Isn't it remarkable what you can get from two lines (eight words, one of them repeated)?
A little creative punctuation in this, but deliberate, so I don't expect anyone to challenge
El Nitpickero.
Reigne, reigne.
All around, maps. Dynamic maps, showing air currents, temperatures, gas concentrations, humidity, clouds, as well as the fixed geographical features and influences of civilisation. Continuously swirling and changing, patterns incomprehensible even to the trained eye.
A gesture of my hand and, in the heart of them, a calendar with a huge lump of it stained orange.
"All right," I said, poking the image with a baton as insubstantial as itself, "for the royal wedding we must have bright sunshine:- that's easy enough. But the two weeks before and seven weeks after there's not one night, not one hour, when someone hasn't arranged a garden party, or fireworks, or luminous hot-air balloons." I thrust my virtual pointer at the dates for the various events. "Or something else that can't happen when it's raining or even cloudy enough to organise a shower before dawn. They know the Royal Meteorological Office can deliver – last years tennis final demonstrated that – and each one has political clout, diplomatic backing, and is the most important thing on the planet to somebody.
But two months without a drop of rain over this area," I swung the rod over the effected area, and it duly tuned brown and withered, "means drought, and almost certainly famine for winter.
This island now supports over half a billion souls, and that's only possible due to continuous, total weather control, on land and round the sea farms."
The watery-eyed political representative had no base for a rational argument but seemed to believe that if you ignored inconvenient facts they went away. (S)he (oh, when would clothing and makeup go back to the straightforward flaunting of gender rather than this coy concealment) hadn't got the authority to do anything, anyway.
"The P.M…"
"All she has to do is choose who to offend. Four nights of rain – or days, if that's any easier – spread over that period, and we can get eighty-five percent yields. We can afford to import the rest." I saw the involuntary wince at the word 'import'; this government had been so insistent about 'self-sufficiency'.
"Six, and you'll hardly notice the difference. But the MO and the Min of Ag have no intention of being the focus of food riots. At eighteen hundred hours that chart, and the analysis, goes onto the open screenweave, and if there have been no decisions made within a sevenday, so does this conversation, and we go onto a standard rhythm of optimising production and informing people of when it will be clear for their picnics."
Panic shone in those eyes, (S)he had been sent to deliver an ultimatum, and had instead been ultimated. "His Majesty…"
Without ever letting the other side of the dialogue extend beyond two words, I broke in yet again:
"His Majesty wants everything to go perfectly, but is too good a monarch to let his people starve. His majesty will never even learn about these negotiations unless we are forced – forced – into going public." I reached out and ostentatiously switched off the recording. "And the P.M.'s given you lead time over your competitors, whichever way it goes. Whether it's her choosing who's to be slighted, is Lord Harrogate more dangerous than the Uzbek ambassador, or us choosing the people's welfare over their entertainment, you can prepare your position in advance. " Although hundreds of more experienced operators who knew me had probable predicted this outcome months ago; if they had known how the days were going to fill up, that is.
Maps changed to tableaux of statistics on a thousand factors over a thousand regions; all interreacting, all dependent on timing planned months in advance, with a precision impossible for unaided humans.
Sooner or later the very chaos mathematics that let us water Surrey while maintaining bright sunlight over Wimbledon predicted that nature would produce the throw of the dice that would overwhelm our control and, be it hurricane, flood or blizzard, or whichever other of the tools with which she had always controlled us, millions would die; the people knew this, but ignored it as residents of flood-plains and volcanic vicinities always had. But, while I was in charge here, it wouldn't be short-sighted Human stupidity that opened the breach in our defences.
