Survivors, p.20
Survivors, page 20
Miya glared at him, and he pursed his lips.
“And God made all kinds of animals to live on the land, large and small.” Their viewpoint rushed towards the shoreline, and suddenly they were flying a dozen metres above lush forests and grasslands, with animals of all kinds walking, running, and jumping.
“And then God made humans. And he was pretty happy with all of it. That was the sixth day.”
“I think they missed quite a bit there,” said Hank. “Just saying.”
“On the seventh day, God went on a well-deserved vacation, and left humans to play with His creation.”
“What?” Miya’s eyes went wide.
In the blink of an eye, the stars, sun, moon and Earth disappeared, and the space around them was filled with a dizzying array of shifting images showing a progression of human activity through time. Farming, agriculture, smiling people. Houses of all kinds, from straw huts with dirt floors to sprawling mansions, automobiles, airplanes, dirigibles. A man smiling as he rode a penny-farthing, small wheel trailing behind as he pumped the oversized pedals of the huge front wheel. More vehicles, assembly lines, factories belching smoke. More automobiles, smog-filled streets and cities. And war. A chaotic sequence of gruesome images, artillery, planes and vehicles and many things adapted for better ways to kill each other.
Miya’s stomach flip-flopped, but soon the images of war gave way to more peaceful images, smiling families in the park, pushing babies along in strollers.
This pleasant interlude didn’t last long; it soon gave way to images of parched soil, devastating floods, dead animals littering the landscape, and polluted waterways. Then more images of war.
The Earth appeared again before them, the flickering images withdrawing to fill in the periphery.
But the Earth wasn’t the same Earth they’d seen before, from the sixth day. It was scarred, with massive sections of the land now brown, or barren desert. Before their eyes, swathes of green gave way to a dirty brown, and the skies filled with angry white swirls.
The flickering images pulsed in time with changes on the Earth as it turned, each revolution showing less and less green, less and less life.
Bright flashes sparked across the land and a few places in the middle of the seas as images of mushroom clouds flickered in the space around the globe. Sickly looking clouds, people in gas masks, fields littered with bodies.
The images around the Earth froze, but the Earth continued to turn. Angry spirals carved their way across the oceans onto the land, and then suddenly, the clouds disappeared, leaving the sea and the land clearly visible. But the blue of the sea now had a sickly brown tinge, and the last traces of green on the land shrank and faded away until there was only a dry, scorched surface.
“On the eighth day, humans really fucked everything up, didn’t they?”
“Holy hell!” Hank whispered.
“That’s the typical reaction,” said a voice. The room lights rose and the collage of images faded away. All that was left was an obviously sick, and possibly dead, planet turning before them.
“Who said that?” Hank craned his neck, searching for the source of the voice.
A smallish man in a spotless green jumpsuit and about Sam’s height walked out from behind a partition, carrying a tall stool. He set the stool just to the side of the spinning Earth. He had a neatly trimmed moustache, salt-and-pepper hair cropped close, and the saddest smile Miya had ever seen.
The small man slowly turned his head, looking each of them in the eye. Miya found his gaze to be intense and mildly disturbing, like she’d been caught doing something naughty.
Miya tucked her hands under her legs and studied the man as he stared at Katriana, Sam, Hank, and Thomas in turn. They all seemed to have a similar reaction as they squirmed in their seats, even Katriana.
The small man nodded. “Welcome to Scaffolding. My name is Quincy Sternham. I don’t apologise for my stature; I was born here, in the gravity well of Earth.”
Miya blinked. “Um … hi. I’m Miya. And I’d like to apologise for what I said last—”
Quincy turned and gave her a stern look. “Please don’t interrupt, or you’ll have to leave.”
Miya flushed and pressed her lips tightly together.
Quincy nodded. “Very well. This is Scaffolding, which is another term for building things up. From almost nothing, in our case. Everything we do here starts from the devastation, the wreckage our ancestors left behind. Their legacy.” He hissed the last word in distaste.
He glanced at Miya, then nodded. “To understand what we are doing here, and the significance of the challenge before us, you need to understand the most important thing of all. How it all ended.”
“You mean the Earth, how it died?” Sam blurted out, then quickly put his hand over his mouth. “Sorry.”
Quincy nodded. “Yes, that’s right. There are many ways to kill a planet, you see. Well, the things that live on it and in its waters, to be more precise. There have been other mass-extinction events on the Earth in the past. A few that we know of include the End Ordovician, four hundred and forty-four million years ago. Then the Late Devonian, three hundred and sixty million years ago. This was followed by the End Permian, two hundred and fifty million years ago, and the end Triassic, two hundred million years ago. And the End Cretaceous, sixty-five million years ago. And the End Holocene, around a thousand years ago.”
“That’s a lot of extinctions,” said Sam.
“Yes,” said Quincy. “But the important thing about all of them, except the most recent one, is that the Earth recovered on its own. Something was left to start again, to evolve into new species of flora and fauna. The world that our great-ancestors knew was what survived and grew out of the End Cretaceous, which they strongly believed was the result of a massive asteroid impact in Yucatán, Mexico, and killed off the dinosaurs. The other mass-extinction events had different causes; one of the earliest ones occurred when cyanobacteria evolved that began processing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen, in vast quantities. This made the atmosphere toxic to other things that lived on the Earth at the time, but other, newer species that learned to consume oxygen thrived and prospered.”
“Wow,” said Sam, wide-eyed. “So the atmosphere changed.”
“Yes.” Quincy waved a hand. “And all of that is quite interesting, of course, but that’s not what I want to talk to you about. I want to explain what happened during the last and most significant mass-extinction event. The ones humans caused. Did you know that after some of the prior extinction events, it took millions of years to recover?”
Sam shook his head.
“Well, that’s what the geological records show. We’re lucky, in some ways, that we killed the Earth the way we did. Or there would be no hope for us, none at all. And you wouldn’t be here right now, in this room.”
“Oh,” said Hank. “So how did we kill it, exactly? And why is everything green out there now? Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe the Earth didn’t really die.”
Quincy shook his head slowly. “Oh, the Earth was very much dead, I’m afraid. In terms of biological life, anyway. Except in the deep ocean trenches around volcanic vents, but we’ll ignore that for the moment. In terms of life on land, where us oxygen-breathing, non-finned human creatures like to live, it was gone. Sterile, dead. And much of the oceans too, to the depth of a few hundred metres, and life on the land depends very much on the ocean life-cycles as well. But we did a marvellous job of wiping pretty much everything out. No previous extinction event had even come close.”
“How?” Miya whispered. “I mean, we know it happened, climate change, the resource wars and all, but — how?”
“Ah.” Quincy turned to face her. “That, I will explain. And before you say anything else, your brief admission of guilt in the hallway was more than sufficient for an apology. Because on the grand scale of things, your misdemeanour yesterday evening was nothing at all. Not when you see the unforgivable things that our ancestors — including our direct forefathers on the Arks, did to this poor planet.”
Quincy dragged the stool forward so that the revolving image of the Earth was directly behind him. He climbed back up onto the stool and gave them a sad smile. “I’m going to tell you how to kill a planet.”
“I don’t … want to know.” Thomas shook his head.
Quincy frowned. “Well, you’re going to learn, anyway. It’s important that you understand the depth of the crimes committed over the last few thousand years. In terms of what we’ve done to the planet.”
Thomas nodded. “Okay. Sorry.”
Quincy gave him a thin smile. “The latest mass-extinction event Earth began long ago. It was a gradual process. One that the Earth, as a whole, would have recovered from quite well, in fact, once it had made us extinct. But that didn’t happen. We were far too clever for our own good. But let’s go step by step, shall we?”
They all nodded.
“Okay. To begin with the obvious, rapid increase in CO2 levels through releasing stored carbon into the air. Internal combustion of crude-oil-based products, manufacturing, industry, power generation. Right near the end of it all, CO2 concentrations spiked up to five hundred parts per million.”
“Is that a lot?” asked Sam.
Quincy nodded. “Yes, and no. Analysis of rock samples revealed that some of the earlier extinction events had CO2 peak at nearly eight thousand parts per million. So five hundred wouldn’t have been enough to wipe everything out. Yes, mass extinctions were already well underway during the early two thousands, and it was certainly uncomfortable for us, but many species would have adapted. Humans, being humans, tend to be quite species-centric. In short, we care about ourselves. Some care about more than that, of course, but the majority of us care about ourselves, our family, and our individual well-being above all else.”
Miya raised an eyebrow. “But elevated CO2 levels caused net global warming near the surface, a few degrees at a time, decade by decade, but then faster and faster. That made a difference, it changed the weather patterns. There were droughts, sea levels rose, ice caps melted. Storms got stronger, caused more flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes.”
Quincy nodded. “Correct, but those were localised problems, in a sense, resulting from a system that was no longer in balance.”
“Billions died from starvation,” said Hank.
Quincy shook his head. “You’re being species-centric. Trillions of creatures, large and small, died. But billions of humans, yes.”
“There were wars at the end, though,” said Hank. “The nations fought over dwindling resources. They killed millions more. They released nuclear weapons, chemical, whatever they had, right?”
Quincy nodded. “That, too, is correct. But all of mankind’s collective nuclear arsenals would have only made a small dent in the planet’s ecosphere, overall. Could we have killed off every last human? Close, but not quite; those living in pockets outside of the remaining major centres might have survived that. Nuclear winter would have been terrible, of course, but in the grand scale of things, a short-term event. Something would have survived. Even around Chernobyl, one of the worst nuclear disasters in human history before the end, life was abundant. Species, plants adapt, they learn to tolerate radiation to varying degrees. And that was in some ways worse than nuclear bombs going off. The bombed areas would easily be inhabitable in less than fifty years, like Hiroshima, with the most hazardous by-products like Cesium-137 having a half-life of thirty years. So no, nuking the planet didn’t finish things off, though millions and millions died from that.”
Hank raised his hand. “What about the chemical weapons?”
Quincy shook his head. “Chemical weapons only spread so far, even with airborne dispersal. But that diluted the effects, so the worst damage was near the centre of release. Outlying areas would have remained relatively unscathed.”
“What about biological weapons?” asked Thomas. “They had those too, right?”
Quincy nodded sadly. “Yes, and those were among the most devastating of all. Engineered microbes that would saturate an area, bind with the flora, replicate and spread through natural propagation of the species for a few generations before triggering their payloads and spontaneously dissolving cellular walls and spreading spores … yes, that was pretty bad. No seeds from that generation of plants, either. It was terrible, really. That did more damage than a lot of other things. But that alone wasn’t what killed the Earth.”
Miya raised a hand. “Then what did? Was it one big thing?”
Quincy smiled. “No. It was multiple factors. Everything added together to make things worse and worse for the few scattered areas that still sustained life, areas that managed to get enough water to grow plants, so the food chain didn’t collapse entirely.”
“Didn’t the elevated CO2 levels make the oceans acidic, though?” asked Hank.
Quincy nodded. “Most certainly. And that triggered one of the greatest ecosystem collapses, an entire breakdown of the oceanic food chain above the twilight zone. Zooplankton, which have little hard shells, couldn’t form their shells, and nor could most of the shellfish and some mollusks like sea snails. Shells are a good way of secreting carbon, but they won’t form, or will be too fragile in an acidic environment.”
Hank nodded. “So it was the ocean ecosystem collapse, the nukes and the chemical and the biological weapons together that finished everything off?”
Quincy shook his head. “Nope. In the end, trying to save things actually sealed the fate of the Earth, and accelerated its demise.”
Miya stared at him, wide-eyed. “Trying to save things made things worse?”
“Yep.” Quincy nodded. “A lot worse.”
“How?” asked Miya, shaking her head.
“Water.” Quincy shrugged. “Trying to protect water.”
Miya blinked. “Trying to protecting water made things worse?”
Quincy moved his hand, and the Earth shifted around to float beside him, still spinning slowly. “Fresh water, before the end, was the most precious resource that we had. And the reserves, the lakes, were all shrinking in the drought-stricken areas. No rain, no rivers, no water in the lakes. And of course, the water cycle requires water to evaporate, so it can form clouds, and then fall somewhere as rain. But the lakes were drying up in many places because of droughts, while other areas drowned. So they did what they could to protect the fresh water we had left in the drought-stricken areas. Now, all of this was happening at the same time the Arks were being constructed in orbit. A few future-thinking, well-funded pessimists commissioned them to be built, just in case conditions on the Earth became untenable. They were completed, spun up, and populated to their current numbers, accepting a limited number of people from every continent, and most of the cultures and ethnicities. Diversity is important, especially when you’re trying to keep a species alive and healthy.”
“Oversight is pretty clear on that point,” said Hank. “But you said something about preserving water?”
Quincy nodded. “Right. The surviving scientists developed a simple, but sophisticated, self-replicating polymer that floats. It was designed to sit on top of the water and bind tightly with other polymer molecules in dense layers. In some ways, it was a fragile thing. You could easily break the molecular bonds by inserting a spoon, or a siphon, for example, into the water. But the linked polymers, once they had spread across the entire surface of the land-locked lakes and reservoirs that no longer flowed to the sea, would prevent the escape of water molecules even in a gaseous state, and short of a temporary physical intrusion, they held together. As a bonus, the polymers were carbon-hungry, and would absorb CO2 from the air, and bits of nitrogen to form their webs. So they were a net carbon sink, but not enough to make a difference overall.”
Sam nodded. “So they saved the water they had. That seems like a smart idea.”
Quincy nodded. “It was a brilliant idea. But like all ideas, they can be turned to darker purposes, and accidents happen.”
Miya put her hands to her mouth. “What did they do?”
Quincy spun the Earth backwards with his hand until the angry swirl of white clouds once more covered large areas of the surface. “They weaponised it. During the last days of the Resource Wars, someone in the military with limited scientific understanding realised that if they seeded the ocean or sea to the west of the country they considered an enemy, then little to no moisture would fall on that land mass from the winds that circulated over the planet. Their enemy would literally starve to death.”
“That’s terrible!” Sam shook his head.
“And very, very stupid.” Miya paled. “How long?”
Quincy raised an eyebrow. “Six months.”
Miya shook her head. “Bloody dodos.”
Thomas looked back and forth between Quincy and Miya. “Six months … until what?”
Miya turned to face Thomas. “Self-replicating polymers, Thomas. That spread as far as they could over the water, until they reached land. Dropped in the ocean. Which goes all the way around the planet.”
“Holy hell,” said Hank. “So they stopped all the water on the entire Earth from evaporating?”
“Yes, that’s right.” Quincy nodded sadly. “No more water cycle, no more rain. Whatever managed to fall would be captured in a polymer-covered lake, or trickle its way down to the polymer-covered sea.”
Sam stared at the Earth, which had now returned to its cloudless state. “That sounds really, really bad.”
A tear escaped from the edge of Quincy’s eye. “It was the singular most terrible thing that ever occurred in the entire history of the planet. With elevated CO2 levels, the Earth continued to heat. But without clouds, the albedo — the reflectivity of the Earth, dropped significantly. So it heated up more and more. On the land, soil and deserts got drier, fires swept the land, and as I said before, the flora had, for the most part, been compromised by the biological weapon vectors that reduced them to goo in a few generations, with no seeds produced for when the rains came. Rains which would never come. Of what healthy seeds there were, scattered around the planet, precious few of them were viable after a hundred years under the scorching sun.”
