Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

“Very preliminary tests on the equipment are looking good,” said Isobel. “It could be months before we’re ready to try anything more serious. Meanwhile, the most promising exoplanet candidate continues to be KOI-232.04. The Shatner Space Telescope has gotten some very promising readings as it transits its star, and we know it has oxygen and liquid water. And we’re pretty sure that if we create a stable wormhole with an opening near to KOI-232.04’s gravity well, the mouth of the wormhole will be drawn down to the planet’s surface. But there’s no guarantee it would be pulled down onto solid land.”

Laurence couldn’t believe they were talking about visiting another planet. This was really really happening. He kept falling off his half beanbag with the giddiness. Every time Isobel said something about the evidence for KOI-232.04’s habitability, and the other exoplanet candidates they’d identified, he had to sit on his hand to keep from pumping his fist. Even with so many people dead and dying, even with the world on the edge of ruin. This was straight-up amazing.

“Thank you for that update.” Milton stared into his own lap for a moment. Then he looked up, in every direction at once. “There’s been a wrinkle. Earnest Mather has been running some numbers, and he has a … let’s say a concern. Earnest, can you share your findings with the group?”

“Umm.” Mather looked as though he’d been through a lot since Laurence dropped out of the sky and bought his company. He’d cut off his exuberantly frizzy hair and started wearing chunky engineer glasses. His shoulders were permanently hunched as he sat on a stool. “I have done the math about two thousand times, and there’s, well, a possibility. Let’s put it between ten percent and twenty percent. A possibility that if we turn this machine on, we’ll start a reaction that would lead to an antigravity cascade, which in turn could tear the Earth apart.”

“But tell them the good news,” Milton said quickly.

“The good news? Yes. The good news.” Earnest did his best to sit up straight. “First, we would probably have about a week, between turning the machine on and the Earth being obliterated. So, with efficient crowd control, we could get a lot of people through the gateway before Earth was gone. And there’s around a fifty percent chance that if the destructive reaction started, we could stop it by turning the machine off.”

“So,” said Milton. “Let’s say it’s a ten percent chance of the destructive reaction starting, and a fifty-fifty chance that we could avert a catastrophic outcome in that case. In fact, it might only be a five percent chance of planetary rupture. Or a ninety-five percent chance that everything would be fine. So, let’s discuss.”

Laurence felt like he’d jumped off that high gantry, instead of taking the elevator. He wondered if he should have found a way to warn more people about what happened to Priya. Everybody was trying to talk at once, but all Laurence could make out was Sougata’s cursing. Laurence looked at Isobel, whose folding chair wobbled as she hugged herself, and he wouldn’t swear she wasn’t crying. With no windows and the door sealed tight, the room seemed even more airless than it had before, and Laurence had an irrational panic that he would step outside this room and find the whole outside world erased, gone for good.

Earnest Mather was weeping into a wad of paper towels, even though he alone had known about this bombshell in advance. Maybe because he’d been processing the information for longer, he was readier to cry over it. Laurence couldn’t believe it was going to end like this. How was he going to keep Isobel from falling to pieces?

The room was full of declarations. Someone quoted Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita. Tanaa said even a 1 percent chance of blowing up the planet was too much. “We always knew there were risks,” Tanaa said, “but this is insane.”

“Here’s the thing,” said Milton when the initial outrage had died down. “This technology was always a last resort. We went into this knowing we were leaping into the dreadful darkness. And I give you all my word: This technology will never see use, unless we all judge that the human race is past the brink of self-destruction.”

He paused again. Everybody inspected his or her hands.

“The sad truth is, there is a strong possibility our entire species is hosed, unless we act. It’s all too easy to imagine a number of different scenarios in which conflicts escalate to the point where doomsday weapons are unleashed. Or a total environmental collapse happens. If we see an overwhelming likelihood of that happening, and if we have confidence that we can keep a wormhole open for long enough to transport a sustainable population, then we have a duty to proceed.”

Nobody spoke for a while, as everybody chewed on this.

Anya was the one who decided to jump straight to being process-oriented. “What kind of safeguards or guarantees do we put in place to make sure the device isn’t activated unless we’re all convinced the world is in a near-doomsday situation?”

Earnest wanted to know just how many people they could hope to gather at short notice and send through the portal in the time it remained open. Not to mention supplies. Could they have a whole colony’s worth of people and material stashed someplace nearby, for the green light? Could they attempt to fly in people from other parts of the world, to maintain a diverse gene pool, in lieu of their original plan to build identical machines all over the planet?

“Let’s not derail into talking about logistics,” said Tanaa. “We’re still on the ethical question.”

“There is no ethical question,” said Jerome, another engineer, who wore tight braids and a collarless shirt. “As long as we all agree it won’t be used unless the world is for-certain doomed. That’s clear-cut. We have a moral imperative to prepare a safeguard.”

Milton was sitting back and letting them all argue, either waiting for them to come around to his point of view on their own, or else watching for the right opening to seize control again. Meanwhile, they were suffocating, sitting on folding chairs or beanbags, while Milton had an Aeron. Laurence flinched at the thought that history was being made in this disused server room, which was acquiring a sour-cabbage odor.

“I don’t think anybody in this room is qualified to make the decision we’re attempting to take on here,” said Sougata.

“And there’s someone somewhere else who is?” said Jerome.

“Even if there’s no disaster,” someone said, “what if the planet is uninhabitable within a few decades?”

They started talking ocean acidification, atmospheric nitrogen, food web collapse.

“What if we’re only eighty percent sure it’s the apocalypse?” someone else asked.

Laurence tried to hear the ghost of Patricia that he had been keeping in his head since they’d been separated. What would Patricia be saying if she were here? He couldn’t imagine. She didn’t even believe ethics were derived from universal principles, like the greatest good for the greatest number . She seemed farther away than ever, as though he’d already gone to a different planet than her. But then it hit him: They were talking about maybe condemning Patricia to death, along with billions of others, on the assumption that they were all doomed anyway. He couldn’t even picture himself starting to unspool that for Patricia.

Laurence opened his mouth to say that of course they should pull the plug, this was insane. But at that moment he caught sight of Isobel, who had stopped rocking in her chair and now looked just immobilized. Isobel’s eyes were furrowed and she was inhaling through her nose with her lips pulled inward, and you could almost believe she was about to bust out laughing. Her dishwater bob was getting shaggy and her white wrists were like saplings. Isobel looked so breakable. Laurence felt a stabbing cardiothoracic pain, like a more grinding version of a panic attack, at the thought of hurting Isobel.