Ariadne Black Week 2 Part 2

Alan rubbed his eyes and decided he needed a break after the Chinese files, which had been the biggest mindfuck so far. The fact that their current tyrant's purges had been targeting a conspiracy of cannibals was bad enough. The fact that there hadn't actually been a conspiracy of cannibals to target had hardly been surprising after the American and Danish files.

"Is this really what the world is like?" Alan asked, getting up and sipping water from a conveniently placed glass he suspected Ariadne had manifested for him the moment he got thirsty.

"Well, it's the blind men and the elephant." Ariadne looked relaxed as she examined another file. "Sure, this is the part of the world that feels like a fan, because you're touching the elephant's ear. Intelligence organizations always get stupid if you give them a few decades to fester. There's a part that feels like a leathery tree, and a part like a long rope, and none of them would let you recognize an elephant at a glance."

"How could you possibly have thought you could show up as a Crawler if you knew about this?" Alan waved his hand at the tablet and the paper folders.

"It's not like they could get me if they tried," Ariadne smirked.

"Really?" Alan frowned.

"Not in a realistic scenario, no." Ariadne tapped the tablet. "How would you get a kill team into a place like Atlas?"

"Um, we'd be in Roswell, right?"

"Okay. Let's say we settle in Roswell, New Mexico." Ariadne tapped the tablet again, and a map filled the screen. "Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge is more than twenty-four thousand acres of wetland, and we could build the compound adjacent to it with underground entry points for Crawlers. There would be a few legal hurdles to bully, bribe, or negotiate our way through — your culture is used to draining wetlands, so the habitat that suits me best is also the habitat you've written laws to protect, and those laws would be applied to me by default. Special Forces couldn't operate in that terrain even unopposed, and that's before I settled. I would improve the environment rapidly."

"Bombs?" Alan laughed.

"Wetlands are the best defensive terrain there is against bombardment. Mud, water, and vegetation beat stone. Finding a target in one is very difficult." Ariadne shrugged. "It would take an extremely large and obvious strike to kill me, very close to the population of Roswell. The military could justify that. The CIA couldn't."

"Okay, you've thought about this." Alan nodded.

"Bitter Lake is not my ideal homestead, but it would be acceptable." Ariadne smiled. "You could host billions of Crawlers on Earth before we had to rub shoulders with any baselines."

"Seriously?" Alan raised an eyebrow.

"Easily and comfortably, and without Signal-craft or anything more advanced than the Haber–Bosch process." Ariadne looked wistful. "A mixed population would have a higher sustainable ceiling for baselines alone than you could reach without mutualism. Not that you're on a path to hitting a Malthusian ceiling through demographic expansion."

"We'll end the world first, right?" Alan was surprised at the turn the conversation had taken.

"Oh, you'll throw nukes at each other eventually. But you won't hit Peak Oil or anything like that." Ariadne spoke with the flat assurance of someone who had read a great deal about a place she had never lived. "The worst case for the United States is a major economic contraction, followed by a resurgence under a fission power economy. I don't think carbon is going to kill your species through any mechanism I've seen modeled, and I think your current picture of ecological collapse rests on bad extrapolation. You'd save yourselves a lot of trouble by starting on geo-engineering. Either way, I'd expect several centuries of stability before we were ready to migrate to a space colony — even if I lost access to Signal-craft and to scarce resources. That does require certain moves involving the Russian Federation, but those were made before this season began filming."

Alan blinked several times. "You know you're scary, right?"

"Why else would I volunteer for a harem anime?" Ariadne winked. "Romance is the only story you have for working with the scariest, instead of fighting them."

Alan drank more water. He wondered what he was supposed to say about this.

He never found a good answer.