Containment (6 page)

In the corner of his workspace, Arik could see Dr. Nguyen approach his room in front of someone he didn't recognize. Dr. Nguyen never bothered to knock, so Arik never bothered to open the door for him. Arik saw the surgeon reach out and touch the wall beside the door, then the slats slid apart. Both men entered the room unannounced.

"Hi, Arik," Dr. Nguyen said. He was studying the summary of Arik's physiology on the wall above the bed. "How do you feel this morning?"

Arik had already cleared his workspace and brought up a large blank canvas on which he could type in letters large enough to be read anywhere in the room.

FINE.

"Still not talking?"

Arik was starting to talk again, but his speech was thick and slurred. He preferred to type, although "typing" wasn't quite the right word for it. His sentences appeared instantly on the wall rather than letter-by-letter, word-by-word, and they appeared in much less time than it would take to speak them.

STILL WORKING ON IT.

"Good. Keep practicing. Of course you know Priyanka."

Arik hadn't recognized the small digital image, but he knew Priyanka as soon as he walked into the room. Priyanka was a stocky and handsome Indian man in his early 40's. He was a friend of Arik's father's and would occasionally come to visit when Arik was growing up. If Arik was around, Priyanka always asked him about what he was working on, and unlike other friends of his parents', genuinely seemed interested. Arik didn't know where Priyanka worked which struck him has strange because everyone knew where everyone else worked in V1. How you contributed was an important part of your identity. Arik wasn't sure whether he never knew, or whether he was simply unable to recall. He clearly remembered other details like the fact that Priyanka never stayed for dinner when he came over to visit, always leaving just before they sat down, waving to Arik from the door.

YES. HI PRIYANKA.

"Hello, Arik."

"Arik, Priyanka has some things he needs to talk to you about this morning. Is that ok?"

YES.

"Good. Let me know if you need anything."

Dr. Nguyen left the room as abruptly and unceremoniously as he'd entered. Priyanka looked around for a place to sit, and saw that the only chair in the room was positioned so that he could see Arik's face, but not read the wall. When Arik realized that Priyanka was trying to work out how to make the conversation feel as normal as possible, his workspace shifted to the wall to the right of the bed which allowed it, in addition to Arik's face, to be easily visible from the chair. Priyanka smiled.

"Thank you."

Arik saw that Priyanka was holding a piece of silicon paper. It was partially folded in half, but Arik could see that there were several lines of handwritten text on it. Silicon paper consisted of two very thin sheets of plastic film with several billion tiny magnetically charged beads about a micrometer in diameter pressed between them. The beads were white on one side, and black on the other. A magnetic pen was used to apply either a positive or negative charge which caused either the black or white hemispheres to rotate into view depending on whether you wanted to write or erase. There were much more sophisticated forms of silicon paper — grayscale, color, photochromic, textured, conductive — but all of it was considered obsolete technology. When Gen V was young, they used it for drawing occasionally, and a few of the older Founders preferred to jot down notes, sketch diagrams, or work out equations in silicon notebooks, but it was unusual to see paper in the hands of someone like Priyanka. Information was usually recorded and retrieved by opening up your workspace on any available polymeth surface, or a portable polymeth tablet, if necessary. The only advantage to using an old piece of monochrome silicon paper was that it could be erased, unlike electronically stored data which sometimes had an inconvenient habit of reappearing. Although probably not impossible, there was no practical way of coaxing silicone paper beads back into positions they formerly occupied in order to recover erased data. Besides, you could always just incinerate it.

"Yun tells me that you'll be ready to go home soon."

I HOPE SO.

"So do I. Have you had any trouble with the BCI?"

A LITTLE AT FIRST, BUT NOT ANYMORE.

"Good. That's an extremely rare talent you have."

ALL IT TAKES IS A LIFETIME OF PRACTICE.

Priyanka smiled. He glanced down at his notes, then refolded the paper. Arik could tell that Priyanka was ready to transition from pleasantries to the actual purpose of his visit.

"Arik, before you can go home, I need to ask you some questions."

OK.

"Do you remember anything about the accident?"

NO.

"What's the last thing you do remember?"

MY MEMORY ISN'T LINEAR. IT'S MORE LIKE AN APPLE WITH WORM HOLES IN IT.

"Interesting. In that case, why don't you tell me what you
don't
remember?"

I DON'T REMEMBER MY ENVIRONMENT SUIT MALFUNCTIONING. AND I DON'T REMEMBER WHY I WAS OUTSIDE.

"But you remember going outside?"

PARTIALLY.

"Do you remember ever being outside before?"

NO, BUT I BELIEVE I HAVE BEEN OUTSIDE MANY TIMES.

"Why?"

BECAUSE I DON'T REMEMBER FEELING NERVOUS.

"Has anyone told you what you were doing outside?"

YES.

"What?"

I WAS DISPOSING OF AN EXPERIMENT.

"What was the experiment?"

I DON'T REMEMBER. I KNOW IT WAS RELATED TO MY INVESTIGATION INTO THE FEASIBILITY OF TERRAFORMING VENUS.

"Do you believe that terraforming Venus is possible?"

IT'S PROBABLY POSSIBLE, BUT NOT PRACTICAL.

"Explain that, please."

IT'S THEORETICALLY POSSIBLE TO REPLACE THE EXISTING VENUSIAN ATMOSPHERE WITH ONE THAT WOULD SUPPORT LIFE GIVEN THE PROPER EQUIPMENT AND ENOUGH TIME, BUT THERE'S CURRENTLY NO KNOWN PRACTICAL TECHNIQUE FOR DOING SO.

"But at one time you must have believed it was practical."

I DON'T REMEMBER. I CAN ONLY ASSUME I BELIEVED IT WAS WORTH INVESTIGATING.

"Why don't you believe that it's practical anymore?"

I READ THE RESULTS OF MY EXPERIMENTS.

"What do they indicate?"

GROWING GENETICALLY MODIFIED FLORA IN INDIGENOUS SOIL IS CURRENTLY THE ONLY PRACTICAL TECHNIQUE FOR TERRAFORMING VENUS, HOWEVER THE VENUSIAN SOIL IS STERILE.

"Does it surprise you that the Venusian soil is sterile?"

NO. THAT'S WHAT I WOULD HAVE HYPOTHESIZED.

"Why would you have formed that hypothesis?"

WE KNOW THAT THE VENUSIAN ATMOSPHERE IS FAR TOO HARSH TO SUPPORT OR PERMIT ANY FORM OF LIFE. EVEN THE MOST ROBUST MICROBIAL LIFE AS WE UNDERSTAND IT CAN'T SURVIVE HERE.

Priyanka nodded his head. He seemed satisfied with Arik's answers. Arik hadn't yet put all the pieces together, but it was clear to him that Priyanka and several others were not happy about the fact that he had been outside. Arik wondered if there was something he should be trying to hide.

"Can you tell me what AP is, Arik?"

ARTIFICIAL PHOTOSYNTHESIS.

"What do you think of artificial photosynthesis?"

IT'S A DIFFICULT PROBLEM.

"Would you say that it is a challenge?"

YES.

"Do you believe it is a challenge worthy of your attention?"

YES.

"Do you believe that AP is possible?"

IT IS POSSIBLE. THE QUESTION IS WHETHER IT IS PRACTICAL.

"Ok. Do you believe that it's practical?"

YES.

"Do you believe that AP is more important than terraforming?"

YES. I DON'T BELIEVE TERRAFORMING IS CURRENTLY PRACTICAL.

"Do you recall that your job at the Environment Department is to solve AP?"

YES.

"Do you feel like you're ready to return to work?"

YES.

"Good." Priyanka folded his piece of paper in half again, and pushed it down into his breast pocket. "I have one more very important question for you, Arik. Can you explain to me
why
AP is so important?"

THE ENVIRONMENT DEPARTMENT IS ALREADY PRODUCING OXYGEN BEYOND ITS INTENDED CAPACITY. WE CURRENTLY CAN'T SUPPORT ANY MORE HUMAN LIFE ON VENUS.

"Why can't we just get tanks of compressed air from Earth?"

WE NEED TO REDUCE OUR DEPENDENCY ON EARTH AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

"That's right," Priyanka said. He pushed himself up out of his chair, then smiled. "Well, your memory seems perfectly fine to me. I will recommend that you return to work as soon as possible." He started to move toward the door, but caught himself. "Oh, your father told me the news about Cadie. Congratulations." He watched Arik steadily. "I hope you're not concerned. Sometimes all we need to hasten a breakthrough in our work is for something to lend it a bit of urgency."

Arik's response did not appear. Priyanka looked at the wall for a moment, then back at Arik. Arik forced a smile, then did Priyanka the favor of snapping open the door.

T
he climate crisis on Earth eventually became known as the "Earth Crisis" in order to encompass the prodigious pollution and other environmental problems that had co-evolved alongside climate change. Grassroots movements successfully penetrated most political institutions, but world leaders found themselves in impossible situations; just about every option available to them for addressing the Earth Crisis had serious repercussions on the world's economy. The age of skepticism had long past — there was hardly anyone alive who didn't have first-hand experience with the hardships of living on a hopelessly polluted planet, and news organizations concerned themselves with little else — but it was nearly impossible for an elected official to pass laws and enforce the kinds of sanctions that could have dramatic and measurable effects. There were a few decades of "phased reductions" and "economic incentives" that had so many exemptions and loopholes that everyone knew they never had any real hope of delivering actual results.

But then two things happened that made managing the Earth Crisis both technologically and economically feasible. The first was nuclear fusion, the process of combining atomic particles as distinct from nuclear fission, the process of dividing them. Nuclear fusion occurs naturally in stars as gravitational forces become strong enough to fuse hydrogen atoms, and it also occurs unnaturally in thermonuclear weapons when the energy from a smaller fission bomb is used to ignite a much more massive fusion reaction.

Despite its association with nuclear warfare, fusion is a much safer process than fission. Fusion reactions require such precise conditions that they are inherently self regulating; should anything at all go wrong, the process simply ceases with very little risk of a runaway reaction. Fusion also produces far less radioactive waste than fission which means less reprocessing of spent fuel, and a lower security risk. But the trick with nuclear fusion is starting and maintaining a reaction in a controlled way that, over time, generates more energy than is required to maintain it. Artificially recreating conditions typically only found in the cores of stars is extremely resource-intensive which means that until the fusion reaction is self-sustaining, there is actually a significant net loss of energy.

But once methods for safely and efficiently starting and maintaining reactions were perfected, nuclear fusion power plants began sprouting up like shopping malls all over the industrialized world. The process was then made millions of times more efficient by two discoveries: the first enabled nuclear waste to be reprocessed back into usable fuel, and the second was the discovery of a technique for capturing the energy released by a fusion reaction directly as opposed to using that energy to boil water in order to produce steam which was then used to turn turbines. Over the course of just a few decades, incredible amounts of cheap, pollution-free energy was available almost everywhere in the world.

As a perfect and timely companion to ubiquitous nuclear fusion power, the Nobel Prize winning concept of "End of Life Plans," or ELPs, was adopted by most of the industrialized world. ELPs were simply instructions included with absolutely everything bought or sold that explained what should be done with the item and its packaging in order to discard it. There were, of course, strict guidelines as to what constituted a valid ELP, and strict oversight of those guidelines. Legitimate ELPs included things like returning the item to the manufacturer where it could be refurbished, dropping the item off at a local ELP station which specialized in recycling its components, or, if the material were benign enough, the right colored bin to toss it into.

Consumer adherence to ELPs was also strictly enforced. Anyone caught violating an item's ELP faced fines or community service, and sometimes even very imaginative forms of public punishment involving bright green jumpsuits or yard signs with short shameful slogans. No item could be bought, sold, or imported without a valid and approved ELP which meant that even countries that weren't particularly interested in saving the world needed to comply in order to have access to markets that did. Consumers started selecting products based on the attractiveness of their ELPs which meant that as much thought and engineering had to go into the disposing of a product as producing it. Products that weren't easily recyclable, reusable, returnable, renewable, compostable, convertible, or biodegradable languished on shelves beside their more eco-friendly counterparts. People wanted to feel as good about getting rid of something as they did about acquiring it.

It was initially feared that ELPs would ruin the already-fragile world economy. The theory was that raising costs associated with research and development would cause the prices of goods to increase beyond what the market could bear. In reality, however, ELPs ushered in an entirely new era of sustainable economic growth and prosperity. Even the sharpest and best paid economists underestimated the guilt that the media had gradually installed in consumers for buying goods that were designed to exist in landfills for centuries, but only function for anywhere from a few seconds up to maybe a year. It was true that prices rose, but temporarily; costs were more than offset by the dynamics of guilt-free consumption, and by manufacturers' ability to refurbish and resell end-of-lifed goods. Entirely new industries sprang up around ELP stations. Manufacturing costs gradually decreased as more recycled components were used and fewer raw materials had to be purchased and converted. Many manufacturers transitioned into what became known as
re
-manufacturers. The quality of products even increased so that their components could be reused in future versions. It was common for electronics manufacturers to build very fast processors for their devices, but underclock them so that when they found their way back into their factories through their ELPs, the chips' constraints could simply be removed, and the entire device resold as the next generation, new and improved. ELPs allowed even the biggest and most powerful of multinational corporations to participate in sustainable and responsible manufacturing practices while still feeling like they were being suitably devious.