Ballroom Dancing Aboard The Gladwyn Jebb
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Hope amongst the ice floes and penguins
July 9, 2031
2:47 p.m. Temperature: -1°F
79°30′S 47°30′W — Berkner Ice Shelf, Antarctica
Shackleton must have been one ballsy son of a bitch.
That was the only thing I could think of, standing out here on Berkner Island, looking north out towards the Weddell Sea. I couldn’t imagine trying to navigate the Antarctic without our drones, its moonscape topography and smudged, gray-white horizon line erasing any sense of distance. We had taken five drones with us, each no bigger than a paperback novel. The whirring of their motors was virtually imperceptible to us from underneath the balaclavas and hoods that covered our heads, providing protection from the biting wind. Even though it was still not yet three in the afternoon, it was already approaching twilight. Ric and I had been out here on the Filchner-Ronne for nearly two hours before we had found our target, and now we were ready for the final stage of the operation.
We had made our way onto the land that was owned by the Rukeyser-Kondracke Group earlier this morning. Their 500-acre compound was still in the early stages of development, with a minimal crew and temporary buildings. RKG had gained rights of ownership to this land in exchange for cheap vaccines. Of course, their vaccines hadn’t done jack shit to stem the tide of disease that ravaged 85% of the world. But that was 10 years ago, and nobody, certainly no government, was around to ask RKG for a refund.
Our drones, equipped with electronic counter-surveillance baffles, had managed to avoid detection and provide us with coordinates for the best location to breach the outer perimeter fencing. We had spent most of the day’s light digging a tunnel beneath the outer chain link fencing, using a mini-blow torch and a drill to break through the ice and slip underneath without being detected. This was when Rukeyser-Kondracke’s operation in Antarctica was still relatively new and before they had established a more sophisticated security perimeter.
Once inside it didn’t take us long to locate the macaroni penguins. There was a grouping of six or seven of them near the edge of a small, man-made watering hole. The yellow crest that arises from a patch on the center of the forehead, and extends horizontally backward to the nape gave them a striking appearance, both comical and somehow regal at the same time. Ric took the rifle off his shoulder and got down on his stomach on the cold, icy ground, and took his time aiming. We were probably close to 80 yards away. Ric lay prone, perfectly still as his smart goggles lined up his shot. It was just a few seconds before he pulled the trigger, but it felt like the sun had set and risen again before the dart shot through the air, hitting one of the penguins in the chest. The other birds scattered, shrill chirps of alarm forming a staccato call and response between them.
We moved quickly across the permafrost and I wondered, ‘How the hell did a black girl from Wilmington, North Carolina end up scrambling across the icy coastline of Antarctica to steal a penguin?’ But just as quickly as the thought came to me, I pushed it out of my mind, excited to get to the penguin. We had to hurry before the RKG drones made their sweep of this area. I reached the penguin first, quickly dropping to my knees and removing my backpack. I was breathing heavily and as I rummaged for my tools, Ric checked to make sure the bird was still alive, giving me a brief nod of confirmation. I removed my thick, outer gloves, leaving on my Thermalite SkinTech smart gloves while I began examining the bird’s body for unusual bumps. I found one on its back, up by its left shoulder. I opened the surgical kit given to me by the ship’s doctor and removed a small scalpel. Ric pulled a small, foil blanket out of his backpack, and as I lifted up the animal Ric placed it on the ground. I was amazed at how light the penguin was. No more than a dozen pounds. Ric held the penguin in place as I made a small incision. A thin trickle of blood ran down the bird’s body, the rivulets running slow and thick in the cold. With tweezers, I removed a small, lozenge-shaped electronic tracking device from the bird.
As Ric applied a bandage to the still unconscious bird I put away the surgical tools and pulled out my tablet. My fingers were starting to get numb, even with the smart gloves, but I brought up the drone app and did a quick check. All five were operating optimally, forming a perimeter around us, some 150 feet in the air. Thanks to Miriam and her team, we had some of the most sophisticated drones in the world. She had told us with the type of confidence one only gets after graduating from the Israeli army’s Unit 9900 that the drones would be able to out-think whatever the RKG drones had to offer. She figured that before the Cascade Failure she had probably helped develop whatever technology the RKG drones were running on, and that was an inferior operating system to the one she had created for our drones.
Even with that technological superiority, sometimes more basic tactics came into play. I pulled out a Ziploc bag filled with hand warmers from my backpack. I began unwrapping them, the external oxygen supply mixing with the iron and activated carbon to generate the heat. I stuffed several of them into a mound of icy snow I had quickly built; put the tracking lozenge inside as well, and packed the rest of my gear back into my pack. I looked over to Ric and saw that he had got the penguin inside his pack, along with the foil blanket, and was ready to move out. He stood up and, fishing something from the cargo pocket of his pants, moved towards the ersatz penguin I had built out of snow and hand warmers. He had pulled a black domino tile from his pocket, the one-six. He slid it inside the snow penguin and we headed out.
The trip back to where we had left our small dinghy, hidden by a rocky outcropping, was quiet. Ric wasn’t much of a talker and I was focused on monitoring our drones. I had set them to head on a course in an opposite direction along the coastline, hoping to draw any RKG drones or personnel away from us until we were ready to head back to the ship. Drone Three had picked up incoming surveillance pings and so I initiated a spoof program that would trick the RKG drones into thinking they were just picking up a group of cormorants. I then sent a message to the Gladwyn Jebb letting them know the status of the mission and our ETA back to the ship.
I took a minute to catch my breath and reflect on what we had just done. In the 10 years since humans and the planet had bottomed out as a result of the Cascade Failure, more than 98 percent of the southern hemisphere’s penguin population had disappeared. What remained was under the control of the governments that were still functioning, or corporations like the Rukeyser-Kondracke Group. Maybe we were too late to save the polar bears, and maybe reintroducing penguins to the wild seemed like a small thing compared to what had happened — what was in fact still happening, but it was something. An act of defiance. No, an act of faith. Faith in the spirit of mankind. Jesus, who was I kidding? People are trash. We poisoned the planet and rather than coming to each other’s aid, we grabbed our valuables and slammed the doors behind us on the less fortunate. I lost my faith in mankind as I watched millions starve and drown and burn and freeze while the one percent’s one percent blasted into space or annexed the Antarctic. So yeah, fuck humanity. Maybe this penguin was just a penguin, but she was one less penguin owned by RKG.
I tucked my tablet back inside my jacket and picked up my pace to catch up with Ric. I had started to make my way across one of the rocky outcroppings that dotted the coastline but stopped in my tracks when I saw what had begun to unfold. Fifty yards in front of me Ric stood with his hands in the air, a Rukeyser-Kondracke security guard had a handgun pointed at him. Jesus, where had the guard come from? I cursed myself for having sent our drones away, one of them would have spotted the guard in advance and given us a warning. It was dark and I realized the guard hadn’t seen me yet. The mottled grey of my jacket and pants blended with the rocks. I was just out of the guard’s sight line, but also out of earshot so I couldn’t tell what she said as she spoke into the walkie-talkie strapped to her shoulder. Slowly I went down to one knee and pulled my gun from its holster on my left hip. My goggles brought up a tactical targeting grid and when they lined up the shot, my smart gloves gave a slight pulse and my trigger finger smoothly curled. But the gun didn’t fire, the trigger refusing to move. A message from the targeting program appeared in the lower left corner of my goggles HUD informing me that the shot would likely not inflict sufficient damage to kill the target. I moved my eyes until they engaged the override option and felt the trigger give this time as the targeting sequence activated the glove once again.
Before the guard turned her head at the sound of my gun discharging, the bullet had already slammed into her shoulder. She dropped her gun as she staggered forward and fell to the ground, grunting audibly and she landed upon the rocky shoreline. I ran toward the guard and Ric, who was already moving to grab the gun the guard had dropped.
“Shit, shit, shit,” I said as I approached them.
“She called it in, they’ll have troops here in 20 minutes,” Ric explained, aiming the gun at the guard.
“Wait, no,” I responded, not sure what to do next. The guard looked up at us. She was breathing heavily and in obvious pain.
“She ID’d me. If we let her go we risk having RKG boats track us down before we can get back to the fleet. She lives and we put 18,000 people and one penguin at risk,” Ric said, patting the pack on his back where the penguin was currently secured.
The guard had rolled over on her side, the sleeve of her white jacket starting to turn a deep crimson. She looked up at me and said, “Let me come with you. Please. I don’t want to die on this piece of ice.”
Ric looked at me. We locked eyes for a moment and then I looked back at the guard. I reached down and pulled the mask and goggles off her face so she could breathe easier. She looked like she was a teenager and I saw myself in her face. I remembered feeling that same fear a decade ago as thousands of us desperately fought to get on board one of the UN ships that had come into the port in Wilmington. It was Ric who had dragged me through the chaos and onto the ship that day, no doubt saving my life.
I grabbed the front of her jacket and started pulling her up to her feet. “Say one word, make one dumb move and I’ll put a bullet in your head and dump you in the ocean, understand?” She nodded. “Let’s go,” I said.
I could hear Ric sigh as he grabbed her uninjured arm and we got her to her feet. We made our way to the small rubber boat and got in. I tapped on my tablet and the drones, which had returned when their systems had registered the discharging of my weapon, gathered in a tight formation just above and in front of us, turning on their small but powerful lights to provide us illumination as we headed back to the Jebb.
Fifteen minutes later the UN fleet was in sight and we pulled up alongside the Jebb. A small group of researchers was waiting for us, eager to take the penguin off our hands and get down below deck with it.
We had managed to bind up the guard’s arm and give her some pain medication to stabilize her during the trip. Now we were going to take her to the infirmary. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Jacinda.”
“Where are you from?”
“Tasmania originally. But Australia since the CF.”
“What are you doing working for Rukeyser-Kondracke?” Ric asked.
“It’s a job, innit?”
After eating and getting a shower, I came back out on deck. It was almost 6 pm and an eerie darkness had enveloped the fleet. The moonlight gave the water an appearance of being almost purplish blue. The ghostly vibrations of colliding ice floes we shared the water with were haunting reminders of the past, simultaneously sinister and ethereal. As we started our journey north to Agua Novo, I could see the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf off our starboard side. It had been a lot bigger once. Ten years ago, an iceberg twice the size of Connecticut broke off from the Berkner Ice Shelf we had just been on. Dubbed A-57, the iceberg drifted across the Weddell Sea before getting caught in the South Atlantic Gyre. At the time, this was of interest mainly, if not solely, to the scientific community, who identified the calving as an inflection point for the climate.
The media leveraged it as that day’s harbinger of the coming environmental collapse before returning to their role as pornographers of the politico-entertainment industrial complex. Two weeks later, I remember it was Sunday, July 18, 2021, was the day the world would eventually designate as the official start of the Cascade Failure.
But anybody who was paying attention, and that didn’t include me at the time, knew the catastrophe we came to call the CF had started long before that. Many people had recognized and predicted various aspects — pollution, the refugee crisis, water scarcity, political instability, social upheaval, and global warming — the list was quite extensive. But the Black Swan no one saw coming was the effect each of these elements would have when combined with the others. Sound solutions for individual problems didn’t matter anymore. Implementing carbon offsets, ‘meatless Mondays,’ and marginal tax rates weren’t going to help anymore. It was too late for that. The time had come to buckle up.
August 2, 2042
6:18 p.m. Temp. -13°F
52°46’S 57°52'W — South Atlantic Sea; Agua Novo Environmental Cleanup Area, aboard the UN ship, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar
“Any news from Paranal?” I asked Elena as she came to sit down next to Ric and me at one of the communal tables, a plate of fish, potatoes, and pickled cauliflower in her hand. Ric and I were engaged in what had become our daily dominoes match. He had grown up with the game back in Mexico, and though he had been a patient and willing teacher, he must have held back some bit of learned wisdom, because it was a rare day when I beat him.
“Yes, actually, good news,” Elena replied. “The Lasker Reflect satellites are in position at Lagrange L1, and they think deployment should begin before the end of the year. How about you? How are you two holding up?”
Elena was referring to the recent death of Z-Tux, the penguin Ric and I had liberated from the RKG compound in Antarctica more than a decade ago. The synthetic biologists aboard the science ship, the Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had named her Tux after the mascot for the Linux operating system. They added the Z — for zero — to differentiate her from the clone prototypes they were making of her. Last we had heard they had created F-Tux, the fifth iteration.
“Sad obviously, that little girl had become family. But I spoke with Shin and she said they were really close to a breakthrough with S-Tux.” I said.
“It looks like the krill population around Agua Novo is finally rebounding too,” Ric added. His voice was the sound of whiskey and smoke. He looked every one of his 55 years as he laid another tile down on the table. We were playing with a set he had picked up in Pico Truncado, Argentina several months ago. Ric had turned several members of the crew of the Javier Pérez de Cuéllar into dominoes addicts. You could almost always find players engaged in a game here in the commissary.
“Well, if the Agua Nova project can match the success we’ve been having, I think I might start letting myself feel a little optimistic,” Elena said, popping a small, fingerling potato into her mouth.
“Well, that really would be something, wouldn’t it?” I said and smiled at Elena, and she playfully leaned into me.
Elena, one of the younger crewmembers aboard the Cuéllar, had learned electrical engineering and been part of the team that had done the calculations for the Lasker Reflect satellite system. Designed to shield the planet from the increasingly frequent solar flares, the system was named after Elena’s father, Emiliano Lasker, a Chilean astrophysicist and distant relative to chess champions Emanuel and Berthold Lasker. It was one of nearly one hundred projects under the authority of the United Nations currently in development or early deployment stages that were designed to reverse or lessen the effects of global warming. After more than two decades of promises from the private sector about how the techno-oligarchs were going to save the world, the world had stopped waiting around and started the hard work of doing. The Lasker Reflect was a joint operation of Chile, Canada, and the European Federation of Autonomous States.
After the Cascade Failure, the UN moved its headquarters to the Dag Hammarskjold — the flagship of our twelve-ship fleet. All twelve eco-ships had been designed to be self-sustaining. With wind generators and retractable, photovoltaic panels, they were powered by renewable energy.
Hydroponic farming and closed-loop water filtration systems, along with an integrated heat recovery system, meant that the fleet was able to stay at sea and be self-reliant, at a time when armed conflict had broken out all across the world. It was tough times to be sure, the original 19,000 crewmembers dropping to just under 12,000 after five years. Food was scarce and the raw materials for the 3D printers became difficult to obtain.
Finally, in 2038 a sort of equilibrium was reached, but not until dozens of governments collapsed, more than two billion people perished, and thousands of animal species disappeared from the face of the earth forever. It was also the year those of us aboard the ships started referring to ourselves as members of the ‘Untied Nations.’ It had started as a simple spelling error, two stenciled letters reversed on the side of a box of relief supplies to be delivered to Mar del Plata. But as our traveling flotilla became less dependent on land-based trade and political affiliations, the name became a sort of ironic badge of honor. After having watched the conflicts that had engulfed the planet for nearly a decade ravage many of the countries we had come from, perhaps being untied wasn’t a bad option.
. . .
June 21, 2050
9:44 a.m. Temp.: -11°F
60°52’S 45°19'W — South Orkney Islands, aboard the UN ship, Ban Ki-Moon
“We’ll be back at Agua Novo in 3 hours, please have the reports filed before we arrive.”
“Aye Madam,” Monty replied.
“Monty, it’s ok, you can still call me Billie,” I said. It had been less than a week since I had been made first mate on the Ban Ki-Moon, and I wasn’t comfortable with the formality some of the crew had adopted in addressing me.
Monty smiled and said, “Aye Madam,” before making his way down to one of the lower decks. We had just left Coronation Island, conducting field research on the fur seal population. Monty had led the expedition. I looked again at my tablet and viewed the photos he had sent. I was amazed at how many seals there were now. Many more than on any previous trip we had made. It was another encouraging sign. The ocean acidity levels in the area seemed to be returning to something close to what we might have called normal three decades ago as well. The coral reefs were starting a comeback too.
Before heading up to the bridge I decided to make one stop. As I made my way through the ship I thought about how far we had come, this ragtag Untied Nations. We had lost two of our original 12 ships over the last 20 years, and there probably weren’t more than 4,000 people left from the original 20,0000 who had been aboard when the fleet headed to the Southern Hemisphere. But we had managed to endure, and eventually, even thrive. With doctors from India, an A.I. system from China, Norwegian fishermen, and Colombian farmers we had not just survived, we had become an integral part of the comeback of the planet — and humanity. With the benefit of time, I could see that now. Yes, we had brought our biggest problems on ourselves, but there was still plenty of inherent goodness in the world, it was just a shame that we needed to face catastrophe to see it come back to life.
I made my way down one last hallway and was confronted by Ric, who approached from the opposite direction. He had a look on his face I couldn’t read. Even after 20 years, this man left me perplexed at times.
“Captain.”
He replied with a simple nod. “Billie, take a look at the message I just sent you.”
I pulled out my tablet and punched open the messaging app. I started scanning the message as he instructed, reading in disbelief at the news that the Rukeyser-Kondracke Group had announced the closure of their base in Antarctica after more than 90% of the staff and their families stationed there had succumbed to influenza. The virus, which had lain dormant for decades, had come back when the carcass of a dead seal had become exposed after the most recent melting of the permafrost. The base’s water supply had become contaminated and they hadn’t had the right antibiotics on hand until it was too late. I looked up at Ric who shook his head and continued down the hallway. I put my tablet away and continued to the Captain’s quarters.
“Come in,” I heard from inside after knocking on the door. I opened it and walked in.
“Hi Jacinda, how are you?”
“Good. Tired,” she replied. Jacinda was pregnant with her and Ric’s third child. Ric had had two other kids, both boys now in their late twenties, with his first wife, who had passed away just prior to Ric getting on board with me all those years ago. I had pretended to be the boys’ mother in order to get us all on board. Some official with foresight had understood they were going to need young people on the boats, and it might be easier to take infants than to have women giving birth on the ship. The boys were both crewmen on the Kofi Annan now, far enough away from the eyes of their father to create their own legacies.
“How’s the knitting coming?” I asked. Jacinda was sitting in a chair, patiently stitching fabric.
“You know, if you had told 15-year-old me that when I was 40 I’d be sewing in the cabin of a ship in the Antarctic, pregnant with my third child…” She trailed off, shaking her head. We both chuckled. “Did Ric tell you about the RKG base?”
“He did. Terrible thing.”
“To hell with them, they were all awful,” Jacinda said. It was hard to remember all these years later that it wasn’t just Zero-Tux we had rescued from the RKG base that day. Jacinda rarely mentioned her time there, and it was only when she tried to lift her right arm that I remembered I had shot her. Jacinda had ceased being an outsider long ago. We had brought her on board and given her medical treatment, assuming we would then return her to Australia, which back then had fared better during the CF than most countries. But she had expressed no interest in returning and asked if she could remain on board. Since then she had become a valued member of the crew and nearly 10 years after coming aboard she and Ric had become a couple and started a family. She was little older than his oldest son, but somehow everything just seemed to work.
The fabric in her lap was heavy black cotton and she was stitching a white thread into it. I was about to ask her what she was making when she spoke up.
“I’ve always meant to ask you, was there ever anything between you and Ric?”
“No, never,” I replied.
“Really? Why not?”
“Not my type,” I replied.
“Well, then how come there was never anything between you and me?” Jacinda asked jokingly.
“Not my type either.”
“Because I’m white?”
“No, because you’re Australian,” I said with a smile.
“Tasmanian!”
July 28th, 2062
7:10 a.m. Temp. -20°F
40°59’S 75°11'W — Off the Southern coast of Chile, aboard the UN ship, Gladwyn Jebb
It was cold, even for late July. The brisk chill painted my cheeks and seeped into these old bones as I leaned against the railing. The sun was climbing above the Andes, painting pinks and oranges across the underside of high clouds. We had just left the port of Ancud, newly reclaimed and once again receiving ships. In our wake, I could see our rag-tag swarm of nearly two dozen drones, most of them had gone feral before we captured and reprogrammed them. Their erratic, ragged flight pattern, uncoordinated size and shape distribution, and, most significantly, the mix of commercial, private, and public safety color designations amongst them made them somewhat analogous to the state of our crew.
The unfurled solar wings of our remaining eight ships reflected a yellow-white glare that shimmered upon the blue-green expanse of sea. I was grateful for the warm cup of maté I held in my gloved hands. The deep, rich flavors of the tea we had recently picked up in Santiago settled my stomach. It was hard to imagine that 30 years ago I had never been on a boat. Now I was First Mate of the Gladwyn Jebb, the flagship of the Untied Nations fleet since the decommissioning of the Dag Hammarskjöld.
This morning had me feeling reminiscent. It didn’t seem that many years ago when the CF hit. I thought about being back in North Carolina. We thought we’d be able to muddle through, somehow, but the flooding, the refugees… We kept it together better than most, but when the Cascade Failure really hit, we were just as lost as everyone else. I was lucky, I know it now. The last inflatable raft full of tired, scared, and desperate souls to get hauled up and onto one of the boats of the UN fleet. We never made it up to DC as planned. Instead, we had headed south.
Next month we’ll be in the Falklands, celebrating the 42nd anniversary of the CF. Or, I guess, more specifically, celebrating our survival during that terrible period. More than two billion people across the world perished in just over 16 months. Famine, war, and ecological disaster all twisting in on each other, scaling exponentially until the people and the planet exhausted themselves. But this fleet, originally a dozen ships, someone managed to survive. Nearly 20,000 people from every corner of the globe hung on. Persevered. All of us owing our lives to UN General Secretary Tabitha Widmark. Her brilliant diplomacy — and willingness to fight when necessary — got us through the most difficult times. Almost all of those original crewmembers are gone now, replaced by a generation who know of no other life than aboard these ships. Rising up the ranks, these children of the CF take for granted the 3D printers that supply their clothes, food, and replacement organs.
From a set of stairs to my left one of those children, perhaps in his late teens, appeared. He approached and handed me a note. “Obrigado, Edson,” I replied. Even on this cold morning, the young Brazilian’s smile brought a radiance unrivaled by our solar panels. He turned and hurried back down the stairs, his flip-flops snapping with each step. I knew who the note was from even before I read it and it brought a smile to my face. Ric Oviedo, captain of the Antonio Guterres, had requested my presence. I took a final look at the Chilean coastline. Macaroni penguins, descendants of our beloved Zero-Tux, now lined the water’s edge once again, playfully sliding along the icy shore. I think to myself that it will never be as it once was, but now at least it finally feels like it’s getting better.
Almost an hour later and I was in Ric’s private cabin aboard the Antonio Guterres. It’s the security and defense ship in the fleet, and in addition to being the Captain of the ship, Ric also oversees security for the fleet. I’d known Ric longer than I’d known the sea. The first time I met him, he killed someone right in front of me. Someone I thought I was prepared to die for. I had been such a fool. So many of us had. We’d believed. Believed that those A.I.s were going to save us — upload us to the Cloud. Believed that the Cascade Failure was not only inevitable — it was — but that no one would survive it. The A.I.s had seen the future, lived it, and told us it was the only way. But they were wrong. No, not wrong, they had lied to us. But others; Ric, the Vice President, and her team, they didn’t believe the A.I.s, and they didn’t believe the Cascade Failure would be the end. It almost was. Until it wasn’t. We had taken this world to the edge of collapse and we’d paid a terrible price. But here we were. In four weeks we’d be marking the anniversary. Thirty-plus years of this fleet sticking together. People sharing the burden, sometimes making choices no one should be asked to make, but in the end, we survived.
“Billie. It’s good to see you,” Ric said, the familiar weary smile beneath his white mustache. It reminded me that my own hair, once black, was now the color of ash.
“You too, Ric.” And it was. Like every crew member in the fleet, I owed my life to Ric. But I wouldn’t have lasted three days aboard if he hadn’t intervened. A black woman, and one that couldn’t reproduce at that. My value would surely have been questioned had Ric not vouched for me.
“Nearly 40 years. Hard to believe isn’t it?” Ric pulled a bottle of beer from a mini fridge and pointed it in my direction as he arched his eyebrows.
“No, thank you,” I replied. “When we climbed aboard the Trygve Lie back in ’24, I never would have believed that you’d be a captain one day…”
“Or you a first mate,” he interjected, pointing his bottle of beer toward me.
We shared a smile at the thought.
“Billie, I asked you to come over because I wanted to tell you something in person before I let the fleet know.” He picked at the edge of the label on the Pilsen Callao bottle before continuing. “When we get to Agua Nova I’m going to retire. This is the end of the line for me.”
The initial wave of shock and surprise washed over me, and then I smiled. “Oh Ric, good for you,” I said. I was genuinely happy for him. He was 75 now and had given the fleet more than three decades of hard work and dedication. He deserved to spend his remaining years, well, if not exactly enjoying them, at least doing whatever it was he wanted to do. He had spoken to me many times in the past about going back to Mexico, to the area in Sinaloa where he was born. He hadn’t been there in almost 50 years and he wasn’t even sure if the town existed anymore, but he had told me how much the idea of returning had meant to him. “You’re finally going to head back to Mexico!”
“Well, actually we have something else in mind. Me, Jacinda, and the kids are going to join an international group that’s going to take over the old Rukeyser-Kondracke compound in Antarctica.”
“What?” I sat back in my chair, stunned.
“Believe me, it was the last thing I expected too,” he said with a wry chuckle. “But when I think back on the last 30 years, the thing that kept me going wasn’t looking back to the past, it’s been about looking towards a future. I don’t want that to change now.”
“But you’ve always talked about going back and seeing the land where you grew up.”
“I don’t want to drag Jace and the kids back to Mexico so they can be haunted by the ghosts of people they never knew. Instead, we figured, why not join this expedition that’s looking to do Antarctica the right way, the opposite of what Rukeyser was doing.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“They’re going to re-populate it with wildlife and build a new genetics rehabilitation facility that will be open-sourced and free to everyone. With the new, seventh-generation CRISPR and advances in epigenetics, I may have a good 20 years left.”
I was surprised, but I could see on his face that he was truly excited about this. I stood up and walked around his desk to give him a hug. “Ric, I’m genuinely happy for you. I’m going to miss you, but I’m happy for you.”
“There’s something else,” he said. We released our embrace and Ric opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a manila envelope. Without a word, he reached across the desk and offered it to me.
I took the envelope and read the small white label on the outside: “Douglas-Brown, Wilhelmina.” I looked at Ric, brows knitted studying the name, my name, though no one had addressed me by that first name, or last, in years. His expression remained neutral, which only gave me further pause. I unwound the string that held the flap in place and pulled out the contents of the envelope — three stapled sheets of paper. “What is this?” I asked, quickly glancing at the top sheet, my eyes dancing around the page.
“It’s my recommendation for you to take command of the U Thant.”
. . .
October 1st, 2062
8:10 p.m. Temp. 1°F
52°19’S 61°42'W, aboard the UN ship, Gladwyn Jebb
It was 10 minutes past eight and still no sign of the Guest of Honor. I had grown a little concerned, it wasn’t like Ric to be late for an event, even by a few minutes. The ballroom of the Gladwyn Jebb had been turned into a veritable shrine to Ric Oviedo. Pictures of him had been blown up to poster size and tacked up on the walls. Shots of him with crewmembers; of him with his family; on the bridge of the Trygve Lie; and of course the shot I took of him holding Z-Tux some 30 years ago. From the corner of the room a lively, if not quite professional quality, band played. The band was a six-piece group that functioned as a sort of house band for the Trygve Lie. Ric had assembled them, and over the last 15 years, he had taught them the songs he had grown up with in his youth in Sinaloa. Narcocorridos that told the tales of brave bandits and femme fatales, of drug runs gone wrong and vengeance attained. Most people didn’t know the lyrics, let alone understand them, but as the accordion, banjo sextos, and alto sax played the infectious rhythms and catchy beats, the assembled crowd couldn’t help but bounce along.
I was thinking about heading to Ric’s cabin to check on him when the elevator chimed, signaling its arrival. Many in the crowd looked expectantly as the elevator doors slid open. Out waddled Nine-Tux, followed by Ric and Jacinda. The gathered crowd erupted in applause. Ric and Jacinda circulated through the room, shaking hands, saluting, and hugging various crew members. To honor Ric, the band played, “Jefe de Jefes,” a famous tune originally recorded by Los Tigres del Norte. Ric had indeed become the “Boss of Bosses” among the ships of the Untied Nations. He smiled and jokingly applauded the band when they started playing the song.
After several hours it was time for the party to wrap up. I walked to the center of the room and called for everyone’s attention. The music stopped and conversations came to a close. I looked around the room. Faces both familiar and strange looked at me with anticipation. I’d been thinking about this moment, and what I would say, for some time now, but nothing felt quite right. I took a deep breath and began:
“Thirty years ago I was a scared young woman who thought the Cascade Failure was going to be the end of me. But it wasn’t. Ric rescued me. Then I thought these ships would be the end of me. But they weren’t, Ric rescued me again. For that, I will be forever grateful.” I smiled at Ric and held back tears. “But I’m the captain now,” I said, earning a murmur of chuckles from some of the older crew members who were familiar with the old film the line had come from. “And I’m ordering you, Ricardo Oviedo, along with Jacinda, Miguel, Alonso, Lupita, Rosa, and Jesus off this ship!” Everyone applauded my fake command. “But first,” I said, cueing the band, “may I have this dance?”
The band played a slow waltz, “Sobre las Olas,” by Mexican composer Juventino Rosas. I had secretly asked the band to learn the tune for this evening. Ric turned to Jacinda and she gave him a mock nod of permission. He walked to the center of the room as the rest of the partygoers applauded. We may not have been wearing formal attire, and neither of us really knew how to dance to a waltz, but it didn’t matter. Soon others were joining us on the dancefloor of the Gladwyn Jebb, and we were all swept up in the music.
“You know, in all these years, I don’t think I ever thanked you,” Ric said as he led me around the floor.
“For what?”
“For shooting Jacinda in the shoulder instead of the head.”
We both smiled and as if saying her name was a magical incantation, Jacinda appeared.
“May I cut in?” Jacinda asked me.
“Of course,” I replied and stepped off the dance floor, watching as the couple enjoyed the remainder of the song.
. . .
October 19th, 2062
12:45 p.m. Temp. 4°F
72°45’S 49°32'W, aboard the UN ship, U Thant
For the first time as a captain, I pulled out my tablet and tapped in the command for the ship’s A.I. We had recently onboarded this new A.I. into the fleet’s network, having acquired it as part of a long-standing barter program with the Bala na Cara out of Porto Alegre. I’m not sure why, but knowing that a formerly violent drug cartel now had a sophisticated IT department gave me hope for the future.
The A.I. established a handshake with my tablet, and the first thing I did was ask for its history. I was curious as to how it had gotten its name: Sun Ra. The resulting file was not what I was expecting.
Turns out the BnC had ‘liberated’ the A.I. from an Emirati-held concern known as Doha Solar. Doha Solar had purchased Sun Ra from a Finnish game developer which had bought the intellectual property rights to the famous American jazz musician. Initially, they had planned on using his music for a mobile game, but ultimately reached an agreement with Sun Ra’s estate to reconstruct his personality in an A.I. But like many game companies of that era, the Finnish company went under and sold whatever assets they could.
Like me, Doha Solar ownership no doubt was surprised to find out that Sun Ra, the jazz musician, had had his mind uploaded to an AI program. When they first looked to move into the U.S. market in 2015 with a solar farm, an executive from their American marketing agency suggested they needed a connection to the local market. With their first panels going up just outside of the musician’s birthplace in Birmingham, Alabama, a deal was struck and Sun Ra became the property of Doha Solar. In a clever bit of retconning, the system had been given the official designation, Solar Utility Network — Radiant Array. Or SUN RA for short.
Our techs had warned me the system might take a bit of getting used to, after all, it had an unusual personality. I tapped a few keys and asked it how it was doing. It replied:
Last night I played every song I ever recorded, simultaneously, with a 1,000-piece orchestra, for an audience of 10 million stars spread across the cosmos.
I responded: That sounds beautiful.
Tonight I’m going to compose 100 new songs, for instruments that don’t even exist.
Older now, I often reflected on the trauma I — we — had suffered these past decades. Was it any more than the corporeal version of Sun Ra, born Herman Poole Blount in 1914, had experienced? Did he (it?) now feel liberated? I typed:
What’s it like to have infinite creativity?
Sun Ra replied: Child, I’ve always had infinite creativity. I am eternity. Y’all still living in three dimensions. Linear. Bound by a physics that don’t begin to do justice to the universes.
Smiling to myself I thought, ‘we could all use a little Sun Ra in our lives.’
We were going to head north, up the western coast of South America until we hit Lima. As we began to make our way across the South Weddell Sea and towards Cape Horn I looked back towards Antarctica. It was likely I’d never see Ric and his family again. I’d known him for more than 30 years and it was hard to imagine life without him. I switched apps on my tablet and pulled up the video feed from a drone I had sent out to the old Rukeyser-Kondracke base. Now it was known as The Preserve. Nearly 1,000 people, including Ric and his family, had moved there. The drone swooped over low-slung buildings that housed everything residents of The Preserve would need. Beyond the buildings, herds of reindeer and bison roamed the previously icy plains. Horticulturalists had genetically modified several strains of wheat and other grains to survive in the soil that had been imported. I recalled the drone before it got out of range, and stowed my tablet in the large inside pocket of my jacket. It clicked against something. Reaching inside the pocket I felt a small, hard rectangular shape and pulled it out. A domino. Ric must have hidden it there sometime before he got off the ship. The tile had one white pip on one end, and six on the other. On the back side of the black domino, Ric had written in silver ink, “Good luck Captain.”
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