Radmila had discovered a different map of Los Angeles: Los Angeles seen from deep within the Earth.
“Get rid of that,” said Raph.
“What is it?” said Sofia, who was sitting there dutifully, but using her two wands as a pair of knitting needles. Sofia had always been like that. Sofia was Family because she had three kids. By three different men, but that was Hollywood.
“That’s a forecast for underground weather,” said Raph. “So-called. Everybody knows that you can’t predict earthquakes.”
The map was a garish space of exotic flows. It was a scientific map: ugly, user-unfriendly, speckled all over with menu bars, to-do lists, threat meters, and behavioral prediction.
Those scratchy-looking color-blobs had to be lava, or magma, or strain tensors in the shifting continental plates. All very complicated. Radmila had never seen this map before, so she was at a loss.
Still, it was obvious at a glance that the heavier action was outside this part of the map. So Radmila scrolled the map sideways.
The map’s edge led her to a nexus: a big maroon knot. It looked like a bloodstain.
Freddy flipped his wand around and painted a circle onto the pro-jection. “That node there looks interesting.”
Guillermo said, “So who is hosting this map?”
“Who made it?” said Freddy.
Radmila had been hastily accessing the tags, so she was a little ahead of the game. “Some kind of Acquis science group. They’re based in Brussels.”
“It’s from Brussels?” scoffed Raph. “Get rid of it!”
“Better let me drive,” Freddy decided. He rose from his seat and set his solid, suited bulk into Glyn’s abandoned chair.
Freddy lacked any grace at net surfing. He simply found every tag that looked big and active and pounded it. He popped up his personal notepad and hauled cogent chunks of data onto it. Freddy was a seasoned Family businessman. He never bored easily.
“Okay,” Freddy summarized, after seven tedious minutes. “We seem to have some kind of major movement of liquid rock… an unprecedented movement… deep under Yosemite Valley.”
“They made all that up,” said Raph. “That’s some Acquis political ploy. Propaganda. They’re always like that.”
Guillermo popped loose the electric snaps of his uniform jacket.
“You really think that Acquis scientists would lie about magma?”
“Maybe not ‘lie,’ exactly. But the Acquis are always big alarmists. That’s all a simulation. It’s not like they’re actually down there looking at the real lava. You know that’s impossible.”
“But they’re scientists! They don’t know we’re looking at this map of theirs! They’ve got nothing to gain by lying to us!”
“They’re doing this to harm our cultural values,” said Raph.
“Your thesis isn’t quite clear to me, Raph. What are the scientists doing with this map, exactly? They’re launching some huge culture-war conspiracy to fake the data, just to make us feel unhappy about our earthquakes?”
“Fine,” said Raph, losing his temper, “what are you trying to say to us? That there’s some kind of brand-new, giant weird volcano growing under California? What next, Guillermo? Are we supposed to act all happy about that idea? We don’t have enough troubles this morning? Our hometown just got hit by a Richter Six!”
“That is the
“
“That’s why we’re getting hit by so many earthquakes. This huge lava movement underground: That might be the root cause of that problem.”
Raph shrugged. “That notion sounds pretty far-out to me.”
“Raph, you’re always saying that you want the big strategic picture. This is a big strategic picture. Boy, is it ever big.”
“Yosemite is a park,” said Raph, straining for politeness. “Yosemite Park doesn’t make earthquakes.”
“Let’s look that up,” Freddy counseled. “I’ll tag our private correlation engine for ‘Yosemite’ and ‘volcano.’”
This action took Freddy about fifteen seconds. The results arrived in a blistering deluge of search hits. The results were ugly.
They had hit on a subject that knowledgeable experts had been discussing for a hundred years.
The most heavily trafficked tag was the strange coinage “Supervolcano.’ Supervolcanoes had been a topic of mild intellectual interest for many years. Recently, people had talked much less about supervolcanoes, and with more pejoratives in their semantics.
Web-semantic traffic showed that people were actively shunning the subject of supervolcanoes. That scientific news seemed to be rubbing people the wrong way.
“So,” said Guillermo at last, “according to our best sources here, there are some giant… and I mean really giant magma plumes rising up and chewing at the West Coast of North America. Do we have a Family consensus about that issue?”
Raph still wasn’t buying it. “The other sources said that Yellowstone’ was a supervolcano. Not ‘Yosemite.’ Yellowstone is way over in Montana.”
“You do agree that supervolcanoes exist, though. They’re a scientific fact of life on Earth. That’s what I’m asking.”
“They exist. If you insist. But the last supervolcano was seventy-four thousand years ago. Not during this business quarter. Not this year. Not even one thousand years. Seventy-four thousand years, Freddy.”
Freddy looked down and slowly quoted from his notepad. “ ‘The massive eruption of a supervolcano would be a planetary catastrophe. It would create years of freezing temperatures as volcanic dust and ash obscured the warmth of the sun. The sky will darken, black rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter.’”
Guillermo’s face went sour. “Okay, that is total baloney. ‘Nuclear winter: that sounds extremely corny to me.”
“That’s because this source material is eighty years old. Geologists know a whole lot about supervolcanoes. Nobody else in the world wants to think about supervolcanoes.”
Buffy was losing her temper. “But this is so totally unbelievable! The sky already darkened! The black rain already fell on us! We already have a climate crisis, we have one going on right now! Now we’re supposed to have another crisis, out of nowhere, because California blows up from some supervolcano? What are the odds?”
“Well, that question’s pretty easy,” said Freddy. “A supervolcano under the Earth doesn’t care what we humans did to the sky. If it blows up, then it just blows up! So the odds of a supervolcano are exactly the same as they always were.”
Rishi, who was bright, had gotten all interested. “Well, what exactly are the odds of a supervolcano? How often do supervolcanoes erupt, and turn the sky black, completely wrecking the climate, and so forth?”
It took Freddy a good while to clumsily bang that one out. Maybe a minute and a half. “Sixty thousand years, on the average. That would mean we’re already fourteen thousand years past our due date.”
A contemplative gloom settled over the conclave.
“Look,” said Raph at last, “I’m a Synchronist like the rest of you guys, but let’s not get completely goofy here. We can’t go making our investment decisions on a forty-thousand-year time frame. That’s not due diligence and sustainable business planning. That’s just plain weird.”
“The pace of quakes in LA has been picking up,” said Guillermo. “That trend is clear.”
Raph had a ready answer. “Well, that comes from climate change. All those heavy rains lubricate the local fault lines. And we get rising groundwater, too.”
“Raph, how come climate change can cause earthquakes, but supervolcanoes don’t cause earthquakes?”
“Okay, so you got me there.” Raph shrugged. “I never said I was a scientist.”
Freddy contemplated the geological display map. “Mila, give us that current-situation map again.”
