them down.

Well, one of the pleasures of being her own person is the ability to do her own work. She has several “baby” global weather models available on her computer, and a system she’s come up with for linking them. She pulls out the set of speciality fibrop cables, still in their wrappers from the cadcam shop, and starts patching the systems together.

First thing, work out what the real methane concentrations must be to account for Louie’s data. That only takes a minute or so, and the results pop back at her.

She gives a long, low whistle. It’s piercing and echoing in the little submarine, and she tries to remind herself not to do that again, but painful as it was, the situation earned it. Methane is not six times normal, but nineteen times normal.

Since she’s been assigned to the “hurricane problem,” she does a quick and dirty plug-through. That much more methane traps this much more energy; forty percent of it ends up in ocean surface water; so the surface water in hurricane formation zones gets anywhere from one to six degrees Celsius warmer, usually with the more drastic warming being farther north, and thus that much more energy is available for a hurricane.

She looks at the numbers; the energy bound in such a hurricane is twelve times the biggest hurricane on record.

And she still hasn’t figured how much bigger the hurricane formation zones themselves will be.

Still, there’s something she can do right now, and that’s what she does. She resets the autopilot, takes MyBoat down so that she can run undersea, and heads south as fast as she can. The North Pacific is about to become a bad place to be.

“President Grandma” is feeling more like a grandmother—and less presidential—than ever. Brittany Hardshaw has seen and made hard decisions on two minutes’ reflection, gotten them dead wrong, and spent years defending them when necessary; she knows that on at least one occasion she got an innocent man executed, and during her watch the United States has lost just over five hundred military people, mostly young men, in one corner of the world or another. She sent her close friend from Boise, Judge Burlham, to Liberia as a mediator, knowing it was dangerous, and on the television that night she saw him cut in half with a submachine gun at the airport. She would think she was hardened enough for any job.

Harris Diem’s report is sitting on her desk. It carefully explains the trick that he and a small “Black Team” of NSA scientists were able to pull on the team at NOAA—feeding them doctored data, monitoring the models they built, copying those models down the street in a hidden basement, and then carefully feeding in the correct data. It was a small masterpiece of covert ops. The President of the United States now has in her hands the only accurate assessment of the global temperature situation.