Weatherman by Caldon Mull

Author:Caldon Mull [Mull, Caldon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: adventure, lgbt, post human, post cyberpunk, cyberpunk noir
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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“Oh, I’ve eaten too much.”

“You haven’t touched a thing!” Esteban gestured at her plate, “Not really more than a teaspoon of anything, it’s the variety that makes your gut think so. Different rates of digestion give you the illusion of being full.”

“How long are we likely to be on lockdown?”

“It depends… We’re thickening the atmosphere, essentially dragging moisture out of the soil while we’re heating the planet… It used to be weeks of global dust, now it’s just short of that. I mean, look at MF1-Cadiz and MF1-Marseilles in the Hellas. In a hundred years the air pressure at the bottom of the Planita is half of that of earth-standard, you’ve got running water into a pooling lake.

“At the top of the Hellas crater, and most elsewhere, the air pressure is five percent at worst, or ten percent on average. In another hundred, you’ll live on the shores of a sea that’s the size of... the Antipodean Ocean on earth, you know the one that used to be the Arctic Ocean, when north was still north. So weather in the Hellas is more like weather.”

“What do you think? You’re the weatherman.” she pressed him for an answer.

“Maybe another two days? It’s been sweeping south for about a week already, so there’s not much more to sustain it once it buttresses against Tharsis. It should drop all the ices really soon, which would then slowly melt and universally cool the atmospheric layers to an equilibrium different from the hotter, wetter air and the underlying thicker, cooler moving wedge.

“All the GM lily-pads have been also been disrupted. They’ll land and seed where they fall, but while they’re been blown about in the storm, their dark color will trap more heat from the sun while they’re up there, and they’ll rot where they land.”

“Decomposition usually involves some heat.” she pushed her plate away from her.

“Yes it does, in another decade the whole Boreal Planita will be swampy. When the permafrost goes it’ll release methane gasses in huge quantities, more or less at once. That doesn’t seem likely during this storm, so factor the lilies into the equation, two... maybe three days.”

“That’s something to look forward to.” Doctor snorted. “Eruptions of rotting vegetation gases.”

“Most of the homestead ranchers and farmers should be safer by then, permanently relocated along the higher plains of the Tempe Terra when that happens… I hope. MF3-Cartagena must transplant the MF3-Mumbai claimants to fulfill their allotments as quickly as possible. As soon as that is done, we will be twice the size of any single landed Fleet Arcology.

“If we can show the utilization and development of the Marscape we gain more say in the Martian tribune, according to the Senatorial Charter. MF3-Mumbai was doomed from the start, they chose all the wide open land that was easiest to allot to their tenants… not realizing that all of the Northern plains would eventually become sea-bottom as Mars warmed. They hoped it would take centuries, not the decades the land is submerging at the current rate.

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