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By Root 1315 0

to the store. So off she went, driving so she could stock up on more groceries than could be carried, boggled once again by the destitute look of their grocery store, the best one in the area but sovietized like all the rest of them by the epidemic of hoarding that had plagued her fellow citizens ever since the cold snap, if not the flood. Hoarding was a bad thing; it represented a loss of faith in the system’s ability to supply the necessities reliably. While there might have been some rational basis to it in the beginning, what it now meant is that every time she went to the store huge sections of the shelves were empty, particularly of those products that would be needed in an emergency and could be stored at home: toilet paper, bottled water, flour, rice, canned goods. People were storing these in their houses rather than letting them be stored in the store. She was still waiting for the time when every household maxed, so that when the stores got a shipment the goods would not fly out the doors.

It also looked like certain fresh foods were permanently in shorter supply than they had been before the long winter. This was a different problem entirely.

So she had to hunt for whatever could be used, buy a few meals’ worth of ingredients, some fast stuff, and hurry home to find Charlie still on the phone, vociferating, while also placating Joe about Anna’s absence. He had gotten water on to boil, so they were that far ahead. But Nick had spaced on homework and Joe was whining, and Charlie was engrossed in trying to get his boss elected president of the United States, after which things would supposedly calm back down. Aaack!

Oh well; time to heft Joe onto her hip and see if he would help make a salad, while consulting with Nick on math. It would all be better by the year 2500.

Not for the first time, it struck her that things were calmer and more relaxing at work than they were at home. Or rather, that wherever she was, it always seemed like it was calmer at the other place. Was that normal? And if so, what did it mean?

Back at work, where the calm was again not actually noticeable as such, the climate amelioration projects were still taking up the bulk of their efforts. Carbon capture and sequestration, cleaner energy sources, cleaner transport: each area by itself was massive and complex, and correlating them was really more than their systems could accomplish. Although Frank had established a model modeling group, to study ways to model their efforts as a single thing.

Meanwhile they continued the work on their own fronts, and reported back to Diane and Laveta. Bioinformatics was still expanding at a tremendous speed, although here as elsewhere they were running into the same problem they had encountered with the climate: they knew things, but they couldn’t act on them. Getting genetically modified DNA into living humans was still proving to be an enormous obstacle.

On the climate front, the North Atlantic project was entrained and happening, therefore out of their hands; and everywhere else, they were running into the tail-wagging-dog difficulty that Edgardo had named Fat Dog Syndrome; the dog was too fat for the tail to wag it, no matter how excited the tail got. They tried to quantify this impression by using cascade math to model ways for distributing money that would perturb other sources of it, finding capital at “high angles of repose,” venture capital, pension funds, investment banks, the stock markets, futures markets. Indeed, if they could get the markets to invest, they would really be tapping into the economy’s surplus value, redirecting it to purposes actually useful. But whether these efforts were finding anything useful in the real world was an open question.

“Big profits in global cooling,” Edgardo said.

“Perturbation.” Anna liked the sound of the word and the concept. “It’s a network, and we perturb it in ways that stimulate harmonics.” She thought the math describing this system’s behavior was more interesting than the cascade theories, which always went back to chaos theory. Her urge to