“The mist boats were going to be Gaia’s big silver bullet,” Bish said, leading Roo and Anika down the stairs. “Cohen and Greer had been holding press conferences about how bad shit was getting out there. Glaciers disappearing, storms ripping through the Atlantic coast, Caribbean. Typhoons getting worse. The Arctic melting.”
Bish led them through a long corridor away from the bridge superstructure, deep inside the hull.
“Gaia doesn’t have a formal position about whether the warming trends were human caused or not,” Roo said.
“That’s just PR to protect them from conservatives and religious Midwesterners in the U.S. during their start-up phase. Greer and Cohen figured that if they could build what we needed and let businesses solve the issue, they could route around that shit. But the political will for Western nations to get big serious faded, man.”
“Westerners get all the benefits,” Anika said. More land in Canada, Russia, and Northern Europe. Greenland opened up. Iceland became even more comfortable. New England and Britain are suffering cold snaps now that the Gulf Stream is being forced lower by the billions of tons of Arctic fresh water dumped into the North Atlantic, but they were the minority.
The Midwest and Siberia did just fine.
Anika looked at Roo. “All those people in the equators without water, suffering heavy weather and drought and less arable land? It’s not happening in their backyard, it’s not their problem. That is what the politicians say.”
Bish stopped in front of a door. “So the mist boats help clouds form and bounce sunlight back into space. But Gaia is blocked by governments who maintain that it’s an attempt at radical geoengineering, and that we can’t model the unanticipated side effects.”
Roo folded his arms. “They banned them in the Caribbean. It rained saltwater. It’s not good for the plants, yeah?”
“So then the question is,” Bish said, opening the doors behind him slowly, “if you’re the leaders of a multitrillion-dollar corporation, how do you reverse a global trend, when many people don’t want you to even try? When many who believe there is a problem have thrown up their hands at the enormity of it? When many believe there is no problem?”
The doors clanged open, showing only the utter darkness of the ship’s holds ahead.
“You have to become … slightly mad.” Bish moved toward a control panel. “There are futurists and space nuts who talk about ‘terraforming’ another planet: making an uninhabitable planet habitable for humans. Like Mars. Drop some comets on it, add atmosphere. Put a giant mirror in orbit to heat it up a bit. Big idea stuff. So Ivan Cohen and Paige Greer decided that they would motherfucking terraform Earth to stop it from turning into Venus. So when they took over this factory ship, they started making something new, and filling holds all over the Arctic with these things.”
He tapped a code on the panel, and the lights came on.
For a long moment Anika couldn’t grasp what she was looking at—until she focused her eyes on the smallest unit in front of her.
She walked forward, and out of a solid wall of shiny metal globules, plucked out a transparent ball the size of her fist.
“I’ve seen one of these before,” she whispered.
“For six months Gaia has been churning these things out,” Bish said. He looked morose. “I was supposed to get an exclusive, in exchange for silence, but this morning the story broke. Someone working in a factory finally leaked video of the things. Now everyone’s figuring out what they’re for.”
Roo, the information gatherer, held a sphere up, looking into the shiny insides. There was a mirror inside, gimbaled and motorized so it could adjust itself to face any direction it wanted. “What do they do?”
Bish looked at the two of them as if they were stupid. “It’s a lot more effective than a fucking mist cloud, right? And it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to build a giant mirror in space to deflect some of the sun’s heat. Millions of these things, floating around. Mini-blimps. They’re programmable, little chips inside that cost no more than a penny. You can direct the motored mirrors to face any direction, so in a cloud of them you can use heat to let them rise up or fall, so they can use wind and weather patterns to move around as a unit. They’re shiftable into one giant clump of a mirror, able to focus heat or deflect it where needed. Gaia created their silver bullet, man.”
He held his hands out and walked into the silvered, jostling mass of floating balls. The tinkling sound of hundreds of floating spheres moved with him as he was enveloped by them.
Overhead, the hatch ground to a halt.
The sound of rattling, hundreds of tiny balls slapping against the walls and each other, filled the hold.
“They initially planned to release them a hold at a time,” shouted Bish from inside the now slowly rising mass of spheres escaping the bonds of the hold. “So they could inject them into the upper atmosphere over the Arctic slowly so as not to alarm satellites and radar systems.”
“Or get caught,” Roo muttered.
“Now they’ll be releasing them as fast as they can,” Bish said.
The spheres were thinning out as they rose into the air. Anika could see through gaps to the sky and the edges of the hatch far over her head. Thousands bumped along the sides of the massive funnels, and then they merged into the streams of mist.
Anika was standing beside a moment in history, she thought. This was amazing. Stunning. This company had been laboring in secret to build something vast right here in the Arctic Circle.
Something that would change the world.
For a moment, her head craned back looking at this exodus of tiny machines into the sky, she wasn’t wondering about radiation, revenge, or the cold. She just stared at the metal, glinting cloud in wonder as it rose to reach the dark clouds far overhead.
Roo grabbed her arm. He didn’t look awed. He looked scared. “We have to get off this ship right fast,” he hissed.
“What are you talking about?”
“Those navy ships? They reacting to this. We don’t want to be on none of these ships. No telling how they thinking to react.”
Bish walked across the empty hold floor, sending several straggling spheres that couldn’t quite rise into the air wobbling her way. “You think they’d fire on us?”
“I can’t believe they’d do that,” Anika said.
“I don’t know.” Bish rubbed his forehead. “But why risk it? Take us with you to Pleasure Island. I don’t have anything left here. I’ve lost six months, we have the sphere launch video now. It’s all I need if I’m not getting an exclusive.”
“What about crew? Is there anyone else on board?” Anika asked.
“Like I said, automated and on autopilot,” Bish said.
Roo had his new phone already up to his ear. “Chandra? Spin up, we leaving now.”