Chapter Seven

Rosa sat on the leather couch waiting for his wife and daughter to return from their day in D.C. He stared at the TV, but it wasn’t even on. The only thing keeping him company was his own reflection in the dark screen, a faint dim image of himself staring back.

He had spent his time in the lab, running more simulations using Evata’s calculations, which Aura had helped refine.

They were now at nearly two thousand different computations and scenarios, and each result was the same.

Actually, this new set of data was somewhat worse, ever since Aura refined and extended the models of their work.

He rose from the couch and shuffled across the hardwood floors toward the hallway that led to their labs. The light from their little courtyard shone in from the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows that lined one side. The golden glow of the early evening reflected on the glass frames that hung from the concrete walls on the other side.

He took a step down their scientific memory lane—his slippers clacking on the unforgiving floor. The walls were lined with displays of their accomplishments—from newspaper clippings to magazine covers.

He sighed a breath of regret.

This had been a cheerful place, but now, every time he trekked down the hall to his lab, he felt like a fraud. A member of the one team who had arrogantly decided how to save the world, only to cause much more harm than was originally occurring without them. He finally arrived at the piece he was looking for. They had mounted it in a spot of honor at the hall's center.

Their Nobel Peace Prize.

The golden, coin-like trophy hung in its glass casing, mocking him daily.

The prize they had won for their contributions to the TITAN project and its impact on regulating climate change. He laid his hand on the cold glass, his faint reflection staring back at him like a ghost.

I am nothing but a ghost. I’ve made us all into specters. We are doomed.

TITAN was to be the world’s savior.

The day it launched made history—a vessel that rocketed into the stratosphere to extract greenhouse gases by dissipating them into the vastness of space.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

They expected the oceans to cease rising and agriculture would be possible once again, where it had long become unimaginable.

He smiled sadly.

TITAN was now doing exactly what they predicted. But unfortunately, it also had unexpected adverse effects, decreasing Earth’s mass.

TITAN did indeed balance human’s excessive contributions to global warming. It actually reversed it, but with some unintended consequences that were not apparent in their tests or models.

By ridding the planet of teratons of greenhouse gases, a substantial amount of mass had been removed from the atmosphere—causing the sun’s gravitational pull on the planet to weaken, allowing the world to slip further from its native orbit.

And so, they had unintentionally flipped the climate in the other direction—one which was slowly pressing them farther away from the sun, toward another ice age.

He dropped his hand from the glass case. And if the new calculations were correct, this one would come on faster than ever before and engulf the entire world in ice. He choked down on his guilt. That was the nail in the coffin. Their former models showed that removing matter from the planet would have no effect in the small amounts that TITAN did.

They were so very wrong.

A pleasant beep echoed through their home, snapping him out of his wallowing.

“Arrival, Eva and Vik,” Noxxor chimed.

He cleared his throat and checked his reflection. It was time to talk to his wife.

“Noxxor, activate House Nanny, please,” he said as he marched to the living room.

“Activated. I enjoy it when you close your commands with ‘please’ Rosa. It helps me build an indelible positive relationship memory with your persona.”

Viktoriya’s voice was the first he heard of the two. She seemed excited to have the AI enabled.

“Rosa?” Eva asked, coming in and removing her jacket. “House Nanny? I thought we agreed to have minimal AI interaction for the time being—wait. What’s wrong?”

He opened his mouth, but he didn’t know how to start. How do you tell someone that the world was ending much sooner than they thought?

He looked to the floor, then back to the framed prize on the wall, then to his wife, hoping an answer would present itself from some miraculous hidden reality.

She went to him and caressed the side of his unshaven face. He leaned his cheek into her soft hand.

“It’s the simulations, isn’t it?” she asked, her voice soothing.

He nodded. “There is no good news, love. And it seems, with Aura’s adjustments, things only appear to be worse. I’m talking average temperatures, around zero Celsius, within the next two years. A perpetual winter.”

She sighed and pulled him into a hug. He stroked her short hair.

“That’s not all,” he continued. “Previously, we predicted the planet would become uninhabitable for human life… now, it seems it will be so for most all life as we know it.”

She fearfully looked into his eyes while her gaze widened. “What are you saying?”

He took a deep breath. “I’m saying, if these predictions come to fruition, no matter how much we fortify, no matter what we build or reverse, there will be no way to stabilize and survive in this world. And no world to come back to if we leave.” He pulled her in close. “We’ll need a miracle to survive this.”

He closed his eyes and made a sigh enormous enough for the both of them.

“Rosa—I,” her voice trembled, “What can we do?”

“We’ve made miracles happen before,” he replied. He stroked her hair again, and a well of unexplained confidence rose to his chest.

“We can do it again. We have no choice.”