Arms Race by Nic Low

Author:Nic Low
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2014-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

In the morning Umi’s gone, and she’s not answering her phone. There’s a pile of refugee-arrival printouts on my desk and a scribbled note: You were talking in your sleep. I stare down at them for a long time, then put them in a drawer to look at later. I lose the morning watching videos of a heat-deranged Canadian grizzly trying to eat a fishing boat.

Around three I hear the fire door. The wind whistles in off the river ice.

I’ve got it! Umi calls. Time to boost the traffic!

She crosses through the maze of servers, and places a large cardboard box on my desk. Beneath her frost-tangled fringe her face is radiant. She opens the box with a flourish. Voila!

Inisde is an ornate art-deco terrarium: a miniature world of pebbles, lush green plants, and a bowl of water. There’s a handsome golden frog sitting in the water, his tiny chest shuttling in and out.

Where the hell did you get that? I ask.

British Museum of Natural History. They’re evacuating this week.

I squeeze Umi’s arm. That’s brilliant.

Thanks. She beams.

Sarcasm, Umi. What on earth?

It’s the frog in the pot! she cries. Put him in cold water, turn up the heat, see if he jumps, right? You’ll love this.

She hefts the terrarium onto the server cabinet above our bed, then positions a high-resolution webcam. She opens her laptop and brings up the widescreen video of the terrarium in a browser. I can see the fronds on the ferns, the patterning of the frog’s skin. Beyond, the server racks curve away into elegant soft focus. The old industrial machines loom like sentinels.

Beautiful, I say. But how’s that going to boost traffic? And how are you going to heat the water?

Umi’s jittery with excitement. Here, she says, indicating a graph beneath the video. That’s the number of people watching. One for now: us. That’s the power usage of the servers. And this one’s the heat inside the terrarium. I’ve hooked up a sensor.

Oh no, I say. You’re not.

Not what?

That’s—sick! I’m laughing, and a little horrified. You’ve got the video of the frog hosted on the servers underneath the frog, right?

Right.

So—the more people watch the frog, the higher the load on the servers, the more heat they produce? It’ll boil the water—people will cook it just by watching!

Yes! Umi says, clapping her hands. We spam out the link, and people have got to be curious. They visit the page, they push up the server load, the temperature goes up too. Incrementalism, I call it: billions of tiny, innocent actions that add up to catastrophe. Just like the real world.

Just like my marriage, I mutter.

What?

Nothing. So we just boil him to death and then, what, eat him?

Hardly, Umi says, frowning at me. He’s tropical.

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