Author: Majoki

Sebastian picked up a sheared finger. He gingerly held the digit, storing its smooth, young paleness in his memory before dropping it in the orange bio-waste bag fastened to his belt. Jakarta, Cape Town, Yangon, Chengdu, Lima, Montreal, Oakland. He’d seen the same devastation. The new supernormal.

He’d predicted it. Them.

His algorithms ferreted them out. His devices tracked and measured them. His ingenuity mitigated untold loss of life, but Mother Nature still gave him the finger—the one in the bio bag at his side.

Sebastian knew he couldn’t win against metastorms. The media had dubbed them “hell cells,” but it was unfair to blame Mother Nature. These intense localized storms weren’t Her spawn entirely. And, they weren’t solely attributable to climate change. It had taken some time for Sebastian to hunt down the real enemy, the deadly actor at the heart of metastorms: moma.

In recent years, nanomechanics had produced an ever-wider variety of moma, molecular machines. Moma unclogged arteries, fought agricultural pests and disease, purified salt water. They did a lot of good, saved a lot of lives, fed and hydrated great masses of humanity. Most of these invisible machines were created from quantum carbon tubes. Smart carbon. Highly engineered, specialized, directed and short-lived. At least that had been the understanding.

Once fulfilling a prescribed function, moma were designed to dissimilate, break down in earth’s ambient atmospheric and geologic radiation. Planned obsolescence. For the most part, moma did disband as planned, but in too many the underlying microcronics were more resilient than anticipated, more opportunistic than was comprehensible. High in the stratosphere, moma’s constituent parts had formed a witch’s brew of carbonites, spawning hypercyclonic winds almost impossible to predict: hell cells.

That’s why Sebastian was working to virtually model the metastorms from initiation to disintegration. Out in the field, he collected data. Storm detritus—like the finger in his orange bio-waste bag—provided vital data points. They were also a reminder of what was at stake. Survival.

And his field research had finally spurred a breakthrough. The moma were more than a metastorm catalyst, they were recombinant life. The intense heat and friction within hypercyclonic winds generated a primordial soup, an uncontrolled Miller-Urey experiment engendering new and unpredictable primeval life.

Moma from another Mother. Though not from Nature.

That’s how Sebastian came to characterize moma. One had to confront the monster, engage it. Try to turn it. One could not defeat a burgeoning plague by reasoning with it. One had to isolate, imprison it. One could not match the ferocity of a hell cell to quell it. One had to drain its motive force, starve it.

To do this, Sebastian reasoned, he’d have to change human behavior on a global scale, the greatest of all challenges. Otherwise, metastorm cataclysms would sap the world’s resources along with humanity’s collective will and things would cascade into global collapse.

Hell cells were shoving humankind to the brink. And the only way Sebastian knew to save the world was to shove humanity in another direction. An equally perilous push.

Metastorms were the result of us. We’d created this recombinant moma, this new life, this unpredictably hungry force of nature. We were the storm god here. And we had to control it. Which meant owning the sacrifice to fix the problem: banning the use of moma, discarding a technology that had great benefits, choosing to live our modern lives much differently.

Full bio-waste bag at his side, Sebastian considered the mammoth social-political storm he’d soon be weathering and understood he’d probably be safer standing in the center of a hell cell. He raised both his middle fingers to the clear blue skies filled with moma to remind himself what it meant to live and let die.