CELEBRATE! : Orange County’s First 100 Years : A VISION OF THE FUTURE : A QUESTION OF SURVIVAL

Technology was getting to be as vast and imponderable as natural forces. The world kept handing your dreams back to you as reworked nightmares. he phone barked her awake. Tina liked the Labrador’s warm woofing, but her mate did not. She slapped the kill switch and cupped the receiver to her ear, then stumbled into the dark bathroom.

It was Alvarez from Orange County Emergency Management. The news was worse than anything she had expected: a break in the Huntington Beach dike.

“I’ll send a chopper,” Alvarez said in her ear, his tinny voice tight with tension.

“Don’t bother. Use your choppers to evacuate people. How far is the Metro running from Laguna?”

“To the stop by the river. Traffic’s pilin’ up there.”

She leaned forward in the pre-dawn gloom, letting her forehead press against the cool tile of the bathroom, allowing herself 10 seconds of rest.

In four minutes, she was walking swiftly toward the bus stop near her apartment in Aliso Viejo. Her hand comm said the next bus was due in two minutes, and here it came, early, headlights spiking through the pre-dawn murk.

On the short run into Laguna Beach, Tina called the county overview officer and got the details. The dike had broken badly and the sea was rushing inland, driving thousands before it. Three dead already and calls coming in so fast Operations couldn’t even log them.

Tina yanked open a window and looked at the sky. Cloudless. A lucky break--the storm with its high winds had blown through. Had the tail end of it broken the dike?

She sensed flowing by outside the last long strip of natural greenery in the county--the hushed, moist presence of Laguna Canyon. Then Laguna’s neon consumer gumbo engulfed the bus, and she got off at the station. Walking to Pacific Coast Highway calmed her jittery nerves. As chief structural engineer, she had to find out what broke the dike, whether the trouble was a fluke. A thousand lawsuits would ride on the details.

The Metro came exactly on time, humming on its silvery rails. Tina watched the thin crescent of Main Beach vanish behind in the gathering glow of dawn as she called up on her comm more details from O. C. Operations.

The Metro shot north on PCH in its segregated lane, purring up to high speed. They passed the elite warrens bristling with guard stations. The Metro overtook a twencen car, a big job from the ‘70s with the aerodynamics of a brick. It sluggishly got out of the way. A bumper sticker underlined its splendid chrome extravagance, proclaiming: Think of This as a Kind of Protest . It trailed smoke. Tina wrinkled her nose in distaste.

Heavy traffic buzzed over the helipad at Newport. Cars came fleeing south, horns honking. The Metro slowed as it neared the overpass of the Santa Ana River. Helicopters swooped over a jam up ahead. They blared down orders to the milling crowd who seemed to want to stay to watch the show.

Tina got off the Metro and walked down the light-rail line. People were moving aimlessly, frightened, some stunned and wet.

The dike began here, ramparts rising toward the north as the land fell. Surf burst against the outer wall as she climbed up onto the top walk. She could see all the way to Palos Verdes as daybreak set high clouds afire with orange. A kilometer north, the smooth curve of the dike abruptly stopped. She watched ocean currents feeding the break, eagerly exploiting this latest tactical victory in a vast war.

A Hovercraft sped toward her along the segmented concrete top of the dike. Alvarez, Tina realized; the man had simply traced the Metro. Alvarez, his dark face split by a grin, called, “Ready for some detective work?” as Tina got aboard.

“I need a good look before the block-droppers get here,” Tina said. Alvarez nodded. The Hovercraft spun neatly about and accelerated.

The ocean had already chewed away a lot of prestressed concrete. Currents frothed over gray chunks and twisted steel that jutted up like broken teeth.

“A whole segment gave way,” Tina said tightly.

“Yeah, not just a crack. Somethin’ big happened.”

Something deep and serious, she thought. This was the first major break A kilometer north, the smooth curve of the dike abruptly stopped. She watched ocean currents feeding the break, eagerly exploiting this latest tactical victory in a vast war. in a chain that ran all the way to Santa Barbara. If there was a fundamental flaw they’d overlooked . . . .

Tina clambered down the landward slope of the dike, studying the stubby wreckage, measuring with a practiced eye the vectors and forces that should have held. The sea murmured and ran greedily, the tide rising like an appetite. There were no obvious clues; currents had already erased most evidence. A thin scum clung to the broken slabs and Tina slipped on it.

“Hey!” Alvarez called uselessly. Tina slid down the steep slope. She caught herself at the edge of the rushing, briny flow.

The scum was pale gray goo oozing from fresh cracks in the concrete. It smelled like floor cleaner and stung her fingers. She inched her way back up, hands rubbed raw.

“Been any maintenance here lately?”

“No, I checked,” Alvarez said. “Just the biofilm treatment half a year back.”

“Any modifications here?”

“Nope.” Alvarez answered his comm, listened, then said, “Big choppers on the way. We better zero outta here.”

She disliked losing what frail leads she had. She took a 3-D camera from Alvarez and began snapping holographic shots of the gap. She was still clambering over ruptured concrete when six enormous helicopters came lumbering in from the east, a great rectangular block swaying on cables below each.

Alvarez took the Hovercraft down the inward curve of the dike and onto the frothy flood waters. They sped away, heading inland toward half-submerged buildings. The choppers hovered one at a time and dropped their concrete plugs.

Tina listened to the pilots’ running cross talk on the Hovercraft comm. They gingerly released their plugs, neatly jamming up the break.

“Think it’ll hold?” Alvarez asked, swinging the craft in close for an inspection.

Tina squinted. “Better.” No plug was perfect, but this had stopped most of the gushing white plumes of the sea.

They turned inland. PCH was meters below the water. Signs poking above the swirling water proclaimed that this was Main Street--a district, she remembered, devoted to boutiques and memorabilia from the lost days when this had been surfer country.

They sped along Main, ignoring the shouts of people marooned on roofs. “Safe enough where they are,” Tina said. A man in a dirty T-shirt with Hot to Trotsky printed on it gave them an obscene gesture, and she turned away, trying to think.

The Hovercraft growled, cutting toward the north, but the water did not get more shallow. Bedraggled people perched atop cars and houses, looking like drowned rats. A body floated face down in an alley, clearly dead. They hauled it in, an elderly woman. Until now Tina had been abstractly precise, gathering data. The sad, wrinkled body sobered her. They kept on.

All of the Huntington and Seal Beach areas had subsided in the Big One back in 2004. The quake had wreaked great damage all along the Newport-Inglewood Fault. But the greatest long-term cost lay in the dike that had made the area inhabitable again. Or had seemed to . . . .

Ironies abounded here. Once a sleepy beach town devoted to the elixirs of sun and surf, its major problems had been the traffic trying to reach the sand on Saturday afternoons. Now the problem was stopping the Pacific from getting to the people.

She was thinking furiously when the federal observation dirigible came humming into view, skimming over a stucco apartment complex. The silvery bullet gleamed in the dawn’s crisp radiance.

Nguyen, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, called her on comm and ordered them to come up. Tina had never liked the ride up the spindly cable, but this time she was so interested in the spectacle that she scarcely noticed. In the gondola beneath the great silvery belly, Nguyen stood, watching the disaster below.

He was short, intense, direct. His first words were, “What happened?”

“Something structural,” Tina said. “I want to look at the whole dike from the sea side.”

“OK.” He gestured to the pilot. The dirigible purred and moved sluggishly seaward. “Should I declare an emergency all along the line?”

“Wait till I think this through. And check this out.” She handed him a flake of concrete with a dab of the gray goo on it.

“From here?” Nguyen sniffed at it.

“You’ve got a portable chem lab in the next deck, right?”

“Yes, but this is plainly an engineering malfunction. What . . . ? “

“Just do it.”

She put off further questions by moving to the windows. The dark waters reached far inland to Talbert Avenue, sweeping north as far as the wetlands where the Naval Weapons Depot had been. The first floors in most buildings were submerged. Trees ringed a majority of the buildings as energy-conserving measures--shade in summer, shelter against cool winds in winter.

She thought wryly about how linked the human predicament was. The worldwide greenhouse effect had forced energy conservation to save burning oil. Global warming had also made the oceans expand and melted ice at the poles, bringing on this flood. And now people were perched in the trees, keeping dry. Maybe the hominids should never have left the trees in the first place.

The dirigible swooped along the dike’s northward curve. They could stay up here forever burning minimal fuel, another saving measure mandated by the feds. As they swung lower, Tina picked out the pale green of the biofilm protector that was regularly applied to the dike’s outer ramparts.

She asked Alvarez, “Anything new about that last painting?”

He consulted his portable data screen. “Nope. Supposed to be better, was all.”

“How?”

“Stops barnacles and stuff from eatin’ away at the concrete.”

“Just a cleaner?”

“Lays down a mat, keeps stuff from growin’.”

Now she recalled. Tina knew little about biotechnology, but she understood as an engineer what corrosive seawater did. Biofilm was a loving safeguard that stopped sea life from worming its way into porous concrete. It preempted surfaces, colonizing until it met another edge of itself, forming a light green shield that would last for years.

“See those splotches?” She pointed at the sea bulwarks near the break in the dike. Gray spots marred the green biofilm.

Nguyen asked, “Seaweed?”

“Wrong color.”

Alvarez frowned. “How could li’l microorganisms . . . ?”

“Burrowing back into cracks, growing, forcing them open,” Tina said, though her voice was more certain than she felt.

Nguyen countered, “But this product has been tested for over a decade.”

“Maybe it’s changed?” Alvarez asked.

Nguyen shook his head. “You said this last painting was even better. I don’t see how . . . . “

“Look,” Tina said, “biotech isn’t just little machines. It’s alive .”

“So?” Nguyen asked.

“Life keeps changing. It evolves. Mutates.”

Nguyen blinked, disconcerted. “At this one spot?”

“Some microbe goes awry, starts eating concrete,” Tina said. “And reproduces itself--there are plenty of nutrients in seawater.”

The chem lab report came in then, appearing on the central screen beside the pilot’s chair. Even she, an engineer, could see that the gray goo wasn’t the same as the biofilm.

“We’re right,” Nguyen said.

She eyed the long curve of the dike toward Long Beach, where offshore wedges protected the beaches. Vast stretches of anchored defenses. Were all these great earthworks being chewed up by the very biotech engineered to protect them? Ironies abounded today.

“Perhaps this is a local mutation,” Nguyen said.

“For now, yes,” Tina said.

“Means the product’s vulnerable, though,” Alvarez said, his eyebrows knitted together in worry. “Happened here, could happen anywhere. Those dikes they’re puttin’ in the Potomac, right by the Lincoln Memorial, for instance.”

Tina looked inland, where the monumental energies of Orange County had filled in the spaces left by quake damage. The Big One had hardly slowed down these people. Their gesture of uncowed exuberance rose in Irvine to the south: the Pyramid. Four-sided and the size of the Pharaohs’ tombs, but inverted. Its peak plunged into the ground like an impossible arrowhead, gossamer steel and glass, supported at the corners by vertical burnt-chrome columns. Impossible, but eerily real, catching the cutting sunrise glow. Its refracting radiance seemed to uplift the toylike buildings that groveled around it.

A brown splotch coated one side of the Pyramid. She saw that it was one of the new biofilm cleaners, working its way around the Pyramid while it absorbed dirt and tarnish. Could that moving carpet go awry, too? Weaken the walls?

“There’re going to be plenty of questions to answer,” she said distantly.

“Be expensive to replace the biofilm,” Nguyen said. “But essential to avoid such incidents.”

“How much you figure this little ‘incident’ will cost?” Alvarez asked.

“Five, six billion.”

“Really?” Tina was surprised. “Six billion yen?”

“Or more,” Nguyen said.

Tina hoped there were few dead. This whole incident was dumb because somebody should have foreseen this biotech weakness. But engineers could not foresee everything, any more than geologists could predict earthquakes. Technology was getting to be as vast and imponderable as natural forces. The world kept handing your dreams back to you as reworked nightmares.

But they had no choice but to use technology--imperfect, human crafts, undaunted gestures before the infinite. The county lived by that belief, and today some died by it. But she knew in her bones that these people blessed by sun and ocean would keep on.

DR, COLOR, SWANSON 89