Defining an Elephant
By Peter Watts
Originally published In Tales from the Wonder Zone: Odyssey, edited by Julie E. Czerneda. 2004
CAPTAIN torched New Zealand today.
It warmed up the orbital lasers and the particle-beam cannons and even a few old-fashioned nukes. We watched, helpless and horrified, as the targeting computers locked on and suddenly zap: the East Cape was gone. Zap: the Tasman Mountains, burned to the roots.
The satellites dropped their nukes and Stewart Island slagged down to glass before our eyes.
It took a little over thirteen hours. By the time CAPTAIN was finished, twenty-seven complete ecosystems were on fire. Half a million species, fifteen hundred found nowhere else in the world, reduced to ash.
Not to mention the people we lost. Of course, people aren't exactly in short supply, even today. There's still a good six or seven billion of us. It'll be awhile before we land on the endangered species list.
About ten months, in fact, according to the latest estimates.
In the meantime CAPTAIN orbits overhead, raining death and destruction onto the world. Every now and then it sends us a report: Hi there. Thought you'd like to know: everything's going according to plan.
According to our plan. That's the awful thing. It's only doing what we told it to.
Come one, come all, step right up and see the Fight of the Century.
In this corner, the Champion: Nature, twenty-four million species, from the smallest virus right up to giant redwoods and blue whales. In that corner, the Challenger: global warming, habitat destruction, sewage, smog, and UV strong enough to peel the tattoos off your butt in thirty seconds flat.
At the sound of the bell, come out swinging.
It was no contest, of course. Nature never had a chance. By the time anybody had reliable figures, almost four hundred species were disappearing every day. We couldn't even list them that fast, let alone haul them back from the brink. In thirty years there wasn't going to be much left of the place except rats, seagulls, and nine billion swarming Homo saps.
We weren't just talking about losing parrots and poodles and things that looked cute on Wild Kingdom. We were talking life-support. Some of those species made the oxygen we breathed. Others ate our wastes and our dead, so we didn't have billions of corpses stinking up the landscape. A lot of them just ate each other, sort of a safety precaution to make sure no one species got out of hand. (Not that that little trick worked in our case, mind you...)
We needed them all, like a scuba diver needs an air tank. It was a huge problem just getting anybody to believe that; it was an even bigger one getting them to do anything about it. By the time that finally happened — after all the arguments had been won, after everybody finally realised that it was their lives on the line — by then, there were only fifteen years left.
How can you save the world in a measly fifteen years? How do you keep tabs on twenty-four million species — or even twelve million, assuming that we'd already killed half of them off? How to you protect all that habitat, keep people from sneaking in and burning the last hectare of forest, or poaching the last rhino?
How do you even know they're doing it?
Fortunately there was a system already in place; a veritable feast of hardware left over from fifty years of military-industrial bloat. No self-respecting country goes to war without being able to spy on their enemies. Everyone needs satellites to pick out the other guy's missile silos, listening posts on the seabed to hear hostile submarines on the prowl. They have to be able to snoop in on every square meter of the planet, and they can do it, too; some of those satellites can read the fine print on an insurance waiver from twenty-three thousand kilometers up.
And of course, once the enemy's been found, it has to be dealt with; hence missiles and submarines, orbital lasers and particle-beam cannons.
But by the time all that apocalyptic hardware was ready to go, the War on Dissent was ancient history. Terrorist and Rogue States had vanished along with most of the world's civil rights. Even those nasty little civil disputes in Canada and Africa had blown over. There just weren't any enemies left to try out the new toys on.
This was a real bummer for the military, but it was manna from heaven for us. We swept in and scooped everything up at bargain-basement prices, almost new. Satellites built to spy on enemy airbases could just as easily snoop out poachers and oil spills. Instead of shooting down enemy warplanes and ICBMs, they'd take out illegal logging camps and pirate whaling vessels.
It turned out that the NATO system even had a snazzy name: Cognitive Autonomous Planetary Threat-Assessment & Interdiction Network. CAPTAIN, for short.
Naturally, with a name like that, we had to put it in charge. We reprogrammed it for good instead of evil and we let it loose with fifteen years left to save the planet.
And it went on to set half the world on fire.
A couple of months ago — before everything went so horribly wrong — Bergmann hauled me into his office. "Perhaps you could explain this," he said, pointing at his computer screen.
Bergmann's your basic off-the-shelf military man; he hated it when CAPTAIN got snatched away from the Generals, and he hated having to deal with us tree-hugging environmental eggheads. He knew we were essential to the project — the army doesn't have any theoretical ecologists of its own — so he followed orders like any good soldier.
He didn't like it much, though. He liked us even less.
CAPTAIN was counting species on some test site, assessing biodiversity according to rules we'd programmed into it. The total climbed as I watched — forty species, seventy, a hundred. It levelled out at two hundred eighty three.
"What's the problem?" I asked. "Isn't it picking up all the species?"
Bergmann snorted. "It's picking up more than all of them, actually."
"What do you mean? What's it looking at?"
"You."
"What?"
He jerked his head at the ceiling. I looked up: directly overhead, one of CAPTAIN'S sensor clusters stared down at me. I took a step to the left. The cluster whirred softly, rotating to keep me in focus.
Bergmann folded his arms. "So maybe you could explain to a simple jarhead like me why
