Mother of Storms Read Online Free PDF

“What I want you to do is tell me to go back to bed, after I call the President and tell her that it’s nothing to worry about, so she can call the SecGen and tell him the same thing.”
    “I won’t tell you that if it isn’t true.”
    “That’s why I called you. It’s not really your bailiwick—though we will have to get the computer models going on it as well. It belongs over in the old Anticipatory Section, and since we don’t have one anymore, it belongs to anyone who has a lot of experience and won’t shade the truth for me.”
    Di wonders what the flattery is leading up to.
    “Okay, here’s the story.” Henry tells him, briefly, about the breakdown of the methane clathrate beds and the methane pouring out of the Arctic Ocean. “Near some openings in the ice it’s thick enough to have asphyxiated some seals, and as a precautionary thing the UN guys tried igniting it wherever it was dense enough—but that’s not even putting a dent in the release, because mostly it’s drifting up through tiny fissures and holes and not building up much at any one point. Still, the UN satellites have found about a hundred plumes they can ignite, and they’ve used Global Launch Control lasers to get them burning, and that should reduce the problem by about two or three percent.
    “Which is not a lot. Bottom line is, we’ve still dumped something like a hundred fifty or two hundred billion metric tons of methane into the air. We’re going to have twenty times the normal level for at least a little while. You know how much shit hit the fan when the last Five Year Global Warming Assessment came out. They’re scared to death of … you know.”
    Di is almost amused. As a senior official of the agency officially blamed for the Global Riot—the biggest embarrassment since NASA’s Replicator Experiment nearly ate Moonbase—poor old Henry can’t quite bring himself to say the word.
     
     
    The problem with XV is exactly that it’s like being there. So when the prediction was for the grain famine in Pakistan to continue, and things blew up in Islamabad, in half an hour there were plenty of XV freaks getting the same load of hormones and excitement in Tokyo, Mombasa, Fez, Lima, Ciudad de Mexico, Honolulu. In Seattle, a group of Deepers had all plugged into the Pakistani scenes just before going to one of their “actions,” trying to shut down a neonatal unit, which was supposed to be nonviolent, but with all the glandular workout they’d just had, it didn’t stay that way—or maybe it was that the devoutly Catholic commander of the Federal troops, as the Deepers later claimed, ordered the troops to fire into the crowd.
    At any rate, two XV reporters were caught in the cross fire, a man and woman who usually worked the Newsporn Channel, and as she died in his arms, shot through the lungs, half a billion experiencers jacked in and felt every sob and gasp from both of them, smelled the blood and felt the shots—
    The glands start pumping and the place gets jumping, as they say on Dance Channel, and suddenly all the streets of the Earth were full, shop windows shattering, cops shot, fires going up and firemen unable to reach the hydrants. And everywhere, more XV reporters worldwide jumped in to pick up the additional excitement, more rioters pulling on scalpnets to share the rioting elsewhere while they did their own.
    UNIC can shut down one government or group, or even a consortium of a few dozen, but trillions of parallel links, any combination of which can be a pathway between four million XV reporters and twenty thousand XV channels, with all that message traffic jumping from link to link a couple of times per millisecond, is utterly unstoppable. UNIC couldn’t do more than cause a little static here and there, not enough so anyone even noticed them. Raw experience that would normally never have made it on anywhere was pouring over the channels into even the most restricted societies.
    Ed Porter and the other XV