Emergency

An image: the workings of a municipal well pump facility, rows of machines looming inactive, gummed up with the white material clogging pistons and leaking glutinously from seams.

- Justin Werfd

Another image: a logging site, cutters and trucks sitting abandoned among felled trees, all heavily draped with ropy pale webs.

Another: a surface mine, the pit floor invisible under white goop. An excavator stands in the background, sunk to the treads. A helmeted man lies mired near the pool’s edge, clearly exhausted, holding onto a rope stretching taut off screen.

Ann put down the tablet and looked at her visitor. “It’s getting worse, then,” she said.

“It’s overwhelming our ability to keep up,” the president agreed. “Worldwide. Always at sites of resource extraction. For a while it was just slowing things down, and the industries could clear it away and keep going. But it’s still spreading, still getting more intense. Some of these places have had their operations all but shut down; and if things keep going, within the next few years . . .” She shrugged in frustration.

Ann nodded gravely. She looked away from the younger woman, out her office window, not seeing the New Mexico landscape. “Any progress on tracing its origin?”

“No. It may have started in some isolated place, but with modern transportation and supply chains, it spread so quickly that it was everywhere before we knew it. I guess we can count ourselves lucky that it’s not infectious to humans, or this could have been the worst pandemic in history.”

“And how are we doing with resources now?”

The president looked grim.