The Ministry for the Future

only riot strike riot, she read that Berlin, London, New York, Tokyo, Beijing, and Moscow had experienced simultaneously, in the very same hour no matter the local time of day, teacher and transport worker strikes. This caused chaos in the streets and in the markets. Already the past year’s chaos had been sufficient to cause a massive drop in most of the stock markets, and they had never really recovered from Crash Day, so that was low indeed. The bear of bears. Of course the slack was soon enough taken up by risk-seekers looking to buy low and sell high later, but the sense of panic didn’t go away, the sense that bubbles were about to burst all over the place. The striking workers in the big cities returned to work, but before the situation had settled, the seemingly endless drought afflicting the Middle East, Iran, and Pakistan suddenly intensified into another killer heat wave, this though it was still only May. But the high pressure that sat on the area had jacked temperatures briefly up into the wet-bulb 35 zone, mainly this time a matter of sheer high temperature rather than humidity, and at the same time some cities there were running out of water. Refugees from the area were pouring across Turkey into the Balkans, also north into Armenia and Georgia and Ukraine and Russia, also east into India. India, a refuge from heat waves! But the Punjab was also caught in a drought, so India had sealed its border with Pakistan, already militarized and easy to close. Disaster all around. Pakistan threatened war, Iran threatened war. Something like ten million people were on the move and in imminent danger of dying. The humanitarian aid programs were overwhelmed, as were the national militaries.

Esmeri Zayed, her refugee division head, told her that if the current refugee population were a country, it would have about the same population as France or Germany. A hundred million people were out there wandering the Earth or confined in camps, displaced from their homes.

In the midst of this situation, an atmospheric river struck southern California, and though its winds were not as forceful as the winds of cyclones or hurricanes, its rainfall was at least as intense, and longer lasting. It looked like it might be something like a repeat of the catastrophic winter that had struck California in 1861–62, arriving several hundred years earlier than would have been expected by the US Army Corps of Engineers, as they had labelled the earlier storm a thousand-year storm, but of course all those probabilities were useless now. The tall mountains hemming in the LA basin had caught the truly torrential rain and poured it down onto the mostly paved surface of the basin, and the devastation was universal. Initial estimates pegged the death count to a remarkable low of seven thousand or so, but the infrastructure damage dwarfed anything the Angelenos’ much-feared earthquake would have done to them. Actually there were scientists warning that the weight of that much water might trigger that very earthquake. The Big One, right in the middle of a mega-storm! Only in LA, people said, feeling shivers of schadenfreude, tinged with regret: the world’s dream factory was being destroyed before their eyes. No more Hollywood faces to haunt the global unconscious; that age was over. Restoration costs for the damage they were seeing on the raindrop-spattered images would cost more than thirty trillion dollars, Jurgen estimated.

So now one could imagine that the American people might support action on the climate change front. Better late than never!

But no. Already it was becoming clear that LA was not popular in Texas, or on the east coast, or even in San Francisco for that matter. In fact, no place that was not LA cared about it at all. The dream factory for the world, universally unpopular! People had not liked those dreams, perhaps. Or had not liked having their dream life colonized. Or maybe they just didn’t like being stuck in traffic.

In any case, California’s government, one of the most progressive in the world, and the US federal government, one of the most reactionary in the world— both were making efforts to help. Love it or hate it, LA was important to them. And really, Mary thought, keeping the death count down to seven thousand was an amazing accomplishment of civil engineering and citizen action, also rapid deployment by the US Navy and the rest of the military, and the quick actions of the citizens themselves. The initial rush of the flood had been the most fatal part of it, and after that it was just an accumulation of small accidents. So it was an admirable emergency response. Really the US was in many respects the gold standard for infrastructure, a brick house in a world of straw; those stupid raised freeways, built strong enough to withstand the Big One, had served as refugia for the entire population of the city, and the subsequent evacuation had proceeded successfully. A very impressive improvisation.

Despite LA’s uneven popularity across the world, it was for sure immensely famous. The dream factory had accomplished that at least. Many people all over the world felt they knew the place, and were transfixed by the images of it suddenly inundated. If it could happen to LA, rich as it was, dreamy as it was, it could happen anywhere. Was that right? Maybe not, but it felt that way. Some deep flip in the global unconscious was making people queasy.

Despite this sense that the world was falling apart, or maybe because of it, demonstrations in the capitals of the world intensified. Actually these seemed to be occupations rather than demonstrations, because they didn’t end but rather persisted as disruptions of the ordinary business of the capitals. Within the occupied spaces, people were setting up and performing alternative lifeways with gift supplies of food and impromptu shelter and toilet facilities, all provided or enacted by the participants as if in some kind