18 Slow Fall
Geneva · Monday, 16 February – Monday, 21 June 2032.
The joint notice had gone out on Monday morning, and on Wednesday night Priya sent the sheet that made it worse.
It had one tab that mattered. lowering was 112 rows, one per sphere, sorted by perigee, each one joined to its lock from the Greenbelt work. Dana scrolled to the site_type column and down it. It said fab 112 times. The scrubber column was a solid run of ones. Priya’s email was two lines: Zero data centers. I ran the join four ways because I didn’t believe it either.
By then the newspapers had a phrase for what the rest of the industry was doing, which was running cold. Operators in Loudoun County were draining halls and shipping the work to Stockholm and Odense and Helsinki, anywhere the heat went into somebody’s radiators, because the under tab in Priya’s October paper said those were the sites the spheres saw least; one campus in Oregon had shut outright and called it maintenance. Nobody on the council had proposed another intercept. They had all watched the relay die.
Dana put the sheet on the screen on Thursday afternoon.
The Japanese delegate had asked for the floor first, and he read from four pages he had written out by hand the night before, in English, with the corrections still on them. He had spent eleven years at a chip plant. A wafer took about three months to go through a line, he said. Some steps could not be stopped for more than a few hours without scrapping everything in the furnaces. A lithography tool was the size of a bus, and if you put it on a truck you were buying a new one. A data center could move its work tonight. A fab that shut down threw away a quarter’s output and took most of a year to come back to yield.
“Every one of the 112,” Dana said, “is on a fab. None on the data centers, though the data centers were hotter in January and most of them still are.” She brought up the map. “It’s going after where the thinking gets built.”
The Russian general said that was how you fought a war. You did not bomb the army. You bombed the rail yards and waited.
The French delegate said it was going after the future, not the present. The machines running today were already built. The ones that mattered were in the furnaces in Hsinchu right now.
“Or the present is already cold,” Lin said. “You turned it off yourselves. Last week. It does not need to.”
“They started down on the thirteenth,” Dana said. “Loudoun was running hot on the thirteenth. It picked the fabs before anybody turned anything off.”
Lin looked at the dates on the screen and let it go.
Kessler had his notebook shut on the table in front of him. “A data center is a tenant,” he said. “You can move the tenant. A fab is the building. You say it wants the thinking. I say it wants whatever cannot run away. I do not know which. Neither do you.”
The chair asked Dana which of them was right.
“I don’t know,” Dana said. “I know which addresses.”
In March the tracking networks caught up with Priya.
Izaña and the amateur stations had been publishing impact ellipses since the first perigee pass. In February they were the size of continents, smears across the Pacific that the papers printed in red. Each pass cut them down. By April they were tens of kilometers across, and every one of them sat on a name that had been in Priya’s lowering tab since February.
“They’re drawing my map,” Priya said. It was the first time she had called; she was in her car in a parking structure in Greenbelt, the engine off so Dana could hear. “Slower and with worse error bars. What are the governments doing with it?”
Dana told her. Taipei and Seoul had briefed the companies. Tokyo had issued a statement about vigilance. Arizona’s emergency managers had received the Chandler solution eight days after the council sent it to Washington, and in the version they got the centroid had been rounded to the Phoenix metropolitan area.
“Rounded,” Priya said. “That’s not a centroid. That’s a weather forecast.”
Dana’s terms of reference ran to a page and a half, signed by the chair in February when the blue badge was printed. Section 3 said the technical briefer would provide timely technical information to affected parties. It did not say which parties. It did not say through whom.
She decided that a prefecture was a party.
She wrote the first one on the evening of 9 April, in a council template made for something else, and sent it to the duty address of the Kumamoto Prefectural Government’s crisis management office listed on the prefecture’s website. She copied the chair.
| Issued | 2032-04-09 16:20 UTC Issuer: SCM Technical Briefer |
| Area | Kumamoto Prefecture, JP. Centroid 32.88 N, 130.84 E |
| Window | 2032-07-14 to 2032-07-16 (est.) |
| Radius | evacuate 3 km; glazing hazard to 5 km |
| Basis | SCM tracking solution; pointing data (Raman et al.) |
Evacuate 3 km was the only verb in it. Then she wrote the same notice for Leixlip, for Kulim, for Malta in New York, for Chandler with the centroid to two decimal places, and put her mobile number in the covering email of every one, because the template had no field for it.
The phone rang at two in the morning, Geneva time, in the rented flat on the Rue de Lausanne. The number started +81.
“Dr. Okafor? This is the crisis management duty officer, Kumamoto Prefecture.” His English was careful and fast. “I have your notice. 014.”
“Yes.”
“Is this from the Japanese government?”
“No. From the council.”
“Then who do I call to confirm it?”
“Me.”
She could hear an office behind him, a printer and a man reading numbers. It was nine in the morning there.
“I have called Tokyo since one o’clock,” he said. “The Cabinet Office says it is aware of the council’s work. Defense says ask the Cabinet Office. Foreign Affairs says the council has no authority to issue warnings in Japan.” He stopped. “Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you send it?”
“Because the centroid is right,” Dana said. “And nobody else was going to send it to you.”
“How right?”
“The tracking solution’s one-sigma ellipse is about 9 km by 4. The pointing solution is tighter. The sphere has been locked within a few kilometers of that plant since last summer. The two agree.”
“The plant.” He said a name, the joint venture in Kikuyo, and she said yes. “They built it here because of the water,” he said. “Do you know that? The groundwater. It is the best in Japan for this. Everyone was very happy.” Paper moved. “3.4 kilotons.”
“About that. It’s the mass and the speed. Eleven kilometers a second.”
“Hiroshima was fifteen.”
“Yes. And that was an air burst. This is a surface impact. Most of the energy goes into the ground and the air near it. Buildings come down out to about 0.7 kilometers. Windows to about two. The 3 km is margin on the centroid. The 5 km is for glass.”
“There is a hospital at four kilometers. There are four elementary schools inside five.” He read off names and distances. “The window is three days.”
“Plus or minus a day. It’ll come down to hours. I’ll send you every update when I have it.”
“The plant has six thousand people working. Shifts. Contractors.” He paused. “Is it aiming at them?”
“It’s aiming at the heat.”
“The heat is them. The heat is people working.”
“The heat is the tools,” Dana said. “The furnaces, the chillers, the scrubbers. The ones that lock are the ones that dump it into the air. We don’t see any lock on a place because people are in it.”
“You see the heat. You don’t see why.”
“No.”
“In 2016 we had two earthquakes in two days,” he said. “Magnitude 7.0. Everybody here remembers. We did not know the second one was coming. If we had known three months ahead we would have done everything.” He breathed out. “I need to take this to the governor at ten. He will ask me who said it.”
“Tell him the council’s technical briefer. Tell him the basis is the tracking solution and Dr. Raman’s paper, which is public, with code. Tell him he can call me.”
“He will not call a foreigner at two in the morning.”
“Then you call me. Any hour.”
“And if Tokyo tells him not to move anybody?”
“Then he has to decide whether he believes Tokyo or the orbit.”
“That is not fair to him,” the duty officer said. “But it is the question. Can it miss?”
“Not by three kilometers. Not on anything we’ve seen these do.”
“Can it change its mind?”
She thought of Abilene. “If the plant goes cold, it might,” she said. “I don’t know. Nobody’s seen one turn away on the way down. And a fab can’t go cold in three months without throwing away the fab.”
“So we evacuate a plant that cannot be evacuated.”
“You evacuate the people. You leave the plant.”
He was quiet again. When he spoke it was slower. “Please spell your name. For the log.”
“O, K, A, F, O, R.”
“Thank you, Dr. Okafor.” He read her number back to her, every digit, and she said yes at the end of it.
The letter arrived on 17 April, from the Office of the Legal Adviser at the State Department, addressed to the chair, copied to FEMA and to the Arizona Division of Emergency Management, which had written its own letter two days before. It said the council held no authority to issue emergency information within the territory of a member state, that unilateral notices to subnational authorities undermined coordinated national response, and that the United States reserved its position on the status of the technical briefer. Arizona’s letter said the Chandler notice had caused the governor’s office to learn of the threat from a city fire chief.
The chair read both at her desk in the small office behind the council room and handed them across. “Are they right?”
“Yes,” Dana said.
“About all of it?”
“About the authority. You don’t have any. Neither do I.”
The chair took her glasses off. “Then keep sending them.”
The US delegation stopped coming to the technical sessions the following week. Her emails to the mission came back with an automatic reply naming someone she had never met. The Lookout feed from JPL now came through the council’s registry a day late with a cover sheet. She had expected it to take longer.
Kumamoto did not write a letter. The governor announced a voluntary relocation zone of 3 km on the twenty-second and a mandatory one for the window. The plant said production would continue.
On the twenty-third there was a white paper bag on her desk in the briefers’ room. Inside were two dorayaki, still soft. The Japanese delegate was in his seat across the room with his handwritten pages, reading. He did not look up, and she did not ask.
At the end of May the solutions settled.
Dana ran the 112 forward on Thursday the twenty-seventh with Izaña’s latest astrometry folded in. Hsinchu, Tainan, Kaohsiung. Pyeongtaek, Hwaseong. Kumamoto. Chandler, Taylor, Malta. Leixlip, Kulim, Singapore. The two fabs in Dresden. All of them on Thursday 15 July, between 11:06 and 11:09 UTC. Spheres that had started down months apart, in different orbits, from different sides of the Earth, were going to arrive inside the same three minutes.
She put it on the screen the next morning without saying anything first.
The British delegate said it was showing that it could. The Russian general said it was denying warning; somebody pointed out that everyone had three months’ warning already, and he said warning of the second from the first was different.
Kessler had worked the arithmetic in his notebook while they talked. “It is phasing each lowering to arrive at the same time. The early ones braked late. It paid for this.”
“So it wants something from the three minutes,” Dana said.
“So that nothing can be moved in between,” Lin said.
Dana turned. “Moved by whom?”
“By us.” Lin looked at the column. “If Hsinchu goes first, the next morning there is a plane full of engineers and masks from Hsinchu going to Arizona. Or a plane from Arizona going to Kumamoto. You can move people and photomasks in a day. In three minutes you cannot move anything. It has thought about what you would do after the first one.”
“You’re saying it understands the industry.”
“I am saying the industry is very easy to understand if you have watched it for four years from the side.”
On Monday, 21 June, the German delegate asked his question at the end of the morning.
“Dresden has three fabs,” he said. “Two of them are in your notices. The third, Dresden-Nord, is not. Four spheres on two fabs, and nothing on the third. People in Dresden are asking me why. I would like a reason that is not luck.”
Dana brought up the under tab. Dresden-Nord had sold heat to the city’s district network, and its sink fraction had read over 0.9. “It has a lock,” she said. “A weak one. Its sphere wanders a few kilometers either side of the plant and comes back. That sphere isn’t one of the 112. It’s on its original orbit, perigee steady.”
“It could still be lowered.”
“Not in time. I ran every one of the 112 back to where it started down and forward on the best path it could have flown. None of them could reach Dresden-Nord by 15 July. None of them could reach it at all with the braking they’ve done. It was settled before any of them started down.”
“Settled by what?”
“By whatever chose the 112,” Dana said. “It chose them before the window was set and before anyone ran cold.”
The German delegate was quiet for a moment. “They will not believe me,” he said. “They will want to know who decided.”
She did not have an answer for him. That afternoon she finished the impact summary for the council, eleven pages, every site with its centroid and its time to the second, and at the bottom of the Dresden table she added the line he could take home.