Vampires in Space

City of Rain

I stood outside, on the 56th-floor balcony of the office building, looking down at the distorted and blurring lights of the city. It was sheeting down rain in gushing torrents. The strong wind swirling between the office towers was carrying most of the sky-rivers of water away from me. It was nice. All the h2o II received on the inset, covered porch was the clean fresh scent of the rain. There were occasional back-gusts of super-fine mist. If I remained out here long enough, I'd be wet.

Eventually.

I was not being deluged with water like the city was getting cleansed with. Not that the city is dirty. This is our city. We don't let that happen. No reason too. Not with cleaning automation being what it is. Human governments may be worried about machine intelligences and have all sorts of rules about them, but it does not take automation being all that smart to keep the city nearly spotless. Mostly it's about having good sensors to find unwanted things, and good appliances for them to deploy so scrub, soak, or suck things away and leave behind clean. After this cleansing rain, the cleaning crew will view all the free water as an opportunity.

Santa Fe isn't a tiny burg anymore. Not like it was one hundred and thirty-some-odd years ago when I first came here. Sure: You can still go up the mountain and ski like you could back then. I guess it is more accurate to say you can go and ski again. The CO2 harvesters, carbon sequestration, combined with decades of zero CO2 emissions have the atmosphere back well below 500 parts per million of CO2. Not down to 300 ppm yet, but getting there. It took Mother Nature 50 million years to sequester enough carbon to get to 300ppm. We have not been at it nearly that long.

Modern thinking about greenhouse gases is a lot like when people finally realized they should wear sunscreen to avoid skin cancer. Once the greenhouse gas polluters were not allowed to spill fake information and buy governments wholesale, and once enough people grew up knowing the reality of why they were worse off than their grandparents, policy became pretty sensible. You don't release CO2 without capturing it back, if not more. You launch a methane-powered chemical rocket, you have air scrubbers at the launch site taking back out more CO2 than you just put in. Common sense.

Science fiction has had the idea of terraforming other planets in it since forever. Why not terraform Earth? Some called the pollution of Earth the 'Grand Experiment'. What would happen if you took your only planet and released 50 million years of sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere? Would it turn back to the before times and start growing palm trees at the poles?

Yes.

Would you like that?

No. Neither did the penguins and the polar bears.

The heat latency has been a bitch, but the ocean currents have finally mostly re-stabilized. Winter has returned to being an annual event. Snow is a thing again. We have proven terraforming can work, and now we can think about other planets we might use some of this tech on. Every planet will be different of course. We did the easiest one first. Like the rain out there, we just cleaned this one back up.

All these changes have been in my living memory, and even now I'm still a kid in the Vampire world. Compared to Rachel and Helen and definitely Victoria. Won't be too much longer before she hits 1.5 millennia Still looks like 'Jogger Barbie' though.

On the other hand, compared to the new waves of voluntary turns created by Jessica and my Mom's stolen-from-the-Siren's-and-vastly-improved medical tech, I'm the old man now.

All it took to fix our ancestral home was Vampires asserting behind-the-scenes control of human's worst instincts. What we used to do on a local scale of kings, queens, and countries, we do on a coordinated global scale. There are enough of us now hidden away and pulling the strings to keep the humans from destroying themselves. The best part for me is that my wife Helen has not had to go off and marry some human to put a leash on him or her. She did her turns on that particular political hamster wheel ages ago. Now lovely wife pulls global fiscal strings and comes home at night to her family.