Not Forgetting the Whale

Now this was ridiculous. Why couldn’t he look at a simple scene like a row of children on a quayside without being drawn inexorably back into the tangled mathematics of economic forecasting? He closed his eyes. This, he resolved, should be his first task. He would break this destructive pattern of thinking. He would sever the ties that bound him so tightly to the morass of computer models and economic forecasts that had been his life for eight years. He would make a new start. Here. Today. There would never be a better opportunity to start again, to erase the unwanted memories of a life he had run away from. He had a promise to keep. So damn his unopened thousand emails. He would never read them now. Damn the alert messages from Cassie [the AI he programs] that would be filling his inbox. Damn the short-sellers with their voracious appetite for their corporate failure. Damn Jamie Colverdale and Colin Helms and Lew Kaufmann and their myopic focus on profit. Damn the whole wretched lot of them. Damn his whole unfulfilled, unproductive life.

Joe smiled. ‘You join the dots.’ She was an analyst too. The only difference between them was the links they saw. He saw the cascade of consequences radiating out from tremors in international supply chains. She saw a much more intimate sequence, but possibly no less complex for all that. Her conclusions drew from a personal knowledge of three hundred personalities and patterns of behaviour that stretched back for half a century. His clues came from CNN and Bloomberg; her clues came from odd socks.

Joe was thinking now about Kaufmann – about the fourth future. ‘We think that complex systems last for ever.’ For some reason, into his mind had swung the image of the whale. ‘Do you remember the whale?’ he said. ‘Had you ever seen such a creature? Could you imagine the complexity, the vastness of organisation, the systems all in synchrony that keep an animal like that afloat? How many trillion cells are there in a whale – every one a tiny engine, manufacturing proteins, reproducing, burning energy? Think of the work the kidneys must do. Think of the lungs processing all that oxygen. How big must the heart be? How powerful its beat? Now there’s an animal with no real predators, apart from humans, but what else could hope to touch such a creature? And yet . . .’ Joe looked across at Alvin Hocking. ‘And yet . . . for a short while on Piran Sands, all those biological systems were good for nothing. That’s scenario four. That’s what the whale was facing. If it hadn’t been for us, then all those complex systems would have closed down, one after the other. First the lungs, and then the heart, and then the brain, and then the other organs, one after another in quick succession. And after that, all that would be left would be the trillion cells, but just imagine you were one of those cells. Your supply chains would be gone. You wouldn’t get new oxygen, and you wouldn’t get fuel. So one by one, the cells die too. Once the whale stops breathing, it doesn’t matter if you’re a cell in the heart or a cell at the tip of the tail. There is no scenario that sees you survive.’