“It would be a security challenge.”
“That’s always true! So it’s best to put the thing right out in the open and make it as big as possible. No more hiding from these fuckers.”
“Maybe so.”
“You know I’m right. Otherwise we’re just caving in to terrorism. Do that and there’ll just be more of it. There’ll always be more anyway. Even if you identify and kill these particular murderers, there’ll always be more. Meanwhile we have to live.”
“All right.”
“What?”
“I said, all right. You’re the boss. The COP is three months from now. We’ll put out the call and prepare for it, and the Swiss security services will go all in. After Tatiana, they’ll be worried enough to lock the whole country down.”
“Yes. They’ll call up their army, I’ve no doubt. Bigger is better in this case, all round. The whole world watching.”
“All right.”
“And listen, your black wing— sic them on those bastards!”
“I already have. When we find them, we’ll kill them.”
“Good. I hope you can find them.”
So she let the security people move her to a new safe house, near the Opera. She stayed in it all the time for a couple of weeks, communicating by phone and screen with her team and with everyone else she needed to talk to. They helped her to organize the coming COP as the regularly scheduled global stocktake, plus more: a full progress report from every country, every continent, every industry, every watershed. To that account of the good done, they would add a description of every outstanding problem, every obstacle to getting where they needed to be. The global situation was to be judged actor by actor. Rated, scored, judged; and if judged malingering, then penalized. Time was passing, patience was running out. The sheriff would have to be formed by a concoction of every sanction and penalty they had at hand. The general intellect. The world in their time. In all the blooming buzzing confusion of their moment, they would take stock and get some clarity on the situation, and act. And if Badim’s black wing had anything to it, they would act there too. The hidden sheriff; she was ready for that now, that and the hidden prison. The guillotine for that matter. The gun in the night, the drone from nowhere. Whatever it took. Lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, fuck it— win.
Meanwhile, however, as they approached the time of this conference, a lot of the news coming in was actually quite good. Real progress was being made on many fronts. The main point, or maybe what the financial sector would have called the index that stood for all the other factors involved— which was to say, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere— it really had dropped in the previous four years, and pretty sharply too. This was confirmed from multiple sources. And it had been leveling in the previous ten years before that, shifting up and down with the seasons as always, but staying more level than at any time since measurements had begun in the 1960s. That in itself had been celebrated, but it was now cycling downward between 450 and 445, they said, cycling seasonally as it did, with the current trend moving downward by about 5 parts per million per year, but that rate too was increasing, it looked like. This meant not only that they had stopped burning carbon to a large extent— not entirely, because that would not be possible in their lifetimes— but they were also drawing carbon down from the air in significant and measurable quantities, by way of all the carbon drawdown efforts in combination. There were discussions as to how much the oceans were still serving as a sink for carbon burned into the air, but now, in the Great Internet of Things, the Quantified World, the World as Data, all these aspects of the problem were being measured, and the ocean’s uptake or drawdown was measured to within a fairly small margin of error; and the conclusion from the scientists involved was that since the ocean had already been quite saturated by the carbon it had absorbed in the previous three centuries, the drop they were seeing was only slightly explained by continuing ocean uptake. The majority was being drawn down by reforestation, biochar, agroforestry, kelp bed and other seaweed growth, regenerative agriculture, reduced and improved ranching, direct CO2 capture from the air, and so on. All these efforts were paid for, or rather rewarded beyond the expense of doing them, in carbon coins, and these coins were trading strongly with all the other currencies in currency exchanges. In fact, it looked like there was a possibility that carbon coin might soon supersede the US dollar as the world’s hegemonic currency, the ultimate guarantor of value. The US was a big backer of this complementary currency, of course, which was no doubt a factor in its success; in some senses the carbon coins were like dollars created by the sequestering of carbon. This made for a kind of double standard, or rather something finally to replace the lost gold standard; they had now a carbon standard, and also the dollar to use for exchanges. But the carboni, as more and more people called it, was also complementing the euro, the renminbi, and all the rest of the fiat currencies that had underwritten the new one.
As significantly, money itself was now almost completely blockchained, thus recorded unit by unit in the consolidated central banks and through the digital world, such that any real fiat
