It wasn’t that windy, she felt, although what wind there was easily cut through her clothes and rattled her bones. “Yikes it’s cold!” she cried, and then for the sake of her audience added, “Okay, okay, I’ll come in! But it’s very invigorating out here! The bears are going to love it!”
Then she climbed the steps back into the little antechamber of the gondola, like an airlock, and with some stumbling got back inside. It was insanely warm compared to outside. She cheered herself, and when she was back on the bridge she informed her crew up north and got to the windows on the side where the door to the bears’ enclosure would open.
“Okay I’m ready, let them out!”
“You are the one controlling the door, Amelia.”
“Oh yeah. Okay, here they go!”
And she pushed the double buttons that allowed the exterior door of the bears’ quarters to open. Between the wind pouring into the door and the bears pouring out, the ship got quite a shaking, and Amelia squealed. “There they are, how exciting! Welcome to Antarctica!”
The big white bears ambled away, foursquare and capable-looking, their fur slightly yellow against the snow, and riffling on the breeze, which they sniffed curiously as they trundled seaward. Not too far offshore, just beyond a narrow black lead, the sea ice was covered with a whole crowd of Weddell seals, with many moms lying around nursing their pups. They looked like giant slugs with cat faces. Alarming really. And yet they didn’t look alarmed by the bears, as why should they? For one thing the bears were now nearly invisible, such that Amelia only caught glimpses of them, like a crab made of black claws, or a pair of black eyes like the coal eyes of a snowman, glancing back her way and then winking out. For another thing the seals had never seen polar bears before and had no reason to suspect their existence.
“Yikes, I can’t even see them anymore. Oh my gosh, those seals are in trouble! Possibly there will have to be some population dynamics shakeout around here! But you know how that goes, fluctuations of predator and prey follow a pretty clean pattern. The number of predators swings up and down a quarter of a curve after their prey species, in the sine wave on the graph. And to tell the truth, I think there are millions of seals down here. The Antarctic coastal life zone seems to be doing well. Hopefully the polar bears will benefit from that, and join the other top predators down here in a happy harmony, a circle of life. For now, let’s get some altitude under this baby and see what we can see.”
She pushed the release button on the anchor bolts and they were freed by the explosives in their tips. Up flew the Assisted Migration, skewing on the wind, bounding up and down on itself and blowing quickly out to sea. She turned it into the wind and had a look below. White shore, black-and-white leads, white sea ice, black open water, all gleaming brassily in the low sun of midday. Hazy horizon, sky white above it, a milky blue overhead. The six bears were completely invisible.
Of course each of them was tagged with a radio transmitter and a few minicams, so Amelia’s viewers would get to see them live their lives on her show. They would join the many other animals she had moved into life zones better able to support them. Amelia’s Animals was a very popular spin-off site in the cloud. She was curious herself to see how they did.
She was headed home, and almost to the equator, when Nicole appeared on her screen, looking upset.
“What’s wrong?” Amelia asked.
“Have you got your bears’ feed on?”
“No, why?” She turned it on and got nothing. “What happened?”
“We’re not sure, but they all went out at once. And in some of them you could see what looked like an explosion. Here.”
She tapped away, and then Amelia was looking at the Antarctic peninsula and the sea ice: then there was a bright white light, and nothing more.
“Wait, what was that? What was that?”
“We’re not sure. But we’re getting reports that it was some kind of a … some kind of an explosion. In fact there’s feed coming from someone … the UN? The Bureau of Atomic Scientists? … maybe Israeli intelligence? Anyway, there’s also been a statement released to the cloud, claiming responsibility, from something called the Antarctic Defense League. Oh, that’s it. Some kind of small nuclear incident. Something like a small neutron bomb, they’re saying.”
“What?” Amelia cried. Without planning to she sat down hard on the floor of the bridge. “What the hell? They nuked my polar bears?”
“Maybe. Listen, we’re thinking you should head to the nearest city. This seems to be some new level of protest. If it’s one of the green purity groups, they may go after you too.”
“Fuck them!” Amelia shouted, and started to beat the table leg beside her, then to cry. “I can’t believe them!”
No response from Nicole, and Amelia suddenly realized they were still transmitting her response to her audience. She cursed again and killed the feed, over Nicole’s protest. Then she sat there and cried in earnest.
The next day Amelia stood in front of one of her cameras and turned it on. She had not slept that night, and sometime after the sun had come up, looking like an atomic bomb over the eastern horizon, she had decided she wanted to talk to her people. She had thought it over while eating breakfast, and finally felt she was ready. No contact with her studio; she didn’t want to talk to them.
“Look,” she said to the camera. “We’re in the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history. We caused it. Fifty thousand species have gone extinct, and we’re in danger of losing most of the amphibians and the mammals, and all kinds of birds and fish and reptiles. Insects and plants are doing better only because they’re harder to kill off. Mainly it’s just a disaster, a fucking disaster.