When the evidence mounted of recent widespread flooding—as unnerving as that was—at least the world made sense again. The law of averages had caught up.
Except that it hadn’t.
If a big impact or impacts had unleashed the tsunamis, there would be signs. Granules of shocked quartz and natural glass, forged in the heat and pressure of impact, would be widespread. The asteroid strike that doomed the dinosaurs had left behind a worldwide scattering of iridium dust. Iridium was scarcer than gold—yet all around the Earth, a fine layer of iridium dust could be found at the geologic boundary between periods. That iridium had to have come from an asteroid. A big one. The kind of rock that, smacking into an ocean, unleashed a tsunami.
On Dark, across the past thousand years, ice cores, clay cores, and lakebed sediments alike showed only the disorder and the sudden salinity surges of floods. There was no layer of glass and shocked quartz. There were no elemental anomalies, such as Earth’s iridium dusting at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods.
A distant chime sounded: Marvin signaling the end to recess. On the playground, chaos somehow transformed into lines. The cacophony settled down a notch to mere din. Boys and girls made their way into the childcare center.
Antonio continued his aimless shuffling, wishing that the confusion that afflicted him would resolve itself as easily.
*
The hallway echoed with fussing toddlers, the murmurs of the children minding them, and the chiding of Marvin avatars. Childish shrieks and the squeaking of playground swings drifted in from outside. Wet flakes of an afternoon snow flurry spattered against the window.
Intent on statistics, Li hardly noticed any of it.
A fuzzy caterpillar of a holo hovered over her desk. In one compact graphic, it encoded everything useful to know about cohort six.
Dense thickets of colored lines radiated from the holo’s primary axis. Each tint denoted a specific metric of social development, such as obedience, orthodoxy, and self-discipline. The length of each colored line segment encoded a child’s performance in the corresponding metric. The length of each black segment, a weighted average, gave her one subject’s overall socialization index. Concentric translucent gray cylinders provided the scale. Eighteen measurements multiplied by, for this cohort, seventy-two subjects: she had a significant dataset.
A few segments poked through the outermost translucent cylinder. She reached into the holo to zoom on a subject. 6/32/m/Todd the pop-up tag noted: from cohort six, hence not quite five years local; gestated in womb unit thirty-two; male. By random selection from Marvin’s names database, named Todd.
Todd’s metric for orthodoxy was two standard deviations from average. In the wrong direction. The rating had gotten worse in each of the last three monthly assessments.
“Okay, Todd,” Li said to herself. “What’s your problem?”
Because she couldn’t read minds. Neither could Marvin, although it could analyze speech and categorize body language. It did a passable job, when the children confided, with dream interpretation. So what was going on with Todd?
It didn’t take long to find recordings of the boy asking inappropriate questions at daily catechism. She had a skeptic on her hands.
Time, young Todd, for an intervention. Time to teach you and everyone else that, as her Grandmother Hideko used to put it, the nail that sticks up gets pounded down.
“Li? We should talk.”
Intent on her work, Li had not heard Carlos approach. With a hand gesture she blanked her display. “If it’s quick.”
Not taking the hint he came into her office, closed the door, and sat. His hair and coat were damp, and snowmelt trickled down his face. He reeked of alcohol, even more than usual, even from across the room. So what had he been psyching himself up for?
Carlos said, “The ground is still too warm for anything to stick for long, but the snow is pretty heavy for this early in the season.”
“Tell me you didn’t interrupt my work to prattle about the weather.”
“I’ve been in the yard, talking through the fence with Antonio.” Picking up on her frown, at least, he added, “Relax. Without any kids in earshot.”
“And?”
“It’s not just this region experiencing an unseasonably cold fall. It’s most of the northern hemisphere. It can’t be an accident that the icecaps have grown every year.”
“Per Antonio.”
“Yes.” Carlos took a while picking his next words. “It’s not weather that concerns me, Li, but climate. The climate is getting colder. I’ve seen the downlinks from the moons and—”
“From observatories Antonio programmed.”
“Yes, but—”
“Let me guess. Antonio wants you to give him access to Marvin, or the full data archives, or networked instruments, or all three.”
“Well, yes.”
How could Carlos not see? Was it the booze or willful obtuseness? “We retain control because we have Marvin and the others don’t. Give Antonio access and how long do you suppose our control can last?”
“Let me rephrase. Antonio didn’t ask for access to Marvin. Not directly—”
“Climate. Floods. If those don’t convince us to lower our guard, they’ll be back with dire warnings of blood, boils, and locusts.”
Carlos sat forward, hands clasped, index fingers steepled. “Hear me out. Endeavour is just back from a trip collecting sediment cores.
“And how is that significant?”
Other than demonstrating that the peasants had too much free time on their hands. She must give them new assignments. Additional garments for the children, perhaps.
He said, “A fair proportion of sediment turns out to be diatoms. The pattern in those is scary.”
Li rubbed her eyes. “Will you get to the point? Start with whatever a diatom is.”
“A microscopic fossil. Some types of algae secrete silicate shells, and you can infer a great deal about climate trends from changes over the ages in the microfossils.” He babbled on about isotope ratios and salinity clues, before finally concluding, “The data aren’t good.”
All parroting Antonio, of course. It proved nothing.
“Just how do you have this data? Have you already linked them to Marvin?”
Carlos shook his head. “No, but that is why Antonio brought me into the loop. He wants access to the data about cores collected before the settlement…split. And
