Arctic Rising

Lars dropped his beer on the floor. “Get the backup cameras. I want everything on!”

Bish grabbed Chandra’s shoulders. “I’ll need to join you guys on the trip out. Lars, too. But first, you’ll want to see what’s going down here, man.”

Lars thudded out of the kitchen, and Bish followed close behind. “Six months ago the Hinum was a thousand-foot-long floating offshore factory owned by a Chinese corporation, further up the Arctic Circle, all in strictly multinational waters. They were closer to the oil and were using it to make plastic toys. I guess it helped the margins to be right by the source, and then they could be shipped right to Alaska, or Northern Europe.”

“It was anchored near Thule,” Lars said, leading them down a set of stairs and through a quiet and empty common area.

“I’ve seen the floating factories,” Anika said. As it got harder and harder to find nations without protective labor laws, corporations got more creative.

“The company went bankrupt,” Bish said, ducking another low bulkhead. “The creditors were fighting over who owned the factory and who could get it towed to Chittagong and have it scrapped. Meanwhile, there’s this whole multinational workforce quartered on the ship. I’m getting e-mails and pictures from a friend who’s in the middle of writing a story about the floating factory. I mean, no regulations, labor laws, or oversight. Sounds like hell? But since they’re all trapped aboard, after a few really crazy protests and a few overzealous overseers go missing overboard, they’d built a life here.”

“They had greenhouses.” Lars led them into a small room with a single bare bunk and a gray blanket. Work boots lay scattered under the bunk, heavy coats on the hook behind the door. The desk had four cases stacked on it. Lars opened one of them to reveal padded foam and a two fist-sized cameras. He moved with practiced, precise haste as he opened another case and pulled out a tripod. “You wouldn’t believe the things they grew on the decks.”

“They had everything set up,” Bish said. “Hospitals, greenhouses on deck for fresh veggies, even a small pen with chickens for fresh eggs. These workers from Thailand, Vietnam, Russia, China, they’d built a whole world on this ship. Lars and I wanted to film it before it was all ripped out and scrapped. We flew out, and my story got even fucking better.”

Lars opened another case and pulled out a shoulder-stabilized camera rig.

Bish shut the cases for Lars, but he was waving his hands around as he got more animated. An inner intensity tumbled out with his words. “So these guys revolted when one of the creditors finally got a tug boat out here to commandeer the factory. They tooled up to build weapons and held everyone off, and they declared that the ship was owned by them. Turned it into a worker-owned and -run business. Everyone had a share. They started production up again.”

“They lasted two months.” Lars pointed them out of the cabin, and everyone backed out. “Then Gaia purchased the company’s debt.”

“So get this: Lars has cameras all over the place streaming back to our box at home, and I’m interviewing everyone I can get my hands on, when fucking paratroopers literally drop out of the fucking sky.” Bish paused for dramatic effect.

“For hire?” Anika asked.

“Edgewater, yah.” Lars was leading them down the corridor again, trotting along. The rumbling grew louder now as they got closer to the decks. “Everyone is thinking: hey, Gaia purchases the debt. They are the biggest green company in the world. They are nice people, yeah? Turns out, not so nice after all.”

“It’s a whole standoff,” Bish said as they started climbing stairs again. “Gaia’s founders, Paige Greer and Ivan Cohen, make an offer: we could all accept a like/kind exchange of Gaia shares and a free ferry ticket anywhere in the Circle, or … get arrested. There we are, weapons aimed at us, gunships circling the ship. I was scared shitless.”

“They took the deal,” Roo said from behind Anika. “I remember all those workers showed up on the docks at Thule.”

“Then it got hairy when they found out I had recorded it all. I was like, you have to let me get out of here. They wanted the footage before they’d release me. I told them I had rights. They said I was in international waters, and I’d been filming on their property. I had no rights.”

“So they bargain with us,” Lars said, panting and out of breath. They’d gone up three flights, and now he walked over to a large observation window. “They promise us the story of the century if we agree to never release the footage of Gaia-paid goons pointing guns at factory workers. We met with lawyers for two days. We agreed to stay on board for six months. It was just us, Gaia had these ships switched over to their automated systems with an occasional weekly fly-in by engineers to check on the systems. After the manufacturing stuff was done, all the workers left.”

He set the tripod down in front of the window, and they all walked up to it.

Bish looked out over the decks. “But after all that, they still fucked us.”

“Fucked us hard.” Lars set up one camera to look down at the decks. Anika looked out. The deck’s floodlights revealed the source of the loud rumbling: several massive steel hatches slowly rolled themselves open. Fifteen-foot cracks of dark had appeared. They were going to be looking down into the holds soon, if the hatches kept trundling back. “You should show them a close-up,” Lars told Bish. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Might as well break the story to someone.”

Bish smiled sadly. “I was supposed to break the news about how Gaia, Inc., was going to save the world. But that news broke this morning while you guys were getting out here. At least I get some exclusive documentary footage.”

He shrugged, then turned back for the stairs and waved them along.

“Where are we going?” Anika asked.

“Down to the holds. Trust me, I’m about to blow your minds,” Bish said, grinning.

23

“The mist boats were going to be Gaia’s big silver bullet,” Bish said, leading Roo and Anika down the stairs. “Cohen and Greer had been holding press conferences about how bad shit was getting out there. Glaciers disappearing, storms ripping through the Atlantic coast, Caribbean. Typhoons getting worse. The Arctic melting.”

Bish led them through a long corridor away from the bridge superstructure, deep inside the hull.

“Gaia doesn’t have a formal position about whether the warming trends were human caused or not,” Roo said.

“That’s just PR to protect them from conservatives and religious Midwesterners in the U.S. during their start-up phase. Greer and Cohen figured that if they could build what we needed and let businesses solve the issue, they could route around that shit. But the political will for Western nations to get big serious faded, man.”

“Westerners get all the benefits,” Anika said. More land in Canada, Russia, and Northern Europe. Greenland opened up. Iceland became even more comfortable. New England and Britain are suffering cold snaps now that the Gulf Stream is being forced lower by the billions of tons of Arctic fresh water dumped into the North Atlantic, but they were the minority.

The Midwest and Siberia did just fine.

Anika looked at Roo. “All those people in the equators without water, suffering heavy weather and drought and less arable land? It’s not happening in their backyard, it’s not their problem. That is what the politicians say.”

Bish stopped in front of a door. “So the mist boats help clouds form and bounce sunlight back into space. But Gaia is blocked by governments who maintain that it’s an attempt at radical geoengineering, and that we can’t model the unanticipated side effects.”

Roo folded his arms. “They banned them in the Caribbean. It rained saltwater. It’s not good for the plants, yeah?”

“So then the question is,” Bish said, opening the doors behind him slowly, “if you’re the leaders of a