Friendly Interrogation

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 67 DAYS

“You’re way too focused on downscalin’us, Miss Riddick,” Al Menzies said over dinner as part of a far-ranging discussion last night at his house in Boulder. Maura had just been informed that she wouldn’t have anything to review for another day, so we weren’t in a rush to leave. Al added defiantly, “There’re a lotta people who need to upscale!”

She tightly squeezed my hand under the table, surprising me as much as the calmness in her voice when she answered. “The crap, as you call it, is mostly ours. We created it and we live in it. We have the tools, and the responsibility, to clean it up.”

 “Good point.” He grinned, having just given her his greatest compliment. Beside him as he faced us was a hardcopy of the latest global strategy, sticky notes protruding from more than half its pages. I suspected that he could summarize every one of them from memory. “What do your test subjects in, oh, Indonesia have to say ‘bout all this?”

Maura closed her eyes, and I felt a warm peacefulness envelop me as her grip relaxed. “They know that in many ways they are in a microcosm of the world,” she said, “facing pollution and land degradation as a result of industrial growth and natural hazards that have already pushed two-thirds of them into a state of collapse.” She opened her eyes and released my hand. “Now that the strategy has been improved and better explained, they see it as generally helpful and are providing valuable feedback about how it can be specifically implemented.”

“I’m sorry, but that sounds like pure boilerplate talkin’ points. Are they usin’ the same measurement and reportin’ protocols as everyone else?” Before she could answer, he added, “And does ‘collapse’ mean the same thing there as it does here?”

“Yes, and yes,” she answered bluntly. “We built and calibrated most of the basic capabilities during the biosphere assessment, and then expanded them to cover the remaining variables with multiple checks for reliable acquisition and interpretation of data. Of course, we can supplement the suite as conditions and interest warrant. Our main project now is to create a subset that everyone can use to get useful information, share it, and quickly know what it means.”

Al sat back, a mix of confusion and admiration on his face. “Are you sure you’re a historian and not an engineer?”

“She’s more than both those things,” I said, recalling the training as an enforcement officer that goes into becoming a special agent for the Extinction Response Unit which I learned about yesterday. “You didn’t tell her that you’ve got colleagues doing environmental research all around there, Al.”

“What do they think about what we’re doing?” Maura asked him.

“Like me, they figger humans survivin’ past mid-century will be like hittin’ a blade of grass with a dart from the moon, even with your cybercritter Sally callin’ the shots.”

“It’s going to be a pretty big dart,” she said.

“We’ll see, we’ll see.”

Caleb Tosner called Maura early this morning with two candidates for what he insisted on calling a “personal environmental assessment kit” or PEAK. I offered to pick her up at her parents’ house, but she insisted on joining me at the WICO field office after she had reviewed the designs on her own and met with Felicity Jonas at USERU. In the meantime, I was to get fully acquainted with WICO’s reporting protocols as practiced in the Rocky Mountain area.

We both ended up taking most of the day to accomplish our objectives. When we finally met, Maura briefed me and the personnel in Boulder about her choice for the PEAK, and I described what I think is a critical flaw in the reporting protocols that I’m sure we’ll be discussing into the night.

Reality Check

Maura’s description of Indonesia is based on a simulation I did using publicly available statistics (below), along with some basic research about the nation.

The “flaw” that Will discovered is based on an insight I had while analyzing the results of the simulation.