Текст книги "Seveneves"

Автор книги: Neal Stephenson

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“Yes.”

“Well, the place where I’m working is about as far forward as it’s possible to get, because they want my lab to be sheltered by the big rock.”

“Amalthea.”

“Yes. And if we go there, I can show you a bit of what I’ve been up to. I feel I should offer you tea as well, but I don’t know how to make it here.”

Doob smiled at her way of talking. She had been a fiend for theater at Oxford, and might have become an actress. Intensely conscious of the difference between the way her people in London talked and the way people talked at her school and at Oxford, she’d become good at switching between those accents for effect. “I’d be happy to have a look,” he said. “I think I know the module you’re talking about—I saw it docking a few days ago, and was curious.”

HE HOOKED THE UNOCCUPIED PRESSURE SUIT TO THE WALL OF MOIRA’S lab and it hung there, an inanimate observer, as Moira showed him around. Never one for the life sciences, Doob couldn’t understand everything she was saying to him, but he didn’t care. Being able to relax and let someone else explain science to him was a welcome turnabout.

“Do you know about the black-footed ferret?” she asked.

“No,” Doob said. “I think you can pretty much assume that my answer to all questions about biology and genetics is going to be in the negative.”

“Ninety percent of their diet was prairie dogs. Farmers killed almost all of the prairie dogs and so the population of black-footed ferrets crashed to the point where only seven remained. From that breeding stock, it was necessary to bring them back.”

“Wow, only seven . . . so inbreeding must have been an issue?”

“We speak of heterozygosity,” she said, “which just means the amount of genetic diversity within a species. In general, it’s a good thing. If you have too little of it, then you start to see the sorts of problems that we associate with inbreeding.”

“But if the breeding stock is reduced to only seven . . . then that’s all you have to work with, right?”

“Not quite. Well, technically yes, I suppose. But by manipulating some of the genes, we can create heterozygosity artificially. As well as getting rid of some of the genetic defects that would otherwise propagate through the whole population.”

“Anyway,” Doob said, “it’s obviously of interest to us now.”

“If the Cloud Ark’s as populous as they claim it’s going to be, and if people come up with frozen sperm samples and ova and embryos and all of that, then the human population is probably all right. We’ll have enough heterozygosity to make a go of it. My work here is going to be more concerned with nonhuman populations.”

“Meaning . . .”

“Well, you’ve probably heard that we’ll be growing algae as a way to generate oxygen. Which is only the start of a simple ecosystem that will have to be developed and grown, and become much less simple, over the years to come. Many of the plants and microorganisms that will make up that ecosystem will be cultivated from initially small breeding populations. We don’t want to have a repeat of the Irish potato famine, or something analogous, with the plants we rely on to make it possible to breathe.”

“So your job will be to do with them what was done in the case of black-footed ferrets.”

“Part of my job, yes.”

“What’s the other part?”

“Being a sort of Victorian museum curator. Did you ever visit Clarence’s home in Cambridge?”

“No, I’m sorry to say. But I heard his collection was magnificent.”

“It was crammed with all of these stuffed birds and boxed beetles and mounted heads of beasts, gathered by Victorian gentleman-collector types in pith helmets, doing their bit for science on the fringes of the empire. Not scientists as we’d define them today but contributors to the scientific ideal. These things overflowed the museums and Clarence acquired them by the lorry-load, especially after Edwina died and couldn’t forbid it. Anyway, I’m that person now, except that the samples are all digital, and they are all on these things.” She tapped a thumb drive that was floating around her neck on a chain. “Or their rad-hard equivalents.” She pronounced the technical term with a dubious and ironic tone of voice, suggesting that she and the International Space Station would take a while getting used to each other. “You know the general story—I’ve heard you talking about it on YouTube.” She switched into a credible imitation of Doob’s flat midwestern vowels: “‘We can’t send blue whales and sequoias up on the Cloud Ark. And even if we could, we couldn’t keep them alive there. But we can send their DNA, encoded as strings of ones and zeroes.’”

“You’re going to put me out of a job,” Doob said.

“Good. Then I’ll put you to work here,” Moira said. “This is labor intensive as hell, and they’re not sending me enough help.”

“I thought it was all automatic.”

“If the Agent had given us another couple of decades to improve our gene synthesis technology, it might have become so,” Moira said. “As it is, we’ve been caught in a bit of a gawky adolescent phase. Yes, we can take one of these files”—she tapped the thumb drive around her neck—“and we can create a strand of DNA from it, beginning with a few simple precursor chemicals. But the amount of human intervention is still ridiculous.”

“I’m guessing that is some pretty high-level human intervention too.”

“My Jamaican grandfather worked in the engine room of a navy ship,” Moira said, “which is how our family ended up in England. When I was a little girl, he took me on a tour of one of those ships, and we went down into the engine room, and I saw it, the engine, with all of the bits exposed; the bloody thing was naked and men had to go crawling around on it with oil cans, lubricating the bearings by hand and so on. That’s a bit like where we are now with synthesizing whole genomes.”

“But for now,” Doob said, “that’s far in the future, right?”

“Yes, thank God.”

“For now you’re going to be tinkering with intact organisms.”

“Yes. Just so. Still quite difficult, but I think manageable.” She looked around. The module in which they floated looked nothing like a lab. Everything was sealed up in plastic or aluminum cases, taped shut and labeled with yellow sticky notes. “Sorry,” she said. “Underwhelming. Hardly worth the trip, is it?”

“How can I help?”

“Get me some fucking gravity,” Moira said. Then she laughed. “Can you imagine trying to do tricks with liquids in zero gee? Because that’s all a lab is.”

“It must look frustrating to you now,” Doob said. “Everything in boxes, no gravity to make it all work.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “I’m whingeing. They’ll put this thing on a bolo, won’t they?”

“Maybe a third torus. Big enough to make something close to Earth-normal gravity. Lots of space to work in. A staff of eager Arkers.”

“That’s your job now, isn’t it?” Moira said. “Cheerleader for the Ark.”

“It was my ticket up here,” Doob said. He could feel a little warmth creeping into his face, and cautioned himself not to say anything he was going to regret. “We all needed that ticket. Now that we have paid the price of admission, we need to make it work.”

Moira, perhaps sensing she’d gone a little too far, kept her silence and would not meet his gaze.

“And as of today,” he said, “we have one year.”

Part Two

DAY 700

ON DAY 700, ALSO KNOWN AS A+1.335 (ONE YEAR AND 335 DAYS SINCE the destruction of the moon), the Cloud Ark, as seen from the Earth, looked like a bright bead strung on a silver chain. For the reasons that Dr. Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris had tried to articulate during his soliloquy aboard Arklet 2, back on A+1.0, it was expensive, in terms of propellant, to maintain an actual cloud or swarm of arklets around Izzy. Much cheaper and more reliable was to have them precede or follow the space station along the same orbital path, like a queue of ducklings with Mom in the middle. Once an arklet had found its place in that train, changing its position was a maneuver whose complications were a perennial source of surprise and consternation to newly arrived members of the so-called General Population.

Arkies as such—people who had been selected in the Casting of Lots, who had spent up to two years in training for this mission, and who had been sent up here specifically to manage, and live in, arklets—understood it implicitly. As of Day 700, there were 1,276 of those, with about two dozen more coming up each day during the final surge of launches. New arrivals were assigned to empty arklets that awaited them at the head or the tail of the queue. These were launched on separate heavy-lift rockets about four times a day. Since an arklet consisted mostly of empty space, it weighed almost nothing compared to the lift capacity of a big rocket, and so they were always crammed from boiler room to front door with vitamins. These had to be extracted and stowed before the arklet could be occupied. Each arklet had its own unique manifest of stuff. Some of them were just full of compressed gas, such as nitrogen, which would later be used to fertilize crops. Others might be packed with enough diverse and seemingly random goods to open a space bazaar: medicines, cultural artifacts, micronutrients, tools, integrated circuits, spare parts for Stirling engines, Arkies’ personal effects, and, in one notable case, a stowaway who was found dead on arrival. With the exception of the stowaway—who was stashed in the morgue with the rest of the deceased—all of these items had to be extracted, cataloged, and stowed appropriately. Each arklet had some onboard storage space, so to some extent the storage was distributed—that being a fundamental tenet of the whole swarm-based Arkitecture. Bulk materials like gases could be pumped into external tanks or bladders: little ones dangling from arklets, big ones distributed around Izzy’s periphery where they could serve as extra shielding against radiation and micrometeoroids. So-called dry goods were likewise stashed in mesh bags that lived “outside” until such time as they were needed. Scarce and crowded “inside” space was reserved for organisms and goods that actually needed air and warmth. So, compared to the way it had looked a year ago, Izzy was spare and clean on the inside.

Anyone who had not been chosen in the Casting of Lots and trained as an Arkie was categorized as General Population. There were 172 of those. The number grew only slowly, since most of the people who were qualified, and who were needed, ought to have been sent up a long time ago. Adding new members was attended by much political controversy down on the Earth. The Crater Lake Accord had ratified the general scheme of a Cloud Ark populated by those chosen in the Casting of Lots. It had been obvious, and uncontroversial, that experienced specialists were also needed, and so no one had quibbled over sending up the Scouts and the Pioneers. The concept of the General Population had been written into the Crater Lake Accord precisely to allow for that. People like Rhys Aitken, Luisa Soter, Dubois Harris, Moira Crewe, and Markus Leuker had been sent up under the “GPop clause” because they knew how to do things. For every one of them who got sent up, however, a hundred with similar qualifications were stranded on the ground, where some of them called their congressmen, chancellors, presidents, or dictators. The politics had become so involved as to throttle the incoming flow to a trickle. The remaining available GPop slots were being hoarded by national governments. They were being filled grudgingly and with byzantine premeditation.

For Arkies and members of the GPop alike, it was easy to underestimate the “distance” separating Izzy from an arklet that was only a few kilometers ahead of or behind it in orbit.

The difficulties entailed in moving from one arklet to another could be mitigated by physically docking arklets to a common structure, forcing them to fly in a rigid formation. Or so it might seem to people who had not been steeped in the laws of orbital mechanics. But the fact was that an arklet docked to the end of a truss far off to the port or the starboard wing of Izzy was not in a proper orbit at all. Left to its own devices—free, that is, of the constraints imposed, and the forces exerted, by the truss—it would converge on Izzy, cross through Izzy’s orbit, diverge from it, turn around, and converge again, on the same ninety-three-minute cycle that clocked Izzy’s orbits around the Earth. An arklet mounted “above” Izzy on the zenith would want to go “slower” and lag behind; one mounted “below” on the nadir would want to race ahead. To the extent that the truss structure prevented those things from happening—to the extent, in other words, that it succeeded in its basic function of holding all the modules and arklets in a fixed configuration—it was undergoing stress, exerting forces on those arklets to prevent them from doing what they wanted to do. Humans in those arklets would notice themselves drifting and bumping into the walls as their natural trajectories, as ordained by Sir Isaac Newton, were perturbed by the structure of Izzy. The larger Izzy grew, and the more arklets and modules were connected to her, the greater those forces became, and the closer she came to breaking.

There was another, even more compelling reason for limiting Izzy’s sprawl. She was taking shelter behind Amalthea.

The space station’s original orbit had been carefully chosen. Any lower, and the thicker air would make the orbit decay too fast. Any higher, and the danger from micrometeoroids would increase. That was because the rocks zipping around in space were subject to the same slow orbital decay as Izzy herself. Which was a good thing, since it dragged them down into the atmosphere and destroyed them, leaving clear space for Izzy to sail through. Her orbital altitude of four hundred kilometers was a Goldilocks compromise between “too much orbital decay for Izzy” and “enough orbital decay to sweep the sky of dangerous rocks.”

The attachment of Amalthea to Izzy’s forward end a few years ago had changed all of that for the better. Orbital decay was less of a problem because of the rock’s high ballistic coefficient, and micrometeoroids tended to get stopped by the massive nickel-iron cowcatcher.

The White Sky, however, was going to put many more rocks into their path. Big ones could be detected from a distance and avoided, but little ones could do a lot of damage, and so the most important parts of Izzy needed to take shelter in the lee of Amalthea, crowding up against her aft surface. Some rocks might still come in from unexpected directions, but in general there would be a “prevailing wind” in the drift of lunar debris. Amalthea was aimed into it.

But Amalthea couldn’t protect any parts of Izzy that projected beyond its silhouette. Dinah and the rest of the Arjuna Expeditions crew had made some progress in “embiggening” the asteroid, carving out slabs of metal and then elevating them like flaps on an airplane wing to extend the sheltered envelope, but it could only get so big. At some point it had been necessary to draw a line under the expansion and “fix the envelope,” meaning that Izzy took on a definite shape and size. This had occurred on A+1.233. Since then they had found ways to jam more modules inside that envelope, or, where that wasn’t possible, to pack bags and bladders of stored material into gaps. And they had tacked on additional storage in the unprotected volume outside of that envelope. But nothing had been added to her before or since. She couldn’t grow in the aft direction because Amalthea’s protective shadow only extended back so far—bolides could “wrap around” in any direction, since they weren’t in perfectly parallel trajectories. Anyway, boost engines were needed back there, and being in the path of rocket exhaust made standing in hellfire seem like a pleasant summer’s day by comparison.

Amalthea was now enveloped in scaffolding, anchored directly into the nickel-iron by connection points welded on, or drilled in, by Dinah’s robots. A proboscis extended forward from that cloud of trusswork and supported a little cluster of radar and communication antennas. Forward of that, the closest arklets—seven of them, docked to a hexagonal framework—kept station about a kilometer away, far enough that the firings of their thrusters would not blast those antennas with jets of hot gas. Other heptads, as the seven-arklet clusters were called, were spaced ahead of that one at the same interval. Beyond a certain point these petered out and were replaced by triads—three arklets on a triangular frame—and beyond that were singletons.

A similar tapering could be observed aft of Izzy, though the distance to the first heptad was greater, respecting the danger posed by Izzy’s boost engines. These heptads and triads were a bit like Lego or Tinkertoy parts, making it possible to cluster arklets together without much ado; hamster tubes were laced through their trusses so that, once an arklet was docked, persons and material could be easily moved to other arklets on the same frame. Adapters were also floating around that would facilitate nose-to-nose coupling, but these had been found to be not as useful as the hep and tri frames.

Farther out toward the ends of the train, it was not uncommon to see bolos. Each of these spun with its center of gravity—the grapple joining the two cables—tracking along the shared orbital path of Izzy and the other arklets. For now, though, almost all such coupling was for training purposes. Only about three weeks remained before the White Sky. The Arkies could survive that long in zero gravity. Formation of bolos and simulation of Earth-normal gravity was a practice intended for the long haul, when people might live their entire lives in arklets and would need gravity to build and preserve their bones, their eyesight, and other body parts that went bad in its absence.

The Cloud Ark passed through a complete day/night cycle every ninety-three minutes. Time was arbitrary in space, so the ISS had long ago settled on Greenwich time, also known as UTC, as a reasonable compromise between Houston and Baikonur. The Cloud Ark had inherited that system, and Day 700 began at midnight at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, or A+1.335.0 in ark time. About one-third of the population woke up to begin a sixteen-hour shift. Others would wake up at A+1.335.8, or “dot 8,” and at “dot 16.” The system ensured that about two-thirds of the population was awake at any given time. Awake people needed more oxygen and generated more heat than sleeping people, so it put less of a strain on life support systems, and enabled the Cloud Ark to support more people, if the waking and sleeping cycles were staggered. A reason for the popularity of triads was that each of the three component arklets could operate on a different shift, observing its own artificially imposed period of darkness and quiet. In a heptad, the same basic scheme could be used, with two of the arklets asleep at any given time and the one in the middle of the hexagonal frame being “always on.”

Doob had requested, and been granted, a position in the third shift, meaning that he was basically operating in the same time zone as Amelia, Henry, and Hadley on the West Coast of the United States. He had awakened at dot 16 of the day before, or four in the afternoon in London, which was eight in the morning in Pasadena. So, at the stroke of A+1.335.0, when the first shift of that day began, he had been awake for eight hours and was feeling like a brief nap might do him good. But he knew that this would only make it more difficult to get to sleep at dot 8 and so decided, as usual, to gut it out.

Finding that his brain was too addled to make any sense of the latest figures from Caltech on the continued exponential breakup of moon debris, he went to the “gym,” which was a module containing several treadmills. To prevent their users from bouncing off them in zero gravity, these were equipped with waist belts and bungee cords that held the occupants “down,” pressing their feet against the belt of the treadmill and forcing the legs to do some real work. Supposedly it was good for the bones and muscles. Amelia kept sending Doob emails asking him whether he’d exercised today, and he liked to make her happy by answering yes.

A few minutes after he began his exercise routine he was joined by Luisa Soter, who had just awakened, as she was on the first shift. She liked to do her “jogging” first thing in the morning, so it was not the first time they had intersected in this way. Six treadmills had been mounted to the walls of this cylindrical module; the users’ feet pointed outward and their heads projected in toward the center like spokes converging on a hub, bringing them rather close together and making conversation easy. For extroverted, social people like Doob and Luisa, this was a great setup; more solitary exercisers would don headphones and pointedly focus on a tablet or a book.

“Did you go to Venezuela when you were out collecting Arkies?” Luisa asked him.

The way she stressed the word “go” suggested that Venezuela was an obvious topic of conversation—the thing that well-informed persons would naturally begin talking about first thing in the morning. Doob didn’t know why. He had heard a few people talking recently about Kourou, which was the place in French Guiana where the Europeans, and sometimes the Russians, launched big rockets into orbit. In the last two years it had become one of the most important launch sites for arklets and supply ships. So he had the vague sense that something was afoot there, something that people were concerned about.

He had been focusing all of his attention in the other direction, on Peach Pit and its iron-rich “children.” These were still visible, through increasingly thick clouds of rocky debris. When the White Sky happened they would vanish into a cloud of dirt, and he might not see them for a while. So he had been looking at PP1, PP2, and PP3 while the looking was still good, nailing down their exact orbital parameters, taking high-res photographs. PP3 was especially interesting. It was a congealed glob of mostly iron, similar in composition to Amalthea. It was some fifty kilometers in diameter. And it had a deep cleft on one side, comparable in size to the Grand Canyon, apparently formed by a collision that had rent its outer skin while it was partly congealed. Doob had begun calling PP3 Cleft.

“Doob? You still with me?” Luisa asked. “I was going to say ‘Earth to Doob, Earth to Doob,’ but it doesn’t apply anymore.”

“Sorry,” he said. He had gone into a reverie thinking about that huge crevice on the side of Cleft, imagining what it must look like from the inside. “What was your question again?”

“Venezuela,” she said. “Did you do any of your ‘abduction runs’ there?”

“No,” he said. “Closest I came was Uruguay. Which isn’t that close. And by that time I was pretty burned out.”

“Why were you burned out?”

Typical Luisa!

“Overscheduling?” she went on. “That is, was it physical burnout? Or more emotional/spiritual?”

“I had just had it,” he said. “It’s hard. Taking young people—the best and the brightest—away from their families.”

“But it was for a good purpose, right?”

“Luisa, where are you going with this?”

“Are you aware of what is going on offshore of Kourou?” she asked in return.

“No,” he said flatly.

“You’ve checked out,” she said.

“I talk to my family every day. But other than that? Yes, Luisa, I have checked out of planet Earth. Nice place. Lovely people. But I have to focus on what comes next.”

“So say we all,” she said. “But one could argue that things happening in Old Earth’s final three weeks could have repercussions on New Earth.”

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Apparently not a single one of the seventy-five Venezuelans who were picked in the Casting of Lots has actually been sent into space,” she said.

“You know that the overall ratio has ended up being something like one in twenty,” Doob said. Meaning that for every twenty candidates chosen in the worldwide Casting of Lots and brought to the training centers, only one had found a place up here in the Cloud Ark. Not a figure to be proud of. But it was the best they’d been able to do, and they hoped to bring the number down to more like one in fifteen, or even one in ten, with a last-minute surge of launches.

“Yes. And the Venezuelans know that too. So they’re saying that three or four of their seventy-five ought to have made it up here by now.”

“Statistically, that is not a valid—”

“These people do not look like statisticians.”

“Politics.” Doob sighed.

Luisa chuckled. “I hear you, sugar. I’m not gonna say you’re wrong. But I have to warn you that this is the word—‘politics’—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.”

“And I’ve been in enough faculty meetings at Caltech to know how right you are,” Doob said. “But I meant it in a different way. The way that the Venezuelans ran their selection program was overtly political. In most countries they took the Casting of Lots idea with a grain of salt. There was a random element, yes—but they also filtered for ability. The Venezuelans chose not to do that. So, they ended up sending in kids from the boondocks, truly chosen at random. Many of whom had fine personal qualities. If I had my way, we’d get some of them up here. But I’m not the one who is choosing. The people who are, are choosing on the basis of math ability and things like that. So it makes me sad that other people are in line ahead of the Venezuelans, but it doesn’t surprise me.”

“Three weeks ago, boat people started squatting on Devil’s Island,” Luisa said, “refusing to move.”

“Isn’t that a penal colony?” Doob asked. “Why would anyone—”

“It used to be a French prison, yes,” Luisa said. “Hasn’t been for a long time. Hardly anyone lives there. But it’s right under the flight path for launches out of Kourou. So, whenever there’s a launch, they evacuate it.”

“It must be evacuated all the time then, given the amount of traffic.”

“For the last two years, yes. But then a bunch of people showed up there and camped out and refused to move.”

“I’m guessing that the French and the Russians went right on launching.” In fact, Doob knew as much, since he saw arklets and supply ships coming up from Kourou all the time.

“Yes. So the occupation was more of a symbolic gesture at that point.”

“These squatters were Venezuelans, I take it.”

“Yes. It is a fairly easy cruise along the coast from Venezuela to French Guiana—a few hundred kilometers.”

Something was itching in Doob’s memory. “Does this have anything to do with the supply vessel that failed to show up yesterday?”

“And the day before. There’s been a two-day interruption, going on three, in launches out of Kourou.”

“A few squatters on Devil’s Island can’t explain that,” Doob said. Then he added, as a joke, “Unless they have surface-to-air missiles.”

Luisa said nothing.

“Are you shitting me?” Doob said.

“It’s not so much the ones on Devil’s Island as the ones in the blockade,” Luisa said. She handed her tablet to Doob. She’d pulled up what looked like an aerial photograph, probably shot out the window of a helicopter. In the foreground was the European Space Agency launch complex, which he’d seen before. It was separated from the Atlantic by a couple of kilometers of flat ground, banded with low, scrubby beach vegetation. In the distance was a trio of small islands, a few miles off the coast; he assumed that Devil’s Island was one of them.

The waters between the beach and the islands were choked with vessels: mostly small, but a few rusty freighters as well, a full-sized oil tanker that looked the worse for wear, and some ships that he could have sworn were military.

“When was this taken?” Doob asked.

“A few hours ago,” Luisa said.

“Are those naval vessels?”

“The Venezuelan navy is coming out to maintain order,” Luisa said.

“And you weren’t kidding about the surface-to-air missiles?”

“The pirates who showed up in that oil tanker claimed that they had Stingers, and that they would use them against the next rocket that lifted off from Kourou.”

“That is nuts,” Doob said.

“Politics,” Luisa said. “But we always knew it was going to happen, right?”

“Good morning, Doctors,” said a new voice: that of Ivy Xiao, entering the module to begin her own “morning” exercise routine.

“Good morning, Doctor,” said Luisa and Doob in unison, though for Doob it was afternoon.

“Did I hear the P-word?”

“Yes,” Luisa said. “We were just talking about you, honey.”

Doob was appalled. But Ivy laughed delightedly.

Ivy had been replaced, something like eight months ago, by Markus Leuker, the Swiss fighter pilot, mountain climber, and astronaut. Or, to put it more precisely, a new position had been created that made Ivy’s post redundant. Izzy was no longer just Izzy; it was the combination of the Cloud Ark fleet plus the vastly enlarged complex that Izzy had turned into. As such, a new leadership structure was required. The person at the top of that structure would shortly become the most powerful leader in human history, in the sense that 100 percent of all people alive would be under his or her authority. It was an altogether different job from being the first among the twelve equals who had been manning the International Space Station of two years ago.

Nevertheless, Ivy could have done it. Everyone who really knew her agreed on that much.

They had replaced her anyway. It was partly a matter of global politics. Placing overall command of the Cloud Ark under a representative of the United States, Russia, or China would have been seen as a provocation by the two countries that had “lost.” So it had to be someone from a small country. Preferably one that was seen as politically independent. This narrowed the list of candidates down to basically one: Markus Leuker. The dark horse being Ulrika Ek, the Swedish Arkitect and project manager, who had been launched up to Izzy at the same time as Markus—but on a different vehicle, in case one of them crashed. No one had ever really expected Ulrika to get picked, however. The choice was explained in terms of Markus’s dynamic leadership style, his charisma, and other such buzzwords that, as everyone understood, boiled down to the fact that he was a man.