In the Courts of the Sun (20 page)

“Earlier today, she conducted an emotional
in
terview with a distraught man in Overtown . . . who lost his wife in the tragedy.”
“How are you doing, sir?”
Anne-Marie asked. The guy said something but he was crying and I couldn’t hear what it was.
“And where is your home?”
she asked.
“It’s gone, my wife and I were, and we try to get out, and, uh, and, uh, the fire came . . .”
“And who’s with you now?”
“Nobody.”
“And where is your wife now?”
“Nobody there.”
“ Where is your wife now?”
“She not here. She gone.”
“You can’t find your wife?”
“I, I tried, I tried to hold her hand, and she on fire, and it’s too hot, in there, I can’t hold her. She said go on, you take care of the kids. And the grandkids . . .”
“Okay, sir, what’s your wife’s name in case we can put this out there?”
“There no point, she gone.”
“And what’s your wife’s name?”
“Lakerisha.”
“And what’s your name?”
“JC Calhoun.”
“Well, just in case rescue workers find a Lakerisha Calhoun—”
“There no point, she gone. She all burned up. She was my little . . . she all burned up . . .”
“Reporters face a
diff
icult and e
mo
tional balancing act,”
Brent’s voice said.
“Anne-Marie, thanks for joining us tonight. Now, confronting situations like this—here just now we were watching you, Anne-Marie, out
on
the front lines, and—”
“Could you kill the sound on that?” Marena said. Someone did. “Thanks.”
We all looked at each other in the fresh silence.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m interrupting. I was just seeing if they had any Peeps yet.”
“No, stick around,” Marena said. “There’s no news on the news anyway.”
“Okay.”
“You’ve met Laurence Boyle,” she said, “right?”
He said hello. He was that elder from the airstrip. Probably she’d tried to introduce me to him and I’d somehow missed it, the way I do.
“Laurence is the VP of R and D for Warren Research,” Marena said. “And you know Taro and Tony.”
We all said hi and that it was good we were okay. Taro looked tired. Sic looked absurdly healthy.
“And this is Michael Weiner.” She indicated a mountain of flesh on her right side.
“Good to meet you,” he said in his deep New Zealander public-speaking-coached voice. They say TV adds twenty pounds, but in his case it seemed to have taken a hundred pounds off. He was huge. He looked like that new-age health guy, Andrew Weil, with that same sort of humungo beard and big shiny pate, like his head was upside down. Well, at least he has a look, I thought. He stretched his foreleg across Marena’s chest and crushed my thankfully expendable hand.
“Okay,” Marena said. “What were you saying, Taro?”
Taro usually paused for a moment before he spoke, and he did this time. But instead of waiting, Michael Weiner broke in ahead of him.
“Doom Soon,” Michael Weiner said. “Crossbow effect.”

[14]

“R
ight,”Marena said.
“Sorry, I still don’t get what those are,” Laurence Boyle said.
“Taro was saying that—”
“Hang on,” Boyle said. He was stylusing at his phone. “Listen, I’m going to start recording again for a transcript for Elder Lindsay. Just in case anybody thinks of something. Is that all right with everyone?”
Everybody nodded. “Okay, everybody please speak clearly. And I’ll make sure he plays it into his good ear.” As is the custom in the U.S., he laughed heartily at his own nonjoke. “And watch the profanity, okay?” He touched his phone. “All right, we’re on. Okay. What was that about again?”
“The idea is that the crossbow effect enables the Doom Sooners—what do you guys call them?” Michael asked.
“Doomsters,” Taro said.
“Right, and that whoever did it, he may have thought he was going to destroy the whole human species,” Weiner said. “And the theory is that whoever engineered the polonium dispersal may not have been just one person, but they probably aren’t a lot of people or they’d have already have been identified.”
“Yeah,” Marena said, “the doomster thing—the point is that there are more and more people like that.”
“More and more people like what?” Boyle asked.
“That is, more and more people who have both a desire to cause a lot of damage and the means to cause a lot of damage,” she said. “It’s Taro’s idea.”
“No, thank you, but no,” Taro said. “It is not my idea. The doomster issue is an increasingly common problem in the field of catastrophe modeling.”
“Well, okay, then,” Boyle said, watching the computer transcript read out on his phone. “Professor Mora, can you briefly tell us what it’s about?”
Taro paused.
“Here, have this one,” Marena whispered to me. “I haven’t touched it.” She slid a cardboard mug of stuff into my zone of the table.
“Well, a potential doomster,” Taro said, “that is someone who would like to kill everyone on earth, including himself. An actual doomster would be one of these people who finds the means to do this.”
“Okay,” Boyle said, “but there can’t be many people who are that crazy.”
“Well, there have been similar attempts,” Taro said. His voice was getting stronger as he went into lecture-hall mode. “In Pakistan, twice, and then in Oaxaca. And there were other incidents during the Cold War, and probably several we do not know about.”
“Maybe,” Boyle said.
“But the issue is not exactly whether there are, say, ten people who are that crazy, or ten thousand. The problem is that at some point, one of those people will acquire the means to carry out his desire. And according to the crossbow effect, this will happen sooner rather than later.”
“You’d better explain that term again too,” Marena said.
“Excuse me?” Taro asked.
“The crossbow effect.”
“Oh,” he said. “ Yes. In, in I think 1139, the Lateran Council tried to outlaw crossbows because they said they’d lead to, say, the end of civilization. Because now an ordinary soldier could kill an armored knight on horseback.”
“But then crossbows actually didn’t cause much of anything,” Marena said.
“No,” Taro said. “And then later, in the 1960s, munitions manufacturers used to cite that example to say how people should not worry so much about nuclear weapons.”
“Okay,” Boyle said.
“However, crossbows only killed one person at a time,” Taro said. “And per shot, they were quite expensive for the period. Nuclear weapons killed many people, with much less cost per death. Say a few dollars per person. But they were still quite expensive. Now, today, however, we have many types of weapons that are devastating and cheap. And easy to manufacture. This is what happened in Iraq. The war games the U.S. used to plan the occupation did not reckon with that technology, that is, plastic explosives, even dynamite was coming into the hands of so many people. The Pentagon was using older models, from the days when plastic explosives were expensive. And they were hard to get. But by the 2000s, C4 was very cheap and easily available. So a single attacker could kill many people and do millions of dollars of damage for a moderate cost. Another way you could put it is that the massive democratization of the technology intersected with a growing population of potential users. That is, suicide bombers.”
“Okay, maybe,” Boyle said. “But they never manage to destroy
everything
. And besides, there can’t be many people who want to do something like that.”
Taro paused. I sipped at the stuff in the mug. It was freeze-dried and flash-reanimated green tea with tapioca balls. Kiddie drinks. Whatevs.
“Almost anyone has experienced a moment in their life when they are angry enough to want to end everything,” Taro said. “According to most current models, at some point in the near future, someone who is, say, a little less tightly wrapped, and a little more technically savvy, will feel that way, and he will bring it off.”
“And when’ll that be?” Boyle asked.
“Well, you can graph it,” Taro said. He started sketching on his phone. “In fact, you can even simplify it to just three main vectors. Okay. The thick line,
a,
that is the spread of access to technology. This is derived from a basket of subvariables. Like the rate of growth of the Internet and the rate at which things like explosives or viral vaccine lab setups were declining in price. And then the thin line,
p,
is the number of people that you could consider under stress. That is, at risk of extreme personal radicalization. Doomsters. And the third is
e
. That is the dotted line. It represents growing prevention efforts by the DHS and other police and antiterrorism agencies worldwide.”
He ported the drawing over to the other screens. Marena showed me hers:

“This is a little mathy for me,” Boyle said. Moron, I thought.
“One of the reasons
p
is so steep is because it includes internal feedback. Because of competition. You know how people who go into malls and offices and schools and wherever to shoot people, how lately they are competing with each other for larger and larger body counts? Of course, this is partly because now there are Web sites devoted to keeping score of this. But the point is that it creates a positive-feedback loop. People imitate former successes. And when they see something spectacular, say 9/11, they are inspired to try to top it. So you can chart the rate of growth of the doomster meme, if you like.”
“So what you’re saying is it’s basically fashion,” Marena said. “Like the way, you know, serial killer was the big power profession in the 1990s, and then the thing to be in the zeros was a terrorist, and now the big deal is to be a doomster and take everybody down with you.”
“Wait a minute,” Michael Weiner said. “How many people actually want to destroy everything?”
“That’s right,” Boyle said. “Do you really think people are capable of that?”
“Well, sure,” Marena said, “plenty of people are.”
“Many people have indeed expressed this wish,” Taro said. “And not all of them are in mental institutions or in prison.”
“Twenty years ago the cool thing was writing computer viruses,” Marena said. “Now it’s writing biological ones.”
“So today anyone with even the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in biochemistry and a five-thousand-dollar home lab could probably create a system that could kill off all humans,” Taro said. “And there are over fifty million people worldwide with that level of knowledge; at least a few of them will want to do just that.”
“Well, screw me dead,” Michael Weiner said.
“So the deal is, it used to take a mad scientist,” Marena said. “Now you just need a mad biology major.” She was feeding catchy phrases into the transcript so that Lindsay or whoever could use them at board meetings or whatever.
“You could say that,” Taro said. “Or another way to look at it is, imagine that you gave every single person in the world a doomsday bomb. It is quite certain that somebody would set his off within a few minutes. In fact, many people would probably be rushing to do it because each of them would want to be sure to be the one. And even allowing for more uncertainty than is necessary, these curves still converge on a point close to now. Or even more probably in a few months from now—”
“And that’s right around the Maya ending date,” Marena said.
“Yes. Although it is approximate, of course, in terms of exactly when the event will happen. But it is utterly convincing statistically. That is, it will happen, and within a fairly short time.”
“But there are people trying to stop these guys,” Boyle said.
“Yes,” Taro said, “that is the
e
curve. As you can see, it does not cross either of the others before they intersect.”
“So what we need to do is raise the
e
curve,” Marena said. She’d torn the sides of her paper teacup into a long, precisely spiraled coil on which the circular base bobbed gently up and down.
“We or somebody,” Taro said. “Yes. Sharply.”
No one said anything for a second. I tore open one of the Jelly Belly packs, the ORIGINAL GOURMET Jelly BEAN, it said. TROPICAL fruit blend. I ate three Bellies, started feeling selfish, and dumped the rest of them out on the table. They were irregular spheroids in assorted jewel tones.
“Anyone want some?” I asked.
No one did.
“Well, thanks for your input,” Boyle said. “But I need to just put in here, what everybody’s going to say to this is, there’s always been folks hollering about how the sky’s falling. And they’re always wrong. People are always saying it’s the end of the world. They said the atomic bomb would be the end of the world. People said the year 2000 was going to be the end of the world. They said that accelerator blast in Mexico had created a, a little black hole at the center of the earth, and that
that
was going to be the end of the world.”
He looked around the table. Nobody said anything.
Well, that was a little odd, I thought. I wouldn’t have expected this Boyle guy to be the one to object, just because he was such a Peter Priesthood. Generally, LDS types are a pretty credulous lot. They always think the end of the world is right around the corner. Now the dude was getting all skeptical. Well, maybe I was stereotyping again. Marena opened her mouth and then stopped herself. I had the feeling she’d been about to say something along the lines of “Stuff it, hayseed, you’re out of your depth.” I decided to lighten the mood.
“Let’s not use that term,” I said. “It’s derogatory. Let’s just call it a ‘hole of color.’ ”
Nobody laughed. Or smiled, or anything. I’m an idiot, I thought.
Taro spoke up. “Well, yes. Various people have been telling everyone how the world is about to end, for a long time. And so far, as far as we know the world has not ended. But that is the fallacy of induction. You cannot—”
“Could you explain that term?” Marena put in.
“That is, it is like Russell’s chicken,” he said. “You have simply to ignore an argument that—”
“Sorry, you’d better tell the record what the chicken is,” Marena said.
“Oh,” Taro said. “Yes. Bertrand Russell tells the story of a chicken who believes that the farmer is his friend. After all, the farmer has fed the chicken every day of his life and has never done him any harm. The chicken believes the farmer will go on doing what he has done in the past. However . . . one day the farmer comes in and instead of feeding him, he chops his head off. The point is that induction is often false logic.”
“I’m not sure I or the board am going to get that,” Boyle said.
There was a pause. I looked back at Marena. Her eyes caught mine for a second.
Dammit,
they said.
This Boyle bastard’s trying to shoot us down. He doesn’t want this project to go through, probably because it’s taking budget away from his own bullshit division, so he tagged along and now he’s trying to get us to say something stupid or too optimistic or whatever, and when we do, then he’s going to go running back to Lindsay and spray poison in his ear.
We looked back at Boyle. He started to say something, but Marena interrupted him.
“Look,” she said. “There’s always some nutcase who’s been talking about how a big meteor’s going to hit the earth like, tomorrow. And so far it hasn’t happened. Lately. But if you looked up and saw a big giant meteor coming down, you wouldn’t say it couldn’t hit us just because all those nutcases jumped the gun. Right?”
“Correct,” Taro said. “We need to evaluate the current world situation based only on its merits and not on what other people have said over the years. For instance, another piece of evidence is that we do not find any sign of extraterrestrial civilizations, despite odds in favor of their developing. Quite probably, they all blow themselves up when they get to roughly this stage of technological development.”
Another icky pause manifested itself.
“Hey, look at what you did,” Marena said. I realized she was talking to me.
“What?” I asked.
“They’re all organized.” She tapped on the table. “Check this out,” she said to everybody but me.
I looked down. It was true, I’d arranged the Jelly Bellies in a wide grid, lining them up by color and pattern and, in the case of duplicates, by size.
“Oh, my heck,” Boyle said.
“Oh. Yeah,” I said. “They were messy. They were bugging me.” I swept the shits off the table and into my hand. “Sorry.”
“And one of the best arguments in favor of Doom Soon,” Taro said—going on with his thoughts, as he did—“is simply that we are not encountering any time travelers from the future.”
“Isn’t that because of the Novikov thing?” Boyle asked.
“Well, maybe tha—” Marena broke in.
“No,” Taro said, stopping Marena in midword. “No, that does not apply to us in the present anyway. The most likely reason that there are no visitors from the future is simply because there is no future.”