2064

Fiction: An airing of grievances by a 21st-century villain.

You forced my hand.

When you modernized, flying all around the world in your airplanes, I could have mutated, evolved. I could have used your spectacular mobility to spread myself all over the world at incredible speed. And yet I didn’t. I kept to the natural flyers of the earth, those with organic wings. But then you waged war on the birds with your progression. Your wretched hyper-advancement.

Renewable energy! The electric age! AI!

Blah blah blah.

Look at me! Look at me! I’m so environmentally conscious!

Sickening.

With all your brainpower, did you not consider the cost of these amazing things? In my opinion, I think you did. The highest among you thought, “Hmm, yes, this is a price I am willing to pay. Let us proceed.”

Does this trigger you, reader? Or at least, cause you to blink?

Renewable energy.

Let’s look at that first. Renewable.

The average wind turbine in the mid-2020s was composed of the following: steel, aluminum, copper, and rare earth metals. What are these rare earth metals I don’t hear you ask? They are neodymium and dysprosium.

The extraction of the above metals involves a lot of thrusting into the earth. This is energy intensive. Very energy intensive. Have you ever seen a mining extractor close up? Have you any idea how big they are? These vehicles that extract the materials needed for your renewable energy-fueled lifestyle? Well, I’m not going to bother informing you of the actual size of the vehicle. I’m going to unsettle you with the height of an average tyre on one of them.

Thirteen feet.

Thirteen feet. Yes, that’s the height of a tyre on one of these things. These monsters that cater for the provision of the metals involved in the construction of a device that supplies you with your renewable energy.

Then there’s the sheer amount of each metal to consider. Are you ready? Forty years ago, in a three-point-five-megawatt turbine, you were looking at three hundred and thirty-five tons of steel, nearly five tons of copper, three tons of aluminum, and two tons of our good old rare earth friends. But as the years went by you wanted more, more, more. The turbines grew higher. They grew wider. The mines grew bigger, they went deeper. The tailing ponds grew to the size of giant pools, each one full of lead, arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, mercury. As environmental regulation weakened in the face of insatiable need, even deadlier substances appeared in the pools. Teratogens. Mutagens. As well as poisoning the flyers in their billions, they were rendered infertile. Their gene pool was compromised. The young were born with one wing smaller than the other. Others with two heads. Some with no wings at all. As some grew older, they lost the ability to fly because of the weight of the tumors in their bodies. Millions, silly with poison-induced stunted brain development, blundered into the slash of your now colossal turbine blades, smashed toward the earth while your energy levels crept up, up, up.

Moving along.

Your precious cloud.

The cloud sounds so harmless, doesn’t it? It’s anything but. The cloud is metal. The cloud is core. It is heat. The data center, the cloud’s heart, needs metal to maintain its pulse. RAM, CPUs, drive boards, motherboards. These brutally physical things need gold, silver, palladium, our turbine friends, dysprosium and neodymium – plus a few other fancy dans like yttrium, gallium, indium and tungsten. The data center thirsts for metal. For a while, you constrained its proliferation. You corralled its size. But like the turbines, you bent, you gave way. You let them grow bigger, more frequent. Palms were greased, sacred areas de-sanctified. Concrete crept into wetlands and buildings the size of towns were constructed to house ever-growing server farms.

And then your fucking AI.

At the start, it blew up the cloud by a bit. I mean, it enlarged the size of the cloud – and pushed up the value of the companies in the cloud space. Good for the shareholders of such companies. But then, like every nascent boom, the graph hit its exponential phase. The prompts grew from a trickle to a flood, and as specificity narrowed, the requirement for processing power grew.

What should I eat for dinner?

Not much specificity there.

I have onions, eggs, broccoli, cheese and parma ham in my fridge. Come up with a tasty recipe that will incorporate all of the above.

Bit more demanding.

I have onions, eggs, broccoli, cheese and parma ham in my fridge. Generate a meal from the above that will be of the greatest benefit to my health. Account for nutrition in the following areas: calories, protein, fiber.

Quite detailed.

And that is what happened. Specificity grew. Humans had to think harder to get more out of AI. And you did. You narrowed down your train of thought to a level that resulted in data centers so large and energy-intensive that they needed to be built on the banks of rivers, such was their need for enormous quantities of cooling water. Riverine bird habitats destroyed.

And bigger wind turbines were needed, too, I might add, for these bigger data centers! Renewable all the way! More metal. Tailing ponds the size of lakes by the late 2040s.

Bigger, bigger, bigger.

More, more, MORE.

And then nuclear. SMR. Small Modular Reactors. Slowly, in the late 2020s, this multidecade old, tainted energy source began to rise in prominence. And can you guess what happened? Hmm? Of course you can. In the west, in its modern, advanced energy economies, SMRs began appearing everywhere. And the fuel for these reactors? Uranium. Cue a glut of crappy, hideously under-funded uranium exploration companies listing on the riskier stock markets of the world, sucking in money from your average Ma and Pa. Millions of people lost their shirts gambling on sensationalist, cashless startups, when they should have been investing in bigger mining companies who used sophisticated AI tools to analyze the surface of the earth and zoom in on sites likely to yield uranium.

And yield uranium the tools did. In spades. In some of the destitute countries of Africa where large deposits of uranium were found, the government basically dissolved its environmental preservation laws on the spot in favor of extraction and prosperity. There were anti-extraction movements of course, protests in their major cities, but they were cut down. And I’m being literal when I say cut down. They were macheted by government-sponsored groups, made a terrible example of, to deter dissension. A classic African chastening. The mines that resulted from this eagerness didn’t only cancerize my flyers for miles around, but also the people. The governments cared not a jot. The money came in and they had plenty of cash to provide end-of-life care for their tumor-ridden citizens.

Anyway.

It took me nearly a decade, but I’ve done it. My kind is nothing if not resilient. And if we’re threatened with extinction, well, then you’ll really see our resilience. We’ll resilience you out the fucking door. Which is what I’ve done. I’ve made the crossing. I’ve folded a few proteins here, figured out how to bind to certain sialic acid receptors there… and the crowning glory which I’m most proud of—I’ve come up a way around your immune system.

By this stage, if you’ve half a brain, you’ll know what I am.

I am a virus.

H5N1 is what you call me.

Another name you have for me is avian flu. That sounds a tad more mellifluous than that military-style mixing of letters and digits. Doesn’t make me any less potent an organism, though. Not that it matters. Because I’m different now. I’m not just the avian flu anymore.

Now I’m a human flu.

I’m in thousands of chickens in China and I’m ready to jump to human handlers when they come close. The coding has been done. And then I’ll jump from them to other handlers. That coding has also been done.

Time to clip your wings.