The endless vessel, p.3
The Endless Vessel, page 3
Not if I have anything to say about it, Lily thought.
She sat up. The woes of the world reasserted themselves. She got out of bed, put water in the kettle, and set it to heat for tea. She wasn’t hungry—and what did it mean to wake up after a full night’s sleep and not be hungry?—but popped a piece of toast in the toaster.
On the mat just outside her apartment door lay the South China Morning Post. It boasted the same headline as the article she’d read on Reed’s phone the night before (THE LOUVRE BURNS; THE WORLD MOURNS) but now accompanied by a huge color photo of the burning museum. The paper went into the recycling bin, unread.
Lily had her toast and tea. She spent a few minutes adding pieces to her latest self-designed Lego model, a particularly complex protein molecule with a pleasingly asymmetrical structure. Once it was complete, she’d add it to the shelf with the others, where delicate structures of brightly colored blocks rested atop tall stacks of boxes containing brutally challenging jigsaw puzzles. The molecule was nearly done, but Lily set it aside after only a few minutes. She didn’t want to be working on puzzles for fun just then. She wanted to work on puzzles for work.
Lily showered and dressed in slacks of light cotton and a linen blouse, the only fabrics that made sense in Hong Kong’s heat and humidity. She wrestled her hair into a messy ponytail, a bundle of wiry orange springs. She threw on sunglasses, grabbed her satchel, stepped into the sensible flats she kept on a mat just outside her door, and joined the crowds making their way down the endless terraces of the gigantic escalator the city had installed to aid with the daily commute down from the Mid-Levels.
In many parts of the world the Grey had greatly reduced the number of people going to work each day as many of the afflicted just stopped leaving their homes. That was not the way in Hong Kong; the huge escalator was as crammed as ever. Industriousness was coded into the city’s stones and bones. Hong Kong’s people were, in many ways, the work they performed.
It was quiet, though. None of the normal loud chatter in Cantonese and Mandarin. People were keeping to themselves. That was another side effect of the Grey, and one Lily didn’t mind. Westerners weren’t uncommon in Hong Kong . . . but few with Lily’s particular combination of characteristics. She was a tall, pale, skinny, curly-haired redhead. Open stares, even the occasional old lady touching her hair on public transit——before the Grey it was constant. Now, though, people didn’t much look at anyone. That suited Lily well enough.
Once off the escalator, it was a quick walk through Central to the MTR and then under the harbor and back up again into Kowloon, just seven stops to Sham Shui Po. Her employer, CarbonGo, Ltd., had its offices on the top floor of an ancient high-rise, its exterior speckled with the musty dark growth endemic to any building steeped in Hong Kong’s steamy tropical miasma. It was an ugly pile and no mistake, but the company needed access to an urban rooftop to test its products, and this was what her boss could afford.
A little bakery sat just down the block from Lily’s building, one of her favorite places in the city. She cut through the pavement traffic, angling toward the shop and slipping inside. She still wasn’t hungry, but knew better than to embark upon a day in her lab without more fuel than a bit of toast and jam. The establishment was tiny, about two meters wide, basically a closet. It housed a waist-high glass case that did double duty as a counter and display for various pastries, rolls, and other delectables.
Standing behind the case was the bakery’s proprietor, a tiny woman in her early twenties sporting a name tag reading Charmaine in careful, hand-lettered cursive. She’d made a go of creating something special here. The shop wasn’t just your standard croissant-and-coffee stand. Everything was cute, everything was unique—a donut stall with patisserie dreams. The cupcakes were architecturally frosted, the Danish had unusual fillings like lychee or pomelo, the bread was so freshly baked, it steamed when you pulled it apart. Each day Charmaine filled the glass case with delights, and then a steady stream of customers ensured it ended up empty, waiting to be restocked the next morning with whatever she dreamed up during her predawn baking hours.
Today, just before 8:00 a.m., those shelves were already nearly bare, and the goods on display looked wilted, old. Grey. Charmaine was behind the counter as always. She looked grey too. Her hair hung lank; she looked as if she had slept in her little baker’s uniform. Her name tag was tilted a bit, askew, and that told Lily more than anything else. The effort required to set it right—so minimal, and yet it remained unfixed, unadjusted.
Usually, everything in this shop spoke of effort and care. A reflection of the mind of its proprietor. Today, Lily thought it was still a reflection, but of a deeply altered mind. Her heart broke. What she might have felt for the Louvre, she was instead feeling here for a little sidewalk bakery on Hai Tan Street. The Louvre, she supposed, was a genocide. This was a murder.
“Good morning,” Lily said.
Charmaine looked up at her, but she wasn’t seeing Lily. Her eyes were looking at something else very far away.
“Hello,” she said, her voice like a splotch of wet cement.
“Can I get . . . ,” Lily began.
None of the pastries looked particularly appetizing, but she couldn’t just walk away.
“How about that sweet bun? And a tea?”
Without responding, Charmaine reached into the case with her bare hand, Lily noticed; normally she would, without exception, use tongs. She put the bun on the glass countertop, which was smeared with icing or oil and scattered with crumbs. A paper cup of tea arrived a moment later, conspicuously not steaming.
“And that’s . . . ,” Lily prompted. “Forty, right?”
Charmaine considered for a slow moment, then nodded.
“Yes,” she said.
Lily pulled out two blue Hong Kong dollar twenties and put them down on the countertop. Charmaine looked at them. Didn’t pick them up.
“I hope this doesn’t seem rude,” Lily said, “but maybe you should go to the clinic? Or call your family or talk to some friends? I’m happy to sit with you for a while. Honestly, it would be my pleasure.”
Charmaine gave Lily a long stare.
“I’m fine,” she said.
Lily opened her mouth to push but stopped herself. This was one of the worst things about the Grey. There was nothing you could do. She had learned that in the hardest possible way.
Twenty-seven percent of the world’s population was afflicted by the disease. The Grey wasn’t garden-variety clinical depression. It wasn’t an imbalance in brain chemistry, and it didn’t respond to SSRIs and the other common medications. Therapy, exercise, sleep . . . all the standard treatment methods didn’t make a dent. The Grey was a creeping, relentless malaise, a dark growth on the soul, and once it took you, you were lost.
Humanity had been formally aware of the problem for a little over two years, but it was assumed it had just gone unnoticed for some time before that; humanity, as a species, was always somewhat down in the dumps. It wasn’t until it started affecting individuals with absolutely no reason to be depressed—stable, successful people, or children—that the reality of what was happening became clear. And then a darker realization: it wasn’t just that the Grey could hit anyone at any time . . . it was transmissible. Sometimes it spread within families, or a whole office might come down with it all at once.
Scientists were torn on whether it was a disease at all in the standard sense. They had not been able to find a transmission vector—not a virus, not a bacteria, not a prion, not a fungus—but it was spreading somehow. And without a sense of what was spreading, the world’s doctors could only watch and despair.
One common theory: everyone already had the Grey. It was a species-wide affliction connected to the very nature of being a human being. Some people were just better at fighting it off. Deeply negative events in a person’s life could trigger the onset of the condition, as if a person’s spiritual bulwarks had been breached. This was the reason for things like the Pity Parties. You did what you could to build up your defenses, and when something terrible happened in the world, you told yourself everything was fine. Just fine.
But a blast of bad news wasn’t the only way people succumbed to the Grey. There were other ways you could get it.
Charmaine’s phone sat on the counter near the cashbox. Lily wondered if the woman had maybe clicked on a link she shouldn’t have, watched a video clip she thought would be fine, and gotten the Despair Manifesto instead.
Lily pulled her mind away. Even thinking about the Manifesto felt dangerous.
She thought instead about the flavors of Grey and which might have afflicted Charmaine. There were three. Sometimes people who got it soldiered on, just . . . reduced. This seemed to be Charmaine’s path. She had shown up to her bakery and was going through the motions. Other times people went dark, unable to leave their homes or their beds, barely able to take care of themselves. Many of those ended in suicide. At the opposite end was the third way the Grey could appear, the rarest path—a twisted joy, misery manifesting as mania. Those people were dangerous. They wanted to share the good news.
The minds of just over a quarter of the planet were stuck in one of those traps, and no doctor had figured out a reliable treatment, much less a cure. Once you got the Grey, that was that. Twenty-seven percent. About two billion people.
The world was still running, but the gears were starting to stick, the engine winding down. The obvious conclusion: if enough humans stopped caring about keeping society going . . . it wouldn’t keep going.
The only real defense against the Grey seemed to be purpose. People with a firm sense of themselves and their reason for existing had a lower infection rate and were less deeply affected if they did catch the disease.
Lily would have thought Charmaine had that purpose, running her cute little bakery and inventing her special little cakes. Apparently, lychee Danishes weren’t enough.
Charmaine’s gaze had withdrawn again.
“Have a nice day,” Lily said, taking her bun and her tea and leaving the bakery.
She was sad about poor Charmaine, but if there was one thing Lily Barnes had learned in the Grey world, it was this: do not dwell. Out on the street, she dropped the bun and tea in a trash can and headed up the block to her building at 52 Hai Tan Street. She could feel her mind limbering up, resetting itself to tackle the problems to come. She felt anticipation, resolve.
Purpose.
Lily walked past the elderly security guard dozing at his desk and took the tiny elevator to the top floor. She let herself into the empty office—she was early; she was almost always early—and headed to her workspace, plopping her satchel on her desk. She loved this job. CarbonGo wasn’t a particularly impressive organization, and she wasn’t paid all that well compared to what she might have earned at an aircraft manufacturer or SpaceX or even back at the electronics job she’d left a few months earlier. But CarbonGo had something the other gigs didn’t—a morally defensible line of business.
By working here, Lily could, without any sense of hyperbole, tell herself she was saving the world.
CarbonGo was in the climate change mitigation business: trying to cool things down on a planetary scale. More specifically, they were concerned with finding a technological solution to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
That task was not particularly difficult. Any halfway decent secondary school science teacher could pull carbon dioxide from the air. The trick was to do it on a massive scale. For millennia, every tree that was ever burned, every bit of coal, every barrel of oil, had put carbon into the air. Now all of that had to be sucked back out and stored somewhere. CarbonGo thought that unbelievably gigantic task might be accomplished by developing small devices—“scrubbers,” in industry parlance—that could be placed all over the world in high-exhaust urban environments and chug away vacuuming carbon out of the air.
A good trick—actually, two tricks, from an engineering perspective. Carbon scrubbers weren’t complex. They consisted of a chemical sponge called a sorbent, which soaked up carbon dioxide from the air while leaving all the other gases behind. Finding the right material to act as a sorbent was trick one. Trick two was figuring out way to squeeze the sorbent “sponge” to release the CO2 into a storage medium—tanks, or perhaps limestone or concrete—anything that would either lock it away out of the atmosphere or let it be reused.
Both of these processes were well understood, and many methods existed to do both. The problem was the cost, usually described in terms of dollars per metric ton of extracted CO2. The best tech out there could do it on an industrial scale at about US$58 per ton. The goal was US$30 but, honestly, the lower the better. The cheaper it was, the more people would use it.
Lily’s work for CarbonGo involved trying different combinations of atoms to build a perfect sorbent that would both efficiently vacuum up CO2 like a magnet to iron filings while also releasing it upon as low an application of energy as possible.
Lily powered up her computers; most of her work was done using advanced modeling software. Much cheaper than producing actual prototypes. She leaned forward as the screens lit up, preparing to lose herself in ratios of potassium oxalate monohydrate and ethylene diamine for the next eight to twelve hours, solving the puzzle that would save the world.
“Ms. Barnes,” a voice said, behind her.
She turned to see the company’s owner, Danny Chang, walking across the lab. He had thinning hair and a bit of a middle-aged paunch, and favored tailored suits that did their best to hide the second attribute (as not much could be done about the first). Lily liked him, liked his focus and general lack of frivolity. What Danny Chang lacked in sentimentality he made up for with efficiency, not something you always found in the nonscientific mind.
Danny held something in his hand: a cylinder about twenty centimeters long, maybe eight centimeters in diameter. It was a rich shade of blue, a sapphire color with shadowy accents. Lily had never seen a color exactly like it. That was interesting because colors came from the way stuff reflected light, and an unfamiliar color meant the stuff was unfamiliar too. Not a common experience for someone who worked in materials science. But even more interesting than the cylinder was the fact that Danny Chang was smiling. A huge no-joke grin was plastered across his face.
Lily tensed. Smiles could be very dangerous these days. People with the third form of the Grey, the Joy variant, tended to smile a lot.
The eyes, everyone said. You had to look at the eyes.
But Lily didn’t sense anything off as her boss approached. He just seemed legitimately excited. She barely recognized the emotion.
Danny held up the cylinder, showing it off.
“You see this?” he said.
“What is it?” Lily asked.
“Salvation!” her boss said.
Lily’s gaze shifted to the cylinder. Now that she could get a better look, the thing’s essential oddness was amplified. It wasn’t just that blue color. The finish was like nothing she’d ever seen. It was reflective, but in a way that almost seemed to take in the light, change it, and send it back out warmer. It made her want to touch it, hold it, put it in her bed on a cold winter’s night. Not that Hong Kong had those.
The device had openings at either end. One looked like an intake. The other, a hatch.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Danny said. “I need you to test this, make sure it’s real.”
They went into the hall outside the office, then climbed a set of fire stairs and exited through a rusty steel door to the building’s roof, where various generations of the company’s CO2 scrubbing technology worked away, resembling rooftop HVAC units of various sizes. Some of the earliest, power-hungry models were deactivated to save on the electric bill, but the others hummed along, sucking carbon dioxide out of Hong Kong’s atmosphere a molecule at a time.
The city stretched away in the distance, all skyscrapers and mountains and sea. At ground level, Hong Kong was an anthill. But from high up the city was beautiful, a metropolis built into a stunning natural environment with an eye toward integration, not conquest.
Danny handed Lily the blue cylinder; lighter than she expected. He gestured toward a locked, rust-speckled steel cabinet set next to a workbench at the far end of the roof. It contained a power system and diagnostic tools used to test new prototypes.
“Hook it up,” he said. “Give it a try.”
Lily frowned.
“It’s a scrubber? Where did you get it?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Danny said. “Just connect it, run a pass, tell me the results. Little panel on the side opens, and it only has a few controls. Very easy to use, I think.”
Lily was intrigued. She took the cylinder to the workbench, unlocked and opened the cabinet next to it, and attached the device to power. She opened up the strange gadget’s control panel to see that it was indeed simple.
The activation button for the thing was obvious; she pressed it. A small, pleasant hum commenced. Inside the steel cabinet was a small glass tank, airtight, with sensors attached that measured the mix of atmospheric gases within. Lily placed the blue cylinder inside, sealed the tank, and stepped back.
Out of the corner of her eye, Lily could see that Danny could barely contain himself—he was shifting his weight from foot to foot, almost dancing.
They watched the device in silence until it abruptly seemed to complete its cycle. The small hatch on the end of the cylinder opened smoothly, revealing a solid, milky-white cube a few centimeters on a side. The testing tank had a built-in diagnostic system that could determine how much CO2 had been removed from the internal atmosphere and how much power was used to do it. Lily looked at the readout.
“Holy shit,” she said.
“I take it the results are good,” Danny said.
“Remarkable,” Lily answered. “Hard to believe, actually. Is there a mechanism for releasing the carbon dioxide from the sorbent, though? Doesn’t matter how easily it takes the stuff in if it’s too pricey to get it back out.”
