The Ministry for the Future

60

Spring came and Mary began to swim again from the Utoquai schwimmbad, first once or twice a week, then every day. Then tram back up to the office. She gave the final nod to Janus Athena’s YourLock, and J-A posted the website address to the internet and they watched it go through its unobtrusive birth, a slow week as it turned out, as it was just one spike in the endless interference patterns of discourse. Then people began to share the news that you could transfer everything going on in the rest of your internet life into a single account on YourLock, which was organized as a co-op owned by its users, after which you had secured your data in a quantum-encrypted cage and could use it as a negotiable asset in the global data economy, agreeing to sell your data or not to data-mining operations out there who quickly saw the new lay of the land and began to offer people micro-payments for their data, mainly health information, consumption patterns, and finance. The royalties for being oneself in the world machine were not insignificant, a kind of lifetime annuity, small but useful. And so people began to make the shift, and one day that tipping point arrived where a non-linear shear occurred, like an earthquake, and suddenly everyone had a YourLock account and would henceforth be conducting their internet life by way of it. A whole new internet ecology, the much-hyped but previously vaporwaresque Internet 3.0.

This was news, of course, remarked on everywhere. But on the other hand, when Mary went down to the lake in the mornings to swim, everything looked the same; and this was true everywhere. Global revolutions these days were strange, Mary thought, being as virtual as everything else. And of course in the virtual world it had indeed caused an uproar. What did it mean? Who owned this new system? It was open source, some said, no one owned it. People working in the gift economy had made it, which meant maybe just people playing around. So who profited from it? Other people said its users were its owners and thus made whatever money it made, mostly, as always, by way of advertising fees. It was somewhat like a credit union, perhaps, inserting itself into the social media discourse space. As with a move from bank to credit union, instead of the company using the consumer, the consumer used the company, and owned it too. What did the company per se get out of it? Nothing, because a company was nothing. It was just an organization devised to help its employee-owners, nothing more. Like any other company, in the end. If you thought that was what they were.

All this was going over very poorly in China, where the stance had always been that the Chinese Communist Party was precisely a company in that mold, owned by its consumers and only in existence to advance their welfare. So they kept the new YourLock site outside their Great Firewall, as they had so many previous Western internet companies. But the Great Firewall was riddled with holes, and although some argued that most Chinese netizens were completely absorbed and happy in their Chinese space, it did seem to be true that many of them kept links to multiple accounts they had going all over the world. The internal migrants in all the big cities of China, sometimes called the billion, were still an exploited labor force to the point of wanting some outside leverage over the hukou system that had made them illegal for moving to the cities; and the prosperous middle class was always interested to slip some assets offshore. So in some sectors of the Chinese populace, the site was also being taken up in significant numbers.

Days passed, and as far as Mary could tell in Zurich, the impact of all this internet turmoil was minimal on daily life. Possibly it was the global revolution that internet advocates had been calling for since the beginning of the internet, but as no previous manifestation of this poorly defined revolution had ever come to pass, unless one counted the great privatization of the late 1990s, no one could say for sure what it would look like when it happened. Indeed the internet’s earlier rapid colonization and capitalization of the mental life of so many people had occurred in a similarly invisible fashion, so Mary wasn’t sure people even knew what they were wishing for when they postulated an internet revolution.

But her team knew—or they were imagining it. Now everyone who signed up for YourLock and started using it was also helping to sustain it, by hosting their part of a blockchained record of its history from its beginning. A distributed ledger: it was only by way of work given for free (meaning not just the labor but the electricity), by many millions of people, that this new organization could function at the level of the computing required. Even if that worked, Mary wasn’t sure it was going to represent a net gain in terms of a sustainable civilization. Probably it would depend on what this new network was used for, or on what people did in the physical world. As always, the decisive moves were still to come. Possibly it was true that they would happen first in the realm of discourse, then afterward in the realm of material existence.

She tried to focus on that latter part of life. Morning swim in the Zurichsee, its temperature creeping up as spring turned to summer. Tram and trudge to work, trudge home. Take a weekly tram ride down into the city center and the Gefängnis, to visit Frank May. This was some kind of duty.

He seemed to be doing all right. The Swiss prison system was typically Swiss—practical, benign, a kind of community college dorm that you couldn’t opt out of. Frank spent his days out around the city doing public work of various kinds, from street cleaning to nursing assistant, depending on the need and that month’s schedule. He was either calmer and happier than on the night they had met, or else subdued and depressed—Mary didn’t know him well enough to be able to tell. Possibly a bit of both, if that was possible. Other people: if they didn’t want to share with you, you had no way to tell. When she visited, he regarded her curiously, not surprised anymore that she was showing up, just perhaps a bit discomfitted, or mystified. But not enough to ask her why she came. If he had, she wouldn’t have been able to answer him very well. In her head she staged conversations with him that were completely unlike what really happened when they were together. Tramming back up the Zuriberg she would watch the other blue cars of the tram, bending ahead and behind in the switchbacking S turns that the tracks made to get up the slope, saying to the Frank in her mind, If you would just ask me, I would say to you, I visit you because I want to rest easier, because I am helping you to rest easier. My conception of the world going well is a world in which even you look at it and feel it possible to rest easier. A world in which you gave yourself a break, and forgave all the rest of us our sins, and forgave yourself too. And in these mental conversations he would often nod and say, Yes Mary, I feel better about things. Your stupid ministry has put its shoulder to the wheel and helped to shove the cart out of the ditch. Although it’s not out yet, not by a long shot. Because the ditch was eating the road.

Nothing remotely like that ever passed between them in their actual meetings.

She kept track of Badim’s informal work in private meetings away from the office, in the pattern they had established. They didn’t meet often, nor was there any way to communicate in the office that wasn’t subject to surveillance, so pretty often it was a matter of handwritten notes left on her desk, never direct messages but rather lines attributed to Rumi or Kabir or Krishnamurti or Tagore; she didn’t know these poets’ work, and wasn’t sure if the quotes were real or made up. The gods are in disarray. It is the theory which decides what one can observe. A great comet will appear in the sky tomorrow. Look to windward. These phrases, as gnomic as Nostradamus, were only meant to tell her that things were happening, it was time to meet again. Or so she assumed. If there were specific messages encoded in them, she wasn’t getting them.

So she kept reading the news. Two days after a note had appeared on her desk that said only riot strike riot, she read that Berlin, London, New York, Tokyo, Beijing, and Moscow had experienced simultaneously, in the very same hour no matter the local time of day, teacher and transport worker strikes. This caused chaos in the streets and in the markets. Already the past year’s chaos had been sufficient to cause a massive drop in most of the stock markets, and they had never really recovered from Crash Day, so that was low indeed. The bear of bears. Of course the slack was soon enough taken up by risk-seekers looking to buy low and sell high later, but the sense of panic didn’t go away, the sense that bubbles were about to burst all over the place. The striking workers in the big cities returned to work, but before the situation had settled, the seemingly endless drought afflicting the Middle East, Iran, and Pakistan suddenly intensified into another killer heat wave, this though it was still only May. But the high pressure that sat on the area had jacked temperatures briefly up into the wet-bulb 35 zone, mainly this time a matter of sheer high temperature rather than humidity, and at the same time some cities there were running out of water. Refugees from the area were pouring across Turkey into the Balkans, also north into Armenia and Georgia and Ukraine and Russia, also east into India. India, a refuge from heat waves! But the Punjab was also caught in a drought, so India had sealed its border with Pakistan, already militarized and easy to close. Disaster all around. Pakistan threatened war, Iran threatened war. Something like ten million people were on the move and in imminent danger of dying. The humanitarian aid programs were overwhelmed, as were the national militaries.

Esmeri Zayed, her refugee division head, told her that if the current refugee population were a country, it would have about the same population as France or Germany. A hundred million people were out there wandering the Earth or confined in camps, displaced from their homes.

In the midst of this situation, an atmospheric river struck southern California, and though its winds were not as forceful as the winds of cyclones or hurricanes, its rainfall was at least as intense, and longer lasting. It looked like it might be something like a repeat of the catastrophic winter that had struck California in 1861–62, arriving several hundred years earlier than would have been expected by the US Army Corps of Engineers, as they had labelled the earlier storm a thousand-year storm, but of course all those probabilities were useless now. The tall mountains hemming in the LA basin had caught the truly torrential rain and poured it down onto the mostly paved surface of the basin, and the devastation was universal. Initial estimates pegged the death count to a remarkable low of seven thousand or so, but the infrastructure damage dwarfed anything the Angelenos’ much-feared earthquake would have done to them. Actually there were scientists warning that the weight of that much water might trigger that very earthquake. The Big One, right in the middle of a mega-storm! Only in LA, people said, feeling shivers of schadenfreude, tinged with regret: the world’s dream factory was being destroyed before their eyes. No more Hollywood faces to haunt the global unconscious; that age was over. Restoration costs for the damage they were seeing on the raindrop-spattered images would cost more than thirty trillion dollars, Jurgen estimated.

So now one could imagine that the American people might support action on the climate change front. Better late than never!

But no. Already it was becoming clear that LA was not popular in Texas, or on the east coast, or even in San Francisco for that matter. In fact, no place that was not LA cared about it at all. The dream factory for the world, universally unpopular! People had not liked those dreams, perhaps. Or had not liked having their dream life colonized. Or maybe they just didn’t like being stuck in traffic.

In any case, California’s government, one of the most progressive in the world, and the US federal government, one of the most reactionary in the world—both were making efforts to help. Love it or hate it, LA was important to them. And really, Mary thought, keeping the death count down to seven thousand was an amazing accomplishment of civil engineering and citizen action, also rapid deployment by the US Navy and the rest of the military, and the quick actions of the citizens themselves. The initial rush of the flood had been the most fatal part of it, and after that it was just an accumulation of small accidents. So it was an admirable emergency response. Really the US was in many respects the gold standard for infrastructure, a brick house in a world of straw; those stupid raised freeways, built strong enough to withstand the Big One, had served as refugia for the entire population of the city, and the subsequent evacuation had proceeded successfully. A very impressive improvisation.

Despite LA’s uneven popularity across the world, it was for sure immensely famous. The dream factory had accomplished that at least. Many people all over the world felt they knew the place, and were transfixed by the images of it suddenly inundated. If it could happen to LA, rich as it was, dreamy as it was, it could happen anywhere. Was that right? Maybe not, but it felt that way. Some deep flip in the global unconscious was making people queasy.

Despite this sense that the world was falling apart, or maybe because of it, demonstrations in the capitals of the world intensified. Actually these seemed to be occupations rather than demonstrations, because they didn’t end but rather persisted as disruptions of the ordinary business of the capitals. Within the occupied spaces, people were setting up and performing alternative lifeways with gift supplies of food and impromptu shelter and toilet facilities, all provided or enacted by the participants as if in some kind of game or theater piece, designed mainly to allow unceasing discourse demanding the official governments respond to the needs of their people rather than to the needs of global capital; and the governments involved had to face either siccing their police and militaries on their own people, or waiting out the occupations for what could be months, or actually changing in the ways demanded. Time to dismiss the people and elect another one! as Brecht had so trenchantly phrased it.

Meanwhile flying was still much reduced, except for an increase in battery-powered short flights, and an immense surge in airship construction. Ocean trade was disrupted; millions were out of work; millions were in the streets. Online, people were joining YourLock and abandoning the other social media sites, now called the predatory social media. So many people were withdrawing their savings from private banks and depositing them in credit unions and alternative cooperative financial institutions that another financial crash not only was happening but was the deepest in over a century. The banks had all been so over-leveraged for so long that what that actually meant had been lost; so now, in a crisis as big as this one, most of them had been brought to their knees, and were stumping to their governments’ central banks to squeal for salvation. This time the governments’ treasuries, although still in the hands of financial industry veterans, found they could do nothing like what they had done in the 2008 bail-out; that crash was looking minor compared to this one, and because of the 2020 recession, awareness of what was happening, and why, was much higher. It was a different time, a new structure of feeling, a new material situation. Already people were saying this was bigger than 2020, bigger than the Great Depression, maybe the biggest economic crash ever—because it wasn’t just economic. The whole damn merry-go-round had spun off its flywheel and was disintegrating as it fell.

So Mary called up the heads of the various central banks around the world and got them to agree to gather to talk things over yet again. Many of them wanted her to come to them, and she almost agreed to hold the meeting in Beijing: the Chinese would be key to any solution. But the Chinese were punctilious about joining international meetings, and would go anywhere the meeting was held, she judged; they didn’t care so much about national prestige that they would refuse to join a settlement being worked out elsewhere. The puffy nation in that regard would be the United States, but Mary was pretty sure Jane Yablonski would also come to the meeting wherever it was. And the Bank for International Settlements’ annual meeting in Basel was coming up soon anyway. So she told them to please come to Zurich too, right after the BIS meeting. Air travel being now so fraught, specially arranged stealth military flights would bring them all to Switzerland; or now, quite a few would fly in on airships.

Hosting a meeting of a dozen or twenty of the most powerful people on Earth, which meant also accommodating large staffs for each of them, was a big job, but one that the Swiss were used to performing. For this meeting there were too many people for the ministry offices to hold, so they held the meeting in the Kongresshall, down by the lake.

The morning they convened, the broad picture windows spanning the south wall of the big room provided them with the pathetic fallacy in full measure: a spring storm lashed the Zurichsee, with low shifting gray clouds dropping black brooms of rain onto the silvery lake surface, the windows running wild with deltas of rainwater kaleidoscoping this view. Nothing unusual in that, no LA-like climate apocalypse here, just Zurich spring weather as usual; but still very fitting, given the mood in the room, which was one of grim virtue. They would weather this storm, they said to each other while looking out at it, and all the stark emotion in the room was heightened by the dark metallic sublimity of the rain-lashed whitecaps on the lake, the sound of the wind ripping through the flailing trees.

Mary brought them to order. She reminded them of the meetings she had had with them over the past few years, in which she had urged them to create a new currency of their own collaboration, based on carbon sequestration, and exchangeable on currency exchanges; money like other money, but backed by the central banks working together, and securitized by the creation of really long-term bonds, bonds with a century pay-out at a guaranteed rate of return large enough to tempt anyone interested in fiscal stability. In essence, as she had been saying, creating a way to invest in survival, to go long on civilization, as opposed to the many ingenious ways that finance had found to short civilization, thus in the process shifting most of the surplus value created in the last four decades to the richest two percent of the population, making those few so rich that they could imagine surviving the crash of civilization, they and their descendants living on into some poorly imagined gated-community post-apocalypse in which servants and food and fuel and games would still be available to them. No way, she said to the bankers; not a chance that would happen. Shorting civilization and imagining living on in some fortress island of the mind was another fantasy of escape, one of many that rich people entertained, as ridiculous as retreating to Mars. Money was worthless if there was no civilization to back it, no civilization to make things to buy—things like food. So even if the central bankers were regarding their task in the very narrowest terms, as stabilizing prices and helping the employment rate, and more than anything else, preserving the perceived value of money itself—to do that now, they had to leave their usual monetarist silos, and regard themselves as what they were, the not-so-secret government of the world. In that capacity, something more was now called for than merely adjusting their fucking interest rates.

Yes, they were shocked by her bluntness, by her disgust for their timidity. These Irish! they were thinking; she could see that. But they were also paying very close attention to her; they were transfixed, the storm outside forgotten. Now the storm was in the room, in the form of one angry intense middle-aged woman.

Well, she had to remember; when a meeting got hot it was usually going badly. This was a calculated risk, getting their attention by lashing them a bit; now she had to calm it down. So she did that. The last time she had asked them to do this, she reminded them, they had refused her. Now, she told them, the situation was different. It was so much worse it could scarcely be believed. And as the current representative in their midst of all the future generations to come, she was going to have to insist that they act. She was (remembering what Dick had told her about letting them invent the instruments) open to their suggestions as to how best to act. Possibly the Bank for International Settlements could be brought out of its twentieth-century time capsule and used as the instrument at hand for this. But act they must. Because civilization was trembling on the brink. They were going down.

Here the pathetic fallacy of an ordinary Zurcher spring storm helped bring her point home. The wind was really howling now, the air was black though it was just before noon, the whole lake was slamming into the windows and blurring the view, then the wind clarifying it with a blast, time after time—it was almost as rainy as Galway.

The new Chinese minister of finance, who served as the head of their central bank and was also at the same time a member of the standing committee, and thus one of the seven most powerful people in China, stood up to speak. A woman who had learned her English at Oxford, it sounded like, and she had a cheerful relaxed manner, as if they were discussing history, which Mary supposed they were. She pointed out that Mary had not visited China in her tour of the central banks, nor had she herself been finance minister at that time, so she had not been part of the earlier unenthusiastic response Mary had just described. In fact, in China the national banks were always trying to throw their weight around as vigorously as they could to help China’s economy, and they would be happy to join any international effort that they felt could help in a way that was good for China and the world. Indeed, it sounded to her as if what Mary was asking for was precisely the kind of thing that the Chinese government did all the time.

True enough to be a discussion point, Mary replied. But no matter which national or surpranational (with a nod to the European Union’s central bank head, and the BIS head) model they referenced or preferred, now she urged them to consider again something new and fully international: a carbon coin, a digital currency backed by a consortium of all the big central banks, with open access for more central banks to join; these coins to be backed by long-term bonds created by the consortium, and shored up against financial attacks by speculators who were sure to attack it. Defended by all the central banks working together, they would be able to repulse successfully any entities that tried to hamstring their new system. Indeed, if the central banks blockchained not just the new carbon coins but all the fiat money that existed, they could probably squeeze parasitic speculators right out of existence. The best defense being a good offense.

The crucial banks, Mary thought privately, were the US, the ECB, and China. Germany and the UK were also important, also Switzerland itself. The more the merrier, of course, as always; but the big three were crucial. Even if it were just those three, they could probably go it alone; although if they were in, Mary was sure others would join.

So, right now, although the new Chinese finance minister thought she was being positive by cheerfully comparing the proposal to ordinary Chinese practice, this wasn’t actually helping much with the others; they were looking skeptical that becoming more like China was really the answer for this moment. China was debt-laden, opaque, oligarchic, authoritarian. Even granted the modifying Chinese characteristics always referenced, they were avowedly socialist, even Marxist. What that really meant no one knew, not even the Chinese, but their financial practices were constantly offending ordinary Western norms and sensibilities, so it hadn’t been a very diplomatic move on the part of the Chinese finance minister to suggest to them that by necessity they were now having to become more Chinese. But looking at her, Mary didn’t think that this new finance minister was really very regretful about that. Her look was amused, but in the way a hawk might be amused, something hard to imagine. She had a fierce edge.

On the other hand, all central banks were undemocratic technocracies, not that dissimilar to China’s top-down system. They were run by financial elites who did what they felt was best without consulting even their own legislatures, much less the citizens of their countries. As institutions they were in fact specifically designed to function outside any legislative or democratic whims, the better to keep the financial ship of the world steadily sailing on into the great west of universal prosperity—for the elites first, and everyone else if they could be accommodated without endangering the elites on the first-class deck. So an invitation to become more undemocratic, if couched diplomatically enough, would not be entirely unwelcome to this crowd. It would be a matter of how one phrased it.

Phrasing was also important when showing the stick. First the carrot, which she felt was the best way to lead: do it, she told them, and you are the saviors of the world, staving off chaos and allowing the huge resources of humanity and the Earth to be brought to bear on the greatest crisis in history. People would be writing about them, analyzing them and copying them, even celebrating them, for centuries to come; and a model would be built by them here and now which could be adapted to deal with any future crises of similar dimensions. Thus the carrot.

The stick: if they didn’t do it, Mary and her team could arrange the whole thing to happen through YourLock accounts as a distributed ledger coin, created and given by people to each other. This would cut hard into any power central banks might be said to have. Then also, the Ministry for the Future had allies within every relevant legislature, and Mary’s legal team had prepared detailed advice for governments to introduce new legislation that would expand legislative control over the central banks, giving them mandates and responsibilities to mitigate climate change proactively, as opposed to just responding to the financial risks reactively. The new mandates would require central banks to create a digital currency and manage the exchange rate of it, using all the mechanisms at their disposal. In short, Mary was prepared to start a movement worldwide in which governments put their central banks on leashes and directed them to act in ways governments wanted. The great example of how effective this nationalization or internationalization of the national banks could be was the takeover of the Bank of England by the British Treasury during the Second World War. Britain had commandeered the Bank of England to properly guide capital where it was needed to win the war. The same could be done again with climate change, if the relevant legislatures felt it was necessary. Country-appropriate laws were ready to be introduced by sympathetic powerful politicians in every country.

That’s what we’ll do if we have to, she concluded. She was being blunt again, as at the start; she was slipping into that certain Irish rhetorical mode that was so often useful, the one that said No more fucking around, reality has struck—said with blunt disdain for any naiveté or cowardice that refused to admit the obvious facts. That mode was a mode she liked.

But of course, she went on silkily, I don’t think a total takeover of central banks by governments, or replacement by a new people’s currency, will be necessary. Sharing for a moment a single basilisk glare with the Chinese minister, who clearly was enjoying her presentation. Renminbi was Chinese for people’s money, after all. The situation we’re facing is unprecedented, she went on, and its causes are clear, and now we have to act, and so we will.

Are the causes so clear? asked Jane Yablonski sharply. I’m not so sure!

Mary let Badim and the rest of her team make the case. She had asked them to prepare a kind of group presentation that ran around the table in cause/effect mode, describing each aspect of the problem in turn. Of course the causal chains ran in all kinds of directions, it was a cat’s cradle, but she could make that point at the end; for now, three minutes each to describe the problem: climate change caused by carbon dioxide and methane released to the atmosphere; knock-on effects very close to releasing vastly larger quantities of CO₂ and methane, now cached in the Arctic permafrost and the ocean’s continental shelves; oceans unable to uptake more CO₂ and heat; rate of extinctions already as high as at any time in Earth’s history, in terms of actual speed of extinctions per century, thus set now to match the Permian in terms of total percentage of species gone from the land, which was ninety percent; subsequent to that coming extinction, inevitable famine, dislocation, and war—possibly nuclear war—leading to the destruction of civilization; impossibility of insuring against such an eventuality, or clawing back from it. Irreversible and unfixable catastrophe.

Thus, ultimately, as a result of all these converging factors, Mary concluded at the end of her team’s presentations, they were facing the impossibility of stabilizing inflation rates and employment rates as the climate heated up. The specific principal tasks that central banks were charged with could no longer be fulfilled if the climate emergency got out of hand. In other words, central banks would fail in their principal tasks if they did not save the civilization that had charged them with those tasks. And although it was true that full employment would always remain a key objective for them, she finished, it wasn’t such a victory if the remnant of humanity that survived the crash ended up working as scavengers and peasant farmers. That wasn’t the kind of full employment that the world had in mind when central banks were created.

She saw that Yablonski and the Europeans were offended at this final sarcasm, and she pondered for a moment simply shouting suddenly in their faces, or taking her shoe off and pounding the table Khrushchev style. Or throwing a chair through the picture window and letting the storm pour in over them. Sudden fury at their mulishness: Fuck your inflation rates! she wanted to shout. Do the job that only you can do!

And judging by their faces, it was possible that her own face held all these sentiments and imagined actions and curses, perfectly visible in the way she was looking at them. The power of the eye. Not Medusa, turning them to stone or killing them with a strike from a snake on her head—instead, she fervently hoped, some kind of electrical jump-start, applied by jumper cables that had her two eyes as the contact grips, leaping the gap from mind to mind. Yes, she was very close to losing it.

Then she saw that the Chinese finance minister was grinning broadly, not even trying to hide it. She checked her cheat sheet; who was this woman again? Madame Chan. Daughter of a finance minister from the generation before. A child of the Party hierarchy, like Xi had been, and so many others. Mary liked her look.

In the following days the representatives of the central banks kept meeting in the same room, and while the Zurichsee provided emotional guidance by way of a succession of brilliantly sunny days, marked by tall clouds like galleons, sailing over the lake as if carrying vast treasure, the central bankers finally invented a proposal they could all agree on. It was as bold as anyone could want, and Mary felt that none of the central bankers there would have touched the plan with a ten-foot pole if all of them weren’t in it together to take the heat sure to follow. They would issue together a single new currency, coordinated through the BIS: one coin per ton of carbon-dioxide-equivalent sequestered from the atmosphere, either by not burning what would have been burned in the ordinary course of things, or by pulling it back out of the air. They promised to establish a floor in the value of this carbon coin, which exposed them to great danger from speculators trying to scare money out of the plan; and they foretold a rise in the value of the currency over the coming decades. By doing these things they made this investment a sure thing, assuming civilization itself survived. That by itself would guarantee a certain large amount of capital from many different sources looking for just such a sure thing. Pension funds, small national reserves, big corporate assets, really anyone responsible would want the security involved, especially now that there was no security anywhere else. In essence it was like throwing a life ring to drowning people. It could overwhelm the system, actually, if everyone grabbed at once; but carbon had to be sequestered to create the coins in the first place, so if there was a mad rush to do that, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. And the central banks could always adjust upward the amount of carbon saved that would be required to earn a coin, creating derivative complications of all kinds and giving them more control knobs. Getting the certification teams for the sequestrations up and running was going to be a crazy effort. In fact, at the end of the agreement they all lent some fiat money of the ordinary kind, pooled into a fund administered through the BIS, which would be enough to pay for this new bureaucracy of verification that would have to be created to certify that carbon was really being sequestered. This was a bureaucracy so vast no single bank could afford it, nor of course the ministry, not even close. It was almost a full employment plan all by itself.

So it was a total program. Mary’s team wrote it up in detail, in consultation with the bankers on hand and their staffs, taking all their suggestions and folding them in, and then in the end, after each bank had consulted with its government back home, they announced it, and offered the first tranche of carbon coins for purchase. Began to disburse them too; and the trade price for them held, even rose a little.

Then nothing happened.

This, Mary thought as the days and weeks after the meeting passed, was beginning to look like a pattern. They were only really doing things to try to ameliorate the situation they were falling into after it was too late for those things to succeed. They kept closing the barn door after the horses were out, or after the barn had burned down. At that point their actions, which a few years or decades earlier might have been quite effective, weren’t enough. Maybe even close to useless. Over and again it was a case of too little too late, with nothing stronger anyone could think of to apply to the worsening situation.

If this were really true for something physical, like the Arctic’s permafrost melt, or the ocean’s acidification past the point of life at the bottom of the food chain surviving it, or the Antarctic’s ice sheet collapsing fast—then they were fucked and no denying it.

And yet there were still people fighting tooth and claw. And it could be that it was only in the realm of the social that they were so far behind the curve of the moment. Anyway people were fighting.

Although not just for the good, but also against the good—fighting tooth and claw to forestall their efforts, to hamstring them. Thus in effect there were people trying to kill every living thing on Earth, in some awful genocidal murder-suicide. Here they were, walking a tightrope over the abyss, and these fuckers were jumping all over the balancing pole they were holding, doing their best to cast them all down to disaster and death.

“There will always be idiots,” Badim intoned as Mary cursed another manifestation of these people.

But it was worst than that. “There will always be assholes,” she said viciously.

Badim said, “Focus on all the people still fighting for the good. There are many more of them than the other kind.”

Then one month after the carbon coin announcement, a bomb went off in their offices on Hochstrasse.

It happened at night, with no one in the building; perhaps that had been the bombers’ intent, but there was no way to tell. The Swiss police who accompanied Mary to see the wreckage were taut with apprehension, and they were not so much apologetic as they guarded her, as stolidly disapproving. Blaming the victim being one of the errors that law enforcement people were so often prone to.

They advised her to accept more police protection. In fact they insisted on it. And it was true that the sight of their offices, solid stone Swiss buildings, built to last a thousand years, blown open, shattered, their interiors visible from the street, a black shambles that would have killed them all had they been inside, was indeed shocking to her. So she agreed.

It turned out that what they had in mind was not like being arrested and let out for the day with protection. No, her guardians were suggesting, or requiring, that she go into hiding. They had facilities to make that work for her, safe houses not far away, fastnesses in the Alps. Or anywhere in the world she liked; but she needed to hide for a while. Threats on her life were very much in play. They insisted. She got to choose the where, a little, but not the how.

If she left Switzerland, she would be leaving her team. And Zurich.

So she chose the Alps.