“I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
Van Deesen had been saying this, again and again, under his breath, for the last twenty minutes, and Lopez was frankly tired of it. This was the problem with rich kids, she thought. One real problem, one real problem, and they all go to pot.
Unfortunately Van Deesen had now turned to her. “What are we going to do? We can’t do anything,” he bleated at her. “We’re going to lose our jobs! If we’re lucky!”
She waved idly behind her at the holographic readout – a flatscreen would have done, really, but the station funders wanted a three-dimensional representation of all weather in what they were supposed to call “the Idyll” but which she always pronounced, in her head, as “Idle.” It impressed stockholders when they came by on tours to see the climanipulation team dramatically gesturing across the “sky” like they were the Hand of God and then imaging the accelerated-time result. (The gestures, frankly, were a pain and everybody just preferred to use buttons instead.)
The readout showed exactly what it should show: sun-dappled clouds, not so many clouds as to be threatening but enough that they would provide contrast in the sky and cut down on glare. In the eastern half, where the sun was beginning to set, the clouds were gathering more intensely. It was Thursday, and Thursday meant the twice-weekly heavy shower (for five hours, from 1 AM to 6 AM) that meant nobody had to water their lawn. It all looked perfectly normal.
“This isn’t normal!” God, but Van Deesen was giving her a headache. And of course he was right. Those clouds were gathering three hours ahead of schedule – three hours before they were even scheduled to flip many switches and commence the evening’s electrostatic cloudseeding, creating rain-on-demand, the type of rain the network’s customers demanded: as much as needed and nothing that interfered with their day-to-day business. This wasn’t even the four-times-yearly scheduled daylight rain (“Jump In Puddles! Dash Between Those Drops!”). No, this was unscheduled rain. And probably someone was going to get fired for it. Ideally, Van Deesen.
“Look, Sheldon, it’s pretty straightforward.” She shrugged. “Do you remember studying feedback theory in your climanipulation classes?” She went on before he would have a chance to start improvising an explanation as to why he didn’t. “It’s your classic Dessikan feedback loop. You can’t completely control weather; it’s too expensive a proposition -”
“Yeah, I know, hence the Idyll, where we can control it, and hence it costing extra to live here.” Van Deesen snapped off the words like someone who had never been outside the Idyll. Probably he never had. “But this isn’t being forced from the exterior. The nullification zone is empty all around the Idyll – twenty kilometers every way of nothing but clear skies.” Van Deesen’s voice was growing accusatory. Not towards her – that would be stupid even for him – but towards the weather. It was odd to realize that, but Lopez knew it to be true.
She sighed. “I’m not saying it’s being forced from the exterior. It doesn’t have to be, you know.” She said “exterior” almost neutrally and was proud of it. Nobody would know, looking at her, that she was a gushtown brat who grew up under a metal roof – a roof that was so loud from the constant pounding of rain that she could sleep through damn near anything nowadays. When her uncle had smuggled her into the Idyll at the age of nine, he’d had to take her to the doctors to get a cochlear matrix implanted in each ear; she had been damn near deafened. Her mother hadn’t been able to afford the good earplugs. “Go back and read your Dessikan. It’s pretty straightforward: he predicted that the inevitable result of atmospheric static manipulation was stratospheric collection of water vapour, which would eventually descend and create a superstorm. It’s pretty basic math. We all read it.”
Van Deesen rubbed his temples. “But it wasn’t supposed to happen for years! We’re going to get blamed, Kace! It doesn’t matter if we say it’s math, all that matters is the suits all thought it wasn’t going to happen for another twenty-two years. Who do you think they take it out on?”
Lopez shrugged again. It was amazing to her that Van Deesen hadn’t figured out the full ramifications of what was happening. “I think they’ll have more to worry about, frankly. Have you looked at where that storm is coalescing?” She tapped her oplet gently and the holographic display zoomed in. “I’m pretty sure that storm is going to take out the static wall generators in 7B, and when that happens… well.”
Van Deesen started freaking out at that point, but Lopez was no longer paying attention. She turned to the window and looked out at the perfect horizon, at the sun setting on exactly enough cloud cover to create dazzling pinks and scarlets (this was color arrangement 479, and like all the others it was copyrighted). It was glorious and it was bought and it was paid for, and she imagined how beyond it, over the horizon a hundred miles away, she could see in her mind the permanent storm that the people here had forced on everybody else (because after all who was going to make them pay for your weather?), held at bay by a long row of poles and towers emitting targeted static and plasma discharges, and how each of those poles was interdependent on the others, and how the generators weren’t ready to handle the ravages of a proper superstorm. How it all depended on the universal consent to have every day be beautiful. She wondered if any of them had ever considered what might happened if someone didn’t consent.
She thought about her mother’s face, completely smooth even into her late forties when she died of the pneumo, smooth like everybody’s faces were in the gushtowns because wrinkles simply wore away in the day-to-day. She wondered how Van Deesen’s face would look after a few years of rain, and how the suits would look after they realized this storm wasn’t a one-off occurrence but that in fact their remaining twenty-two years of profits were gone, had never really existed in the first place.
And as she looked out onto the horizon, she realized that she was thinking how good it would be to have weather just like she had done when she was a kid.
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I have a problem with the sense of scale in this story. Unless the idyll is much bigger than I think you want it to be, there should be lots of unoccupied surface area to divert bad weather to. If this takes place on Earth, at least 70% of the surface area is completely uninhabitable (being ocean) and can take rainfall without anybody noticing.
(Yes, chaos theory and all that. But a weather control system can partially work by diverting the chaos into places where it doesn’t seem to matter, like the ocean.)
I am very fond of utopia stories where Something Goes Wrong. Not stories like Elysium, celebrating a maverick who will fix things for you and set things right, but stories where Utopia itself buckles or disintegrates under the hubris of the concept.
“Walden Two” is an exception; the Utopia there doesn’t fall apart, but the story teaches a very very important lesson to those who would aspire to engineer a paradise.
I imagine that the permanent bad weather zone in the story isn’t ‘everywhere’ but all around the nullification zone. No one lives in the nullification zone because it’s dead land; no rain. All the poor people that support the Idyll live just outside it.. and deal with all the crappy diverted weather from the Idyll. (Constant rain is better than no rain). The inside fringe of the crappy weather zone is for the middle class – close to jobs in the Idyll, away from the worst of the weather.
And this storm is too big to be diverted; it’s gonna short out the system and run amok, causing millions in damages, and even when it ends the confidence in the climanipulation program will be gone.
Very nice, MGK. This reminds me of a short film I saw when I was 12-13 years old. It was about a group of 8-10 year olds living in a futuristic building. I can’t remember if it was supposed to be another planet or a future Earth, but it always rained, never letting up. There were trees and plants and grass that they could see out the windows, but the rain was dangerous to them, so they never left the building. There was one little girl who believed that the rain would stop one day and give them a chance to go outside, but no one else did. One day, in a fit of pique, the others locked her in a closet, and, of course, they turned to see the sun come out. Awestruck, they went out and played in the sun and fields, leaving her locked in the closet. The rain returned and they went back inside. It ended with them letting her out with their heads bowed in shame.
Kaisius I remember that thing! Gosh what was it called?
The film you’re thinking of is based on the Ray Bradbury short story “All Summer in a Day.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Summer_in_a_Day
Thank you, Toast!
I was more under the impression that the storm was going to break their system and subject idyll to a 20+ year storm, rather than simply make people uncomfortable and doubt the system for a little while.
Loved it. That is all.
Maybe this is just me, but reading this I felt that Lopez came across as somewhat sociopathic. I assume we’re meant to be agreeing with her as the world-wise, level-headed viewpoint character contrasted with the spoiled rich kid Van Deesen and the offscreen Evil Corporate Overlords, but I found it kind of hard to do so when she’s being so utterly blasé about a “superstorm”.
The piece only refers to the economic impact on said Evil Corporate Overlords, but in no way does “superstorm” sound like a good thing to be living in the middle of, especially not if you live in a place that was only built to stand up to carefully controlled weather conditions. People are going to lose their property, their livelihoods and their lives, people whose only mistake was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure, the Evil Corporate Overlords will be bankrupt and the Narcissistic Rich People will lose their faux utopia but there’ll be a very high cost in human lives for popping their little bubble and that seems like the kind of thing that a sane person should be concerned about as they contemplate it.
Instead of trying to, I don’t know, raise the alarm, get people evacuated or come up with a solution (obviously the technology in this story exists to support its message but it seems odd to me that they couldn’t use the climanipulation tech they have to bring on the rain early, before it reached critical mass – maybe get a tropical storm instead of a hurricane) she’s apparently sitting there smugly content to just lead Van Deesen to the conclusion she’s already drawn and speculate on the human misery likely to result.
I’d also like to add that “happy nostalgia” is not a normal response to “Lots of people are going to be subjected to conditions that cause permanent disability”.
LOVE this.
“I found it kind of hard to do so when she’s being so utterly blasé about a “superstorm”.”
It seems obvious to me that Lopez deliberately caused the superstorm by subtly mishandling the weather, and that she’s going to use Van Deesen as a patsy. She’s the villain of the piece.
One of the better teachers I had as a youngster was in the habit of reading SF shorts to the class (these days, of course, he’d’ve been fired instantly).
It’s quite likely that he told us the titles and authors, but they never made as strong an impression as the works themselves.
One of the joys of my adulthood is browsing collections of classic SF shorts, and going “Oh hey, this story!”
The story as described by Kaisius rang a bell, and I immediately knew it was one of those mysterious works from my youth. But my almost instantaneous second thought was “That’s gotta be a Bradbury.”
So, thanks Kaisius for reminding me of it, and thanks Toast for confirming my suspicion, and telling me what it’s called.
… y’know, everyone talks about Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein as the Big Three. Personally, I reckon Bradbury should be right up there. To write something that sticks so profoundly and recognisably over more than three decades? That’s some damned good writing.
@Thok I thought the same thing.
Loved the story and I think it is a mark of it’s quality that there are so many different interpretations; I suspect they say a lot about the beliefs people are bringing to the story.