Mother of Storms Read Online Free PDF Page B

editors had the best day of their careers. Plug into XV and you could be standing on the sidewalk watching a store burn in London, then watching a mob strip a woman naked in Montevideo, then crouching behind an overturned car while shots scream off it in Seattle, then facing the insectoid cops and their riot guns in Tashkent, back to London for more fire, back to Montevideo for a flash of a rape, back to Tashkent as the guns roar and blood sprays everywhere, on to Paris where an XV reporter choking on smoke is trapped on a third floor—all that in three seconds, not pictures but full sensory experiences, on and on.
    Finally, the only thing that seemed to limit the Global Riot was that most people preferred to stay home and wear the goggles and muffs so that they could experience violence and destruction worldwide with their full concentration, instead of having it be background music for their own rioting.
    As it was, at least half a million people worldwide died while plugged into XV, not realizing that while they popped back and forth between the firestorm in Seoul, troops going berserk in Denver, liquor-store looting in Warsaw, and the ever-popular gang rapes in Montevideo, the building was burning down over their heads. There were nine million dead in total, worldwide, not counting suicides afterward, crashes of fire trucks and ambulances trying to get to the trouble, or heart attacks while experiencing it all on XV.
     
     
    So far nobody has figured out any way to prevent the next Global Riot. Di understands perfectly well what Henry is worried about. Supposedly UNIC has gotten equipped to grab net control and shut down global communications if need be, but after seeing them unable to shut down Abdulkashim earlier tonight, Di knows that’s strictly propaganda.
    All this comes to Di as one big impression while he swallows hard. “All right, then, Henry,” he says. “Offhand I’d say a methane release that big is going to have effects and people are going to notice. Methane is one of the major ways the Earth traps heat, and it’s letting loose right before spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s going to warm up a lot faster than usual this spring. You’ve got to make them understand this won’t just blow
over and can’t be kept secret. So … how much how fast? You said a hundred and fifty to two hundred billion tons—is that firm?”
    “That’s the estimated volume in the beds that have already gone,” Henry says, “and since to some extent they seem to be able to set each other off mechanically, it’s probably low. How fast—I don’t know. How long does it take a not very dense gas to rise to the surface? It’s not very soluble in water, so we won’t get much help from its dissolving; besides, I suppose whatever dissolves is just going to block the absorption of other methane from other sources later. As for finding its way through the ice—you want my bet? I bet it didn’t take an hour to get to the undersurface of the ice. And there are so many cracks and fissures, big and little, that I don’t expect it to stay under the ice more than two or three hours. We thought about flaring the pockets—use missiles to punch holes and set the stuff on fire—but the collapse after the pocket goes will probably break the ice up more and let other methane escape. I guess we’ll do it so that it looks like we tried, but we don’t expect it to accomplish anything. So very unofficially, figure it’s all in the air tomorrow.”
    Di gives a low whistle, leans back, reaches for his terminal, unfolds it onto the table in front of him. “I’ll have to get back to you—and I need numbers, accurate ones, soon. I can do some preliminaries on it pretty fast. And you’re right, we need the old Anticipatories.”
    He thinks for one moment of pointing out that it was Henry who let them cut out the “Wild Thinkers” on grounds that the things the Anticipatory Section dreamed up were mostly not going to