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action… and after years of pain, it had actually been working. And now, after over a century of painful but successful national conversion from oil- and coal-based power sources to geothermal, hydro-tidal, solar and wind power sources, their sustainable infrastructure was about to come crashing down upon them.
    And the most ironic of all, their geothermal industry would prove to be equally unable to provide power for the rest of the country, even in the face of a volcanic upheaval that was proving to be providing enough power for the entire country to run on every three minutes or so. Their most powerful geothermic plant complex had happened to be the old one at Yellowstone… and the nation had taken a large hit when geologic states were becoming so unstable there that the local area, including the geothermic plant, had had to be shut down and evacuated. Though proposals to restart it and run it purely on automation had been forwarded multiple times, they had never been ratified and acted upon. That left the next-largest mainland plant, at Mount St. Helens, and many smaller plants around the country, but again, none of which provided more than a small fraction of America’s power needs. (And there would surely be those who would claim that the evacuated plant had somehow caused the caldera to finally breach—a claim akin to suggesting a mosquito-bite could cause a human body to detonate.)
    Power gone, the nation’s breadbasket literally scoured, nothing running… it was a crisis of biblical proportions. And though it would be a slow process, Lambert guessed that within the month, the United States would be effectively, completely shut down.
    Lambert reflected briefly on the thinking of the late-twentieth century regarding what was referred to as the Great Extinction Event of the late Cretaceous period… at the time, it was believed that a rogue asteroid impact had served to wipe out the dinosaurs. But by the mid-twenty-first century, scientists had come to a new conclusion: That runaway climate change had devastated the environment, ruining the food chain from plants-up and leaving the dinosaurs with nothing to live on, and that before the actual impact, they were already dying off and almost gone. If anything, the asteroid may have been the final nail on the coffin, but without the impact, there would have been the same result. And in this new scenario, the trigger had been volcanic activity: Specifically, the volcanic ranges west of India that had started the runaway global warming event. Man had been watching for its expected death-knell in the wrong direction—the Extinction Event had not been triggered from without, but from within. And the likelihood of future such events were statistically more likely to happen than any potential asteroid collision.
    Scientists and reporters were already picking up on the parallels, and the ironies, of the two eras: Many of them were stating that there was, at this point, nothing that could be done; that Man’s time on the planet was as done as the dinosaur’s. Geologic history was repeating itself, and for the human race, the fat lady had sung.
    And it was happening on Lambert’s watch. All the good he had accomplished, all the positive improvements he’d made to his country during his term, would be wiped out, both literally and historically, by this one event. He had been damned by unfortunate circumstance.
    President Lambert looked up. He realized Thompson was standing there, silently watching him. He managed a weak smile and said, “I’m all right. Let’s talk about our meeting with the Ceo.”
    ~
    The satellite-wide ambient lighting had begun to dim hours earlier, in sync with Greenwich Mean Time, the official time on-board all of the satellites. That meant that it was not that late to Lambert and Thompson, at about the time most people on-board Verdant were already in bed.
    Nonetheless, Lambert felt exhausted, mostly from the mental stress, the deep-down feeling