Zero

“The special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.”

                G.K. Chesterton

“I’d always thought there’d be more than just the two of us to witness this, Your Holiness,” said the Chief Scientist.  He peeked over at the clock, again.  Ten more minutes.  His face had turned a greenish-gray a half-hour ago.  He took another sip of water. 

Her back was turned toward him.  The woman in the control room with him was short, slim, plainly dressed.  Though her brownish blonde hair, which curled in a long single braid from the back of her head to drape over the front of one shoulder, showed flecks of gray, she retained a girlish innocence that had once captivated the world.  This included him at the time.  He’d been a young scientist, fresh out of graduate school, and she was a teenage toast of the world, feted by world leaders and celebrities. 

A few foolhardy people back then objected to her beatification, begging others to peer closely into those pitiless eyes or notice the hard-set mouth.  Both traits were evident from the beginning…and certainly on display here today.  But today he was the only audience. 

As a girl, she said things already spoken many times before, over many years by others, but she encapsulated them in the voice of an unassailable waif, inviolate in her convictions, which struck the world broadside with the force of a hardened sabot round; ironically, like one made of depleted uranium.     

As then, her mouth remained a straight horizontal line, except when speaking, and she said to the Chief Scientist, “Considering the momentous circumstances, one might think so, but it’s just the flip of a switch and nothing more.”  She said this with what he thought was a concentration camp commandant’s coldness, an absolute zero coldness.  “They know this is long overdue and are aware of its importance.  I didn’t see a need to make the occasion celebratory.”

Just a flip of a switch!  Celebratory!  His face belied the screams inside his mind.

He no longer asked himself how had they gotten to this point, because he knew full well how.  There’d been countless warning signs, which he and others deliberately ignored, afraid to be the one to acknowledge the deafening claxons that might as well have been the whisper of a dandelion considering how unheeded these were when uttered by men and women far braver than him. 

“Scientific consensus” they said so many times in her defense that it was unchangeably true.  More powerful men than himself must’ve known and did nothing as well—he knew this was a pathetic excuse, yet never ceased telling it to himself.  This was well before the deniers were formally rounded up and liquidated.  He’d thought this cruel act unnecessary.  Their squawkings were long since marginalized into their own form of zero.  Once again, he said nothing.  She was, after all, infallible; how could she be otherwise when she merely repeated what was consensus and intended to hold them accountable for it.  

At one point he’d dared looking at some of the forbidden papers.  Hard copies found buried in dusty unused libraries.  He went there because the digital versions were scrubbed years before.  Scrubbed.  He’d grown tired of the word.  It implied making something clean, made like it was before and must be again.  Removing filth and leaving behind the original freshness.      

The deniers’ data and analyses were clear and irrefutable, but ignored all the same.  Sanctimony was found more important than science, even to learned men and women, which included him.  The deniers never had their own version of her…nor a perfect theory that proved any result, justified any contradiction, served so many purposes.       

The encouragement of mass suicide had been a dismal failure, though “reassuringly popular amongst teenagers and college students,” she told him after the first few months of that program.  She’d said this with that awful casualness that was staggering—and none of them noticed, or cared, at that point.  His own niece embraced the call and did her duty.  Why only now did the guilt of her death cause him anguish?    

They’d considered camps—those eyes of hers seemed so perfectly suited to the notion and its implementation—but the logistics of the extent necessary to achieve her goals were insurmountable, based on the calculations of men just like himself who had then presented to her another plan, the one requiring merely the flip of a switch in a few minutes.  He’d been at this presentation and it was the only time he’d seen her eyes light up and a genuine smile flit across her lips, albeit for mere seconds.    

Shortly thereafter, she summoned an assembly of scientists and engineers, and gave them their orders.  Many of them looked stunned by what they heard; and yet each one of them, visibly shocked or not, held his or her tongue.  That the plan was insane and immoral did not matter, for such quaint concepts were long extinguished before they got to the point of building this control room, deep in a mountain, and armed it with artificial intelligence that he found predictably dispassionate, not unlike the woman who’d forced others to birth it.

A week ago, there’d been a final meeting.  In hindsight, it had been such a remarkably short meeting. But by then, what more was there to discuss?

She made it sound so simple…ethical…imperative…inevitable: “The man-made sources we’ve identified.  The natural sources are a greater challenge, but I’m told the rover units coupled with the satellites and drone sniffers can take care of these in short order—and everywhere kept near zero.  Sea, land, and air ones, fully distributed globally, will do the bulk of the scrubbing.  The large reserve of them is a wise idea in case of a volcanic or limnic eruption, or should there be an explosion of termite activity in the absence of manmade control measures.”

The meeting room contained not a single pencil tap, let alone a peep of dissent.

She’d been proud to announce, “The tests are complete.  The AI is synced with the mobile units and the fixed mega-scrubbers.”  No peep came from his mouth, either, though a maniac’s laugh echoed inside his head.  An extinction rebellion whose goal is extinction itself.  Did no one else in the room not see it?  Would the world have reacted differently had they known to this moment it would lead?  He knew the answer: Many people would not have resisted.  That is to say, well-off people in the industrialized countries.  To them it was a lark right up to the end.  The poor, those struggling to lift themselves out of poverty and achieve a Western standard of living, would’ve protested mightily, violently, if only they’d known in time.

Now the AI controlled mechanical armies and it would brook no dissention, certainly no sabotage.    

Five minutes to go.  He took another sip of water. 

“I see all green, Your Holiness.  Are you sure you don’t want to just set a timer and let the AI flip the switch?”  She turned to face him.  The eyes, two abysses into which they’d all tumbled, studied him.  He shivered, as if a chill draft rose from the abyss and sought him out for its embrace.  “My life has led to this moment,” she said.  “It’s only fair that I assume the responsibility for the atonement of the human race, the saving of our planet.”     

“Very well,” said the scientist. 

A few minutes later, she did indeed flip the switch.  From now on the AI would control everything related to the project: its implementation, its defense, its permanency.  Most importantly, it would ignore any entreaties to shut down, show mercy, return to the way things were.   

The two of them did not speak for an hour.  The woman kept her eyes focused on a large display screen.  He could not bring himself to look.  Without turning to him, she said: “It’s working.  The level is already dropping rapidly.  Everywhere.” 

“Then it’s time?” the scientist asked the woman.

“Yes.”  

They left the control room…and a huge, thick titanium door silently closed behind them, and which only the AI could thenceforth open.  It had been programmed to under no circumstances open it for a human.