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staffers other than Harley had not yet arrived (the first of them were only now pulling up in the second of nine trams following the President’s transport), but the workstations in the main space had been maintained by cleaning staff and looked as if they had been used just yesterday. Harley planted himself at one workstation and activated the intelligence system with a quick thumb-swipe, as Lambert and Thompson continued on to the President’s Office. Despite its regular use as an auxiliary President’s office, it was not oval in layout… only the office in the High House was designed to resemble the famous Oval Office in the original White House, back in what little was still above water in Washington, D.C. But it also looked as if it had been used as recently as that morning.
    The President took a leisurely turn through the office, then settled behind the desk, flicked his thumb across the login sensor, and watched the displays mounted beneath the glass-topped surface snap on in his customized orientation. The screens displayed data on the state of the United States at that moment, as well as data on the Verdant satellite that corroborated with Harley’s report, and added information gleaned from other news reports and data collectors by the embassy staff.
    Lambert concentrated on the United States reports, which were not good: Besides the nationwide flight cancellations, the ash was beginning to have an effect on the ground, causing abrasive and choking dust-storms in the states surrounding Wyoming. The word “ash,” in this case, was an unfortunate misnomer, suggesting light flakes of carbon, something that drifts out of a campfire, to most of the public… when in fact, it mostly consisted of fine grains of rock, in sizes that ranged from pinprick to golf-ball, spewing out of the caldera, buoyed aloft by the hot gasses, and eventually raining down on everything below it. Local fields and forests were getting stripped down to nothing… it was clear that any crops that were in the path of the advancing ash clouds would be wiped out. The ash was fine enough to be inhaled, and could cause immediate suffocation at worst, or at best, enough of a build-up in the lungs to cause cancer and other ailments in later months or years. The ash was also capable of wearing down surfaces like sandpaper: Clear surfaces like glass would become permanently clouded over; protective finishes would be scraped away, leaving buildings, vehicles, roads, machinery, anything, more exposed to the elements afterward; and wear and replacement schedules would be accelerated for anything exposed to the ash.
    Possibly worst of all, the ash cloud would immediately impact the power industry. The cloud itself would most directly block the millions of acres of solar cell installations that depended on the Sun’s light and heat to generate electricity. Once the ash descended from the sky and impacted the cells directly, it would wear away at their surfaces, tearing away or obscuring the multiple chemical layers that did the work of converting solar energy into electricity, and efficiencies would drop severely… essentially all of those solar cells would have to be replaced outright. Windmills would similarly suffer major damage from ash-related wear, worse than any dust-storm, and would also certainly need replacement. Only their tidal systems would be left, but they mostly provided power only to coastal regions… though possibly they would be barely adequate for the major coastal cities, they would certainly not be enough for the entire country.
    The United States had come so far from its twentieth century pollution levels, its overly-generous contribution to global warming. It had waited so long, even after pretending to heed the warnings of scientists, that it had finally taken the severe droughts, the three-meter sea level rise (and still rising), and the loss of so much expensive American coastline property, to spur the country into decisive