TWTBACD Ch.23 - The Machine in the Room

Chapter 23

The Machine in the Room

2035–2037

2037: Hanover Protocol — machine hides what it knows

[VAN DEN BERG FAMILY — Amsterdam and beyond]

Lucas van den Berg was ten years old in 2035 and had a quality that his parents found increasingly difficult to manage: he was always right. Not about everything. About things he decided to assess carefully. He would spend sometimes hours sitting with a question — not reading, not researching, just sitting with a quality of interior attention that Pieter recognised from mirror-contemplation and Sofie recognised from the hospital ethics committee — and at the end of this process he would produce a statement that was almost invariably correct.

"The climate is going to force a major food system reorganisation within twenty years," he told his parents at dinner in 2035. He was ten. He had been thinking about this for a week.

"Why twenty years?" Pieter asked.

"Because that's how long it takes the production data to diverge from the consumption projections far enough that people can't ignore it. The divergence is already happening. I read the FAO reports."

"You read the FAO reports."

"Yes. They're dry but they're clear. The trendlines cross around 2055 if nothing changes. But things will change. The question is whether the changes are planned or emergency."

Pieter looked at Sofie. Sofie looked at Pieter. Their son was ten and discussing the geopolitics of food supply with the matter-of-fact certainty of a man who had spent his career in scenario planning.

"What do you think should happen?" Sofie asked.

"Transitional support for smallholder farmers in vulnerable regions combined with targeted AGI deployment for yield optimisation in areas with degraded soil," Lucas said. He ate a bite of stroopwafel. "Also more regenerative agriculture in Europe. We're behind Iowa on that."

They had never mentioned Iowa to him. He had found it in the USDA reports.

Pieter revised his twenty-year portfolio projections that evening. Three times, he arrived at the same conclusion as his ten-year-old son.

[NGUYEN FAMILY — Bao's Turn]

Bao Nguyen was seventeen in 2035 and had spent fifteen years taking electronics apart and seven years putting them back together. He had completed the formal electronics curriculum at his high school in Da Nang and then, on his own initiative, enrolled in online engineering courses from a university in Ho Chi Minh City and simultaneously been accepted as an unofficial apprentice by the senior Korean engineer at his father's factory, a man named Park Joon-ho who had recognised, within three weeks of meeting Bao, the specific quality of his intelligence: not just technical, but architectural — able to see systems whole.

"You should study in Korea," Park told him.

"I don't speak Korean," Bao said.

"You speak machines," Park said. "That's the universal language."

The Korean engineering institute's international programme accepted Bao in the spring of 2036. He was eighteen. He had never been outside Vietnam. He packed carefully and methodically and said goodbye to his family with the contained emotion of someone who feels things deeply and has learned to feel them quietly.

Tuan watched his son board the bus to the airport. He had the sensation, which he recognised from other significant moments — his own move to Da Nang, the day he first got the new tolerances in his hands — of things properly in order. His children were going where they needed to go. Bao to Korea. Minh to university in Hanoi. Hanh, who was twenty-four, working as a nurse in Da Nang and saving methodically for the specialist training she planned to pursue in Singapore. They were dispersing, as children disperse, in the directions their natures required. He and Linh would remain. The factory would remain. The hands would keep working.