Part One
Without assistance from numerous persons who put themselves at great professional risk, telling this story would not have been possible. For security reasons, I cannot name them. They provided critical access to both audio and video footage of the secret discussions that took place in Los Alamos, New Mexico in October 2019. By presidential order, records of this conference at the national laboratory’s Aurora research complex remain sealed in the National Archives to this day.
The reason isn’t at all clear. Certainly the evidence of what happened there does not flatter the U.S. governing class of that era. On the other hand, the same evidence shows that at least some key decision-makers, in what was then the world’s most powerful nation-state, anticipated the monumental changes of the 2030s and 2040s. Some of them knew that such a chain of events was possible, years before the later implosion of global food supplies and markets amidst increasingly chaotic weather and impending sea level rise. The Aurora Conference participants knew as well that the only feasible response to the coming crisis would be not a modest adjustment of policies but instead an engineered transformation of human societies, dwarfing the planet-wide military mobilization of the Second World War.
In the face of such knowledge, the participants at the Aurora Conference chose, in essence, to do nothing. That choice deserves to be open for scrutiny by the people who live with its consequences today.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
July 2063
Most of them didn’t want Antonio Anarres at the conference, and he knew it. He freely admitted to being exactly what so many other powers behind other thrones had long denounced: a troublemaker, rouser of rabble, someone who refused to play the game.
But here he was, even so. Parking his still functioning 2001 Honda Insight (the Miracle Mobile, his staff had dubbed it, just past 400,000 miles) outside the conference center in Technical Area 3 of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Under wary surveillance by security teams sporting combat armor and assault rifles, beneath the brown moonscape of the Jemez Mountains. The former green of their ecological recovery from the 2000 fire had withered in the years of the great drought.
Anarres suspected that one of the participants in today’s proceeding had put in a good word for him with the conference organizers. Whoever they were. Anarres was never quite clear on that.
Looking at the roster of participants gave him some ideas. The former Secretary of Energy, a Nobel laureate, now President of Stanford University. The retired admiral commanding U.S. forces in the Pacific, who had directed operations during the North Korean conflict and the crisis in the Taiwan Strait. The President of Royal Dutch Shell. The Vice President of North American operations for Lloyds of London. The chief of staff to the Democratic Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. The President of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The Archbishop of Santa Fe. The Republican Governor of Texas, one of the new generation of post-Tea Party leaders rising through the GOP. And, serving as chair of today’s session, the former President of the United States.
Just the sort of people, in other words, that Anarres had spent the last few years denouncing. Naturally, he came to the conference wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots. He’d thought about chewing tobacco, then thought better.
“Well,” he said to the dying mountains. “Here we are.” The newly built Aurora Project research center stood at the other end of the parking lot, a complex lattice of crystalline metal and glass. The conference would be held there.
Antonio Anarres crossed himself and took a deep breath. Started hobbling toward the research complex, with the aid of his gnarled cane made of hickory. It was October 22, 2019.
“Tony!” the Texas governor bellowed in greeting as Anarres shuffled into the conference chamber. “Why, they’ll give security clearances to just about anyone these days, won’t they?”
Anarres stood out in his cowboy duds amidst the power suit aristocracy mingling around the vast oval obsidian table, in turn surrounded by silver-blue virtual reality screens and polished white floors. It looked like a scene out of Star Trek, Anarres realized.
“Dwight,” he replied with a folksy smile to the Texas governor, “I didn’t realize your regime had reopened diplomatic relations with the United States. Welcome to America.”
Anarres could tell by the faint twitch in the governor’s jowls that the man was irritated. Mission accomplished. The exchange elicited a tight little chuckle from the mingling dignitaries on the high tech stage. The former President caught Anarres’ eye, regarding the new arrival as if examining a lab specimen. Anarres threw him a salute.
Anarres’ friend Dwight, the current governor of the lone star state, had been chief policy advisor to his predecessor during the Texas weather crisis that began in the spring of 2017. In those warming months the great drought finally forced mandatory water rationing across most of the state. The harvest later that year was a near total loss. The national news broadcasts led with images of dead cattle scattered in dust extending to the horizon. In the midst of this desolation, the energy corporations went on sucking whatever water was left from the aquifers and lakes. They needed the water for fracking oil and gas. Local farmers and homeowners, themselves ordered to go without water, took note.
At the time, Anarres had been mayor of a tiny West Texas town called McCune, population 1,437, named for a forgotten leader of the Populist rebellion in the 1890s. Shortly after emergency water rationing began in McCune, Mayor Anarres had personally deputized a force of 200 people from around the county – farmers, fieldworkers, shopkeepers, the unemployed; men and women; gay, straight, and other; documented legals and dreamers and not so much. At sunrise on April 19, 2017, this improvised militia roared up in a phalanx of pickups and moving vans to the fracking rigs just outside of town, wielding shotguns, hunting rifles, a jury rigged Vietnam-era machine gun mounted on the back of a pick-up truck, and, most importantly, CNN. The citizen force had with it an embedded reporter, Pentagon-style, from the Atlanta-based network. Just like Annares’ unit back in Karbala. As mayor of McCune, Texas, he made sure that his town’s rebellion would be national news.
His dawn raiders caught the company employees (“motherfrackers”, Anarres had called them) totally by surprise, seizing control of the fracking equipment, Quonset huts, and assorted trucks and steam shovels and storage pens, all without incident. When a manager helicoptered in from San Antonio to see what the hell was going on, a welcoming committee of armed citizenry politely escorted him from the craft, doused it in kerosene, and blew it up.
The whole thing went down in full view of the cameras and was soon broadcast around the world by flabbergasted cable news gibbering heads in Washington and New York. Not everyone, it seemed, greeted the shale gas battalions of corporate America as job-creating liberators. Not during the drought.
When Anarres negotiated with state authorities during the ensuing 47-day standoff, the government man on the other end of the line was none other than Dwight, the governor’s chief policy advisor, who would eventually succeed his boss in office and sit at the table with Anarres in Los Alamos.
That event lay in an unimagined future as tanks and Apache attack helicopters surrounded the occupied fracking fields outside McCune in the spring of 2017. It did not end well. At dawn on the forty-seventh day of the siege, someone fired a shot. Anarres never found out who. Maybe one of the exhausted, terrified kids he’d brought with him, all riled up in the beginning with talk of justice and standing up for God-given rights. Maybe it was one of the kids manning the tanks that surrounded the expeditionary force from the town of McCune. It didn’t matter. After that first shot, the National Guard and the Army unloaded. In only a few seconds, hundreds of rounds of machine gun fire and grenades and mortars and tank shells struck the defenders occupying the fracking rigs. Annares was looking at the woman next to him when her skull exploded, spraying her brains and blood all over his face. He just stood there, watching the corpse topple over. He felt metal slam into his shoulder and his leg, smashing him to the ground. Somehow, he staggered back up to see who was left. Of the 203 who began the siege with him, he later learned, 72 were dying or dead.
Twenty minutes later, Anarres and his citizen militia surrendered to the Texas National Guard and, remarkably, elements of the U.S. 101st Airborne division. Mother of mercy, he thought. In the prison hospital he couldn’t stop seeing in his mind the woman next to him as she died. He couldn’t remember her name.
After the siege, the Texas legislature passed a special bill granting the governor emergency authority to dissolve any municipality or county that impeded fossil fuel extraction efforts. The same bill authorized rule of the locality by direct executive decree from the governor. McCune was the first town to be dissolved and put under central authority. It was not the last.
While Anarres learned to walk again in federal prison, the alliances that he forged by smartphone during the McCune crisis (with a little encryption help from disenchanted former NSA programmers) began to pay off. Scores of cities and counties across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain West, then hundreds, passed ordinances banning fossil fuel extraction for as long as the great drought endured. Local governments and citizens often backed these measures with occupation of the drilling rigs. Miraculously, a mass slaughter like McCune did not happen again. Still, over three dozen people died in clashes with police, corporate security forces, and National Guard units. Every new casualty brought more localities into the growing regional movement.
In the spring of 2018, delegates from across this archipelago of resistance formalized their relationship, establishing the Community Commonwealth Alliance of America. The Alliance soon concluded strategic partnerships with several major unions and immigrant organizations. By summer 2018, Alliance membership encompassed 1,200 towns and counties and over a million people. By year’s end, more than 100 state legislators in the American heartland, from both major parties, owed their election to Alliance support.
This initial foray into electoral politics was fueled by a palpable rage transcending the fracking conflicts that gave birth to the Alliance. The source of it lay in the indifference or incompetence of government in general as things fell apart. That ineptitude became undeniable when the summer of 2018 brought a new wave of broiling heat across central Texas. And wildfires that went on for weeks, burning thousands of homes and businesses in more than 150 counties. On the night of August 11, 2018, a wind driven inferno burned two thirds of Austin, the state capital, to the ground, killing more than a thousand people and destroying most government buildings. While the ashes cooled, Federal and state authorities dragged their feet delivering aid to the homeless or trying to restore power and services. The state government simply relocated to Dallas over the next few weeks, leaving the wreckage of the old capital behind. In the chaotic transition, authorities took no action in the face of relentlessly tightening water restrictions around the state. They showed no apparent interest in relieving the price spikes at local supermarkets, which admittedly reflected weather-related turbulence in agriculture markets far beyond the lone star state.
Then came Hurricane Alpha. The one that everyone thought would never actually happen because it had so often been predicted. A category five that slammed the Texas Gulf coast on the morning of November 11, 2018. They named it “Alpha” because all the names assigned to that year’s storms in the conventional nomenclature had already been used up. When the rain and storm surge and wind had passed, much of the metro Houston area was a lake filled with metal and concrete and broken glass. Across the Gulf coast region of Texas, the God-hammer wind ripped open oil and gas pipelines across hundreds of square miles, tore train cars off the tracks, flooded refineries, dumped debris and toxic waste all over the interstates and feeder roads. This wrecked landscape had functioned as a central hub of America’s energy distribution infrastructure, refining and distributing petroleum and natural gas that served as feedstock for pharmaceuticals, plastics, and agricultural chemicals, to say nothing of running the nation’s cars, trucks, and electric power plants.
With the refineries crippled and fuel shipments cut off, the American economy went into a tailspin. As Alpha broke up over Oklahoma the first evening after Landfall, gasoline at pumps around the country hit $5.00 a gallon. Two days later it reached $7.00. A Presidential order released oil from the strategic petroleum reserve and suspended all federal regulation of gasoline refining and shipment, in an effort to streamline deliveries to gas stations. Another executive order suspended all trading on Wall Street until further notice, after the New York Stock Exchange lost 2,500 points within two days.
On Alpha plus five, CNN broadcast footage of a crowd of 10,000 people surrounding a Wal-Mart in the Houston suburbs, demanding food and water. As many as five million in the region had gone without electric power since Landfall, with the unseasonably warm November air lurching back toward freezing. Most stores in the area had run out of food and bottled water even before the storm. No new shipments were coming, thanks to roads blocked by debris or by traffic jams of fleeing refugees. Broken pipelines and powerless pumping stations had cut off water to towns and cities across the Gulf coast region.
Government was the only possible instrument that could rapidly substitute for storm-wracked infrastructure and restore food, water, and electricity to the devastated area. State agencies and the federal government did try to respond, sending in a few dozen trucks from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and setting up scattered aid stations run by state police, the National Guard, and the Red Cross.
It wasn’t enough. Following the Austin fire, state emergency management offices had yet to fully establish themselves at new facilities in Dallas. Even before that fire, they’d been starved of funding. In their jury-rigged new surroundings, state officials lacked the personnel and equipment to handle the aftermath of Hurricane Alpha. Emergency management teams, to cite just one example, operated with unpaid phone bills and a moratorium on office supply purchases.
The local FEMA office was no better off. The series of budget freezes and spending sequesters and tax cuts begun under the Bush and Obama administrations had kept the financial markets stable (except for the minor apocalypse of 2008), but now the true consequences of fiscal austerity had arrived. The FEMA offices in Texas used barely functional surplus computers over a decade old. Lack of engine maintenance kept half the agency’s vehicle fleet in the garage. The FEMA manager in Dallas confined his skeleton staff primarily to a consulting role, offering weekly seminars to state and local officials on best practices for doing more with less. On the day before Alpha, for example, the manager himself spoke at a local Presbyterian church, urging his audience in the event of an actual emergency to donate canned goods.
Such was the condition of government when Alpha arrived.
By Alpha plus seven, reports of looting dominated the news from Houston. Local police actually began to join rag-tag neighborhood militias taking over Wal-Mart distribution centers. They cited, as their inspiration, the McCune uprising of the previous summer. More than a year later, many in the Alliance leadership now questioned whether such tactics were justified. Others, however, pointed to the increasingly desperate pleas of church leaders, city councilors, and aid workers in Houston, as the rains after Landfall unexpectedly turned to snow and ice – the city had seen snow only 40 times since 1895. Meanwhile, the traffic lights never came on and the shopping malls remained empty and dark. Something had to be done.
The Alliance relief effort in Houston began on Alpha plus twelve. Convoys of 18-wheelers bearing emergency rations from private donations back east rolled through National Guard checkpoints to cheering crowds and adulatory coverage from exhausted journalists. These reporters, trained to be deferential to government and corporations, had arrived before Landfall, gone without sleep for days in the aftermath, seen the looting and the harbingers of thirst and starvation. Despite admonitions from management, many journalists began to side openly with the Alliance and with shotgun-wielding locals venting their fury at state and federal ineptitude. It was insubordination, but it also made for undeniably great television, so management went with it despite misgivings. When the Presidential helicopter made the obligatory tour of the disaster zone, the networks pointedly broadcast a crowd of more than 200,000 people filling the streets of Houston, unfurling banners that read: NO MORE KATRINAS.
Historians debate whether the Alliance relief trucks really made a dent in the post-Landfall food and water crisis or whether the belated injection of massive federal military aid was the real turning point. By Christmas the hostile media coverage had given way to glowing narrative voiceovers of Air Force transport planes landing around the clock at central Texas airports, laden with pallets of rations and bottled water. The talking heads heralded the evacuation helicopters loaded with malnourished children, landing on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf of Mexico, recently redeployed from bombing the ruins of North Korea. Uncle Sam eventually saved the day.
Still, the Alliance emerged from the Alpha crisis as a major national force. The second coming of Occupy Wall Street, commentators dubbed it. Minus the self-defeating obsession with utopian decision-making schemes. The men and women who hammered the Alliance into existence and held it together through the inevitable squabbling and personality clashes were not student activists or academic intellectuals or dead end anti-capitalist street theater performers. The Alliance leaders had been schooled in the practicalities of local government and labor organizing and immigration reform. To them, the point of organizing was not to make noise. It was to seize power, then hold it and use it, pressuring established institutions to act and pushing back when they cracked down. That was the lesson the Alliance leaders drew from the crusade against fracking during the drought. And the relief effort after Landfall in 2018.
Antonio Anarres drove the lesson home upon his parole early the following year. The feds let him go as part of their post-Alpha public relations campaign, trying to appear reasonable and conciliatory, to win back the support of voters and rebuild an aura of national stability amid signs of yet another oncoming recession. The first one never really ended after 2008, Anarres said to assembled thousands at the Alliance convention in Omaha on the Fourth of July, 2019. It’s time, he urged the roaring delegates, for we the people to stop whining about the government and start governing. The convention elected Anarres president of the Alliance by acclimation.
After that, he skipped the network requests for interviews. Instead he went to the cathedral down the street and sat by himself until morning. Remembering the woman who died next to him at the end of the siege outside McCune, Texas.
Four months later he set aside his cane and clambered into a seat at the conference table in the newly completed Aurora research complex of Los Alamos National Laboratory. He still couldn’t figure out how that had happened. If he had to guess, he would speculate that his guardian angel among the assembled bigwigs was the chief of staff to the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Her boss was known to be pushing the Democratic Party in a more populist direction. Trying to co-opt the Alliance would be a sensible strategy to that end, Anarres reasoned. Others in the party disagreed with that approach, including the current president and her predecessor. Who, it so happened, was chairing the meeting at which Anarres now found himself.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the former chief executive said in his trademark professorial baritone, “Welcome. Please be seated and we’ll get started. I’m sure you all know our featured speaker for this morning. Sax?”
It was, Anarres would later be told, a nickname only friends used, addressing the Nobel prize laureate in physics and current president of Stanford University. The scientist strolled around the table as the attendees took their seats. He adjusted his spectacles, owl-like eyes blinking. “Thank you, Mr. President. Good morning, everyone.”
One of the attendees, the admiral who’d commanded the campaigns in Taiwan and North Korea, grumbled. He guzzled another gallon of coffee into the metal and plastic of his maimed body. His face bore the scars of flash burns, sustained during the cruise missile attack on the Seventh Fleet that opened the Taiwan crisis. Although he had yet to declare his party preference officially, he was already a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination next year. He’d made clear that he would run for the GOP only if its leaders completed the still unfinished process of purging the remnants of the Tea Party. Asked by a journalist to explain this stance, the admiral with the burned demon face glared. Because, he said, when the missiles hit off Taiwan, nobody gave a fuck who we had sex with or who had an abortion.
He was the only one in the room Anarres felt like talking to.
“Did anybody even pass out an agenda?” the admiral wondered. “I’m flattered by the invitation to sit with you all, don’t get me wrong, but I still have no clue what this little shindig is about.”
The Nobel laureate physicist blinked behind his spectacles, frowning. “It’s about the end of the world, admiral. And what we can reasonably do in response.”
(Photo by cyphunk)
March 12, 2014