Work Text:
Branch location: Usher Foundation New York City, 160 West 66th St, 5th Floor
Instance reported by: Giulia Poletti
Reporter initial and date: GP 7/24/2020
Witness: Jasmine Herrera ID#: 02004
Witness initial and date: JH 2020/7/24
Incident summary: Incident resulting in the deaths of 56 CEOs and tech investors at a summit in Palo Alto, California.
Description of incident: (attached)
[Transcript begins]
GP: I came here myself to tell you this story because I want you to help me. I want you to use whatever connections you have to get this into the New York Times. I want everyone in the country to hear this. Can you do that?
JH: I’m not sure why you would come here if you wanted it in the Times.
GP: The government employs you to investigate unexplainable phenomena. I would hope that you have the power to do something with that information. So just answer me this: if you decide my story is worth telling, can you get it in the Times?
JH: I could probably pull a few strings. But I have to ask—why not go to the Times directly?
GP: Because you have a confidentiality agreement. You can’t call the police on me. It’s right there in your mission statement. Can you imagine if they believed me at the Times? They wouldn’t wait.
JH: Ah. Yes, thank you. That does make sense.
GP: Good. Then I’ll begin. My name is Giulia Poletti. Until recently I was a climatologist specializing in the effects of climate change on biodiversity. It’s a depressing field to work in. The best we can hope for is that when we find out exactly how horrifying the loss of life is due to human activity, it’s bad enough that a couple governments will make laws lowering the carbon cap a little. Not all of my colleagues felt the same way. Some of them were even hopeful. But I don’t believe there’s any way to reverse this. Even if we cut global greenhouse gas emissions in half and they stayed there, there’s no way to revive all the species we’ve destroyed. There’s no way to make amends to all the people who have suffered and died. Our planet is well on the way to being barren, unrecognizable, but because the apocalypse is taking a few decades there are still people who refuse to see it. And among them are almost all the people who are actually responsible. So I decided to show them a faster version of the apocalypse they still think is coming, not come.
Trillionaires don’t get together that often, but I’m sure you’ve seen the tech summit in the news. I knew about it beforehand because one of my colleagues was going to be there as a consultant on creating livable microbiomes—that’s Hunter Kerry, though you’ll find he’s dead now—and I even convinced him to let me come as his plus-one. I was so angry, I don’t think you can imagine. What if you had the opportunity to face fifty of the two hundred people who were most responsible for destroying millions of lives? But you can’t show how angry you are. Oh, no, they’re rightfully paranoid with security. We must have gone through a full half hour of patdowns, tests for incendiary devices and biological weapons, and we’d had to do an extensive background check before we were even allowed on the guest list. They know how universally despised they are, and it terrifies them. But they could not check here. Inside my head. That’s the only weapon I need.
You’re wondering right now how I could have possibly used my mind to make what happened at that summit happen. And the truth is that I don’t know either. Somewhere inside all the fear and righteous fury I found… power.
You know, originally I was planning to give a presentation. I wanted to shock them. I wanted them to feel a tiny fraction of the horror conservationists deal with every day. It was going to be a bait and switch: preview an innocuous presentation about the minimum biodiversity necessary to sustain agriculture in, say, a closed colony on the moon. Then bring something much nastier. Imagine for a moment that you’re me, that night. Fury boiling in the pit of your stomach, having to smile and laugh with the fucking mass-murderers who pretend their hands are clean because they’ve never held a gun. Hands sweating so much you keep thinking you’re going to drop your thumb drive as you hold it tightly in your pocket. Imagine the way my breath caught in my throat when the MC announced that my presentation was next, the way the whole room seemed to narrow to only me as I walked up to the podium. I fumbled with the drive and had to keep smiling and smiling as I failed to put it in the right way up. And I gave them this little self-deprecating laugh as I introduced myself: “Sorry, I’m so nervous, I’ve never spoken in front of such an illustrious crowd before!”
I opened the presentation, and made my introduction. I didn’t put the shock stuff in the beginning. I wanted to lull them into watching-a-presentation mode so they’d take a minute to call security. So I gave part of a presentation that was exactly what I said I’d talk about. Just the introduction, the problem statement. Then I flipped to the slide that started the real presentation: a full screen of the blasted desert that used to be the Amazon rainforest. “This is our problem,” I told them. “This is the problem we’re facing.” I made eye contact with the CEO of the big agricultural corporation responsible for it and I said to him, “Mr. Hauser, would you please stand up?” I can’t believe I called him out in front of all of them. I barely remember what I said, I was shaking so much with nerves. He was furious. He yelled for security to come take me away, and who the hell let me in here in the first place?
I backed up toward the massive screen. And then I backed up into it. As I retreated, the barren landscape reached out to envelop the room until all these men in suits were knocking over their chairs and tables, looking around in stupid incomprehension in the harsh sunlight. I smiled the first real smile that had been on my face all evening, and spread my arms wide and I said, “You have never had to live in the world you destroyed. You live in microclimates perfectly controlled for your own comfort. You never have to think about the consequences of your actions. How do you like them now, gentlemen? How long do you think you’re going to survive out here?”
They started frantically trying to raise anyone on their cell phones, but that didn’t last long when they realized they had no signal. The security guards Hauser told to grab me were just standing there as confused as anyone else. What would be the point of taking me away? Where would they take me to?
I don’t know who the first one was to accuse Hauser, but it only took about thirty seconds before every finger was pointing at him. There were eighty or so guests at the summit. Plenty of people for a mob. They started demanding to know if he’d done this on purpose, as some kind of sick joke—not a single one of them even seemed to notice me. He shouted them down for a while but they kept pressing in until they overwhelmed him. They ripped him to pieces with their bare hands. But they didn’t stop there. Not a single one of those bastards has a shred of compassion or common sense. If they did, they could have come up with a way to survive. People live in deserts, after all. But no, they needed someone else to accuse. They landed on the man who heads up Monsanto in the United States. You wouldn’t believe how quickly it devolved into faction warfare. They started fighting over who got the security guards, trying to bribe them with money that was completely useless in the empty desert. The guards figured out pretty quick that they were the only ones with weapons, and that lasted a while before they were overpowered by the sheer mass of business-suited bodies.
When there were maybe thirty of them left, the fighting cooled down and they settled into little camps. All sticky with drying blood, all twitchy, all more paranoid than ever. Not that I think they realized it wasn’t getting anywhere, as I said they are phenomenally stupid and self-centered. But they were exhausted, thirsty, and coated in dust.
Since they were unoccupied for the moment, I thought it was time to remind them of why they were here. I wasn’t afraid they would hurt me, though I don’t know why. So I shouted, “Can I have your attention, please!” They all looked up at me as if they hadn’t realized I could possibly still be there. And I told them that since they weren’t going anywhere, I’d like to finish my presentation. They seemed stupefied with tiredness, so I slid down to stand behind the podium instead of on it, and I continued with my powerpoint. Mr. Hauser was already dead, but I pointed him out anyway. On every slide I had about ten names I could call out for causing it—the desertification of the Amazon, the destruction of native prairie in the US, the deoxygenation of the rivers, the pipeline spills. I even had one for Hunter and the other consultants, for helping this scum. Every time I said the name of someone who was still alive I looked them in the eye and I saw them realize what it meant that it was their fault. It meant that they would find no clean water here. It meant that if there had ever been any plants here they’d blown away a long time ago and there wouldn’t be anything growing to forage. I saw them realize that they had created the place they would die, they had dug their own grave. I saw my own despair mirrored in their hearts, and I smiled.
So I got to finish my presentation after all. And it had exactly the impact I’d wanted. I stayed until the last one of them was dead—from a party that had tried to walk out of the desert with no water since they’d overturned all the tables. I followed them until they collapsed—they only got about ten miles—and then I kept walking until I walked back into the world I knew. When I got back online I saw what the news was reporting: that a bunch of tech supergiants had been murdered at a summit. But that’s not really going to put the right kind of fear in the rest, is it? I need them to know what’s coming for them. As surely as global climate change, I’m going to make sure they all feel it. Unless they start fixing things. They’ve got the money after all. They might not believe me this time, but when I start warning them beforehand I think they’ll come around. Maybe make some policy changes.
So. Are you going to get this to the Times, or am I going to have to take you on a trip?
[Transcripts ends.]
Followup:
As of August 14, Ms. Poletti has issued two more threats, to Russ Girling (President and CEO of TransCanada Energy) and Kelcy Warren (CEO and chairman of Energy Transfer Operation LP). Girling was found on the 12th in his Calgary home, dead of what was reported as blood poisoning after publicly refusing to credit Poletti’s threat. But we were able to get our hands on the coroner’s report yesterday morning, revealing that the poison in question was crude oil that had somehow made its way into his bloodstream. The case is getting quite a lot of publicity—for completeness I’ve attached all the articles I could find on it. Warren hasn’t yet responded to the second threat, but this morning Poletti tweeted a screenshot of a second email to him (attached) with an image of a ticking clock.
V.L. 2020/8/14