The O.D. (41 page)

(Seven seconds)

“The questions you have to ask yourselves today, and then take back to your respective governments, are,

“Do we admit that these problems exist?

“If so, do we accept that we need to meet them with drastic action?

“If yes, do we believe that Dismantlement is the answer?

“If yes, do we accept the premise that only a guide of the cleanest, purest impartiality can steer us down the road of Dismantlement fairly and logically?

“If so, are we willing to place our future survival in the hands of The O.D.?

“Finally, do we have faith in the Exemplarship of Eydos, or are we to continue stumbling in the dark – aimless and disunited – until circumstances take us down?” The final five words, spoken as the man moved away from the podium, were delivered in a kind of mournful song.

The atmosphere in the hall was electric, and Lim Lin Hok, not wishing to lose a single watt, moved quickly to the lectern. Even though the conference was being broadcast live to an audience of billions, five journalists were making for the exits and their satellite video phones, having decided that Carlos Laurenço’s return from the dead, and not The O.D., was the biggest news story of the day and deserved their personal commentary.

The Chair of the Eydos Summit stood patiently at the lectern waiting for the thunder around her to subside. When the dome eventually fell silent, she began to speak in the calm, measured tones for which she was famous. “So, what is to be done? Protocol says we should debate Dismantlement, but logic says debate would merely suffocate this baby at birth, as it did to any proposal of weight in Kyoto, Rio and all the other summits before. To consider the spirit – not the details, but the
spirit
of Dismantlement you need no data, and no time for rumination. Dismantlement is not something that can be argued or watered down. Its basic premise is incontrovertible. Nor can Dismantlement be put into a simple draft or protocol. To do so would take years we don’t have. The established code of summits such as this has proved to be impotent, so, as Chair, I am changing it. A simple Yes or No to the premise put forward by Eydos is all we need today.
Agree
in
principle
to the 250 year task of dismantling and rebuilding our world… or don’t. If the vote today is Yes, then tomorrow you can take it home for ratification by your respective governments. The day after that, we can start working on the details and writing the policies that will turn us around and lead us away from the precipice.”

The die-hard debaters in the audience and the sticklers for protocol were finding Lim’s dictatorial stance and unashamed partiality hard to swallow. Others, more aware of what lay beyond and ahead, were thinking, why the hell not? Lim raised her hands to dampen the din. “Let me quote from a religious book. Which book and which religion is of no consequence. A wise word is a wise word. It said, ‘Pay attention to your thoughts, because they become words. Pay attention to your words, because they become actions. Pay attention to your actions, because they become habits. Pay attention to your habits, because they become your character. Pay attention to your character, because it is your
fate
.’

“The problems we all face together are bigger than people, bigger than political parties and bigger than countries. So are the solutions. As Conference Chair I cannot in all good conscience remain impartial on this matter. I urge you to give your unqualified support to The Office of Dismantlement. Take consensus home with you and let the work begin. Vote
now
.”

For this conference, each delegation had Yay and Nay buttons connected wirelessly to a control box mounted on the wall of the dome six feet above the floor. Out of this box, two calibrated LED tubes, one red, one green, rose in an arc to a point just short of the top of the dome. Over the previous six days, the system had responded perfectly to the motions thrown at it. A small number of countries always knew which way they would vote on any given issue. The rest would wait and see how the votes were going before casting their own. As a result, there would be two surges. The first would show a bias low down towards either red or green, followed a few seconds later by the dominant colour surging towards the top of the dome. A third button would allow a country to clear the vote it had just cast and change it, so, in the ten minutes allowed before vote casting was locked, there would often be oscillation between the red and green LEDs. Such was the case now.

Ten seconds after Lim’s call for the vote, the green tube was on two and the red tube on eight… then five… then eight again. The green tube went up to five, then dropped back to three. With over 180 countries yet to vote, the weight of unexpressed confusion in the dome was taking its toll on Pilot, whose skin had taken on a ghostly pallor. Macushla Mara looked worriedly at her partner as the Secretary General called him up to the stage to stand beside her.

Pilot walked over and took position next to Lim, who was a full head shorter. He peered towards the press gallery looking for a friendly face and caught Austin Palmer’s eye. Palmer winked at him and then began tapping feverishly on his tablet. Hoping to glean some kind of reaction from the sea of delegates washing against the cliff of the stage, Pilot could just make out the United States delegation at the far back. Only Paul Dasching was transmitting positivity in the way he was standing and holding court, voting box in hand, finger on button. But which button? As a potential Presidential candidate, would he ever be able to back Dismantlement and cast a Yay vote? Soon, Dasching was looking as worried as the rest of them. The voting process itself was taking on the appearance of red and green yo-yos dancing in the lower reaches of the tubes.

Pilot transferred his gaze from the red and green undulating tubes to the Eydos delegation in the front row. Macushla’s face gave little away, but her eyes were sparkling. At the corners of her mouth, he detected the faintest smile. Lim and Pilot stood like ramrods, staring defiantly and challengingly at the delegates below them. Their afternoon’s work was finished and there was nothing more they could do.

The Conference effectively ended at this point.

At ten minutes to six on that strange Friday afternoon, the world turned over…

Everything happened simultaneously. The full three hundred and sixty degrees of the horizon fell away as Pilot’s dais rose up on a vast plateau of emotion.
I
think
it
is
tidal
wave
. Dubravka Horvat’s words, spoken over a decade before, popped up in his mind from nowhere. Arrayed before him, a centillion brain cells in four thousand skulls were agitating like molecules over a flame, but it wasn’t a vocalized reaction. The hall itself was strangely quiet – the hell, all in Lonnie Pilot’s head.

The upward acceleration lasted for twenty seconds. Pilot’s stomach told him when he had reached the peak of positivity in the auditorium and told him again, a few seconds later, that the plateau was collapsing beneath him and that he was now dropping at a frightening speed, without support, straight down towards a trough of negativity.

Midway through his fall, he found himself looking
up
at the delegates in favour of Dismantlement and
down
at those against. What he was experiencing was the solidification of world opinion into two separate camps. It was futile for him to have expected it to be any other way. The human race had always been a double sided coin. Nort
h−
south, yi
n−
yang, ho
t−
cold, sensitiv
e−
thick, enlightene
d−
lights out, have
s−
have-nots. These opposing walls of knotted resolve seemed to be heading towards each other with irresistible force, swallowing up any smaller waves of indecision standing in their path. The two were merging to create a maelstrom of vacillation. Fastening his attention on some cheering Danish delegates swirling at the top of the whirlpool, he followed it round and watched it disappear inside the funnel.

A split second later, another wave hit him with a ferocity that nearly rendered him unconscious. Mental exhaustion had weakened him to the point that he could no longer keep the gates closed against the onslaught of information coming his way. The ‘noise’ was deafening and, for the second time in his life, Pilot felt fear.

To everyone else present, however, the sea was flat calm. Silence hung over the auditorium like a wet blanket. To these people, Dismantlement was far too significant and consequential to demean with applause, far too logical and sensible to dismiss with boos, yet far too large and terrifying to embrace with conviction. What Pilot alone was experiencing was the utter violence of their indecision. What he also knew was that Dismantlement would never fly with
these
people. The final vote was locked at just ten votes cast out of a possible 19
3−
Ireland, Israel, Iceland, Bhutan and Tonga in the green tube; India, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Brunei and North Korea in the red. What of the others? The delegates of the Eydos Summit, representing a global constituency of nine billion people, just looked vacuously at one another like airline passengers whose cabin roof has been ripped off at twelve thousand feet.

Lonnie Pilot, meanwhile, the man who had blown their cover, could only stand helpless as row upon row of stampeding horses bore down on the soft and vulnerable inner sanctums of his mind…

There was no way anyone at the Eydos Summit could have known what was happening beyond the Mother Dome. In the TV lounge of Scheveningen Prison, Henry Bradingbrooke watched the broadcast with lines of concern etched in his brow. He couldn’t tell if they had won or had lost. No-one could. But underneath this doubt, a seed of hope had been sown by Pilot’s and Lim’s empassioned presentations, aided by those of a serving-and an ex-president. And it had germinated in front of computer, television and smartphone screens throughout the world. A billion people – two-thirds of the live global audience – were creating the beginnings of their own wave. A wave of immense, but as yet untapped power coursing freely and strongly in the direction of Jane Lavery’s bonsai tree. Whatever arguments against The O.D. their representatives might bring home from Eydos would be inconsequential in the face of this human tsunami. Control of their, and civilization’s destiny would be wrested from the hands of the weak and the blinkered and passed to those of the strong and the visionary.

Possibly
.

And possibly, the human world would run with its one last chance at survival.

XXVI

The southwesterly wind, heavy with tropical heat, even at this early hour, collided headlong with a massive cold front pushing down from Scandinavia and threw darkly menacing cumulus clouds up into a four mile high iron curtain, bisecting the island length-wise. Innocently caught between the two worlds of darkness and light, Eydos lay in the Bay of Biscay like a quarter moon. In the Nillin basin, all was calm and bright. The six hundred foot basin rim shut out the gales on the one side and hid all but the upper reaches of the growing cloud bank on the other. Thickets of gorse thrashed in the wind atop the rim, while the grasses in its lee stood motionless.

It was the start of another summer’s day in the Bay of Biscay, a day already being noisily celebrated by hundreds of thousands of seabirds bivouacked on the ledges and in the crevices of the island’s two-hundred-mile western wall. Whitecaps bucked along the entire length of this coast while what seemed like whitecaps, but were in actuality patches of guano, climbed up the cliffs from the sea below.

A musty fragrance filled the air, seasoned by the ever-present salt spray and soured by occasional pockets of guano fumes rising off a cliff face still warm from the day before.

In the water at the entrance to Blasius Fjord, a family of seals bobbed around in the angry waves, looking out to sea, waiting…

Things were not as the seals liked them. The fish they would normally have breakfasted on were nowhere to be found. Added to which was the unusual tickling sensation attacking the sensitive skin around their ear holes, and the pressure on their bellies normally associated only with deep swims. To creatures programmed from birth by the natural signals of their surroundings, the messages they were now receiving just served to confuse. And so they waited. In the circumstances it was the only thing they could do.

Action, albeit no answer, was not long in coming.

At an unseen, unheard signal, half a million nesting seabirds threw themselves off the cliff and into flight as if the entire island had just been electrified. At the exact same moment the seals dived under the surface like a team of synchronized swimmers, only to arise some moments later in disarray and more befuddled than ever.

A lone mollusk, attached for the past four months to a point on the rock just a few metres under the waterline, could sense through its primitive nervous system a slight change in its condition. The mollusk had no way of knowing what that change was – that the waterline was now nearly a meter
below
it.

Inside Mirko Soldo’s cistern, lightly illuminated through a crack in the roof, tiny waves reflected in miniature what was happening in the sea beyond and forced a lone water-boatman to row frantically for its life. There was no haven for this insect, however, and it was buffeted first one way, then another, then another – tossed between waves formed not from any lateral force, but from one directly below. For several minutes the water-boatman weathered the storm in ignorance, but with great skill. Then, as suddenly as the disturbance had begun, it subsided.

Half a mile away, a white butterfly slalomed along a row of cottonwoods and eventually alighted on a honeysuckle flower. The honeysuckle was the most common bush now in these parts and, for several weeks every year during flowering, gave the island a distinct creamy glow. This day, the honeysuckle flowers were probably at the height of their beauty.

It seemed only fitting that Eydos should die wearing her best clothes.

The butterfly took to the air again, fluttered about for several seconds, then landed on another flower. As the insect’s legs came into contact with the flower’s sepals, Lonnie Pilot’s ‘spam’ exploded.

With a shockwave that felled dead trees as far away as Brittany, half a million cubic miles of igneous rock figuratively rolled over in bed, first rising twenty to thirty metres, then dropping between two hundred and a thousand metres, pulling the blanket of the Atlantic Ocean over its shoulders as it did so. Blasius Fjord, once a turbidity canyon, and soon to be one again, simultaneously opened at the seams on the upward movement, then ground closed again on the downward.

The mollusk was ripped from its home on the rock and sucked down to a fatal depth by the sinking island, as were thousands of seals, field mice, wild sheep and fledgling gannets.

The white butterfly, its entire world pulled from under its legs, flew in circles for the rest of its life before waltzing dead into the boiling sea below.

Three hundred and eight years after her birth, Eydos returned once again to her resting place under the sea. Seven minutes was all it took.

Lonnie Pilot and Macushla Mara were long gone. And the outside world bore no resemblance to the one they had left. Civilization had achieved what destiny had prescribed it from the fashioning of the very first tool.

Among the flotsam and jetsam, the feathers and the broken branches left by the island, five ancient flatdeck barges, one with a partial aircraft fuselage on its deck, tossed heavily for several minutes before sinking – their rusted, holed hulls unable to repel the churning seas around them.

Several miles to the southwest, three egg-shaped lifepods in various states of deterioration were also fighting the maelstrom’s attempts to suck them down. Then, forty minutes after the epileptic sea had flattened, something else happened… The wheel on the hatch of one of the pods began to rotate anticlockwise.