Hieroglyph (82 page)

Jethro went and sat in the front row, and a big screen appeared up front. A skinny woman in a charcoal-gray suit got up and used her Robo-Bop to control a presentation.

“Thanks, Jethro,” the stick-figure woman, Zoe, said. She had perfect Amanda Seyfried hair. “It really comes down to what we call product versatility.” She clicked onto a picture of a nice midrange car with a swooshy device bolted to its roof. “Take the Car-Dingo, for example. What does it do?”

Various people raised their hands and offered slogans like, “It makes a Prius feel like a muscle car,” or “It awesomeizes your ride.”

“Exactly!” Zoe smiled. She clicked the next slide over, and proprietary specs for the Car-Dingo came up. They were so proprietary, Bruce had never seen them. Bruce struggled to make sense of all those extra connections and loops, going right into the engine. She pulled up similar specs for the ThunderNet tower, full of secret logic. Another screen showed all those nonsensical Robo-Bop menus, suddenly unlocking and making sense.

“Wait a minute.” Bruce was the only one standing up, besides Zoe. “So you're saying all these devices were dual-function all this time? And in all the hundreds of hellish product meetings I've sat through, you never once mentioned this fact?”

“Bruce,” Jethro said from the front row, “we've got a little thing at DiZi called the Culture of Listening. That means no interrupting the presentation until it's finished, or no artisanal cookies for you.”

Bruce sighed and climbed over someone to find a seat and listened to another hour of corporate “buzzsaws.” At one point, he could have sworn Zoe said something about “end-user velocitization.” One thing Bruce did understand, in the gathering haze: even though DiZi officially frowned on the cheap knockoffs of its products littering the third world, the company had gone to great lengths to make sure those illicit copies used the exact same specs as the real items.

Just as Bruce was passing out from boredom, Jethro thanked Zoe and said, “Now let's give Bruce the floor. Bruce, come on down.” Bruce had to thump his own legs to wake them up, and when he reached the front, he'd forgotten all the things he was dying to say an hour earlier. The top echelons of DiZi management stared, waiting for him to say something.

“Uh.” Bruce's head hurt. “What do you want me to say?”

Jethro stood up next to Bruce and put an arm around him. “This is where your Crisis of Conscience comes in, Bruce dude. Let's just say, as a thought embellishment, that we could fix it.” (“Thought embellishment” was one of Jethro's buzzsaws.)

“Fix . . . it?”

Jethro handed Bruce a Robo-Bop with a pulsing Yes/No screen. “It's all on you, buddy. You push Yes, we can make a difference here. There'll be some disruptions, people might be a mite inconvenienced, but we can ameliorate some of the problems. Push No, and things go on as they are. But bear in mind—if you push Yes, you're the one who has to explain to the people.”

Bruce still didn't understand what he was saying yes to, but he hardly cared. He jabbed the Yes button with his right thumb. Jethro whooped and led him to the executive elevator, so they could watch the fun from the roof.

“It should be almost instantaneous,” Jethro said over his shoulder as he hustled into the lift. “Thanks to our patented ‘snaggletooth' technology that makes all our products talk to each other. It'll travel around the world like a wave. It's part of our enterprise philosophy of Why-Not-Now.”

The elevator lurched upward, and in moments they had reached the roof. “It's starting,” Jethro said. He pointed to the nearest ThunderNet tower. The sleek lid was opening up like petals, until the top resembled a solar dish. And a strange haze was gathering over the top of it.

“This technology has been around for years, but everybody said it was too expensive to deploy on a widespread basis,” Jethro said with a wink. “In a nutshell, the tops of the towers contain a photocatalyst material, which turns the CO
₂
and water in the atmosphere into methane and oxygen. The methane gets stored and used as an extra power source. The tower is also spraying an amine solution into the air that captures more CO
₂
via a proprietary chemical reaction. That's why the ThunderNets had to be so pricey.”

© 2013, Lauren Pedersen / ASU

Just then, Bruce felt a vibration from his own Robo-Bop. He looked down and was startled to see a detailed audit of Bruce's personal carbon footprint—including everything he'd done to waste energy in the past five years.

“And hey, look at the parking lot,” Jethro said. All the Car-Dingos were reconfiguring themselves, snaking new connections into the car engines. “We're getting most of those vehicles as close to zero emissions as possible, using amines that capture the cars' CO
₂
. You can use the waste heat from the engine to regenerate the amines.” But the real gain would come from the car's GPS, which would start nudging people to carpool whenever another Car-Dingo user was going to the same destination, using a “packet-switching” model to optimize everyone's commute for greenness. Refuse to carpool, and your car might start developing engine trouble—and the Car-Dingos, Bruce knew, were almost impossible to remove.

As for the Crados? Jethro explained how they were already hacking into every appliance in people's homes, to make them energy-efficient whether people wanted them to be or not.

Zoe was standing at Bruce's elbow. “It's too late to stop the trend, or even reverse all the effects,” she said over the din of the ThunderNet towers. “But we can slow it drastically, and our most optimistic projections show major improvements in the medium term.”

“So all this time—all this hellish time—you had the means to make a difference, and you just . . . sat on it?” Bruce said. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

“We wanted to wait until we had full product penetration.” Jethro had to raise his voice now; the ThunderNet towers were actually thundering for the first time ever. “And we needed people to be ready. If we had just come out and told the truth about what our products actually did, people would rather die than buy them. Even after Manhattan and Florida. We couldn't give them away. But if we claimed to be making overpriced, wasteful pieces of crap that destroy the environment? Then everybody would need to own two of them.”

“So my Crisis of Conscience—” Bruce could only finish that sentence by wheeling his arms.

“We figured the day when you no longer gave a shit about your own future would be the day when people might accept this,” Jethro said, patting Bruce on the back like a father, even though he was younger.

“Well, thanks for the mind games.” Bruce had to shout now. “I'm going to go explore something I call my culture of drunkenness.”

“You can't leave, Bruce,” Jethro yelled in his ear. “This is going to be a major disruption, everyone's gadgets going nuts at once. There will be violence and wholesale destruction of public property. There will be chain saw rampages. There may even be Twitter snark. We need you to be out in front on this, explaining it to the people.”

Bruce looked out at the dusk, red-and-black clouds churning as millions of ThunderNet towers blasted them with scrubber beams. Even over that racket, the chorus of car horns and shouts as people's Car-Dingos suddenly had minds of their own started to ring from the highway. Bruce turned and looked into the gleam of his boss's schoolmaster specs. “Fuck you, man,” he said. Followed a moment later by, “I'll do it.”

“We knew we could count on you.” Jethro turned to the half-dozen or so executives cluttering the roof deck behind him. “Big hand for Bruce, everybody.” Bruce waited until they were done clapping, then leaned over the railing and puked his guts out.

Bojanovic/Shutterstock, Inc. & Electra/Shutterstock, Inc. (SUV & coyote)

STORY NOTES
—Charlie Jane Anders

Until recently, I was always intimidated to approach real scientists and experts to check the science in my stories. I figured they're busy people and don't have time to worry about my weird flights of fancy.

But I've found lately that scientists really like getting the chance to have input into science fiction, and working on my story in
Hieroglyph
really helped me get over my fear of being an annoying author.

For my story in
Hieroglyph
, I was hoping to pull off a fake-out—you think the story is going in one, fairly depressing, direction, and then it suddenly turns out to be something quite different. And for that to work, I needed there to be some technologies for mitigating environmental damage embedded in these apparently useless gadgets that everybody is carrying around.

So the great part about writing, and especially revising, this story was getting to have a crash course in different technologies that could absorb carbon. I exchanged tons of e-mails with two people at Arizona State University: Braden Allenby, Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics, and Jean Andino, Senior Sustainability Scholar with the Global Institute of Sustainability. And I also e-mailed a lot with Jez Weston, a policy analyst with the Royal Society in New Zealand who had given a talk about geoengineering at Nerd Nite Wellington.

The thing I learned from all three of these experts was that doing things like reducing a car's emissions below a certain point, and capturing carbon from the air, are difficult and expensive to do—but there are things that could be coming along, even if they would be expensive to implement. (Perfect for the overpriced gadgets in my story.) Braden Allenby suggested you could spray sodium hydroxide into the air and capture carbon for storage underground. And then Jean Andino came up with an even better solution—you could use liquid amines to capture the carbon, with solar power used to regenerate them. Dr. Andino, who had done a lot of work for Ford Motor Corporation, also suggested a technology that uses a photocatalyst to convert CO
₂
emissions and water into methane, which could be used as a fuel source. You could even capture the CO
₂
within the car's cabin.

This was a really fun research gig, and a chance to learn something about the cutting-edge technologies that could help save the planet someday.

“THE DAY IT ALL ENDED”: THOUGHTS OF A TECHNOLOGIST
—Brad Allenby

Brad Allenby, an engineer and ethicist at Arizona State University, discusses the radical worldview of “The Day It All Ended” at hieroglyph.asu.edu/DiZi.

TECHNICAL PAPER
—Carbon Capture

Read an article from the peer-reviewed
Journal of Materials Chemistry A
about the production of solar fuels, coauthored by “The Day It All Ended” collaborator Jean Andino of Arizona State University, at hieroglyph.asu.edu/DiZi.

TALL TOWER

Bruce Sterling

MY WIFE WENT TO
the Tall Tower. She left for orbit, never to return to Earth. Gretchen so wanted to go on up there.

I got pretty lonesome. The Tall Tower commenced to weigh heavy on my troubled mind.

To dream big and to build big, that was the big idea of the Tall Tower. To build a tower that touched the cosmos. In weightlessness they build bigger than the green Earth can allow.

Big dreams do come true sometimes, but time goes on, despite the size of dreams. I'd fulfilled some dreams. A loving bride, two fine sons. I'd gotten in my full share of trout fishing and campfire songs with the guitar.

I had built a home, and I'd run a good business, too. I was a historical tour guide by trade. My horse, Levi, and I led a mule train of tourists together, down into an old-time copper mine.

That hole in Arizona was one of the biggest structures humankind had ever created—and in my own day, it was a mighty ghost mine, a feral wilderness of landslides, rattlesnakes, and cactus.

Levi and I made that Arizona copper mine into an exotic tour business. We kitted out for every season in our heritage cowboy gear: me with my white hat and blue jeans, plus a six-shooter and a lariat. Levi sported his shiny silver saddle and his blue-and-white-striped horse blanket.