A sonic boom sounded, and the user interface on the videoconference indicated that Alastair’s audio feed had been silenced in favor of the overwhelmingly louder signal from Rufus’s microphone. Alastair looked confused and astonished and made efforts to say something, but the sonic boom continued to echo for a few moments off the canyon walls and so Rufus could only see his lips moving.
“Was that what I think it was!?” he finally said, after he had got audio back. His eyes darted from side to side as if he’d just been let in on a delicious secret.
“Yup.”
“You’re there!?”
“A few miles away. Found a good place to set up.”
From the bemused way that Alastair looked around, Rufus got the idea that he was thinking If only these people knew that I was talking to someone who is right there!
“So people are talking about it, I guess,” Rufus prompted him.
“Oh, yes. Biggest news story of the year to date, I’d say.”
“What are they saying?”
“Too early to know, really. It was such a surprise. People have talked for decades about doing this.”
“Putting sulfur into the stratosphere.”
“Yes. And almost from the moment it was first mentioned, the idea was loathed by Greens. Just anathematized. To the point where you couldn’t even really talk about it in public or you’d get canceled. So in general I would say that the Greens were like—” Alasdair released his grip on his pint long enough to whisk the palms of his hands together.
Rufus understood the gesture and nodded.
“We’ve put paid to that nonsense,” Alastair said, “no need to concern ourselves with it any more, let’s move along to the real program of, as T.R. puts it—”
“Getting China and India to stop burning shit.”
“Exactly. Which somehow hasn’t worked,” Alastair said, deadpan. Then he continued, “So I would say that the chattering classes, who live in that sort of bubble, were knocked off balance quite badly and are still having a hard time believing it’s real. Even I, who’ve seen it . . .” Alastair shook his head and took a swallow. “That’s why I reacted as I did when I heard the sonic boom just now. Had this mad impulse to turn my phone around and show everyone in the pub.”
“Have you been in touch with the Dutch?” Rufus asked. He was going to say “Saskia” or “the queen” but, just as Alastair had difficulty believing that Pina2bo was real despite having seen it with his own eyes, Rufus couldn’t believe that he’d done what he’d done with certain other parts of his body.
“Just touching base, status updates. I’m to have a chat tomorrow with some of her staff. Possibly her as well. She has to go lay a wreath or something. Foam disaster. Might run late.”
“What are you actually doing for them?”
“I’m to write a report on what it all means for the Netherlands.”
“Doesn’t the Dutch government have . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Commissions and experts and so on? All very much in the bubble. Everyone already knows what those lot are going to say.”
“What are you gonna say?”
Alastair grinned. “Remember Eshma?”
“Gal from Singapore. Seemed nice.”
“She’s in charge of climate modeling for their government. Chatted with her the other day. And you know what? She can’t get instances.”
“Beg pardon?”
“It’s a cloud computing term. When you need a virtual machine in the cloud, or a whole cluster of them, you go on Amazon Web Services or one of its competitors and spin up an ‘instance.’” Alastair used air quotes. “There’s all different sorts—you literally choose the one you want from a menu, and then clone as many as you need. If you are running a computational model of the climate—which is what Eshma does for a living—there’s a particular model, a piece of software, that most in that discipline have standardized on. And it runs best if you set up a cluster, in the cloud, consisting of a particular item on that menu—one sort of instance that the model has been optimized for. So when she got back from that little junket to Pina2bo, she got busy doing exactly that.”
“Running the computer model on a bunch of instances to see what the effect of Pina2bo was going to be. On Singapore,” Rufus said, just to be sure he was following.
“Singapore yes, obviously, but because that is such a small nation-state, they need to know how it will affect China. India. Australia.”