The Ministry for the Future

25

Zurich in winter is often smothered in fog and low clouds for months on end. Prevailing winds from the north ram the clouds coming in from the Atlantic against the wall of the Alps, and there they stick. Gray day after gray day, in a gray city by a gray lake, split by a gray river. On many of these days a train ride or drive of less than a hundred kilometers will lift one out of the fog into alpine sunlight. Then again, it’s the time of year to get down to work.

So Mary worked. She read reports, she took meetings, she talked to people all over the world about projects, she wrote legislative proposals for stronger national laws governing legal standing for those future people and creatures and things without standing. Every day was full. In the evenings she often went out with Badim and others of the team. They would usually walk down to the Niederdorf, and either cross a bridge and eat at the Zeughauskeller, or stay on their side in the dark alleys around the Grossmünster, and gather around the long table at the back of the Casa Bar.

On this day the sun had broken through the clouds, so they took the tram down to Bürkliplatz and then another one toward Tiefenbrunnen, and ate at Tres Kilos, which they usually did only for birthday parties or other big occasions. But this was a day to celebrate. First sun of the year, February 19; by no means a Zurich record, as Jurgen noted lugubriously. The Swiss like to keep records for these kinds of weather phenomena.

A short day, so that by the time they got to the restaurant, night had long since fallen. The string of chili-shaped lights draping the entryway glowed like spots of fire. Inside someone else was celebrating too, and just as they walked in all the lights went off and a waitress carrying a cake with sparklers sparking off it walked in from the kitchen to the sounds of Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday.” They cheered and sang with the rest, and sat back near the kitchen where they always did if they could. Mary sat next to Estevan and Imeni, and listened to them flirt by bickering. This was getting to be an old routine, but they seemed stuck in it.

“We are the Ministry for the Future,” Estevan insisted to her, “not the ministry to solve all possible problems that can be solved now. We have to pick our battles or else it becomes just an everything.”

“But everything is going to be a problem in the future,” Imeni said. “I don’t see how you can deny that. So if you pick and choose, you’re just dodging our brief. And end up in a shitty future too by the way.”

“Still we have to prioritize. We’ve only got so much time.”

“This is a priority! Besides we’re a group, we have time.”

“Maybe you do.”

Imeni elbowed him, then poured them both another margarita from the pitcher, which had just arrived. They shifted to a discussion of the day’s news from Mauna Kea: carbon dioxide had registered at 447 parts per million, the highest ever recorded for wintertime. This despite all the reports from individual countries showing significant drops in emissions, even the US, even China, even India. Even Brazil and Russia. No: all the big emitters were reporting reductions, and yet the global total still grew. There had to be some unreported sources; or people were lying. Opinions as to which it was were divided around the table. Probably it was a bit of both.

“If people are lying, it means they know they are in the wrong. But if there are secondary emissions no one knows about, maybe stimulated by the heat already baked in, that would be worse. So we have to hope people are lying.”

“Easy to hope for that, you always get it!”

“Come on, don’t be cynical.”

“Just realistic. When have people ever told the truth about this particular question?”

“People? Do you mean scientists or politicians?”

“Politicians of course! Scientists aren’t people.”

“I thought it was the reverse!”

“Neither scientists nor politicians are people.”

“Careful now. Mary here is a politician, and I’m a scientist.”

“No. You are both technocrats.”

“So, that means we are scientific politicians?”

“Or political scientists. Which is to say, politicized scientists. Given that political science is a different thing entirely.”

“Political science is a fake thing, if you ask me. Or at least it has a fake name. I mean, where’s the science in it?”

“Statistics, maybe?”

“No. They just want to sound solid. They’re history at best, economics at worst.”

“I sense a poli sci major here, still living the trauma.”

“It’s true!”

Laughter around the table. Another round of margaritas. The bill was going to be stupendous—Tres Kilos, like all Zurich restaurants, maybe all restaurants, made most of its money by way of outrageous liquor prices. But probably her team thought the ministry would be paying for it tonight. Which was true. Mary sighed and let them refill her glass.

She looked at the table, listened to Estevan and Imeni flirt. Feeling each other out, but subtly, as they were with the group. In-house romances were never a good idea, and yet they always happened. No one was going to be doing this job for life; and that was true of all jobs. So why not? Where else were you going to meet people? So it happened. It had happened to her, long ago. She could recall this very kind of banter between her and Martin, long ago in London. Mary and Marty! Two Irish in London, a Prot and a Catholic, trying to find some way to get their claws into the system. Now he had been dead for over twenty years.

Quickly and firmly she refocused on the present. Estevan and Imeni were very much alive. And Mary could see why they might take to each other, despite their obvious differences. Well, who knew. Their banter was a little brittle, a little forced. And what drew people to each other was fundamentally unknowable. For all she knew they had already become lovers and then broken up, and were now negotiating a settlement. No way to be sure, not from the boss’s angle.

At the end of the long meal she hauled herself to her feet and calculated her level of inebriation—mild as always these days, she was careful, she was with her colleagues, her employees, and it wouldn’t do to be unseemly; and her youth had taught her some hard lessons, as well as given her a pretty high tolerance for alcohol. All was well there, she could glide along in her crowd to the nearest tram stop and get on one of the blue trams, transfer at Bürkliplatz and catch one going up the hill, saying goodbye to Bob and Badim and traveling on with Estevan and Imeni. Then she got off at Kirche Fluntern, waving goodbye to her two young companions as they headed onward, curious about them, but already thinking about other things: tea, bed, whether she would be able to sleep.

She was walking down Hochstrasse when a man walking the other way turned abruptly and began walking by her side. She looked at him, startled; he was staring at her with wild eyes.

“Keep going,” he commanded her in a low choked voice. “I’m taking you into custody here.”

“What?” she exclaimed, and stopped in her tracks.

He reached out and snapped some kind of clasp around her wrist. In his other hand he showed her a small snub-nosed pistol. The clasp now locked around her wrist was one half of some kind of clear plastic handcuffs, it appeared, with the other clasp locked around his wrist. “Come on,” he said, starting to walk and pulling her along with him. “I want to talk with you. Come with me and I won’t hurt you. If you don’t come with me now, I’ll shoot you.”

“You won’t,” she said faintly, but she found herself walking by his side, tugged along by the wrist.

“I will,” he said with a blazing glare at her. “I don’t care about anything.”

She gulped and kept her mouth shut. Her heart was racing. The drink she thought hadn’t affected her was rushing through her body like fire, such that she almost staggered.

He walked her right to her building’s door, surprising her.

“In we go,” he said. “Come on, do it.”

She punched in her code and opened the outer door. Up the flights of stairs to her apartment. Unlocked and opened the door. Inside. Her place looked strange now that she was a prisoner in it.

“Phone,” he said. “Turn it off and put it down here.” He indicated the table by the door where she indeed often left her stuff. She took it from her purse, turned it off, dropped it on the table.

“Do you have any other GPS on you?” he asked.

“What?”

“Are you chipped? Do you have any other GPS stuck to you?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so,” she added.

He gave her a wondering look, incredulous and disapproving. From the same pocket that held the gun, he took out a small black box, flicked a tab on it, moved it around her body. He checked its screen, nodded. “Okay, let’s go.”

“But I don’t—”

“Let’s go! I have a place right around the corner.”

“I thought you said you just wanted to talk to me!”

“That’s right.”

“Then do it here! Unhook me and I’ll talk to you. If you drag me out of here, I’ll fall down as soon as someone is looking at us and scream for help. If you only want to talk, it will go better here. I’ll feel safer. I’ll listen more.”

He glared at her for a while. “All right,” he said at last. “Why not.”

He shook his head, looking baffled and confused. She saw that and thought to herself, This man is sick in the head. That was even more frightening. He reached down with his free hand, unlocked the clasp around her wrist. She kneaded that wrist with her other hand, stared at him, thinking furiously. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

He glared. “I want to check it first.”

They went in the bathroom, and he looked in the cabinet, and then behind the shower screen. She supposed she might have had some kind of lifeline system in there, or another phone or an alarm system. No such luck. When he was satisfied he walked out the door, leaving it open. She went in and stood there for a second. Then the door swung almost shut—he had given it a push. Propriety. A polite madman. Well, it was something. She sat on the toilet and peed, trying to think the situation through. Nothing came to her. She stood, flushed, went back out to him.

“Do you want some tea?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well I do.”

“Fine. We’ll start there.”

She boiled water in the teapot and brewed a cup of tea. Something to make her feel calmer. He refused a cup again, watching her work. Then they were sitting across from each other, her little kitchen table between them.

He was young. Late twenties or early thirties; hard to tell at that age. Thin drawn face, dark circles under his eyes. A lean and hungry look, oh yes. Spooked by his own action here, she thought; that would make sense; but that wildness she had seen from the moment he had accosted her was there in him too, some kind of carelessness or desperation. To do this thing, whatever it was, he had to be deranged. Something had driven him to this.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I want to talk to you.”

“Why do it this way?”

His lip curled. “I want you to listen to me.”

“I listen to people all the time.”

He shook his head decisively, back and forth. “Not people like me.”

“What do you mean, why not?”

“I’m nobody,” he said. “I’m dead. I’ve been killed.”

She felt a chill. Finally, not knowing if it was smart, she said, “How so?”

He didn’t appear to hear her. “Now I’m supposed to have come back, but I didn’t. Really I’m dead. You’re here, you’re the head of a big UN agency, you have important meetings all over the world, every hour of every day. You don’t have time for a dead man.”

“How do you mean?” she asked again, trying not to become more alarmed than she already was. “How did you die?”

“I was in the heat wave.”

Ah.

He stared at her tea cup. She picked it up and sipped from it; his eyes stayed locked on the table. His face was flushing—right before her eyes the skin of his cheeks and forehead blushed, from a blanched white to a vivid red. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead and the backs of his hands, tense there on the table before him. Mary swallowed hard as she saw all this.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That must have been bad.”

He nodded. Abruptly he stood. He wandered around her little kitchen, his back to her. Out the window the night was black, the lights on the rise of the Zuriberg glowing all fuzzy in the night’s smirr. He was breathing hard, as if recovering from a sprint, or trying not to cry.

She listened to his deep rapid breathing. Could be he was charging himself up to do something to her.

After a while he sat across from her again. “Yes it was bad,” he said. “Everyone died. I died. Then they brought me back.”

“Are you all right now?” she asked.

“No!” he cried out angrily. “I’m not all right!”

“I meant physically.”

“No! Not physically. Not any way!” He shook his head, as if shaking away certain thoughts.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. She sipped her tea. “So. You want to talk to me. About that, I assume.”

He shook his head. “Not that. That was just the start. That was what made me want to talk to you, maybe, but what I want to say isn’t about that. What I want to tell you is this”—and he looked her in the eye. “It’s going to happen again.”

She swallowed involuntarily. “Why do you think so?”

“Because nothing’s changed!” he exclaimed. “Why do you ask me that!”

He stood up again, agitated. Now his flushed face turned an even darker red. His brows were bunched together. He leaned over her and said fiercely, in a low choked voice, “Why do you pretend not to know!”

She took a breath. “I don’t pretend. I really don’t know.”

He shook his head, glaring down at her.

“That’s why I’m doing this,” he said, voice low and furious. “You do know. You only pretend not to know. You all pretend. You’re head of the United Nations Ministry for the Future, and yet you pretend not to know what the future is bringing down on us.”

“No one can know that,” she said, meeting his eye. “And I have to say, the ministry is organized under the Paris Agreement. The UN isn’t directly involved.”

“You’re the Ministry for the Future.”

“I lead it, yes.”

He looked at her silently for a long time. At some point in this inspection, still looking at her, he sat back down across from her. He leaned over the table toward her.

“So,” he said, “what do you and your ministry know about the future, then.”

“We can only model scenarios,” she said. “We track what has happened, and graph trajectories in things we can measure, and then we postulate that the things we can measure will either stay the same, or grow, or shrink.”

“Things like temperatures, or birth rates, or like that.”

“Yes.”

“So you know! I mean, in your exercises, is there any scenario whatsoever in which there won’t be more heat waves that kill millions of people?”

“Yes,” she said.

But she was troubled. This possibility that he was bringing up to her now was exactly what kept her awake at night, night after night. Scenarios with good results, in which they managed to avoid more incidents of mass deaths, were in fact extremely rare. People would have to do things they were not doing. His presence in her kitchen was all too much like one of her insomniac whirlpools of thought, as if she had stumbled into one of her nightmares while still awake, so that she couldn’t get out of it.

“Ha!” he cried, reading this off her face.

She grimaced, trying to erase the look.

“Come on,” he said. “You know. You know the future.” It sounded like he might hurt his voice, he was so intent to speak without shouting. He coughed, shook his head. “And yet you’re not doing anything about it. Even with your job.”

He stood again, went to her sink, took a glass out of the drainer, filled it from the tap, took a drink. He brought it with him back to the table, sat again.

“We’re doing what we can,” she said.

“No you’re not. You’re not doing everything you can, and what you are doing isn’t going to be enough.” He leaned toward her again and captured her gaze, his eyes bloodshot and bugging out, pale tortured blue eyes scarcely held in by his sweating red face—transfixing her—“Admit it!” he exclaimed, still strangling his voice to less than a shout.

She sighed. She tried to think what to say to him. The look in his eye scared her; maybe he was thinking that if he killed her now, someone more effective would replace her. It looked like that was what he was thinking. And here they were, after all. She had been kidnapped and taken to her own apartment. When this happened to women they often died.

Finally she shrugged, heart racing. “We’re trying.”

For a long time they sat there looking at each other. She got the impression he was letting her ponder her statement for a while. Letting her stew in the juices of her own futility.

Finally he said, “But it isn’t working. You’re trying, but it isn’t enough. You’re failing. You and your organization are failing in your appointed task, and so millions will die. You’re letting them down. Every day you let them down. You set them up for death.”

She sighed. “We’re doing all we can with what we’ve got.”

“No you’re not.”

His face flushed again, he stood up again. He circled in her kitchen like a trapped animal. He was breathing heavily. Here it comes, she thought despite herself. Her heart was really racing.

Finally he stopped over her. He leaned down at her yet again. He spoke again in the low choked voice that seemed all he could manage.

“This is why I’m here. You have to stop thinking that you’re doing all you can. Because you’re not. There’s more you could be doing.”

“Like what?”

He stared at her. He sat down again across from her, put his face in his hands. Finally he released his face, sat back in his chair. He looked her in the eye. There she saw something: a real person. A very troubled real person, a young man, sick and scared.

“I went back to India,” he said. “I tried to join a group of people I had heard about. Children of Kali, you’ve heard of them?”

“Yes. But they’re a terrorist group.”

He shook his head, staring at her all the while. “No. You have to stop thinking with your old bourgeois values. That time has passed. The stakes are too high for you to hide behind them anymore. They’re killing the world. People, animals, everything. We’re in a mass extinction event, and there are people trying to do something about it. You call them terrorists, but it’s the people you work for who are the terrorists. How can you not see that?”

“I’m trying to avoid violence,” Mary said. “That’s my job.”

“I thought you said your job was to avoid a mass extinction event!”

“Did I say that?”

“I don’t know, what did you say? What do you say now! Don’t split hairs with me, I’m not here for hair-splitting! You’re killing the world and you want me to remember what words you used to cover your ass? You tell me now! What is your job as head of the Ministry for the fucking Future?”

She swallowed hard. Took a sip of tea. It was cool. She tried to think what to say. Was it wise to try to talk things over with this distraught young man, who was getting angrier by the moment? Did she have any other choice than to do so?

She said, “The ministry was set up after the Paris meeting of 2024. They thought it would be a good idea to create an agency tasked with representing the interests of the generations to come. And the interests of those entities that can never speak for themselves, like animals and watersheds.”

The young man gestured dismissively. This was boilerplate, known to him already. “And so? How do you do that, how do you defend those interests?”

“We’ve made divisions that focus on various aspects of the problem. Legal, financial, physical, and so forth. We prioritize what we do to portion out the budget we’re given, and we do what we can.”

He stared at her. “What if that’s not enough?”

“What do you mean, not enough?”

“It’s not enough. Your efforts aren’t slowing the damage fast enough. They aren’t creating fixes fast enough. You can see that, because everyone can see it. Things don’t change, we’re still on track for a mass extinction event, we’re in the extinctions already. That’s what I mean by not enough. So why don’t you do something more?”

“We’re doing everything we can think of.”

“But that either means you can’t think of obvious things, or you have thought of them and you won’t do them.”

“Like what?”

“Like identifying the worst criminals in the extinction event and going after them.”

“We do that.”

“With lawsuits?”

“Yes, with lawsuits, and sanctions, and publicity campaigns, and—”

“What about targeted assassinations?”

“Of course not.”

“Why of course? Some of these people are committing crimes that will end up killing millions! They spend their entire lives working hard to perpetuate a system that will end in mass death.”

“Violence begets violence,” Mary said. “It cycles forever. So here we are.”

“Having lost the battle. But look, the violence of carbon burning kills many more people than any punishment for capital crimes ever would. So really your morality is just a kind of surrender.”

She shrugged. “I believe in the rule of law.”

“Which would be fine, if the laws were just. But in fact they’re allowing the very violence you’re so opposed to!”

“Then we have to change the laws.”

“What about violence against the carbon burning itself? Would bombing a coal plant be too violent for you?”

“We work within the law. I think that gives us a better chance of changing things.”

“But it isn’t working fast enough.” He tried to compose himself. “If you took your job seriously, you’d be looking into how to make change happen faster. Some things might be against the law, but in that case the law is wrong. I think the principle was set at Nuremberg—you’re wrong to obey orders that are wrong.”

Mary sighed. “A lot of our work these days goes to trying to point out the problems created by the currently existing legal regime, and recommending corrections.”

“But it isn’t working.”

She shrugged unhappily, looking away. “It’s a process.”

He shook his head. “If you were serious, you’d have a black wing, doing things outside the law to accelerate the changes.”

“If it was a black wing, then I wouldn’t tell you about it.”

He stared at her. Finally he shook his head. “I don’t think you have one. And if you do, it isn’t doing its job. There are about a hundred people walking this Earth, who if you judge from the angle of the future like you’re supposed to do, they are mass murderers. If they started to die, if a number of them were killed, then the others might get nervous and change their ways.”

She shook her head. “Murder breeds murder.”

“Exile, then. Prisons that you contrive, on your own recognizance. What if they woke up one day with no assets? Their ability to murder the future would be much reduced.”

“I don’t know.”

“If you don’t do it, others will.”

“Maybe they should. They do their part, we do ours.”

“But yours isn’t working. And if they do it, they get killed for it. Whereas you would just be doing your job.”

“That wouldn’t justify it.”

“So you keep it in the black zone! A lot of the world’s history is now happening in the dark. You must know that. If you don’t go there yourself, you’ve got no chance.”

She sipped her tea. “I don’t know,” she said.

“But you’re not trying to know! You’re trying not to know!”

She sipped her tea.

Abruptly he stood again. He could barely hold himself still, now; he twitched, he turned this way and that, took a step and stopped. He looked around as if he had forgotten where they were.

“What’s the story here?” he said, gesturing at her tiny kitchen. “Are you married?”

“No.”

“Divorced?”

“No. My husband died.”

“What did he die of?”

“I’m not telling you my life,” she said, suddenly repulsed. “Leave me alone.”

He regarded her with a bitter gaze. “The privilege of a private life.”

She shook her head, focused on her tea cup.

“Look,” he said. “If you really were from the future, so that you knew for sure there were people walking the Earth today fighting change, so that they were killing your children and all their children, you’d defend your people. In defense of your home, your life, your people, you would kill an intruder.”

“An intruder like you.”

“Exactly. So, if your organization represents the people who will be born after us, well, that’s a heavy burden! It’s a real responsibility! You have to think like them! You have to do what they would do if they were here.”

“I don’t think they would countenance murder.”

“Of course they would!” he shouted, causing her to flinch. He shook hard, he quivered where he stood; he reached up and held his head as if to keep it from exploding. His eyes looked like they might pop out of his head. He turned his back to her, kicked the front of her refrigerator, staggered and then went to the window and glanced out, hissing, fuming. “I’m a fucking dead person already,” he muttered to himself. He put his hands to the windowsill, leaned his forehead on the glass. After a while his breathing steadied, and he turned and faced her again. He sat down across from her again. “Look,” he said, visibly pulling himself together. “People kill in self-defense all the time. Not to do that would be a kind of suicide. So people do it. And now your people are under assault. These supposed future people.”

She heaved a sigh. She kept her eyes on her tea cup.

He said, “You just want someone else to do it. Someone with less cover than you have, someone who will suffer more for doing it. That way you can keep your good life and your nice kitchen, and let the desperate people take the hit for trying. The very people you’re tasked with defending.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I know. I met with some of them in India. I wanted to join them, but they wouldn’t have me. They’re going to do what you should be doing. They’ll kill and they’ll be killed, they’ll commit some petty act of sabotage and be put in prison for the rest of their lives, and all for doing the work you ought to be doing.”

“You didn’t join them?”

“They wouldn’t have me.”

A spasm contorted his face. He wrestled with the memory. “I was just another firangi, as far as they were concerned. An imperial administrator, like in the old days. An outsider telling them what to do. Probably they were right. I thought I was doing the best I could. Just like you. And I could have died. Just by helping a little health clinic. I did die, but for some reason my body lived on after my death. And here I am, still trying to do things. I’m a fool. But they didn’t want my help. Probably they were right, I don’t know. They’ll do what they need to without me, they don’t need me. They’re doing what your agency should be doing. That’ll be harder once they go outside India. They’ll get killed for it. So I’ve been trying to do what I think they might want, here, where I can move around better than they can.”

“You’ve been killing people?”

“Yes.” He swallowed hard, thinking about it. “I’ll get caught eventually.”

“Why do you do it?”

“I want justice!”

“Vigilante justice is usually just revenge.”

He waved her away. “Revenge would be okay. But more importantly, I want to help to stop it happening again. The heat wave, and things like it.”

“We all want that.”

His face went red again. Choked voice again: “Then you need to do more.”

Her doorbell rang.

It was well after midnight. There was no one who would call on her now.

He saw that on her face and lunged toward her. They both had stood up instinctively. “You gave me away!” His terrified face inches from hers.

“I didn’t!”

And because she hadn’t, she could meet his wild-eyed glare with one of her own. For a second they stood there locked in a gaze beyond telling, both of them panicked.

“There are cameras everywhere,” she said. “We must have been seen out on the street.”

“Go tell them you’re okay.” He put his hand in the pocket with the gun.

“All right.”

Heart pounding harder than ever, she went to her door, out onto the landing, down the flights of internal stairs to the building’s outside door on the ground floor. She opened it, keeping the chain on.

Two police officers, or perhaps private security. “Minister Murphy?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“We received a report that you were seen entering your apartment with a man.”

“Yes,” she said, thinking hard. “He’s a friend, there’s no problem.”

“He’s not listed among your known friends.”

“I don’t like the implications of that,” she said sharply, “but for now, just know that he’s the son of an old schoolmate of mine from Ireland. I tell you it’s all right. Thanks for checking on me.”

She closed the door on them and went back upstairs.

Her apartment was empty.

She wandered around. No one there. Finally she checked the door that led out onto the little balcony hanging over the back lot of the place. It had been left ajar. All dark down there. Overhead, the bare branches of the giant linden that covered the yard blocked the stars with a black pattern. She leaned over the metal railing, looked down. Probably one could downclimb one of the big square posts at the outer corners of the balcony. She wouldn’t have wanted to try it herself, but the young man had looked like someone who wouldn’t be stopped by having to downclimb a single story.

“I told them you were a friend,” she said angrily to the darkness.

She was angry at him and at herself. Her mind raced. She felt sick. It took about a minute for her to run through her options and realize what she had to do. She ran back inside and down the stairs to the outside door, ran out into the street calling, “Police! Police! Come back here! Come back!”

And then they were back, hustling to her fast and staring at her curiously. She told them that she had had to lie to them to keep all three of them from being shot by the man who had been with her. He had seized her in the street, held her at gunpoint; he was gone now, having left while she was talking to them. All true, though ever so incomplete. She realized as she spoke to them that she would never be able to tell anyone what had really happened. Things like that hour were not tellable.

They were on their radios, alerting their colleagues. They led her upstairs, guns drawn. She sat back down on her kitchen chair, took a deep breath. Her hands were shaking. It was going to be a long night.