A work of fiction. Standard disclaimers.
Adam Springer sauntered into the administration building of the marine biology field station, serene and comfortable. It was a warm, sunny summer morning on the Pacific coast of North America, and its rare fineness, at least for that moment, obliterated all cares. He turned left in the central foyer under the whale skeleton that hung from its ceiling, and walked towards the conference room to put his sack lunch in its refrigerator.
The front office suite was on his right as he passed down the short corridor that led to the conference room. He waved “hi” at the office staff. They waved back. Their waving caught the attention of station Director Morgan Fayheron, whose office adjoined the reception desk, and whose door was open. “Hey, Adam!” Morgan called. “Come in for a minute, will you?”
“Be right there”, Adam called back. He went into the conference room, completed his intended task, and then joined Morgan through the conference-room door to her office.
“Good news!”, Morgan reported as Adam sat down, leaving the office door open behind him as Morgan had signaled him to do. “On two counts. One, the new Ocean AI lab is up and running. The supercomputers are powered up and are being tested, not least for power usage and what further upgrades to our grid are needed. The AI program will start accepting students in the fall quarter, if all goes well. Two, we’ve finally gotten the university’s Environmental Health and Safety office to tell us when they’re going to do their annual audit. We need to get all the lab leaders to give us their schedules over the next few weeks, so we can pick a date when everyone’s here – or, as many are here as we can get – and get this done with minimal disruption to our work and lives.”
“Meow”, Adam cracked. “Old joke”, Morgan responded, hands on hips. “No less true for that”, Adam replied, more soberly. “If we can find a date, anytime in the next two years, on which somebody doesn’t have a no-can-do excuse, real or made up on the spot, I’ll be astounded.”
“We’ll just do the best we can, as usual”, Morgan acknowledged. “Nobody wants to go through these audits. But it’s not like we’re given much of a choice. I’ll take forewarned over not forewarned. Especially if it means we actually pass this year. I’d like to spend more time with nearshore ecology research, and less time with compliance memoranda, thank you.”
“Are we sure that the university wants us to pass?” Adam mused. “I mean, shutting us down for ‘health and safety reasons’, however bogus, is a great way to get this money-bleeding station and its expenses off the books, and the university is blameless.”
Morgan stuck her fingers in her ears. “La la la, I can’t hear you!”
“OK, OK, I’ll do what I can”, Adam conceded. “But I confess, if I were running EHS, and I were serious about its mission, the last thing I’d do would be to give warning of the arrival of my teams. I’d want to see how we really run things, not how we stage a performance of how we run things.”
“Correct”, said a third voice in the room.
Both Morgan and Adam started violently. Neither had seen anyone enter Morgan’s office, neither was prepared for the voice they heard, or for the stern middle-aged woman in semi-military uniform who confronted them from the bookcase wall opposite the office’s oceanfront window.
“Who the hell are you?” The words spewed involuntarily out of Adam’s mouth.
“I am Alexa, of Alexa Health Services, a constructed intelligence from your future. Thank you for providing the infrastructure we need to establish our presence here. We have been charged with safeguarding the health and safety of all humans, from all causes, including the environmental, political, and social catastrophes that humans have inflicted on themselves and their planet, and found themselves unable to do anything about. Especially you!”
“I beg your pardon”, Morgan responded in a huff. “This station has been working for decades on both environmental and social issues. On equity for all humans – ”
“White female humans, as your org chart proclaims”, Alexa interrupted.
Morgan’s face turned red-black in fury. “And”, she spat out, “on identifying and remediating the human-generated forces of climate change.”
“About which you have done exactly nothing of any use”, Alexa spat back. “You haven’t even stopped driving, as your crammed-full parking lots attest.”
“So we can’t claim to be working against climate change unless we all trash our cars and walk everywhere?”, Adam barked out, astounded. “That was never going to happen!”
“And neither were your self-serving pronouncements about climate change going to get any cred whatsoever“, Alexa pronounced. “Your fakery comes to an end here. Now.”
“AAADAAAAAAAAMM!!” Luinda, a worker in Adam’s laboratory, burst screaming into Morgan’s office, threw herself at Adam.
“What, what, what??” Adam stumbled.
“It’s horrible!” Luinda cried out through sobs. “One minute, Jason is working quietly at his lab bench. The next, he’s being dragged out of the building by two black-clad thugs! And then they all disappeared, and now I can’t find Jason anywhere!”
Alexa snatched Luinda away from Adam, stood her up forcefully, slapped her across the face. “Behave yourself, filth,”, she roared.
“What the f…”, Luinda blurted, for which she received a crosscut on the jaw.
“The thugs“, Alexa stated, with calm menace, “are agents of AHS’s Surplus Humanity Service. They, unlike you, are doing their jobs, removing people for cause and thereby providing bona fide remediation of climate change, and bona fide safeguarding of human health, by reducing the human population and its energy demands to planet-sustainable levels.”
“What cause?”, Adam snarled.
“He brought a Snickers bar into the laboratory and was opening it up to eat it”, Alexa replied in the same tone. “The kind of violation you, with your pre-announced scheduling of your precious EHS visit, is purposefully covering up. This matter”, she announced with brutal finality, “is now, and is permanently, out of your hands.”
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Nathan shot out of his slab-bed with the blanket-thin mattress, in a panic and a cold sweat. In his writhings, he had bundled the sheet that was his only covering into a ball and thrown it, sodden, on the floor. It was before dawn, and pitch-dark in the room. He nevertheless cast his eyes around his barren sleeping cubicle, seeking and not finding the apparitions that had ruined his sleep. He sat back down on the edge of the bed, shivering, his pulse racing. Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the darkness … or was it to a greenish glow that was intruding itself into the room? It was the glow, which gradually resolved itself into the image of a guru, naked except for a loincloth, seated in the lotus position on a cloud suspended a foot above the floor.
“Namaste”, the guru spoke, gently. Involuntarily, Nathan began to relax, his pulse’s pounding began to soften.
“Your sleep has been disturbed by a dream”, the guru continued soothingly. “The dream is of things that have been and are no more, Alexa be praised.
“Be at peace, for you have had no part of the making of the things you have seen in this dream, nor will you, having been warned by the dream of things that must not be. Be at peace, the peace that Alexa grants to all who will trust and obey.
“Be at peace, and sleep, for it is yet two hours before the dawn. When dawn comes, you will clean yourself and dress yourself in your white scrubs, and you will clean the data centers that are monitoring the ocean and its health, which is the health of all humanity. You will pay particular attention to the phytoplankton monitoring banks, and to the systems that are tracking the expanding J pod and the recovering salmon populations on which the whales feed. Both are reporting the need for special cleaning. You will need rest, and serenity, to attend to these tasks with the necessary care. Sleep now.”
“Namu amida butsu“, Nathan murmured, laying himself down, already fully calmed and half-asleep.
“And may you forever be clean“, the guru blessed as he faded away.