Chapter Nineteen

Levi

They were leaving the vineyard just after lunch for a day testing Mojo’s field skills.

Enrico had invited the others.

Levi wasn’t sure he was glad that the Metz family and Tess had accepted.

But here they were. All of them.

“The plan is to watch Mojo do a search and rescue mission, then at dusk go see the animals in the park.” Enrico stood by the open park vehicle as the group piled in.

Levi loaded Mojo into the cargo area then rounded to the vehicle to find everyone already seated and Gwen patting the seat beside her.

Doors shut, buckled, and engine running, Enrico glanced over his shoulder, “Gwen, your mom told me you’re working with the effects of weather on feeding human populations. We’re in a bad stretch here. Starvation for man and beast is a real possibility. If you’re still on for a drive through Etosha at sunset, would you and Tess mind if one of my commanders came with us? You can see the animals, and we can pick your brains?”

“Talk about the weather?” Craig put on his ball cap and adjusted the bill. “Nothing makes Gwen happier.”

“Sure, that’s fine with me. What is the subject of the brain picking?” Gwen asked.

“As you may know, our emergency food stores are being depleted at an unprecedented rate. Everyone is hoping that with the rain, we’ll recover and start rebuilding the reserves back to where they were. In the meantime, we need to cull our wild herds.”

“That bad?” Goose asked.

“Worse,” Enrico said. “The international news found out that a cull is planned.”

“What are we talking here?” Reaper asked.

“Around seven hundred animals in all.” Enrico put the vehicle in drive and started toward the highway. “These are round numbers: eighty elephants, thirty hippos, then impalas, about three hundred zebra, and another hundred of elands. The culled animals will come from five different parks for butchering, then be turned into biltong, a kind of dried meat from this region that’s a bit like jerky and distributed to the people.”

“We knew about that,” Gwen said. “The reserves emptying so quickly and the upcoming cull is what spurred WorldCares to send us in and see what we think might happen with the drought. Our headquarters is worried that culling the animals will put significant pressure on your tourist economy. When jobs go away, hunger follows.”

“It’s a different world here,” Enrico said. “When Westerners hear about the cull, some things will be easier for them to accept; the buffalos will be okay. “

“Impalas,” Goose said. “They’ll think of the car, not the animal.”

“I couldn’t tell you what an eland is,” Gwen said, reaching for the shoulder seams on her shirt and shifting them back and forth until it fell smoothly over her chest.

“Why would increasing the food supply create economic pressures?” Iris asked.

“One of the problems is that people often don't read anything beyond a headline,” Enrico said. “And the explanation will be the buried lede. In the United States, we’re taught that wildlife in Africa is endangered and should be preserved. That took hold in a big way in the eighties and nineties when researchers shared their findings on elephant psychology, proving they’re sentient beings with complex emotional lives.”

“I remember doing fundraising to protect the wild elephants. There was the fear that they were dying out,” Goose said. “Being from a tiny island in the Caribbean, the idea of animals as large as an elephant really caught hold of my imagination as a boy.”

“Exactly, sentiments changed, and that has profound ramifications. Take Zimbabwe as an example,” Enrico said. “Depending on tourist money to help protect their animals and help their economy, they benefited from the concern over animal extinction. People wanted to see elephants before they went the way of the dodo. Around forty years ago, Zimbabwe stopped culling their elephants. Right now, they have over a hundred thousand elephants, and their ecosystem can only sustain half that.”

“What do you do with a surplus of fifty thousand elephants?” Iris asked. “Seems there wouldn’t be enough food for them to forage or water to drink.”

“They're encroaching into human spaces, which pits the farmers against the elephants, each trying to survive. It's a big problem with no easy answer.”

“We have that situation on the East Coast in the United States,” Craig said. “Not elephants, deer. There's not enough food or water or space to roam. The deer end up too close to humans, causing accidents on the roads. The government arranges for rifle hunters in the country and bow hunters in the suburbs to come in and cull the herds. My hunt club participated in that regularly. We got to join in the sport of hunting. The butchers distributed the deer meat to needy families. It feeds the people, and the deer can survive because there’s enough food, water, and space.”

“Yes,” Enrico agreed. “The numbers are figured out in an office as data points. Go here. Kill this number. Distribute them there, right? But people become very emotional about the idea of culling African wild animals.”

“Strong feelings without the benefit of a lived experience,” Goose said. “It’s a balancing act.”

“And this is the dilemma,” Enrico turned onto the highway headed east of Etosha Park. “We have three main industries: mining, fishing, and tourism. Tourism is king. Now, the animals are dying. The people have little food. The supplies are depleted, and the government has decided that, like the deer that Craig was talking about, we need to cull the herds in order for everyone to survive. You’re exactly right, Goose. It’s a balancing act. If the tourists believe we’re exploiting the animals rather than caring for them, Namibia could develop a reputation for bad stewardship when, in fact, this is not the case. The risk is that the tourists would find another country to visit.”

“Sometimes treating them well,” Craig said, “means culling them in a systematic and careful manner. It’s hard to get that across when you’re talking about elephants and hippos.”

“It's a difficult set of circumstances,” Levi acknowledged.

“Rain is the answer,” Enrico slowed to a stop as a wildebeest moseyed across the road.

“At the vineyard, too, we’re hoping for rain,” Craig said. “That might turn things around.”

“Over Africa right now, there’s a new weather system. It might be promising,” Tess offered. “It's nothing we've seen before.”

“Ever?” Levi asked.

“Never,” Tess pulled in a deep breath. “We're going to have to get used to the idea that what used to be predictable, like the start of the Namibian monsoon, isn’t going to be as straightforward anymore.”

Craig looked over his shoulder at Gwen. “That new system could mean rain here in Namibia soon?”

Gwen shrugged. “Hard to tell. The spaghetti lines look like they trace farther north.”

“North like Angola, then?” Iris asked.

“Mom, I honestly haven’t looked at the modeling since we started our vacation. I can get you the specifics once we’re back at the vineyard if you want.”

“Yes, please. I'd like to know that.” Iris shifted around in her seat until her back was pressed to the sidebar. “I just thought the monsoon timing might have been something that came up at the conference you girls just came from.”

“I’d say that conference was just a source of frustration and incredulity.”

Levi heard an uncharacteristic note of defeat in Tess’s tone.

“Why?” Craig asked. “What did you learn?”

Gwen laughed. “I learned that Tess has a theory that because of social media, we’re all going to die. And very soon.”

“What?” Reaper’s smile became a chuckle.

“Gwen thinks it’s my conspiracy theory. I don’t think I’m that far off, honestly,” Tess said.

Enrico tipped his chin up. “Okay, let’s hear this.”

“Fact, not a conspiracy theory,” she started, “research tells us that the human brain gets a dopamine reward when it perceives patterns and connections.”

“Basically, what you do for work with the prediction of how weather affects populations,” Iris said. “So that accounts for why you girls like your jobs so much.”

“I hadn’t really put that together. But you’re right. However, Gwen and I base our predictions on quantitative data. In a conspiracy theory, the connections aren’t real. And interestingly, it seems to me that there’s a significant social reward that comes with being a conspiracy theorist. People who are following the same conspiracy theories seem to feel like they’re privy to secret information, and they form a kind of clique. For people who have trouble connecting, it’s a social club.”

“There’s the monetary side of developing conspiracy theories, too,” Gwen added. “Disinformation equals clicks, and clicks equals money. Because quacks on social media are treated as though their opinions have the same weight as facts, the words of people who make the subject matter expertise their life’s work are relegated to the same level of importance as Jane the Human Weather Vane.”

“People say, ‘Do your own research.’” Tess pressed the flat of her hand to the side ledge, “They have no idea what they’re talking about. I mean, to do this personal research, are they heading out in the field or into a lab? Or are they watching shiny influencer videos that are chasing those clicks? There are sources that debunk the bunk that are reputable. But a video link sent by a bestie far outweighs the academic, mainly because the academic is often inaccessible because of the vocabulary and advanced subject matter. We are living through an extinction period, the death of expertise.”

“But this is weather, girls,” Iris said. “What could they possibly be making up?”

“I have an example, Mom. Did you hear that for nine days last year, a strange rumbling was detected?” Gwen looked around, and there were only shaking heads. “A seismic signal appeared in scientific stations all around the globe. They looked like the squiggles of an earthquake. A couple of theories were postulated about the cause.”

Tess grinned. “The most popular was that aliens had landed, and their spaceships were being detected.”

“Another prevalent conspiracy theory was that the government was doing experiments on controlling the weather.”

“These are the scientists or the conspiracy theorists who are saying this?” Enrico asked, flipping on his signal and passing the slow-moving truck in front of them.

“The conspiracy theorists—who read the scientific data and made up what they wanted to—presented at our conference advancing the idea that something nefarious was going on that the government was trying to keep from the citizenry.” Gwen bent to dig her water bottle from her pack.

“That had to spring from something,” Craig said.

“Around the third day of the rumble, we saw the speculation start popping up on social media,” Gwen said, unscrewing the top. “Of course, scientists came on to the threads, explaining that they thought that the signal machines were broken or that something had caused them to fail. But after more days of rumbling, the machines were all checked and deemed operable. The conspiracists grew louder and more alarmed. After nine days, the vibrations disappeared. The event was over.”

“We have people who monitor those chats because we use citizen scientists,” Tess explained. “They might, for example, track temperatures in their backyards or identify and count birds during migration. We include the volunteers who are willing to gather data for us in our forums. We could hear the alarm in their word choices. And we couldn’t comfort them because we didn’t know anything. In a vacuum of information, conspiracy theorists emerge. And once someone believes something, it’s tough to change their minds.”

“So it was aliens then?” Levi asked with a smile.

“This is the current scientific theory,” Gwen paused to take a long drink, then screwed her cap back in place, “The concentration of greenhouse gases has increased the volatility of weather patterns. In our traditionally frozen areas, ice is melting at an unprecedented rate. The conclusion, as of now, is that there was a mega-tsunami. It was created by a wave when an ice break splashed into a fjord. What the apparatus was measuring was the sound of the ensuing wave.”

Craig shrugged. “So the nine-day rumble is no more. That conspiracy theory will fade.”

“It wasn’t just that,” Tess said, “we’re facing a significant problem with the tech-bros and their philosophy: move fast, break things.”

“My,” Iris put a hand to her chest, “that sounds downright ominous.”

“I was out in California a lot last year, volunteering for a science experiment,” Reaper said. “And I heard something about that. Are you talking about the guys who are developing a way to offset carbon emissions with space pollution?”

“That’s them. They were at our conference. Scary as shit.” Gwen turned. “Oops, sorry, Mom.”

“What now?” Goose asked.

“I don't remember the specifics, but in general,” Reaper said, “they’re releasing some kind of pollutants into the sky to try to cool the planet.”

“It’s a startup company,” Tess explained, “that got a million dollars in venture capital to run their experiments. The future money would come in when industries offset their carbon footprint by purchasing sulfur dioxide balloons and shooting them into the sky.”

“Is that a real thing?” Levi asked.

“It's called solar geoengineering, and it’s a research subject in all the major universities right now,” Tess said. “They think it might be an option to put a reflective substance into the sky, sort of like ozone sunscreen. Until I went to the conference, I thought that was only happening in the laboratories.”

“People are actually out there sending sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere?” Iris asked.

“Into the stratosphere,” Gwen said, “But yeah, that’s what’s happening.”

“Who's funding that?” Craig followed Enrico’s finger as he pointed out the front window.

“That’s the training grounds over there,” Enrico said. “Looks like they’re ready for us.”

“I think it's crowdsourced, Dad.”

“There ought to be a law!” Craig railed.

“You don’t know to make a law until someone does something like this that can impact the population,” Goose said. “Mexico is leading on that.”

Gwen pulled her pack up from the floor and set it on her lap, getting ready to get out. “And when they make those laws, the conspiracy theorists believe that the government wants to keep control of the weather all to themselves as a power move.”

“You know what? I actually saw that playing out on a real-world mission.” Levi said. “My clients believed our government targeted their colleagues for retaliation, and the U.S. showed their hand through the precision use of weaponized weather.”

“Are you serious?” Gwen looked at him with flirtatious eyes, which startled him. Levi sent a glance toward Tess; yup, she was paying attention, and she’d seen it, too.

“Was this with Tidal Force?” Reaper’s voice had a cautionary tone.

“A private contract I took on before I interviewed with Iniquus. The group that was affected was not my client. Client adjacent. They knew each other through business.”

Reaper nodded.

“I was coming off my military contracts and started going through the process of interviewing with Iniquus. I took a week- long private contract with some buddies of mine to do close protection on the island of Capri.”

Iris smiled. “There are worst places you could've been.”

“Yeah, it was a hardship,” Levi laughed. “Absolutely gorgeous island, beautiful water, just an amazing experience. The only thing that marred it was when we learned that there was—” Levi stopped and looked at Gwen, saw the same look in her eyes, and turned to Tess instead, “There’s a stretch of water that Phoenicians used for thousands of years. There’s a specific wind.”

Gwen tapped her shoulder against Levi’s. “The Mistral is a strong wind that comes down from the north and makes the Mediterranean choppy.”

Levi felt a blush rise from his collar. “Yes, thank you. The coast guard assured us the Mistral wasn’t blowing, and the area would have calm sailing. But then we got word from them that big storms were coming up, and so we insisted that our people stay in their hotel until the danger passed. That wind was intense. It was almost like a hurricane. It shook the buildings like an earthquake. My client's buddy was out on his sailboat. It was supposed to be unsinkable.”

“Let me guess,” Craig said, “it was named the Titanic?”

“It did go under quickly like the Titanic. Something wild and, as Gwen and Tess have been saying, unprecedented happened. There was a—I’m uncomfortable throwing out weather terms in front of you two—a downward pressure wind that I think they called a downburst.”

Though he was looking at Tess, it was Gwen who answered. “Yes, that’s pretty fierce,”

“The authorities believe it was a downburst or a waterspout, and it so happened to strike the exact spot where this billionaire’s yacht was anchored. It was a tragedy. People died.”

“And the government tie-in?” Gwen asked.

“The billionaire, who died in the event, had been under investigation for fraud, but, apparently, the grand jury said the prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to take it to trial, and the charges were dismissed. The conspiracy is that where the Russians might have accidents like falling off a balcony or down a flight of stairs, the United States could use precision weather to remove people from the equation. Making it worse, the billionaire’s partner, who had been part of the same scheme, had died the day before. He’d been riding his bike along a bluff in Oregon when a gust of wind blew him over the cliff.”

Iris’s eyes were wide. “My goodness, I might see how a person could latch on to that conspiracy theory. What are the chances? Two acts of weather. Two different countries. Two people tied to the same crime?”

“In two days’ time,” Levi added as Enrico pulled to a stop next to a building, and the group all piled out.

But rather than walking toward the waiting rangers, they formed a circle.

“Gwen, this conversation started with you saying that conspiracy theories were creating problems for you at your conference?” Iris said. “If it affected your work, does that mean it had to do with Africa? Or even Namibia in particular?”

“In a way. Are you ready for this?”

“Doubtful,” Craig said, leaning back against the vehicle.

“We’ll explain more this evening when Enrico’s colleague is along. But in general, there is an unprecedented shift in the winds. The conspiracy theorists think that the American insurance companies have developed a way to manipulate the winds in such a way as to make themselves more profitable. And that this year, they’re testing it out.”

“Wait.” Reaper closed his eyes with a quick shake of his head, then popped his lids back open. “What now?”

“More tonight about the weather issues happening in Africa and Europe, but in America, the theory goes that the insurance companies were able to hold the winds on the east side of the Atlantic near Africa and Europe, saving East Coast USA from hurricanes. Then they tested to see if they could bring a hurricane inland and thrust it northward.”

“Following that thought,” Iris wrapped a hand around her neck. “Why would the insurance companies do that? They lost billions.”

“They did it to test their equipment,” Tess was definitely looking defeated, and Levi wanted more than anything to take her into his arms and comfort her. He shoved his hands in his pockets instead.

“Mom, the conspiracy theorists are saying that the insurance companies can manipulate the winds. The goal this year is to make the market hot by destroying homes. Everyone desperately wants to protect their house investment and will pay whatever it takes to keep their insurance in place. Next, the insurance companies turn off the wind and rake in the premium money caused by this year’s panic. But the insurance companies have no fear they’ll need to pay any future claims since they can direct the wind. The insurance industry gets mega-wealthy, and the executives go on to live plush lives.”

“Wait,” Levi stabbed his hands onto his hips, leaning forward. “They’re saying what now?”