“Both,” said Zia.
Galang laughed. “Good point. The zeitgeist is the zeitgeist is the zeitgeist.”
“You somehow always manage to know everything about everyone.”
“That’s why you need me around, sister. Ears to the tracks.”
Zia laughed. “Some things never change. You’re still trading gossip like a prying teenager.”
“Gossip gets a bad rap,” said Galang. “Love, war, art, all the important things in life are gossip. We’re like electrons, we only exist in relation to each other.”
“Yet another thing that never changes: you always have a response to everything.”
“A professional hazard, I’m afraid.”
“Well, I guess it’s journalism that’s kept you in touch with folks. Chasing stories around the world. Shining a light on abuse of power. You better watch out, somebody’s going to turn your life into a blockbuster biopic one day.”
“Yeesh, I hope not. But… If they do, promise me that you will personally ensure they get Hasan Herianto to play me. He’s so dreamy.”
“Hah, like I have Hollywood hookups.”
“It’s far more likely that they make the movie about you.” Galang wiggled his fingers and dropped his voice an octave. “Zia León travels the world rescuing people from disaster. Daughter of a tech billionaire and an environmental luminary, she fights to relieve the suffering of strangers amidst the wreckage of a dying planet.”
“Oh, the melodrama,” said Zia. She didn’t show it, but the joke stung because it hit a little too close to home. Decade-old headlines scrolled across her vision whenever she curled up on her hard cot and closed her eyes. Electrical Grids Fail Across the Tropics as Temperature Spikes. Nineteen Countries Declare State of Emergency. Heat Wave Death Toll Hits 20 Million. The maddening pity of the Costa Rican president elect as she accepted Zia’s withdrawal from ambassadorial appointment. The impossible chasm that had opened between Zia and her father, grief wrenching them apart along an invisible fault line. She took a sip of chai, letting the spicy, creamy, sweetness wash away her angst. “Production would stop as soon as the film crew discovered how mundane humanitarian aid really is. Logistics isn’t particularly cinematic.”
“Meh,” Galang waved away her objection. “Montage, montage, montage. They’d need to inject some drama though, maybe a spurned lover? Or is there something along those lines already developing?”
Zia guffawed as Galang leaned in conspiratorially.
“Alas, no,” she said. “I’m super boring. All work, no play. Hardly worth your layover.”
Galang gave her a look that communicated his deep concern that Zia was turning into an ascetic monk suffering from that strangest form of sexual perversion: celibacy. She responded with a lascivious wink that she hoped implied a whimsical preference for the freedom of un-attachment. She wasn’t a monk, she was a knight errant. Or at least that’s what she tried to tell herself on the rare occasion that she actually had time to entertain such banalities.
Galang leaned across the table. “Speaking of drama, have you decided what to do about Tommy?”
Zia rubbed her forehead. “Shit. Jason’s been harassing me about it almost daily, which is maddening but understandable. We could really use the money. We can always use the money. But taking oil money to respond to climate change catastrophes?”
“It has a certain twisted logic.”
“And then there’s the fact that it’s Tommy.”
“You know what I think of him,” said Galang. “But you probably shouldn’t be taking financial advice from a journalist, we’re barely managing to keep our industry afloat as it is.”
“You know what I think of him,” said Zia. She shook her head. “Twisted logic seems to be precisely what my job requires these days.”
“I hear you,” said Galang with feeling.
“Maybe that’s why I’ve been distracted lately.”
“With what?”
The chill of alpine breeze on naked skin, stars wheeling above. It starts, as all truly great stories do, on a dark and stormy night—better yet, it’s about why we can’t seem to make sense of how nights get all dark and stormy in the first place.
“So you know how global temperatures have leveled out over the past few years?” asked Zia.
Galang nodded. “No scientist I’ve interviewed has been able to fully explain it. Lots of handwaving.”
“Right,” said Zia. “Selai has made it her mission to figure out why, or at least why scientists can’t explain it.”
“Really? Now that’s interesting. When she sets her mind to something…”
“…something usually gives before she gives up,” said Zia. “Exactly.”
“What about Haribo?” asked Galang. “Isn’t she being paid gobs of money to gallivant around the world taking exceptionally gorgeous photos of gummy bears?”
“Well, that’s the other thing about Selai,” said Zia. “As soon as she masters something, she moves on. This is me reading between the lines, but I think she wanted to treat social media virality as a problem she could solve. Once she broke the internet, Haribo got excited and Selai got bored. So when she started hearing from her uncles in the Fijian cabinet how unreliable climate models threw off all their infrastructure plans, she started digging. You know how serious Fiji is about climate science.”
“It’s never fun to be a canary in a coal mine.”
“Right. She’s read every paper, ripped out the innards of every model like a mechanic gutting a clunker, and done her own tests running open-source Mozaik architecture on top of the Interstice research data pool. She told me about it at the reunion and I’ve been reviewing her materials.”
“And?”
“The upshot is that the numbers just don’t add up,” said Zia. It had felt good to dig so deeply into something that her mind began to run scenarios on autopilot. “Until a few years ago, climate models made somewhat different projections from each other but generally agreed on what direction we were headed and what inputs were causal. But none of them projected global temperatures leveling out, and nobody has been able to identify why they were wrong. There are a lot of folks tossing around theories, but when you do the math, none have enough explanatory power to make sense of it.”
“Hence the handwaving.”
“Correct,” said Zia. “Selai’s still doing mathematical forensics. The models are insanely complex, so there’s a lot there. But I started thinking about you and me, all the scientists we talked to while editing my mom’s book.”
“Uh huh.”
“And I’m wondering whether the problem isn’t in the models themselves, but in the inputs. What if the math is right, but the models are reflecting reality imperfectly? What if a flaw in the models’ descriptions of nature is the source of the disconnect? I’ve been making a list of the researchers we can introduce Selai to.”
“The earth system is a big haystack in which to find a needle,” said Galang.
“Which is why she’ll need all the help she can get,” said Zia.