Veil Read online

  What is it like to kill someone? Dembe’s eyes had been impossibly luminous when she had responded, It’s hard—until it’s not. The better question is: what is it like to save someone? If Zia had managed to save any lives by sabotaging Tommy’s plan, they were the future millions who might have perished in a climate catastrophe had he been successful. But that was so abstract, so difficult to wrap her head around, let alone her heart. It wasn’t the same as pushing someone out of the way of an incoming bus or taking a bullet for them. Then again, shouldn’t diplomats be celebrated for averting wars that would have been? Hadn’t they accomplished at scale what bodyguards did in person? Dancing with counterfactuals lacked drama, but was desperately needed in a world where technology had granted one man the power to change the climate.

  Up ahead, Gilberto swore and hacked through a cluster of vines with a machete, derailing Zia’s train of thought. The last decade had been hard on him too. He’d left guiding after Miranda’s death and now spent three nights a week tending bar at a local dive, drinking more than he should. An anomalous beer belly jutted out from his otherwise skinny frame and, while he still wore his signature soccer jersey and flip flops, cigarettes had taken a toll on his lungs and he was clearly struggling with this climb as much as Zia was.

  She slapped away a mosquito the size of a dragonfly and her hand came away bloody. Her calves burned and sticky strands of spider web clung to her face no matter how much she tried to get them off.

  This expedition was her first break in what had turned into a six month odyssey of conference rooms whose polished glass, bad coffee, and besuited denizens had merged into a single, mind-numbing proto-conference room, a Valhalla for the hopelessly banal where the only food was stale sandwiches and you had to speak in acronyms—the most frequently mentioned, ESSA, she already half-regretted coining.

  The Earth System Stewardship Agency now had eleven other members in addition to Costa Rica, Ghana, and the Maldives, bringing the total number of participating nations to fourteen. Himmat had formally taken over operations in Chhattisgarh, allowing Zia to help Aafreen draft the first official act establishing criteria for ESSA membership—pulling numerous all-nighters to get it done just like they had in high school. Any country could apply to join, but acceptance was based on low per capita emissions levels and binding mitigation commitments. That made China, the United States, the EU, Russia, SaudExxon, and most other rich, big emitter countries ineligible. To participate in making geoengineering policy and deciding what to do with Santiago’s drone fleet, they would first have to make sweeping changes to their energy systems.

  A number of those same heavy hitters had permanent seats on the UN Security Council, which had called an emergency session to evaluate ESSA’s legitimacy. But by the time the session was convened, none could make a case for what should be done instead that wouldn’t be automatically vetoed by their peers, and so, while they certainly hadn’t approved of ESSA or its plans, they seemed content to let the question of legitimacy stagnate in bureaucratic purgatory, if only to have someone else to blame if things got nasty.

  In the meantime, ESSA had officially taken over Project Svalinn, and Selai was working with leading researchers from around the world in a sprint to parse Santiago’s secret database tracking the program’s performance. Soon, they’d be able to map out what the best options would be going forward. The whole effort was funded by leasing back the drones’ signal boosting capacity to Interstice, which was in the midst of a desperate search for new leadership.

  Selai was also spearheading an educational campaign aimed at making ESSA comprehensible to the public. She had taken her gummy bears up in one of the geoengineering drones, and the images of them sitting in front of the windscreen looking down on Earth from the stratosphere had gone viral. Haribo hadn’t known whether to be thrilled at the exposure or horrified at catching a political hot potato, but Zia had convinced the brand manager to double down and sponsor a contest for students in ESSA signatory nations to participate in a free climatology course culminating in a drone ride.

  Zia glanced back to check on Santiago, remembering the terror of losing him in the woods en route to the island airfield. T-shirt soaked with sweat, he was stepping over stones and around puddles in the same steady, soldierly way that had always been his wont on their family backpacking trips. Even so, his progression from lean to frail was accelerating to match the velocity of his fall from grace.

  In the wake of making his clandestine program public, he’d stepped down as Interstice’s chief executive and pled guilty to unilateral geoengineering and data obfuscation in an ongoing proceeding at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Zia was worried they’d come down hard on him, though at least the tribunal had promised to take the program’s results, its transition to new management, and the extenuating circumstances surrounding its unveiling into account. Whatever the outcome, it would set the precedent for a whole new category of environmental crime. In the meantime, he was out on bail with a special dispensation to consult with ESSA on operations.

  “Aquí,” announced Gilberto, leaning on his walking stick and gasping for breath. “She wanted to come here. To visit the old trees. The big trees.”

  Zia and Santiago exchanged a glance neither could decipher, and then stepped through the overhanging fern fronds and into the grove.

  Old growth rubber trees dominated this precious pocket of primary forest, Romanesque white columns stark against the shadowy green ferns of the understory. These silent sentinels exuded a palpable presence. Standing on the soft loam beneath them was to stand on a threshold between worlds. Passages from Miranda’s books flared and faded in Zia’s mind. Cause and effect fused. Time split and curled back like the petals of an opening blossom. Reality dilated—every color, texture, and smell becoming ever more itself.

  “She would have been so proud of you.” Santiago’s voice was barely louder than a whisper. “And I am so proud of you. For doing what you do, for being who you are.”

  “She’d be so pissed at you,” said Zia, swallowing hard. “Can you imagine what she’d have to say about the drones?”

  Santiago managed a shaky chuckle.

  “All too well,” he said. “All too well.”

  “And she’d be pissed at us,” said Zia. “For being such douchebags to each other for so long.” Ten years. Ten years of unreturned calls and cancelled visits. Ten years spent fading from each other’s lives. The only important games are the ones we play against ourselves. “And she’d be right.”

  Once shed, denial was as insubstantial as the raccoon’s cotton candy.

  Santiago’s chuckle collapsed into a sob.

  Zia wrapped an arm around his bony shoulders, reached out to graze her fingertips against smooth, creamy bark, and gazed up the towering trunk into the dense, shifting foliage of the rubber tree. Her mother had taught her that problems were inevitable—the universe was far too complex for humans to anticipate all the downstream impacts of their actions. Her father had taught her that problems were soluble—there was nothing physics allowed that human ingenuity could not accomplish. Problems were inevitable and soluble, yet all solutions were temporary and generated new problems to be solved. Zia was the daughter of a wizard and a prophet and maybe, just maybe, reconciling their respective legacies would be hers.

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  THE END

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  WRITING VEIL

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  A few years ago I listened to a podcast interview with award-winning journalist Charles C. Mann in which he described scientists researching how to intentionally manipulate the global climate to offset the worst impacts of climate change.

  While geoengineering proposals range from seeding the oceans with bacteria to sucking carbon dioxide directly from the air, only one approach is practical with today’s technology. You fly planes into the stratosphere and spray inert dust that makes the Earth ever so slightly shinier, reflecting a tiny bit more incoming sunlight back i
nto space, thus reducing the amount of energy entering the Earth system and cooling the planet. The kicker is that it would only cost two billion dollars a year to offset the current rate of global warming. That means that any country and even a few wealthy individuals could decide to create such a program all on their own.

  Holy shit, I thought. Someone needs to write a novel about this. This scenario raises so many questions that will define the coming century: what does it mean to exist within an environment in which we ourselves are the primary agent of change? What will the future look like when technologies like nuclear weapons, CRISPR, the internet, and geoengineering can give a single human being the power to literally change the world? How can we harness our own natures in order to leverage such technologies to actually make the world better? I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I read Mann’s book, The Wizard and the Prophet, which had led to his podcast interview. It tells the incredible true stories of two little-known but highly influential scientists whose work and ideas shaped the 20th century. Norman Borlaug’s high-yield crops saved millions (maybe billions) from starvation and William Vogt more or less founded the environmental movement. Their diametrically opposed views about humanity’s relationship with nature and the kind of future we should strive to build have defined the debate over agriculture, water, energy, and climate change for generations. The Wizard and the Prophet embraces complexity in a way that illuminates deeper truths and challenges us to ask hard questions instead of settling for easy answers. As you may have guessed from Veil’s closing sentence, Mann’s central metaphor stuck with me.

  I like to think of literature as a single extended conversation, and The Wizard and the Prophet referenced Oliver Morton’s masterpiece of scientific nonfiction, The Planet Remade. Rigorously researched, richly imagined, and compellingly told, it weaves the science, philosophy, and politics of geoengineering into a thought-provoking narrative that shows how this little-known field may take the world stage in the not-too-far future. I found it utterly fascinating and thought-provoking in the extreme. No matter what you think about geoengineering or climate change, this book will deepen and complicate your perspective.

  In The Planet Remade, Morton quotes the leading political scientist interested in geoengineering: David Victor at the University of California, San Diego. As it happens I studied under Victor in grad school at UCSD and he was one of the best professors I’ve ever had—constantly challenging students to look at difficult problems from nuanced perspectives that reframed our understanding of the systems that shape our lives. I reached out to my old professor, and to Morton, and other researchers. I read more articles, books, and scientific papers. I watched as the topic emerged from academic obscurity into the pages of the New York Times, the Economist, and the Atlantic.

  And Veil was born.

  It would be convenient if the rest of the creative process could be aptly summarized by a 1980’s film montage (Galang would approve!), but birth is never easy for anyone involved.

  I had a great premise, but stories are about people and it took a while to find Zia and Santiago and Miranda and Dembe and Aafreen and Selai and the rest. It took even longer to figure out how their intersecting lives might reveal something interesting about the future in which the story is set, how their personal transformations might interact with the transformation their planet was undergoing.

  I brainstormed. I outlined. I tested the patience of dear friends with extended bullshit sessions. Finally, I forced myself to sit down and start writing.

  There’s a funny thing about writing novels. I only ever figure out the heart of the story as I’m writing it. Rather than executing a clever plan, working through a manuscript sentence by sentence feels like hacking through dense undergrowth like Gilberto, following an overgrown path that might or might not lead out the other side.

  As I explored this particular jungle, patterns began to emerge. Zia took on unexpected depth and started making decisions that surprised me. Her circle of friends came into focus. Santiago’s scheme began to coalesce, as did Tommy’s. Strange loops connected choices, objects, locations ever more tightly—opportunities to increase the story’s density of meaning, a pocket universe reflecting itself not unlike the glimpse of infinite selves Zia gets while escaping in that mirrored elevator.

  My wife and I were traveling. I wrote in Austin before sneaking off to explore the bustling music scene. I wrote in the farthest reaches of Patagonia. I wrote in cafés tucked along the wide streets of Buenos Aires. I wrote in an attic apartment in Bordeaux and in countless rural albergues as we spent five weeks walking the five hundred mile Camino de Santiago Norte. It was on that ancient pilgrimage route that I finished the rough draft.

  But something was still missing.

  Notes came back from my beta readers. Beloved sections they demanded remain untouched. Opportunities for improvement. I grappled with their feedback as we camped on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, swallowed raw herring in Amsterdam, wandered through ruined castles along the Rhine, and summited peaks in the Austrian Alps. Everywhere, we saw the impacts of climate change: receding glaciers, historic heat waves, flora, fauna, and humans struggling to adapt to a new equilibrium.

  It wasn’t until a long train ride through Italy—interrupted by a wildfire on the tracks during which conductors handed out plastic water bottles to sweating passengers—that my wife posed the ultimate question: why are you writing this story in the first place?

  Only by answering did I realize the answer. I was writing this story to take readers on a journey that would challenge them to reflect on life in the Anthropocene. I was writing it because Zia and Santiago losing Miranda echoes how we have all lost capital-n-Nature—the ability to draw a clear line between humanity and our environment. By coming up with ever more ingenious tools that extend our reach from the subatomic to the cosmic, we have lost a neat metaphor for explaining the world to ourselves. Zia and Santiago had to find the courage to face their grief, to reconcile, to figure out a way forward. That is precisely the situation we find ourselves in with respect to the Earth system: we can no longer afford to pretend that our actions don’t have consequences or that it’s possible to turn back the clock. However difficult it may be, we must take responsibility for the extraordinary powers we’ve developed, and use them to build a better future together.

  I had finally arrived at the heart of the story.

  I needed that lodestone as I waded through numerous revisions. I needed that lodestone when my agent and I parted ways unexpectedly. I needed that lodestone when publishers passed on the manuscript. I needed that lodestone when I decided to publish it myself because this is the story I wanted to tell, a story I was happy to invest in.

  If you’ve come this far with me, I hope you agree that the effort was worthwhile. Writing Veil changed my life, and my greatest aspiration is that reading it might enrich yours.

  Just as Zia’s success depended on her friends, Veil’s success depends on you. We all find our next favorite book through recommendations from people we trust. So if Veil means something to you, please leave an Amazon review and tell your friends about it. I know it might sound insignificant, but it makes all the difference in the world.

  And if you’d like to get to know me better, I send a monthly newsletter recommending books I love that you might too and publish a blog where you can think alongside me.

  You can subscribe to both here: www.eliotpeper.com

  Whenever life threatens to overwhelm you, remember Zia. She’ll be there for you. Always.

  Cheers, Eliot

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  THANKS

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  Josh Anon, Amy Batchelor, Brad Feld, DongWon Song, Lucas Carlson, Tim Erickson, and Craig Lauer read early drafts and gave invaluable notes.

  Tegan Tigani and Amanda Rutter edited Veil—improving the story and sharpening my prose. Any remaining errors are mine alone.

  Peter Nowell sketched an intriguing cover concept after a conversation about the themes the stor
y wrestles with. Kevin Barrett Kane turned that rough concept into the beautiful cover you’re holding in your hands right now, and designed the entire book, inside and out.

  Tyler Cowen interviewed Charles C. Mann on the Conversations with Tyler podcast, planting the seed that grew into this book.

  Oliver Morton’s The Planet Remade was a constant point of reference as I worked through the rough draft.

  Numerous scientists, journalists, analysts, and investors made time in their busy schedules to help a novelist better understand the implications of engineering the climate.

  My brilliant wife, Andrea Castillo, was my creative partner every step of the way. Our dog, Claire, provided ample doses of much-needed distraction.

  You read this book, bringing the story to life in the theater of your mind.

  To all, a thousand thanks.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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  Eliot Peper writes speculative thrillers that explore how technology shapes our lives. He is the author of Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Cumulus, True Blue, Neon Fever Dream, and the Uncommon Series, and his books have earned praise from the New York Times Book Review, Popular Science, Businessweek, San Francisco Magazine, io9, Boing Boing, and Ars Technica.

  Eliot’s writing has appeared in the Verge, Tor.com, Harvard Business Review, VICE, OneZero, TechCrunch, GEN, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has given talks at Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Comic Con, Niantic, Future in Review, Qualcomm, SXSW, and the Conference on World Affairs.

  As an independent consultant, Eliot helps leaders think differently about the future and how to create change. Typical formats include talks, advisory engagements, and creative commissions, and his clients include founders, venture capital investors, award-winning designers, Fortune 100 companies, and government agencies.